“If the desert is the place of demons, the city is the place of idols” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 54).
Not Urban Warfare, but Warfare Is Urban
“We could find many causes of war — ontological, ecnomic, technical — but the Scriptures affirm that the agent of war is the great city. There is no such thing as a great agricultural war. A rural people is never a ravenous people. They may make migrations, but not wars. War is an urban phenomenon, …
All Are Babylon
“And so we must state the problem as it concerns Babylon, for she, as we have already seen, is the figure of all other cities; she is The City in the Bible” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 48).
As Though a Higher Power Were At Work
“Nonetheless, all of this is decidedly insufficient to explain the biblical teaching. There is such profound understanding of urban reality that it appears to be taken from an observation of our modern world” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 42).
Foundational Murder
“We know that it was common practice, not only among the Semites, to lay the first stone of a new town on the body of a human sacrifice offered to the power of the city in order that his spirit protect the city” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 28).
Intervening Grace
“Thus the Lord himself is going to substitute his work for man’s, and he will build lasting cities, different cities, the true cities of Judah, cities which will be under another sign and controlled by a power other than Cain’s” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 27).
One City, Many Shapes
“Babylon, Venice, Paris, New York — they are all the same city, only one Babel always reappearing, a city from the4 beginning mortally wounded: ‘and they left off building the city'” (Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 21).
The Mother of the City of Man
“Babylon, the great city, or Babylon the Great. The biggest in the world. No one can rival her, not even Rome. Not because of her historical greatness, but because of what she represents mythically. All the cities in the world are brought together in her, she is the synthesis of them all” (Ellul, The Meaning …
The Medieval City
“In this, the medieval city was more completely a commonwealth — a full communion and communication of social goods — than any society that has ever existed with the exception of the Greek polis, and it was superior even to the latter, inasmuch as it was not the society of a leisured class supported by …
What God Hath Scattered, Let No Man Gather
“Men can live in their towers, they can build their skyscrapers and their giant cities, they can cover the world with a web of interlocking cities, but these have no more meaning for them. Babel will never be finished” (Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City, p. 19).