Cities and Gods

Extract

A lecture given on the 23rd March 1987 at Sion College in the City of London as one of a series related to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Report ‘Faith in the City’.

Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God!
His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth,
Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great king.
Within her citadels God
has shown himself a sure defence.
Walk about Zion, go round about her, number her towers.
Consider well her ramparts,
go through her citadels;
that you may tell the next generation
that this is God.
(Psalm 48)

It might not seem too misguided to look upon the whole vast biblical narrative, and much subsequent Christian writing as well, as one stupendous epic, a Tale of Two Cities: Jerusalem the holy city of God, upon the one hand, ‘Babylon the great, she who made all nations drink the wine of her impure passion’ (Revelation 14:8), upon the other. Long after the historical Babylon had ceased to matter in the least to Jew or Christian, and long after the historical Jerusalem had ceased to matter all that much to Christians at least, the symbolism of the two cities lives on, and new Babylons continue to be denounced, new Zions, new Jerusalems continue to be built in Europe, America, Africa and elsewhere.