The 'city' in Ellul and The Epistle to Diognetus
In his pivotal work 'The Meaning of the City' ( Sans feu ni lieu: Signification biblique de la Grande Ville ) French professor of law, theologian and author Jacques Ellul identifies 'the city' as the spiritual, though concrete, phenomena in which humankind's rebellion against God gets its actual expression in such things as power, money and technology. For this reason the city is also the concrete locus of God's work in Christ. The liberation from sin and death is in practice a liberation from the spiritual and material powers dwelling in the city. The dialectics of salvation (the Kierkegaardian double-movement?) becomes concrete as a movement between city and desert: "No longer does man belong to the city, exactly as he no longer belongs to the crowd, because his individuality has been affirmed by his encounter with Jesus Christ. He was made separate, set aside when he left the city to go out into the desert. And this is accomplished in a d...