Support First Things by turning your adblocker off or by making a  donation. Thanks!

Theologian Carl Trueman offers a useful corrective to the evangelical elites overemphasis on urban areas :

One thing Paul and I did discuss was the current nonsense about cities being special which so dominates the popular evangelical imagination. Not that cities are not important: as areas where there are the highest concentrations of human beings, they are inevitably significant as mission fields. Rather, we were thinking of the `from a Garden to a City’ hermeneutic which jumps from scripture to giving modern urban sprawl some kind of special eschatological significance. Was there ever a thinner hermeneutical foundation upon which so much has been built? OK, there probably has been, but this is still a whopper.

The prioritizing of the city is arguably a much neglected aspect of the modern hermeneutical horizon. Failure to recognize this has surely helped a rather unself-conscious approach to the city and the Bible. Indeed, it seems to have facilitated a kind of trite reification of `the city’ and a rather overbearing emphasis on its theological (as opposed to sociological) significance. The Industrial Revolution is important in this regard: as industry lifted productivity out of the confines of the seasons and the soil and decisively shunted economic strength away from the rural pathways to the urban factories and offices, the superiority of the city to the countryside became a given of both Right and Left, to the Gradgrinds and to the Marxes. As the former worshipped efficiency and the pragmatics of material production, so the latter invested the urban proletariat with ultimate historical significance, a twist on Hegel’s `Last Man.’

Read more . . .

Dear Reader,

While I have you, can I ask you something? I’ll be quick.

Twenty-five thousand people subscribe to First Things. Why can’t that be fifty thousand? Three million people read First Things online like you are right now. Why can’t that be four million?

Let’s stop saying “can’t.” Because it can. And your year-end gift of just $50, $100, or even $250 or more will make it possible.

How much would you give to introduce just one new person to First Things? What about ten people, or even a hundred? That’s the power of your charitable support.

Make your year-end gift now using this secure link or the button below.
GIVE NOW

Comments are visible to subscribers only. Log in or subscribe to join the conversation.

Tags

Loading...

Filter First Thoughts Posts

Related Articles