A Tale of Two Cities, Part 1: From Two Seeds to Two Cities

The idea of two polarized cities is impossible to get out of our imagination. We see it in Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. We see it in Tolkien. We see it in the Pilgrim’s Progress. There is nowhere we do not see it, even where degenerate art tries to unsee it. Augustine wrote,

“In truth, these two cities are entangled together in this world, and intermixed until the last judgment effect their separation. I now proceed to speak, as God shall help me, of the rise, progress, and end of these two cities.”1

And so began one of the great classics of the Western world. But how does God Himself speak about these two cities in His one story?

Two Seeds, Two Cities

Let us begin with what theologians call the “protoevangelium,” or first gospel.

“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15).

What are its elements? First, there is promise rising above the curse. Second, there is God-initiated warfare. Third, there are two Heads, One of whom will eventually crush the head of the other, even through His own wounds. Fourth, there is a seed which, while singular in one sense, always implies generations or nations. 

In short, there are two people groups populating the human race. They are not going to the same place. They do not see the world from the same perspective. They are motivated by two loves, taking orders from two princes who are at war with each other. The love of the one is a love of the world (1 Jn. 2:15, Jas. 4:4), yet because this world is cursed and fallen, the world that they love is not the world that God designed. It is a shadow world—real in one sense, in that is occupied for this time and a stage of rebellion against the original, yet also a phony, a mockery of the world of light. The implications of this issue forth into the hatred of this rebel population toward the true King, and therefore, whether they admit it on the surface or not, a hatred of the King’s new true citizenry, who had to be transformed from rebels back into sons and daughters themselves.

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you” (Jn. 15:18)

and,

“Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you. We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death” (1 Jn. 3:13-14).

What we see in between the Garden and the Flood is the first traces of these two lines working themselves out on to the stage of recorded history. We are not surprised to see rival accounts from the rebel nations which are merely introduced in the Scriptures.

But getting back to how we find our first threads of eschatology here, there is recapitulation even of the first seed of Babylon and its most powerful ancient expression. As Augustine spoke of the fratricidal act of the founder of the earthly city, Cain, and the corresponding crime of the founder of Rome,2 so the seed of the serpent is always propagated by violence—whether direct (physical) violence or indirect (spiritual) violence—which may be a fifth element embedded in Genesis 3:15, as to the woman’s role in having a seed, that is, by good nature.

Augustine poses the question: Why is it that, as soon as Cain’s son Enoch has been named, the genealogy is forthwith continued as far as the deluge, while after the mention of Enos, Seth’s son, the narrative again returns the the creation of man?3 And the simple answer is to trace out both the origins and the end of the two cities. The line of God would continue and therefore pick up the creation mandate; the line of Satan would be coming into judgment.

The Days of Noah as a Type to be Repeated

Jesus’ statement on the typology of Noah teaches recapitulation of the type: 

“Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man” (Lk. 17:26; cf. Mat. 24:37).

We will keep seeing this great strength of the Realist position. This is more than a simple analogy saying that there will be a cataclysmic judgment at some point in the future just as there was in the past. Types are everywhere repeated in such a way that we are supposed to think about their essence. Usually there is some clear action-item for the church.

Hebrews’ statement on the same typology teaches us that separating from Babylon is an act of faith unto God; it is positive from our part. That it condemns is God working judgment through the church. Noah didn’t seek the unbeliever’s condemnation. He warned them so as to save them. But that act divided him and other seven from the world.

“By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith” (Heb. 11:7).

There was an original world where all people were to be God’s people. Its leader (Adam) rebelled. There was line from Adam. The other split off in rebellion. God started over with Noah. They would rebel again. Always from out of God’s house. Then those who are called back to God are called out of the rebel house. Really, there are two “out of” directions. The first is apostasy from the house of God. When that rebel place reaches a certain point, God calls a “remnant” out of there. It is a kind of counter-rebellion.

2 Peter and Jude’s teaching on the same—fall of demons, destruction of Sodom, and the Flood. In this case the word typos is not used, but the parallel word ὑπόδειγμα is, from which we derive “paradigm.” It is a figure, copy, or model:

“For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly…” (2 Pet. 2:4-6).

Though we will come back to this in our concept of recapitulation of the “end of the age,” it is worth noticing here the parallel between those who entered the ark fleeing what was God’s garden (Eden-Jerusalem), and become Satan’s city (Babylon), so that this was the prototype for coming out of Babylon.

Not All of Israel is Israel

Abraham is called out of Ur of the Chaldeans—what would later be the southern part of the Babylonian Empire. And so the origin of the nation of Israel was one man and his clan coming out of Babylon. We will see a pattern. Babylon’s center of evil shows up in the very place that Jerusalem’s center of power was. Admittedly, this is sometimes more symbolic and does not have a one-to-one correspondence with historical, or literal, Jerusalem and Babylon.

Abraham as “father” in two senses. Paul’s doctrine of election, in Romans 9 especially, shows how the two seeds can even exist within the church. In Revelation, this takes on the language of the Lamb’s Book of Life: “And the dwellers on earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world will marvel to see the beast, because it was and is not and is to come” (17:8; cf. 13:8).

But we might ask: Why two cities? As Bauckham points out,

“cities were commonly personified as women,” so that “Rome appears in Revelation, not as the goddess Roma, the form in which she was worshipped in the cities of Asia, but as ‘the great whore’ (17:1). She is also called Babylon the great city, after the Old Testament city which destroyed Jerusalem and in which Jerusalem’s citizens lived in exile.”4

But the idea runs from cover to cover, as Bauckham says again, “All the proud, God-defying, tyrannical and oppressive cities and states of the Old Testament contribute to the picture: Babel, Sodom, Egypt, Tyre, Babylon, Edom. The Babylon of Revelation sums up and surpasses them all.”5

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1. Augustine, City of God, I.35.

2. Augustine, City of God, XV.5.

3. Augustine, City of God, XV.21.

4. Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 126.

5. Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 126.