I have been working my way slowly through Christopher Watkins book, Biblical Critical Theory. It is a brilliant work and one I can’t simply “dive into.” It’s been an incredibly slow walk… and I’m not even halfway through.

But I need to pause from time to time and take in amazing thoughts and phrases that leave my mind reeling. The scope of what he is communicating is something I have to slowly digest.

The city of God is the embodiment of the world as it was meant to be, of human life as it was created to be enjoyed and lived to the full. The earthy city is not a second creation but a parasitic perversion of the first, repopulating its categories in ways that seek to make human beings into their own creators, their own redeemers, and their own judges, and into those who make a name for themselves. (p. 220)

For Watkins, there aren’t “mirrored powers.” There is God… and then there are lesser imitations of what other powers want to be. There isn’t God and his “counterpart” the devil. There isn’t the goodness of God and its counterpart, evil. They are not equal! So, there are not two equal “cities” (or kingdoms). There is the kingdom of God and then a twisted perversion that wants humanity to be comfortable in its own moral ambiguity and in a false pursuit of “making a name” for themselves.

I need to pause and get those words back out into the “interwebs” because it helps me to digest it more as I type it again…