However, in his book Culture-Making, Andy Crouch points out important differences between the Garden of Eden and the theme park.¹ He highlights that we are made in the image of God to be creative cultivators of God’s creation. A theme park, with its highly scripted and choreographed experiences and environments, leaves little space for such image bearing. Rather than fulfilling our calling to be creators and cultivators, we are left with few choices other than consuming or perhaps critiquing. In contrast, God placed people in the garden of his design, commanding them to care for it, to manage, to use it, to creatively order it, and to develop it.

In light of this mandate, the Garden of Eden was a sheltered place, but it was not a perfect place. In fact, nowhere in Genesis does it say that the Garden of Eden was perfect.² “Perfection” generally implies “static,” “fixed,” or “unchanging.” But in the Garden, God does something that Disney would never even think about. He leaves the people to their own devices: to use their gift of free will to do something in harmony with God’s will, or to use it for their own purposes or glory—to rape, distort, abuse, and exploit it. When the wrong choice is made, creation fractures, splinters, and groans.

This story leaves us with a question and a choice of our own. Did God give up on his creation after Adam and Eve chose selfishly? The sloppy answer has been yes, that while God wants to save people from their sin, the world is “heading to hell in a handbasket.” It’s the notion that God has thrown in the towel on the creation that he called “good” and that “it’s all gonna burn someday.” Consequently, physical places here on earth are relatively insignificant, eternally speaking.

Yet, the Jewish worldview of Jesus was that not only has God not given up on creation, but that he was also actively at work within it, moving towards a rebirth, a regeneration, a renewal. Randy Alcorn—perhaps the leading theologian of heaven—articulates the biblical perspective that God will “restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets” (Acts 3:21 TNIV). He asserts, “The earth’s death will be no more final than our own. The destruction of the old Earth in God’s purifying judgment will immediately be followed by its resurrection to new life.”³ The Bible says that God’s judgment will destroy our works of “wood, hay or straw,” yet it will purify those of “gold, silver, and costly stones” (1 Cor 3:12-15 TNIV). Moreover, the apostle John notes that when Christians die, what they have done on earth for Christ “will follow them” (Rev 14:13 TNIV). This is why theologian Albert Wolters concludes that “those purified works on the earth must surely include the products of human culture. There is no reason to doubt that they will be transfigured and transformed by their liberation from the curse, but they will be in essential continuity with our experience now—just as our resurrected bodies, though glorified, will still be bodies.”⁴

The choice then is what to do with God’s creation. Like Adam and all who have followed him, we have a choice between prayerful stewardship to his glory or selfish manipulation of creation to our demise. “From the Garden to the City” could be the name of a film adaptation of the Bible; it could also refer to the first eleven chapters of Genesis, where cities become the culmination of human cultivation. Unfortunately, the stain of sin and corruption that produce the earliest cities remains indelibly etched into our perception of the city today. After Cain kills his brother Abel, he is separated from a communal relationship with God, his family, and the land. Not satisfied with God’s provision of a mark of protection that will ward off those who would harm him, Cain defiantly relies on his own provision. He builds a city which functions as a surrogate form of protection and provision, similar to the way that people run away from their families and their God to the anonymity of the city today.

Genesis 1 begins with the ordering and shaping of nature, but by Genesis 11, nature is supplanted in the city of Babel. Like Cain, the residents of Babel sought to “make a name” for themselves, to control their own identity and security, and to build a “stairway to heaven” (the ziggurat form that the tower may have taken) on their own strength and to their own glory. In this city, the cultural project is the supplanting of all traces of dependence on God. What they chose to make of the world (culture) deepened their alienation and independence from their Maker. As Andy Crouch notes, “For all its moments of beauty and ingenuity, culture can easily be Babel: a fist-shaking attempt to take over God’s role for ourselves.”⁵

So from early in history and our reading of the Bible, the city is cast as a receptacle for sin, a “den of iniquity.” However, God seems to be calling urban prophets in the tradition of Nehemiah to return, revisit, and restore the city to its rightful place as the culmination of his larger story arc. Author Eric Jacobsen even suggests that God has chosen the dense, diverse, and walkable streets of the city as a focus of redemption.⁶ Just as Joseph told the brothers who had sold him into slavery “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” (Gen 50:20 TNIV), God seems to be saying of our cities: “Though you meant them to be a form of escape from me, I will use them to draw you back to me.” Jacobsen highlights this redemption theme throughout the cities of the Bible: Cain’s desire to flee to the city after killing his brother finds a redeemed expression in the cities of refuge set apart in the Law of Moses; the fear of alienation and scattering of the citizens of Babel is redeemed when the Israelites find cities in the Promised Land in which they can gather; the desire to make a name for themselves in Babel is redeemed in the city of Jerusalem, where God causes his name to dwell. God’s power to redeem is stronger than our ability to alienate and break down.

Throughout the Bible then, it becomes clear that place is important to God—whether it be wilderness or city. Although the specific geography of Israel’s homeland changed (from Canaan, to Egypt, to the Wilderness, to the Promised Land, to exile, then back), his chosen people were a “place-based” community. In fact, God got pretty prescriptive with the Israelites in how he wanted everything laid out from the macro-scale of the community site plan to the micro-scale of the “smells and bells.” But the end of the story culminates with the creation of another glorious place.

Just like with the Garden of Eden, God is the “architect and builder” (Heb 11:10) of another masterfully designed environment, “the holy city, the new Jerusalem” (Rev 21:2). Although he is the Supreme Designer of the city, God allows people to participate in the finishing of this project. This heaven (as we often call it) will be a physical place on earth where God’s instruction to the first human beings is ultimately fulfilled. Besides God’s own handiwork, artifacts, and people, “the glory and the honor of the nations” are brought into the city by “the kings of the earth.” (Rev 21:24-26). In this final vision of the city, it is filled with redeemed human culture. The question of what cultural artifacts will make it into the New Jerusalem is a fascinating one. Andy Crouch doesn’t bet on “cultural mediocrity, the half-baked and half-hearted efforts to make something of the world.” He does bet on certain works of Bach, Miles Davis, green tea crème brulee, fish tacos, Moby Dick, the Odyssey, and the iPod, while recognizing that they would be suitably purified and redeemed, like our resurrected bodies.⁷

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