Fragments from Jacques Ellull's "Meaning of the City"

-"[Adam and Cain having sex after the curse] is man's desire to find life, eternity, again. He transmits his life to his children" (5)

-"[Israel's] revolt is ever so much [defined as theological meaning attached to historical or psychological fact; does not mean false or ahistorical] more profound in this myth than in Prometheus...It is much more than taking God's power. It is the desire to exclude God from his creation. And it is this solidarity in a name[...]which was to keep men from ever being separated on Earth" (16)

-"The city is a place of physical war, but also of spiritual war. And the men who live there are sacrificed to her destiny" (22)

-"Sin is for the chronicler principally a political act of disobedience to God - worship on the high places, covenants with foreign people" (39)

-"As long as the human heart has not been transformed by the Holy Spirit, it is impossible for him to be convinced of God's excellence [...] Man acts reasonably in every area but one: that of his relations with God, where he acts contrary to all reason and knowledge because the roots of his heart are bad" (40)

-"Jerusalem is called upon [...] to show that the reality of God's grace is for the very object of man's revolt" (107)

-"[Jesus] is not one witness among others of man's long quest [...] He is not an example to be followed. He is not a momentary translation of man's permanent hope [...] He is himself, himself alone, the answer, the goal, and the kingdom of God present on Earth" (130)

-"No other religion has so severely condemned the origins of civilization and man's civilizing acts and industrial progress [...] nevertheless, it is the city, death's domain, which appears as the crowning moment of history. And more importantly, it is not the natural, normal ending, but the result of God's intervention" (162)

-"Only the death of the very Son of God is sufficient to change the facts of history. Only the resurrection is sufficient to dispossess the demon powers of their domain. Thus it is only God, by his act, who made the city into a neutral instrument" (170)