Kline, Meredith. Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations For a Covenantal Worldview. (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006).

The disciplines of city and urban planning are rooted in the ordering of a civil and just society built on a particular understanding of man and how he needs to be governed. The storied history of design practice articulates a thorough understanding of the philosophical nature of humanity and aggregate forms of structured living. A brief overview of the city within history will demonstrate a wide variety of assumptions and philosophies about the nature of humanity, its end, purpose, and destiny. Ancient cities such as Ur, Uruk, Babylon, and Xanadu find their identity and origin in the search for the administration of social justice and the organization of cultural government.

Not only do these cities hold individual seats for the execution of social justice (such as courts, palaces, temples, and other religious and civic structures), their architecture and design says something concrete about humanity’s relationship to the gods and need for the promulgation and advancement of their own specific culture. This in turn indicates the individual human search and competition to exert power and authority over each other recognized in a position of anarchy and the resulting need for government espoused by Thomas Hobbes.

I am struck by the overwhelming comparison and Biblical account given by Kline regarding the ordination of the human city to these secular acknowledgments for the origin of cities given in the authoritative text for city planning, Raymond Unwins “Town Planning & Practice.” The Human City is described by Kline as an ordinance of common grace, originating in the order of sin and seen primarily as a postlapsarian response to the need for justice, government and protection in the life of Cain. The human city is neither a part of the kingdom of Satan (by establishment of the evil intentions of an ungodly man” p162-163) nor an institution ordained in the kingdom of God (as a temporal measure of common grace but not affording eternal salavation, the structural manifestation of which is the ‘kingdom of god’ 169) but instead a structural interim postlapsarian response to the need for God’s elect to be brought into the kingdom of God.

In this sense the human city, or polis, is defined in several categories:

1) The human city is the sum of man’s endeavours and the shape of his hope

2) The human city is a structure of temporal safety, not eternal salvation

3) The human city is the vehicle for justice and judicial order

4) The human city is a medium for governmental structure and protection of community

Kline clarifies that though the human city is a common grace ordinance and response to the fall, prelapsarian cultural structure would have assumed the form of city as well. Kline refers to this as the Metapolis, defined as the “eternal city of the great King.” The distinction is that God orally commands the city into existence in Genesis 4:15 by divinely pronouncing it as the structure through which God will execute justice and protection for Cain and his descendants, thus invoking governmental order through the authority structure of the family.

The cultural structures necessary for the institution of cities had already existed. Thus, these contributing factors provide the structure for the human city, but not the motivation, thus the impetus and essence of a city

1) Dominion mandate: the source for citizens is found in the command to multiply and produce offspring

2) Dominion mandate: the origination of the cultivation of resources leading to the materials for the physical architecture of the city

3) Dominion mandate: instituted the authority structure of human family, which when engaged in the cultural process is the source of a centralized government

While Kline’s ideas regarding the essence of the city being rooted in the justice and judicial order are compelling to a practical understanding of the urban planning, the contrast and criticism of neo-Dooyeweerdian and Kuyperian thought (and thus a holistic Reformational understanding of the purpose of culture and its institutions) provides significant barriers for the advancement and redemptive nature of the city. It seems that Kline, through his discussion of the city logically leads to a dispensational theology.