Two Cities: One that Creates and One that Cannibalizes
This excerpt is part four of our summer series, How Shall We Live in the Digital Age?—a collection of short pieces and excerpts from the June 2025 Ex Fonte, exploring how Christians can and should navigate the ever-changing digital landscape.
Sean McDonough
Given my interest in the book of Revelation, at a recent forum on the place of artificial intelligence (AI) in the community of faith, I was asked to speak about whether or not AI could be—let’s call it—the “operating system” for Babylon, as it is depicted there. While “Babylon” represents the Roman Empire in Revelation in its original context, it also serves as a broader metaphor for worldly corruption and rebellion against God that is destined for judgment. The book of Revelation is tremendous because it opens up imaginative vistas for us to think into issues like AI. That’s one of the reasons I love the book so much. But to answer that question, we need to know a little bit about how the book of Revelation functions.
A Tale of Two Cities
Central to Revelation—insofar as we can really say what the book is all about—is what I like to call a “tale of two cities.” If you look at the portrayal of Babylon in chapter 17 and then at the portrayal of the New Jerusalem in chapter 21, you’ll see a distinct contrast drawn between these two cities. Babylon (“the city of man”), depicted as a woman, is adorned with gold and jewels and flows from the will of the counter-creative satanic trinity. The other city, the New Jerusalem, is likewise depicted as a woman adorned with pearls and replete with proverbial streets of gold. The latter is the chaste bride of the Lamb; the former, the notorious harlot of Babylon. These two cities stand in stark opposition, and they issue from two vastly divergent sources.
Babylon is the civilizational expression or fruit of the satanic trinity. This “trinity” consists of Satan, portrayed as a fiery red dragon; the Beast that Satan summons out of the sea to rule over the world in his name and for his glory; and then a second Beast, who is a type of propaganda machine for the first Beast. (John doesn’t use the term “Antichrist” for the first Beast, but that’s effectively who this beast is.) It’s not hard to see how the Devil is a mocking imitation of the Father; the Beast is an imitation of Christ—God’s deputized, authorized, empowered ruler—and the second Beast is a blasphemous imitation of the Holy Spirit. In Revelation chapters 12-20, the members of the satanic trinity and their city—the Dragon, the first Beast, the second Beast, and Babylon, have been marched onto the stage. Then, later, they are marched off again, but in reverse order, in scenes describing the destruction of Babylon, the Beasts, and the Dragon. Again, Babylon represents the civilizational expression of the will of the satanic trinity and, as such, it is the great counterfeit city, a simulacrum, an imitation of what civilization is meant to be.
In some sense, we can say that Babylon is sheer illusion because it has cut itself off from the God who alone is and who alone gives life. It’s slowly bleeding out its very existence, but it has a wonderful façade—it looks great on the surface. To the extent that it takes the things of creation and puts its own name on them, it’s purely illusory, the hijacked creation project of the living God. The gold and jewels represent the looted goods from God’s good created world, now turned over to idolatry, oppression, and self-expression. It’s a world turned in on itself—in curvatus in se—as Augustine and certainly Luther, would say. It is a world that is completely self-enclosed.
The New Jerusalem, on the other hand, descends as a gift from heaven, from God. God creates “in the beginning” and he continues to uphold the world as it goes along its course. His superintendence is an ongoing reality. He enlists humanity to join alongside in that creation project, empowered by him, to work for what Tolkien calls the “effoliation and multiple enrichment of the world”— to make the world a better place. It is the continuation or the summation of the journey through history of God’s pilgrim people, God’s people working in the good creation toward God’s purposes.
Yet we know that there was the fall—the intervention of the operations of the satanic trinity—which French theologian Jacques Ellul labels the “counter-creation.” The result was that humanity took those created abilities and used them for their own nefarious, self-involved purposes. God’s gift of creativity is not diminished, but it is now turned in the wrong direction.
The image I like to use to illustrate these colliding realities is drawn from the Kutuk River up in Alaska. Apparently, the orangish, yellowish, metallic stream is the result of permafrost melting and leaching out metals into the water. I can’t think of a better image to describe the coexistence of God-given, celestial, earthly creativity—represented by the blue stream—and this mechanized, metallic, defiled misuse of those created abilities represented by the murky stream.
So, we have the “New Jerusalem stream” coming out of Eden, coming out of God’s temple, and then we have the “Babylon stream” coming out of a counterfeit Eden, which looks like the real thing until you taste it and see what happens when you consume it. This dichotomy is presupposed in the book of Revelation, and I think helpfully illustrates the issue of AI. Here, on the one hand, we have the potential for a wonderful enhancement of human life: AI, to take one example, can be used to guide self-driving cars which can aid people with disabilities and allow people who are getting older to have a greater degree of mobility and independence. Likewise, AI-generated algorithms and data crunching can develop remedies for various diseases that afflict our bodies. This use of our God-given abilities to enhance human flourishing is tremendous.
On the other hand, it’s almost comical how quickly the downside of AI becomes evident. It’s not just the scare-mongering Skynet, Terminator-type scenarios to which I’m referring. Especially in academia, particularly in the context of, say, in-depth research papers, the first thing we professors think about is how students may co-opt a platform like ChatGPT, where the machine does the thinking for them. Our phones get smarter, and our brains get dumber.
That’s the quintessence of Babylon. It is the quintessence of a world turned in on itself as it becomes almost cannibalistic, hollowing us out from the inside. Those very capacities which enabled us to develop AI are sucked out of us by the machine that we’ve created.