Book Review: Douglas Wilson’s Five Cities that Ruled the World

A quick scan of the Amazon.com reviews for Douglas Wilson’s latest effort and you will notice that people either love this book or hate it. If you are already familiar with Wilson’s work and enjoy it, the odds are you will feel that this book deserves five stars. If you stumbled upon this book in search for a good “unbiased” secular history book, then you will more than likely wish there was a zero stars button.

Wilson is a pastor/theologian/cultural commentator/historian with a well developed Christian worldview and no aspirations of glory in the world of secular historical scholarship. He intends this book as a Christian take on the historical influence and development of five major world cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London and New York. He places these cities in their historical framework (a brief overview due to limited space) and critiques them from a Christian perspective, noting particular contributions each have made to modern society.

Several reviewers have found the afterward particularly odd or confusing. This is likely because they are unfamiliar with Wilson’s postmillennial eschatology, or, his belief that the world will not grow progressively worse until Christ returns, but, like the mustard seed or the leaven in Matthew 13:31-33, the Kingdom of God will start small and rapidly grow until it fills the whole world…ultimately ushering in the return of Christ when the majority of the world is already living as Christians and Christian societies.

Obviously with this view there is a very positive take on the nature of history and God’s design for and work in it. While the book could have been clearer and I would have liked to have seen longer, more developed analysis as someone already familiar with the basics of world history, Wilson provides a good introduction and overview that should drive interested parties to further study. He also writes with his typical informal style that makes for light and interesting reading. Reccomended for anyone not turned off by this review.