Stringfellow on Principalities in John's Revelation

Having agreed to read Stringfellow with a friend, I have come across lots of good stuff this weekend. Below is a quote where Stringfellow discusses the difference between the two cities in the Book of Revelation--Babylon and Jerusalem--saying that both symbolize bigger things--Babylon, the Roman Empire; and Jerusalem, the Church. I find these thoughts interesting, and it has me thinking that Revelation would be worth revisiting in the near future:

"Babylon in Revelation is a disclosure and description of an estate or condition which corresponds to the empirical reality of each and every city of all societies--in history. The Babylon of Revelation is archetypical of all nations. ...

"What Babylon means theologically and, hence, existentially for all nations or other principalities in the dimensions of fallenness, doom, and death, Jerusalem means to each nation or power in the terms of holiness, redemption, and life. ...

"The awful ambiguity of Babylon's fallenness is expressed consummately in Babylon's delusion that she is, or is becoming, Jerusalem. This is the same moral confusion which all principalities suffer in one way or another; this is the vocational crisis, really, which every nation in history endures. This is the vanity of every principality--and notably for a nation--that the principality is sovereign in history; which is to say, that it presumes it is the power in relation to which the moral significance of everything and everyone else is determined. Babylon's famous wantonness, Babylon's decadence, Babylon's profligacy is only most superficially to do with materialism, lust, or the decline of moral values, and Babylon's fall is not particularly a punishment for her greed or vice or aggrandizement, despite what some preachers allege. Babylon's futility is her idolatry--her boast of justifying significance or moral ultimacy in her destiny, her reputation, her capabilities, her authority, her glory as a nation. The moral pretenses of Imperial Rome, the millennial claims of Nazism, the arrogance of Marxist dogma, the anxious insistence that America be 'number one' among nations are all versions of Babylon's idolatry. All share in this grandiose view of the nation by which the principality assumes the place of God in the world."

William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973; reprint, Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2004), 48-51.