Why is the city so important for Christian theology?

YOU WILL NOTICE I BEGIN WITH A QUESTION: Why is the city so important for Christian theology? The question has been stated in different terms throughout the history of Christian reflection. In John's Gospel we have the confrontation between Christians and the world, in Augustine an examination of the relationship between the city of God and the city of the pagans, in Aquinas an inquiry into the Church and the Empire, in the Lutheran restatement of the two kingdoms, and in the various investigations from Barth, Tillich, and Maritain we have debates between religion and culture. These all form different aspects of my question of the Christian and the city. The "city" then is used metonymically to speak of the material and temporal realities in which we live. But it is used as such because the city today remains, for most Christians, the context within which we experience and exercise our dealings with contemporary culture, the state, and the world. The city is, for most of us, the living face of the national an d international bodies with their laws, ideologies and institutions of government. To raise the question, then, of the city's importance for Christians involves theology in a wide number of discussions: with the social, the anthropological, the political, and the economic at state and global levels. But in phrasing my theological enquiry in this way I want to resist the abstractions that can enter into discussions of the Church and the State, Christianity and capitalism, religion and culture, and human beings as social animals. Cities are where most of us live. In cities Christians, in their everyday practices, encounter living forms of capitalism, forms of society, forms of political organization at both macro and micro levels that are highly specific. The "world" in the Johannine sense of that term, is indwelt, shaping and forming Christian and non-Christian. It is not an abstraction--in our living as Christians we continually work with and in the world, and the world works with and in us. Christian theolog y must then not only involve itself with economics and politics and anthropology, it must involve itself with architecture and urban planning, with the dominant modes of civic living--with the theme bars, sport and fitness centers, the music, the dance scenes, the theaters, the cinemas and the fashions that characterize the contexts in which we are embedded. By the word "involve," I mean Christian theology has to seek to understand and communicate its gospel--the Christian theologian must seek to understand and execute his or her calling--with respect to this rich and varied environment. For whether we wish to criticize or extol aspects of contemporary culture what the Christian is here to do is not simply to interpret, to comment from some lofty distance, but to indwell and transform where we are. Christians are involved, in many different ways, in transformative practices of hope with respect to where they have been placed or where they have been called to be.

An initial answer to the question I raised would suggest that the city is important for Christians because in the West that's where most of us (and most other people) live. To return to John's Gospel, Christians are not extracted from the world, in fact we engage in that which is most truly ours in Christ: for though Christ was not received by the world, John tells us he entered into that which was "his own [ta idia]."

Now let us make a further theological move. The fall from salvation may well have taken place or have been conceived to have taken place in a garden, but when the state of Christian salvation attains its perfection it will occur within or is conceived to occur within a city. When the first heaven and the first earth are consumed in apocalyptic judgement, and the new heaven and the new earth are established, the book of Revelation speaks of a "holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down Out of heaven from God, made ready like a bride adorned for her husband." I do not pretend to fathom the metaphors and allegories of the New Testament's final book, but the city in the Scriptures is an important figure, and, ultimately, along with the imagery of the bride, is employed to sum up the perfect life in Christ. Beatification is citizenship, the Church becomes the polis: "I saw no temple in the city; for its temple was the sovereign Lord God and the Lamb. And the city had no need for sun or moon to shine upon it; for the gl ory of God gave it light; and its lamp was the Lamb. By its lights shall the nations bring into it all their splendour. The gates of the city shall never be shut by day--and there will be no night. The wealth of splendour of the nations shall be brought into it." Note the repetition; this city is not characterized by its poverty and austerity, it is characterized rather by its "splendour," its wealth, its gemstone beauty and sublime proportions-equally owned and admired by all. Alongside other Scriptural images of this kingdom we are not talking about banqueting here, nor fasting, not hunger; we are talking wine tasting (Christ himself told the disciples at the last supper "I shall not drink of the vine again until that day when I drink it with you in the Kingdom of heaven"); with the language of bride and bridegroom, though there may be no marriage in heaven, we are talking of eros in ways Gregory of Nyssa, St. Augustine and St. Bernard of Clairvaux understood. What does all this mean for we, now, here and t heologically engaged? Well, returning to our question, the second reason cities are important for Christians is because, in ways that are mysterious in the Scriptures, civic living has eschatological significance because it is to be experienced (as Augustine recognized) in the light of the city of God as the true res republica.