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.

Now that is an easier statement to make than to understand. And to my mind nothing characterizes the theologian's situation more than this: he or she is always making earth-shattering statements that subsequently have to be struggled with continually that they might be understood. Remember, Hegel learnt about how fundamental self reflection was from his theological studies. Theology, par excellence, is a reflective craft because it asks questions it cannot answer and makes statements it cannot fully understand. So, allow me to think through something of the significance and implications of the city as an eschatological concept.

Step one: Somehow the very best of what being human means is summed up in being a Christian citizen in this Kingdom where the gates are never shut and all is illuminated by the light of the Lamb, the slaughtered Lamb (let us recall) but upon the throne (let us emphasize). Now, of course, certain Greeks--Plato and Aristotle, famously, Pericles and Solon also--understood something of this. The polls was a place for the formation of subjects who transcended their individuality by living in and through the friendships that composed true civic relations. Later apologists for cenobitic living also recognized a parallel between the polis and the monastic community. Philosophically, and existentially, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we were recalled to the dialogical nature of being human--by Hegel, by Heidegger, by Gadamer, by various forms of communitarian thinking from Taylor to MacIntrye. In other words, the eschatological value of persons as fellow-citizens reveals a theological anthropology. It sugges ts something of what it means to be a human being created in the image of God, for the destiny of being human is to be in community, as the triune God is himself in community. Let me pursue this association between citizenship and Trinitarian relations a little further, for it is the mysterious heart of the city's eschatological significance. The image for the presence of and participation in God in the Book of Revelation is light. The eschatological city is not simply illuminated by God but dwells within the illumination of God. To employ a Heideggerian metaphor, the Trinitarian relations--that is, one recalls, Trinitarian processions, i.e., Dynamic--provide a "clearing" [eine Lichtung] in which citizenship is perfected. Training in citizenship can, therefore, be understood as central to the operation of salvation. Put another way, spiritual development (even sanctification) is inseparable from sociality. The citizen is the opposite of the sinner--for the citizen is working out the destiny of what it is to b e human. The citizen understands that repentance, forgiveness, peace and reconciliation are not ends in themselves, but the means necessary for the good ordering of the city--an ordering governed by, because constituted in the space opened up by, the Trinitarian God. To be created in the image of God is then to be born into the discipline of being a citizen--in our imaging of God we reflect God's own existence as social. We might take this further and ask in what does good citizenship lie, and suggest it lies in being able to reflect, to be reflective. This suggestion would run somewhat counter to Kant's and Hegel's reading of the Fall as the Fall into self-consciousness (which was, for both, a felix culpa). Although by "reflect" here and "being reflective" I intend something far richer than just self-consciousness or mental deliberations. By "reflect" and "being reflective" I would propose a whole economy of response to the other--a mental act that is also a somatic action and a spiritual meditation that als o constitutes the giving and receiving of grace. Theoria is not to be divorced from praxis; nor reasoning from prudence (phronesis). To be reflective is, I am suggesting, the condition that makes possible the training in citizenship. It is not a product of the Fall. Sin, we might say, distorts the economy of reflection. When we look at each other, after the Fall, we see only ourselves reflected in the other. But, in the destiny of being human as the perfecting of citizenship, when citizens look at each other they will see reflected, and they will reflect upon, the glory of the Triune God. What we are being trained to see in our formation as citizens of the kingdom of heaven is the primordial and divine relationality in which we dwell and have our being.

This then is step one in the elucidation of the eschatological significance of the city: the revelation that the destiny of what it is to be human is to be a citizen. Step two returns us to the concreteness of our present urban contexts. For if as human beings we are to be reflective--in the manner I have proposed we understand that term--so that we might be formed as citizens, then we can see all our attempts to be the builders of earthly cities as expressions of a desire that structures all our intercourse and activity. Any city--London, New York, Berlin, Graz--becomes a human project, a corporate project, issuing from the desire to live as city-dwellers. As such, all cities bear an analogical relation to the heavenly city. They are sites for the formation of citizenship, and as such provide situations for the operation of what I have called reflection or the economies of response. Christians need cities then for their formation, their discipleship. In the practices of everyday living in our urban and subur ban environments Christian desire is disciplined and transfigured among neighbors and friends, lovers and colleagues, in the institutions we work for and institutions we work with, and with respect to the thousands of nameless and faceless others with whom we co-habit and on whom we are, to various degrees, dependent. But there is more than this. For if cities are understood as the greatest of human artforms, then the building and designing of cities is shot through with transcendental aspirations. The founders and builders of cities imitate a divine office. We should not then be surprised to discover in our cities intimations of the heavenly city. And to my mind--this is what gives cities their buzz, their kudos, their charisma, listen, in their writings, to the dreams of architects--the visionary nature of their ambitions. Their materials may be marble or brick, steel or glass, concrete or wood, but their constructions are of light and space. The builders and designers of cities are all utopians; some like Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Courbusier explicitly so, in their elaborate plans for "Broadacres" or "The Radiant City." They are designers not just of buildings and boulevards, parks, pavements and shopping malls. They are designers of lifestyles. Every city is an expression of the way its citizens sought and still seek to live out their conception of the good life. All cities are orientated towards an ideal future--the creation and distribution of wealth and well being. All cities seek a timeless and universal perfection. They seek to show that "Here is a place where human beings flourish and prosper." They seek to make a name for themselves. Since the late nineteenth century; the establishment of the professions of town planning and urban development, Stadtebau, Stadtbaurat and Stadtebauer, and the pastoral idyll of the garden city, cities have aspired to the ideals of openness and transparency. It is as if the metaphysical and political ideals of the Enlightenment--the absolute freedom of the individual and t he promise of the New at the heart of the meaning of the modern--were now made technologically possible with the advent of steel-framework buildings, reinforced concretes and laminated glass. The towers of glass and the crystal palaces are demands for a city without shadows, whose values are immediate and self-evident. They are constructions of light and space, the homes and the workplaces of angels, those who are equally transparent and immediate. The classical and gothic imitations of those solid nineteenth-century buildings are affirmations of the importance of tradition and moral duty. But our contemporary cities, as cities of angels (los angelos) aspire not to the transcendent moral values of the good, the beautiful, the true and the justice, but to the lifestyles of those without conscience, and those beyond good and evil. They aspire towards a realized eschatology--to install the heavenly. Show me your city and I will show you what it is you long for. The towering achievements of Portman, Piano, Foster and Gehry in the newly conceived Potzdamerplatz in Berlin, for example, make a statement summed up in song by the British pop star Robbie Williams, "Let me entertain you." The buildings of Las Vegas make similar statements. The skylines of New York and Chicago announce the arrival of Promethean ambition, new attempts at the construction and completion of Babel--as the German film director Fritz Lang understood when he made Metropolis. You walk again among the Titans, these cityscapes announce--only the Titans now are international corporations and conglomerates. The precincts of St. Paul's in London and Wren's magnificent church speak of the founding of a new Rome, a new eternal city in England's "green and pleasant land." Cities compose our most complex ideologies and desires for eternal life.

But I have been speaking here of specific areas--Manhattan, Potzdamerplatz, St. Paul's--and this reminds us that cities are complex places, composed of different quarters geographically and different times, historically. The city is not one homogenous whole; they are places of plurality and they are palimsests--tablets of wax upon which things have been written and erased, though the previous writing still remains beneath the waxen surface. And we come now to the third reason why cities are important to Christians. For, in the attention to building our cities without shadows we can easily forget these other areas and these past but still haunting traditions. The creation of the city's focus, the city's name, the structural and infrastructural organization that makes the heart of the city these awe-inspiring monuments to human design and ingenuity, draws attention away too frequently from the other parts-from the dark spots, the overcrowding, the squalor, the red-light districts