Chapter 12 REDEMPTION AND THE CITY

As we saw in the last chapter, God unexpectedly calls Israel to serve the pagan city of Babylon - to seek its prosperity-while living in exile there. And in a sense, the people of God have yet to return from that state of exile. In this chapter, we will see how this exilic model helps us understand the relationship of the church to the city in New Testament times, and even today — and how God plans to resolve the great tension of the city at the end of time.¹

During the exile, Israel no longer existed in the form of a nation-state with a government and laws. Instead, it existed as a countercultural fellowship contained within other nation- states. In many ways, this is also the form of the New Testament church, as Peter and James suggest when they address believers as “the Dispersion” (Jas 1:1 ESV) and “exiles” (1 Pet 1:1 ESV). Twice Peter uses parepidemoi as a word for “exiles”—a word we sometimes translate as “resident aliens.” Parepidemoi were citizens of one country and yet full-time residents of another. Their primary allegiance was to another country, and that country’s culture was formative for their beliefs and practices. Yet they lived in their country of residence as full participants in its life. In other words, “resident aliens” lived neither as natives nor as tourists. Though they were not permanently rooted, neither were they merely travelers who were just passing through.

RESIDENT ALIENS AND CULTURE

In an article on 1 Peter titled “Soft Difference,” Miroslav Volf shows how the tension Peter envisioned between persecution and attraction and between evangelism and service does not fit neatly into any of the historic models of relating Christ to culture. Unlike models that call for a transformation of culture or a Christendom-like alliance of church and state, Peter expects the gospel to always be highly offensive and never completely embraced or accepted by the world. This is a caution to those Christians who hope to bring about an essentially Christian culture. And unlike models that call solely for evangelism and are highly pessimistic about influencing culture, Peter nonetheless expects some aspects of Christian faith and practice to be highly attractive in any pagan culture, thus influencing people to praise God.2

Christians are now considered citizens of “the Jerusalem that is above” (Gal 4:26; see Phil 3:20). Indeed, in a significant statement, Jesus tells his followers that they are a “city on a hill” (Matt 5:14). Communities of Christ-followers are God’s “city” within every earthly city. They are the renewed people of God (see Isa 32:14; Dan 9:16). Their ultimate allegiance belongs to God and his kingdom, yet, in keeping with the term used by Peter and James, believers are not just “passing through” their earthly cities. This reflects the same balanced attitude that Jewish exiles were called to have toward Babylon. The Jewish exiles were not to hate the pagan city as they bided their time, waiting for the day of their departure. They were to be fully involved in its life, working in it and praying for it. At the same time, they were not to adopt its culture or lose their distinctive identity as God’s holy people. God called the Jewish exiles to accept and embrace the tension of the city for the sake of God’s glory — and this is exactly what today’s Christians are called to do as well.

Resident aliens will always live with both praise and misunderstanding. Jesus taught that Christians’ “good deeds” are to be visible to the pagans (Matt 5:16), but he also warns his followers to expect misunderstanding and persecution (v. 10). In a similar way, Peter calls Christians to live in the midst of pagan society in such a way that others will see their “good deeds and glorify God” (1 Pet 2:12), but he warns them to expect persecution nonetheless. Both Peter and Jesus indicate that these “good deeds” (which in the Greek meant not merely personal morality but also acts of service to others) will lead at least some pagans to glorify God.

Despite these similarities, the Christian church differs from the Jewish exiles in two significant ways. First, the Jews “increase in number” in Babylon almost exclusively by having children and growing families (Jer 29:6). The church must also multiply and increase in the pagan city as God’s new humanity, but this happens especially through evangelism and discipling (Acts 6:1, 7; 9:31; 12:24). We also see a significant shift in God’s call to mission between the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, mission was centripetal; the flow was in toward the center. Israel was called to be an obedient people, becoming a society that displayed God’s glory for the nations to see (Deut 4:6-8). The nations were called to look and to “come in” and worship God. But in the New Testament, mission becomes centrifugal — moving outward from the center. The people of God are sent out to the world to proclaim the gospel (Matt 28:16-20; Acts 1-2). The Babylonian exile and Jonah’s mission are foreshadowings of this future change.

Second, despite their engagement with Babylonian society, the Jews still kept the Mosaic code, so that their dress, food, and other practices continued to set them culturally apart from the Babylonians (see, e.g., Dan 1:8). Their dietary laws alone virtually dictated that Jews eat separately from pagans. In the book of Acts, God has to send Peter a vivid and forceful vision to get him to even consider accepting an invitation to enter a Gentile soldier’s home (10:28-29). In Christ, these ceremonial and cultural regulations and distinctions become obsolete (Mark 7; Acts 15:1-35). Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners as a strategy for ministry. Adopting these New Testament teachings frees Christians to participate in a city’s culture more fully than the Jews in Babylon could. However, this freedom also makes the danger of assimilation and compromise more acute for Christians. As future citizens of heaven, Christians must see and avoid the idolatries and injustices of their culture, even as they continue to enjoy its common-grace blessings.

So why should we apply the exhortations of Jeremiah 29 to the church today? In the Bible, we see the people of God living in three configurations. From Abraham’s day onward, God’s people existed as an extended biological family. From the days of Moses, they existed as a nation-state, with laws and a king and an army to enforce those laws by civil sanctions. During the exile, however, God’s people existed as a dispersed fellowship of congregations (synagogues) living in many different nation-states. God’s laws did not take a civil form during that period - the disobedient were expelled from the congregation, but they were not executed.

JONAH’S MISSION

The book of Jonah foreshadows the centrifugal New Testament mission (sending believers out) rather than the centripetal Old Testament mission (calling nonbelievers in). Jonah is the only Old Testament prophet sent to a pagan city to call it to repentance. God’s final statement is striking. The Lord calls Jonah to love the great pagan city of Nineveh because of the vast number of its spiritually blind inhabitants (Jonah 4:10-11).3

THE “CRUCIALITY” OF CITY MINISTRY IN THE BIBLE

Many of the reasons that city ministry was so effective in the early church have been outlined by Wayne Meeks in The First Urban Christians and by Harvie Conn in his many books. They identify three “crucial” factors:

  1. Cultural cruciality. In the village, someone might win its one or two lawyers to Christ. However, if you want to win the legal profession, which will influence all lawyers, you must go to the city, where you will find the law schools and the law journal publishers—the key institutions of influence in that profession.
  2. Global cruciality. In the village, someone can win over the single people group living there, since rural areas are often sociologically homogeneous. But if you share the gospel in a city, you can reach dozens of different national and ethnic groups. Indeed, you can reach them through one language—the lingua franca of that place. The gospel then travels back into many different cultures through immigrants who return to visit or remain in their homelands.
  3. Personal cruciality. In the village, people live in a culture that tends to resist change and is more conservative and traditional. However, because of the diversity and mobility of the cities, urbanites are more open to new ideas—such as the gospel! The pressure and diversity of the city environment make even the most gospel-hostile people open to new ways of thinking and living.

After the exile, the Jews went back to being a nation-state. Yet the New Testament does not envision the Christian church in this way. Instead, it shows that the church continues to exist as a dispersion of people from every nation under heaven (Acts 2), just as Israel did in the exile (see Jas 1:1; 1 Pet 1:1). Therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude that the church should continue to relate to the human cities of our time, not as the people of God did under Abraham, Moses, or David, but as they did during the time of the exile.

CITY MINISTRY IN THE EARLY CHURCH

In the early church, God’s redemptive mission no longer centered on a particular city such as Jerusalem or Babylon. All of the cities of the world become primary targets of God’s mission. The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery in its article on “City” states the following:

In Acts 17, Paul travels to Athens, the intellectual center of the Greco-Roman world. In Acts 18, he goes to Corinth, one of the commercial centers of the empire. In Acts 19, he arrives in Ephesus, perhaps the Roman world’s religious center, the hub of many pagan cults and particularly of the imperial cult, with three temples for emperor worship. By the end of Acts, Paul has made it to Rome itself, the empire’s capital of military and political power. John Stott concludes, “It seems to have been Paul’s deliberate policy to move purposefully from one strategic city-centre to the next.”5

Paul’s ministry in Ephesus reveals several of the strengths of urban ministry. In Acts 19:1 we read, “While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus.” Stott remarks that virtually all the roads in that part of the world went through Ephesus. Similarly, all major cities are the unavoidable crossroads for their regions and societies. Paul entered Ephesus and rented the “lecture hall of Tyrannus” (v. 9). Stott notes that the lecture hall would have been a school that stood vacant for two to three hours at midday when people took a break from work for a meal and rest.7 There Paul did gospel dialegomenos, arguing and persuading his hearers dialogically—not simply by preaching but by making his case that the Messiah was Jesus and engaging with people’s questions and objections. “This went on for two years, so that all the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord” (v. 10). Because Paul’s ministry took place in the region’s major city, virtually everyone in the Lycus River valley would have been exposed to the preaching of the gospel.

Stott observes that “all the inhabitants of Asia visited Ephesus from time to time, to buy or sell, visit a relative, frequent the baths, attend the games in the stadium, watch a drama in the theatre, or worship the goddess [Artemis].” By reaching the city, Paul reached all segments of society, as evidenced in the letter to the Colossians. In this epistle, Paul follows up with disciples in cities along the Lycus Valley-Laodicea, Hierapolis, and Colossae (Col 4:13-16)—who were likely converted through his Ephesian ministry, even though he had never visited those places personally. This suggests that if the gospel is unfolded at the urban center, you can effectively reach the region and the surrounding society. Stott cites J. A. Alexander’s insight that Acts shows the spread of the gospel “by the gradual establishment of radiating centres or sources of influence at certain salient points throughout a large part of the Empire.”10 Stott concludes:

This process of urbanization… constitutes a great challenge to the Christian church. On the one hand, there is an urgent need for Christian planners and architects, local government politicians, urban specialists, developers and community social workers, who will work for justice, peace, freedom and beauty in the city. On the other, Christians need to move into the cities, and experience the pains and pressures of living there, in order to win city-dwellers for Christ. Commuter Christianity (living in salubrious suburbia and commuting to an urban church) is no substitute for incarnational involvement.11

AS THE CITY GOES, SO GOES THE CULTURE

In his book The Rise of Christianity, sociologist Rodney Stark discusses the strategic importance of the early Christians’ reaching city dwellers to influence the broader culture: To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity…

People had been enduring catastrophes for centuries without the aid of Christian theology or social structures. Hence I am by no means suggesting that the misery of the ancient world caused the advent of Christianity. What I am going to argue is that once Christianity did appear, its superior capacity for meeting these chronic problems soon became evident and played a major role in its ultimate triumph… [for what Christians] brought was not simply an urban movement, but a new culture.2

The early church was largely an urban movement that won the people of the Roman cities to Christ, while most of the rural countryside remained pagan. Because the Christian faith captured the cities, however, it eventually captured the ancient Greco-Roman world. As the city went, so went the culture. 13 Why? The urban elites were, of course, important, but the Christian church did not focus on them alone. Then, as now, the cities were filled with the poor, and urban Christians’ commitment to the poor was visible and striking. Through the cities, Christians changed history and culture by winning the elites as well as by identifying deeply with the poor. Richard Fletcher, in The Barbarian Conversion, shows that this same thing occurred during the Christian mission to Europe from AD 500 to 1500.14

THE COMMON-GRACE CITY

Bible scholar Meredith Kline notes how the development of culture in Genesis arises from the development of cities:

The city is not to be regarded as an evil invention of… fallen man… The ultimate goal set before humanity at the very beginning was that human culture should take city-form… There should be an urban structuring of human historical existence… The cultural mandate given at creation was a mandate to build the city. Now, after the fall, the city is still a benefit, serving humankind as refuge from the howling wilderness condition into which the fallen human race, exiled from paradise, has been driven… The common grace city has remedial benefits even in a fallen world. It becomes the drawing together of resources, strength, and talent no longer just for mutual complementation in the task of developing the resources of the created world, but now a pooling of power for defense against attack, and as an administrative community of welfare for the relief of those destitute by reason of the cursing of the ground. 12

CONSUMMATION: CULTIVATING THE CITY

Beginning with the Old Testament prophets, God’s future redeemed world is depicted as a city. And in Revelation 21-22, when God’s creational and redemptive intentions are fully realized, we see that the result is indeed a city, with walls and gates and streets. In some ways, this city is unlike our current cities, more of a “garden-city” that perfectly balances the glorious benefits of human density and diversity with the beauty and peace of nature. The city of God’s old enemy, Babylon, is finally overthrown, and God’s people thrive in peace and productivity (Rev 18).

What is most striking about this holy city is that it has not been built from scratch. In its midst flows a crystal river, and on each side of the river is “the tree of life” that bears fruit and leaves to heal the nations of all the effects of the divine covenant curse (Rev 22:1-3). This city is, in fact, the same garden we see in the Genesis account, which was also marked by a central river and the presence of the tree of life (Gen 2:8-10), but it has been expanded and remade into the garden-city of God. It is the garden of Eden, yet faithfully cultivated — the fulfillment of the purposes of the Eden of God.15 Indeed, the very word used for “garden” in Genesis 2 denotes not a wilderness but a “park,”16 a well-tended plot of land one would find in a city or near a royal palace.

Why is this important? God’s directive that Adam and Eve “rule over” the earth (Gen 1:28) is often called “the cultural mandate.” This is a call for them to “image God’s work for the world by taking up our work in the world.”17 It is a call to develop a culture and build a civilization that honors God. Gardening (the original human vocation) is a paradigm for cultural development. A gardener neither leaves the ground as is, nor does he destroy it. Instead, he rearranges it to produce food and plants for human life. He cultivates it. (The words culture and cultivate come from the same root.) Every vocation is in some way a response to, and an extension of, the primal, Edenic act of cultivation. Artists, for example, take the raw material of the five senses and human experience to produce music and visual media; literature and painting; dance and architecture and theater. In a similar way, technologists and builders take the raw material of the physical world and creatively rearrange it to enhance human productivity and flourishing. Because we are called to create culture in this way, and because cities are the places of greatest cultural production, I believe that city building is a crucial part of fulfilling the mandate.

As we have already pointed out, the first evidence for this connection between the city, the culture, and the flourishing of human beings is found in Genesis 4, where Cain is “building a city” (v. 17). Immediately after the city is built, we see the first development of the arts, agriculture, and technology — the beginnings of the human cultural creativity that God had called for. Even though Cain’s purpose in building the city was rebellious, its power was good. The tension of the city was present from its very start.

The cultural mandate, our failure to fulfill it in accord with God’s design, its connection to city building, and the progressive importance of the city of man to the city of God — all these plotlines resolve at the end of the book of Revelation. Though the first Adam failed to faithfully heed God’s call, the second Adam - Jesus Christ—will fulfill the mandate of the first Adam. He will save a people, subdue the earth, and bring in a civilization that honors the Father (1 Cor 15:22-25). Since the Bible reveals to us that a city is the final result of the work of the second Adam on our behalf, it seems fair to assume this was what God had intended when he gave the cultural mandate to the first Adam. In other words, God called Adam and Eve to expand the borders of the garden, and when God’s will is finally done and Jesus fulfills the cultural mandate on our behalf, the garden of Eden becomes a garden city.

Many Christians assume that the final goal of Christ’s redemption is to return us to a rural, Edenic world. Based on this assumption, the work of Christians is exclusively to evangelize and disciple. But Revelation shows us this is not the case. God’s intention for human endeavor is that it raise up civilizations-cities-that glorify him and steward the endless wonders and riches that God put into the created world. This insight has led Harvie Conn to write that the cultural mandate “could just as easily be called an urban mandate.”18

The city is an intrinsically positive social form with a checkered past and a beautiful future. As redemptive history progresses, we see that God’s people begin as wanderers and nomads outside of cities, and as city rebels (Babel). Then God directs them to be city builders and rebuilders (Jerusalem) and city-loving exiles (Babylon). In New Testament times, the people of God become city missionaries (indeed, New Testament writings contain few glimpses of nonurban Christianity). Finally, when God’s future arrives in the form of a city, his people can finally be fully at home. The fallen nature of the city - the warping of its potential due to the power of sin - is finally overcome and resolved; the cultural mandate is complete; the capacities of city life are freed in the end to serve God. All of God’s people serve him in his holy city.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REFLECTION

  1. Keller writes, “The church should continue to relate to the human cities of our time, not as the people of God did under Abraham, Moses, or David, but as they did during the time of the exile.” In what ways is the situation of the Christian church different from that of the exiles in Babylon? In what ways is it similar? How does this affect the mission of the church today?
  2. From Acts 17 through the end of the book of Acts, Paul has strategically traveled to the intellectual (Athens), commercial (Corinth), religious (Ephesus), and political (Rome) centers of the Roman world. What are the centers of power and influence in your own local context? How is your church seeking to strategically reach these different centers of cultural influence?
  3. Keller writes, “Then, as now, the cities were filled with the poor, and urban Christians’ commitment to the poor was visible and striking.” Do you believe this is still true of the Christian church? If so, give an example. If not, how can this legacy be recaptured?
  4. Keller writes, “Gardening (the original human vocation) is a paradigm for cultural development. A gardener neither leaves the ground as is, nor does he destroy it. Instead, he rearranges it to produce food and plants for human life. He cultivates it. (The words culture and cultivate come from the same root.) Every vocation is in some way