"Zion is the only human city, its the only one left"

('Tank' to 'Neo' in The Matrix)

Introduction

In this paper I want to approach the question of 'theology and the ecology of urban life' from the perspective of a 'post-liberal public theology'. By this I mean a theology which conceptualises 'public-ness' as being paradigmatically displayed by the Christian ecclesia before the wider world In my view there are four key aspects to the post-liberal project. The first is a theological critique of the presumed secularity and religious neutrality of public life. As John Milbank has argued, secular modernity is not neutral with respect to Christian theology, but is fundamentally hostile to it. Hence a primary challenge for Christians is to contest this taken for granted secularity with an alternative, theological vision of the world. The second is a reflective critique of systemic problems of the theological and ecclesial heritage of 'Constantinian' Christianity, which have been partly responsible for the displacement of Christian faith in modern public life: specifically, the failure to sustain a fully Trinitarian understanding of God and the Constantinian accommodation of the church to dominant regimes . The third task is to recover the vision of the gospel as public truth centred on the life of the church as 'the polis of God'. The fourth is to reframe the wider social and political order as a truly 'secular space' on the basis of the theo-political claims of Jesus and the kingdom.

My task here is the explore what this project means for Christian engagement with urban - and suburban - life. 'The city' is a crucial site for the development of a post-liberal public vision/ecclesial practice for a number of reasons. First, it is the primary location for many church communities. Like the majority of Australians we live in cities or suburbs and these provide the context for Christian assembly, mission and everyday life. Second, the language of the city is integral to a Christian vision of and engagement with the world. The life of a congregation is shaped to a greater or lesser extent by a scripturally based civic imagination, arising out of our identification with the Christian story. Third, the 'city' confronts us as perhaps the most important site in which we face the diverse challenges of the culture of secular modernity.

My discussion will follow the reverse order of these three themes. First, I will discuss the ways in which late modern cities have been viewed by various (post) modern urban theorists. These people are generally more reflexive about modernity and recognise the need to contest and to re-direct the ongoing processes of urban change, especially in an era of 'globalisation'. In particular, I am interested in attempts to spell out a normative vision for cities in terms of ideas such as sustainability, citizenship, civil society, civic spaces and the like. Second, I examine what it means for us as Christians to be oriented towards 'another city'. Does the opposition between the heavenly city of God and the earthly city mean that we should not become too entangled with the affairs of this present city? I will suggest that, rather than turning us away from the cities in which we live, our allegiance to 'another city' should prompt us to contest and re-imagine these places in terms of the rule of Christ. Finally, I will discuss some of the ways in which the vision of embodying the life of 'another city' might be expressed in the practices of urban church life.

Cities have long been important sites for the processes of modernisation and the experience of modernity . They have been the nerve centres of industrial production, commerce and employment, and thus magnets for ever-increasing numbers of people . Cities have been places of enormous human creativity and human flourishing, as well as of terrible human dislocation, misery and degradation. Cities depend upon and give rise to extraordinary innovations in technologies of urban infrastructure and administration, and also impressive efforts to alleviate human misery and inequality through welfare, better planning and the like. And it is in cities that we encounter most forcefully the modernist experience that 'all that is solid melts into air'.

Over the last decade, many cities have experienced the impact of another era of economic restructuring, catalysed by new communication technologies enabling increasingly global flows of capital, economic production and people . As Soja comments these changes represent a further major transformation in the nature and meaning of the city. This is particularly evident in the increasing integration of cities into a global economy and changes in economic activity with new dynamic sectors in financial services and culture industries displacing the older 'rust belt' industries. Despite this dynamism and growth, particularly in the emergent global cities, the city also confronts planners, politicians and citizens with major problems and challenges:

* Environmental unsustainability: In Cities for a Small Planet, Richard Rogers observes that cities constitute 'the major destroyer of the ecosystem and the greatest threat to humankind's survival on the planet' Cities are a major source of water and air pollution (including greenhouse gas emissions) and the unsustainable use of natural resources. In response there is a worldwide movement for more 'sustainable cities' aimed at improving energy efficiency and reforming the present car based transport infrastructure around the renewal of public transit systems.

* Cultural difference: According to Saskia Sassen and Leonie Sandercock, globalisation further extends the cultural diversity of cities. Sandercock discusses the various factors that have contributed to a large increase in the movements of people around the world, creating new multicultural urban communities and the need for new forms of citizenship and approaches to urban planning: "The result is postmodern cities and regions of extraordinary cultural diversity and the attendant problems of living together in one society for ethnic groups with diverse cultures and social practices".

* Social fragmentation: Cities are also the primary sites for what Anthony Giddens has called the 'disembedding mechanisms' of late modernity. Cities make possible lifestyles of extraordinary freedom and choice, yet the absence of resilient communal traditions means that urban dwellers have few moral coordinates within which to make sense of their lives. In her analyses of cities in the global economy, Saskia Sassen has highlighted the ways in which global cities have become important sites for the concentration of corporate power, but also of marginalised workers. She worries about the consequences as

* The politics of fear: A related characteristic of late modern cities, reflecting the growing inequalities between rich and poor, is the increasing difficulties faced by municipal authorities in providing services and security for urban populations. In Mike Davis's account, Los Angeles, perhaps of the archetype of the late modern city, is shaped by a politics of fear and a tacit abandonment of those earlier public visions which sought to create the city as a civic space.

Amongst contemporary urban theorists there is also a particular emphasis on the discursive construction of the city, or the way the city is imagined. Anthony King identifies a paradigm shift in urban theory, such that interpretations of the city now encompass both the structural processes of urban change, as well as representations of cities. Similarly, Edward Soja, has argued for the need to go beyond the 'new urbanism' of Harvey and Castells, concerned primarily with the ways in which urban life was structured by the processes of political economy, to recognise the importance of the cultural representations of the city. As James Donald puts it, 'the city' needs to be understood as 'text'. This more postmodern approach to the city, with its emphasis on discourse and difference, is also reflected in the attention given to the diverse micro-environments of urban life.

I am interested in the attempts by communities, activists, planners and urban theorists to develop a civic vision, drawing upon ideas of citizenship, sustainability, public space, and the like, which can provide a framework for dealing with issues of technological change, environmental unsustainability, social inequality and cultural diversity in cities. I mention a couple of examples. English architect Richard Rogers is a passionate advocate for the reshaping of cities around concepts of environmental sustainability and a shift away from transport systems dominated by the private car. In Rogers' urban vision, public spaces for citizenship is a central theme:

Likewise, in her study of the re-design of urban spaces in New York and other American cities, Sharon Zukin has emphasised the primary importance of public culture:

From the perspective of public theology what is most striking about all this is the almost complete absence of reflection on the religious character and meaning of the city. It is generally taken for granted that the city is a secular space. There are very few who attend to the ways in which even late modern cities, with their festivals, monuments and expressions of symbolic power, still produce representations of the sacred. There are some who do. Leonie Sandercock, noting that theorists such as Soja and Harvey speak exclusively of a secular city, quotes Jane M. Jacobs observation: "This erasure of the sacred speaks precisely of the modernist underpinnings of 'western urbanism' as well as the recalcitrant modernism of these accounts of the 'post' modern urban" .

It is this supposed 'erasure of the sacred' that we need to contest, and to re-imagine our late modern cities in terms of the Biblical tension between the city of God and the earthly city. Yet in order to do so, we need to be able to re- articulate the vision of the heavenly city in ways that connect with the environmental, social, cultural and spiritual meanings of our cities.

The promise of the heavenly city is of course central to Christian discourse and tradition. It is at the core of the story of Israel in the Old Testament in which the city and the temple provided the focus for Israel's covenantal relationship with God. In times of occupation and exile, Israel's hope was sustained by the promised restoration of Zion. Jerusalem was also the place of Jesus' passion. Jesus goes up to the city, he weeps over it, is welcomed by the people as Israel's promised king, and yet is crucified outside the city gate . His death, a deeply paradoxical climax to Israel's eschatological hope, is enacted in the city. He is the Messiah who brings Jerusalem's liberation, and yet in the moment of hope, Jerusalem spurns his gracious offer, and in spirit it becomes not Zion, but Babylon.

In the New Testament epistles, at one level the Old Testament language of city, temple and land loses its specific reference to the material and territorial hopes of the Jewish people. These terms become metaphors for the ecclesial people of God, now inclusive of the Gentiles and no longer tied to any particular city or land. Yet the hope of the restoration of Jerusalem, the holy city, still remains as a future promise.

There are many for whom the idea of the heavenly city now functions as part of the rhetoric of urban reform, providing a language of hope and an inspiration for making the earthly city a more human and better place. Yet surely this is to misread the ontological opposition between the city of God and the earthly city which is fundamental to the Biblical narrative. John Milbank provides a powerful contemporary statement of this basic biblical and Augustinian duality:

Whereas the civitas terrana inherits its power from the conqueror of a fraternal rival, the 'city of God on pilgrimage through this world' founds itself not in a succession of power, but upon the memory of the murdered brother, Abel slain by Cain. The city of God is in fact a paradox, a 'nomad city' (one might say) for its does not have a site, or walls or gates. It is not like Rome, an asylum constituted by the protection offered by a dominating class over a dominated, in the face of an external enemy. This fact is but a dim archetype of the real refuge provided by the Church, which is the forgiveness of sins. Instead of a peace achieved through the abandonment of the losers, the subordination of potential rivals and resistance to enemies, the Church provides a genuine peace by its memory of all the victims, its equal concern for all its citizens and its self-exposed offering of reconciliation to enemies.... (392-3)

It is this ontological difference which suggests that as pilgrims on our way to the heavenly city, we should not become too absorbed in the life of the earthly city. We should be sojourners, or resident aliens. As the letter to the Hebrews puts it:

However, if we consider more carefully the opposition between the two cities in Scripture , it becomes clear that to belong to 'another city' entails not a detachment from the present earthly city but an anticipatory embodiment of the rule of Christ which contests those powers that presently dominate the city. I shall try to develop this by exploring three dualisms contained in the idea of the two cities.

The first is the apocalyptic conflict between Zion and Babylon, or between Christ and the principalities and powers. This is not a timeless opposition, but one which is overcome through Christ's victory over the powers, resulting in the submission of the kingdoms of this world to the rule of Christ. The gospel narrative is one of judgement, repentance and subordination, and the wealth of the nations being brought into heavenly city. As Jacques Ellul portrays the ultimate meaning of the earthly city:

The second is the eschatological tension between the already and the not yet of the kingdom. The New Testament inherits from the Old its basic structure of eschatological hope, of the promise of God's future intervention for the salvation of his people. As Oscar Cullmann observes, the difference in the New Testament is that this eschatological tension is partially relaxed in the 'already' of the victory of Christ. Christians do not merely yearn for a promised future kingdom, one which has not yet been inaugurated. Indeed, we rejoice already in that salvation which has been achieved in Christ, and is already experienced in the gift of the promised Holy Spirit. Thus the letter to the Hebrews can also say of the (present) assembly of God's people:

Both motifs are important for Christian communal experience. They are not simply held in tension, but properly shape each other. Thus the present experience of the work of the Spirit in the life of the heavenly city is always anticipatory, always provisional, tempered by the sense that we still wait for the completion at the end of the age. Conversely, the expectation of the coming reign of God must be relaxed and sustained by the present work of God that flows from the incarnation of Jesus. The practical life of the Christian community is not one simply of 'waiting' but of active anticipation, of embodying the first fruits of the kingdom.

The third is the duality between this present material world and the hope of heaven. For centuries, Christian piety has been shaped by the desire to go to heaven, to depart this mortal, earthly existence and to be with the Lord. The problem with such imagery is its implicit negation of the materiality of God's good creation. Our hope of heaven should mean not the negation of this material order, but rather its ultimate transformation and perfection as it enters, in the fullness of time, into its promised resurrection liberty.

How we imagine the material world is crucial for the way in which we think theologically about the city. Cities are themselves human 'readings' of materiality, embodying an understanding of our human connections with nature, not only practical, but also moral and metaphysical. A recovery of an understanding of the created order as the enduring context of the Trinitarian love of God is thus crucial for an adequate theological engagement with cities and urban life.

A vision of the apocalyptic victory of Christ over the powers, the perfection of the creation through the saving work of God, and an anticipation of this hope in the present experience of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church should lead us to contest rather than withdraw from the earthly city. Against the background of the apocalyptic gospel which proclaims the victory of Christ over the powers of violence, sin and death, we are called to embody a 'Trinitarian city' which celebrates the 'already' of Christ's rule whilst at the same time looking for its ultimate consummation.

Although the orientation of the church is always towards God's future, the shape of that future is anticipated through the outworking of Christ's victory within the present structures of the created order. Ecclesial practice is always anticipative, because we know that the full consummation of the victory of Christ has not yet been realised in time. It is also projective, in the sense that this anticipation is always a work of re-imagining our world, with its beauty and its terror, in terms of its ultimate perfection in the heavenly city. Oliver O'Donovan provides an example of this projective imagination of the heavenly city in his conclusion to The Desire of Nations:

There are many ways in which Christians are engaged in the life of the city: through our diverse individual urban practices, including where we live, our occupations and sundry civic and social activities; through the more intentional urban (and suburban) ministries in which congregations and specialist church agencies reach out to others, particularly to those populations most marginalised and at risk; and through the involvement of churches or church agencies in issues of urban policy and planning, including transport issues, the design of new urban centres, and the redevelopment of older inner urban areas.

At the centre of all such activities is the assembly of Christians in the practices of eucharistic worship and community. In this section I want to explore the ways in which the eucharistic assembly of the church can shape our civic imagination and thus re-frame our urban practices in terms of a vision of another city.

David Ford has commented that the eucharist has for centuries been a 'condensation of the Christian habitus' with a 'superabundance of meaning' making it a rich source for collective Christian imagination and practice. The eucharist

Sadly, it has to be said that much of contemporary Christian worship is not a particularly conducive context for this work of imagination. There is either a preoccupation with liturgical performance, inward experience or doctrinal correctness. The challenge we face, as Luke Timothy Johnson has argued, is to rediscover the communal practice of re-imagining our world in terms of Scripture:

For the eucharist to enable us to re-imagine our urban practices and spaces requires an improvisory openness, or what Ford calls 'non-identical repetition'. We have all experienced times in which the practice of the eucharist has been 'interrupted', making surprising or unexpected connections between the ecclesial and the everyday, thus giving us deeper insights into both the gospel and our everyday world. A few brief examples: Tim Costello's description of the often unpredictable nature of communion services in the Baptist Church in St Kilda; Nicholas Bradbury's attempts to open up the formal liturgy to include the spaces for people's experiences in his inner city parish; and Stanley Hauerwas' accounts of the downtown Broadway United Methodist church in South Bend, Indiana

I want to focus on three moments of a Christian civic imagination. The first is the recognition of the inherently political meaning of the eucharist and in particular the way in which it narrates the church's identity as a different political community, bearing witness to the wider world of the politics of God's kingdom. The second is the way in which the eucharist re-enacts the identification of our bodies with the body of Jesus and through that our inclusion (or inscription) within that social body which is named as 'the body of Christ'. The third is the way in which this embodiment might reshape the way we imagine and inhabit the spaces and urban environments in which we live.

Bernd Wannenwetsch has recently commented that the political meaning of the church is not something separate from worship, but is constituted and expressed paradigmatically by the practice of worship itself. It is in eucharistic worship, framed by the practice of baptism, that we are brought into a new unity of equality and mutual service in our common life in Christ, and where we learn the distinctive political practices of Christian community.

The work of political imagination was an important feature of the first churches. As Rowan Williams has noted, in their communal worship the early Christians transformed the meanings Roman notions of civitas. Of particular significance, according to Milbank and Wannenwetsch, was the radical shift in the relationship between the oikos and polis, between the household and the city, which marked the assembly of the early Christians.

In our own times, we need to re-discover the political meanings of eucharistic assembly, not by 'politicising' the gospel through applying its symbols to secular political causes (the nation, the forests, peace, even the poor), but by recognising the new identity and the new relationships into which we have been initiated through baptism and that we re-affirm through the practices of congregational life. John Yoder's Body Politics is an excellent example of this. Yoder explores what he considers five 'sacramental practices': baptism, the holy meal, binding and loosing, communal deliberation and the exercise of gifts in a way that foregrounds their radical politics and their creative implications for the politics of the wider community.

We may develop further the civic meanings of the gospel by considering the way in which through baptism and participation in the eucharist our bodies are identified with that of Jesus and thus incorporated into the ecclesial body of Christ. Unfortunately, as many have noted, a spirit- body dualism continues to pervade Christian thought and practice. Bodies are only significant as vehicles for human spirituality and not as the subject of God's discipline and promise.

William Cavanaugh has noted that the split between the soul and the body reflects the split between the religious and the secular and between church and the state, such that the body is tacitly surrendered to the state (or the market) and its secular disciplines. Cavanaugh’s focus is on the more extreme issue of torture in Chile during the Pinochet years. In our liberal democratic societies thankfully our bodies are not subject to a brutal regime of terror and torture. Nonetheless in more subtle ways our bodies are subject to the diverse disciplines of the secular state and market: for example, the disciplines of government administration, medical care, work, media, fashion and youth culture.

In response to this, we need to recognise that in participating in worship we 'offer ourselves as a living sacrifice' and subject our bodies to the alternative discipline of Christ. This means not just, or even primarily, the disciplined control of bodily desire in the 'use' of our bodies, but rather the work of re-imagining our bodies as belonging to the social body of Christ (we are members one of another). It is thus an issue of identity, such that our bodies, in all aspects of their particularity: race, class, age, gender, physiognomy, health and fitness, are incorporated into the body of Christ.

To take seriously that we are embodied persons makes a great difference to the ways in which we see ourselves within the world and how we engage with people, places and nature. Arthur Frank's The Wounded Storyteller helps us to see what it means to think 'with the body'. Likewise Richard Sennett explores the connection between bodies and cities in his book, Flesh and Stone. Once a harsh critic of Christianity, Sennett now writes as a 'believer' and concludes his book by showing how our identification with the broken and fragile body of Christ draws us out of ourselves and makes us able to enter into a 'civic body'.

How then does this 'civic imagination' extends to the spaces and places - to the ecology - of Christian assembly? I want to address this question in terms of a Christian 'habitus'. David Ford provides a wonderful discussion of the Christian habitus as it is expressed in the gathering of the people of God. In answering the question 'what is going on in the eucharist?' Ford observes that it is not enough to focus only on abstract theoretical ideas:

By focussing on the Christian habitus, we become more aware of the connections between the Christian body and the places of Christian community, particularly (though not only) of church buildings and congregational spaces. We recognise the significance of church architecture, in which the design of church buildings reflects and influences the politics of each specific community. We learn to 'read' the design and use of buildings and how they order human relationships, particularly in terms of the zones of power and meaning.

The meaning of buildings is not simply a matter of the formal organisation of space, but also the often improvisory ways in which such space is occupied through our communal practices. Don Saliers speaks of

The task of reimagining space - and time - in terms of an authentically Christian habitus is a daunting one, particularly in our late modern times. On the one hand, the production of space is shaped overwhelmingly by a secular imaginary which makes a Christian imaginary seem anachronistic and irrelevant. We read with wonderment John Baldovin's account of the way in which Constantinople was conceived as an ecclesial city in which liturgical worship reached out to encompass the whole of the city. We also marvel at Roger Lloyd's confidence when he writes of 'the great church which broods over the whole life of the community '...

For many reasons, cathedrals seem to have the best chance of symbolizing the City, even of actually becoming it, but any church in town or village where worship in enriching relationships is an effective symbol of the City, and a field for the verification of its beauty and power. Such a church must be filled by "high and low, rich and poor, one with another". It must exhibit the outward signs of being lovingly cared for and tended. Through its worship and teaching it must so bring the best out of all its people that they become "members of one another" and grow to be precious to one another that no one ever lacks help when needed or is left to rejoice miserly and alone"

At the same time we have the ambiguous legacy or burden of church buildings which reflect the ecclesiology and architectural style of a past era strongly influenced by ideas of little relevance to our present world. The magnificent cathedrals which embodied a more powerful public vision of the church are now marginalised as 'heritage' and no longer speak for the Christian communities that meet in them.

Nonetheless, there are many examples of a creative 're-ordering' of the 'house of the church' to produce spaces and places which more clearly serve the needs of Christian community. For example, architects, town planners and artists influenced by the vision of the Liturgical Movement have developed an approach to church design in which the design of buildings and the internal ordering of congregational spaces is shaped by the over-riding priority of the mission and witness of the church.Richard Giles observes

How does this focus on the eucharistic assembly of the church and the development of a Christian civic imagination help to address the larger problems of sustainability, social fragmentation, cultural diversity and social violence in the city? No doubt it will be argued that we be concentrating instead on what we can contribute to the secular tasks of improving public transport, overcoming social inequality and providing adequate health, education and welfare services, particularly for those most at risk.

I have argued that the truest thing we can do as Christians is to narrate the story of Jesus and the kingdom in our ecclesial practices in ways that are open to the hopes and travails of our present city and are thus able to re-imagine the city in terms of the 'civic-ness' of the heavenly city. Our eucharistic practice needs to be 'porous' and responsive to the urban experiences of congregations, to the problems of unsustainability, social fragmentation, cultural diversity and the politics of fear. It needs to be open to the ways in which the festivals and monuments of cities provide a renewed focus for the sacred meanings of the city. If and when it is truly open to the city, it can provide for the community activists, planners and architects in its midst who work to defend the public sphere, both practical support and encouragement and an alternative civic imagination that can contest the ultimately false imagination of the earthly city.

I conclude with three brief examples of this open-ness. The first is John Yoder's account of 'body politics', already mentioned above. Yoder describes the sacramental practices of baptism, the holy meal, binding and loosing and so on in ways that open up their connections with the analogous practices of the wider world. Thus, for example, Yoder makes a connection between binding and loosing, or the exercise of restitutive moral judgement in the church, and forms of conflict resolution in the wider community. Similarly, he foregrounds the economic meanings of the Lord's supper, and connects the exercise of spiritual gifts in the church and Christian vocation in secular employment. Over and above the political meanings of each particular practice, Yoder helps us to see the church, not as a peculiarly religious sub-culture, but as a new polity, called by God to be now, what the world is called to be ultimately.

The second is a recent essay, 'The World in a Wafer: The Geography of the Eucharist as Resistance to Globalization' in which William Cavanaugh explores the ways in which the eucharist implies an imagination of space and time which contests the homogenisation of space and time resulting from globalisation. Cavanaugh describes globalization as enacting 'a universal mapping of space typified by detachment from any particular localities" (p182). By contrast

The third example is the final chapter of his Crossing the Postmodern divide where Albert Borgmann writes of the ways in which a city (such as his hometown Missoula, Montana) can embody a postmodern realism which resists the commodification of social life and restores a 'focal realism'. Borgmann develops a vision of the city in terms of the feriel (everyday) the festive (in sport, theatre) and concludes with a discussion of the heavenly city. In his view the everyday and the celebratory city is not enough. There is a deeper need for 'comprehensive and comprehending orientation'. His example of the embodiment of the heavenly city is not from Missoula but the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York, which Borgmann admires for its open-ness to the city around it.

Borgmann's example reminds us that 'old churches', increasingly marginalised as relics of a bygone era and only of interest for their 'heritage' value still have the potential to be signs of a different ordering of urban space. Indeed, as the public spaces of urban life become increasingly enclosed as a result of the dominance of a neo-liberal public culture, paradoxically these old buildings become ever more relevant as signs of an alternative, deeper and truer civicness, of spaces and places for the civic assembly of the heavenly city.