First published in 1989 in Theology in the City, ed. A.E. Harvey. , 32–46. You can read a 2024 introduction to this here.
Faith in the City is a significant recent episode within the history of the Churches’ concerns about the ways in which people live in modern urban society and what cities make of human beings. (I use the term ‘city’ as a shorthand or symbol for modern urban politically ordered society.) The long and continuing history of the city and the Churches is larger than Faith in the City and its sadly too exclusively Anglican outcomes. We are still living in the historical moment of Faith in the City, but it is on the way to becoming part of our remembered past, relativized by subsequent events. It is not yet obsolete, but in time its analysis and recommendations will be so. Because Faith in the City is a historical action, the concern of this essay is not to explain and vindicate the text of the Report but to reflect on the traditions of practice of which it is a part.
The Report could not have been made unless there were a broad living tradition of Christian practice preparing for it. The Report itself draws attention to this tradition;1The Archbishop’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, Faith in the City (Church House Publishing, 1985), ch. 3. but more revealing is the list of the places and people the Commissioners visited or consulted and the stories of the commissioners themselves. To take but one example: it is more than thirty years since David Sheppard went to the Mayflower Centre in London and thus engaged with the city in the tradition of the Settlements and Clubs founded in the late nineteenth century by men from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in poorer areas of London. Of course this form of Christian social involvement in what we now call Urban Priority Areas had all sorts of questionable characteristics, but it was better to risk paternalism and idealism than to pass by on the other side. Within a tradition of caring action and readiness to learn by living with people in the city, Sheppard was apprenticed. The Report represents and rests on such commitments; it relates to the practice of many Christians in various organizations and groups over many years.
It is not accidental that I speak more of the city than of Urban Priority Areas. The city has been ‘a focus of civilization’ since the middle of the fourth millennium BC.2C. Tunnard, “The Customary and the Characteristic: A Note on the Pursuit of City Planning History’ in O. Handlin and J. Burchard (eds), The Historian and the City (The Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, 1963), P. 217. In the city, ‘man’s esthetic and economic endeavors mesh . . . closely in corporeal form’. The city has developed the ‘sense of order out of which civilization grew and on which it depends’.3S. L. Thrupp, “The City as the Idea of Social Order’, ibid., p. 122. Cities are different from the mere extension of urbanization, of the kind which is alleged to be happening in the South- East of England as the pressure of population eats up the countryside. Such urban sprawl may indeed now be destroying the city in many places because its results are difficult to manage politically and they do not give a convincing visual manifestation of a working human order. Sprawl has no centre or shape.
In this respect, my emphasis is different from that of Faith in the City. Despite its title and its intentions signalled in a few paragraphs,4Faith in the City, 1.47; 1.50; 3.29. the Report is concerned above all with Urban Priority Areas, and its effect in some quarters has been to distinguish them from their total social context. In order to give Urban Priority Areas the priority they deserve, they must be seen within the ‘city’, the whole political setting in which and because of which they occur. The Report does not deny the importance of the political view, but for a variety of reasons it was not sufficiently developed. Faith in the City is rooted in the traditions of pragmatic social science, which provided the intellectual backbone of the post-1945 consensus. Urban Priority Areas are identified by multiple indicators of a statistical sort. They are territories which can be drawn on maps, with high ‘Z’ scores, and thus marked off for specific treatment. There is a danger that the impression is created that the problem of the Urban Priority Areas can be discerned and tackled in detachment from the dynamics of the whole society, with its economy and politics, provided – and this is a challenging proviso – enough resources are devoted to them. The truth lies in the other direction. The existence of Urban Priority Areas reveals something about the working of the whole economic, political and moral system in which we all live. Urban Priority Areas demand direct and immediate action; they also drive inquiry back to the city.
The city is corporate human power in positive self-assertion and activity. It is both the framework within which problems occur and that within which they may be tackled. The city symbolizes the way people live together so that they are able to achieve significant control over their own humanity. The city thus incorporates some view of humanity in its workings. It is at any time a statement about the bounds and possibilities of human beings. The city is the working answer given to questions like: What kind of goodness can human beings realize? Are human beings one community or many? What is the relation between kindness and kinship? How near to genuine equality and freedom can we come? Such questions arouse others: May we realistically read the city as a meaningful moral concretization of responsible humanity? Is the good and well-doing city (political community) possible? These questions require us to confront our pessimism again and again. Perhaps the city fails to open up a good human possibility. It may rather show we are caught in a level of human helplessness and structured incompetence broader than what is painfully evident in the Urban Priority Areas.
We concentrate on the city to ask what cities make of human beings. What sort of humanity is encouraged and enabled by different sorts of city? Human well-being is our criterion for reflection on the quality of the social order within which people live. How is human well-being to be assessed? The general quality of life can be represented by statistics of the total money-measured wealth of the country, of how it is growing and how it is shared. To these statistics other measures (such as those of literacy, health and crime) could be added. Such statistics would allow us to make some broad judgements about what chances people have of being healthy and happy human beings, but it is well not to put great faith in them. The criteria of human well-being need to be worked out also in terms of the value of persons and the significance of personal experiences. Such criteria make political management much harder, if not impossible, but politics needs to be open to realities it cannot manage. It is right to insist, with William Temple, on the priority of persons as made in the image of God: so ‘the State exists for its citizens, not citizens for the State’ (or any other political organization or collective).5W. Temple, Christianity and the Social Order (1942; new edn SPCK, 1976), p. 40. In dealing with questions of the distribution of wealth and poverty in our society it is good practice to listen to individuals, for it is in people that we can see what is happening to humanity in the city.6cf. D. B. Forrester and D. Skene, Just Sharing (Epworth, 1988), ch. 1; R. Banks, All the Business of Life (Albatross Books, 1987). Of course we have to go on trying to manage our living together within the limits of our political skills, but we need to be continually and genuinely disturbed by meeting living evidence of the inability of human beings living and working together as the city to do adequate justice to the needs, potential, sensitivity and worth of all human beings as persons. It is good that Members of Parliament hold ‘surgeries’ so long as they, the MPs, are really cut up by them and do not use them to cut down or out those who consult them.
What the city makes of human beings cannot be read off safely from general statistics. It is not, however, a question to be ducked by pleading the immeasurable variety of human beings as persons, which is beyond our capacity to grasp. In order to advance on this issue where we may not retreat, we have to make use of other measures too. One such measure would be a consideration of the type of person represented by the ideals and morality of the city. What role models are on offer in the city? What styles of human living are made easier by being materially supported and applauded? By the articulation of ideals, people are enabled, though not coerced, to see themselves in certain ways and to develop in certain directions, while other ways are discouraged. To know what the city is making of humanity is thus as much a matter for cultural, religious and historical study as it is for economic statistics. We are not here looking merely at what the moral teachers in a city say, but at what the city says to people about their humanity through its institutions, policies and actions. What people are told they ought to do is not always the same as what the city enables or encourages them to do.
Prophecy
Probably we ought not to be totally pessimistic about the possibility of the city’s shaping people’s humanity for good through what it actually does. There is, however, no city without the need for prophets, who, for the sake of humanity, teach ideals and morality which are in tension with what the city is actually making of humanity. In Britain today we cannot do without prophecy, which is why the Churches should not be intimidated by the tension between them and the State. Of itself, that tension does not prove they are being prophetic; they might just be trouble-makers; but if there is no tension, they can be certain they are not verging on the prophetic. Beyond the question of whether or not the Church is prophetic is the issue of the variety of ways the possibly prophetic can relate to the institutionalized working order of the city. In a concentration camp, prophecy is impossible: there can only be protest and subversion. That is because the dynamics of the camp, by which it is what it is, give prophecy no opportunity. Prophecy cannot speak to people in the camp to call them back to the basic good values of the form of society they live in: there is nothing to appeal to. Morality and humanity are in simple opposition to the camp and are given no foothold by it. Is Britain today to be understood in a similar way? It is alarming that there are those who think that all we can do is protest and be separate and work for a radically different order. Such a judgement needs to be considered carefully. Many of the Churches’ discussions are confused because of the divide between those who take this view and others who think that prophecy is possible since there is still much in our society and its ordering that can be appealed to and built on.
There may be another level of complication that needs to be taken into account in any discussion of prophecy in Britain today. There are different schools of prophecy, recalling people to different views of our British past and to different forms of society partially present in our traditions. All prophets relate positively to what they are in critical tension with. But because they are prophets and not totally alienated protesters they are enculturated in some part of our society, with its values and traditions. To be enculturated in one part is likely to mean being ignorant and unappreciative of some other part. Therefore prophecy involves conflict among the prophets as well as between them and society. What prophecy we have may therefore sound very like political debate. That should not be used to invalidate or silence the prophets, but it requires us to develop an ear for the prophetic word being spoken in ordinary political debates. What enables prophets is in the last resort not only what the prophets say, but that others, even a city, have an ear that can pick up the message. Without that ear, prophets would become unprophetic alienated protesters. What ear is there in Britain? How do we hear? What forms our hearing? Does the city shape us so that we cannot hear? Are we being deafened to that most prophetic of voices, the cry of the poor?
We tend to think of prophecy as though it were the activity of a special class of insightful and perhaps inciting persons, set over against society and the average run of people. Some may think the Quakers go too far in believing that there is that of God in every one, but their views helps us to understand prophecy better. For the public prophet will not be heard unless there is prophetic receptivity in people. By virtue of their receptivity and capacity to listen, many people are prophets or have a prophetic side to them. If that is so, we should expect to meet the prophet not simply in some other person, who bears down upon us with his “Thus saith the Lord’ and other appropriate signs, but in ourselves. And this prophetic side of our being gives us the ear for the prophets outside ourselves. If we have this ear because the city has so formed us, it is evidence that there is something good about the city; there is something in the city to which we can relate prophetically rather than as alienated protesters and denouncers of doom.
What can the prophet appeal to? What ideals or values are in any way operative in the city, inherent in its workings or manifest in its symbols? That is far too large a question to be answered in a short essay; values can be investigated in so many ways, some of them very detailed and scientific. Here I want to draw attention to some ways in which the city in Britain has been informed by images derived from cities known to us historically like Jerusalem and Athens. These cities have served as images of the ideal city, which might inspire us in our attempts at city-building. They are prophetic, or aids to prophecy, not merely because they set an ideal before us, but because they interpret our own political experience to us, giving us patterns within which we can see shape in the multifarious and confusing incidents and encounters that make up our living together. These images do not merely help us to make sense of what is, they also invite us to dream and to work for a better city. These images are prophetic because they are two-sided: they connect both with what is, discovering what is going on, and with what is yet to be, inviting us towards its potential or promise. If they do not manage to make that connection between what is and what is to come, these images cannot be prophetic. They will fall on one side or the other of the polarization (which is the death of prophecy) between complacent or despairing conservatism, which holds on to what it has because there can be nothing better, and alienated protest and abdication, which seeks another world having no connection with where we are. Are these images still prophetic for us?
Jerusalem
Jerusalem is a religious symbol of the city, open to various interpretations in, and after, the Bible. In much of the Christian tradition, following Augustine, Jerusalem has become heavenly and lies in the future for those who are its citizens. On earth they are strangers and pilgrims with no abiding city. Others have taken Jerusalem as a model and a task for our political activity. In the Psalms, Jerusalem is celebrated as the city where the people gather together to worship God. God is to be worshipped for his mighty deeds, some of which are monumentalized in Jerusalem itself (Ps. 48.12-14). Is is God who defends the city: ‘Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain’ (Ps. 127.1). God gives his peace to the city and requires those who live in it to share his peace with one another. Hence, the city is called to realize a justice which is more than giving each person his due: it is to give God his due, by building the city that his peace, presence and forgiveness make possible, so that all his people may share it together. Jerusalem is where the tribes go up and where together they find what has the ultimate claim upon them, ‘above my highest joy’ (Ps. 137.6). It is the city where there is nothing to make people grieve or feel afraid or go hungry or feel despised and neglected (Rev. 21-22).
One obstacle to our working with this image of the city is that it is inextricably theistic: the city is God’s work as well as his place. Can this mean anything for our largely secularized politics? We are not the first people to face this question: the history of biblical Jerusalem was a sobering secularizing experience. Jerusalem was seen as the city of God only by faith which reached beyond the fragmentary hints evident in its actual life. Can such faith express itself only by looking beyond this world to a Jerusalem kept in heaven? Or is the city we seek by faith one which can have genuine though never complete realization in our work of building and running the earthly city? Whether or not it wins our theological approval, the image of the ‘national Jerusalem’, as David Deans called it in Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, has focused the prayers and political participation of many people in modern Britain. Its most famous expression has been William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’.
This vision of Jerusalem was massively denied by life in modern industrial towns and cities. In the nineteenth century many people realized that a human quality of life was not possible in them. Human beings died young from many avoidable causes. Too many of those who survived had to struggle with adverse conditions so that their health was damaged, their spirits broken, their educational development stunted, their sociality warped. The cities needed to be changed to enable a more truly human kind of person and community.
Action was taken on the basis that the full humanity of people could be enabled by the physical shaping of the city and the provision of decent housing and various public facilities. G. M. Trevelyan said Robert Owen first clearly taught the ‘modern doctrine’ that ‘environment makes character and that environment is under human control’.7G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (Longman, 1942), p. 484. Communities – or groups acting at least professedly on behalf of communities, though not without some obvious or subtle elements of self-interest set about improving cities and even inventing new kinds of cities. In the twentieth century, planning became more comprehensive; even without the Second World War, which cleared the ground, our towns and cities would have been bulldozed and rebuilt, thanks to the enthusiasm of planners. Urban redevelopment has been conditioned by many practical constraints and financial interests but it has not lacked vision which gave it some hope of eventual coherence. It is not surprising, therefore, to find the story of modern British town planning told in terms of the quest to build the New Jerusalem.8J.Stevenson, ‘The New Jerusalem’ in L. M. Smith, The Making of Britain: Echoes of Greatness (Macmillan, 1988), pp. 53-70. Faith in the City was written in this tradition at a time when it was already falling into disarray and was widely as well as wilfully discredited.
Attempting to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, in the belief that environment enables humanity, is now criticized for creating dependency in people. It is said it takes away their independence and will to work and be responsible for themselves. Social engineering, as it is sometimes called, is therefore a cause of many of our troubles. The quest for the heavenly Jerusalem as the other- worldly haven from all the struggles of this life has often been accused of sapping the will for this world’s work. Now it is alleged the same pattern repeats itself where the expectation of a new earthly Jerusalem – or the assumption that we have a right to it or that we can enjoy it even while it is half-built and half-paid for – makes people unwilling or unable to work and suffer realistically. While there is much to be said for such criticism of the New Jerusalem tradition, it is first necessary to appreciate its positive truth.
It does not necessarily imply a deterministic view that circumstances produce human beings. There is no need to think in those terms to see the necessity of changing urban conditions. Let us accept that what people are has roots in spontaneous desires and efforts which are beyond precise political management and cannot be directly or totally determined by outward material circumstances, as a die shapes metal. It is still the case that what people can desire depends on what they think is open to them and on the energy they have to work for it. Those who are poor and have no helper will see, unless they are stupid, that very little is open to them and will attempt little. Those who have to spend most of their energy getting barely enough, maybe not enough, of the basic necessities of life, will not have energy to make more of themselves. Those who have frequently suffered disappointments in the struggles with poverty, and who find they are kept at the bottom, in poverty amidst plenty, ought not to be condemned as lazy or cowardly or unenterprising if they give up the struggle. Certainly those who have never known the discouragements of living with inadequate material resources have no right either to criticize such people or to order society so that they are left without generous help, in the naive hope, derived from a one-sided knowledge of human nature, that putting such people under further pressure will do them good.
I am ashamed that words like these need to be written in Britain in 1989, as though we had forgotten lessons our Victorian forebears learnt at great cost. Those who say that people’s capacity to be hopeful, reliable and enterprising is independent of their material conditions or those who argue from this assertion to justify doing little to improve those conditions are rarely living with low and precarious incomes themselves, in bad housing, in poor health, and with low social status. The loudest preachers of the possibility of being good in bad conditions are rarely speaking from the test of experience. Nor are they speaking within the fellowship of the city, which is a political community that includes both the exhorters and their audience; they rather shout across the alienations and inequalities that divide our society and are physically evident in the existence of Urban Priority Areas, those parts of cities which have for too long been at the end of the queue.
This political argument recalls fundamental theological issues about the nature of human freedom and dependency. The Christian tradition has wrestled with this question throughout its history. Human beings are created by God; they are creatures who have been given otherness from God; they are not extended parts of God’s own being, nor are they inert in his hands. They are radically free, not merely from other beings but from their Creator. Yet this freedom is finite because it is given freedom: whatever other limits it may have, its decisive limit is that it is given by God. It is not to be counted as a possession owned despite God, let alone to be seized by an act of robbery from him. God-given freedom is not inhuman; it is the freedom to be human. It serves the nature and purpose of human beings who are made for God and find fulfilment in relation with God. Being made for God does not mean that humanity is dissolved into God; it means finding and using the given freedom to be human in God’s way for humanity, a freedom disclosed in humanity itself, significantly in God-become-human in Jesus with the ordinary humanity of one who comes ‘eating and drinking’. Humanity is a gift of God and implies continual openness to God’s giving. The gift of God, our true humanity, is not a gift given once for all; it is like manna in the wilderness, given to us a day at a time. Our human being is always then a mixture of dependence and freedom; a dependent freedom, which is not felt as a constriction but as a liberation. Theologically, therefore, it is not necessary to set dependency and freedom over against each other.
How does God give us the freedom to be human as he intends? Does God give this freedom to us in our life in the city or is it only available in some spiritual realm which human beings as political animals cannot inhabit? God has apparently not created us for the freedom of disembodied, asocial angels who are his direct agents. God makes bodily social creatures to bear his image. He sets them in families and peoples. In doing so, God ensures that his gift of freedom would have to come to human beings through the mediation of humanity. Human dependencies are not necessarily bondage and oppression. They may be the dependencies in which we find ourselves freed to be human. God does not make us directly dependent on himself, so that the freedom we thereby are given is purely spiritual and unable either to illumine or to be realized in the life of the city. God gives us life within networks of natural and human dependencies which he does not destroy but rather respects because they are intrinsic to his creative concept. He plays consistently within the rules of his own game. It is obvious that human dependencies do not serve the liberating purpose of God with complete faithfulness; but God is faithful to his creation and continually works to keep it open and serviceable to his purpose. This God may be seen in Jesus Christ. God becomes human out of respect for, and faithfulness to, the integrity of his gift to human beings in creating them human. For Christians, it is through Jesus Christ, God-made-man, that our radical dependence on God is established. In Jesus Christ, God lives a human freedom which is dependent. This humanity is not purely dependent on God; it risks and endures and redeems dependence on other human beings. Jesus is handed over to men, and is dependent on them for what becomes of him and his cause. The giving of the Holy Spirit, the outcome of the whole life and sacrifice of Jesus, does not cancel the truth that God gives freedom to human beings in and through their living of human life together, so that freedom comes out of our dependence on others. For the Holy Spirit is not a sign that God has changed his method and, having tried to work through humanity in Jesus, now turns to a direct spiritual communication with individuals who can thus claim to be in touch with God without any dependence on other human beings. If that were so, of course, we could claim that we can be truly and properly dependent on God even while treating human beings as independent of each other. No, the Holy Spirit means that God is still pursuing his way with human beings through human beings. The way he worked in Jesus, choosing humanity as the means of the full revelation of God, is being universalized through the Spirit. He acts everywhere and in everything by the Spirit, who remains hidden but moves people to build and act in community (Gal. 5.13-6.5; Rom. 8.22-27; 12.1-21) and to be Christ to one another.
Humanity and embodiment are social: so the grace of God is humanly mediated by multiple channels. The surrounding grace of God makes human beings the objects of God’s love and establishes them as of inestimable value to God and so of course for themselves and each other. God’s grace operates through many channels, to make this truth real to people. God wants his love to get through to people effectively to bring them to the full humanity he intends for them. His love does not disdain any means, certainly not any means inherent in the creation God made. Every part of humanity may be used by God as a channel of his grace to people, for he works through every created agency and avenue that he finds open or can open. So there is no theological reason why material conditions and the conduct of governments and economies and cities should not be used by God. That puts on all, including governments, the obligation to make themselves available to God for his work and not to escape into some spiritual but unchristian delegation of participating in his affairs to the Churches and other minority agencies. “The means of grace’ anything which gives ‘hope of glory’ – includes potentially the social system, or the city. If we do not there find dependencies that liberate, we shall find dependencies that oppress; and the worst kind of oppressions are created by those who refuse to acknowledge dependency, who lust after independence, like Lucifer, and who therefore do not know how dependent they are on God through others and do not work to liberate those who are dependent on them.
At present in our society the responsibility of individuals is being preached with vehemence. To order society successfully, more trust is placed in the demands of the law than in generous grace. There are, however, hints that even the strongest advocates of individualism know something in practice of the gracious reality of society which is denied in theory. The family is said to be very important. It is a place of refuge and support; people need such a place for dependency; there is no better start in life than to have the gifts of a good family and education. Now, the family shows that individuals are not responsible out of total self-sufficiency. If the family is so important to the maintenance of efficient human beings, should we not move forward with the same logic and perception of human nature to interpret what lies beyond the limits of family? The family which does this job is fragile: it needs to be located in supportive political community. The family is not universally available. If individuals need such families, what about those who do not have families? Do they not need to be living in the kind of society which will encompass them with familial care? If families can and should care for people, so that people can depend upon them and be equipped to live responsibly, why cannot other institutions and groups work in the same way, both towards individuals and towards families? The preaching of the family by politicians will be empty and unhelpful if what some learn about the grace of life in a good family – that it is social- is not the basis on which we attempt to build the whole city, the total political community in which we live, which in the end is the global human family. The dangers of dependency are being dangerously exaggerated by one- sided analysis. As a result, we are not enjoying the blessings of well- ordered mutual and liberating dependencies in our society.
Athens
It is unhistorical and unfair to suppose that the dangers of dehumanizing dependency were not recognized by many who believed that human beings needed the grace of a good environment. William Temple, for example, argued that ‘society must be so arranged as to give to every citizen the maximum opportunity for making deliberate choices and the best possible training for the use of that opportunity’.9Temple, Christianity and the Social Order, p. 44. Images derived from the city-state of Athens helped to restrain any tendency to feather-bedded dependency lurking in the New Jerusalem model. Athens celebrated citizenship as active participation in the affairs of the political community. As the franchise was progressively extended to all adults in Britain this vision of citizenship gained plausibility. As in Athens, however, citizenship involved more than voting, of which they had much more in Athens anyway. There had to be intelligible debate, directed to the public and not confined to a narrow political circle. This kind of public life could be promoted in some measure by advancing education and by serviceable media. Also necessary was experience of participation in political life and action. In that respect, little Athens, with its direct democracy and its slaves, was not a model that could ever be fully realized in Britain. It was, nevertheless, an image which inspired aspects of our politics. Some entered the vision of participatory politics through the trade unions. War or the threat of war broke up the mental or geographical seclusion in which many lived, forcing them to think as citizens.10R. Hillary, The Last Enemy (Macmillan, 1942); A. Koestler, Arrival and Departure (Cape, 1943); P. Addison, The Road to 1945 (Cape, 1975). 11 D. Soelle, Christ the Representative (SCM Press, 1967). The Labour victory of 1945 was significantly helped by the political education many acquired, formally and informally, in the armed forces. Others discovered being citizens as a significant dimension of their being human through participating in local politics.
Modern British local government developed in the hope that, through it, citizenship would become real for more people. The hope had some plausibility at least for a few people in a few generations. Its plausibility was aided by the education many people were given: they heard about Athens, and even about the medieval guilds. If they could not precisely re-enact contemporary equivalents, they could interpret the very different modern experience of politics in terms of these visions.
Today, does it not have to be admitted that this vision and the drive to realize it has broken down? Education no longer sustains it. The reform of local government in 1974 swept away much of the symbolism of local patriotisms. The dominant value behind the reform was efficiency of administration rather than participation in local, historically developed communities with meaningful identities. These changes cannot, however, be blamed purely on the insensitivity of centralizing government. There were many reasons why the tradition of local government had not realized the idealistic quest for citizenship as real humanizing participation in corporate self-governing life together. The ideal, even the make-believe, expressed in terms of imagery derived from Athenian or other experiences, could not endlessly overcome and be imposed on our own situation, which is not local but mobile. The motor car rather than the city is its image and its power.
For all its pain, and the immense dangers of dehumanizing cultural impoverishment through the loss of the past, our present situation has the merit that it invites us to live our own lives and to take responsibility for them rather than to exist vicariously, borrowing parts to play from the repertoire of the long and rich histories in which we know ourselves to stand. To know that our political life is not Athenian and should not be squeezed into that image might be an element of gain in what many feel to be a loss. In any case we have to make the best of it. The truth of our situation is not, however, that we have replaced historically derived ideals with some better, workable and human ideal. We delude ourselves if we suppose that is the case. In our politics now, we are more nakedly open to the basic human question: What shall our humanity be?
A New Image
What indeed is our humanity now, in so far as it is shaped by our life together in political community? It is not defined for us by Athens or Jerusalem, however suggestive such images continue to be for many of us. It might be well to face the gloomy possibility that we are invited to see ourselves by the city we live in as consumers. No longer is the city symbolized by the Town Hall where a political community deliberates about its well-being and development; the city’s symbol is the shopping centre where people can find what they want. Perhaps from this vantage-point the truth is discovered about older forms of citizenship: even old town politics was like a market for those who could get into it. People went into politics for what they could get out of it. The political ideal collapses in the face of the cynic’s recognition that we are all consumers; the only differences are that people have different tastes and buying power. Many of the messages that come to them are invitations to consume; many of their forays into society are as consumers. We not only consume food and drink and goods from shops. We consume education and health-care, which are understood as businesses directed towards giving the customer what he wants. We consume the world as tourists. As impotent spectators of ‘news’, we consume the history and sufferings of others.
Some do not have the resources to be consumers; to be poor is to be forced to know oneself as a consumer, ever struggling to satisfy basic needs and never getting free from them. This is the dependence of the poor. Affluence, the freedom to consume without worry about paying, is equally a form of dependence. Our social order is such that many can assume a large measure of power to consume, while others merely dream of it. Affluence allows us to be consumers and as such we are dependent on the way the social order works. The affluent protect themselves from disasters within the social order; but a disaster to the social order would take away what they depend on. While it holds, the affluent can take the social order for granted; they can be apolitical. And the affluent live such busy lives, consuming things and people, that they sustain the illusion that they are actively and even creatively living their own lives. Their dependence on all they consume is hidden from them; they despise dependence and those who are obviously dependent; they cannot build a society of grace. If the affluent consumer has any inkling of what the world is like, he gets locked into a fearful protectiveness of what he has. That reveals his basic dependence.
The affluent lacks public spirit, not so much because he is selfish, but because the city offers no possibility save that of being a consumer, a passive and anxious dependant.
Of course, human beings have it in them to be more than consumers, affluent or poor. They want to be more. And the city requires more. At the least, it needs producers. Hence it must develop ways to get people to work harder and produce more, but the best ways it knows confirm people’s view of themselves as consumers: ‘If a man will not work, let him not eat.’ ‘In order to be a consumer, you must produce.’ ‘In order to do well for your family, you must get on.’ It is implied in exhortations of this sort that if people did not know themselves to be consumers, with escalating demands, there would be no adequate means of motivating them to work or of disciplining them. People as voters behave as irresponsible consumers of public services, supporting policies without regard for what they cost. Privatization and the poll- tax are both attempts to control the situation by treating people as consumers. The national and local political communities are reduced to supermarkets of services for sale; everything has its price for those who can pay. The life of political community is no longer a celebration of our humanity which transcends our being consumers. The city offers us no other common definition of our humanity.
Is this the end of our road? Do we have to submit to the city’s definition of us as consumers, especially since its power over us derives from the basic needs of our existence? Are those who have a fuller vision of what it is to be human doomed to make unavailing protests against the city they cannot effectively subvert? Or is there some hope for prophecy here? Can the city of consumers be the place where we learn afresh what it is to be human in God’s way or does consumerism inflict upon us a necessary irremediable blindness? Through the inadequate and masked forms of dependence we know as consumers, can we learn what it is to live by grace? In the distorted freedom necessary to a consumer society, can we find the freedom to develop communities of resistance, endurance, and innovation? May the experience of responsibility that comes to us as consumers lead us to take responsibility for our common humanity, which is most crucially seen in the question of the humanity, not of myself, but of those I am most likely to overlook? Whether we respond to these questions as subversive protesters against an irredeemable society or as prophets who bring out what is good and hopeful in society against its own betrayals of its promise, to ask these questions will release us from seeing humanity merely as it is being defined by the city these days. We will at least imagine – and then we may be able to work for a city which enables a citizenship which is something more than the right to consume. And the closer prophecy is driven to being simple protest against society, the more the religious element will be significant; in our struggle, we may look to God with deeper faith, hope and love, because there humanity is faithfully kept for us, over against any city which robs us of humanity or seduces us into surrendering it for a ‘single meal’ (Heb. 12.16). The images of Athens and Jerusalem cannot be models for us in any simple way, but they may haunt the edges of our vision as useful reminders and witnesses of our human calling in the city.
Notes
- 1The Archbishop’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, Faith in the City (Church House Publishing, 1985), ch. 3.
- 2C. Tunnard, “The Customary and the Characteristic: A Note on the Pursuit of City Planning History’ in O. Handlin and J. Burchard (eds), The Historian and the City (The Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, 1963), P. 217.
- 3S. L. Thrupp, “The City as the Idea of Social Order’, ibid., p. 122.
- 4Faith in the City, 1.47; 1.50; 3.29.
- 5W. Temple, Christianity and the Social Order (1942; new edn SPCK, 1976), p. 40.
- 6cf. D. B. Forrester and D. Skene, Just Sharing (Epworth, 1988), ch. 1; R. Banks, All the Business of Life (Albatross Books, 1987).
- 7G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (Longman, 1942), p. 484.
- 8J.Stevenson, ‘The New Jerusalem’ in L. M. Smith, The Making of Britain: Echoes of Greatness (Macmillan, 1988), pp. 53-70.
- 9Temple, Christianity and the Social Order, p. 44.
- 10R. Hillary, The Last Enemy (Macmillan, 1942); A. Koestler, Arrival and Departure (Cape, 1943); P. Addison, The Road to 1945 (Cape, 1975). 11 D. Soelle, Christ the Representative (SCM Press, 1967).