On Finding Faith in the City

Sermon given to the University of Cambridge, Sunday 1 March 1987 at 11.15 a.m. You can read a 2024 introduction to this here.

In its report, published fifteen months ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission called for action by Church and Nation to respond to Urban Priority Areas.¹Faith in the City: A Call for Action by church and Nation, (Church House, 1985) We must let this call ring in our ears until it is made truly redundant, until the injustices, inefficiencies and inhumanities in our society, concentrated in and symbolised by Urban Priority Areas, are overcome. 

The importance and urgency of the Report does not mean that in every way it is beyond question. Like the Bible, it has its oddities and ambiguities, and of course it has even less title than the Bible to infallibility. Critical investigation of the Report is required, not to justify our being deaf to its call, nor to clutter up its Sense of priority with trivial considerations, but to enable genuine hearing and constructive action. 

One particular oddity of the Report which intrigues me is its title. The Commission was disturbed to find that a growing number of people are excluded from sharing the common life of the nation by poverty and powerlessness. We might then have expected a title in the tradition of The Scandal of Poverty,²John Atherton, The Scandal of Poverty, (Mowbray, 1983) or Bias to the Poor,³David Sheppard, Bias to the Poor, (Hodder and Stoughton, 1983) or In Darkest England and the Way Out,⁴General Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out, (1890) or The Bitter Cry of Outcast London.⁵W.C.Preston, Bitter Cry of Outcast London, (1883) That is where the substantial analysis and recommendations of the Report seem to place it. But its actual title, Faith in the City, has a more affirmative tone, and nudges our mind in other directions. The title is nowhere explained in any detail. The Report as a whole does not make its meaning clear beyond ambiguity. Yet I sense that the idea of Faith in the City was a basic inspiration for the Commission in its work and that it became an organising principle of the Report, part of its hidden skeleton.

At one point, for example, the Commissioners list convictions which they ‘believe to be central to the Christian faith’. Amongst these convictions is this: ‘the city is not to be shunned as a concentration of evil, but enjoyed as a unique opportunity for human community’ (3.45). That sounds to me like a positive confession of faith in the city.

Now we may ask, is such a conviction central to Christian faith? If so, what does it mean? What does it commit us to? What path does it light up for us? If we are investigating central Christian convictions, it is not a bad move to go back to the Bible. It is well known that the Bible starts with a garden, that cities soon appear, (after the Fall, some will want to emphasise), and that its story ends with the new Jerusalem, an international garden city, with the river of life running through the middle of it, sustaining the tree of life which fruits every month and has leaves ‘for the healing of the nations’ (Rev 22. 1-2). From beginning to end, the biblical story is full of cities, but they are mostly regarded as powerful intruders in the life of the people of God, which is the main concern of the Bible. Babylon and Damascus, Nineveh and Rome, Corinth and Athens evoke no confidence. However, Jerusalem is different. It is celebrated by the Psalmist as the city of the great king; God makes Jerusalem secure by his presence and, in its beauty, it is the joy of the whole earth (Ps 48. 1-3). This kind of delight in Jerusalem was broken historically; but then faith and joy in Jerusalem was transmuted into the core of eschatological hope. And for early Christians, as the letter to the Hebrews shows, it is the heavenly reality to which the sacrifice of Jesus has opened the way for us: You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem…..and to the assembly of the first born who are enrolled in heaven…..and to the blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel (Heb.12. 22-24).

It need not surprise us, then, that there is no obvious faith in the city as a framework for living together in the Bible. There is no general theory of the city which might encourage talk of the city as ‘a unique opportunity for human community’.

For that conviction Christianity is indebted to the Greeks. The fact that we learn it from the Greeks does not mean that it cannot become a central conviction of our Christianity but it is good to understand how our mind is formed and to see what we are doing or have to do theologically. Talk of the city as an ‘opportunity for human community’ reminds me of Aristotle’s theory of the city – the polis. For him, the city was the framework for fully human community. It was both the means and the mode for living together so that true humanity might be realised and fulfilled. The city exists for the good life. ‘Man is by nature an animal intended to live in a polis. He who is without a polis is either a poor sort of being or a being higher than man‘ (a beast or a God, to put it crudely).⁶Aristotle; Politics, Book I ch ii, (trans E Barker) Human beings not merely need the city as the external framework of life; they become themselves in making it. So the city is essential to humanity. Living in it, sharing in making the city, playing a part in the continual business of keeping the city in being, preserving and innovating – all this is the way by which human beings realise the proper purpose or end of their existence, by being fully human together. Once all this is taken, a Christian learning from Aristotle might soon rise to a general theological theory of the city. He might argue that since humanity is created by God, the fulfilment of humanity is“to be believed to be God’s purpose. It is God’s concern to bring humanity to its true end. If humanity’s nature is to fulfil its end by building and living in cities, then the city must have God’s blessing and support. Christians may therefore have faith in the city. 

Is it a cause for gratitude or for satire and envy that there are many people whose experiences of city-existence allow them to believe in the city in this way?

Some people are not embarrassed by the rhetoric of civic patriotism; it opens no credibility gap. They speak in tune with Aristotle because their local experience in Cambridge or Leeds is as positive as Dr Johnson’s was of London:

‘When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford’.

Yet such readings of the city are partial and selective. Dr Johnson felt London was the best place for intellectuals, but he was also aware that for the poor it was far too large. People got lost, so that they died of hunger unnoticed and uncared for. They lost their jobs when their industries became obsolete – Johnson knew this in 1779 – and were then denounced as idle by those who could not give them work. What unfairness!’⁷Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Sept 20, 1777; April 1, 1779: Oct 10, 1779 Why should the poor have faith in the city? How can talk of its being an opportunity for human community be plausible to them? 

When the Stranger says: ‘What is the meaning of this city?

Do you huddle close together because you love cach other? ‘

What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together

To make money from each other’? or ‘This is a Community’?.

And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.⁸TS Eliot, Choruses from ‘The Rock’, III

The Stranger, like the poor, does not have faith in the city. Maybe the present plight of the universities is sensitising us in new ways to the ‘difficulty of having faith in the city: although we are not poor or powerless, we may gain a new perspective closer to that of the poor.

The antagonism between the city and faith sometimes goes deeper still. Pericles, we are told, praised ‘the spirit of the Athenians facing their trials’ and he celebrated their constitution and ‘the way of life which has made us great’.⁹Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Book II ch 4 and 5 His funeral speech was a wonderful confession of faith in the city – the particular city of Athens. In the very next paragraph Thucydides moves on quickly to tell how the plague fell upon the Athenians, medicine and every other human art and science could do nothing and prayers proved equally useless. ‘In the end’, he says, ‘people were so overcome by their sufferings that they paid no further attention to such things’. Here are people who do not merely find believing in the city hard: believing in the gods has become impossible. What people suffer in cities, sometimes because of cities, erodes the capacity to believe anything at all. People, worn out, take refuge in apathy, in cynicism, in nihilism, in getting what pleasure they can, without deep human meaning. In Gethsemane Jesus told his disciples, to “watch and pray’ but it was too much and we are told they ‘slept for sorrow’.¹⁰Luke 22.45

In bringing upon people this loss of faith and of the capacity to believe, the city reveals at least part of the truth about itself. This truth is softened, if not quite concealed, in the idealism of the city which we may derive from, say, amalgamating Aristotle and Pericles with our local contemporary patriotisms. By contrast, is it too lurid and extravagant to take that terrible modern invention, the concentration camp, as a clue to the nature of the city? I think it has value at least as a question about the city, though it is dangerous as a model and inadequate as a description.

If people who experience the city in this faith-destroying way still read their Bibles, they may see themselves living-in that great Babylon of Revelation 18, the dreadful city which traded in everything without scruple, not merely in lucrative gold and silver, nor in useful wheat and oil, but also in cruelty and blasphemy, ‘in slaves, that is, in human souls’. In our own country now, Rastafarians have revived this language of Babylon to make explicit their alienation, their determined and principled inability to share faith in the city.

‘Babylon’ cannot then be the object or inspirer of faith; yet even in Babylon there is faith. A Rasta says: I have to ‘take oppression from men because of what I stand for’ but, he goes on, ‘faith is the strength to overcome the oppression’.¹¹E Cashmore, Rastaman, (1979), p 130 He speaks like St John: This is the victory which overcomes the world, even our faith.¹²1 John 5.4 This is not faith as trust in the city – it.is faith despite the city, faith in what transcends the city. This is faith closer to Augustine than to Aristotle, closest perhaps to Francis of, Assisi. Here, faith no longer expects human fulfilment through the city and the kind of culture and government symbolised by the city. This faith will not invest in such illusions nor waste its energies on futile Sisyphean politics. It will lay up treasure in heaven, where moth and rust do not corrupt, nor thieves break in and steal.¹³Matt 6. 19, 20 From this point of view the measure of pure and authentic faith is that it is unreserved and radical in leaving the world to seek the transcendent and invisible God. It chooses ‘naked to follow the naked Christ’.¹⁴GG Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion II, p 108

There can indeed be no Christian understanding of faith in the city which has a simple direct faith in the city, as though it institutionalises God and all truly human values. The breaking of such confidence in the city is where Christian faith starts. However there is more to Christian faith in relation to the city than the theological endorsement to our practically based disappointment with the city, as though the divine judgment is merely a booming echo of our disgust with politics, as though God’s only word to us in the city is to come out of her, to avoid all part in her sins and her fate. Christian faith in God takes death into account, but it is faith in one who gives life to dead and who calls into existence the things that do not exist.¹⁵Rom 4.17: 1 Cor 1.28 Yes, there is death, in which God participates and which has meaning as negative judgment – but out of death, arising from the point of death, there is resurrection to newness of life. No Christian faith is authentic which lacks the perspective and spirit of resurrection.

Some of the poorest people in this country and in other countries give living testimony to the truth of resurrection. They have faith which defies the life destroying Power of the city – by the eagerness and generosity of their living. Dominique Lapierre writes of a slum in Calcutta with a painfully ironic name meaning City of Joy. Speaking of slums in general, he says:

‘The miracle of these concentration camps was that the accumulation of disastrous elements was counterbalanced by other factors that allowed their inhabitants not merely to remain fully human but even to transcend their condition and become models of humanity.

In these slums people actually put love and mutual support into practice. They knew how to be tolerant of all creeds and castes, how to give respect to the stranger, how to show charity towards the beggars, cripples, lepers and even the insane. Here the weak were helped, not trampled upon. Orphans were instantly adopted by their neighbours and the old people were cared for and revered by their children’.¹⁶Dominic Lapierre, The City of Joy (trans K Spink, 1985), p 37

We must try to hear testimony of this sort truly, without romanticising the poor or using it to justify the injustice which deprives people of natural possibilities of the good life together. We hear a similar testimony in the Bible – for example in our reading today:¹⁷Hebrews 12.18-13.6 Christian faith as described by the letter to the Hebrews starts from and presupposes the shaking of everything that can be shaken? The writer to the Hebrews goes on immediately to urge brotherly love, hospitality to strangers, care for those in prison, the upholding of marriage and a proper management of money. The Church community, which is described as part of the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, is called to shape its continuing social earthly life in positive and practical ways. They are natural and proper expressions of faith in God who creates and redeems life, who forms human beings to share God’s love by living in love together – love in deed and truth, not just love in word.¹⁸1 John 3.18

Faith which works by love is not faith in the city – it knows itself often enough in conflict with the life and values of the city as it is. But it is a kind of faith ‘that cannot be without hope or prayer for the city – it loves God’s creation, God’s people, too much to consign the city to God’s wrath, as its final possibility. It confesses that its own experience of the love and goodness of life comes from a transcendent source, from God, is a social reality, a form of human community. Such human community is a model for the city, in general, an invitation to the city. It is living evidence that human communities are not inevitably intolerably unjust, divided and destructive of humanity.

So we can say: The faith that loves does not rely on the city but it is hopeful for the city – it calls-and works for its conversion. And the faith that loves because it is rooted in the love of God wants effective love to be extended in the world, and therefore it would like to see the city serving that purpose. The city is a great set of instruments for multiplying good – and evil – in the human community. If we are moved by love to wish for the multiplying of love, why should we not pray for the power of the city as a multiplier to serve the Kingdom of God? If the devil should not be left with all the best tunes, why should he be left with all the best social instrumentation? Christians, who have faith for the city, will not consign the city to death as though the resurrection means nothing for it. They will act in the city in a way that shows they know that the city, in truth, stands always before God, that is, before the invitation to conversion, before the possibility of being an instrument to do his will, to share his loving purpose.

The story of Jesus is central to Christian faith. How can we believe an institution that rejected him in its blindness to the foundations of its own peace and prosperity?. Yet how can those who believe in God through Jesus not approach the city as he did, weeping for it, seeking its welfare, hoping beyond its deathliness?¹⁹Luke 19.41, 42 Radical and pure faith which goes to Jesus will find itself sent back to the city with the hope of love. And perhaps that is what the Archbishop’s Commission, finally means to say to us. Its message is not another plea for direct faith in the system as we have it, but for a political life of faith. The Report’s last words are worth quoting:

‘Somewhere along the road which we have travelled in the past two years, each of us has faced a personal challenge to cur lives and life styles: a call to change our thinking and action in such a way as, to help us to stand more closely alongside the risen Christ with those who are poor and powerless. We have found faith in the city.’ (15.10)

But what do we find beyond the shaking? (see line 12)

Notes

• 1
  Faith in the City: A Call for Action by church and Nation, (Church House, 1985)
• 2
  John Atherton, The Scandal of Poverty, (Mowbray, 1983)
• 3
  David Sheppard, Bias to the Poor, (Hodder and Stoughton, 1983)
• 4
  General Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out, (1890)
• 5
  W.C.Preston, Bitter Cry of Outcast London, (1883)
• 6
  Aristotle; Politics, Book I ch ii, (trans E Barker)
• 7
  Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Sept 20, 1777; April 1, 1779: Oct 10, 1779
• 8
  TS Eliot, Choruses from ‘The Rock’, III
• 9
  Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Book II ch 4 and 5
• 10
  Luke 22.45
• 11
  E Cashmore, Rastaman, (1979), p 130
• 12
  1 John 5.4
• 13
  Matt 6. 19, 20
• 14
  GG Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion II, p 108
• 15
  Rom 4.17: 1 Cor 1.28
• 16
  Dominic Lapierre, The City of Joy (trans K Spink, 1985), p 37
• 17
  Hebrews 12.18-13.6
• 18
  1 John 3.18
• 19
  Luke 19.41, 42