The City of Man and the City of God: God and Social Reconstruction
                                                            -George D. Younger

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE OBSCURES THE FACT THAT "city," "citizen," and "civilization" all share a common Latin root and represent different forms of the same basic idea. City (civitas) is the total community to which men belong. It is the place where they hold their citizenship and feel the ties that bind them to their fellows. In the ancient world one city could be a whole state; therefore, the word was used interchangeably for city and state. In the modern world a city must be counted to include all its surrounding region, even though this is usually neither the state nor the nation. Citizens (cives) are the inhabitants of the city. They receive their citizenship through belonging to the community and participating in its affairs, not the other way around. Although we like to think it is the citizens who come together to make the city, they really receive their citizenship through their participation in the city's life.
Civilization (from the Latin civilis) means that a group of people have been brought to the state of being citizens in the fullest sense. Although we often use the term to refer to the culture or society of any group of people, it should be saved for those forms of human culture which most fully realize the possibilities of human Society. A civilized community is a city that, through the development of art, science, religion, and government, has reached the point where its citizens can truly enjoy their citizenship.
Lewis Mumford points out in his history of the development of cities, The City in History, that the earliest reasons for the establishment of cities were not, as some imagine, the benefits that would be gained by the citizens. The walled fortress-city for the protection of its inhabitants and the city as a center of trade and commerce arose comparatively late in human history. The earliest cities were created for the benefit of divinity as burial places or as sanctuaries. Civilization, the process of coming together into cities for the advancement of human community, has depended from the start on men's acknowledgment of God, however weak or distorted that faith may have been. And we must add that the attainment of civilization still requires faith in the God who has made us for community and sets us to live in cities. The true city, the faithful citizen, the full civilization, will be known only when the Lord "will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God ,himself will be with them" (Rev. .21: 3), because the dwelling of God is with men.

TWO CITIES OR ONE?
The Christian hope teaches that one day men will know the blessedness of the city of God. When God is truly worshiped and served, man will share the harmony with his Heavenly Father and his human neighbor that the Creator intended from the beginning. But Christian thinkers have always found it difficult to determine whether we are dealing with two cities or one. Do we see an earthly city, the city of man, which must someday be replaced by a celestial city, the city of God? Or do we see only the metropolis itself that is gradually to be transformed into a perfect society, the city of God?
    Augustine of Hippo, writing after the fall of Rome to the Goths in A.D. 410, was the first to propose that there are two cities here. Faced with the necessity of explaining why great Rome had fallen, even though her rulers were Christians, Augustine replied in his work, The City of God, that there were two cities, the earthly and the heavenly. The earthly city, the city of man, is formed by love of self and glories in itself; the heavenly city, the city of God, is formed by love of God and glories in the Lord. The barbarian invasion, said Augustine, had destroyed a part of the city of man, but the city of God was still to come. The Christians in Rome held citizenship in the city of God and remained faithful to that city, even under persecution, but they had not made Rome into the city of God. All that can be obtained in the earthly city is temporal peace, while the city of God will bestow an eternal peace that cannot be broken. Christian citizens of Rome, then, were but pilgrims journeying on to the celestial city. .
    Where Augustine saw two cities, the thinkers of the Enlightenment and the men who founded the United States of America felt there was basically one city, the city of this world which is being transformed through progress into the city of God. This vision of a completely new world to be secured according to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" is implicit in the writings and utterances of the Founding Fathers. It is made quite explicit in the following stanza from Katherine Lee Bates's national hymn:

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees, beyond the years,
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears!

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.

The pilgrimage here is a shorter one from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, from the founding of the Colonies to the time when the nation's cities will all conform to God's intention and become the city of God "undimmed by human tears."
In raising the question about how the city of God will come, we have set the alternatives against each other: Are there two cities here, or one ? Yet, a more careful look at Scripture, at Augustine, at the thinkers of the Enlightenment, and at our own situation will show us that the alter- natives are not necessarily exclusive of each other. For the Old Testament prophets the promise of a restored Jerusalem did not assume the complete absence of the Lord from the city before that time. In the New Testament, although the apostle Paul looked forward to the end when Christ "delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power," he saw even in the present moment that God,. through Christ, the "first fruits," "must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet"
(I Cor. 15:22-28). Augustine clearly understood that the city of God is not all future but impinges on the life of the present in the lives of the faithful who already live according to a dual citizenship. And the apostles of reason in America, for all their confidence in the power of the people to establish a new order of the ages, were still concerned that their revolution should have "reasons which will justify it in the sight of God and man" (cf. letter of John Adams, July 3, 1776).
The only city that we seem to know in the present is the city of man, the city founded on self-love and erected to the glory of man. Yet we remember that God set man in human society for the worship of God and the achievement of true fellowship with his fellowmen. The city of God, the city founded on love of God and erected to his glory, still retains its essential skeleton in spite of the at- tempts of the architecture of sin to cover it over with walls of man's devising and to bedizen its interior with the grotesque decorations of pride and self-love and greed. We also remember that God has sent his Son for the redemption of mankind. Therefore, the grace of God allows, even in the midst of this time, some of the qualities of that future city to be realized within the life of our cities. Complete fulfillment and the perfected city of God will not come until the end; yet some of that divine order of redemption can be known even here and now.


THE REIGN OF CHRIST
If Christ had not come and men were still left in their sins, we could well afford to leave our discussion where it was at the close of the last chapter. God made the city to worship and serve him, but the city has rejected that service and turned aside to its own ways. God gave rulers to the city for the creation of order and the restraint of sin, but those who are in authority need the judgment of God's justice fully as much as those over whom they exercise their power. God intended the culture of man to praise him and to free all men for their God-given man- hood, but "civilization" now can only mean that which is organized against God and seeks to exalt man and his works. In short, the city could then only be reminded of its original charter and the way in which that divine purpose has been violated. The city could only know God as its Creator and as its Judge.
As those who know the reign of Christ by God's grace through faith in his cross and resurrection, however, Christians cannot be content with the duties of obedience
to the powers that be, and of challenge and criticism in the name of divine justice. They know God as Redeemer, and have a responsibility to bear witness to the new possibilities opened up for mankind through God's reconciling love. Righteousness and restored relationships are the marks of the reign of Christ in the life of the world. Even as physical healing marked the ministry of Jesus and the apostles, so social reconstruction and growth in civilization can be part of the healing ministry of Christ in this age. The message of reconciliation between God and man and between man and man is verified and demonstrated in power when reconciliation occurs in the life of the city. When the Seventy returned to Jesus, they came with joy, saying, " 'Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!'" To this Jesus replied, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven'" (Luke 10: 17-18). The process of social change in the metropolitan area can demonstrate the same power and proclaim the same conquest.

CHANGE AND RECONSTRUCTION
If there is a single constant factor to expect in the life of the metropolis, that factor is change. The great cities of Europe may pride themselves on their ancient buildings and historic monuments that have stood unchanged for centuries, but the cities of America are in constant flux. A comparison of street plans or skyline pictures will show that almost every American city differs drastically today from its appearance fifty years ago. The change is no less striking in forms of government, groups making up the population, types of commerce and industry, activities, and organizations. Social change is constant and occurs on all sides.
Although it is customary in the United States to assume that anything which is new or different represents progress, much of the change represents shifts in fashion or
taste rather than basic improvement in the condition of the city's citizens. These changes are less than they seem, for they satisfy the desire of the city's residents for novelty and the need of the city's leaders for activity, yet they contribute little or nothing to the proclamation of the rule of Christ over the power of sin in the life of the metropolis. Much is being said these days about the task of social reconstruction facing the citizens of the newly independent nations of Africa and Southeast Asia. With populations ranging from a few tens of thousands to millions, these states are finding it necessary to redirect the course of inherited institutions and to erect new structures so that their people may enjoy the benefits of politics, economics, health, education, family life, and other areas of the common life. The problems that must be solved in moving from political subservience to responsible independence are massive, yet in every land we hear of leaders, technicians, and simple citizens who welcome the challenge of 'social reconstruction. The changes to be made in the life of society will be deep-seated and far-reaching, for they will determine the future of the citizens of these new nations. Social reconstruction is an exciting and challenging task.
Yet, when we look at the life of any American metropolis, we see problems as complex and challenges as great as those facing any African or Asian nation. The number of people affected within a single metropolitan area may be many times the total population of one of the new members of the United Nations. If all those who depend on the city or cities at the heart of a metropolitan area are included, the satellite region covers hundreds of square miles. Within that territory are many towns and residential areas that did not exist fifteen years ago, and even in the older sections great segments of the population did not occupy their present place of residence at that time. The political structures and other mechanisms of planning
and control are often as unsuited to the new problems and situations facing the region as were the British, French, or Dutch colonial administrations of recent memory. Surely here is a situation that cries out for reconstruction as deep- seated and far-reaching as in the new nations. Few recognize, however, that the basic need is for reconstruction, not ephemeral change.
    One of the reasons for this blindness is the newness of urbanism as a way of life, even for the United States. In 1800 no city in the Western World had a population of a million. London had just a little less than that number, Paris was a little over half a million, whereas in America Philadelphia led with a population of 69,403, followed by New York with 60,489. Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles had not yet been settled. By 1900 three American cities held more than a million persons, and the census of 1960 showed five cities exceeding this figure. However, whereas ten years earlier 15 cities were over a half a million, 21 cities topped that figure in 1960, and 130 had populations of 100,000 or more compared with 107 in 1950. Estimates indicate that close to 70 percent of our people live in metropolitan areas.
The very rapidity of this growth has meant that city life had come into existence and we were living with it before we felt the necessity to prepare for its coming. The growth of central cities has taken place within two generations; the suburban explosion has occurred in the last two decades. Every indication points to more of the same in the future. Homer Hoyt, in a study for the Urban Land Institute, has predicted that the world's urban population will triple in the next forty years to 3,416,000,000, so that more than half the world's population will live in cities by the year 2000. The problems of urbanism are hard upon us, and no city in our country has more than two generations of experience on which to draw for guidance. .

Another reason for blindness to the need for social reconstruction is the pattern of control that exists in every metropolitan region. The reins of political, economic, and social power are in the hands of those who were new- comers to the area in a previous generation. In New York those of Irish, Italian, and Eastern European origin dominate the city's life at the very time when Negroes and Puerto Ricans are ceasing to be minorities and coming to make up a substantial segment of the population. On the West Coast, in the sprawling vastness of Los Angeles, earlier settlers from the Middle West hold control, al- though the greatest influx includes whites and Negroes from the South and Southwest, along with Mexican Americans. The same situation prevails across the land. Leaders representing the desire of older residents to retain their hard-won gains and continue in positions of, control sit at the top of the pyramids of power. Although these groups desire a continuation of those changes that consolidate their dominance, they are wary of reconstruction that might admit others to a share in social leadership.
Still another cause of this blindness is the "suburban" mentality itself. Most families have moved to the outlying sections of the metropolitan area "for the sake of the children," as they put it. By this they mean they went seeking newer homes, less-crowded neighborhoods, better schools, more green areas and playgrounds, and higher social prestige. The very act of moving shows rejection of the city and the notion that their family should live as part of the larger society of the metropolitan area.
Yet, the inhabitants of the suburbs are no less a part of the city when they sleep on its outskirts than when they looked out their bedroom windows at its pavements and buildings. In spite of their wish to busy themselves with the "small-town" problems of their local village, school district, or tax area, the metropolitan difficulties they seek to flee are still part of their own situation. Road construction, traffic control, and rapid transit are often more galling to the suburbanite who must travel everywhere by car, bus, or train and must permit trucks to travel through his boundaries than to the resident of the central city. The employee who works in the city and leaves every evening to sleep outside its limits often has a larger share of his Federal, state, and local taxes going to the support of the residents of the city than to the place where he and his family dwell.
    In spite of this involvement, however, the "suburban" mentality resents the continued claim of urban problems for attention and seeks to reject any responsibility for the work of social reconstruction in the metropolitan area. Like the older residents of newly expanded towns who vote against school bond issues because their own children are grown, the suburbanites-who oppose that kind of unconcern when directed at their needs-turn around and deny that they share the burden of the needs of others in the metropolitan region.

THE NEED FOR METROPOLITAN STRATEGY
On the American continent great cities have been with us for less than a century, and the sprawling, exploding metropolis for less than two decades. Almost all the changes that have occurred are reactions to the unstructured flow of people from other lands to ours and from the rural areas to the cities. The unprecedented growth in the use of the private automobile, the spread of radio and television, the multiplication of labor-saving devices and automation both in the home and at work-these have created changes to which cities are still responding. In almost every case, moreover, the changes were well under way before the city's leaders began to devise means to deal with them. And many times the symptoms of change have received far more attention than the underlying causes.

When one considers some of the special services required, the picture becomes even more complex. Public works, water supply, garbage disposal, fire protection, police, courts, public health, traffic control and safety, recreation, air pollution control, noise abatement, education, fiscal policy and taxation, housing, redevelopment, city planning, rapid transit, welfare services-all these are important to the proper functioning of a metropolitan area, and all impinge directly on the life of the citizens. Each requires its own encyclopedia of specialized knowledge and is presided over by its own hierarchy of technicians. But each of these specialized groups is usually more concerned with the tactics necessary to solve its own limited set of problems than with the wider strategy required for genuine social reconstruction.
The deepest need of every metropolitan area is for a coherent strategy that can weld together the complex, competing forces that seek to make segments of the city's life over into their own image. Such a strategy requires an ability to see the whole in the midst of all its parts. Where each segment of the metropolitan power structure seems most interested in securing its own share of the available resources and recognition, some groups need to be developing strategy that will take these into consideration while looking beyond them to the common good. The late mayor of New York, Fiorello H. LaGuardia, has already become an urban legend because he raced to fires and scenes of disturbance, read the comics over the radio during a news- paper strike, and gave marketing tips to housewives. But his abiding concern for the minutiae of municipal life and the daily concerns of the citizens was founded upon an ability to picture the whole city and take every New Yorker into account. This sort of vision is needed in every metropolitan area today.
A metropolitan strategy also requires an ability to see the future in the midst of the present. No one can predict all the trends of so dynamic a society as the one in which we live. Yet it is still possible to see the direction in which much of the present is pointing. Although those involved in each of the pyramids of power seem most interested in present advantage, some groups need to be looking beyond the city that already is to the city that is in the state of be- coming. Philadelphians still have reason to thank William Penn for the four small squares he laid out at the corners of his plan, tiny oases of light and air surrounded by the urban hurly-burly. And Chicagoans of a future date will give similar thanks to those who provided for the belts of forest preserves in Cook County that will retain natural areas for recreation and water supply when the expanding metropolis has pushed its limits far beyond them. Our vision cannot be bounded by the present.
Finally, a metropolitan strategy will require an ability to determine those times and places where leadership is needed. Since most crucial decisions in the metropolitan area involve a long period of discussion and the achievement of an informal or formal consensus before policy is set and action can be taken, they do not result in concrete projects until long after the need arises. Accommodation, negotiation, and compromise are used to secure a working unanimity, but these are slow processes. There- fore, there is always need for those who can discern the issues and begin to raise them, so that the powers that be will start mobilizing their forces to meet them. Although the innovators are bound to be labeled "controversial," time and again they prove to be the watchmen on the wall alerting the body politic to its responsibilities.
The natural inertia and self-interest of those who possess influence are bound to be thrown on the side of keeping things the way they are. The pressure to eschew the work of reconstruction and maintain the status quo, even in the face of radical challenge and change, is communicated in various ways: fear among the leaders who face loss of their own positions, pessimism among the technicians who have seen their careful proposals resisted and struck down time after time, silence and apathy among the people at large who have come to expect that "nothing can be done," Yet, in spite of these pressures to conformity and inertia, there is always more plasticity in the situation than many recognize.
A simple household worker was arrested for sitting in the front of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and a broad-gauged challenge to traditional patterns of race relations in that city was launched. A newspaper kept asking questions about the conduct of the police force in Chicago, and a complete housecleaning of the department 'was finally instituted. Alcoa and U.S. Steel, with corporate headquarters in Pittsburgh, resisted the pull to locate the center of their operations in New York's Wall Street, and the renaissance of Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle 0 was ensured by their decisions to build new office buildings there. The examples could be multiplied indefinitely, but they demonstrate that, when the need for leadership is recognized, there are always times and places calling for its exercise.


ONE MORE CASE HISTORY
Few urban problems gain more attention with less understanding than those of troubled youth, popularly labeled "juvenile delinquency." In every city a whole raft of charitable organizations, the school system, the police department, juvenile courts, recreational facilities, and family services all gain support for their activities with youth on the basis of "preventing juvenile delinquency." Each undoubtedly provides necessary services to youth and deals with part of the picture. Yet, in spite of the best efforts of all concerned, rates of juvenile misbehavior and the seriousness of the crimes committed by minors have continued to increase steadily since the end of World War II. One urban neighborhood, faced with recurring acts of violence by teen-age gangs that claimed to be organized for self-protection, but insisted on waging preventive wars, responded first with indignation at mass meetings, calls for more police protection and special youth workers, and attempts to provide increased recreation and athletics. In the course of working together, all the agencies and concerned citizens began to find that, important though their own role might be, it did not result in decreased violence unless carried out in conscious cooperation and coordination with the work of others. As time went on, their efforts were concentrated first on the gang leaders, then on their followers, and finally on younger brothers and sisters who were set to follow in their footsteps. The tactics of dealing with specific outbreaks of violence began in time to yield to the strategy of dealing with youth as a whole. What had been "rumbles committees" trying to keep track of the warring contingents became "youth service teams" devoted to seeing that all who were concerned about youth worked together effectively.
Even this did not prove to be sufficient, however, as it became more and more evident that much of the misbehavior was the result of the failure of urban society to have a real place for working-class youth. The schools did not talk their language and were not preparing them for the real choices open to them in society. Social agencies could offer them a "good time" and concerned adult leaders, but they were not providing a sense of worth for their activities. Probation officers, family service workers, school guidance personnel, mental health therapists, could talk over problems with them and their families, but they could promise no relief from the stigma of being poor or outcasts in the city. Plans for support, guidance, and activity were all helpful, yet they all fell short of the root- and-branch reconstruction necessary to provide these young people with the opportunities necessary for their
growth to healthy adulthood.
A broader strategy was necessary. Because many were not trained or ready to accept even the most menial jobs and were prevented by patterns of discrimination and . union restrictions from gaining rudimentary experience, the whole field of employment became a major focus. Special centers for the counseling and placement of youth, pre-employment training and subsidized work have been planned. Because many were becoming school dropouts and many more were just going through the motions, the field of education also received attention. Remedial reading classes, curriculum materials that use experiences familiar in their daily lives, increased individual guidance and cultural enrichment, are to be provided in the public schools. And because the hostility and alienation which was acted out in teen-age gang warfare often had its roots in the hostile attitudes and feeling of alienation on the part of adults, the integration of all groups into the community and the overcoming of passivity and despair be- came essential. Neighborhood councils to furnish a focus for constructive action and special programs to reach those who feel shut out of community affairs will be organized. None of these programs by itself provides a panacea for the displacement of youth in an urban neighborhood; but, taken together, they provide a wider strategy around which all available resources can be mobilized for the necessary work of social reconstruction.


RELEVANCE OF THE CHRISTIAN HOPE
One of the most discouraging discoveries of those who have been working with the problem of teen-age violence has been the fact that, when open warfare was averted and the gang groups began to break up, many of those who had been most involved shifted to the use of narcotics and became addicts. One form of social sin had merely been replaced by another. Few problems in urban life have proven as hopeless and as resistant to cure as that of narcotics addiction. Once "hooked," the addict seems power- less to keep from returning to his habit, no matter how many times he may go through withdrawal from the use of drugs.
In New York City, where the rate of addiction has been the highest in the United States, it has been primarily groups organized by Protestant churches that have been willing to bear the stigma of association with addicts when possession of drugs was a crime, and to stick with the addict and his family over the endless periods that precede and follow each attempt to "kick the habit." Faithful to God, "who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all" (Rom. 8: 32), and trusting in the power of the cross to deliver from all sin, these churches have refused to count the addict as hopeless or to confine the work of social reconstruction to those situations which respond most quickly to our human strategies.
Because the resistance of sin, both in persons and in the city at large, is so strong, the Christian hope possesses a relevance that surpasses any simple social optimism. Knowing that the power of sin has been broken in Christ, yet realizing that the complete fulfillment of the city of God has not yet been reached, the Christian is able to plan and to labor in hope. His hope is founded not on his own efforts nor on the efficacy of his strategies and plans, no matter how carefully drawn. Ultimately his hope is based on the power of God to redeem a broken and disobedient creation, to realize within the life of the metropolitan area some of the life of the city of God.