THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE CITY OF MAN:
A HISTORY OF THE CITY/CHURCH DIALOGUE
                                                     -Harvie M. Conn

In A.D. 374, Saint Jerome, "scolding a monk for having abandoned the desert" for the city, wrote, "O wasteland bright with the spring flowers of Christ! O solitude out of which come these stones that build the city of the great King in the Apocalypse! O desolate desert rejoicing in God's familiar presence! What keeps you in the world, 0 brother? You are above and beyond the world. How long is the shade of the house going to conceal you? How long shall the grimy prisons of those cities intern you?"^I
Jerome's words highlight the dialogue of this chapter-the church and the city-dominated world. What is the relation between the kingdom of God and the city of mankind? Jerome's own anti-urban solution to that relationship is the prototype for one contemporary answer. What other solutions does history offer?

The Church in the Cosmopolis
At the heart of Jerome's response to the city was the ancient recognition, shared by Christians and pagans, of religion as the integrating core of the city. The utopian dream of a world order integrated by religion and focused on the city arose long before Jerome. The classical heritage exemplified it.
The ancient Greek city-state was a religious community in the official sense. Its citizens were those who could trace their roots back to the god or gods responsible for the city. Citizenship carried with it the right and obligation to worship at civic shrines. To be ostracized was to be forbidden to enter the city walls. To live outside the city walls was to live outside of civilized life. The terms pagan and heathen originally meant those who lived outside those city walls.The cities of Olympia and Delphi, among others, modeled that inter- connection of religion and urban life.² Olympia stood for the body as the active physical expression of the human soul. And, for Olympia, physical exercise was disciplined play of a religious sort. Until the fourth century B.C., when prize winning became an end in itself, the games that took on the name of that city every four years were to establish "a state of political peace in which inhabitants of all cities could travel freely under protection of Zeus . . . [and] to violate any such pilgrim was an act of sacrilege."³ From Delphi and its twin gods, Apollo and Dionysius, came the theater as both an urban institution and a religious festival, the priests from the temple occupying the front row of the "orchestra." Attic comedy had grown out of old fertility rites; Delphic tragedy wrestled with the religious problems of human development opened up by the new urban order: fate, chance, free will. As time wore on, these religious dimensions shriveled. Tragedy lost its cosmic dimensions and provided a symbol of the new course of urban development. The real religion of the fifth century became "a devotion to the city itself"⁴
Against this stream of theopolitical trivialization, Plato flung his dream- plan for a new city-state, The Republic. As a quest for social justice, it rep-resented an attempt to recover the religious dimensions of ideal justice, a Cosmopolis constructed by the Good, "religion within the limits of human reason." But as an urbane vision of the city, it had come too late. The city-state had passed its peak.

Hellenization and the First Urban Wave
Aristotle's pupil, Alexander the Great, found another purpose for the city. It became a tool for the colonization of his conquered world, a world that by 323 B.C. included the Persian empire, stretching from Macedonia on the Balkan Peninsula across Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, and Persia into India and encompassing Palestine and Egypt. At strategic points, Alexander built Greek cities to serve as administrative centers. Through these cities a new cultural vision began to penetrate the alien world of the East: "urbanization became the means of hellenization."⁵ For six and a half centuries, from Alexander to Constantine, the city was the leading instrument in social, political, and cultural movement.
In the process, the gods abandoned their place as religious center to the city. The city itself became the holy sanctuary, a sacred enclosure around an altar.⁶ Stoic cosmopolitanism won the day, rejecting Plato's idealization of the city-state. Combined with the Hellenistic social humanitarianism of openness and tolerance, it promoted a universal community, a world ruled, said Zeno, its architect, by a single universal divine law. "Men, through their unique gift of reason, could learn and obey the cosmic will. With the gods, they constituted a spiritual world-city."⁷ Rome, for the Stoics, became the political embodiment of their cosmopolitan theology.

The Church and the Roman City
Against this backdrop, the church began its dialogue with the city-religion. Whether from the right or from the left, the early champions of the gospel in the city were aware that the good news of Jesus Christ and his redemptive work meant a de-divinization of the ancient city.⁸ The conflicts of the second-century church over emperor worship were not because Christianity was anti political, as were the mystery religions. They flowed from Christianity's radical break with the notion of the city as the meeting place of the gods and humanity. How was the church to be in the city but not of it? How was the church to function as an "alien citizen"?⁹
The historical context demanded an answer. With few exceptions, Christian groups in the second century were found in cities where Judaism was strong. To the outsider the church was an illegal association, an opposition urban cult. Its emerging system of government, with bishops and clergy as apparent heads of an urban community, had a city flair. Not till the last twenty years of the third century, in fact, did Christianity begin to impact some important rural areas of the empire.¹⁰
To the right and what might be called a Christ-against-the-city posture was Tertullian. For Tertullian's Christian, life was an urgent attempt to escape the pollution and idolatrous decay of urban life surrounding us. Christians are to be found everywhere in urban society, he responded to those who saw a disengaged church. "We sail with you, and fight with you, and till the ground with you; and in like manner we unite with you in your traffickings-even in the various arts we make public property of our works for your benefit" (Apology xliii). But ultimately the only city that matters for the Christian is the heavenly Jerusalem. The alien character of Christianity was to dominate.II
From the left was the Christ-of-the-city perspective of the Gnostics with their efforts to naturalize Christ into the Cosmopolis. The movement was molded by an individualism that saw the knowledge of Christ as a severely spiritual (amaterial) experience that had its place in the life of the city as the very pinnacle of human achievement. It saw the church not as the new people of God but as an association of "the enlightened who could live in culture as those who sought a destiny beyond it but were not in strife with it."12 Participation in the life of the city was now a matter of indifference; it involved no great problems.

The Church in the Theopolis
With the acceptance of Christianity by Emperor Constantine and the securing for Christianity of the privileges of a licensed cult by the Edict of Milan in 313, the Christian approach to the city began its march from cosmopolis to
theopolis. "During the first three centuries the tendency of events had been, on the whole, to accentuate the elements of opposition between the Church and the world."^I3 Now a synthesis began to emerge in which the Roman concept of cosmic harmony in the city of reason and order was fused with the Christian concept of God as emperor to form a corpus Christianum, the Christian body politic.

Eusebius of Caesarea, the church historian of this era, celebrates the era of Constantine as "nothing less than the realization of the secular hope of men, the dream of universal and perpetual peace which classical Rome had made her own, but of which the Pax Romana was merely a faint and imperfect anticipation. "¹⁴ Lactantius, the Christian philosopher, sees in the New Republic a new concept of the city built on the Roman vision of life as a continuous process of self-development and founded on the respect for humanity imperfectly realized in the classical cosmopolis. This, thinks Lactantius, is the ratio mundi, the law of nature that he identifies with the law of God.¹⁵
This Christian celebration of the city was far too optimistic and ill- timed in light of the ensuing decline of urban history. The empire's commonwealth of self-governing cities was already crumbling under the onslaught of Vandal invasions. In 410 Alaric's Visigoth army sacked Rome, the symbol of Eusebius's urban dream. The first great urban theologian, Augustine (354-430), took pen in hand to demythologize that dream.

Augustine and the City
Augustine's majestic evaluation of the fall of Rome, De Civitate Dei, proclaimed a new model for understanding the city: Christ, the trans- former of the city, or Christ-for-the-city. As a systematic rejection of the Eusebian picture of the urban empire, Augustine's model argues that the working out of God's purposes does not stand or fall with the fate of Rome, or indeed with the fate of any human society. He sees all humanity divided into two urban commonwealths: the terrestrial and the heavenly. It is a division, he contends, created before the foundation of the earth to be sealed at the judgment of the last day. The whole of history, therefore, is an eschatological movement toward the constitution of the heavenly city as it will finally emerge.¹⁶
In that movement, Christ is the transformer of the city. He redirects, reinvigorates, and regenerates that life of humanity, expressed in all human works, that actually is the perverted and corrupted exercise of a fundamentally good nature.¹⁷ Augustine sees the reality of the present civitas as abnormal, the good nature of creation corrupted by the root of sin. Flowing from that abnormality he sees what Niebuhr calls "the social sinfulness of mankind," a disorder extending to every phase of urban culture.¹⁸ Jesus Christ comes to this disorder to heal and renew what sin has infected, to restore and redirect what has been perverted. The culture of the city is not discarded by this work of regeneration; it is redirected by the power of the kingdom of God. "The Christian life can and must make use not only of these cultural activities but of 'the convenient and necessary arrangements of men with men' -conventions regarding dress and rank, weights and measures, coinage and the like. Everything, and not least the political life, is subject to the great conversion that ensued when God makes a new beginning for man by causing man to begin with God."¹⁹

In all this, Augustine insisted, we are restrained from slipping into a "culture Christianity" by our awareness of the antithesis that operates in history through the conflict of the two cities. "Two loves have built the two cities: self-love and contempt of God the earthly city, love of God and contempt of self the heavenly. The first seeks to glory in itself, the second in God" (De Civitate Dei 14-28).
In any empirical city, the two loves are inevitably interwoven. A city is only the sum of its members, the two cities inevitably present in any historical city. No commonwealth, even that ruled by Christian emperors like Constantine, can be identified with the city of God. The Christian church as an organized institution is the threshing floor on which Christ separates the wheat from the chaff, always containing both until the day of judgment.
Augustine's model had its tragic flaws, though they were not found in the antithetic dualism of the two cities.²⁰ These flaws were rooted in the favored place he gave the church and his frequent reduction of faith ,to obedient assent to the church as an authoritative, cultural institution.
In the immediate centuries that followed, these flaws became more noticeable as the cities lost ground and the church grew dominant. The disintegration of Rome, the incursions of the Germanic peoples, the rise of Islam and its conquest of the Mediterranean basin-everything moved toward a catastrophic decline of the city as a model for the world.²¹ By the end of the fifth century, the western half of the empire had slipped into chaos, nearly all its cities stunted by decline. In Britain only a few major places, like London and the legionary camps of York, Lincoln, and Chester, remained inhabited. By the end of the seventh century, the once busy port of Genoa had become a fishing village. The concept of the city as an independent political entity, as a symbol for the world, vanished entirely in the Dark Ages.

The Second Urban Wave
Its reemergence, beginning perhaps in the tenth century, now found a new model for its center-the church. In spite of such anti-urban aspects of Christianity as its opposition to the pagan way of life embodied in municipalities, its withdrawal from the secular world of the city into the desert or monasteries, its neo-Augustinian substitution of the heavenly for the earthly city, the church's form and organization began to lend its shape to the re- creation of the city. The second great urban wave was born, and the church was its midwife.
Strangely enough, the earliest model for this theopolis came from one of the very reasons for the city's downfall, the monastery. Plato's vision found realization in the Benedictine order, the monastery as the link between the classical city and the medieval city. "It was in the monastery that the ideal purposes of the city were sorted out, kept alive and eventually renewed. It was here too that the practical value of restraint, order, regularity, honesty, inner discipline were established, before these qualities were passed over to the medieval town and post-medieval capitalism, in the form of inventions and business practices: the clock, the account book, the ordered day."²² The image of the heavenly city and the Roman cosmopolis were fused and kept alive by the monasteries.

Following the tenth century, when the new urban communities were re-forming, this Roman inheritance began to take concrete shape in an architectural emphasis on enclosure, protection, security, durability, and continuity. As the barbarian populations of northern and central Europe swung over to Christianity, the role of the city/church began to grow. After the fall of the Roman empire, the church became the one powerful and universal association in western Europe. The fundamental political divisions of society, the parish and the diocese, took their forms from a church that had once taken them from the empire. "From the smallest village with its parish church to the greatest city with its Cathedral, its many churches, its monasteries and shrines, the Church was visibly present in every community: its spires were the first object the traveller saw on the horizon and its cross was the last symbol held before the eyes of the dying."²³

Aquinas and the City
The great systematizer of this theopolitical synthesis was the thirteenth- century theologian Thomas Aquinas.²⁴ Aquinas sought to answer the question about Christ and the city with a "both-and." Yet, as Niebuhr indicated, Aquinas's Christ is far above the city, and the gap between Christ and the city is never taken seriously enough.²⁵ He seeks to represent a model sometimes designated as a nature-grace dualism. Christ and the city, grace and nature, are not hostile worlds but complementary ones. "Since, therefore, grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it, natural reason should minister to faith as the natural inclination of the will ministers to charity."²⁶ So, Aquinas need not seek a rule for human social life in the Gospels. These urban rules must be found by reason. "They constitute in their broad principles a natural law which all reasonable men living human lives under the given conditions of common human existence can discern, and which is based ultimately on the eternal law in the mind of God, the creator and ruler of all. . . . Culture discerns the rules for culture, because culture is the work of God-given reason in God-given nature."²⁷

But there is another law for the city-the law revealed by God through his prophets and ultimately in his Son. This law is partly coincident with the natural law and partly transcends it. The city provides humanity as a social being with direction in accordance with natural law. The church not only directs us to our supernatural end but also, as custodian of the divine law, assists in the ordering of our temporal life. The urban man or woman of reason sometimes falls short of that goal and requires the gracious assistance of revelation.

The Collapse of the Theopolis
Aquinas's synthesis left the world of the city relatively autonomous of the kingdom of God, except in a supplementary way. It was to set up a schizophrenic two-realm a priori, leaving open the possibility of reason- able people building a utopian vision for the city with a minimization of the disruptive, city-destroying power of sin. The seeds of the secularized city, the modern megalopolis, were sown by Aquinas and harvested in the more consistent efforts of the Renaissance and Enlightenment minds.
From the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the transition from theopolis to megalopolis was achieved. A new pattern for the city was to spring out of a new economy-mercantilist capitalism. A new political framework, the centralized despotism or oligarchy, was to be embodied in urban culture. A growing skepticism moved from the secularist isolation of nature and grace, hinted at in Aquinas, through the progressive isolation of nature from grace, trumpeted by Duns Scotus (1270-1308), to the humanistic abandonment of grace by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In the political realm, this growing secularization finds expression in the new vision of the city nurtured by Dante Alighiere's De Monarchia (1310-1313). Dante called for a divine dual appointment for the governing of humanity. The pope was to rule in the spiritual realm and the emperor in the secular, each absolutely sovereign in his own realm.
The vision received an even more secular twist with Machiavelli's fifteenth-century treatise The Prince. This work signaled the beginning of the radical transfer of absolute authority from God and the church to the national state. The divine attributes of sovereignty and power were denied to God and attributed to the civitas. The ancient Roman dream of a world order whose object was to promote the public good and not private interests was in the process of being re-divinized under a new sign, the sign of the prince.
This growing vision, however, was still transitional, still linked to the Christian past of earlier days. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), in his utopian novel New Atlantis, sketches an idyllic island community revolving around what he calls the house of Solomon, "a house of science and technique, a laboratory, a bureau of planning and a workshop. Upon this complex scheme was built his hope of a perfect society."28 Built into Bacon's ideal community is a vision of science that has since controlled people's minds. But it is still not fully divorced from Christianity. The community Bacon describes had earlier received a book containing the Old and New Testaments and, with it, a letter promising the inhabitants of the island peace and goodwill from God. Christianity and the humanism of the emerging science are still interwoven at this stage of the transition to megalopolis.
The effect of the process, however, was wearing away more and more at the interaction of Christianity and the city in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the cities, the medieval ideal of the Christian knight and the Christian prince was being replaced by a new urban image, the commercial merchant. Cities were changing while the church, represented by its clergy, seemed tied to another world, outsiders to the city and its citizens. Late medieval Flanders, for example, was a city of only external, formalized religiosity among laypeople, a significant number of its citizens never darkening the door of the confessional for years on end.²⁹ Late medieval Germany was in a similar state. Although a form of piety was evident in the city, it was flawed and unsatisfying. On the eve of the Reformation the medieval model was failing, especially on the city level.
Rome's extensive ecclesiastical bureaucracy, which had been the unity of Europe during the Middle Ages, was disintegrating in many areas, hurried along by a growing regional sense of identity and administrative competence. The well-entrenched benefice system of the church, the muscle of patronage, which had permitted important ecclesiastical offices to be sold to the highest bidders and residency requirements either to go un-enforced or to be fulfilled by poorly qualified substitutes, revealed its deleterious effects especially on the local level. Bishops were traditionally appointed from the nobility and not always known to have either a shepherd's heart or a theologian's mind. Cities were very sensitive to their lack of firsthand knowledge of and sympathy with local urban problems.³⁰
The focus of this tension became increasingly the freedom of the city from the church.There was constant quarrelling in town councils about the bishops' right to intervene, about the rights of patronage, and thus about authority over parishes and parish clergy and about the extension or restriction of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Corporations and councils tried to guard against attempts by the clergy to separate itself from the laity by claiming privileges such as immunity from taxes, jurisdiction and civic obligations. Town councils tried to control the administration of ecclesiastical and monastic property and to take over ecclesiastical functions which had civic consequences, such as schooling, provision for the poor and sick, oversight of social morality
The free-city concept was finding roots in some of Europe's urban centers. Cities like Augsburg, Nurnberg, and Lubeck were seeing themselves as organic parts of a cosmopolitan order of civil rights and freedoms. In this concept, the religious embraced the secular; sin and salvation had strong social and political connotations. One chronicler of the free-city apologetic wrote: "God has become a citizen of Bern, and who can fight against God?"³²

The Reformation Interlude
In this transition from theopolis to megalopolis came the interruption of the sixteenth-century Reformation, uniquely an urban event. Contradicting at its core the disintegrating effect of nominalistic secularism on the city and the then emerging Renaissance call for a return to a new cosmopolis, it rediscovered a sovereign God unleashed by an open Bible in the life of the city.³³
In the course of the century, fifty of the sixty-five imperial cities subject to the emperor officially recognized the Reformation either permanently or periodically and as either a majority or a minority movement. Of Germany's almost two hundred cities and towns with populations exceeding one thousand, most witness Protestant movements. Some of the largest- Nurnberg, Strasbourg, Lubeck, Augsburg, and Ulm, all with populations in excess of twenty-five thousand-became overwhelmingly Protestant. The Reformation cannot be understood as reinforcing the iconoclasm' of the late medieval age. Its attractiveness was the heart of its proposals for the religious life of cities and towns. "Protestant preachers pointed out what many laymen had evidently also come to suspect-that the church and her clergy would first have to undergo a major redefinition before they could be integrated as good citizens into society. The root of the problem, I am suggesting, was not the privileges of a special clerical class or even its administrative and moral failings but the most basic beliefs and practices of the church it represented."³⁴
The need was for a religious transformation. Calvin supplied that trans- formation when he spoke for the Reformers in defining the ultimate purpose of the city, whatever its form, as God's righteousness. God's law, engraved by him on our conscience, was the origin of all our ideas of right and wrong, not the cosmopolis or the theopolis. The most basic political institution was to be the covenant instituted by God between himself and the magistrates and people of a city.³⁵
The Reformation call involved a new social ethic for the city. The Protestant concept of the clerical ministry as an activity, not a passive sacramental state, appealed to burghers who had fought to curtail clerical privileges and immunities. The Reformation slogan of the priesthood of all believers stratified urban society in the pragmatic and ethical terms of who could best serve his fellow citizens. Being lord over all was no longer incompatible with being servant to all. The importance of secular life and vocations was confirmed, sanctifying as it did the laity. Conversely, it also worked to secularize the clergy. The citizen saw the Reformation as inner freedom from religious superstition and nominalist uncertainty, as a new ethic of urban service. "The Reformation appears as an enlightenment. The special religious works and ceremonies of the medieval church are criticized as psychologically burdensome and socially useless in contrast to Reformation sponsorship of natural and useful service to one's neighbor through ordinary lay vocations."³⁶ The Protestant movement was seen as an unprecedented religious flattering of secular life, but without the medieval separation of the sacred from the secular.

Reformation Models for the City
Three models divided the Reformation perspective on the city. From Luther came the two-kingdom theory, a dualism of Christ and the city in paradox. Unlike the Thomistic synthesis, built on a concept of the city in need of divine amplification and development, Luther sees the culture of the city as cracked and madly askew, a kingdom of wrath and severity. The reasonable institution rests on a great irrationality.
Yet, unlike the radical notions of Tertullian, Luther knows that he belongs to that culture and cannot get out of it, that God indeed sustains him in it and by it. "This is the basis of Luther's dualism. Christ deals with the fundamental problems of the moral life. But by the same token he does not directly govern the external actions or construct the immediate community in which man carries on his work."³⁷ In the city of humanity, the Christian is ruled by both divinely bestowed reason and humanity's natural wisdom, "a fair and glorious instrument and work of God." Living in paradox between Christ and the city, "the freedom of the Christian man," for Luther, becomes "autonomy in all the special spheres of culture."³⁸ It is precisely here that Luther may be in danger of encouraging the modern process of secularization in the city. He frees humanity for responsibility under God, but he does it by creating two worlds where there had been one.
The second Reformation model flowed from a deep sensitivity of the failure of Luther and Calvin to construct a view of the church that would repudiate the theopolitical heritage of Constantinianism. Anabaptism, the radical Reformation, called for a restitution of a "confessional church based on personal faith." Any church that allowed itself to become identified with the civitas was to the Anabaptists fallen.
In many respects, Anabaptism sounds like a Reformation return to the Christ-against-the-city model of earlier days. It saw the city's culture as "not simply an amorphous conglomerate of evil impulses but a structured reality taking concrete form in the demonic dimensions of economic and political life."³⁹ For some this might resemble Luther's two-kingdom theory. But against him, the movement saw the kingdom of God incarnated in the believing community of disciples and hostile to Kultur, humanity's autonomous creation and setting of values. The insistence on the separation of the church from the Constantinian world had structured a concept of a world intolerant of the practice of true Christian principles in the urban society. The society of the city would always be the partner of the flesh and the devil. But the church must walk another road, exemplifying in her fellowship the living and suffering and dying of the Lord Jesus.
Thus, though both Lutherans and Anabaptists were pessimistic about the world of the city, the Lutheran was willing to make a paradoxical com- promise by participation in a world order that remained sinful. The Anabaptist would not. "He must consequently withdraw from the worldly order and create a Christian social order within the fellowship of the church brotherhood. Extension of this Christian order by the conversion of individuals and their transfer out of the world into the church is the only way by which progress can be made in Christianizing the social order."⁴⁰To use the language of Roland Bainton, Anabaptism symbolized "the church withdrawn. "
Calvin provided the third model from the Reformation: Christ as trans- former of the city. Drawing his strengths (and some of his weaknesses) from Augustine, he looked for the present permeation of all life in the city by the gospel. Dominated by the cosmic dimensions of the sovereignty of God, Calvin saw the city as God's minister, not only in a negative fashion as a restrainer of evil, but also positively as a promoter of human welfare. Even in the radical ruins of the fall, Calvin discerned the splendor of the image of God in human nature. He looked at the vocations of humanity as activities in which they may express their faith and love, glorifying God in their calling as they were faithful to the demands of the law of God.
His understanding of human depravity allowed for no optimistic hope in "the transformation of mankind in all its nature and culture into a kingdom of God. . . ."⁴¹ At the same time, Calvin's perspective was theocentric enough to work for the manifestation of the rule of the kingdom of God in the city through the application of evangelical laws in the body politic. He refused to allow even this sphere to be ruled by natural law or the benevolence of humanitarian reasonableness. Here, too, the law of God was to govern the entirety of life.⁴²
The Reformation ultimately offered no brake on the increasing pressure for the secularization of the city. Anabaptism called for a new model of the kingdom of God structured against the city. Luther left the city to the dictates of natural law and reasonableness. Calvin compromised his call for reforming by not breaking entirely with the Constantinian ecclesiology in which the church embraced all in a given locality.⁴³
The old vision of the city as a theopolis collapsed under the blows of the Reformation.⁴⁴ But it was the Renaissance spirit of humanity as the measure of all things that carried away the pieces for a new construction. Christopher Wren's plan for the reconstruction of London after the Great Fire of 1666 recognized this new ordering of city life. He did not give the dominating site to St. Paul's. He planned the new avenues so as to give this honor to the Royal Stock Exchange.

The Church in the Megalopolis
With the collapse of the medieval theopolis, a new vision of the city began to emerge. A growing isolation of the sacred from the saeculum found modern humanity now searching for a new religious way to see the city without having to find God at its center. The Greco-Roman world had integrated religion and city by asking, "Am I a good man?" The Reformation question, rejected by the growing consensus, asked, "Am I a Christian man?" The modern question became, "Am I a happy man?"⁴⁵ The pursuit of individual happiness became an inalienable right for the modern urban dweller.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century humanity had not lost its medieval passion for religious comprehensiveness and order. It was still animated by what the French call1'esprit de systeme, a religious yearning for total explanation. Only now that yearning was sought not in God, but in the secularity of humanity itself; not in theopolis but in megalopolis. At the heart of the change was a profound revolution in consciousness, the religious mindset of secularization.⁴⁶
Thomisrn's natural order had finally overpowered grace. In the process, even the understanding of that natural order had been transformed. The accommodating mentality of the theopolis (a nature-grace consciousness) shifted to an emancipating mentality (a nature-freedom consciousness). "Grace disappeared in the religious thinking of modern man and its place was taken by the category of freedom. Man was to be reborn as a completely free and autonomous personality and released from all controls over his thinking. And, in this spirit, even the category of nature, still retained from the medieval synthesis, was transformed. Nature became a 'macro cosmic sphere within which human personality could exercise its autonomy."'⁴⁷
In the centuries immediately after the Reformation, this new mentality began to manifest itself in many areas of urban life. The choir, which once chanted hymns to God, was removed to the concert hall. Drama, leaving the porches of the church, was turned over to professional actors under the patronage of the nobility. The nave, the bare assembly place of the church, became the bourse. The merchant, not the minister, became the spokesperson for power in the city. Not God, but the individual, was celebrated as the builder of the new city of humanity. Bacon's utopian New Atlantis became the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Societies and cities were heralded as mechanical contrivances created by individuals to serve their mutual interests. Hobbes's designation of the body politic as the "mortal God" shocked his world with its irreverent adjective, mortal, but it signaled as well the beginning of a new era in the history of urban mythology.

The Third Urban wave
Anchored in the emerging Enlightenment exaltation of humanity, pressured by an accelerating population growth, encouraged by eighteenth- century inventions like a usable steam engine (1767), the Western city, already infatuated with capitalism,48 embraced the machine. The medieval city represented protection and security. The industrial city represented the priority of the individual and the calculated risks that promoted the individual. Cities exploded with vitality and problems.
In 1800, not a city in that Western world had even a million people. About 3 percent of the world's 906 million people are believed to have lived in the mere 750 places of larger than 5,000 population. But by 1850, the picture was changing radically. London, the biggest of the Western world's cities, grew from 959,310 in 1800 to over 2 million. By 1901, the figure was well over 4 million. In one century she had grown by 3.5 million people.
In the United States, the pattern was similar. In 1850, 85 percent of the population was still classified as rural, but by 1900 there were three cities of over 1 million people and an additional thirty-five between 100,000 and becomes the midwife of classic theological liberalism, and Jesus is delivered as the Christ of culture.1 million. In the century between 1790 and 1890, the total U.S. population grew 16 fold, but urban population grew 139 fold. By 1920, the urban population had passed 50 percent. Limited transportation found workers living near factories in densely packed tenements. Pathetic living conditions, poverty, and squalor increased as waves of new immigrant workers from southern Europe poured into American cities during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
In the face of the urban manufacturing world's pain and squalor, some people turned away from hope in the individual. Individualism in the city, they cried, brought only "brutal indifference." "The unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellant and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together. . . . This isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, [but] it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city."⁴⁹ With these words, Friedrich Engel's (1820-1895) looked at industrialized Manchester, England, and saw there "the marvels of civilization" for the few linked to the "nameless misery"
for the many. With Karl Marx (1818-1883), an observer of London's growing gap between rich and poor, he joined in calling for the inevitable downfall of capitalism and the bringing of the working class to power. Hope of the future for them lay in the inevitability of the class struggle.

Revival of the Christ-of the-City Model
Marxism, however, was not yet to have its day. The optimistic idealism of the individual, triumphing in the brotherhood of mankind, was a more cheerful solution to urban pain.
Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1899) provided much of the theological underpinnings for that response. He promoted the idea of the kingdom of God shorn of its supernaturalism-the kingdom of ends. In that kingdom was to be found the true form of a world ethical society. "The Christian idea of the kingdom of God," he wrote, "denotes the association of mankind- an association both extensively and intensively the most comprehensive possible-through the reciprocal moral action of its members, action which transcends all merely natural and particular considerations."⁵⁰ Closely related to Thomas Jefferson's hope for a mankind gathered into one family "under the bonds of charity, peace, common wants and common aids," Ritschl's vision of the megalopolis under God becomes a synthesis "of the great values esteemed by democratic culture: the freedom and intrinsic worth of individuals, social cooperation and universal peace. "⁵¹ Ritschl becomes the midwife of classic theological liberalism, and Jesus is delivered as the Christ of culture.  In England, Ritschl's vision, touched with a hint of Marx, was part of the impetus for the incarnation of the Christian Socialist movement of 1848-1854 under the leadership off. D. Maurice (18°5-1872). Like Ritschl's, Maurice's vision of the kingdom was a teleological, universal one in conflict with what he termed "unsocial Christians" and "unchristian socialists." He spurned the desire of the evangelicals of Germany and England "to make sin the ground of all theology" and with it their views of hell and eternal punishment. His answer was that Christ is the head of all humanity and the kingdom of God would be realized through the participation of the organizations of humanity in a new, universal society for all.
In line with this social model for his humanitarianism, Maurice attacked the whole laissez faire, competitive, commercialist outlook in the name of Jesus. According to him, the true law of the universe is that we are made to live in community as children of God. Writing with his associates in the short-lived journal Politics for the People, he pressed with caution his theme of liberty, fraternity, and unity as God's intention for every people under heaven.'"
From that theme flowed a measure of reform movements in English urban life. In a day when higher education for women was a distrusted novelty, Maurice founded Queens College for women (1848). To prepare working men to manage in the industrial revolution, he founded the Workingmen's College and became its first president. Though the spin-off projects made some small impact, his wider vision was what made its deeper influence in the church.
This same humanitarian liberalism spawned the social gospel movement in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth. Would we ever see an end to the urban face of crime, poverty, congestion, racial polarity, and pollution?
In 1887 appeared Edward Bellamy's utopian, social-gospel answer to that question, Looking Backward. The most influential novel in America since Uncle Toms Cabin (1852), it quickly sold a million copies. Endeavoring to picture a future "'City of God, to shame. . . the imperfections of the City of Man,' he limned a social order of welfare programs, garden cities and public works, mechanization of labor, vast educational resources, women freed of household drudgery-recognizable features, in great measure, of contemporary industrial society-and, greatest blessing of all (this still to be achieved), people living together as loving brothers."⁵² In this society, the fatherhood of God had become the brotherhood of mankind.
Bellamy's vision was shared by men like Washington Gladden (1836-1918), Shailer Mathews (1863-1941), and Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), who appeared to give it more theological teeth. Calling for an alliance between the church and the working class, Rauschenbusch, like Ritschl before him, retooled the biblical formula of the kingdom of God into the reformation of society as Christianity's only true task. Sin became injustice; redemption, social morality; heaven, a just society; and hell, a slum. As a pastor of the Second German Baptist Church in New York's "Hell's Kitchen" area, Rauschenbusch's experiences created a liberal revision of the gospel into a socialist solution for overcoming the evils of industrial society. ⁵³

Evangelical Responses to the City
The evangelicals of these centuries were not silent. The Wesleyan revival of eighteenth-century England produced the Clapham Sect of wealthy politicians and businessmen. Led by men like William Wilberforce, they became an influential center of urban and social reform. Under the inspiration of their parish rector, John Venn, founder of the Church Missionary Society and father of its illustrious secretary, Henry Venn, the group led in the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and a wide program of prison reform.
In the nineteenth century their tradition was carried on by Lord Shaftesbury. His career achievements included better treatment of the mentally ill, improved housing, better health, sanitation, and recreation facilities, better schools, labor legislation, improved mining conditions, and opposition to the opium and liquor traffic.⁵⁴ Shaftesbury's support of the Society for Improving the Conditions of Labouring Classes and his report to Parliament of housing conditions in St. George's Hanover Square, London, prompted the erection of model lodging houses.
But, unlike the Ritschlian response, the evangelical response harbored no illusions of building the kingdom of God on earth. The manifesto of the Clapham Sect was Wilberforce's 1797 work A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity. The social services of the English upper and middle classes were a product of religion, not an end. What Maurice was later to reject, Wilberforce endorsed. The religion of the upper classes did not recognize, he wrote, the primacy of Christianity in life, the temporal nature of the present, the coming judgment at death, and the folly of attempting good works without faith in Christ.
The temptation to place this model in Niebuhr's typology of "Christ the transformer of culture" (Christ for the city), however, must be resisted. For along with a ringing affirmation of the biblical supernatural was a deadening insensitivity to the secularism of the period's capitalism.
Borrowing from the voluntarism characteristic of an earlier Anabaptism and the introspective concern over the individual reinforced by Calvinistic Puritanism, the evangelical of these times did not fully acknowledge the processes of industrialization and modernization as secular voluntarism. As a result, voluntarism's focus on the individual did not lose its hold on the evangelical even in his or her deep commitment to social amelioration. The religious roots of urban individualism were not acknowledged, and unregulated economic activity (the productive assets of the individual) remained unquestioned by the reformers.
As the nineteenth century moved into the twentieth, that lack of sensitivity on the part of the evangelical led to other growing problems. The evangelical moved from social amelioration to social reinforcement, from change agent to defender of the status quo. The voluntarist concept of institutions (embodied in its views on the church) increasingly left the evangelical without the theoretical capabilities to deal radically with the structural enormity of the problems of industrialization and urbanization. In the United States, for example, the motivating compassion of Christ, coupled with acculturated, secularized individualism, produced large-scale religious philanthropy and organized charity programs for the city. ⁵⁵ But the drag of secular accommodation could not manifest Christian justice for the city.
Reinforcing this perspective was a new way of defining poverty that was gaining popularity. A distinction was growing between the "worthy poor" and the "unworthy poor." This combined with a racist social polarization that identified the poor with the foreign-born immigrant poor.⁵⁶
All these factors combined to build an anti-urban mentality among America's evangelicals.
Urban problems, like substandard housing, poverty, unemployment, disease and crime were too much for the churches with their limited resources to cope with effectively. Many of the faithful shook their heads in despair and concluded there was little they could do about the wretched social conditions except pray and try to evangelize their neighbors. Added to this was the retreat from the inner city by established Protestant congregations, leaving many slum areas virtually devoid of churches.⁵⁷

As the American evangelical moved into the first half of the twentieth century, other historical developments reinforced these tendencies. An increased reaction among the evangelicals began to build up against the impact of the social gospel movement on two fronts. The identification of that movement with theological liberalism created animosity toward it. In addition, its identification of systemic, environmental structures as the root of urban dislocation and its espousal of socialistically oriented methods for social reform were also menacing to the evangelical.
The combination of all these elements led not simply to a rejection of the social gospel movement but to a vigorous rejection of social reform with it. In the aftermath, the pietist focus of earlier years on individual piety and personal ethics began to receive prominence.
Sin was seen as an individual affair to be dealt with on an individual basis. Thus, attention was focused on personal vice-alcoholic beverages, smoking, theater attendance, prostitution, gambling, card playing-while social sin- slums, poverty, political corruption, fraudulent business practices, monopolies, hazardous working conditions, adulteration of foods-was deliberately ignored or overlooked. The result was that a mood of indifference settled over these churches as they withdrew from sociopolitical affairs and promoted the pie of the local congregations in almost total unconcern about social evils.⁵⁸

Unaware of the ideology of the secularist religion of the megalopolis, evangelicals increasingly identified themselves and the gospel with status-quo capitalism. They could not offer the city a Christian alternative to the social and political structures it had created.
By the first half of the twentieth century, "the capture of the evangelical churches by business interests" had taken place. Dwight L. Moody was closely associated with the Philadelphia department store owner John Wanamaker. He received substantial financial support from men like Cyrus McCormick, Philip Armour, Jay Cooke, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, and J. P. Morgan. Billy Sunday's principal backer was John D. Rockefeller, Jr. These financiers could not complain when Moody preached, "I never saw the man who put Christ first in his life that wasn't successful," or when he advised his ministerial supporters in 1897, "Don't let Sunday be given up to talking on topics you don't understand such as capital and labor."⁵⁹ Alba Johnson, president of the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia, could say, "You know the widespread social unrest is largely due to the workingman's envy of those who make a little more money than he does. Now Billy Sunday makes people look to the salvation of their own souls, and when a man is looking after his own soul's good he forgets. his selfish desire to become rich. Instead of agitating for a raise in wages he turns and helps some poorer brother who's down and out.,^,60
In the wake of the theological controversies over liberalism in the early twentieth century, pietism's earlier mistakes had frozen into a static, evangelical, middle-class support of the religious value systems of the megalopolis. The "no politics" rule of the English Methodists of the nineteenth century had moved evangelicalism toward laissez faire conservatism with- out seeing the same religious ideology in it that they saw clearly in Marx- ism and socialism. "All the issues which were most important to working class people fell into the category where most Christians felt they must stay neutral.,,⁶¹
This was reinforced by the rise of extreme dispensational views, which strengthened a pessimistic outlook toward the future of the megalopolis and held out little hope for solutions apart from the return of Christ. The suffering of the city began to be interpreted not as a call for the gospel but as a sign of the end.62 In 1914, R. A. Torrey wrote, "In the Return of our Lord is the perfect solution, and the only solution, of the political and commercial problems that now vex us.⁶³
Revivalism as a feature of the evangelical methodology helped to reduce the complexities of the Christian faith to simple alternatives. Through their reduction of repentance from the public to the private sphere, the full implications of discipleship were not sufficiently stressed. "In time new elements crept into the evangelistic message such as the middle-class success myth, American chauvinism, opposition to actions of organized labor, and, of course, prohibition.,,⁶⁴ Privatization of religion as a cultural, Western given had moved within evangelicalism from a hidden presupposition to an explicit principle of what could better be called neo-fundamentalism.

Christ-and-the-City-in-Paradox
Unhappy with both liberalism and evangelicalism, a new model for understanding the city, neo-orthodoxy, emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. A variation on an earlier theme, it sought to throw doubt on the nineteenth century's optimism by an analysis of humanity's despair, anxiety, and guilt.
From the Danish philosopher S0ren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) it borrowed an existentialist orientation to the here-and-now, concrete humanity in its concrete situation. From Kierkegaard also came a revolt against the abstract religious goals of those content to know dogmas or ideas but not to live them. The real God of the megalopolis was to be found by the leap of faith from the dark abyss of doubt into the arms of Christ.
Karl Barth (1886-1968) gave neo-orthodoxy its systematic shape. But the American-born brothers Reinhold (1892-1971) and H. Richard (1894-1962) Niebuhr came closest to linking it to the social dimensions of the city.
Reinhold Niebuhr forged those links in a thirteen-year parish ministry among the working class in Detroit. Here, in an industrial community, he experienced the ruthless power of industry as it resisted unionization. Here also he re-examined his own liberal and highly idealistic creed, which he now found to be irrelevant. Marxism's cynical realism reinforced his concerns about social injustice and its roots in economics. But it had its own problems.
In the teaching years that followed in New York, Niebuhr's developing theology continued to focus on the urban world and its social problems. Kierkegaard's human predicament, the paradox of sinful pride and human freedom, became the center of his concerns.
Only in the dialectical relationship of love and justice could the paradox be faced. Justice makes its coercive demands, and love, the "impossible possibility" taught by Jesus, the suprahistorical norm, guides us in our struggle toward the goals of justice. Love overcomes evil by its vicarious identification with a suffering megalopolis. But the victory is always ambiguous, calling Christians to lift up their eyes to a still higher goal. "Christian realism" must recognize the ambiguity of the human solution. The tragedy of social life is that one must choose the lesser of two evils rather than an abstract absolute good. The mythical symbol of the resurrection of Christ affirms that such a choice is possible. Writes Niebuhr, "The hope of the resurrection embodies the very genius of the Christian idea of the historical. On the one hand, it implies that eternity will fulfill and not annul the richness and variety which the temporal process has elaborated. On the other it implies that the condition of finiteness and freedom, which lies at the basis of historical existence, is a problem for which there is no solution by any human power.,,⁶⁵ For all the good that Niebuhr left us (and there was much of it), he left us also an accommodating synthesis characteristic of the Christ-and-the-city-in-paradox model.

The Church in the Global City
By 1950, almost 64 percent of North America's population was urban, and Europe's cities held over 55 percent of its people. As the pace of urban growth in these areas began to slow considerably, it exploded in the so- called Third World. The expansion of the megalopolis took on world dimensions.The Kierkegaardian dialectical opposition between time and eternity remains to frustrate. ⁶⁶
Richard Niebuhr's model operates in much the same way. The conclusion of his masterful work Christ and Culture points out that all the views he has set forth contain truth that ultimately must be synthesized by the individual's personal decision. His own view of Jesus Christ as the flowing of the eternal in the temporal, immanent divinity actualized in a human person, is not radical enough to set Jesus either over against culture or even as a transformer of the culture of the city. The Zeitgeist of existentialism, which is part of Niebuhr's working presuppositions, does not allow him to see Jesus as mourning the city.
Niebuhr's Jesus cannot function as the canon of the city. So Niebuhr sees the culture of the city as basically a relativizing instrument. No single conclusion can be the Christian answer. The claim of finality by any finite mind is said to usurp the lordship of Christ. It violates the liberty of Christians and the un concluded history of the city. The problem for Niebuhr is not the conflict between the continuity of Christ and the discontinuity of the culture of the city, but "the conflict between the continuity of culture and the discontinuity of Christ, between man's present and God's future.,,⁶⁷
Ultimately, Richard Niebuhr also sets Christ and the city in an unconcluded paradox. Operating from Kierkegaard's dualism of the finite and the infinite, he cannot ask, How does the eternal Christ look at pseudo- autonomous city culture? He can only ask, How can the believer, linked to infinity, live in finitude?
The fourth great urban wave began to break on the shores of Mrica, Asia, and Latin America. Mrica's urban populace jumped from 14 percent in 195° to 36 percent in 199°. Latin America's urban community has gone from 4I percent of the population in 195° to 71 percent in 199°, Asia's from 16 to 32 percent. ⁶⁸
The mega-city phenomenon has come to the world, especially the southern hemisphere. At the beginning of this century only twenty cities in the world exceeded 1 million in population. As of 1980, that figure had reached 235, with some u810cated in economically less-developed areas. Since 195°, population in these cities has grown tenfold.
In 195°, only two cities in the world had a population of over 10 million-New York and London. By 1985, fifteen did, and only three of these were in Europe and North America. By A.D. 2000, say some, there will be twenty-four, all bur three in the southern hemisphere.⁶⁹
The "urban anguish" of the northern hemisphere in the nineteenth century has now become a global phenomenon. Old problems have become more visible: human dysfunction during rapid social change, the political domination of the powerful over the marginalized, the widening gap between rich and poor.
An estimated half the urban population in the southern hemisphere lives in slums or shantytowns. Everywhere the pattern is repeated. Slum dwellers form a third of the populations of Nairobi and Dakar; 415 squatter areas in Manila represent 38 percent of the population; 48,000-by official count-live on the streets of Calcutta (200,000 is the generally accepted figure); five hundred ciudades perdidas (lost cities) with 2.7 million people are in Mexico City. "In the year 2000, 2.u6 billion or 33.6 percent of the world will be in cities in less developed regions and 4° percent (a conservative figure) will be squatters (846 million). This would indicate a world that is about 13.6 percent squatters by the year 2000."⁷⁰
Compounding the problems of global urbanization for the church, we must remember, is population increase in areas traditionally hostile to Christianity. This, combined with growing nominalism in the northern- hemisphere centers of Christianity, has resulted in a significant drop in the percentage of urban Christians. In 19°0, argues David Barrett, Christians numbered 68.8 percent of urban dwellers; by 1980, only 46.3 percent. By A.D. 2000, it will reach 44.5 percent.?⁷¹

The Church Responds
The 1950S and 1960s found the world church facing these challenges and demanding theological reflection on their significance. The superficial optimism of the social gospel movement had faded away under the impact of neo-orthodoxy. With it went the earlier fear of secularism as an enemy; a new emphasis on the vocation of the church in and for the world began to dominate.
Nourished by a particular interpretation of the prison saint Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) and his posthumous call for the church to exist only "for others. . . in all the worldly tasks of human community,"⁷² many in the world church embraced secularization as the key to the heart of the urban world.
Under the influence of optimistic theologians like Harvey Cox and Colin Williams, the church was displaced by the world as the object of God's first concern.⁷³ The theological slogan for this changed emphasis was missio Dei, the mission of God, and the person whose theology promoted it was J. C. Hoekendijk (1912-1975).
Fearful of what he called ecclesiastical introversion and its alleged threat to the essential character of mission, Hoekendijk warned against a church- centric interest. From this perspective, he argued, the world almost ceases to be the world and becomes a sort of ecclesiastical training ground.74 His emphasis became the agenda for discussion in the world church as he called for a new sequence in missions that moved from church to world.
More quickly than the social gospel before it, the theology of secularization faded as a permanent solution. According to a later self-reflection by Harvey Cox, one of its advocates, it had misjudged the persistence of
human religiosity and minimized the dark side of secularization as a process that could destroy as well as heal. It was also, Cox admits, a perspective on the city "of a relatively privileged urbanite. The city, secular or otherwise, feels quite different to those for whom its promise turns out to be a cruel deception. "⁷⁵
What the theology of secularization left behind, however, was a new agenda for the church that would not go away. Before the eyes of the church was not simply the city as the spiritual gathering place of the lost outside of Christ but also the city as the gathering place of the wretched and the oppressed, a center of racial, religious, and class struggle.

Protestant and Catholic Conciliar Reactions
Within Protestant and Catholic circles, old perspectives on the city have reappeared, but this time with a darker hue. Despite the articulate protests of some within its ranks, the World Council of Churches, through the 19605 and 1970s, has revitalized something resembling the old Christ-of-the- city model. Increasingly the Council had seen mission as "world-affirming mission." The church's calling? "To affirm God's presence in all realms of life, to seek to discern his action there, and to seek obedience to his will through the action of Christians in the world. "⁷⁶
The Fourth Assembly of the Council at Uppsala in 1968 appears to be something of a climax in this emphasis. There, David Bosch argues, the model was expanded in three ways: a new definitional emphasis on mission as humanization and vigorous sociopolitical involvement; mission as the acknowledgment of God's activities in the world, the world said to be providing the agenda for the missio Dei; a positive interpretation of the world and of history. ⁷⁷
More than one evangelical commentator has seen the years following that Uppsala Assembly as one of modification and re-evaluation within the Council. Harold Lindsell could see the Fifth Assembly at Nairobi in 1975 as "a substantial improvement over Uppsala. The radical cast of the 1968 Assembly had yielded to a more centrist approach, a better balance, and the rediscovery of evangelism as an important part of the mission of the Church."⁷⁸
Undoubtedly one factor in this modification toward a more evangelical cast has been the growing number of Third-World delegates to the meetings. Since Nairobi, the majority of the WCC delegates has not come from the West.
Another dimension to the shift, we suggest, may be the growing strength of the nonconciliar evangelical presence through the 1974 emergence of the ongoing Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. Lausanne sponsored global gatherings in 1980 and 1989, both within months of similar gatherings of the Council's Commission on World Mission and Evangelism elsewhere.
The timing of the events has prompted comparisons.⁷⁹ Some have noted a growing exercise in self-criticism in both camps; Lausanne has become increasingly aware of the "horizontal" obligations of the gospel, and the WCC appears to be rediscovering the "vertical" dimension of evangelism. The perceived convergences, in fact, have been strong enough to prompt evangelicals attending the 1989 San Antonio gathering of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism to issue an informal plea for fuller cooperation to the Lausanne II gathering at Manila.80 Has the Council model shifted? Evaluation remains difficult, and final judgment will probably have to be postponed to future years, but there are encouraging developments that prompt hope.
In 1982 the Central Committee of the WCC approved and published a document, Mission and Evangelism-An Ecumenical Affirmation, that has received wide but cautious endorsement from evangelical circles. How- ever, it was said to have received almost no attention at the Vancouver Assembly of the Council in 1983, and, according to Bosch, though Section I of the 1989 San Antonio Report made much use of it, there was no explicit reference to it in the remaining Sections of the Report.81 Bosch, until his death in a car crash in 1992, remained cautiously optimistic that a new model was emerging within WCC circles. He hoped for a union between the Council's deepening commitment to the poor and a reappearing evangelical concern for the lost. The gospel's demand for believing all things, hoping all things (I Cor. 13:7) requires no less.
At the same time, my own caution remains stronger than my optimism. I hope, but with great fearfulness. Modifications in the old model are surely apparent. But are they strong enough to bespeak a new model emerging? Continuing theological pluralism within Council circles, growing questions about the uniqueness and exclusivity of the work of Christ, and decades of commitment to a strongly socioeconomic and political agenda remain deterrents to a radical shift of models. Can the WCC break radically . enough from its functional definitions of evangelism, structured in the past more around deed than word, to move in a new direction?
If it is fair to make generalizations on the basis of one agency's work, the Urban Rural Mission (URM), a Council ministry, offers little room for optimism. Mandated under a different name in 1961 at the New Delhi Assembly, URM has undergone a number of modifications in its mandate since then. But its nine priorities remain oriented to the support of people's struggles for justice and self-empowerment and to the development of solidarity with regional churches in social contexts of struggle, repression, and marginalization.⁸² From an evangelical perspective, one notable absence from these crucial and needed concerns is any connection of the URM's agenda of social change with evangelization and the task of calling men and women to personal repentance and faith in Christ.
Protestants have not been alone in shifting back from church to world. Vatican II, the historic gathering of bishops of the Roman Catholic Church from 1962 to 1965, shows similar directions. Drawing some contrast to the preconciliar views of salvation theology as ecclesiocentric, the church in Vatican II criticized itself as detached from the world and self-serving, at least in the past.
Vatican II's perspective on the global megalopolis was touched, says George Lindbeck, by the insights of Teilhard de Chardin and his vision of a universe in movement toward the Omega Point of fulfillment in Christ.83 In the shadow of that influence, it saw salvation as God leading the universe in all its aspects, including the so-called secular ones, toward the consummation. The church's mission is thus described in terms of the unification of all humanity and all genuine values of other religions and of secular developments in the fullness of its catholicity. "The Church in the Modern World, which is much the longest of its documents, is entirely devoted to this theme. It gives a highly positive evaluation of progress in all realms, not only ethical, social and political, but also economic, aesthetic, scientific, and technological. Its message is that Christians should throw their energies into the building of the earthly city. . . . ,,⁸⁴
There are differences between the foundations of Vatican II and the World Council of Churches in this area.⁸⁵ But the similarities are equally striking.  Houtepen, in fact, sees "sufficient building blocks for a common view of an attitude toward the saeculum" that there could emerge a new momentum for ecumenical progress between the two groups.⁸⁶

Liberation Theologies
This Vatican II call for dialogue with the world and its socioeconomic needs was heard loudly in Latin America. Encouraged by its vision of the church as a dialoguing servant, fed by the experience of destitution and repression in a region dominated by Christendom for centuries, came the diffuse movement we monolithically call liberation theology.
Making pastoral use of Marxism as an instrument of social analysis (as Thomism had used Aristotelianism before), liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutierrez saw evangelism as the announcement of the presence of the love of God in the "historical becoming of mankind."⁸⁷ Mission to the city becomes denunciation, the confronting of the present state of social injustice. It becomes annunciation, the proclamation of the good news "that there is no human act which cannot in the last instance be defined in relation to Christ.,,⁸⁸ The church becomes a sacrament in the city of the convocation of all people by God, a theology of the church in the world refined into a theology of the world in the church.
Deeply oriented to the liberation of the oppressed, liberation theologians operated out of a new theological commitment to the poor. The poor become not the objects of gospel charity but the artisans of a new humanity-shapers, not shaped. Any ideological construction that finds the meaning and purpose of human history outside the concreteness of the historical "now" is spurned. True theology, in its search for hope in a world of poverty, asks, "Where is the God of righteousness in a world of injustice?" Liberation theology fits well into the Christ-of-the-city model. It "can- not see the church as having any mission to build a separate history, but rather as leading the way in expressing and exemplifying the one meaning of the one history. The mission of the church is inescapably tied to historical struggles for liberation. Salvation does not occur elsewhere than in and through this struggle.,,⁸⁹
Creating this theology, and created by it, was a new model for the urban church, the Base Christian Communities (CEBs). Described by Leonardo Boff as a form of "ecclesiogenesis," the CEB movement may number as many as 100,000 in Brazil and another 80,000 in the rest of Latin America.⁹⁰ Centered in the needs of the poor, the CEB typically appears in the shape of a small assembly of marginalized lay Christians. The elements of worship, Bible study, and community service revolve around the group's daily struggles as members corporately seek change in their personal and social situation. In an urban world characterized by massive poverty, they model the need for moving beyond almsgiving as social action to solidarity with the neediest.
Out of the United States and a similar setting of repression and social rejection has come another form of liberation theology, Black theology. One of the very few authentically indigenous American theological movements that were specifically urban in context, it began formally in the 1960s as a commentary on the civil rights movement and the struggle of Blacks for justice and self-identity.
Its most prolific writer, James Cone (b. 1938), defines Christianity as "essentially a religion of liberation" in a society where people "are oppressed because they are black." With his Latin American counterpart, he calls for a theology that will identify with the goals of the socially marginalized. He sees existential Blackness as a hermeneutical circle around which such things as Christo logy, ecclesiology, and eschatology must be reconstructed in terms of Christ as the liberator from social oppression and to political struggle.⁹¹ Says Cone, "there is no place in Black Theology for a colorless God in a society when people suffer precisely because of their color."⁹²
In the years since the 1960s, Black theology has continued to grow in maturity and global impact. Dialogue with Latin American liberation theologians and with feminist theologians has widened its agendas, and a healthy infra-movement discussion has developed.⁹³ Cone himself sounds less strident and has come to see closer connections between racism, sexism, imperialism, and capitalism.⁹⁴
Black theology has its own distinctives. Grounded in the Mrican slave experience in the U.S., it is considerably more reluctant about close ties with Marxist social philosophy than is its counterpart in Latin America. Its stress, though modified by the years, remains on the socioethnic issues of the Black experience as the key to structuring theology. By comparison, Latin America's orientation is more politicoeconomic.
Liberation theologies, wherever they originate, carry all the deficiencies associated with a Christ-of-the-city model. The need for personal conversion stands in danger of being minimized. Liberation becomes the process of setting people free to help God build the future, God so historicized that he loses his otherness, and the poor so c At the same time, liberation theologies offer powerful challenges for the development of a uniquely urban theology. How can we do theological reflection in a context of social, political, and ethnic oppression? What must the church say about the practice of justice and compassion toward the urban marginalized? Does the global city demand not only a church for the poor but also a church of the poor?

Evangelicals Awakening?
The closing decades of the twentieth' century have seen a new revival of interest in the city among evangelicals. A major role in this renewed concern has been played by the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. Its Theology Working Group has promoted worldwide study through the 1980s on such urban-related themes as the gospel and its relation to human culture, the simple lifestyle, and the relationship of evangelism to social responsibility. The Lausanne-sponsored 1980 Consultation on World Evangelization (COWE) in Pattaya initiated an extensive program of global consultations on urban ministry.
Ray Bakke, a Lausanne Associate, has led such gatherings in over one hundred cities to date. Spurred by his enthusiasm for a "responsible evangelism," regional networks of urban churches have been formed to search for new information and strategies.
Lausanne's achievements have been many. It has continued to under- line the evangelical heritage of the past in evangelism as the primary focus of the world church. It has augmented this with a robust stress on unreached peoples as a strategy for carrying out that evangelistic task. It has been able to combine this theme with a growing concern for the social, economic, and political dimensions of mission to the city. And, in doing that, it has welded a stronger consensus in the world church on the need for putting together the horizontal and vertical elements of the gospel.
At the same time, the consensus has not been without dissensions. Particularly, some evangelical voices on the "right" have continued to question the propriety of its proposals for merging evangelism with social issues.95 Some labeled "radical evangelicals" have in the past demanded better integration of the horizontal dimension,96 although this criticism has lessened considerably, particularly in view of the achievements at Lausanne II in Manila, 1989, with its attention to urban mission in all its dimensions.97
How does one explain the continuing dissension within the evangelical camp? I suspect it reflects the continuing heritage of diverse models within the camp. The voluntarism and individualism that hindered some evangelicals in earlier centuries from dealing with secularism as more than an individual issue may still remain. The pessimism of an earlier dispensationalism toward pre-advent social change, though greatly modified through the years, may still thwart expectations of even partially realized reformation of the city's social structures. The note of repentance that permeates the Lausanne Covenant and the Manila Manifesto may still sound too triumphant for many evangelicals. Is the model of Christ as trans- former of the city becoming dominant in Lausanne? Too dominant, in fact, for those who have made other choices?
Where will the future like us in cities of the world? Can and should God be served in all the culture and occupations of the city? Roger Green- way is right when he says,

The biblical Gospel is far larger than either the liberal social activists or the traditional fundamentalists imagine. It is a Gospel which includes winning disciples to Christ, establishing churches, and building a Christian community with all its facets and areas of concern. The whole city, from top to bottom, must be called to repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the full Gospel which requires the total renewal of man and his society, and it is the only Gospel which offers any genuine hope for today's urban world.98

Discussion Questions
1. Describe the integrating role of religion in the city as it was perceived in ancient times by both Christians and pagans. What happened to this perception in the course of history? What did Plato try to recapture? What does Conn mean by "Stoic cosmopolitanism"?
2. Compare Tertullian's Christ-against-the-city with the Gnostic Christ- of-the-city and Augustine's Christ-for-the-city. Argue the strengths.and weaknesses of each position and explain which one you consider closest to the truth.
3. Explain Thomas Aquinas's understanding of Christ's relation to the city. In Aquinas's thinking, what roles do reason, grace, and the church play in urban life? Explain what Conn means when he writes, "The seeds of the secularized city, the modern megalopolis, were sown by Aquinas and harvested in tire more consistent efforts of the Renaissance and Enlightenment minds."
4. Describe the role of cities in the Protestant Reformation, which the author describes as "uniquely an urban event." What new vision for the life of cities did the Reformation encourage? Compare and contrast the models that emerged: Lutheran, Anabaptist, and Calvinist. 5. Explain Ritschl's idea of the kingdom of God and its eventual influence on theological liberalism and the approach to city ministry known as the social gospel.
6. Identify some of the nineteenth-century evangelical responses to the needs of city people and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. In their rejection of the social gospel, what unfortunate mistake did American evangelicals make? Explain how it happened.
7. What place did Harvey Cox give to the church in the "secular city"? What has become of that viewpoint? What role do you believe the church ought to strive for in the city?
8. In Gustavo Gutierrez's liberation theology, what constitutes urban mission? What place does the church play in this theology? How are the poor regarded? How do the Base Christian Communities fit into this scheme?
9. What was James Cone referring to when he defined Christianity as "essentially a religion of liberation" in a society where people "are oppressed because they are black"? How does Black theology differ from Latin American liberation theologies? What is the key weak- ness in all liberation theologies? What challenges do liberation theologies place before the church in the city?
10. How do you feel about the note of "Christ the transformer" of urban culture that can be detected in the Lausanne movement? How does that concept of the church's mission give shape and direction to the task of discipling the city?