FA I T H A N D T H E A C A D E M Y: E N G A G I N G T H E C U LT U R E W I T H G R A C E A N D T R U T H
always destined to failure, how do the two entities interact with one another? More specifically, how does being a being a citizen of the heavenly city shape one’s perspective on the earthly city? How, then, does citizenship in the City of God affect how we inhabit the City of Man today?
1. Citizens of the City of God do not put their ultimate hope in the earthly city. They are eschatological beings, happy in the hope of the full manifestation of the heavenly city in the new heaven and new earth. Only when Jesus Christ returns in judgment will the heavenly city be revealed in all its glory and the earthly city be brought to eternal ruin.
2. Citizens of the City of God take a realistic view of how much actual good can be accomplished in the City of Man. The City of God must not coopt the City of Man or collapse the two into one missional entity hoping to bring about the fullness of the Kingdom of God through its partnership with the earthly city. Or, from another perspective, an earthly nation can never so absorb the heavenly city that that nation becomes a primary advancer of the Kingdom of God. Members of the City of God must have a chastened view of just how much true good can be accomplished in, with, and through the earthly city.
3. Citizens of the City of God do not seek to dominate the earthly city. The very lust to dominate is the insidious urge that twists and corrupts the earthly city into what it is. Individual citizens of the City of God should be cautious about taking positions of power. “Augustine counsels people not to pursue high position, unless it is done under the compulsion of love or for the sake of promoting the well-being of the people.”14 We serve as leaders not to gain the upper hand in a culture war but to care for the well-being of others. As UVA sociologist James Davidson Hunter puts it, citizens of the heavenly city rather than “seizing power” seek to be a “faithful presence” in the earthly city.15
4. Citizens of the City of God work for the common good and peace of the earthly city. Realistic expectations and skepticism toward power should not cause heavenly citizens to totally pull back from engagement in the public square. The earthly city can bring about real goods like a penultimate kind of peace that is preferred to civil conflicts and international wars. “The earthly city can, then, achieve limited goods, even if not the greatest goods for which
humankind was created. And citizens of the Heavenly City can help foster those goods in the many different earthly cities in which they find themselves.”16 “Even the most disordered persons and institutions do not fall outside of the providence of God.”17 “It is within the interest of the ‘pilgrims’ of the city of God to seek the welfare of the earthly city, just as the Israelites in exile were admonished to seek the welfare of Babylon — for ‘in its welfare you will find your welfare’ (Jeremiah 29:7 ESV).”18 Augustine ends his magisterial work not with a crushing loss but with a happy hope, a vision of eternal rest: “There we shall be still and see, see and love, love and praise. Behold what will be in the end without end! For what else is our end but to reach the kingdom that has no end!”19
Letter 126,2. The translation is from J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 304. 1
2 Quoted in Robert a Markus’s Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press: 2006), 31. 3 Robert Marcus, Christianity and the Secular, 33. 4 Robert Marcus, Christianity and the Secular, 34. 5 Letter, 136.2. 6 The City of God, I, Preface 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Augustine does not always equate the city of God with the church because there are some in the (institutional) church who are not true members of the church or the city of God and there are some in the earthly city who are predestined to membership in the true church and the city of God. Yet, sometimes Augustine speaks of the city of God as if it were equivalent to the church. 10 See James K. A. Smith’s You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016). 11 The City of God, I.35 12 Much in the following several paragraphs depends on William Babcock’s introduction to the New City Press translation of Saint Augustine’s The City of God, part I, vol. 6 of THE WORKS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE: A Translation for the 21st Century, trans. William Babcock (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2012), ix - xlvi 13 The City of God, part I, vol. 6 of THE WORKS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE: A Translation for the 21st Century, xxxii. 14 Kristen Deede Johnson, Theology Political Theory, and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 163. 15 James Davidson Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 95. 16 Kristen Deede Johnson, Theology Political Theory, and Pluralism, 169. 17 Ibid. 18 James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology, vol. 3, Cultural Liturgies (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017), 219. 19 The City of God, XXII, 30
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