Two Cities, One City or No City?
Reflections on Church and State Today
Roanoke College, May 20, 2001
A story is told about a Canadian author who decided to write a book about famous
churches in the United States. She traveled to Portland, Maine to start her research,
thinking that she would work her way across the country from east to west. On her first
day she was inside a beautiful small church taking photographs when she noticed a
golden telephone mounted on the wall with a sign that read "$10,000 per call." Intrigued,
she asked the pastor what the telephone was used for. The pastor replied that it was a
direct line to heaven and that for $10,000 you could talk to God. The Canadian thanked
the pastor and went on her way.
At her next stop in New York City she saw the same golden telephone with the same sign
under it in at a large cathedral. Wondering if it was the same kind of telephone she had
seen in Portland, she asked a nearby nun what its purpose was. The nun told her that it
was a direct line to Heaven and that for $10,000 she could talk to God. She traveled on to
Roanoke, Columbus, Detroit, and Chicago, and in every church, she saw the same golden
telephone with the same "$10,000 per call" sign under it. Finally, the Canadian crossed
the Mississippi River and stopped at a church in a small town, and again, there was the
same golden telephone, but this time the sign under it read "10 cents per call." Surprised,
she asked the pastor about the sign. "Pastor,” she said, “I've traveled all over America
and I've seen this same golden telephone in many other churches. I'm told that it is a
direct line to heaven and in the other states, the price per call was $10,000. Why is it so
cheap here?" The pastor smiled and answered, "You're in Iowa now, friend. It's a local
call."
I trust that gracious Virginians are able to forgive this terrible bit of chauvinism from a
native son of Iowa. If I had come from Nebraska, like my good friend Bob Benne, I
would not have called your attention to that fact. I hope that Professor Hinlicky will
overlook the heretical theology of the story. If by chance the story has any relevance for
what I want to say tonight, it is that it may serve to direct our attention to God’s heavenly
city. This is not a static, spatial abode above the earth, as the story understands it, but
God’s eternal city ahead of us. Your cell phone or internet browser won’t connect you to
this city, for the Holy Spirit does the calling, gathering through the Gospel the community
that awaits, points to, and even now takes part in God’s new city. The heavenly city is the
Father’s true and certain promise to us, made on account of the life, death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ, His Son, Our Lord. St. John speaks of his vision of this
heavenly city:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had
passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem,
coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband;
and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
1
"See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God, and
they will be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every
tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no
more, for the first things have passed away."
And the one who was seated upon the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new."
(Revelation 21:1-5a)
Many years ago I left Iowa, for good, for Chicago, and now once again I live in this
fascinating city by the lake, a city where citizens vote early and often, where even
cemetery residents have been known to cast their vote. When you think of the longsuffering Chicago Cubs, who year after year live under the cross of a losing record, you
might think it is a very Lutheran city. I also have had the good fortune to live in three
other great cities of the world: New York, Berlin, and Buenos Aires. I enjoy the vitality,
diversity, beauty and creativity of cities, and I lament their under side—their poverty,
segregation, loneliness and decadence. I know how they show forth the best and worst of
life; Chicago was, after all, home for both Jane Adams and Al Capone. I marvel how
millions of people can live together and carry on their lives in some semblance of ordered
freedom. I am amazed by the countless, complex networks of mutual dependence that
keep the city going. Amid their cries and clamor, cities are people held together not only
by a common space but also by a shared history and future, and by some sense, however
weak, of their common good.
Recounting my fondness for cities may help explain why “city” appears three times in my
title. “City,” as I use the word this evening, is a figure or image of people bound together.
“City” evokes the social nature of human life. “There is nothing so social by nature, so
unsocial by its corruption, as this [human] race,” wrote Augustine in The City of God.1
God has created humans as social beings, and sin—our turning away from God—
corrupts, distorts and contradicts our sociality. Yet social beings we remain. Sin does not
erase the goodness of God’s creation, and so humans, even sinful human beings, can live
only in dependence on others. When Augustine wrote his grand narrative of God’s
dealings with the world—its origin, course and goal—he did so with the language of city.
“The glorious city of God is my theme in this work,” reads the first line of his twenty-two
book narrative, which took him fourteen years to write. In naming humans’ true and final
destiny as God’s eternal city, Augustine was expressing the biblical truth that life directed
toward God is always social.2 With the Psalmist he could say, “There is a river whose
streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the
midst of the city; it shall not be moved” (Psalm 46:4-5a). Professor Oliver O’Donovan of
Oxford is commenting on St. John’s vision of the New Jerusalem and following
Augustine when he writes provocatively, “For no destiny can possibly be conceived in the
world, or even out of it, other than that of a city.”3
“Two cities, one city or no city?” The question hints at three profoundly different ways
of viewing and living in the world. In brief, the Christian narrative tells of two cities—
the earthly city and the heavenly city, to use Augustine’s language. It is the biblical
2
narrative of God’s salvation of the world, that begins with creation, tells of human
rebellion and of God’s redeeming activity in Israel and in God’s Messiah, and ends with
the vision of a new heaven and a new earth. As it awaits the coming of city of God in its
full glory, the church lives, for the time being, in two cities. “One city” refers to those
worldviews in which the earthly city is the only reality. In the modern western world
these narratives have often been a secularized version of the biblical story but without
God. In their stories of worldly salvation, of human progress, they relate how “modern
man” has come of age and through education, science and technology will bring about an
ideal future. One-city narratives have, to a large degree, shaped the modern world, and for
countless people still provide the assumed, taken-for-granted account of the way the
world is. Yet for many today the credibility of their one-city narrative has collapsed, and
they are left with no city and no story. One-city narratives of modernization, they say, are
also oppressive, not liberating. In despair or in glee, they recognize “that you can not
very well have a drama without a dramatist.”4 No-city persons are unwilling or unable
to place their lives in a comprehensive narrative that binds them with all people. They are
left with the particularities of their own accidental lives and their self-chosen group,
creating their own spiritualities, constantly re-inventing themselves, or pursing their own
gain without regard for the well being of the city. In gross or sophisticated language, they
cry out, “I can do what I want, and nobody can tell me otherwise.”
We who are concerned for the life and mission of the church are wise to recognize the
pull, prominence and predicament of these one-city and no-city worldviews. In one way
or another, they affect us personally, our congregations and our communities. In this
situation, those of us who inhabit the Christian narrative—there is no neutral point
outside of or above the various narratives or non-narratives that form contemporary life—
do well to attend to our own story, God’s story of love for the world. I turn then to the
Christian tale of two cities, drawing out certain enduring themes and recalling both its
meaning for the church and its significance for the broader society. In my telling of the
Christian story, what some call “the doctrine of the two” is vital and intrinsic, a doctrine
that has found expression in the language of two ages, two cities, two kingdoms, two
goverances, two authorities. “Church and state” in my subtitle suggests a particular
concern for the political dimension of the two cities. Cities, to be sure, are more than
their governments, and the city of God is present only in a fragmentary way in the church.
The two cities are richer and more inclusive than church and state and should not be
equated with them, yet the two cities are decisive for how the church approaches its
understanding of and relationship to earthly governments. As I find my with this
inexhaustible topic, allow me to venture far and wide and to paint with broad strokes.
The China Experience
Let me go first to China where a one-city narrative is deeply ingrained. Last Fall my wife
and I had the opportunity to get a small glimpse of life in China today during a nearly
month-long visit to that huge country. During our visit to seven cities, we saw evidence
of the remarkable growth of the Protestant church in China. The worship services we
attended were overflowing, the seminaries and Bible schools we visited were growing
3
rapidly, the stories we heard of healings and conversions were numerous, and the reports
we received from church leaders, communist party officials and academic experts were
unanimous in telling of unanticipated and surprising growth. No one knows how many
Protestant Christians there are in China today; estimates we heard range from 10 million
to 60 million; the number I rely on is 35 million.6 To put that number in perspective: At
the time of the Communist Revolution in 1949, there were from 700,000 to one million
Protestants, according to common estimates, largely as a result of Protestant missions that
began in the nineteenth century and were forced to leave in 1949. At the end of the
Cultural Revolution in 1976, only twenty-five years ago, many thought the church in
China had perhaps been eliminated. Today, to take one example, Amity Press in China
has printed 25 million Bibles, and not all Christians have their own Bible. No longer can
Chinese leaders dismiss Christianity as a foreign, imperialist import. The Holy Spirit is
up to something new in China.
In 1982, as part of Deng’s modernization project, the Chinese Communist Central
Committee issued what is known as “Document 19.” It criticized the “leftist errors” of
the Cultural Revolution and set forth a new policy “on the religious question” that
government still follows. It states: “The basic policy the [communist] party has adopted
towards the religious question is to respect and to protect the freedom of religious
belief.”7 This policy means, for example, that the government has returned to the
churches many church buildings closed and taken during the Cultural Revolution and
allows Christians to gather openly for worship and to operate Bible schools and
seminaries. But “the freedom of religious belief” is a restricted and controlled freedom.
“Document 19” makes clear that the freedom granted churches and other religious bodies
is subordinate to the party’s authority “to build a modern and powerful socialist state.”
May I add in passing that the actual practice of this policy is very complex and varies
from place to place in that vast country. I am skeptical of the claim that there is no
religious persecution in China as well as the claim that religious persecution is universal.
Many Christians are grateful for the limited freedom they do have when they compare it
to their experience during the Cultural Revolution. Many others believe that government
restrictions compromise the church’s witness to Jesus as Lord. In some places the
relationship of registered and unregistered churches is tense and in other places one of
fluid contact. We in the West should expect to hear different perspectives from a church
struggling and thriving in a precarious and delicate situation of one-party rule and to learn
to discern wisely their significance for us.
“Document 19” is an excellent example of how policy is wrapped up in narrative. Its
narrative is the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist one in which the communist party reigns
supreme. Classical Marxism is a leading modern version of the one-city narrative. It tells
of one earthly city bound in class struggle until the party leads the proletariat to the
creation of a harmonious, classless society. What Marxism cannot tolerate is a public
community that gives its allegiance to an authority independent of the party and
sojourners even now as citizens of a new city beyond the classless society. Marxism
attacks such communities as superstitious, unscientific and oppressive, and until they
4
disappear in the classless society, the party’s mandate is to confine them to private life
and as far as possible to make them instruments of the party’s rule. A grave difficulty for
the communist party, it should be noted, is that many Chinese no longer buy into its
narrative. This massive disillusionment has lead to rise of the no-city alternative and is
one factor in the growth of the Christian church in China.
The current religious policy also has deep roots in Chinese history. China’s history is one
of dynasties, and the present regime may be seen as the latest dynasty, with the party
replacing the emperor. These dynasties considered religion to be subordinated to and an
instrument of their rule. For centuries China has lived within a one-city narrative. The
historian John King Fairbank speaks of “the ancient Chinese assumption of a symbiosis
between culture and temporal power” that resulted in rulers engineering “a unity of
culture that was the basis for political unity in a single universal state.” Quoting Stuart
Schram, he summarizes: “The state was the central power in Chinese society from the
start, and exemplary behavior, rites, morality and indoctrinations have always been
considered in China as means of government.” Fairbank notes that “no struggle between
church and state developed in medieval China comparable to the West. The church—
whether Buddhist or Daoist—was quite unable to achieve independence from the state.”8
In light of its past and present, one wonders what the significant presence of a community
that bears a two-city narrative means for China’s long-term future.
The Christian Narrative of Two Cities
The world in which the church began and spread was, like Chinese dynasties, an Empire
with a narrative that sang the glory only of one city. The numerous polytheistic religions
throughout the Roman Empire were little more than clubs and were not independent
alternatives that threatened the required emperor worship. The one exception was the
people of Israel with their belief in and loyalty to one God, a people whose land was
occupied by the Romans and whose temple was destroyed by them in 70 AD. Four
centuries later, shortly after the sack of Rome in 410, Augustine spent a good part of The
City of God telling and giving a devastating critique of the story of the Roman Empire,
“which, though it be the mistress of nations, is itself ruled by the lust of rule.”9
Wherever the church took root, the glory of the Roman Empire was no longer the only
story line in town. The church announced that the new age of God’s salvation had been
inaugurated by Jesus Christ. The church invited people to receive a new personal and
communal identity in the waters of baptism, to walk in a new way of life, to hear the
merciful word of God’s forgiveness and to gather around bread and wine to taste the feast
that is to come. The church, those called out and gathered by the gospel, received the
story of Israel as God’s story, remembered the One who was crucified and rose from the
dead, celebrated his presence among them and found their hope in that city where sin,
death and the power of Rome would be no more. They saw themselves as sojourners in
the earthly city, participating already by faith in the city that is to come, living still under
the cross as they waited for the New Jerusalem. They lived in Roman cities and followed
5
local customs while they showed “forth the wonderful and confessedly strange character
of the constitution of their own citizenship.”10
The Christian narrative tells of a community whose authority does not come from
political authority, whose ultimate hope does not depend on human power, a community
that confesses and proclaims “Jesus is Lord.” This enduring theme in the Christian
narrative may be called “the freedom of the church.” The church is free wherever the
Holy Spirit binds it to the freedom of trusting and serving its Lord alone. Only because
we know this freedom can we weep when the church exchanges its genuine freedom for
the false freedom of doing whatever it wants, bowing down to other lords, melting down
its identity to become another religious society, making itself an instrument for other
ends, betraying its Lord for temporal gain.
St. Paul wrote that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20). The same Paul was
a Roman citizen, and when he ran into serious legal problems, he claimed for himself the
rights and privileges of a Roman citizen (Acts 22:22-29). No, we have not caught Paul in
a contradiction. Paul recognized legitimate political authority as God’s good work, even
called such authorities “God’s servants,” and urged Christians to obey them (Rms. 13:17). Paul understood that Christians are citizens of two cities, intermingled and
interwoven in history, both of them God’s, both having a distinctive divinely appointed
role in God’s providential rule and care of creation.
A second enduring theme in the narrative emerges: the church’s affirmation of and call to
participate in and care for the earthly city. Our citizenship in God’s heavenly city does
not cancel out our earthly citizenship nor lead us to withdraw from the earthly city. Even
when recognizing that the peace of the earthly city is built on strife, and always partial
and fleeting, Christians do not disdain the earthly city, but take part in it for the sake of
the neighbor, grateful for the good gifts God gives in through and the earthly city.
Charles Taylor credits the Reformation for the modern “affirmation of ordinary life.”11
Professor Benne has voiced this theme in his book Ordinary Saints.12
The New Testament also contains another attitude toward the political authorities of the
earthly city. John, who envisioned the coming of the New Jerusalem, denounced the
Roman Empire as “Babylon the great, mother of whores and of earth’s abominations”
(Revelations 17: 5). John probably wrote when the Emperor Domitian was insisting on
divine honors and calling himself “Lord and God.”13 When God’s servants claim to be
gods, they become demonic. The early church drew a line in the sand when it came to
Emperor worship, with the result that mandatory Emperor worship led to government
persecution of Christians, as happened for John’s churches. Christians prayed for the
Emperor and were taught to honor him and to obey his authority but they refused to
worship him as a god. On the basis of this crucial distinction, Christians were willing to
give their lives in witness to God, accepting death and rejecting taking up the sword in the
name of the city of God. Roman persecution illustrates how power built on one-city
narrative may oppresses the church, perhaps sensing the profound threat the church’s
two-city narrative represents to its monopoly of meaning and power.
6
The stories of martyrdom in the early church—and today—convey with power the
enduring theme that political authorities in the earthly city are limited. When they claim
absolute authority, total power, and ultimate allegiance, when they promise to bring about
human fulfillment, they overstep their bounds and invade God’s heavenly city, placing
the church in a situation of suffering and resistance. The church’s participation in society
is meant to be critical, its “yes” to political authority always to accompanied by an
potential or actual “no.” The narrative of the two cities makes an indispensable
contribution to the well-being of society by confining the reach of political authorities to
the provisional and temporal matters of life and telling government that it too is
accountable to God.
The presence of the church produces a new dynamic in society. Political authority must
come to terms with the presence of a community that places its ultimate loyalty in God’s
authoritative word, and the church must come to terms with political authority. The
history of the West, unlike the history of China, is marked by the ever-changing
encounters of church and state, sometimes as struggle, sometimes as cooperation,
sometimes as one dominating the other, sometimes as hostile or friendly divisions of
spheres and responsibilities. The experience of the United States with its unique
characteristics also belongs to this history. The constitutional guarantee of “the free
exercise of religion” from 1791 represents the beginning of a new phrase in how
government deals with the social dynamic set loose by the church’s presence in society.
The legal philosopher George P. Fletcher raises the basic question about why the
Constitution should wish to defer to religious commitments, He writes: “The free
exercise clause represents a frontal attack on the principle of applying the laws equally to
everyone. What is so special about religious claims that they generate exemptions from
statues that apply neutrally to everyone?” He observes that “the present tendency on the
Court and among scholars is to think that the psychological intensity of religious beliefs
requires us to accord these beliefs special protection.” Fletcher finds this way of thinking
“deeply flawed,” noting that other beliefs are as strongly held. He sees “the fundamental
error” in “the assumption that religious belief can be reduced to intensely and sincerely
held beliefs that the believers label religious.” Fletcher offers another account for
religious freedom: “The imperative of loyalty to a higher power provides the most
compelling account of our deferring to religious obligations. The religious life, as we
know it in the West, is based on the individual’s having loyalties to a transcendental
authority. These loyalties preclude giving wholehearted allegiance to a secular authority.”
Further, he notes, these claims of loyalty to a higher authority “must be embedded in a
community practice.” “Religious beliefs, so far as they are to be taken seriously, arise in
congregations or communities of believers. They represent a submission to an external
authority that commands obedience. They are expressed not only in views about the
world, but in shared, interdependent rituals based on those views.”14
Without using the words, Fletcher captures the meaning of the narrative of the two cities
for addressing the why of religious freedom. Fletcher is describing from the outside what
7
Christians live from the inside—namely, a communally formed loyalty and obedience to
God. Fletcher sets forth an underlying principle for government action: “The state should
not force people to act disloyally.”15 Once again, the principle coincides with the
Christian belief that governments have limited authority. The assumption that Fletcher
finds wide spread and criticizes—that religious beliefs can be reduced to their
psychological intensity—belongs to a one-city worldview, one that excludes from its
purview communal loyalty to a transcendent authority. How these different concepts of
religion work themselves out in our pluralistic society I do not know. But Christians have
reason to make their public case for religious freedom in ways that embody the truth of
their own narrative.
“Two Cities, One City, No City?” in the Church
So far I have presented “one city” and “no city” as worldviews that make no claim to be
Christian. In concluding, let me very briefly suggest that parallel alternatives are also
alive in the church. Christian thought and practice do not always work out of the
narrative of the two cities. Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, some
Christians tend toward understanding their faith in ways that may also be described as
“one city” or “no city.”
One version of a Christian one-city narrative makes the church virtually the only city.
Christians have sometimes identified the church with the city of God, viewing the
existing church as the center of all. Today, some, believing that the church has become
so accommodated to a decadent modern culture that it has lost its identity, focus so
exclusively on reforming the church and creating an independent Christian culture that
they seem to overlook that the earthly city is also God’s city.16 Another more common
version today of a Christian one-city narrative moves in the opposite direction. The basic
pattern is that the Christian story is incorporated into an earthly one-city narrative,
providing it with religious covering and motivation. Thus, for example, the city of God
becomes an future ideal society that can and will be realized by the spread of democracy
and capitalism, the triumph of socialism, the predominance of one’s nation-state, the
advance of science and technology or the course of evolution. This merger of the two
cities into one, however, doesn’t work, for it creates undue expectations for the earthly
city and domesticates the heavenly city, forgetting that Christians’ hope for the New
Jerusalem where sin, tears and death are no more depends on God alone. “No city”
versions of Christianity come close to denying the civic or social nature of human
existence and salvation. Some Christians see their faith as a private matter, something
that happens between God and their inner life. For them, the church has no or only an
incidental role, and they envision their life before and after death in individualistic terms.
No-city Christians will sing “Amazing Grace,” but they also may view salvation as that
which satisfies their needs and consider that a “do-it-yourself” affair.
“Two cities, one city, no city?” Amid these alternatives in our society and church, the
church today needs to recall anew the truth, meaning and significance of living in two
cities. Let us live in the earthly city with the passion that comes from love of the
8
neighbor, with the wisdom that knows the power of sin, and with the confident joy that
knows that God calls us to serve in our time and place. And let us place our lives in the
earthly city in the perspective of God’s eternal future for us and all creation, “for here we
have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Hebrews 13:14). As
we work, worship and play in our earthly city, may we sing, “Glorious things are spoken
of you, O city of God” (Psalm 87: 3).
9