I SAW THE CITY
TWO very startling things arrest us in John's
vision of the future. The first is that the likest thing to Heaven he could
think of was a City; the second, that there was no Church in that City.
Almost nothing more revolutionary could be said,
even to the modern world, in the name of religion. No Church--that is
the defiance of religion; a City--that is the antipodes of Heaven. Yet
John combines these contradictions in one daring image, and holds up to the
world the picture of a City without a Church as his ideal of the heavenly
life.
By far the most original thing here is the simple
conception of Heaven as a City. The idea of religion without a Church-- "I saw
no Temple therein"--is anomalous enough; but the association of the blessed
life with a City--the one place in the world from which Heaven seems
most far away-- is something wholly new in religious thought. No other religion
which has a Heaven ever had a Heaven like this. The Greek, if he looked forward
at all, awaited the Elysian Fields; the Eastern sought Nirvana. All other
Heavens have been Gardens, Dreamlands--passivities more or less aimless. Even
to the majority among ourselves Heaven is a siesta and not a City. It remained
for John to go straight to the other extreme and select the citadel of the
world's fever, the ganglion of its unrest, the heart and focus of its most
strenuous toil, as the framework for his ideal of the blessed life.
The Heaven of Christianity is different from all
other Heavens, because the religion of Christianity is different from all other
religions. Christianity is the religion of Cities. It moves among real things.
Its sphere is the street, the market-place, the working-life of the world.
And what interests one for the present in John's
vision is not so much what it reveals of a Heaven beyond, but what it suggests
of the nature of the heavenly life in this present world. Find out what a man's
Heaven is-- no matter whether it be a dream or a reality, no matter whether it
refer to an actual Heaven or to a Kingdom of God to be realized on earth--and
you pass by an easy discovery to what his religion is; And herein lies one
value at least of this allegory. It is a touchstone for Christianity, a
test for the solidity or the insipidity of one's religion, for the
wholesomeness or the fatuousness of one's faith, for the usefulness or the
futility of one's life. For this vision of the City marks off in lines which no
eye can mistake the true area which the religion of Christ is meant to inhabit,
and announces for all time the real nature of the saintly life.
City life is human life at its intensest, man in
his most real relations. And the nearer one draws to reality, the nearer one
draws to the working sphere of religion. Wherever real life is, there Christ
goes. And He goes there, not only because the great need lies there, but
because there is found, so to speak, the raw material with which Christianity
works--the life of man. To do something with this, to infuse something into
this, to save and inspire and sanctify this, the actual working life of the
world, is what He came for. Without human life to act upon, without the
relations of men with one another, of master with servant, husband with wife,
buyer with seller, creditor with debtor, there is no such thing as
Christianity. With actual things, with Humanity in its everyday dress, with the
traffic of the streets, with gates and houses, with work and wages, with sin
and poverty, with these things, and all the things and all the relations
and all the people of the City, Christianity has to do and has more to do than
with anything else. To conceive of the Christian religion as itself a thing--a
something which can exist apart from life; to think of it as something added on
to being, something kept in a separate compartment called the soul, as an extra
accomplishment like music, or a special talent like art, is totally to
misapprehend its nature. It is that which fills all compartments. It is that
which makes the whole life music and every separate action a work of art. Take
away action and it is not. Take away people, houses, streets, character, and it
ceases to be. Without these there may be sentiment, or rapture, or adoration,
or superstition; there may even be religion, but there can never be the
religion of the Son of Man.
If Heaven were a siesta, religion might be
conceived of as a reverie. If the future life were to be mainly spent in a
Temple, the present life might be mainly spent in Church. But if Heaven be a
City, the life of those who are going there must be a real life. The man who
would enter John's Heaven, no matter what piety or what faith he may profess,
must be a real man. Christ's gift to men was life, a rich and abundant life.
And life is meant for living. An abundant life does not show itself in abundant
dreaming, but in abundant living--in abundant living among real and tangible
objects and to actual and practical purposes. "His servants," John tells us,
"shall serve." In this vision of the City he confronts us with a new definition
of a Christian man-- the perfect saint is the perfect citizen.
To make Cities--that is what we are here for. To
make good Cities--that is for the present hour the main work of Christianity.
For the City is strategic. It makes the towns: the towns make the villages; the
villages make the country. He who makes the City makes the world. After all,
though men make Cities, it is Cities which make men. Whether our national life
is great or mean, whether our social virtues are mature or stunted, whether our
sons are moral or vicious, whether religion is possible or impossible, depends
upon the City. When Christianity shall take upon itself in full responsibility
the burden and care of Cities the Kingdom of God will openly come on earth.
What Christianity waits for also, as its final apologetic and justification to
the world, is the founding of a City which shall be in visible reality a City
of God. People do not dispute that religion is in the Church. What is now
wanted is to let them see it in the City. One Christian City, one City in any
part of the earth, whose citizens from the greatest to the humblest lived in
the spirit of Christ, where religion had overflowed the Churches and passed
into the streets, inundating every house and workshop, and permeating the whole
social and commercial life--one such Christian City would seal the redemption
of the world.
Some such City, surely, was what John saw in his
dream. Whatever reference we may find there to a world to come, is it not
equally lawful to seek the scene upon this present world? John saw his City
descending out of Heaven. It was, moreover, no strange apparition, but a
City which he knew. It was Jerusalem, a new Jerusalem. The significance
of that name has been altered for most of us by religious poetry; we spell it
with a capital and speak of the New Jerusalem as a synonym for Heaven. Yet why
not take it simply as it stands, as a new Jerusalem? Try to restore the natural
force of the expression--suppose John to have lived to-day and to have said
London? "I saw a new London?" Jerusalem was John's London. All the grave and
sad suggestion that the word London brings up to-day to the modern reformer,
the word Jerusalem recalled to him. What in his deepest hours he longed and
prayed for was a new Jerusalem, a reformed Jerusalem. And just as it is given
to the man in modern England who is a prophet, to the man who believes in God
and in the moral order of the world, to discern a new London shaping itself
through all the sin and chaos of the City, so was it given to John to
see a new Jerusalem rise from the ruins of the old.
We have no concern--it were contrary to critical
method--to press the allegory in detail. What we take from it, looked at
in this light, is the broad conception of a transformed City, the great
Christian thought that the very Cities where we live, with all their suffering
and sin, shall one day, by the gradual action of the forces of Christianity, be
turned into Heavens on earth. This is a spectacle which profoundly concerns the
world. To the reformer, the philanthropist, the economist, the politician, this
Vision of the City is the great classic of social literature. What John saw, we
may fairly take it, was the future of all Cities. It was the dawn of a new
social order, a regenerate humanity, a purified society, an actual
transformation of the Cities of the world into Cities of God.
This City, then, which John saw is none other
than your City, the place where you live--as it might be, and as you are to
help to make it. It is London, Berlin, New York, Paris, Melbourne,
Calcutta--these as they might be, and in some infinitesimal degree as they have
already begun to be. In each of these, and in every City throughout the world
to-day, there is a City descending out of Heaven from God. Each one of us is
daily building up this City or helping to keep it back. Its walls rise slowly,
but, as we believe in God, the building can never cease. For the might of those
who build, be they few or many, is so surely greater than the might of those
who retard, that no day's sun sets over any City in the land that does not see
some stone of the invisible City laid. To believe this is faith. To live for
this is Christianity.
The project is delirious? Yes--to atheism. To
John it was the most obvious thing in the world. Nay, knowing all he knew, its
realization was inevitable. We forget, when the thing strikes us as strange,
that John knew Christ. Christ was the Light of the World--the Light of the
World. This is all that he meant by his Vision, that Christ is the Light
of the World. This Light, John saw, would fall everywhere--especially upon
Cities. It was irresistible and inextinguishable. No darkness could stand
before it. One by one the Cities of the world would give up their night. Room
by room, house by house, street by street, they would be changed. Whatsoever
worketh abomination or maketh a lie would disappear. Sin, pain, sorrow, would
silently pass away. One day the walls of the City would be jasper; the very
streets would be paved with gold. Then the kings of the earth would bring their
glory and honour into it. In the midst of the streets there should be a tree of
Life. And its leaves would go forth for the healing of the nations.
Survey the Cities of the world today, survey your
own City--town, village, home --and prophesy. God's kingdom is surely to come
in this world. God's will is surely to be done on earth as it is done in
Heaven. Is not this one practicable way of realizing it? When a prophet speaks
of something that is to be, that coming event is usually brought about by no
unrelated cause or sudden shock, but in the ordered course of the world's
drama. With Christianity as the supreme actor in the world's drama, the future
of its Cities is even now quite clear. Project the lines of Christian and
social progress to their still far off goal, and see even now that Heaven must
come to earth.
This document (last modifiedJune 24, 1998) from Believerscafe.com
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