Faithful to the Cities of the World (Urbana 84)
Part 1 of 2by Raymond J. Bakke, an address given at Urbana 84
When I moved into Chicago in 1965, I read every thing I could to help me make the transition to a community ridden with gangs and riots during the Vietnam era. I had been studying Scripture since I was a child. But the people who believed the Scripture were fleeing the city about as fast as those who didn't believe it. And I was confused by the cultural captivity of the urban church. So I read everything I could. The Secular City by Harvey Cox came out the same month that I moved into Chicago. Shortly thereafter, Jacques Ellul's book The Meaning of the City appeared. Somewhere between Cox's optimism and Ellul's pessimism, I thought, must lie the truth.
I picked up a radical theological journal and read that evangelicals and conservatives could not make it in the city. The reason, said the author, was that they take the Bible too literally. The Bible, said the author, is a rural book. God makes gardens; evil men make cities. God's favorite people are shepherds. His second favorite are vinegrowers. His least favorite are urban dwellers. Those of us who accept and take in Scripture, said the author, are swallowing an anti-urban bias. I think that there's an element of truth to this. But heresies, said William Temple, tend to be exaggerations of truths. Nonetheless, that thesis challenged me to get into Scripture like I never had before. I'd memorized Scripture for my personal growth. I had memorized Scripture in seminary to take hold of the great covenants and doctrines of God. But now I was driven to Scripture to see if there was in fact a theology as big as my city of Chicago. And I testify: indeed there is.
The City in the Old Testament
I found over one thousand references to cities in the Bible in both testaments. I found over one hundred cities listed in the Bible and began to do case studies of them. I started analyzing the careers of biblical characters. Joseph was an Egyptian economist with two seven-year plans, one for budget surpluses and one for budget deficits. He was a man who urbanized the economy of Egypt and used the instruments of a pagan pharaoh to feed the whole Middle East, including God's people. Read Genesis 41 and 47 to see how he did it, combining elements both of socialism and capitalism.
I started looking at Moses with new eyesight. He was bicultural. Stephen in Acts said he was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. With that culture and education Moses was then driven into the wilderness for field education: public health, primitive communities, sheep culture. After he married interracially, he was ready for ministry. He took a group of mud and brick makers from Egypt into the worst neighborhood in the Middle East and built a culture for them. That is a pastoral model for a pastor in the large city.
I started looking at Nehemiah, that urban architect layman serving in the Persian government, who got a leave of absence and a government grant to go back and start the first biblical model-cities program for the redevelopment of Jerusalem. The promise of Isaiah about the exiles who returned to Jerusalem applied to him: "And you shall be called restorers of streets to dwell in." If we are to faithfully face the cities of today, we have to recover a biblical theology for urban ministry.
I started looking at Daniel in the exile. Daniel 1:8 says, "Daniel resolved not to defile himself." Daniel sorted out the issues of faith and culture much like Niebuhr in this century. Daniel was able to master the king's curriculum yet reject the king's lifestyle and values. That is our task in the cities.
I started looking at the two books named for women in Scripture: Ruth, a commentary on the early history of Israel, and Esther, a commentary on the later history of Israel. Both are second marriages. Both deal with ethnicity but in different ways. One is assimilationist. One is dispersionist. I began to see themes coming through the Scripture colorfully in ways I had never been taught.
I looked at Jonah, the urban missionary. According to a British author who over a hundred years ago wrote a marvelous little commentary called Portrait of a Patriot, "The problem, with Jonah is that he had wrapped the gospel in a Jewish flag." He thought that because the Ninevites were his enemies, they were also God's enemies. He preached a certain amount of orthodoxy but with a heart that wasn't orthodox. He didn't love those people. He preached "Repent or you'll go to hell." And under his breath he was saying, "I can hardly wait." I've see a lot of evangelism in Chicago and other places that's like that.
I started looking at the benefits of Diaspora Judaism. The fact that the Temple was destroyed was a great tragedy. But when those people were dispersed into the cities, they invented the synagogue and their faith became portable. They rediscovered the doctrine of angels. And more, they translated the Bible in Alexandria, Egypt, so that their children would learn the faith. The language issue arises over and over again in every generation among the immigrant groups in the cities.
I began to notice twenty-five kinds of urban ministry in the historical books of the Old Testament alone. Almost everything I would want the church to be doing in the cities today can be found in ancient Israel. Obviously we're going to have to become people of both testaments. We're going to have to do what the Reformers did - celebrate the theology of creation on the one hand and redemption on the other. Many of us have not been doing that. The dichotomy is tragic. It's cut us off from two-thirds of our Bible, much of which deals with cities.
The Jews dealt with crime by having cities of refuge directly run by priests. In fact, in looking through Deuteronomy, I found that the morality expected in the cities was higher than that expected in the countryside. If a woman is raped in the country, you stone the man. If he's raped in the city, you stone them both. Why? Because she should have screamed for help. Underneath that is a principle: the presence of people is presumed to have been beneficial.
I began to see in the Scripture how God looked at cities. Ezekiel 16 is a classic passage on cities. God says Jerusalem's mother was a Hittite and her father was an Amorite (v. 45). See how families flow into places? There's no dichotomy between people and place in Scripture. It's what the biblical scholars call the corporate solidarity motif. It's an ecological theology that combines peoples and families. Listen how the prophet speaks of the city: "Your older sister was Samaria, who lived to the north of you with her daughters [those are the suburbs and small towns indicating interdependency]; and your younger sister, who lived to the south of you with her daughters, was Sodom" (Ezek 16:46). Chicago, your sister to the north is Milwaukee; your sister in the south is Atlanta. Your cousin is Beirut, and Beirut hurts today. You should feel the pain in Chicago. There is no such thing in Scripture as throwaway environments. None at all. It is impossible to say that I love my city but that I hate another place, and still be a Christian biblically. You are Simon Bar-Jonah; you are Paul from Tarsus. Family and place are combined.
The City in the New Testament
I turned to the New Testament, and I found Jesus used the cities of Galilee. Matthew 9:35, a great missionary text, says he went about all the cities. He visited, taught, preached and healed. Then in chapter 10 he gives the mini-commission which anticipates the Great Commission. He sends the disciples out, but they were so wrapped with prejudice he didn't let them go outside the boundary of the country. The Holy Spirit hadn't yet come on them. And then in Matthew 11:1, after they came back and reported, he went back to the cities again. It's at the heart of Matthew.
Look also at Pail E. M. Blaiklock, a late professor of New Testament, who wrote a little book in 1968 called Cities of the New Testament. In the preface he said that the urban church followed the contours of the urbanized Roman Empire. Stephen Neill, the late missionary, historian and theologian, in his book on the history of missions, says the early church was fortunate to have a person like Paul as the architect of its mission. Bicultural and multilingual, Paul went to the cities of the Roman Empire. We have to recover that model.
This century has been called the century of homeless man, Perhaps ten million refugees wander the cities of the world. There's one book in the New Testament which is a private letter by Paul about an urban refugee, Onesimus. He stole money in Asia, ran away to Europe and found Christ in the ghetto. Paul had rented a house church in the Greek ghetto of south Rome where he was having a kind of Leighton Ford outreach campaign with his five Greek associates. Onesimus found Christ there and was sent back to Asia to be an evangelist, teacher and preacher.
The Bible may begin in a garden, but it ends in a city. We've got an urban future whether we like it or not. And what kind of a city is God building? Look at Isaiah 58 which gives us a record. It's going to be a city with a housing policy, an employment policy, and a public health policy, a city where the writer says the children do not die young. That's God's agenda and, he's building a city right now. You couldn't honor him more, I suspect, than to love God and begin to love the city.
When Jeremiah wrote to the exiles who had been taken captive, they were living in a ghetto on the river called Kabar. They didn't like it. Their own city had been destroyed. But they got a letter from home that said that God had put them there (Jer. 29:4). They thought, "What do you mean - 'God put me here'? I got dragged here." But the letter said they had been sent - on a mission. And then the prophet said they should put down their roots in the city and raise their families there (Jer. 29:5-6). And I challenge you to start doing that too. Stop running away from the cities. Move in there with your children. They'll be better off and so will you.
In the next seven seconds or so a hundred babies will be born in this world. Forty-nine will be yellow, thirteen will be white like me, and the rest will be black and brown. I don't know where you can educate children that are any more realistic about the real world than in the cities of this country. Let's recover the Scripture, our biblical roots.
Read Part 2 of 2 of Faithful to the Cities of the World
Raymond J. Bakke is a professor of ministry at Northern Baptist Seminary in Lombard, Illinois, and is cofounder of the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education (SCUPE). This article originally appeared in Faithful in Christ Jesus, © 1984 by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of the United States of America.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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