Missions Resources - Bibliography
Foundations of God's City: Christians in a Crumbling Culture
Authors: Boice, James Montgomery
ISBN: 0-8308-2225-9
Publisher: Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1996
Summary: On September 11, 2001, many Americans awoke for the first time to an insecure world. The world was no different after the attacks, but to those who had never known terror on their own shores, it felt earth-shattering.
But a rule of history is that no empire lasts forever, and no human-made peace is eternal. Even the most spectacular empires are eventually humiliated. In the 1800s, China was forced to submit to the outside-imposed presence of drug dealers in their country. In WWII, the English endured the Battle of Britain, a season of German bombing that was ultimately far more destructive than Al Qaeda's attack on New York - all while the English still had an empire upon which the sun never set.
How do we relearn to think about the world in this reality?
Writing before the terror attacks, but with absolute relevance, James Montgomery Boice, an urban pastor and theologian, finds in our contemporary situation a spiritual replay of an event that shook the Western world centuries ago and evoked a deeply Christian response: the fall of Rome to the barbarians.
To meet this challenge Boice calls us back to Augustine, the great Christian leader and theologian who witnessed Rome's destruction and wrote his great masterpiece The City of God in response. There he detailed the tension between two rival cities - the earthly city, formed by love of self even to the contempt of God, and the heavenly city, the city of God, founded and shaped by love of God even to the contempt of self. Members of God's city are nevertheless in the world and need to conduct themselves as a renewing force in it.
Deeply biblical in its argument, thoroughly conversant with contemporary culture and practically informed by personal involvement in urban ministry, this is a book for the hour in which we live. It awakens Christians to their identity within society and to their eternal destiny, instructing them in the one right thing to do: "Be God's people in the midst of this world's culture."
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