Tuesday, June 30, 2009

The City Without A Church

THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH (1850)
By Henry Drummond

I, John,
Saw the Holy City,
New Jerusalem,
Coming down from God out of Heaven.
* * *
And I saw no Temple therein.
* * *
And His servants shall serve Him;
And they shall see His Face;
And His Name shall be written on their foreheads.


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.

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