Near the end of World War II, Winston Churchill remarked of war-torn England, "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us." Churchill understood buildings as more than pretty pictures on souvenir postcards. We learn many things from the bricks, stone, mortar, sidewalks, streets, and plazas in many cities. Our buildings, rooms, corridors, streets, sidewalks, landscapes, and skyscapes affect and influence us in profound ways.
All those things around us that we take for granted’the width of a street or sidewalk, the distance to a pub or a grocery store, or the height of an apartment building or townhouse’may seem of little importance to Christian living in this fallen world. But, in part and in whole, the things we build speak to us and reveal our deepest convictions. So what do our cities say to us? Do they speak to God's goodness and mirror his wise rule over all creation, or do they deny it? What do they say about the community of men, imaging forth the Trinitarian community of the Godhead and the host of heaven?
One of the authors of this article is a pastor and the other is an architect, and both are Presbyterians with a love for the Reformed faith. We also love art and architecture, but we see a disconnect between the patterns of community written on our hearts and the patterns of community written on our twenty-first-century streets and highways. The scale of humanity, the interaction of different classes of people in mutually enriching ways, the family as the first institution, the rhythms of work and rest, the harmony of God's works and the works of man and of the church as the final institution’all these and more echo the message revealed in the Bible. In the first instance, many cities not only ignore all this, but they also actively suppress them, just as all sinners suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Rom. 1:18).
Think of What Ahab Could Have Accomplished with Modern Zoning!
In 1 Kings 21, we are told that King Ahab wanted Naboth's vineyard. There were only two ways for King Ahab to get it. The first was the voluntary method. King Ahab asked Naboth for his vineyard and offered him compensation. Naboth turned him down. The second way was the coercive method. Jezebel arranged for Naboth to be falsely accused and stoned to death, whereupon his property was seized by the king. The Lord told Elijah to tell Ahab, "Have you not murdered a man and seized his property?" (21:19). The end result was God's wrath upon King Ahab and his offspring.
The story of Naboth's vineyard raises two questions for us as we consider the built environment. First, why wouldn't Naboth sell Ahab the land? And second, would it have been any less of a theft if King Ahab had just changed the zoning, taken it by eminent domain, or raised the property tax rate to force Naboth out?
The first question is answered by Deuteronomy. The land Naboth possessed was the inheritance given by God to his ancestors. Naboth saw himself as a temporary superintendent. It was land held dear, a patrimony to pass on. For the twenty-first-century Christian, it is easy to see that we have given up our inheritance, exchanging a world made with people in mind for a modern world of machine-like efficiency.
The second question is one that also must be considered. In 1926, in Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Amber Reality, the Supreme Court decided that a city could use zoning laws to force prescribed land uses on property owners as an extension of their policing powers. This led to an explosion of zoning ordinances across the country as modern leaders seized upon the opportunity to make a world in their own image. One can easily argue that these changes led to the dismantling of depth and richness of a world built for community. For example, zoning laws separated the uses of home and work and of faith and family. Buildings previously integrated into the community, especially churches, were pushed to the perimeter of the city, not in search of needy souls but in need of the required number of parking spaces. With this blow struck, today's communities have largely gone the way of King Ahab's family: "Dogs will eat those belonging to Ahab" (21:34). In other words, modern cities are places where people get eaten, not places where people thrive.
The silence of Christians about these matters delivers a loud message to the world. It says that we have little regard for the promotion and protection of our common humanity in all the ordinary things of life, such as at the heart and center of our cities. It also suggests that an atomistic and materialistic understanding of social life is a matter of indifference to Christians. The result of our silence is that churches are relocated physically far away from the center of the city. Many observers have described twenty-first-century cities as "cities with no there there." For the Christian, the missing there is the promotion of human wholeness and the presence of gospel-churches at the center of cities.
Learning to See Again
Romans 1 says that "the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness." The truth, while being temporarily suppressed, is never contained. By the 1970s, urban theorists’such as Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Christopher Alexander in A Pattern Language‘began to point out the inhumanity of our cities. As a countermeasure, Jacobs and Alexander attempted to identify systems and patterns present in vibrant living cities. Their work influenced a generation of architects and planners. Certainly, what has been produced has been a step in the right direction. Their contributions to city planning have even been received with open arms by many Christians. But one danger is that they continue to use King Ahab's coercive methods to achieve their ends and so the results are mixed. These are not communities finally motivated by love of neighbor; they are still modern beneath the surface, but covered over with a Thomas Kincade-type facade.
Genuine life is always organic, springing up by the power of God. According to Scripture, governments are tasked with honoring and protecting life, not necessarily reproducing it. When they try, the results are often artificial and ugly. Modernity is guilty of many crimes against humanity, and the reason is that modern man doesn't know what a human being is. The modern condition breaks things down into their smallest material parts; but as with Humpty Dumpty, modernity doesn't know how to put things back together again. And in the process, it kills what it seeks to understand. That's why modern cities are generally so charmless and inhuman. Everything is sorted into classes: financial districts here, industrial zones there, bedroom communities over there, shopping centers’you get the picture. But where are the people? And where are the institutions that connect people and God?
First, we need to see that cities are complex and organic, springing up freely’not mechanisms made by governments. Second, we need to reclaim the inheritance of older cities like London or Geneva where there was a visible presence of the community of Christ, the church. As Christians, we must resist trading with King Ahab for better parking, freeway access and more land for the surround-sound auditorium. Third, we need to expose King Ahab's plots to marginalize the church in urban life. We are in for a fight’zoning commission meetings can be very pugilistic!
God's creation is designed for community from the interaction of the largest city down to the smallest subatomic particle. Everywhere we look, we see reflections of his glory and signs of his plan for human flourishing. The gospel brings us into community and fellowship with the living and Triune God, who then empowers us to reflect that fellowship in communities far and wide.
