Lectures
Between the Garden and the New Jerusalem: A Trinitarian Vision for Urban Blessedness
Synopsis
Modern societies are increasingly imperiled by diminished levels of civic commitment. As cultural and legal trends encourage more pervasive patterns of individualism and privatization, many citizens have a sense of being independent consumers of social goods and services rather than members of a body politic. Sacrificial commitment to the common good becomes more problematic when there is no notion of “the good” held in common by an increasingly diverse population. The lack of civic commitment is especially felt in America’s heartland towns and cities. Once the local laboratories of political participation and incubators of republican virtues, today they increasingly call into question the sustainability of the American experiment. The precipitating crisis of the town soul presents an opportunity for Christians to re-examine their understanding of the nature and norms of civic life, as the love of neighbors requires caring for our neighborhoods. Since Christians believe that human beings are created in the image of a triune God, and thereby created for relationships, the Church must resist the temptations toward individualism and offer to its neighbors and neighborhoods an example of the meanings of membership and the contours of community. In this lecture Mr. Myers offers a survey of the biblical themes integral to a theology of urban blessedness, from the earliest experience of human community in the Garden of Eden to the full flourishing of eschatological urban dynamism in the New Jerusalem, providing practical implications for contemporary Christians living in America’s cities and towns.
