Christchurch Men's Meeting - Sunday 28th October 2007

City Dwellers: The City in God's Plan and Purpose for the World

Rev 21:1f. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband...

Introduction
A few years ago I received a job offer from a company in Berkshire. My wife and went to look at houses. We went from village to village. We looked at houses in a tiny villages.
But when I looked at these villages: there was little "life", often no center and sometimes no pavements! All of a sudden, we began to long for the city with it's busy-ness, people, opportunities,...

Some questions: Is the city your ideal? Are your dreams urban? Can you not wait to get into the city? Would you choose to live here, in an urban space?

I want us to think about the city biblically: what is God's purpose with regard to the city? What should our strategy be as city-dwellers? How can we love the city? What would it take to make us city-positive? What are our dreams for London, in terms of Christ and His kingdom?

Big cities are here to stay: in the future more and more people will gravitate to the major,
global cities of the world – 80% of the world's population by later this century.

How can we think biblically about the city?

I. The City as God's Purpose in History.
The Bible starts in a garden, but ends in a garden-city. This is story of development and maturity.
God created man, and created a garden-sanctuary from which he, with his helper, was to spread out and fill and civilize the undeveloped world that God had given him.
The Cultural Mandate in Gen 1:26-28 was man's marching orders to build civilization, which meant the construction of cities.
Meredith Kline: "'The city is not to be regarded as an evil invention of ungodly fallen man... The ultimate goal set before humanity at the very beginning was that human-culture should take city-form... The cultural mandate given at creation was a mandate to build the city. Now, after the fall, the city is still a benefit, serving humankind as refuge from the howling wilderness condition into which the fallen human race, exiled from paradise, has been driven... ('Kingdom Prologue').

Eventually, the garden was to become a garden-city, a temple-city.

What is the city?
Cities are places of refuge and safety – city means "he lies, recumbent" i.e. a place of safety.
Cities are places of justice – the elders at the gate, the Cities of Refuge.
Cities are centers of prosperity and development of culture, of government, commerce, arts and higher civilization.

The city stretches us: in the city there are more people like you, who are better at what you do then you are. That challenges you.
In the city there is more intense life and a higher development of technology, culture and civilizations. Civilization flows out of the city to the rest of the nation.

Abraham
When Abraham was called out of Ur, he was called out to pursue a heavenly city (Heb 11:10) For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God"..
This does not mean an "other-worldly city", otherwise, as Rushdoony notes, why leave Ur? The city and land that Abraham received in promise was a "place" here. Therefore, later in Heb 12:22-23 this is made clear, "But you have come to Mount Zion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. "

When we pray the Lord's Prayer we pray for the manifestation in history of the City of God - "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven." Matt 6:10.

This develops through the whole Bible: the Garden Sanctuary leads to the Tabernacle, then the Temple in Jerusalem, the post-Exile Temple and then the New Jerusalem (= the church).

In Rev 21-22. we have the final picture:-

1. The New Jerusalem is the people of God – the fact that it is lowered from heaven means that the church is God work, it cannot grow out of the fallen and rebellious world of sinful man.
2. Moreover, it is a cultural center: the wealth of the nations is brought into it... (v24. .. and the kings of the earth bring their glory and honour into it". And v26.).

Some Conclusions:
1. The development and maturity of God's kingdom, through Christ, are the central message of the Bible;
2. It means that the development of culture and civilization under God, is also central.
3. Therefore, we see that the city is central to the story. God's kingdom is, to borrow St. Augustine's title, the City of God.
4. Therefore, the city is good, it has always been God's goal and purpose for mankind.


II. Sin and the City: The City of Man.
But there is an alternative and competitive line, that runs in parallel with this since the Fall.

The line of Cain, Babel, the seed of the serpent.

1.In Gen 4:17 Kayin(Cain) knew his wife; she became pregnant and bore Hanokh(Enoch). Now he became the builder of a city and called the city's name according to his son's name, Hanokh. (Schoeken Bible). The city in Nob.
So the rebel-murderer Cain is banished and what he does is establish a city culture apart from the faithful line of Abel/Seth.
This line leads to Lamech the polygamists and rebel ( vv18ff). The city can be a way of defining man's rebellion against God.

2.Then after the Flood, we have the Tower of Babel – a city in the plain of Shiner (Gen 11).
Once again this is a place of rebellion – 10:4f "Let us build ourselves a city and a tower, ...v8. " they are scattered to prevent them building the city...
This was their rebellion against the mandate to spread out and fill the world with civilization.
This shows us that the city can become a place of pride and self-exaltation because of the great achievements possible there.

Because the city can be a place of rebellion. You can lose yourself in the city, but not in the village. Hence there is more violence, strife and upset.
Therefore, the city is fallen and becomes a place of rebellion


III.Our strategy for the City?
How should all of this shape our strategy for London? (most of this is "stolen" from Tim Keller).

1. In NT we find that Paul focuses and heads for the cities of Asia Minor: Corinth: Thessalonica, Ephesus, Colossae, Rome etc.
Therefore, to disciple the nations (lit. make disciples of the nations as nations) we must have a strong emphasis on the evangelisation of the city.
According to Rodney Stark by 300AD 50% of the urban population of Asia minor was Christian, whilst 90% of the rural was still pagan. The early church was urban.

2. If the cities are centers of power, influence: i.e., government, cultural leadership, education, science, business, media and entertainment - why would you not start there?
London's population is c 7.5m. That means almost 15% of a population of UK live here – and it's the 15% that lead the rest.
Knowing this, where would you put your effort for the gospel and the Kingdom?
In other words, the whole nation is shaped out of the culture of the city – the city sets the pace for the rest of a nation.
Therefore, to influence the nation, we have to be in the city, evangelizing the city, transforming the city.
3. That means we must engage with it culturally – Paul walked around the Aereopagus before he preached; he strove to understand the place and then fashion his message accordingly;
Modern cities are global cities: the world comes here. You can reach the world from London.
4. Engage with it holistically: the city attracts minorities, new arrivals and the poor feel "safer" there, the ministry of the church needs to be a word and deed ministry.
Our goal is to make London, to make Leyton, Waltham Forest a a better place.
We evangelicals in more recent times have not been good at that.
As C. H. Spurgeon said, if you want to give a poor man a tract, make sure you wrap it up in a sandwich!

Conclusion
God's future is urban – the nations are to be discipled, and that means the great cities so the world need to be transformed by the gospel.
Don't fear the city, remember its key place in God's plan. Love the city and serve the city.

Douglas Wilson - Piercings Blogs MySpace and Education
Listen here

"If your plan is for a year, plant rice. If your plan is for a decade, plant trees. If your plan is for a lifetime, educate children." - Mark Twain

The Problem with Unschooling

Unschooling is self-defined as,

"Unschooling means learning what one wants, when one wants, in the way one wants, where one wants, for one's own reasons."

"Unschooling is self-education. And self-education is simply the practice of freedom. Learning is freed from an artificial, externally controlled context to become again what it has in actual fact always been - a natural, spontaneous process.."

This approach is heavily child-led and child-centered and , I think, in quite the wrong way. The child is given to much autonomy and everything proceeds at his/her pace. Proverbs however seems to indicate a parent led activity. The key words in proverbs are train, discipline, teach, instruct, and exhort. Moreover, diligence and hard work are extolled (go the ant thou sluggard), so that laziness is viewed as the great enemy of advancement and progress under God, and the cause of poverty and waste.

This means that there are some problems with this approach.

Unschooling seems to want to remove the good restraints on us.

1. doing things we don't like when we don't want to do them.

I don't always want to get up in the morning, or go to church with zest and enthusiasm! But I have to be self-disciplined. I don't like chores much, but they have to be done gladly. That's life and it's good for me.

2. being pushed outside our comfort zone.

This is, being challenged from outside ourselves and our narrow field of vision. This is the challenge of others: when we rub up against people better than ourselves we are (ought to be) challenged to greater efforts and higher achievements. That's one of the benefits of community. Education needs to push the child on, gently and reasonably . We all need to be stretched, and often we don't stretch ourselves enough, at least not without training.

3. the discipline of scope and goals set by others.

This applies to any instruction and ALL work. Even if we are self-employed our customers set our scope for us - otherwise we are out of business.

4. not going at our own pace.

We are naturally lazy, sluggish and slow according to Proverbs. Our children will be too. It is good for us to be prodded.

In summary:-

1. Proverbs clearly places the action with the parent: teach, train, discipline, encourage... It heavily condemns lazines and a lack of diligence and application. These virtues and graces seem to come though training and education and example, they don't naturally spring forth from the ground.

2. I agree that we want to establish a life-time of self-driven learning, but to achieve this one needs some basic tools and these cannot be self-discovered - we have to be taught and trained in nearly all of the core subjects (literacy, maths, sciences, Bible, etc). Without strong, disciplined grounding in these basics we do not even have the foundations upon which to build a life-time of learning - children may study parts of these subjects out of interest but it is unlikely that they will have a comprehensive knowledge in all the basics. John Taylor Gatto (who tends towards unschooling) says that we have to teach our children to read or they won't have the tools to discover knowledge for themselves.

3. Children will develop a passion for a subject or activity through being MADE to do it, when they did not initially like it. To be limited to the narrow horizon our preferences and present interests is self-limiting.

4. Opportunity: learning to read when you are 8 yrs when you could easily have done the same at 5 or 6 yrs is a lost opportunity and a waste of 2 years of good reading. This is not redeeming the time.

5. Could you really derive unschooling form the Bible, with it's child-directed approach. Everything I can see is parent directed within the larger community of the people of God.

6. Finally, the method of unschooling is out of step with the way we have to operate when we mature to adulthood.

The Tolerazzi over in Europe...

"Doc. 112978 June 2007
The dangers of creationism in education

ReportCommittee on Culture, Science and EducationRapporteur: Mr Guy LENGAGNE, France, Socialist Group

Summary
The theory of evolution is being attacked by religious fundamentalists who call for creationist theories to be taught in European schools alongside or even in place of it. From a scientific view point there is absolutely no doubt that evolution is a central theory for our understanding of the Universe and of life on Earth.
Creationism in any of its forms, such as “intelligent design”, is not based on facts, does not use any scientific reasoning and its contents are pathetically inadequate for science classes.
The Assembly calls on education authorities in member States to promote scientific knowledge and the teaching of evolution and to oppose firmly any attempts at teaching creationism as a scientific discipline."

So much for toleration.

Concrete Music
Jeremy Begbie's Music in God's World, in this month's Books and Culture (Sept/Oct 07) has some good and solid things to say about music. Music, Begbie points out, is concrete and physical, that is, it is not an abstraction. When music becomes treated as an abstraction we are flung into the chaotic world of modernism, serialism and the concert-hall-emptying rest.

Music is physical: strings are plucked, wind is blown through a hollow pipe, the hammer strikes the string, the cymbals collide. All in real time and space, hard things coincide. Sound waves pass through the air and strike our eardrum. Sound is phyical.

All of this stands in opposition to a false spiritualization, the view that music is, at bottom, a non-phyisical, pure spiritual thing. Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) expressed this spirituality in an essay, On the Spiritual in Art. Begbie summarises: "Physical forms must be isolated form their everyday contexts and treated with a high level of abstraction so that their inner non-physical meaning may shine forth, so that their physicality and particularity may be transcended". Hence, Kandinsky moved towards abstract art.

The extension of this move, in music, was Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). With Schoenberg we must move away from melody and the pleasure of sound to abstraction. "Schoenberg believed that music's sensory pleasure - how beautiful if sounds to the ear - is irrelevent to the quetsion of artistic significance (and to this day the music will sound jarring to many). Music shoud be concerned chiefly with the creation and development of artistic ideas; the pleasure it affords should be primarily intellectual". Enough said: there it is, the intellectualisation of music towards abstraction.

Modernism tends towards abstraction, a rejection of the "lower" physical realm, a false "spirituality" and flight form the physical world into the world of the mind.

In response our Christian repsonse is robustly physical. We rejoice in our materiality and our physicality. Christ came in the flesh for our salvation and the earth is the Lord's. Worship is not to be an abstraction, an inner experience, or a mere propounding of ideology, but the physical gathering of a physical people around a wooden table, with real bread and real wine. With musical instruments and physical voices with lift up praises to heaven. There is no abstraction here.

Biblical Chronology
James B Jordan's essays on Biblical Chronology (at http://www.freebooks.com, see under Newsletters) are a clear, Bible-oriented and committed introduction to the complex issues associated with ancient chronology. The discussion is by no means over. But the commitment to the primacy of Biblical Chronology is refreshing and vital. The chronologies of the ancient world are piecemeal, broken and inaccurate. The Bible's chronology is none of these, but it is an embarrassment to the establishment.

To start to understand the mish-mash that is ancient chronology as well a the complex issues involved and the uncertainties, see David Rohl's and Peter James' extended discussions that move more in a biblical direction.

Both authors challenge the establishment view of chronology and expose the uncertainties that are portrayed as orthodoxy in academia. The issues are complex and require an expert understanding in many fields. But for the ordinary reader, Jordan's essays are a great beginnng-point to at least grasp the schema of biblical chronology.