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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
“Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come”
(Heb. 13:1 2-14).
I
Blessed and cursed by a peculiar “hopelessness,” Christians claim fellowship with Christ who suffered outside the city gate, and are called to follow him into that wilderness beyond the camp, that region other than the earthly civitas, from which we might discern another city. This other city shows the structures of this world, which seem so solid and so real, to be afflicted with an ephemeral quality, a kind of unreality, so as to make them a source of anxiety rather than a resting place for our restless hearts (Lk. 12: 12-34.)- And so we exist in a state of perpetual pilgrimage to our true patria, following “Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:2).
1 As Wayne Meeks notes, “within a decade of the crucifixion of Jesus, the village culture of Palestine had been left behind, and the Greco-Roman city became the dominant environment of the Christian movement. So it remained, from the dispersion of the ‘Hellenists’ from Jerusalem until well after the time of Constantine” (The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul [New Haven: Yale University Press, 19831, 11).
2 For a fascinating reading of Paul which sees him as arguing for an internalised (and therefore universally available) “faith” as the basis for participation in the people of God and opposing the “carnal” and historically particular basis of ethnicity and obedience to the Law, see Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Boyarin’s interpretation brilliantly identifies a persistent Christian tendency to “spiritualize” and “universalize” so as to obliterate difference, but it is highly questionable whether Paul is in fact, ;is Boyarin claims, the “fountainhead” of such a “western universalism” (229). For a critique of Boyarin on this point, see Stephen Fowl’s review in Modern Theology 12:l (January 1996). 131–133.
3 Michel, de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Steven Rendall. tms. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117Google Scholar. Subsequent references, abbreviated PEL, shall be in the text.
4 One should note that this ambivalence is already present in Israel, manifested in the tension between the ideals of the tent of presence and the Temple.
5 On the four factors of Temple, Land, Torah and ethnicity as definitive of the Jewish symbolic world, see Wright, N. T., The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 224–232Google Scholar.
6 Davies, W. D., The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 366–367Google Scholar.
7 Davies. The Gospel and the Land, 179.
8 W. Janzen, “Land,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, David Noel Freedman et. al. eds. (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 1V: 153. Cf. Wright. 366, n. 31: “Jesus and the church together are the New Temple; the world, I suggest, is the new Land.” One should note that, after the destruction of the Temple, Judaism too “deterritorialized” the promise. See Boyarin, A Radical Jew, 251–259, on the rabbinic “displacement of loyalty from place to memory of place’’ (256).
9 On the nature of early Christian hope, and in particular its continuity with Jewish eschatology, see Wright, 332–334.401.459–464.
10 See Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus and Community: The Social Dimension of Christian Faith, John Calvin, trans. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 126–8.
11 Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on the Canticle, sermon 13, in From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings, selection and introduction by Jean Danielou, trans. and ed. by Herbert Musurillo (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 273.
12 Michel de Certeau, “La rupture instauratrice,” in La faiblesse de croire (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987). 183–226, esp. 209–212.
13 Lohfink, Jesus and Community, 99–106.
14 On the weekly eucharist as the occasion for the distribution of goods from the rich to the poor, see Justin Martyr, First Apology, ch. 67.
15 See Peter Brown, The Body and Society, Ch. 7: “‘A Promiscuous Brotherhood and Sisterhood’: Men and Women in The Early Churches” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 140–159. On the Christian deconstruction of the antique distinction between oikos and polis, see Bernd Wannenwetsch, “The Political Worship of the Church: A Critical and Empowering Practice,” Modern Theology 12:3 (July 1996), 269–299.
16 Contra Celsum, VIII:75 [ET: Origen: Contra Celsum, Henry Chadwick, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). 510].
17 Epistle to Diognetus V [ET: The Apostolic Fathers II, Kirsopp Lake, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950,361].
18 See “La rupture instauratrice,” 112.
19 Cited in Origen, Contra Celsum. VIII.2 [454]. Cf. Contra Celsum VIII.49 where Celsus characterises Christians as “suffering from the disease of sedition” [488].
20 See Robert, Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984). 117–125Google Scholar.
21 “The whole structure of the Empire was indivisibly ‘political’ and ‘religious. ’ The main purpose of the Imperial rule was usually defined as ‘Philanthropy,’ and often even as ‘Salvation.’ Accordingly, the Emperors were described as ‘Saviours”’ (Georges Florovsky, “Empire and Desert: Antinomies of Christian History,” The Greek Orthodox Theological Review 3 [ 1957], 135).
22 On the distinction between “use” (uti) and “enjoyment” (frui) see Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, Book I, chs. 22–35.
23 Epistle to Diognetus V [359].
24 Ibid., VI [361].
25 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Razing the Bastions: On the Church in This Age, Brian McNeil, C.R.V., trans (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993). 80–81.
26 Athanasius, The Life of Anthony xiv [ET: Athanasius: The Life of Anthony and the Letter to Marcellinus, Robert Gregg, trans. (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 42–43].
27 Florovsky. “Empire and Desert,” 150. Emphasis in the original.
28 Johann-Baptist Metz, “Christians and Jews After Auschwitz: Being a Meditation also on the End of Bourgeois Religion,” in The Emergent Church, Peter Mann, trans. (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 26. Cf. the comment of Boyarin: “The insistence on the value of bodily connection and embodied practice emblematic of Judaism since Paul thus has significant critical force over against the isolating and disembodying direction of western idealist philosophies” (A Radical Jew, 232).
29 For a brief account of the reductions, along with a record of their artistic achievements, see C. J. McNaspy, S.J., Lost Cities of Paraguay: Art and Architecture of the Jesuit Reductions, 1607–1767 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1982).
30 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, S.J., The Spiritual Conquest Accomplished by the Religious of the Society of Jesus in the Provinces of Paraguay, Paranà, Uruguay. and Tape, C.J. McNaspy, S.J., et. al., trans. (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1993), 30.
31 Henri de Lubac, The Splendour of the Church. Michael Mason, trans. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956), 125.
32 Anthony, Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA Stanford University Press, 1990). 21–29Google Scholar.
