A Nineteenth Century Prophet

All this week at the holiday club I’ve been using material from Celtic Daily Prayer from the Northumbria Community in team prayers each morning. Today I was flicking through other parts of the book and came to the ‘Finan Readings’ for July. Most are based on Henry Drummond‘s nineteenth century book ‘The City Without A Church’ (full text online here). Some of the quotes are startling and read like postmodern emerging church thinking. For example:

John, in his Revelation, 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. 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.

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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If the future life were to be mainly spent in a temple, the present life might mainly be spent in church.

But if heaven be a city, the life of those who are going there must be a real life. Christ’s gift to us was life: a rich and abundant life. And life is meant for living. An abundant life does not show itself in abundant dreaming, but in abundant living – in abundant living among real and tangible objects and to actual and practical purposes.

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John saw his city ‘descending out of Heaven’. It was, moreover, no strange apparition, but a city which he knew. The significance of that name has been altered for most of us by religious poetry: we spell it with a capital and speak of the New Jerusalem as a synonym for heaven. Yet why not take it simply as it stands, as a new Jerusalem? Try to restore the natural force of the expression – suppose John to have lived today and to have said, ‘I saw a new London’? Jerusalem was John’s London.

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In every city throughout the world today, there is a city descending out of heaven from God. Each one of us is daily building up this city – or helping to keep it back.

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