The Dual Nature of our Existence

Augustine, in book XXII of his City of God, lays out the final fate of the City of God, or rather those who are true followers of Christ. What I found most intriguing, however, came in chapters 22-24, where he first lays out a litany of woes to which mankind is subject, and then comes to chapter 24, where he lists an incredible array of ways in which we are blessed, many of them the result of human ingenuity. This reality is readily apparent to, I'd say, everyone. This world is so incredibly full of horrendous awfulness, that to even look at a tiny part of it is to understand that we are a broken race. Even in my day to day life, I walk down the street every day and encounter homeless, desperate people, riding on the train beneath where millionaires live and work. Why is that? We convince ourselves that it's an inevitability, but that's merely a pleasant lie we tell ourselves so that we feel a little less guilty.

At the same time, the world is incredibly beautiful - I live in a community of believers who really try to do Christian life together. Not perfectly, by any stretch of the imagination, but I find so much to be thankful for in my day-to-day life, and a new life in my soul that I never thought possible. I see the muck and grime and the smell the sewage in the subways, but also see an incredible feat of human engineering that allows this city to even exist in its present form. I see the internet, which is allows people to indulge their worst vices, or to band together to fight for just causes far more effectively than ever before. Indeed God, after all, created the world, created US, a miracle of complex cell structures and firing neurons and saw that "it was very good" - the Fall hardly changed that, but what a morass of sadness it added.

This duality gives us as believers pause. Sometimes, I think, the temptation is to close up ranks and try to just live with one another in our safe communities - not try to change the world, but to get by in it, until we can shake these earthly bonds and go to meet our father. In addition to being impossible in a city like New York, it is also not a desirable outcome. The Lord's Prayer doesn't give us this option - "Your Kingdom come, on Earth as it is in Heaven." Now, one could say that that's merely an entreaty for the Lord to return, to set everything right, to remake the world as it was meant to be. However, when you truly are passionate about something, when you really want something to happen, you strive for it, work toward a goal. I would say that for believers, that goal should be nothing less than the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

Now, I know that that statement sounds both dangerously Utopian, and smacks of a Theocracy, but that's not what I'm saying. I've always said that the only way to enact change is from within, not from on high - and in the end, power almost always acts as a corrupting agent to even devout Christians. What I am saying, however, is that we must not let the seeming inevitability of the brokenness of the world deter us from going out in it and trying to bring the Kingdom here. I think Paul's assertion that Christians must be , as pastors often paraphrase "In the world but not of it", really strikes the proper balance. We must live and work in this world, but we cannot allow it mold our faith or goals.

This brings me back to Augustine. When he speaks of the two cities, the City of God and the City of Devil, he points to a dual existence here on earth, one for those living as followers of Christ, and one for those living as worshipers of anything other than God. But he never says that we just have to let this be as it is. In his Confessions, he writes of his mother living a deeply Christian life, married to his father, a pagan. However, Augustine's father, thanks to the ministrations of his mother, had a deathbed conversion experience, which Augustine credits to his mother living the life she led (he also gives her a great deal of credit for his own conversion). This then, to me, provides an excellent model for Christian living - that if we show through our lives the truth of the gospels, than others will take notice. That is actually how I, too, discovered faith, through the realization that these people are living how I wished I could live. And that desire to understand helped me to finally ask God for that last little push.

On a further point about duality, I've found it amazing that virtually anything can become sinful. I found that I was beginning to substitute reading ABOUT God for a relationship WITH God. And this is easy to do; books have a concrete beginning and an end, and we almost inevitably pick up some bit of knowledge from reading one. And yet prayer, for me at least, is quite difficult. I'm very much still learning to hear His voice, what Elijah encountered on Mount Horeb as the "Still Small Voice" (1 Kings 19:12), and so it's been difficult. But this has pointed out to me how even an obviously good thing - it's hard to find many believers who would criticize the study of scripture or theology - can become an idol in itself. Crazy world we live in.