ABSTRACT
Following the ancient parallel between the human body and the city (Sennett: 1994, 31-123), we began in Chapter 3 to develop a theology of corporeality as such so that the physical body might be understood as mapped onto the body of Christ. In Chapter 4 I explored this further with respect to the displacement of Christ’s body such that all human bodies participate in this one body and this participation and belonging constitutes the ecclesial body, the Church. To forward the examination of the nature of this ecclesial body as an erotic community founded within and sustained by the desire of God, Chapter 5 mapped out various models for the erotic community which have come to dominate our current understanding of ourselves as sociosexual beings. Chapter 6 then began to conceive of a theological account of the sacramental body, emphasising its relationship to the distention of time and also its continual fracturing and coming together within that distention. The distention of time was the temporal axis of the spatialised corporeality of displacement in Christ. Chapter 7 developed this account of the sacramental body with specific reference to sexual embodiment and the performance of gender. Then Chapter 8 began to sketch the relationship between this sacramental body and the contemporary city of angels, pointing out how the figure of angels operates as an index of certain contemporary desires for a frictionless and perfected communication. Thus with this chapter we began to move back to the focus of this book, the contemporary city and a theology partly produced by, but also hopefully productive within, the city that we sketched in Chapter 2, the city of endless desire, the postmodern city, the city that followed the city of eternal aspiration, the modern city. And now we come to the final drawing together of the global city and the city of God (made up as it is of the multiple implicated bodies we have examined throughout) and the depiction of the relationship that binds and bonds them. What has been
important throughout is that time is God’s grace, and that it comes to us as a gift not of the present alone, but as the pull of both past and future within the present. The city of God is not then imposed upon us in some arbitrary now, some future rupturing event. It is continually being given us to live in and build. It is only possible to separate it from the kingdom of this world, the secular city, by divine judgement. We may speak then of two kingdoms or two cities, as Augustine and later Luther did, but none of us can know the extent to which one is independent of the other. None of us have that true knowledge of where we are at any given moment, or where anyone else is. None of us can know the extent to which any activity we are engaged in is a work in God, and therefore good and true and beautiful, or a work of selfreference, and therefore nothing but the swollen bruising of an injury to the body. There is faith, hope and charity which operates by seeing through a glass darkly.
