“Till We Have Built Jerusalem”: Human Flourishing and the Built Environment
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.
Written in 1804 by William Blake, this poem is a theological work. Originally published as a hope-filled critique of England, it was during the First World War that it took on the mantra of Patriotic Anthem Par Excellence. Set to music, the phrase “for green and pleasant lands” was used to justify millions of men marching off to the horrors and filth of trench warfare. Along with most Romantic Poetry however, Jerusalem was not originally a commentary on war, but on industrialisation. The “dark and Satanic Mills” under consideration were those the coal-powered manufacturing plants of filth that dominated England’s skyline. For Blake, these Mills took on a spiritual and otherworldly significance. They were satanic—a hellish invasion into human reality. While promising material prosperity, and to some degree delivering on that promise, industrialisation brought pollution, illness, and a death-like existence to millions of people. According to historian Arnold Toynbee, the industrial revolution represents “a period as disastrous and as terrible as any through which any nation has ever passed.” The atrocity of all of this for Blake was that England claimed religious foundations, asserted beautiful landscapes, professed personal courage. Yet in practice, they were devouring the poor, abusing the created world, and willingly selling the soul of their cities for the allure of material gain. All of this critique for Blake came to bear on England’s built environment—the mills of industry that turned many a life into a living nightmare. One can hear an air of satire in Blake’s voice, “and was Jerusalem builded here?” Far from patriotism, Blake’s Jerusalem was critique.
Scripture depicts the built environment as a paradox. On the one hand, it is seen as a good gift. On the other, it is seen as the place of curse. As a good gift, the built environment plays an essential role in human flourishing. As the most vulnerable of mammals, homes are needed for shelter, streets for walking, parks for playing, and sheds for working. It might be good for wild animals to roam the planes of the earth, living in caves with no permanent abode, but not so for us.
But, the importance of the built environment is so basic and so fundamental for human flourishing that many are oblivious to the shape and charter of their built worlds. The truly surprising element of this is that when we turn to the Biblical narrative, we find that Scripture pays quite close attention to the structures of our built world. As Craig Bartholomew, in his work Where Mortals Dwell, says,
“The capacity to build was woven into the fabric of our being as those…made in the image of God...from the very beginning, where and how we dwell are not marginal elements of human existence; they affect us deeply (curse as change of location). The dwelling place where we reside comes to exist in our image, but we, the dwellers, also take on certain of its properties.”
“We shape the buildings, then the buildings shape us,” said Winston Churchill. More than the mere provision of shelter, the built environment has a meaning making, character shaping function. From the earliest forms of human habitation, buildings function as formative spaces. As historian Lewis Mumford points out, “The house was always more than mere shelter for the body, it was the meeting place of the household unit; its hearth the centre of religious ceremony, not just an aid for cooking." And, these places of meaning and forming, are not only true for private accommodation, but also for communal life. The role that the built environment played in the flourishing of a nation, is seen clearly within the life of Israel. Firstly, land was given as the gift symbol of covenantal blessing. Secondly, Jerusalem as a City was built literally as “the city of Peace” and “the dwelling place of peace.” Finally, the Temple was constructed at the centre of Jerusalem as the physical location on earth in which God’s presence was located. In light of Scripture, we are compelled to say that the built environment is a good gift that enables humanity to flourish. That is, we fill buildings with meaning, and that in turn shapes what we believe. There is a symbiotic, or reciprocal nature between humanity and the built world.
Yet, on the other hand, East of Eden we must also affirm the element of curse inherent within the built environment. Metal rusts, wood decays, glass shatters. But more than this, our built environment has the capacity to magnify, even heighten, human evil. We see this magnified evil in the biblical cities of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Babylon. In contemporary contexts we see this intensification within the Concentration Camp, the Urban Slum, Vegas, or the million plus Brothels; all testifying to the ability of our built environment to bring about an intensification of human evil. However, the ability of our built environment to heighten human suffering goes beyond these “intensely evil structures.” As Nicholas Wolterstorff writes, “the tragedy of modern urban life is not only that so many in our cities are oppressed and powerless, but that so many have nothing surrounding them in which any human could possibly take sensory delight.” Walk any city block with an eye towards beauty and you will see Wolterstorff’s point. Our most densely constructed urban places are often our most ugly, devoid of anything “delightful” or “beautiful.” A Christian theology of the built environment must be able to articulate the “cursedness'' of all built environments, not only materially in what they are, but ethically and morally in what they do to us as those that are formed by the structures we inhabit.
And so, a Christian theology of the built environment find itself expressing a paradox:
As gift, our built environment is not only essential to being human, but provides the context of meaning making and character shaping. The Built Environment is an incredible gift.
As curse, the built environment not only participates in the brokenness of this world, but also has the ability to intensify human wickedness. The Built Environment is curse.
While the trajectory of human history moves towards the Heavenly City of Jerusalem, on its way toward this destination the journey is filled with both elements of gift and curse.
Unique Issues in Aotearoa New Zealand
When we turn our attention to the built environment here in Aotearoa, it is perhaps the element of curse that has been most prevalent in recent years. This element of curse can be seen in the crises of affordability, homelessness, rental availability, residential investments, supply chains, or market monopolies. While all of these topics are deserving of their own investigation. I want to reflect here briefly on policy and politics. Namely, I think that the primary location of curse is the 1991 Building Act. In taking their cue from the Rogernomics era of deregulation and market-led restructuring of the 1980’s, the 1991 Building Act allowed the free market to regulate New Zealand Housing and Construction Industry. Apprenticeships were scrapped, treatment in timber was done away with, untested products were introduced, and the belts-and-braces of traditional construction methodology was done away with. Local councils stopped prescribing specific building approaches and the finished product became the test of suitability, rather than the lifespans and life cycles suitability. All of this under the mantra of efficiency and innovation: let the free market decide.
For those familiar with New Zealand’s construction history, it was the 1991 Build Act that set the scene for what is now known as the “leaking building crisis.” This crisis saw tens of thousands of homes across New Zealand allow water through their external cladding at unacceptable and unprecedented levels.* This water turned houses into damp, mould, rotting places of human habitation. While the total cost of this leaking crisis is still somewhat unknown (the last formal report was done in 2009 by PWC and is now horribly out of date),** the most recent (but perhaps not the most thorough) estimation puts the total leaky building costs at somewhere around 50 billion dollars. To place this figure in economic terms, the total cost of the Christchurch earthquakes was 40 billion. It is no wonder that former Minister of Building and Construction, Maurice Williamson, stated that “the leaky homes issue is equivalent to a natural disaster of huge proportions and it is having a considerable impact on the wealth and health of…thousands of New Zealanders and their families.” The most tragic element of this saga is that 31 years after the Building Act was introduced, and 20 years after the scale of the issue was known, we are still no closer to remediating the vast majority of these homes. Moreover, most are now outside the ten year period for corporate liability, and outside the scope of Government redress. This means that most leaky houses are still leaking without any financial help to resolve them.
“While the trajectory of human history moves towards the Heavenly City of Jerusalem, on its way toward this destination the journey is filled with both elements of gift and curse.”Lest we think of this crisis as merely an economic issue, the health implications have been well documented. In order to understand the health impact, we must step back and ask “what is a house?” Pioneering architect and housing advocate John F. C. Turner articulates this question well. If we understand housing as a noun, what it is as a commodity, the issue of housing becomes material costs, and economic implication. If however, our understanding of housing is as a verb, what it does, then the activity of being housed becomes a social and ethical issue. As a verb, housing describes kitchens in which we prepare food, bedrooms in which tuck our tamariki up to sleep and lounges in which we extend hospitality. As a verb, housing is primarily about the place of dwelling provided for people—what houses do. Within this “verb,” there is complete consensus—damp, mouldy housing leads to terrible health outcomes, particularly as it relates to respiratory disease and skin conditions in children (Institution of Medicine, National academy of Science, and the World Health Organisation). While it is important to note that the exact relationship between disease and environment is complex, one meta data review suggested that damp, mouldy housing can be directly attributable for up to 20% of all respiratory and skin infection. Simply put, our leaking building crisis didn’t just create an economic crisis larger than the Canterbury earthquakes. It created a social crisis whereby well over 100,000 households continue to live in homes that are detrimental to the health of all occupants, and they have little to no ability to remediate these issues.
The true cost of this is hard to quantify. Perhaps like Blake we should reach for language of demonic, satanic, or hellish imposition. For many New Zealanders their housing has become the primary location for experiencing “curse.”
What Does the Church Have to Say?
For William Blake, Jerusalem was not a call to excessive patriotism or literal war. It was a call to the Church. Specifically, it was a call for the Church to view the issues of this world, industrialisation for him, through the lens of Scripture. It was a call for the Church to put her hand to the plough and work until the vision of Heaven on Earth became reality.
The resounding questions left ringing in my ears throughout the leaky building debacle is this, “where was the Church. At the political and policy level before, during, and after the leaky building crisis? Where was the Church?”
The answer to that question is quite simple: “Almost entirely absent.” The church knows how to be “hands and feet” after a natural disaster, and she knows how to be the prophet in the kings court over explicitly ethical issues (sex, marriage and abortion), but she has no real understanding of the kingly task of entering into complicated bureaucratic processes within a liberal democracy. The nuances and intricacies of MBIE, HUD, and Kainga Ora, not to mention the ministers and politicians themselves, provides a landscape the church has been almost entirely unwilling to enter. The only notable exception to this rule that I can find is Salvation Army’s Policy Unit, they put out an annual “State of the Nation.” But, their contribution is a drop in the bucket in comparison to actual need. But why is this? Why has the church evacuated the space of public theology as it relates to the built environment?
I can list four reasons:
First, the modern western theological tradition has largely left the doctrine of creation poorly attended. As William Whitney highlights, many Christians today wrongly assume that a doctrine of creation has primarily to do with the divine act of creating outlined in the first few chapters of Genesis, rather than the broader and deeper framework of “God’s self-disclosure in and through time by Christ and the Spirit (the Trinity and Revelation), the triune God’s continued provision to his creation (Providence and Common Grace), the goodness of the created realm as worthy of care, the human role in shaping the created realm through activities of aesthetics and science (theology of culture), and the forward movement of God’s kingdom towards the new creation (eschatology).”
Second, there has been a tendency to misappropriate Jesus’ phrase, “not on this mountain, not in that temple.” For many this statement of Jesus has been seen as a rejection of place and building in relation to faith. However, according to Timothy Gorringe, it would be far more apt to say that “In the NT we have what can be described as a “universalisation” of the promise...a concern with land which moves beyond Palestine to “the whole inhabited earth,” a concern with place that moves beyond the immediate to the cosmos, a concern with holiness that moves from the holy of holies.” Jesus does not spiritualise place and land and promises, making them somehow non-physical, but universalises them; all people, all places, all land. In the wonderful phrase of Eugene Peterson, “this side of the incarnation there is now no place, no culture, that does not have the potential for holiness.”
Third, this eclipse of creation and misappropriation of Jesus has resulted in malformed eschatology. If the beginning is ignored, and the middle is misconstrued, then the end will undoubtedly become disfigured. The heavenly vision of Jerusalem for many Christians has simply become a vision of another place, rather than a vision of earth transformed. This spiritualised eschatology has little to say to the material, the physical, and the earthly concerns of this world. "Spiritualised Christianity,” says Walter Brueggemann, “by refusing to ask questions of land, (and we could add place and buildings) has served to sanction existing inequalities.”
Fourth, the church has conceded much ground to technical experts. Issues related to housing have become the domain of lawyers, policy makers, engineers, architects and construction experts. But, somehow, in the technicalising of our world we have lost a basic unifying vision of what it means to be human. Again, according to Gorringe, the “issues with the built environment are not primarily technical but ethical. That is to say, they are fundamentally questions of value, and understanding the human project as a whole.” We have ten thousand pages of technical data relating to the minimum standard of insulation required within the eastern wall of Western Southland home, but we struggle to articulate a vision of justice in relation to buildings, we bumble over the specifics of peaceful place, we fumble our words when it comes to ideas of mercy and grace. In short, we have no communally held picture of shalom (jeru-salem) as it relates to our built worlds – what the world looks like, feels like, acts like, is like when it is made right.
It is no coincidence that toward the very end of his poem Blake states “I will not cease from mental fight.” Blake knew the task of building Jerusalem to be first and foremost an intellectually demanding enterprise. And perhaps that is where we both end, and start. The first step for the church to wrestle with these issues is quite simple. Engage. Think. Enter the fray. “Until we have built Jerusalem” is a call for the church to seek the well-fare of all humanity, to see people flourish in their homes, in their workplaces and in their recreation.
It is a call for the church to build cities of peace and flourishing wherever and whenever they find themselves, and to do so until Christ returns.
~
Tim Jacomb is pastor at Karori Baptist Church, has a background in residential construction, and is part way through property study at Auckland University's Business School.
*Some of the underlying causes include, but not limited to, the use of monolithic cladding systems, loss of traditional “belts and braces” approach to construction that built in redundancy, untreated timber, NZ’s climate, complexity and design of houses, loss of eaves, no vapour barriers, flashing and sealant misuse, movement and instability of timber frames, unskilled labour, and the paradigmatic changes to the construction industry brought about by the 1991 Building Act. See Hunn, Bond, and Kernohan, “Report of the Overview Group on the Weathertightness of Buildings,” 3-9.
**The initial cost of this weathertightness issue was estimated at 240M, with roughly 12,00 dwellings adversely affected. Within three years that initial estimation had been adjusted to 1B. And by 2009 those numbers were again re-estimated with the remedial cost now totalling 11.3B affected 89,000 homes. See PWC, “Department of Building and Housing Weathertightness – Estimating the Cost” (PWC, 2009), 2–3. This is the most comprehensive official report published on the leaky building crisis to date.