Reprint of the original, first published in 1826.

In a culture dominated by the individualistic values of political and social liberalism, Gary Badcock says that we seldom hear of the church as the creature of the Word of God. The church has been entrusted to us by God and belongs to the structure of the Christian faith itself. Ecclesiology is first of all theology because it is primarily about the presence of God, Badcock maintains, and is thus biblical and creedal ( one, holy, catholic, and apostolic ) something that we believe which is what undergirds its empirical, sociological, and even pastoral function. Rather than a hollow shell where humans dream moral dreams and do good deeds, the church is the house where God lives.

In nineteenth-century Britain, ahead of the rest of the world in economic development, many towns and cities grew to a size that only London had attained before. This volume focuses on the intellectual and controversial response of the period's leading men and women to the key issues of urbanization and its surrounding social problems. The extracts selected date from 1785 to 1909, and are drawn from the writings, reports and speeches of admirers of city life and its most passionate critics, optimists and alarmists, advocates of back-to-the-land panaceas, and reformers who aspired to control and reform cities. Contemporaries quoted include Dickens, Cobbett, Carlyle, Disraeli, Engels, Mrs Gaskell, Ruskin, Joseph Chamberlain, William Morris, Charles Booth, H.G. Wells and Seebohm Rowntree. In a valuable introduction the editor indicates the main preoccupations of the debate abotu the city, proposes a periodization for it, adn shows its connections with other controversies and issues, as Victorian Britain found itself entering an 'age of great cities'. This book was first published in 1973.

More than half the people in the world live in cities, including a growing number of megacities with populations exceeding ten million people. This trend means that an understanding of urbanization must be an urgent priority for Christian theology and mission across the globe. This updated edition of Seeking a City with Foundations, with an additional chapter, explores Christian responses to the city, ranging from rejecting the urban as evil, to embracing it as being central to God’s redemptive purposes. Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, including history, social science, urban planning, and the history of art, readers are given a detailed text which confronts the challenges that contemporary urbanization presents to world Christianity. Looking at urbanism as a theme throughout Scripture, culminating with the great vision of the New Jerusalem, David Smith explains that God’s own future is revealed as urban, highlighting the need to identify modern-day idols as we share the gospel in cities and acknowledge the impact of global economic forces. The book also explores the causes of what has been called the divided city and traces the urban theme through the Bible to present an alternative vision of the urban future – a future in which the injustices in ever-growing slums and a crisis of meaning among the privileged might be overcome through the power of the reconciling message of the cross. This timely book proposes a way forward for urban mission, highlighting that transformation of our cities must be the focal point of Christian mission and hope.

The liberal governance of the nineteenth-century state and city depended on the "rule of freedom." As a form of rule it relied on the production of certain kinds of citizens and patterns of social life, which in turn depended on transforming both the material form of the city (its layout, architecture, infrastructure) and the ways it was inhabited and imagined by its leaders, citizens and custodians. Focusing mainly on London and Manchester, but with reference also to Glasgow, Dublin, Paris, Vienna, colonial India, and even contemporary Los Angeles, Patrick Joyce creatively and originally develops Foucauldian approaches to historiography to reflect on the nature of modern liberal society. His consideration of such "artifacts" as maps and censuses, sewers and markets, public libraries and parks, and of civic governments and city planning, are intertwined with theoretical interpretations to examine both the impersonal, often invisible forms of social direction and control built into the infrastructure of modern life and the ways in which these mechanisms shape cultural and social life and engender popular resistance.

In a globalized world, networks are key, whether they are networks of people, ideas, or interests. In this volume of essays on the texts and teachings of Jonathan Edwards, contributors from each continent ask questions about how the world of Edwards explains or illuminates the world of today, whether in the area of systematics, missions, historiography, politics, church-planting, or biblical studies. Such diverse discourses enrich the networks of scholarship that the contributors represent, and provide a global snapshot of contemporary research in Edwards studies. These papers were presented in August 2015 at the Jonathan Edwards Congress held at Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia, where personal engagement with the topics at hand made the worldwide network of Edwards aficionados and scholars not merely a virtual aspiration but an experience in time and space. This book will not only inform its readers but surprise them as well, as they track the power of eighteenth century theological ideas in the late modern world.