Coming Home

Christian perspectives on housing

Brown, Tomlin

• Publisher: Church House Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781781401903
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politik & Staat

Everyone has an interest in housing, because we all live in some kind of home. While there has been plenty of theological reflection on the natural environment, there has been little on the built environment or on a theology of housing. Addressing the urgent problems of housing inequality and affordability, Coming Home proposes a practical and biblical theology of housing provision as an essential part of community building.It explores the purpose of home and housing today, housing and human flourishing, shared living and neighbourliness. It asks how and why the church should contribute to local and national housing policy – and thus to building community life – and offers case studies in community action.Contributors include Samuel Wells, Timothy Gorringe, Niamh Colbrook, Selina Stone, Angus Ritchie and Shermana Fletcher of the Centre for Theology and Community. Collectively, they bring theology and practice together.

1. Coming Home: A Theology of Housing and Community

GRAHAM TOMLIN

There is no shortage of agencies with suggestions on how to solve the housing crisis. Charities, think tanks, housing associations, experts in housing policy and academics all have their proposals to solve a predicament that manifests itself in unaffordable accommodation, a lack of social housing, poor-quality living conditions and the persistent scandal of homelessness. The Church, however, is not just another social agency offering its solutions. Its primary loyalty, as Augustine insisted, is to the City of God, not to the City of this World. Its purpose is focused within the two great calls of the Church – to worship the God of Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit and to bear witness to that same God.

That does not mean, however, that the Church has no interest in the messy business of this world, such as the building, buying or renting of homes. In fact, it is precisely in such a context that the Church bears its witness. The Church never bears witness to Christ in a vacuum – it always does it in the specific contexts of particular times and places. Unlike many social issues, housing affects everyone, without exception. Each one of us has a home, whether it is an expensive mansion, a tiny flat, or anything in between. Because it is so universal and because our homes have such an influence on our wellbeing, housing has to be a primary arena of life in which the Church bears witness to Christ and his kingdom. If the gospel and the call to discipleship has a claim on the whole of human life, then the Church needs to think deeply about housing. As Miroslav Volf puts it, the story of the gospel ‘is an invitation to make our nested homes – family home, city-home, homeland, earth-home – reflect in some measure that coming home of God which completes creation’.

The primary question for the Church is therefore not the obvious one – how to solve the problems in our housing market – but how can the Church bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ in relation to the housing crisis? That is the crucial question this chapter seeks to answer.

Walter Brueggemann has argued that land and its use is one of the primary themes of the Bible.1 We might go further and say that the homes and houses that are built on land are also one of the key themes that run through the narrative arc of biblical history and theology.

The Bible tells the story of a journey from a God-provided home, moving out into a hostile world, followed by the long history of redemption which leads back home again, but to one that looks different from the first. Like the Prodigal Son, who leaves home only to return to it later in a ‘new normal’, the story takes the human race from its home with God in Eden, through expulsion from that home, to the place of return, to a final picture of God making his home with us (Rev. 21.3).

Tim Gorringe reminds us that ‘all building expresses an ideology’.2 So, for example, the current market-driven approach to housing so often expresses the idea that a home is a place to exclude people, or a reward for success, or an asset to shield against the winds of change, something to put our trust, savings and wealth into. A Christian approach to housing is one that unashamedly embodies a vision of the story of the gospel. There are at least five pivotal ‘moments’ in this story: Creation, Fall, Redemption, the New Community and the New Creation. A theology of housing, church and community emerges from this story and takes shape as a witness to it in so far as it maps on to this story.

Creation, Sustainability and Stewardship

In the beginning, the original creation was pronounced ‘good’ (Gen. 1.31). It was given as a home for animal life of various kinds and, ultimately in time, the human race. The Garden of Eden is a picture of the divine provision of a space in which people can flourish and find fellowship with God, with other humans and with the rest of the created order.

Two central themes emerge in the Bible’s view of created land. Chris Wright points out that these are held together in two key themes of the psalms: ‘The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it’ (Ps. 24.1), and ‘the earth he has given to human beings’ (Ps. 115.16).3 The earth, or the land, is both God’s property and God’s gift.

The witness of the prophets and the writings is that, on the one hand, the specific Promised Land was never ultimately Israel’s to own, as it remained God’s possession, yet on the other hand it was given as a gift to Israel, as an inalienable expression and embodiment of God’s generosity and love for his people. The gift of land was intended to bind the people to one another and to the God in whom they found their identity and wellbeing. Land, homes and houses were given not to create individual isolated enclaves, but to create a community in fellowship with God and one another.4 With land comes moral obligation: land possession was dependent on observance of the Torah, otherwise the land will be lost. And that is of course exactly what happened in the exile.

To translate this into terms familiar with housing and property, God is (as it were) the freeholder of land, which is then ‘leased’ to humans as a gift. This of course radically relativizes human ownership of land. If God has all the rights and privileges of land ownership, then we are only ever the tenants and trustees of land. Moreover, with this gift of leased land, humanity is given responsibilities to ‘work it and take care of it’ (Gen. 2.15). Responsibility for proper care and preservation of land falls to the tenants. Land ownership brings with it not the licence to exact as much produce or revenue from it as it will yield, but the responsibility to treat it well, and to ensure it is shared equitably.5

A housing policy that reflects the divine ownership and gifted nature of creation would therefore need to pay attention to the moral issues of the protection and sustainability of the land on which houses are built. Housing developments that are unsustainable, in the sense that they use too much of the earth’s resources, are wasteful of energy or are out of sympathy with the natural environment, cannot bear witness to this part of the story.6 We need to think of ourselves as stewards, not rulers of the natural world and of the properties we own or let out for rent. Housing policy needs to work with the grain of creation, to safeguard and not do violence to the earth God has given us.

Fallenness, Security and Justice

The second key moment in the biblical narrative is that of the Fall. The human race, the very part of creation singled out to bear the divine image, to protect, nurture and develop the creation, revolts against its maker and is consequently banished from the Garden that was intended as their home. From this point on, their experience is one of violence (the killing of Abel in chapter 4), of nature as an enemy rather than a friend (the flood in chapters 6—9), and of confusion (the Tower of Babel in chapter 11). The security and safety of Eden is exchanged for the insecurity of a cold and hostile world. Left to its own devices, land and housing become concentrated in the hands of a few and divisions grow between rich and poor.

In the early days of Hebrew possession of the land, it seems to have been allocated to tribes, and within that to families – generationally extended kinship groups that each possessed a portion of the land to sustain life and economic viability.7 By the eighth century bc, a number of social changes – including a centralizing of state power, imposition of high levels of taxation, the growth of a wealthy class through the expansion of Solomon’s empire, and battles with surrounding powers such as the Assyrians that decimated the peasantry – all led to a concentration of land and property in fewer hands, and the loss of land from the family kinship groups that originally farmed it.

The result was not just poverty, injustice and division, but ultimately exile and land loss. As the prophet Isaiah put it:

Woe to you who add house to house

and join field to field

till no space is left

and you live alone in the land.

The Lord Almighty has declared in my hearing:

‘Surely the great houses will become desolate,

the fine mansions left without occupants.’

Therefore my people will go into exile

for lack of understanding;

those of high rank will die of hunger

and the common people will be parched with thirst.

(Isa. 5.8–10, 13)

When land use gets out of kilter, all kinds of social problems begin to rear their heads, and a society cannot last long when land is misused. The Old Testament was no stranger to a housing crisis.

To deny people a share in the land and the sense of belonging that went with it was wrong, not because it infringed some modern principle of the sacredness of private property, but because being unable to share in the land meant being shut out from the community that enjoys together the grace and goodness of God. It meant denying people access to the life into which God had invited them – a life fully enjoying the blessing of God and neighbour, a full participation in the life God intended them to live. If the gift of God to people was land, then denying some people access to some form of trusteeship of land was to sever their relationship to God as the Giver and to the covenant community that held that land.

As Israel entered the promised land, to ensure the ongoing possibility of people sharing in the blessing of that land, the enactment of justice became vital. In this context Leviticus 25 becomes crucial, with its strong link between land possession and observance of the law: ‘Follow my decrees and be careful to obey my laws, and you will live safely in the land. Then the land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill and live there in safety’ (Lev. 25.18–19). Every 50 years there was to be a ‘Jubilee year’ – a recalibration of ownership, with slaves being freed, and everyone returning to their ancestral lands. In between, land prices were to be related to the Jubilee principle, with prices dropping the nearer it came to the deadline year. There is proper scholarly debate as to whether the Jubilee year, as described in this passage, was ever enacted, but either way it does indicate an ideal to which Israel aspired.

The basic principle of the Jubilee was not to prohibit land ownership or sale, or to impose absolute equality, but to protect land tenure by families so they were not allowed to drop out of the community into generational bondage. Those who ran up debts they could not pay would often have to sell land or even themselves into slavery. The Jubilee was a way to check that spiralling process into entrenched poverty. It also was designed to stop land being concentrated in a very few hands, as had happened in some of the surrounding nations where the...