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Spring 2026 · Vol. 55 No. 1 · pp. 4–16 

Diagonalizing the Village and the City: A Theological Exploration of Article 12

Gil Dueck

Our Confession of Faith (Canadian Mennonite Brethren, 1999) is important and instructive on multiple levels. At one level, it simply aims to articulate our understanding of what the Bible teaches on “the important stuff” and to make that accessible for all of us from the pulpit to the pew. On another level, it is instructive for teaching us about what Mennonite Brethren (MBs) have identified as “the important stuff.” So we could say that MBs have chosen eighteen topics that were of sufficient importance to solidify in a confession, and one of those is the question of how we understand our relationship to “Society and State.” There is something about this relationship that is both experientially challenging p. 5 and theologically significant. We know that our faith makes claims upon us that impact our engagement with the world around us. My aim in this essay is to take a fresh look at Article 12 by revisiting a familiar MB storyline through some contemporary theological and cultural lenses.

Watkin sees a cultural landscape littered with dichotomies that tempt us toward a sub-Christian cultural engagement. . . . By diagonalize he means marshaling the resources of the Bible in search of an alternative.

Delbert Wiens on the Village and the City

To that end, I want to go back to 1973 and the publication of Delbert Wiens’ famous essay “From the Village to the City,” 1 which followed his more famous New Wineskins for Old Wine from a decade earlier. 2 Both articles addressed the question of how the faith of the old country could reconcile itself to the challenges of modern life. “Village” and “city” are, for Wiens, controlling metaphors that capture a way of life, a way of knowing and believing, and a way of understanding our allegiances. It is, perhaps, easy for us to have positive associations with the village. Wiens’ description of village life is evocative:

Our peasant forefathers lived in a village culture. Several dozen houses were clustered together and the men walked out to till their fields. The children ran freely about the village and fields, and all looked out for all. Much of the work was done together, the entire village gathering to make a celebration while helping a family kill a pig or build a barn. And at the center of the village was a church. 3

We may read this and feel a kind of nostalgia for times that seemed simpler. We may remember a kind of psychological security that came along with a smaller circle with common perspectives. We may look at the contemporary political landscape with its bewildering complexity and wish that we could return to the village.

The city, for Wiens, is a place of greater complexity, possibility, and also danger, and he was distinctively attentive to these tensions as he contemplated MB life in the twentieth century. He describes the city as a “universal solvent, destroying community, dissolving ethics, denying greatness, undercutting the Scriptures and theology, and eradicating the sense of God.” 4 He also notes, “The city is also a liberation. It delivers us from the narrow smugness of the village. . . . the city is not only Babel and Babylon. The city is also Jerusalem. Even in the Scriptures the future promise is a city.” 5 This is not all he says about the city but it is clear that he sees it as a mixed blessing. We may feel an instinctive pull toward the city with its variety and open-endedness. The city is the place where you can transcend your origins and the heavy weight of tradition. The city is a place where things are happening, and culture is formed. It is a hub of activity, p. 6 commerce, and creativity. It is a place of possibility, even as it undercuts the best aspects of the village.

Wiens makes the point that twentieth-century MB life involved a move from the village to the city, and that there is a kind of moral imperative in the transition from simple villager to sophisticated city-dweller. In many ways this is the modern story—the story of the small, contained, circumscribed existence of pre-modern Christendom giving way to the large, porous, cosmopolitan existence of late-modern liberal democracy. But Wiens also expresses a kind of wistful sorrow as he describes it. “We may be living in the city,” he noted, “but our strength is still derived from the earlier reality that molded us. I often feel that I am living off an older spiritual capital that I am not replenishing.” 6

Wiens is ultimately ambivalent about the village-to-city transition. On the one hand he sees the move as necessary—in the way that it is necessary for young people to adjust to the larger world that exists outside of the home, the school, and the church. Whether or not this process is pleasant, it needs to happen, and we do ourselves no favors by hiding from it. On the other hand, Wiens worries about the city even as he appreciates it. “It’s easy for me to romanticize the village,” he says, “and I both love and hate the city.” 7 In another place, he poignantly remarks, “I am angry with myself when I realize that I grew up with homemade rye and whole wheat bread and came for awhile to prefer the fluff that can be bought in any grocery store.” 8

The journey from the village to the city is, among other things, a crisis of allegiance. In the village there is no real context for questions of allegiance. There is simply tradition mediated through a totalizing social context in which the entire web of belief and ethics is self-evident and rarely questioned. But the threat of the city is that it unraveled this social order and all its derivative meanings. So Wiens ponders how to read the Bible after higher criticism. He wonders how to maintain a coherent map of the world when that map collides with others:

Those who are being shaped by the city have discovered that there is no single language and no single way of life. The city encompasses many languages . . . . There are alternate ways to live and to understand. There are different human “universes,” and each one has its own way of perceiving and its own criteria for judging truth. The meaning of the city is Babel, and no language can be assumed to be truer than another. 9

The allegiances of the city inevitably call the allegiances of the village into question. p. 7

Complex and Simple Spaces

It has been over fifty years since “From the Village to the City” was published. I want to suggest that the village to city metaphor can be extended. This is not just a twentieth-century MB story. It is the modern story, and it is a useful story to consider when conceptualizing the place of the church in the late modern West. Article 12 of the MB Confession of Faith uses the language of society and state, but these words are not timeless: they are modern. No one in Jesus’ time thought of themselves as belonging to either a “society” or a “state.” The fact that these terms have an entire article of our Confession of Faith devoted to them situates us firmly as modern people responding to modern challenges. Within the history of the church, we are a subset of Christians that needs to figure out how to relate to the state in the aftermath of modernity.

William Cavanaugh describes the origin of the contemporary nation-state and what this means for the life of the church. Cavanaugh’s reading of history sees much of the premodern West as existing in a “complex space” that could roughly be compared to “village life.” He borrows the spacial term from John Milbank for whom authority was marked by personal loyalties that were owed in complex, layered communities. 10 The political space is characterized by multiple levels of loyalty and allegiance, from the most mundane local relationships all the way up to the highest authority—whether the emperor or the Pope. The space between the individual and the highest authority was “complex”—there were a variety of relationships and associations between them. There were family relationships, village relationships, tribal relationships, church relationships, guild relationships, regional relationships—each of which was local and circumscribed by a shared conviction that there was an ultimate divine authority under whom all these associations cohered and gained their legitimacy. There was virtually no contact between the highest authority and the village peasant. All of life was lived in the complex space in the middle.

This complex space was gradually overturned in modernity, and one of the key developments was the emergence of the nation-state. To oversimplify a complicated history, the modern nation-state emerged out of the problem of religious violence in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. It seemed to many as if the challenge of theological conflict was irresolvable, which begged the question of how political unity could be forged in the absence of theological agreement. The answer—eventually—was to bracket out theological questions and conceive of the state as a neutral arbiter that existed simply to preserve the peace and guarantee p. 8 the rights and security of the newly ennobled individual. In the place of a complex space there was now a “simple space” between ultimate power represented in the nation-state and the rights-bearing individual. In the midst of so many squabbling religious “villages,” the solution was one powerful secular city to keep the peace. Inside the walls of this city, everyone could more or less do what they wanted as long as they did not get in each other’s way. All of the old associations still existed, but their character and meaning had changed. You could still go to church, but you could no longer assume that it was at the center of a village.

The Empty Shrine

So the creation of the nation-state comes at a cost. As Cavanaugh puts it,

In the Enlightenment narrative, the tragedy of religious violence can only be solved by a recognition of the indeterminable nature of the truth about God, at least on a public level. . . . What matters is that at the heart of democratic capitalism there is an “empty shrine,” swept clean of reverence for the transcendent. 11

Put more simply, if we are not all going to agree on the God question, we need a secular, neutral political container that will keep the peace. In the place of a complex space of multiple, mutually reinforcing associations, the modern nation-state creates a simple space that consists primarily of the authority of the state and the rights of the voluntary individual who makes whatever private associations seem best to them. The village eventually gives way to the suburbs.

On the one hand, Cavanaugh is trying to make the point that the contemporary nation-state requires an empty shrine to deal with the problem of religious violence. But on the other hand, he knows that nature abhors a vacuum. The shrine will not stay empty. Something has to take God’s place. Something needs to bind us together. Our hopes and fears are too great to ever be fully secularized. Our disagreements destabilize us and the threat of conflict returns. It is impossible to have a pluralistic political space that is actually open to everyone doing their own thing. Cavanaugh concludes,

In the absence of a transcendent telos, plurality is not simply a promise but a threat, one that must be met by an even greater pull toward unity. But what could be the source of unity in a nation-state of diverse ends . . . ? It can only be that the nation-state becomes an end in itself, a kind of transcendent reference needed to bind the many to each other. 12 p. 9

This, of course, is where the relationship between society and state becomes uniquely challenging because this is where the question of our allegiance comes to the fore. If the nation-state is seen as the “transcendent reference” that is needed to bind us together, we have the roots of a kind of secularized nationalism that competes for the kind of allegiance that is owed only to God. This is the threat that Article 12 of our Confession is at least partially trying to address. It attempts to answer the question of how Christian communities navigate this simple space under the nation-state.

This is an important question. It is one that many of our forebears had to navigate in acutely practical ways. A persistent plotline in the MB story is the quest for the freedom to practice our faith without fearing the intrusions of the state and specifically the requirement to fight. We are a people who have been sensitive to the question of competing allegiances, whether in nineteenth-century tsarist Russia or twenty-first century liberal democratic Canada. Our confession carves out this space and reminds us that in every time and in every political space, our first allegiance as followers of Christ is to God alone.

The Politicization of Everything

We ask the questions of society and state in the context of a resurgent impulse toward nationalism. In many ways the modern hope of a global, rational citizen freed of their village loyalties has foundered. In almost every contemporary political space, we can observe the return of the local, the tribal, and the national. We are seeing a kind of cultural protectionism as nation-states try to secure themselves and their borders in a destabilized economic and political environment. This is happening even in Canada where a new and somewhat awkward fitting “elbows up” nationalism is gaining traction in response to political isolationism and protectionism south of the border.

But another danger of the “empty shrine” of the modern state is that politics tend to take the place of religion, not just at a national level but at a personal existential level. We are not just tempted to think of politics more, but we are tempted to politicize everything. In the simple space between the state and the individual, the political dimension of human experience expands and creeps. It occupies more space and it occupies more important space. We are more enmeshed with our opinions. The environment is more polarized because more of our ultimate concerns are invested in our political views. The key shift here is that the threat of violence migrates downward—from a geopolitical struggle between p. 10 empires and nation-states to an interpersonal struggle between identities. Tim Perry notes,

In the collapse of the domain once called the religious, that part of human life in which the great questions of ultimate value, reality, and ends were entertained, the political has increasingly filled the void. . . . In the absence of religion, the human drive to worship hasn’t dissipated but remains and is redirected. 13

As we have moved from the village to the city, our hopes and fears have become more immanent and thereby welded to our political identities. And as our politics and our identities have become more tightly connected, the stakes of conversations have risen because they have come to signify not just what we think but who we are. Richard Beck notes that, “Politics has become existentially freighted. Instead of a pragmatic pursuit of the common good, politics is where I discover, pursue, and perform my identity. . . . The more politics matters, the more violent it becomes.” 14

This is why our political disagreements now seem to loom so much larger today. It is also why the state has expanded in scope so dramatically over the past decades. Indeed, our expectations of what the state ought to do for us have grown exponentially. Yes, we look to the state for basic security and safety—these are the basics of the social contract. But we also look to the state to reinforce our moral convictions, to validate our perspectives, to shield us from our opponents, to provide us opportunities, to mitigate all our risks—in short, to train us in the way that we should go and to exercise a level of care for us from cradle to grave. This is a long way from the simple space neutrality of the early days of the nation-state. But this is the place that the state has come to occupy in the aftermath of the empty shrine.

This leads to some odd dichotomies. On the one hand, the state is an utterly mundane thing. For many of us, our actual interaction with “Canada” rarely goes beyond some grumbling about the Canada Revenue Agency during tax season. And yet the state functions as the locus for so many of our deepest hopes, whether for health, security, peace, and even purpose. And even if the possibility feels remote in Canada, the state can even ask us to give our lives. Alisdair MacIntyre memorably notes this contradiction:

The modern nation-state . . . is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository for sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf. . . . It’s like being asked to die for the telephone company. 15

The Church and Biblical Critical Theory

In the midst of this incoherent competition for allegiances in simple space sits the church. The church is not the state. And it is not a citizen. It is a third thing—a community that has a higher allegiance. It will always be a community that sits uneasily in this space. It is not an easy space, but it is a vitally important one. As Christopher Watkin puts it, “It is of crucial importance that the church is neither a government nor a business, that it belongs neither to the state nor to the market. In modernity, the church, therefore, stands outside the two main administrative and totalizing aspects of society.” 16

The question that we are confronted with, then, is how to inhabit a socio-political world that confronts us with competing allegiances. To that end, I want to draw on Watkin’s work in his influential 2022 book, Biblical Critical Theory. First, what does he mean by the term critical theory? This is an umbrella term for an approach within late twentieth- and early twenty-first century academic life that, according to the late Tim Keller, “aims to make visible the deep structures of a culture in order to expose and change them.” 17 Critical theory takes as a starting point the fact that the words and ideas and theories we use to understand ourselves and the world that we live in are at least partially misleading or deceptive. There is something else going on beneath the surface that is often obscured by our desire for power, control, and/or money. As such it is the job of the critical theorist to get beneath the surface and to expose what is really going on for the purpose of social change.

In the hands of the critical theorist, then, the surface level presentation of any cultural phenomenon obscures what is really going on and is likely serving someone else’s interest. For example, social media is not primarily a benign emancipatory technology that connects people and empowers diverse voices. Perhaps it is a new and subtler form of enslavement that props up a corrupt economic system that seeks to commodify and exploit consumers. This is an approach to culture that is fairly suspicious and quite wired to notice power imbalances and economic interests. This kind of approach takes different forms across academic disciplines, but the motivating impulse is generally the same: to see behind, to articulate hidden structures, to challenge power, and to effect social change. p. 12

The Bible and Diagonalizing Our Cultural Allegiances

Watkin recognizes that cultural structures need to be uncovered and are not always clear to us. However, rather than using critical theory for that purpose, he wants to use—of all things—the Bible. He believes that Christians have in Scripture an incredible resource for understanding the inner structure of our cultural conversations. He believes that when we do this, we will uncover both the deeper aspirations and hopes that give these conversations their potency. But we will also be able to describe how the gospel transcends their limitations and offers the truest and best news in response.

The Bible, he suggests, offers a system of symbols, narratives, and vocabulary that are meant to orient us to the world. The Bible is not just a source book for theology. It offers us a story and symbolic world that is meant to orient us toward whatever cultural world we inhabit. If this is what it is, it can serve as an analytical tool and guide for us and help prevent us from being captured by the cultural scripts that surround us. In short, Watkin wants to offer a diagnostic on culture with the Bible as his primary lens of analysis.

Watkin is attentive to the risk of presenting Christianity and culture as neatly contained and separate from one another, as if our only task is to consider how these two could possibly mix and what kind of “cultural concentration” is permissible. “Trying to separate Christianity from culture,” says Watkin, “is like trying to extract the flour from a baked cake: it’s a fool’s errand that destroys what it examines and only creates a useless mess.” 18

The reality, of course, is much more complex. There are many aspects of our culture that have deeply Christian roots. A simple example would be our language—turns of phrase like “turn the other cheek,” or “go the extra mile” have obvious roots in the teachings of Christ but have become so commonplace that those roots have become invisible to us. Another well-worn observation is widespread acceptance of contemporary moral intuitions around human dignity and the importance of equality, compassion, and justice—each of which has a specific and distinctively Christian genealogy. As Tom Holland has noted, “To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.” 19

So when approaching the task of using the Bible to uncover cultural structures and substructures, Watkin suggests a somewhat novel term. He says that our approach to culture should be to diagonalize it. What does he p. 13 mean by this term? Watkin sees a cultural landscape littered with dichotomies that tempt us toward a sub-Christian cultural engagement. He is deeply sympathetic to the challenge of cultural engagement in the context of an empty shrine. How do we understand the cultural longings and fears that are embedded in our most challenging conversations? Watkin believes that in this context we need to develop the skill of critiquing these dichotomies. By diagonalize, then, he means marshaling the resources of the Bible in search of an alternative that fulfills the deepest aspirations of each without simply combining the two ideas or seeking a mushy compromise in the middle. “Given a choice between two camps or positions in our culture,” he says, “the Bible frequently settles for neither and presents us with something richer than both, a subtler solution that neither position has the resources to imagine.” 20

Watkin uses what he describes as a paradigmatic example from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. There Paul highlights a cultural dichotomy: the Jews, he says, demand signs while the Greeks seek wisdom. We can imagine a culturally engaged observer in Paul’s day being torn between the religious zeal of the former and the sophisticated cultural respectability of the latter. This same dichotomy might be present in a different form today. Paul’s understanding of the gospel does not affirm either, according to Watkin, but diagonalizes the dichotomy by pointing out how Christ both subverts and transcends it. There is something distinctively Christian about the cross of Christ that subverts and transcends our desire for spiritual validation through signs of power. Christ crucified as the power of God on display for the world is something unanticipated, beautiful, subversive, and true.

Likewise, Christ crucified demonstrates a deep salvation-oriented wisdom that could not have come from the brightest philosophical minds of this or any other time. It is not the final link on a chain of human logic. It transcends human rationality. If the dichotomy is between “signs” and “wisdom,” the biblical diagonalization is Christ crucified, the power and wisdom of God, a more powerful sign and a deeper wisdom than we could have ever imagined. Once we are tuned in to cultural dichotomies in this way, we can use the Bible to seek a way beyond the competing allegiances.

Revisiting Article 12

How does Watkin help us understand our confession’s approach to engaging with culture? We have a beautiful treasure in Article 12. It is trying to navigate a crucial cultural tension around how we understand our relationship to society and state. And it uses the Bible to get beneath p. 14 the surface of this tension. On the one hand, it acknowledges that the state is instituted by God. This language is borrowed directly from Romans 13, which says that no authority exists that is not instituted at some level by God. To rebel against this authority is, in a sense, to rebel against God! On the other hand, Article 12 acknowledges that the state can demand an idolatrous allegiance. It can ask too much of us. Our confession borrows language from Philippians 3:20 when it says that our citizenship is in heaven, and the commentary cites the “unrealized” ideal of a theocratic nation under God that failed because of Israel’s inability to keep the covenant and their desire to imitate other nations.

By using these biblical turns of phrase and alluding to central biblical plotlines, our confession diagonalizes this tension and points beyond it. It addresses the fear that we will become sectarian isolationists by insisting that we owe a legitimate and God-ordained allegiance to the state. It also challenges our tendency to overidentify with the state by relativizing its power under God’s alone. It positions us appropriately as citizens of the world who owe a form of allegiance and participation within our societies. Yet it locates those societies under the ultimate authority of God and undercuts idolatrous versions of nationalism. In doing this it tells us what the state can do, which is preserve order and promote the well-being of all. More importantly it implicitly tells us what the state cannot do: function as our primary identity to which we attach our most fervent hopes and offer our deepest allegiance.

Conclusion

We began with a journey from the village to the city. At the end of his essay, Wiens casts his eye to the future and ponders what may come after the city. Here, he is both tentative and suggestive. On the one hand, he is pessimistic that the city can be a place of Christian faithfulness. But in that place, he takes a tentative theological step. “The city points everywhere, and nowhere,” he says. “In the end, it either points the way to death or it points beyond itself and waits in silence. In so doing, the city also testifies of what it does not know. And so it too is preparation for the gospel.” 21

Wiens returns to the village but in a roundabout way. He returns to the notion of community as the antidote to the splintered image of the city. “A new community must be built,” he concludes, but “It must exist inside the city . . . . I do not know what shapes this community will take, but I am quite sure that it will look different from the church that we now have.” 22 My suggestion is that the gospel diagonalizes the tension between the village and the city. And it does this via the church. The church affirms p. 15 our hunger for a place of belonging and security within a shared allegiance to Christ. It provides an answer to the question many are asking amid the loneliness and alienation of twenty-first century city life: Where can I belong in a way that feels rooted, secure, and meaningful?

Likewise, the church anticipates our ultimate participation within a community that exists for the benefit of the world and will include members of every tribe and nation. It points us toward a New Jerusalem as the terminal destination of a project that began in Eden. Membership in this city will no longer come with worries of disintegration or loneliness or fragmentation. We will no longer feel the need to sacrifice meaning for belonging because at the center of the city is not a temple (with its temptations toward misplaced idolatries) but the unmediated presence of the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb. This is the future to which the church testifies even though it does not yet “know” it experientially. So, we who live amid the tension between the village and the city do not wait in silence but in hope.

Notes

  1. Delbert L. Wiens, “From the Village to the City,” Direction 2 (Oct. 1973–Jan. 1974): 98–149.
  2. Delbert L. Wiens, New Wineskins for Old Wine: A Study of the Mennonite Brethren Church (Hillsboro, KS: Mennonite Brethren Publishing House, 1965).
  3. Wiens, “From the Village to the City” (and throughout), 100 (emph. added).
  4. Wiens, 147.
  5. Wiens, 147.
  6. Wiens, 112.
  7. Wiens, 104.
  8. Wiens, 123.
  9. Wiens, 109.
  10. William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 19.
  11. Cavanaugh, 92.
  12. Cavanaugh, 47.
  13. Tim Perry, When Politics Becomes Heresy: The Idol of Power and the Gospel of Christ (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2025), 40. p. 16
  14. Richard Beck, “Reflections on Faith and Politics: Part 3, The Threat of Worldview Defense,” Experimental Theology with Richard Beck, 13 October 2025, emph. in the original, https://richardbeck.substack.com/p/reflections-on-faith-and-politics-d1c.
  15. Alisdair MacIntyre, as quoted.in Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy, 36–37.
  16. Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2022), 461.
  17. Tim Keller, foreword to Biblical Critical Theory, by Christopher Watkin (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2022), xv.
  18. Watkin, 15.
  19. Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic, 2019), xxv.
  20. Watkin, 15.
  21. Wiens, 146–47.
  22. Wiens, 147.
Gil Dueck (PhD, Vrije Universiteit) serves as academic dean at Columbia Bible College (Abbotsford, BC) and teaches in the areas of theology and ethics. He lives with his wife, Shelley, and their three daughters in Abbotsford. This article is a revised version of a paper presented at Equip 2025 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, October 2025.

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