Reinterpreting Jeremiah 29 amid the Deconstruction of Urban Space: A Theology of Exile in Response to Contemporary Gentrification

Abstract

The massive urbanization and spatial restructuring of Indonesian metropolitan areas have intensified gentrification, systematically displacing lower-income communities from city centers to peripheries—a condition this study conceptualizes as "internal exile"—while the classic text of Jeremiah 29:7 has been reductively deployed in Indonesian churches as a passive slogan to "pray for the city," stripped of its radical spatial and political implications. Employing a qualitative-interdisciplinary method that integrates biblical exegesis with the socio-spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey within a contextual hermeneutical framework, this article reinterprets Jeremiah 29:4–7 to demonstrate three claims: first, gentrification constitutes a structural form of internal exile that negates the marginalized population's right to inhabit urban life; second, the divine imperatives to "build houses," "plant gardens," and "seek the shalom of the city" are not passive survival instructions but subversive, counter-hegemonic mandates for economic rootedness, communal resilience, and active participation in public affairs within an oppressive urban system; and third, the prophetic call for shalom—understood as holistic justice and equitable access—demands that the church transcend its gated-community mentality and re-embody its missional identity as an agent of spatial advocacy and social solidarity with the displaced, thereby contributing to the development of a contextual Indonesian urban theology that refuses to divorce biblical fidelity from the concrete struggle for spatial justice.