How is a Christian to live in the earthly city? (Rome)

Politics Between the Earthly City and the City of God in Christianity ... The former was a critic of political self-divinization of both pagan and Christian Rome, ... the Christian life and the earthly life: the city of God and the earthly city. ... it is insufficiently social.5 This is why his great book is titled, City of God.

Explanation:

FROM THEIR FIRST HEADQUARTERS in the holy city of Jerusalem, to their future Western hub in the imperial city of Rome, the apostles’ mission was an urban one. As they set out to fulfill Jesus’ final commission, recorded in Matthew 28:19, their route from Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria, and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8) leapfrogged from one ancient Near Eastern city to the next.

The apostle Paul pursued this path with such zeal that he eventually thought he had saturated the area “from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum” (Rom. 15:19, 23) and so headed off toward Spain. By the late second century, the Way (one of the earliest names applied to Christianity) began to look like a truly global urban movement. The Epistle to Diognetus (second century) claims, “What the soul is in the body—that is what Christians are in the world. The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world.”

escalation means to increase in intensity, extent, or amount.

the social contract theory