Twenty-two reasons to love the earth

Why Christians take the extra-human creation seriously:

1. God declares all things good; he made them and blessed them. Even before the arrival of humanity, God declared his handiwork "good" and blessed it (Genesis 1).

2. God sustains and cares for all life, not just human life. Psalm 104 and Job 38-41 celebrate the created order in its bounty, complexity and divine providence outside of reference to human affairs. In Matthew 10.29 and Luke 12.6 Jesus teaches that not even a single sparrow escapes the caring notice of God. Why should we disparage or dismiss that which God cares for?

3. God's plan (intimated and initiated in the resurrection of Christ) is the renewal of all things through their liberation from bondage to decay. Why would redemption be of anything less than the scope of creation? We hope not for redemption from the world, but the redemption of the world.

4. "The earth is the LORD's and everything in it!" (Psalm 24.1). How we treat the creation is a reflection on what we think of the Creator. My parents built and own the house where I grew up; if I decided to ransack it to make a quick profit, that would reveal something deeply broken about my relationship with them.

5. Human economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. We depend on natural ecosystems for every breath we take, every mouthful of food, every sip of clean water. The "environment" is not simply the background to our everyday activities, the earth is our home. Even if we thought our obligations ended with humans, we would have pressing reasons to care for life beyond humanity. This is basic prudence. (Proverbs 8.12)

6. Our livelihoods are a fraction of our current lifestyle. That is, we can easily thrive on far less than we presently consume, indicating that our culture generally accepts idolatry in the form of consumerism, where our purchases define our identity. We can easily repent of our idolatrous over-consumption without any threat to our livelihoods (though there may be some industries that need to shrink significantly or die altogether). Natural ecosystems are not a necessary victim of our flourishing; there is no ultimate competition between our well-being and that of the rest of the planet's living systems.

7. Human beings are not souls trapped in bodies, but embodied lives. Our future is resurrection like Christ's and any spirituality that ends up hating the body (and the natural world upon which it relies) is an expression of what Nietzsche correctly diagnoses as ressentiment. True spirituality is earthy. (Matthew 6.10)

8. We are members of the community of creation, not demi-gods without obligations towards our fellow creatures. Anthropocentric domination is a misreading of godly human authority as caring service. (Genesis 1-2)

9. We need the extra-human creation in order to fulfil our role (and they need us) in joining together in praise of the Creator (e.g. Pss 96; 148).

10. God has filled the world with beauty and only the hardhearted and blind ignore it.

11. God's saving purposes are not limited to humans. If God has not limited his gospel to one particular race, age, gender, culture or class, why would he limit it to one species? Jesus' death was for all creation (Colossians 1.15-20). In the archetypal salvation narrative of Genesis 6-9, Noah and his family are saved along with representatives of the rest of the community of creation.

12. Wisdom requires paying attention to the world beyond the human. Jesus enjoins us to consider the sparrows and lilies (Matthew 6.26, 28). Wise king Solomon spoke of trees (1 Kings 4.29-34) and Proverbs 12.10 points out that "The godly care for their animals, but the wicked are always cruel". Remember that the world's first animal welfare organisation, the RSPCA, was founded by William Wilberforce, the same man who helped lead the campaign to abolish modern slavery.

13. The journey of becoming a neighbour involves the ongoing expansion of our horizon of love. When we are gripped by God's love, we are freed from the echo-chamber of our own concerns into caring for our neighbour. But just who is our neighbour? The answer to that question can never be delimited in advance but must be discovered as we come across those in need. Are other creatures also (in some sense) our neighbours? In the end, I believe so. For instance, Deuteronomy 24-25 places concern for the needs of oxen amongst concern for poor labourers, the widowed, orphans and aliens. Compassion is not circumscribed by the human.

14. Our neglect is having dire consequences, but the freedom to repent is the first and most foundational freedom.

I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

15. The earth is our mother. Remember, anthropomorphism is distinct from deification and this particular one is ancient and scriptural (Genesis 1.24; Romans 8.22).

16. God has promised to "destroy the destroyers of the earth" (Revelation 11.18). Divine justice is not limited to our mistreatment of him and one another. God's transformative evaluation (otherwise known as his judgement) embraces all the deeds done in the body (2 Corinthians 5.10), not just those that directly relate to human interactions.

17. Failure to attend to the needs of the more than human creation causes real and serious harms to our human neighbours. Ecological injustice is a major cause of human suffering. (Romans 13.10)

18. Throughout the holy scriptures are examples of idolatry (the worship of creatures rather than the Creator) leading to negative ecological consequences. (e.g. Leviticus 18)

19. Mistreating other animals is a failure of compassion. Wisdom embraces more than human needs. (Proverbs 12.10)

20. Greed, hubris and fear are major motives behind the systems, cultures, actions and inactions that are degrading the Earth. (Luke 12.15)

21. There are demonic powers that destroy life, oppress people and seek to deceive us all that are operative in the desecration of God's good world. (Ephesians 6.12)

22. And finally, because God calls humanity into the care of this place. Stewardship is a much-abused concept, but within a broader theological vision of creation and humanity, it has its place. (Genesis 1-2; Ps 8)

Which of these do you find most compelling? Least plausible? What have I missed?

In case of rapture, this blog is fully automated

There has been much discussion about a group in the US predicting the "rapture" of believers today. I probably don't need to repeat that predicting dates for eschatological events is silly and unscriptural ("no one knows the day or the hour" - Matthew 24.36). Nor that the very idea of the rapture - a sudden removal of believers from the earth by the hand of God - is also based on a misreading of a couple of passages. Lacking the time to give a full account at this point (other things have dragged me away), I suggest this post or this short piece by N. T. Wright.

Of course, this idea is but one manifestation of a Christian hope that gets things upside down. We are not going to heaven; heaven is coming to us.

Lent: What is the reward of fasting?

"Beware of practising your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. [...] And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you."

- Matthew 6.1, 16-18 (NRSV).

Does fasting earn spiritual brownie points? Does every meal skipped now give us an extra helping at the messianic feast of the age to come? I don't think that this is Jesus' point here. He is warning against those whose acts of piety (he mentions charitable giving, prayer and fasting) are done in order to be seen by others. Jesus has no problem with good deeds that are visible to others. Indeed, just a few verses earlier, he taught his listeners to "let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven" (Matthew 5.16, NRSV). The issue here is not the visibility of the works, but their purpose. Ostentatious display somehow undermines the point of such deeds, which suggests that their point has to do with our hearts, with our motives and desires (a conclusion also suggested a few verses later in 6.19-21, where Jesus speaks of what it is that our hearts treasure). We give, pray and fast in order to allow our hearts to be shaped by such disciplines. These activities are done for the healing of our desires not the enhancement of our reputation. At least part of the reward of fasting, then, is to discover that our treasure is indeed heavenly and so free from the vicissitudes of material possessions or social reputation.

"Heaven" in Matthew's Gospel is not code for eschatological promise (as it is often misused in much Christian discourse), but is either a reference to God's dwelling place (5.34, 14.19 and all occurrences of "Father in heaven"), or a synecdoche for God himself (3.17, 16.1, 18.18, 21.25 and all occurrences of "kingdom of heaven"). In other words, when Jesus speaks of storing up treasure in heaven, he is not first and foremost talking about the future (unlike, say 1 Peter 1.4, though even there the hope is that it will be revealed, not that we will go to heaven to be with it). Instead, storing up treasure in heaven means cherishing God, seeking first his kingdom and his righteousness. It means a transformation of our desires so that we are not seeking our own glory but delighting in God's. And this is why any attempt to gain credit before others through acts of piety destroys the very purpose of those acts, since it distracts us from the chance to have our desires realigned towards God and his purposes.

Therefore, perhaps the "reward" of fasting (or prayer or giving) that Jesus refers to in Matthew 6 is not that we somehow earn a better future, but that our desires take another step on the path to healing, that we are slowly liberated from our crippling self-obsession. This is no mercenary bonus, unrelated to the activity that wins it. It is the appropriate outcome of the very activities that seek to draw us out of the echo chamber of own hearts. Our reward might well be that we become a little more capable of love.
I have tried head off one potential misunderstanding of this post at the pass.

Why I'm not going to heaven

Heaven's above!
Yuri Gagarin, the first human to orbit the earth, is reputed to have said upon his return, "I looked and looked but I didn’t see God". God is not in heaven; we have now been there.

This anecdote may make us smile. Heaven is indeed well-known as the dwelling-place of God, yet when Christians pray to "our Father in heaven" we do not mean that God is literally to be glimpsed by cosmonauts up above the ionosphere in the heavens. The Scriptures do frequently speak of "the heavens" in this literal sense of what you see when you look up on a clear night. But the term gains extra layers of meaning as we follow the biblical story from the creation of the heavens and the earth in Genesis 1-2 through to the marriage of heaven and earth in Revelation 21-22. Heaven comes to mean a reality far deeper, richer and more overarching than merely the sky.

For many Christians, "heaven" has come to serve as a shorthand for everything we hope for, for the ultimate goal of our salvation, for the blissful land of rest at the end of our journey. We populate this realm with images from cartoons and movies, in which white robed figures with haloes play harps on clouds, or perhaps play rugby against the angels. Even where the content is left more vague, much Christian piety assumes that going to heaven when we die is the content of Christian hope. This theme is found in many of our songs, mentioned at many funerals, serves as a focal point in evangelism, and is frequently discussed in wistful or anguished conversations late at night.

Heaven: the origin, not the goal, of our salvation
However, a closer reading of the biblical narrative would suggest that such conceptions are significantly wide of the mark. The good news of Jesus certainly does hold out a stunning hope in the face of death and for a dying world. But it is not that we will go to heaven. It is that heaven will come to us. It is not that we will pass into a higher realm at death, but that, one day, God will transform this world so that his will is done on earth as it is in heaven. It is not that there is life after death for an immortal soul, but that at some point after our death, God will raise us bodily as he did for Jesus. Although there are a few passing references to the fact that those who have died in Christ are not lost, but are now with him, this is never held out as the primary content of our hope.

This is worth pausing over. We are indeed "citizens of heaven", but this doesn’t mean we hope to end up there. Instead, it is from heaven that we await a Saviour who will raise us to have glorious bodies like his (Philippians 3.20-21). Our inheritance is indeed in heaven, but that is because Jesus is our hope, and he is hidden until the day our living (i.e. resurrection) hope is realised (1 Peter 1.3; see also Colossians 1.5). We seek to enter “the kingdom of heaven”, but this is Matthew’s way of speaking of what is elsewhere called "the kingdom of God"; "heaven" here is simply a reverent way of referring to God without directly mentioning him (see also Luke 15:18). We could go on and on, but nowhere does the New Testament teach that going to heaven when we die is the focus of Christian hope.

The truly Christian hope, based on the experience of Jesus, is for resurrection, not merely an otherworldly existence after death. Resurrection is a powerful act of God to vindicate and transform our lowly bodies to be like Jesus’ glorious body, for us to be raised as he was raised, not simply back from the dead into mortal bodies to die again, but raised in glory and freedom.

"Your will be done on earth"
And it doesn’t end with our bodies. Our hope is for God to say "yes and amen" to the creation that he declared good, very good. It is for the earth to be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea, for death to be swallowed up in victorious new life, for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. In short, our hope is not to escape this place and these bodies and go elsewhere, it is for God to heal and bring new life to his broken creation, conquering death and decay forever.

Thus, Christian hope is not for redemption from the world, but for the redemption of the world. Jesus’ resurrection therefore has implications not just our bodies, but also for the entire created order of which they are a part. In Romans 8 Paul pictures the created order as a woman giving birth, waiting and straining for a future joy, despite pain and distress at the moment. Switching metaphors, he says that creation is like a prisoner, in bondage to decay. So while everything currently falls apart, God has something surprising planned: a gaol-break! And creation is yearning, groaning for that day. And so, says Paul, are all those who have gotten their first taste of God’s future in the Holy Spirit. We too groan and yearn for that day when our bodies will be redeemed, that is, raised into glorious freedom.

Matter matters
That heaven is not the end of the world has all kinds of implications. Here, briefly, are four.

God has not abandoned his good creation.
The God who has the power to call things which are not into existence is the same God who raises the dead (Romans 4.17). Therefore, redemption is not fundamentally opposed to creation and the created order, but vindicates it. And that means that the church is not the opposite of the world, but an imperfect foretaste of the world’s true future.

God says "yes" to life.
His "no" of judgement is only to be understood within an overarching "yes" to Christ, to humanity, to his world, to life. He opposes that which opposes the flourishing of his creation. God is unashamedly positive about all that is good in the world: he says "yes" to love, to laughter, to sharing, to sex, to food, to fun, to music, to matter. It is because he loves the world that he will not put up with its present disfigurements.

Humanity as humanity matters.
Jesus was raised, and remains, a human (1 Timothy 2.5). We await resurrection as humans. Nothing that is truly human will ultimately perish (though all must be transformed). This makes human endeavour and relationships noble, even while they remain tragically flawed. Christians remain humans, with much still in common with our neighbours. Secular work in God’s good world is not to be despised or treated merely instrumentally. Neither is art, or education, or healthcare, or agriculture, or science. There is much about these activities that will not endure, and much that requires reform; yet these tasks all participate as part of what it is to be a human creature.

What we do with our bodies and the planet matters.
Not because we can create the kingdom of God or sculpt our resurrection bodies now, but because God cares for them. Bodies and the broader environment in which they find their place are good gifts, worth caring for. Just as our obedience will never be complete in this age, yet we keep thanking, trusting and loving God, so our care for creation is presently an imperfectible, yet unavoidable, responsibility and privilege. We must therefore also reject any dualism that opposes ‘spiritual’ to 'physical' concerns. To be truly spiritual is to be enlivened, empowered, cleansed and directed by the Holy Spirit of life, who is the midwife our birth (Job 33:4) and our rebirth (Titus 3.5), and the midwife of the world’s birth (Genesis 1.2) and rebirth (Romans 8.22-23). To be a friend of God is to be a friend of creation, of humanity, of life - the kind of friend that hates what is evil, clings to what is good, that is not overcome by evil, but overcomes evil with good (Romans 12.9, 21).
This article was originally published in Salt magazine with the title "Heaven: It's not the end of the world" in Autumn 2009 and then online by WebSalt. Long time readers (or those who browse the sidebar) may recognise that it is a condensed version of my sixteen part series on heaven from the early days of this blog in 2006. I thought I would repost it here (with permission from the Salt editor) in order to provide a more accessible and convenient form of the argument in a single post. Those looking for a little more detail are referred to the full series.

Prudence and hope

What is the relationship between prudence and hope? How do our fallible and stumbling attempts to project, predict and plan for the future that lies immediately ahead of us relate to God's eschatological promises to make all things new? How does Christian hope for the last things shed light (or darkness) upon the penultimate things? In particular, how is our exploration and expectation of the immediate future related to the final consummation of all things? If Christian hope is alien in origin (does not arise from innate possibilities within our present situation, is not from us as creatures) yet intimate in effect (does not abandon or replace the created order or humanity, is for us as creatures) - that is only to say, if Christian hope is properly christological - where does this make a difference as we face the uncertainties and apparent inevitabilities of the coming years?

I suspect that these are going to be significant questions in the constructive theological phase of my thesis. I have a number of thoughts, but have decided simply to throw some questions out there to begin with and see if there are any nibbles or insights.

Bad theology kills

"U.S. Representative John Shimkus, possible future chairman of the Congressional committee that deals with energy and its attendant environmental concerns, believes that climate change should not concern us since God has already promised not to destroy the Earth."

Cathal Kelly, "God will save us from climate change: US Representative".

You can watch his relevant comments here, where he claims: "The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood."

God may have promised to Noah that "never again would there be a flood to destroy the earth", but he made no such promise to thwart our ongoing (and increasingly successful) attempt to undermine the conditions for stable human civilisation through our hubris and greed. The Noah account in Genesis doesn't promise no more floods, not even no future floods that wipe out cities or bring down societies, far less that God will prevent us from causing floods through our own shortsightedness, just that "all flesh" will not be cut off by a flood again. Representative Shimkus has misread the passage, perhaps through failing to distinguish different kinds of threats. A flood (or other threat) doesn't need to cut off all flesh or to be "the end of the world" for it to be worth serious policy consideration.

Sloppy exegesis and an escapist eschatology are here linked directly to deadly politics. Bad theology kills.

How green is God? A reply to Lionel Windsor

Is my God greener than Lionel's?
I've just come across a talk written by Lionel Windsor, whom I know and respect from my MTC days. It was published at some stage in the last 12 months by AFES's SALT Magazine under the title, "Is God green?". It can be found in five parts: #1, #2a, #2b, #3a, #3b. Having recently written a similar kind of piece for the same publication, it was interesting to note how much overlap our pieces had. His was longer, more conversational and an easier read but I'd say we agree on about 90% of the theological and ethical content.

We agree on the goodness of creation distinct from human usefulness, on the depth of human sinfulness and its effects on ecological health,* on the distinction between treating symptoms and treating the underlying disease, on the centrality of Christ and his death and resurrection for any theological discussion of treating this disease, on the universal (not merely human) scope of Christ's redemptive action, on the church as the first fruits of a redeemed humanity, on the anticipatory nature of Christian discipleship, on the impossibility of our actions "saving the world", on the significance of eschatology and God's future judgement and renewal in ecological ethics, on the aptness of yearning and active waiting, on the endurance of love and the passing away of the present form of the world,** on the cruciality of gospel proclamation and probably on much else as well.
*I think his analysis of the links between ecological destruction and human sin could be extended into social structures that give our greed, pride, apathy and so on extra momentum, and make some of these issues "built in" to the way we collectively and habitually do things.
**I would phrase certain sections of his talk quite differently and also emphasize the continuity of the resurrected body with the corpse - that it is this body that is resurrected and transformed, not some replacement for it - and so also expect a measure of continuity between the renewed creation and the old. Though since Lionel is happy to speak of creation being perfected and makes reference to Paul's seed analogy in 1 Corinthians 15, I don't think we're really too far apart here.

Our differences (such as I can discern from a single article and I apologise if I've misread him) seem to revolve around two issues. First: the relationship of ecological catastrophe to divine judgement. Lionel says,

"[T]he judgement day will not come before God is ready. So if you think that the human race will wipe itself off the face of the map through environmental disasters, then that is actually an arrogant attitude. Final judgement is God's job. Right now, God is keeping the world until he is ready to judge. We can’t wipe ourselves out because God will not let that happen until he is ready to judge us!"

He seems to imply that divine judgement is limited purely to the final judgement, whereas I think that the unveiling of God's wrath against human folly is already evident today in our being handed over to the consequences of our own greed and stupidity as discussed in Romans 1. Thus, ecological catastrophe can already be understood as manifestation of God's judgement in allowing us to experience the destructive effects of our search for invulnerability. We taste our own medicine and find that it is poison; we have to lie in the bed we have made. So, Lionel's contrasting of ecological catastrophes with divine judgement in order to avoid misunderstanding of eschatological judgement masks their present connection. I suspect, however, he may well be entirely happy with this nuance.*
*UPDATE Lionel has clarified that he was here only referring to final judgement and quite rightly pointed out that he discusses my concern in part 2a. My apologies for not re-checking my point.

But there is a further claim being made here, even about the day of eschatological judgement, namely, that human actions will have no part in bringing it about (even inadvertently). To my mind, the fact that the timing of the day of judgement is in the hands of God and so is hidden from human knowledge (two common scriptural themes) doesn't necessarily mean that God might not use human instruments in bringing about an end to human history. God's actions are frequently mediated by imminent agents and the images used of ultimate judgement are, I take it, largely metaphorical, such that its actual shape is not known in advance, only its inevitability and decisiveness (amongst other things). But Lionel seems to see final judgement as God's exclusive prerogative without any human instrumentality (apart from Christ the judge, of course).

And this means that Lionel is confident that, try as we might, we can't wipe ourselves out. I am not so sure. Certainly, we can so damage the living systems on which we thoroughly rely that our civilisation and way of life falls apart (whether quickly or slowly). Indeed, we can do this through the speedier nuclear option as well as the slightly delayed ecological route. Can we entirely "wipe ourselves out", presumably meaning the extinction of the human race as a whole? At a practical level, I don't see that it beyond our present power and theologically I see no promises that this cannot happen. This doesn't mean we thereby escape judgement, or that all hope is lost, because even if we entirely destroy ourselves, God can raise the dead. Suicide is no way out, either individually or collectively. The closest I think we see to a scriptural expectation of humanity's continued existence until final judgement is Paul's comment in 1 Corinthians 15 that "we shall not all sleep, though we shall all be changed" (a comment also applicable to babies, by the way). However, even this is not decisive as I think Paul's point is that death is not a necessary route to the kind of transformation of which he speaks. That Paul does not mention the possibility of the self-destruction of the entire human race may have more to do with a pre-industrial imagination not yet shaped by the staggering increase in human agency that has come in the modern era than with a divine promise of the imperishability of our species.

But the point is a minor one, and I don't place much weight on it. It is enough that we certainly have the power to wound ourselves grievously, to decimate the possibility of life on earth and shatter or erode the conditions under which our society is possible. And while these may not have ultimate significance, their penultimate import is weighty indeed.

The second, and I suspect more important, difference concerns the relation of the good to the best, or of deeds of love with words of love. Lionel paints a moving picture of composting out of love for neighbour, or even lobbying the G8 for the same reason. But then he places such activity in direct competition with "speaking the word of the Lord to others", and implies that doing one means the inability to do the other. They are competitors to my limited time and energy:

"But what is the greatest labour in the Lord? Compost heaps take time. Lobbying G8 leaders takes even more time. And we don’t have an unlimited time here on earth. Sure, these are good ideas, but how do I decide what is the most urgent thing? The primary, the greatest labour in the Lord? Isn't it to speak the word of the Lord to others? Isn't it to share Jesus with your friends and family?"

But I say, why either/or? Why not both-and? The good need not be the enemy of the best. The promotion of the gospel is not a zero sum game between words and deeds. Both are necessary; neither is sufficient. There is no conflict between loving God and his word of life for all and loving my neighbour in a dying world.

And so, despite much in common, I suspect that Lionel and I end up with somewhat different estimations of the place of ecological responsibility in Christian discipleship. My subheading was of course tongue in cheek, as though it were a matter of competition. But the differences between us are nonetheless of (penultimate) importance, since Christians have too often been too quick to sidestep the gospel invitation to love our ecological neighbours, or to relegate such matters to mere optional extras.

With these points mentioned, I warmly recommend you read his piece as a cogent introduction to an evangelical ecological theology.

Of gloom, doom and empty tombs

My old subheading used to be quite a mouthful:

A blog - always room for one more - devoted to thinking things through to the end. But not in a gloomy, doomy, or weird mushroomy kind of way, but in the roomy & quietly empty tomby kind of way that the God & Father of Jesus seems to work.

I changed it to make it snappier, but also to highlight a slight shift in focus here. The old description focused on "thinking things through to the end", i.e. on eschatology, the Christian doctrine of the 'last things' and of God's promised future in Christ. I then distinguished what I see as a properly Christian hope, based on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead ("empty tomb"), from dark apocalyptic scenarios of destruction ("gloomy and doomy" eschatologies) as well as from unfounded speculation and wild conjecture ("weird mushroomy" eschatology). I have long had in my profile that one of my nemeses is "escapist eschatologies", that is, understandings of God's promised future that lead us away from engagement with the world and our neighbour based on the misunderstanding that this present life is either irrelevant or mere preparation, and that our physical existence is a problem from which we must be liberated. In short, I wanted to distinguish Christian hope for the redemption of the world from sub-Christian hope for redemption from the world.

I still hold to all that, but the emphasis has shifted.

Reflecting the focus of my PhD work, this blog now spends more time on the ethical implications of hope based on an empty tomb. I am now writing more about eschatological ethics than ethical eschatology.

And the particular context that interests me is pursuing such ethical reflection amongst the gloom and doom of our present situation of interlocking ecological crises, which threaten the viability of life as we currently know it. Anyone with a passing acquaintance with these threats knows things are bad, and the more you look, the worse things seem: complex, intractable and menacing.

How is it possible amidst such nightmares to maintain Christian hope? One solution is to deny the darkness of the gathering gloom, or declare it irrelevant in comparison to the glorious news of a resurrected saviour. But such answers are shallow and ultimately irrelevant because they are once more escapist. Good theology leads us back into our situation to see it afresh, not off into comforting timeless truths. Unless we can face the shadows with honesty and integrity (which will include grief and lamentation as ways of groaning in hope), then I suspect that our theology might not be walking the way of the cross. Only a theology that sits with those in darkness can hope for the coming dawn.

Losing the wood for the trees, and vice versa: or, the eschatological reconciliation of complex goods

"...evil is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard to the whole,. whether the whole be conceived as the immediate community, or the total community of mankind, or the total order of the world. The good is, on the other hand, always the harmony of the whole on various levels. Devotion to a subordinate and premature 'whole', such as the nation, may of course become evil, viewed from the perspective of a larger whole, such as the community of mankind."

- Reinhold Neibuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 14.

In this account, evil is a failure of contextualisation, a mistaking of a part for the whole, an insufficient awakening to the complex goods of the world. There may be other aspects to an account of evil (not simply the intellect, but also our will and imagination and desire are corrupt. All evil is not simply ignorance), but this is an important point to ponder. Is my desire for some good thing actually undermining someone else's blessing? Or is the way that I am pursuing my desire making it harder for others to love life? Or perhaps even more subtly and yet disastrously, might the aggregation of many individuals pursuing their various goods diminish the common good of each?

And yet, there are still "various levels" at which the good is to be sought, noticed, preserved and pursued. It will not do simply to replace a myopic individualism with a hypermetropic collectivism. It is often difficult to see how the good of both the individual and the wider community can be attained when they come into conflict, but if life is not ultimately a competition then it is possible to attempt the creative and imaginative task of seeking an integration between apparently competing goods in hope that such a reconciliation is possible. Or, in other words, we hope for win-win situations.

Yet our grasp on what is good, on what constitutes a life truly called blessed, is fragmentary. The complexity of all the various goods in a single human life, in society and throughout the created order is too vast for any individual to comprehend. And so we continue to mistake partial goods for complete goods and even our provisional attempts at reconciliation may end up creating new injustices. We may even despair of the possibility of win-win outcomes in many situations. We may conclude that it is a dog-eat-dog world and for me and mine to do well, others must do poorly.

And so, this belief (in the non-competitiveness of human, and indeed creaturely, flourishing) is a tenet of faith, presently unseen and repeatedly thwarted by a fallen world. It is an eschatological hope for the reconciliation of all things, anticipated in Christ's earthly life and promised and inaugurated in his resurrection. And so today we seek signs and foretastes of this future reality, bearing witness to the one who is alive and brings life to all. Today is not the day to achieve this final reconciliation, but we must be content in our discontentment, eschewing utopian fantasies for the good that it is possible to do today.
Good to see that Niebuhr agrees with me.

Christianity Today looks at tomorrow

The flagship of popular evangelicalism in the US, Christianity Today, has published an article by their editor-in-chief David Neff in which he argues that a healthy biblical eschatology leads us to more not less concern for ecological responsibility. Titled "Second Coming Eschatology: We care for the environment precisely because God will create a new earth", the article concludes like this:

When I was growing up, eschatology meant "end times"—that is, my church focused on the timing and manner of final events. But Jesus and the apostles played down the time element and even the manner of the End. Instead, they emphasized the inbreaking of God's rule and the way our ability to see his rule helps to transform the present.
If we are given that ability to see God at work, bringing the present into contact with the End, we cannot be indifferent to the way things are. We cannot be deaf to the groanings of Creation. And we can treasure every gift God gives us as a sign of his promises."

Articles like this give me some hope that the tide of popular Christian opinion may yet be turning.

Only theology can save the Earth?

“It may well be that only theology – good theology – can save the Earth now.”

- Jim Wallis, God's Politics: Why the right gets it wrong and the left doesn't get it, 353 (Oxford: Lion, 2005).

Discuss.

New every morning: novelty, imperialism and cataclysm

Continuous Cities • 1
The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-wrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio.

On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services. It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels, and their task of removing the residue of yesterday's existence is surrounded by a respectful silence, like a ritual that inspires devotion, perhaps only because once things have been cast off nobody wants to have to think about them further.

Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse. Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands, and the street cleaners have to fall farther back. The bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher, become stratified, extend over a wider perimeter. Besides, the more Leonia's talent for making new materials excels, the more the rubbish improves in quality, resists time, the elements, fermentations, combustions. A fortress of indestructible leftovers surrounds Leonia, dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains.

This is the result: the more Leonia expels goods, the more it accumulates them; the scales of its past are soldered into a cuirass that cannot be removed. As the city is renewed each day, it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterday's sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday and of all its days and years and decades.

Leonia's rubbish little by little would invade the world, if, from beyond the final crests of its boundless rubbish heap, the street cleaners of other cities were not pressing, also pushing mountains of refuse in front of themselves. Perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonia's boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption. The boundaries between the alien, hostile cities are infected ramparts where the detritus of both support each other, overlap, mingle.

The greater its height grows, the more the danger of a landslide looms: a tin can, an old tyre, an unravelled wine flask, if it rolls towards Leonia, is enough to bring with it an avalanche of unmated shoes, calendars of bygone years, withered flowers, submerging the city in its own past, which it had tried in vain to reject, mingling with the past of the neighbouring cities, finally clean. A cataclysm will flatten the sordid mountain range, cancelling every trace of the metropolis always dressed in new clothes. In the nearby cities they are all ready, waiting with bulldozers to flatten the terrain, to push into the new territory, expand, and drive the new street cleaners still farther out.

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 114-16.

Emerson on the end

"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82)

I don't believe this, though the converse might be true.

Moltmann on escapism

“To believe means to cross in hope and anticipation the bounds that have been penetrated by the raising of the crucified. If we bear that in mind, then this faith can have nothing to do with fleeing the world, with resignation and with escapism. In this hope the soul does not soar above our vale of tears to some imagined heavenly bliss, nor does it sever itself from the earth. … It sees in the resurrection of Christ not the eternity of heaven, but the future of the very earth on which his cross stands.”

- Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope (SCM, 2002 [1967]), 6.

Too often, Christians use bad theology to justify bad politics. Salvation is not a get out of gaol free card that enables the bearer to ignore the concrete situation in which she finds herself. What we do with our lives, our bodies, our communities and our ecosystems matters.

Moltmann on the end of the world

"Some people think that the Bible has to do with the terrors of the apocalypse, and that the apocalypse is 'the end of the world'. The end, they believe, will see the divine 'final solution' of all the unsolved problems in personal life, in world history, and in the cosmos. Apocalyptic fantasy has always painted God's great final Judgement on the Last Day with flaming passion: the good people will go to heaven, the wicked will go to hell, and the world will be annihilated in a storm of fire. We are all familiar, too, with images of the final struggle between God and Satan, Christ and the Antichrist, Good and Evil in the valley of Armageddon - images which can be employed so usefully in political friend-enemy thinking.

"These images are apocalyptic, but are they also Christian? No, they are not; for Christian expectation of the future has nothing whatsoever to do with the end, whether it be the end of life, the end of history, or the end of the world. Christian expectation is about the beginning: the beginning of true life, the beginning of God's kingdom, and the beginning of the new creation of all things into their enduring form. The ancient wisdom of hope says: 'The last things are as the first.' So God's great promise in the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation, is: 'Behold, I make all things new' (21.5). In the light of this ultimate horizon we read the Bible as the book of God's promises and the hopes of men and women - indeed the hopes of everything created; and from the remembrances of their future we find energies for the new beginning. [...] If the last is not the end but the new beginning, we have no need to stare fascinated at the end of life."

- Jürgen Moltmann, In the end - the beginning: the life of hope
(Fortress, 2004), ix-x.

I will be very interested to read the rest of this little book. Moltmann can be so inspiring, though sometimes his language is a little over the top. "Christian hope has nothing whatsoever to do with the end"? What about the end of death? The end of crying and mourning and pain? The end of endings?

"God doesn't do waste"

A message for the new year from Rowan Williams, nicely linking our attitudes towards the world and one another.

Wright on heaven on earth

[The book of] Acts, which of course begins with the story of the Ascension, never once speaks in the way [...our] whole tradition [...] so easily does. At no point in the whole book does anyone ever speak, or even sound as though they’re going to speak, of those who follow Jesus following him to heaven. Nobody says, ‘well, he’s gone on before and we’ll go and join him’. And for a very good reason. When the New Testament speaks of God’s kingdom it never, ever, refers to heaven pure and simple. It always refers to God’s kingdom coming on earth as in heaven, as Jesus himself taught us to pray. We have slipped into the easygoing language of ‘the kingdom of heaven’ in the sense of God’s kingdom being ‘heaven’, but the early church never spoke like that. The point about heaven is that heaven is the control room for earth. Heaven is the CEO’s office from which earth is run – or it’s supposed to be, which is why we’re told to pray for that to become a reality. And the point of the Ascension, paradoxically in terms of the ways in which generations of western Christians have seen it, is that this is the moment when that prayer is gloriously answered.

- N. T. Wright, 'On earth as in heaven', sermon preached 20th May 2007.

I have posted an sixteen-part series on this necessary corrective to our thinking, singing and expectation about heaven and hope. Wright's sermon is a very interesting brief exploration of "what the kingdom of God looks like when it’s on the road, arriving on earth as in heaven."
Eight points for correctly naming the city.

The future of love

Reflections on 1 Corinthians 13.8-13
But is this kind of love really possible? Is it just a pipe dream? Isn’t it all too hard? I’ve tried it and it doesn't work. I’ve tried loving others and have still been treated like dirt. Can’t I just be nice and polite and tolerant instead? Can’t I settle for avoiding people?

Paul’s answer is to turn to the future. Gifts will pass away: prophecy, speaking in tongues, special revelations of knowledge, all will end one day. They are just means to an end, instruments to help us along the way. When we grow up, we put aside baby-talk. When your flatmate arrives back from overseas, you no longer need email, you can talk face to face. All these spiritual gifts are good and can serve the common good, but the common good they serve is love. Love isn’t just a means to an end. Love isn’t just an instrument to help us get along. Love is not just the path of our journey; it is our destination. Love isn’t simply our duty; it is our destiny. As we learn to love, we are in training to speak the language of the future. We are preparing our tastebuds for the coming feast.

And we get a taste now. This is God’s gift. He treats us in a way that brings new health to shattered spirits; he speaks words that heal and build and make us true; he gives himself for us, preferring our benefit to his comfort. He does all this for us, so that we can start to become like him. Love is therefore not a burden; it is a privilege. We get to be a little bit more like God.
Photo by CAC.

Condemning condemnation?

Andrew Errington has posted some thoughts and a confession on condemnation and the goodness of God. Here's a taste of the issues he's wrestling with:

If there is a God who will damn his children forever, I would rather go to hell than to go to heaven and keep the society of such an infamous tyrant. I make my choice now. I despise that doctrine. It has covered the cheeks of this world with tears. It has polluted the hearts of children, and poisoned the imaginations of men…. What right have you, sir, Mr. clergyman, you, minister of the gospel to stand at the portals of the tomb, at the vestibule of eternity, and fill the future with horror and with fear? I do not believe this doctrine, neither do you. If you did, you could not sleep one moment. Any man who believes it, and has within his breast a decent, throbbing heart, will go insane. A man who believes that doctrine and does not go insane has the heart of a snake and the conscience of a hyena.

- Robert Green Ingersoll, The Liberty Of All (1877).

Hope: God sees the world upside down

H/T Frank. A simple idea, but quite effective.

However, to speak of hope, we must speak of Christ crucified. This is what turns the world upside down:

Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

- 1 Corinthians 1.22-25