Why bother? On fighting a losing battle

"It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth's living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and discuss it. Those who did attend the Earth summit in Rio last week solemnly agreed to keep stoking the destructive fires: sixteen times in their text they pledged to pursue "sustained growth", the primary cause of the biosphere's losses.

"The efforts of governments are concentrated not on defending the living Earth from destruction, but on defending the machine that is destroying it. Whenever consumer capitalism becomes snarled up by its own contradictions, governments scramble to mend the machine, to ensure – though it consumes the conditions that sustain our lives – that it runs faster than ever before.

"The thought that it might be the wrong machine, pursuing the wrong task, cannot even be voiced in mainstream politics."

- George Monbiot, After Rio, we know. Governments have given up on the planet.

George Monbiot reflects upon the outcomes of the recent Rio+20 conference, indeed upon the whole sweep of international negotiations since the first Rio conference, and reaches a healthy degree of pessimism. Our present political system is, apparently, incapable of performing the kind of deliberation required to implement policies consistent with its continuation beyond a fairly short timeframe. This much is not particularly news, though the failures at Rio only underscore the tragedy of our present situation.

However, I'd like to highlight the closing paragraphs of Monbiot's piece, where he turns to the question of giving up.

"Some people will respond by giving up, or at least withdrawing from political action. Why, they will ask, should we bother, if the inevitable destination is the loss of so much of what we hold dear: the forests, the brooks, the wetlands, the coral reefs, the sea ice, the glaciers, the birdsong and the night chorus, the soft and steady climate which has treated us kindly for so long? It seems to me that there are at least three reasons.

"The first is to draw out the losses over as long a period as possible, in order to allow our children and grandchildren to experience something of the wonder and delight in the natural world and of the peaceful, unharried lives with which we have been blessed. Is that not a worthy aim, even if there were no other?

"The second is to preserve what we can in the hope that conditions might change. I do not believe that the planet-eating machine, maintained by an army of mechanics, oiled by constant injections of public money, will collapse before the living systems on which it feeds. But I might be wrong. Would it not be a terrible waste to allow the tiger, the rhinoceros, the bluefin tuna, the queen's executioner beetle and the scabious cuckoo bee, the hotlips fungus and the fountain anenome to disappear without a fight if this period of intense exploitation turns out to be a brief one?

"The third is that, while we may have no influence over decisions made elsewhere, there is plenty that can be done within our own borders."

If we compare these reasons with the motivations of someone facing terminal illness, we find some parallels. Why continue any form of treatment when the result will still be death?

First, because sometimes, extending life is worth the effort. There are limits to how far this stretches, but particularly where there are still opportunities to bless and be blessed by others, then the pursuit of a longer life can be a faithful response. I think this is an important perspective, since, in the long run, a warming sun will see the end of all life on earth (perhaps in a few hundred more million years) and indeed entropy will ultimately see the heat death of the universe, making all efforts at sustainability ultimately contingent and temporary. Whether we manage to extend something like the present ecological order for another ten, hundred or thousand years can't hide the fact that change will come. But relative gains still matter. I may be certain of my own death within fewer decades than I have fingers, but I'm still willing to do things that make it more likely that I get onto my second hand, or even onto my second digit.

Second, because one never knows. Perhaps a miraculous remission may materialise after all and the terminal diagnosis turn out to be incorrect, despite all the odds. There are no guarantees of such an outcome, but the possibility remains open. If a cancer patient may hope for the sudden collapse of the tumour that threatens the life of the body, Monbiot is here hoping for the sudden collapse of the machine that threatens the natural world on which it relies. What would it look like for the machine of consumer capitalism to collapse before the collapse of natural systems? Is this an outcome that can be actively pursued or simply hoped for? Obviously, when talking about an politico-economic-cultural system, for it to collapse raises the question of what replaces it. Whether you think there are genuine alternatives that can be realistically implemented on pathways that maintain human flourishing without massive and violent disruption will largely determine whether you are a bright or dark green.

Third, because I might not be able to win the war, but battles can still be won or lost. I might be doomed to die, but symptoms can be treated. Monbiot goes on to speak of re-wilding as a strategy that can be feasibly pursued at a national or sub-national level even in the absence of international agreements. And perhaps there is value in such a move. But his three points leave me wondering: can these be extended? Are there more reasons to keep going, even when to all appearances it looks like a losing battle? I can think of three more.

a) It is the right thing to do. Even if unsuccessful in averting global tragedy, to live in ways that individually and communally show respect for the community of creation and acknowledge our finitude are simply to live in line with the truth about ourselves. Whatever the outcome, to live honestly is to live rightly.

b) The way of the cross is the way of light. Faced with suffering and difficulty, the Christian is called not to shrink back in self-protection, but to walk forward in obedient trust, seeking to love and care even where this comes at personal cost, based on a hope in the God who judges justly. We are not to conform to the pattern of the world - neither its hyper-consumption nor its catastrophist resentment - but to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. What does it look like to deny myself and take up my cross in a world threatened by converging ecological crises? The answer will be complex, though some of the first steps are clear enough.

c) We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Hope for the renewal of all things is not a get out of gaol free card that justifies a life of selfish indulgence, but a summons to live in the light of the future. If God refuses to abandon his good creation, neither can we.

UPDATE: Reposted at Ethos.

This is a finite planet with a finite resource base

Warning To the People of Earth from Bruce Mohun on Vimeo.
William Rees was the co-founder of the ecological footprint concept. This video puts together excerpts from three of his talks and an interview. The concept of an measuring one's ecological footprint in hectares required to sustain my lifestyle is not an exhaustive metric as it doesn't take all factors into account, but it is still a useful shorthand measure that highlights in a single figure how far our lives are above the carrying capacity of the planet, that is, the degree to which we are stealing such capacity from the poor and from future generations.

"There is no way around this. Any politician who says to you 'there is no conflict between the growth of the economy and maintaining the quality of the natural environment' doesn't know what he or she is talking about. Historically, it has always been this way. The more humans take, the less remains for non-human species."

Shades of green: how do we respond to ecological degradation?

Ecological concern is a broad movement, containing much diversity. In my previous post, I mentioned Northcott's account of three approaches to ecological ethics: ecocentric, anthropocentric and theocentric. These refer to the underlying logic of different approaches to ecological ethics.

But there are other ways of categorising the field that might supplement Northcott's suggestion. One categorisation I've also found helpful is to consider the different kinds of responses that are commonly seen. Following a taxonomy coined by Alex Steffen, let us call them light green, bright green and deep green. As with the previous categories, these are tendencies rather than mutually exclusive options. And as with the three approaches mentioned previously, I believe we require elements of all three in a healthy response, since each on its own is insufficient.

Light green
Light green ecological activism assumes that the most effective response begins by winning hearts and minds. Given sufficient information and perhaps some persuasion and attractive exemplars, individuals will understand the necessity and/or benefits of making lifestyle, behavioural and consumer changes. No large political change is required, simply a gradual raising of awareness. Where the people lead, the politicians will follow.

At its best, light green responses place an emphasis on personal responsibility and the necessity of a change of heart to sustain any change of life. The light shade of this green could be read as a reference to an optimism about the human capacity for change in the light of new knowledge, viz. the freedom to repent, or it might refer to the moral superiority of choosing light over darkness.

But the lightness of this shade could also be read as lightweight, lacking in seriousness. At its more fatuous end, consumer choice is the name of the game. If it has "eco" in the label, then buying it will help the planet (ignoring the fact that it might help things more if I were not to buy anything most of the time). As long as the consumers have good information about their personal ecological footprint and products are clearly labelled, then we can rely on the sensible lifestyle choices of individuals to transform the landscape. Light green actions may be susceptible to manipulation through corporate greenwash.

And so even earnest and well-intentioned light green activism may obscure the structural reasons why society develops the way it has, the deep and powerful economic and ideological vested interests in the status quo. It generally fails to question consumerism, merely replacing one kind of consumption for another, albeit one with a lighter footprint.

Bright green
Bright green was Alex Steffen's preferred mode. The focus here is on intelligent transformation of society through better design, technological development and more widely distributed social innovations. This approach assumes that it is possible to have your cake and eat it, that increasing human prosperity is highly compatible with ecological responsibility, that going green is not merely the lesser of two evils, but a chance to embrace a better life for all. The brightness of this green is intended to refer both to the focus on intelligent response and to the optimism concerning human ingenuity and flexibility espoused by many in this camp.

Much of the talk of "green jobs", "low-carbon economy" or "sustainable development" goes here, though these terms can and are, of course, used in government and corporate greenwash for policies pursued for other reasons. Politically, bright green activism advocates radical social and economic change. Bright greens are frequently passionate about redesigning cities (often with reference to new urbanism), transforming the economy to renewables and/or nuclear power, smart grids, electric cars (with vehicle-to-grid capabilities), techno-progressivism, closed loop materials cycles, bio and/or geo-engineering and, in general, the capacity of co-ordinated thoughtful human action to improve a situation.

At its best, bright green activism seeks constructive solutions rather than mere protest. Undoubtedly, it is possible to build a better mouse trap - to design systems, cities and even whole societies that waste less, produce more and more closely align with human and ecological well-being. Systems are indeed important; personal change is insufficient to avoid an ongoing and worsening ecological catastrophe.

Yet bright green thought can be blinded by the brilliance of its vision to two realities: human sinfulness and finitude. It is utopian, and like all utopian dreams, it can easily become a nightmare. We all have a tendency to go with the devil we know, to continue self-destructive habits, to put selfish interests before the interests of others. We are slaves to sin and without spiritual liberation, even the powers of intelligence and optimism are frustrated.

But there is perhaps an even deeper problem for bright green thought than sin, namely, the finitude of the earth and its living systems. That is, at its most euphoric, bright green thought forgets that finitude is a gift and control an illusion. Furthermore, not all human-caused damage is humanly reversible.

Deep green
This green is deep because it attempts to delve beneath the surface of which political party happens to be in power or which new technology is being developed, instead seeking after the underlying philosophical, economic and political causes of ecological degradation. The analysis of the problem is taken deeper than left vs right or the relative merits of nuclear or wind power. The problem lies not in lack of information or political co-ordination, but in industrialism, capitalism, or some foundational component of contemporary society. Like bright greens, deep greens seek radical political and social transformation, including (depending how deep they go) a rejection of consumerism, of contemporary hyper-capitalism, of the logic of the market in all its forms, of industrialism and even, in some cases, of agriculture.

Sometimes it is also called dark green, since it is frequently associated with pessimism about the possibility of sufficient change without massive disruption to human populations. Some dark greens seem to think that a major human die off is inevitable, desirable or both. Yet not all deep green thought is Malthusian, as it seems reasonable to include certain forms of steady state economics under this banner. Perhaps dark green deserves its own category.

Yet deep green is a better label for all approaches that view endless economic growth as ultimately inherently self-limiting. It echoes the term deep ecology, a philosophy that tries to avoid anthropocentrism in our understanding and appreciation of the complex community of life. Human flourishing is both entirely dependent upon and ultimately less important than the flourishing of ecosystems.

At its worst, deep green can be irresponsible or merely heartless in its embrace of the necessary misery associated with economic decline or collapse. It can be self-indulgent in a wholesale rejection of any partial solution or temporary improvement. It can be self-righteous in condemnation, futile in protest, acquiescent in despairing resignation, paralysed by apocalyptic nightmares.

Yet at its best, a deep green perspective refuses to grasp illegitimate hopes. Our all-too-human hopes must die. We need to feel how deep the roots of our predicament are: both within our own hearts (as light green affirms) and woven into the structures of society (as deep green reveals). While the life of Christian discipleship may have room for what Barth calls little hopes, these are only possible once we have crucified any other great hope outside Christ.

Brown
And of course, some people remain brown, perhaps sporting merely a fig leaf of greenwash to cover their advocacy of ongoing exploitation of the creation without serious limits. There are also various shades of brown, but they all smell bad.
First image by Brennan Jacoby.

Perplexed but not in despair: Christian pessimism

"We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair" - 2 Corinthians 4.8.

This is a verse I have often reflected upon, and it seems to me to justify a certain kind of Christian pessimism. Paul is no triumphalist; he makes no claim that the Christian life will consist of steady improvement or sudden perfection. Affliction, difficulty, confusion, grief, yearning, lament, dissatisfaction, weakness, dying: these all belong to the normal Christian experience. Faith in Christ is not a miracle cure for all of life's ills. In fact, it is what enables one to let go of all such delusions as the inevitability of progress or the impossibility of failure, to embrace one's finitude and acknowledge one's fallenness and the brokenness of the whole created order without being crushed by fear or guilt in the process.

Of course, such pessimism is not the whole story, but it is a very important part. Without it, faith is shallow, or simply in denial. Unless we are willing to lose all our false hopes, then real hope is obscured and diluted. Christian faith means the courage to face the truth about ourselves and our inability to secure the results we most earnestly desire.

Karl Rahner offers these thoughts under the heading of "Christian pessimism" as a reflection on 2 Corinthians 4.8.

“Our existence is one of radical perplexity. We have neither the right nor the possibility to ignore this situation or to believe that we can abolish it in any dimension of our experience. I need not point out, or bemoan in detail, the daily experiences that make us perplexed.

“In the beginning of Scripture God tells us that we must rule over nature and her powers. When we do it we start misusing them. We invent all kinds of social systems, and every one of them turns without fail into an occasion of injustice and abuse of power. We claim that we are looking for peace among all peoples, and we get ready for war in order to find peace. The whole of human history is a perpetual swinging back and forth between individualism and collectivism, and humanity has never succeeded in discovering a permanent and universally acceptable compromise between these basic demands of human nature.

“What matters here however is to understand that, for a Christian anthropology, this perplexity in human existence is not merely a transitory stage that, with patience and creative imagination, might eventually be removed from human existence. It is a permanent existential of humanity in history and, although it keeps assuming new forms, it can never be wholly overcome in history. This is an essential feature of a Christian pessimism. It does not matter here whether we explain this pessimism through the fact that we are creatures, and finite creatures at that, or through an appeal to original sin, or by making our ineradicable sinfulness an argument for pessimism.

“Of course, we cannot say that human finitude and historicity alone explain the fact that history cannot follow its course without friction and without blind alleys. Nor can this Christian pessimism be justified merely by the fact that it is impossible fully to harmonize all human knowledge with its many disparate sources, or to build a fully harmonious praxis on the basis of such disparate knowledge. We might also mention that we can never fully understand the meaning of suffering and death. Yet in spite of all this, the Christian interpretation of human existence says that within history, it is never possible wholly and definitively to overcome the riddles of human existence and history, which we experience so clearly and so painfully. Such a hope is excluded by the Christian conviction that we arrive at God’s definitive realm only by passing through death, which itself is the ultimate and all-embracing enigma of human existence. It is true that Christian hope has the right and the duty to project, in the empirical space of our human existence, an image and a promise of a definitive existence. But ultimately this is only the manner in which we practice faith in the consummation that God alone gives, that God’s self is.

“People are afraid of this pessimism. They do not accept it. They repress it. That is why it is the first task of Christian preaching to speak up for it.”

- Karl Rahner, "Christian Pessimism" in Theological Investigations XXII
(trans. Joseph Donceel; London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1991), 156-57.

Something fishy about the free market?

I am no economist nor an economist's son, so correct my faulty thinking here please.

The free market is frequently trumpeted as the best thing since sliced bread, bringing wealth and happiness to millions through the wonders of the invisible hand that guides producers to make just what consumers desire. It's so efficient: rather than the farmer or factory owner or politician having to guess how many litres of semi-skimmed organic milk to produce, demand will set the right price. Consumers happily buy just as much as producers are bottling. This is because the market signals shifts in demand to the producer. Not enough milk coming through? The competition for milk will push the price up, giving the farmers incentive (and capital) to produce more and the consumers incentive to cut back until there is equilibrium once more.

But there is a certain situation in which this mechanism might actually be the worst possible one. Think about fish. The rivers, lakes and oceans have long been an important source of food for all kinds of cultures. And fish are a renewable resource; so long as we don't take all the fish out of the water, some will reproduce to ensure tomorrow's meal as well. But under free market conditions, a finite renewable resource will inevitably be overexploited. If a certain kind of fish is being fished faster than its natural rate of reproduction, fairly soon the fishing boats will return with smaller catches. This reduction in supply will push prices up, reducing consumer demand. Yet higher prices also justify further exploitation of the resource. If it can be sold for a higher price, it makes sense to put more resources into catching that species of (now rarer) fish. Although this higher price is a warning signal that the limits of the resource's ability to renew itself are being reached, the market actually rewards those who keep exploiting it if they can.

This is why regulation is important to avoid killing the goose that lays the golden egg. But of course, fishing is perhaps the classic case in which regulation is very difficult to enforce as it involves many countries and the tragedy of the commons. Also, since no country wants to be the first to cut down its industry, fishing is actually massively subsidised around the world, making the problem worse.*

There is, of course, a deeper problem than the free market, and that is our belief in the possibility and desirability of infinite growth. We need to learn that finitude is a gift.
*From Wikipedia:

"A major international scientific study released in November 2006 in the journal Science found that about one-third of all fishing stocks worldwide have collapsed (with a collapse being defined as a decline to less than 10% of their maximum observed abundance), and that if current trends continue all fish stocks currently fished will collapse within fifty years. However, they also conclude that "available data suggest that at this point, these trends are still reversible"."

For those worried about the effects of their consumer choices on overexploited fisheries, here is a pocket guide giving information about which species are under threat.

Finitude is a gift

Faced with ecological threats of various kinds, many people would rather not think about them. They retreat into denial, or a security based in the possibility of technological advances or the allegedly inevitable forces of the free market. The broad popularity of reaching for hope in the market or technological fixes can be seen in the frequency with which politicians draw upon these themes. We are comfortable and our inertia draws us to answers that require little thought and less change. We trust that the explosive economic growth of the last few hundred years is now the normal trajectory, able to be extrapolated into the foreseeable future.

Wendell Berry has written an excellent article titled "Faustian economics: Hell hath no limits" reflecting upon our collective obsession with the myth of infinite growth. He argues that the pursuit of limitless consumption, unbounded knowledge and endless control is not only a dangerous illusion destroying our planet, but an attack on our very humanity. We will ultimately lose not just the planet, but also our soul. He rediscovers a life-giving alternative (though he doesn't say so explicitly) in a Christian conception of creatureliness. Here is a taste of the essay's opening:

"The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so far, have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such 'biofuels' as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that 'science will find an answer.' The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

"This belief was always indefensible—the real names of global warming are Waste and Greed—and by now it is manifestly foolish. But foolishness on this scale looks disturbingly like a sort of national insanity. We seem to have come to a collective delusion of grandeur, insisting that all of us are “free” to be as conspicuously greedy and wasteful as the most corrupt of kings and queens. (Perhaps by devoting more and more of our already abused cropland to fuel production we will at last cure ourselves of obesity and become fashionably skeletal, hungry but—thank God!—still driving.)"

The full article is not short (approx. 4,000 words), but well worth reading and re-reading. H/T Roberto.

Williams on grace

"[...] the proclamation of Jesus makes concrete the presence of a non-competitive other: God is not to be approached through skilled intermediaries who will see to it that God's 'interest' is safeguarded in a transaction that, by giving privilege to us, may compromise the divine position. And, if God is conceived as needing to be conciliated so that violent reaction may be averted, as in the mind of the unprofitable servant in the parable [see Luke 19.11-27], God is still within the competitive framework; God has a 'good', an interest, that is vulnerable. Whereas, if God's reaction can never be determined by a supposed threat to the divine interest, God's action and mine do not and cannot occupy the same moral and practical space, and are never in rivalry.

"God's action is never, in this picture, reactive: it is always, we could say, prior to human activity, and as such 'gracious' - that is, undetermined by what we do. This in turn changes how I am to see my activity: what it can never be is any kind of bartering for a favourable or advantageous position vis-à-vis the universe and its maker. That God is not threatened by finite action entails that there is a level at which my own being is not capable of being threatened. It is simply established by God's determination as creator - that is, by God's will for what is authentically other to the divine being to exist. My behaviour does not have to be a defensive strategy in the face of what is radically and irreducibly other, because the radicality of that otherness is precisely what establishes my freedom from the necessity to negotiate with it. [...] God's acts are undetermined by ours, and [...] therefore we can never and need never succeed in establishing our position in the universe."

- Rowan Williams, "Interiority and Epiphany: A Reading in New Testament Ethics" in On Christian Theology (Blackwell, 2000), 249.

If God's loving commitment to me is not established or threatened by my actions or inactions, then I am not burdened by the necessity of making something of myself. The infinite challenge posed to each of us is not to meet God's needs, but to live in the freedom of God's infinite acceptance.
Fifteen points for picking the Sydney location.

Williams on our delusions of control and finality

"Human beings are perennially vulnerable to the temptation of arrogating divinity to themselves. It is a temptation manifest in the refusal to accept finitude, creatureliness and dependence – what Ernest Becker has called the 'causa sui project', the delusion that the world is my world, a world controllable by my will and judgement. But it is no less manifest in what we call the apocalyptic delusion, the belief that we can stop, reverse or cancel history, that we can assume the 'divine' prerogative of acting with decisive finality in the affairs of the world, that we can 'make an end'. Because our human history is marked by an ultimate severing of relations in death, and because death is something we can inflict (though not resist), it is not surprising that we nurture this delusion. It can be a source of relief: by the murder of another, by the obliteration of a race, by the consignment of someone to the isolation of prison or hospital, by the suffocation of my own memory, I can be free ('A little water clears us of this deed'). Or it can be a source of horror and despair: death ends all hope of reconciliation, it fixes in an everlasting rictus the hopeless grimace of failure in a relationship. We may stand appalled at our destructiveness, believing that we have indeed destroyed, annihilated, our possibilities.

"The resurrection as symbol declares precisely our incapacity for apocalyptic destruction – and equally declares that the 'divine prerogative' of destruction is in any case a fantasy. God’s act is faithful to his character as creator, and he will destroy no part of this world: his apocalyptic act is one of restoration, the opening of the book which contains all history."

- Rowan Williams, Easter: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, 17.

Williams makes at least two important points here. First, our desire to "wrap things up", achieving neatness and cohesion, can be a symptom of a refusal to be a creature, a misdirected protest against our own finitude. Not only is this futile, it is destructive. The attempt to achieve a 'final solution' to problems ought to make us shudder. Our projects remain provisional and ambiguous; they are open to correction, misunderstanding, clarification, reinterpretation, confusion and opposition. The attempt to leave an indelible and irrefutable stamp upon history is an inhumane megalomania - a warning against all utopian dreams.

Second, this desire for finality is often expressed in fantasies of destruction, obliteration, erasure. But God doesn't work like this. He is the creator of new things through the resurrection and transformation of the old. The "end of the world" of which Jesus' resurrection is a sneak preview is not really an end, but a new beginning in which all things are made fresh.
Both these points are in a similar vein to these two quotes from Moltmann.

Mary's melody: a revolutionary hope VII

Jesus' revolution starts now, but is not yet complete. We're a little like sleeper cells, waiting for the day the world is turned upside-down and living quietly subversive lives now. For instance, this meal we are about to share is not based on income, or status, or friendship. Such sharing is a subversive act in a world dominated by economics.

Jesus said, Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God (Luke 6.20). Mary’s song teaches us that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Once we realise our poverty, when we give away everything that we think is ours, once we share all the good things we don’t and can’t ever own, when we are poor, then God will open our eyes to see that we have everything in his kingdom. When we loosen our grip and let our treasures slip from our hands, then we will discover that it is only with open and empty hands that we can receive. Once we realise our helplessness, when we stop being impressed by our own abilities, or stop being envious of those around us, once we are weak, then God will give us strength to pick up our cross every day. Once we realise our finitude, our frailty, our emptiness, then God can begin to fill us with unspeakable beauty, undying love, untamable hope.
Series: I; II; III; IV; V; VI; VII.

Worse than death? II

Sin is worse than death

Our God is a God of salvation,
   and to GOD, the Lord, belongs escape from death.     - Psalm 68.20

Death will be the last enemy to be defeated at the general resurrection of the dead and the renewal of all things. Yet while it will be the last to go, it is not the Great Enemy, the Adversary. There are things worse than death.

There are things that diminish life, that corrode joy, that devour the heart, shrink the spirit, corrupt the good. Sin is worse than death. Death brings an end to the goodness that is life, but sin can take what is good in life and turn it sour. Death is a negation; sin is a negative. Death reduces to zero; sin puts it in the red. Now, of course, the picture is more complex than this, since what is good is not removed when it is corrupted, and evil is not simply the reverse scale of quality as good. Created things remain good, even while corrupted. Fallen humanity in particular is a complex thing, simultaneously both blessing and problem, both gift and cursed.

When our first parents disasterously declared their independence from God, claiming their own pre-emptive knowledge of good and evil, God's gracious response was to cut them off from the tree of life:

Then the LORD God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”-- therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.

The denial of everlasting life to the wayward husband and wife was to place a boundary on the spread of evil, to prevent it becoming forever woven into the fabric of the world. Death, the return of the dust to dust, was on the one hand the inevitable result of life that denies its own basis as the generous gift of God. Human death is a self-made self-annihilation, a suicidal turn from the source of life. But, on the other hand, it was also from the start useful as a curb on evil: a self-limiting curse.

Again, we must be careful here. Simply having boundaries, being embodied, temporal or dependent are not themselves problematic. Such finitude is part of the good gift of God. The finitude of death contains a darkness not found in being six feet tall or living in a world where snowmen melt. The tragedy is not change, not limit, but the disordering infection of rebellion, a will turned upon itself, an entity oriented to its own goals without reference to the whole or the head. This is the sad shock of sin: irrational, destructive, malignant - and ultimately self-destructive. Death is the result, but sin is the cause.

Sin is worse than death. Untrusting anxiety, apathetic lethargy, bitter regret, faithless betrayal: these are the real enemies of God and his people. These will blunt and bleed the soul, poison the spirit and stop the heart more surely and grievously than the cessation of brainwaves and breath.
Series: I, II, III, IV, V, VI.
Fifteen points for naming the novel in which the ill-treated heroine is finally captured at this ancient location.

Heaven: not the end of the World XVI

Implications, or why matter matters
Going to heaven when you die is not the biblical Christian hope. Instead, in the light of Jesus' resurrection, Christians are to hope for the transforming presence of God that brings new life to the dead and an end to all that is wrong and warped in creation.

Having recently summarised the main points of this series, I wanted to suggest a few reasons why it is important. What difference does this make? To get us started, I'd like to suggest seven. I'd love to hear more.

1. Creation and redemption are not fundamentally opposed
The same God who made the world has acted in Christ and the Spirit to save it. The world was made through Christ and was redeemed through that same Christ (Colossians 1.15-20). We must reject any gnostic or Marcionite division between Creator and Redeemer. The church is not the opposite of the world; it is the imperfect foretaste of the world's true destiny.

2. God has not abandoned his good creation
If we await our redemption from the world, rather than the redemption of the world, then it would appear that God, having called his creation 'good, very good', has given up and is ready to consign it to the garbage. God's power and faithfulness are called into question by any escapist eschatology. However, the God with the power to call things which are not into existence is the same God who raises the dead (Rom 4.17).

3. 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. God is unashamedly positive about all that is good in the world: '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.

4. 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' with 'physical'. 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 (Tit 3.5), and the midwife of the world's birth (Gen 1.2) and rebirth (Rom 8.22-23).

5. Humanity as humanity matters
When the Word took flesh, he came as one of us. He remains one of us. We are not saved from our humanity, but are made more fully human. We await resurrection as humans. Nothing that is truly human is to finally perish (though all must be transformed). This makes human endeavour and relationships noble, even while they remain tragically flawed. Christians remain humans first, giving us 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, or industry, or government. 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.

6. Difference is not necessarily sin
The Neoplatonic vision of creation and redemption is one in which an original unity degenerates into plurality before returning back to the source, the One. Not only does the doctrine of the Trinity undermine such a way of thinking about the world, but the fact that we await the resurrection of ourselves and our world in all its/our wonderful diversity and beauty also involves the rejection of this common assumption. We do not need to all be the same.

7. Our knowledge of God is not otherworldly
However hidden, confused, partial and dim it might presently be, one day creation 'will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.' (Isa 11.9; cf. Hab 2.14). The fullness of God's deity dwells bodily in Christ (Col 2.9). The home of God is to be with humans (Rev 21.3). Having a body, using language, being situated in a specific cultural context, being gendered: none of these are barriers to the knowledge of God. While each has been problematised by sin in various ways, we must not confuse finitude with fallenness. To seek knowledge of God, one does not need to transcend creaturehood.
Aside: Maybe the prohibition against visual images under the old covenant was not because the God of Israel was simply an idea, or simply invisible, but to prevent the pre-emptive summons of his presence through a human re-presentation. God is not at our beck and call, but sovereignly presents himself in his own good time through his Word and Spirit - which blows where it will.

So much more could be said about each of these points, and perhaps there are some more series to come here. But for now, I will draw this series to a close. 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 (Rom 12.9, 21).
Series: I; II; IIa; III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX; X; XI; XII; XIII; XIV; XV; XVI.
Ten points for the first to link back to the post that pictured the same structure as above.

Barth on the unknowable God

Jesus: the ultimate iconoclast

“It is in full unity with Himself that He is also – and especially and above all – in Christ, that he becomes a creature, man, flesh, that He enters into our being in contradiction, that He takes upon Himself its consequences. If we think that this is impossible it is because our concept of God is too narrow, too arbitrary, too human – far too human. Who God is and what it is to be divine is something we have to learn where God has revealed Himself and His nature, the essence of the divine. And if He has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ as the God who does this, it is not for us to be wiser than He and to say that it is in contradiction with the divine essence. We have to be ready to be taught by Him that we have been too small and peverted in our thinking about Him within the framework of a false idea about God. It is not for us to speak of a contradiction and rift in the being of God, but to learn to correct our notions of the being of God, to constitute them in the light of the fact that He does this. We may believe that God can and must only be absolute in contrast to all that is relative, exalted in contrast to all that is lowly, active in contrast to all suffering, inviolable in contrast to all temptation, transcendent in contrast to all immanence, and therefore divine in contrast to everything human, in short that He can and must be the “Wholly Other.” But such beliefs are shown to be quite untenable, and corrupt and pagan, by the fact that God does in fact be and do this in Jesus Christ. We cannot make them the standard by which to measure what God can or cannot do, or the basis of the judgement that in doing this He brings Himself into self-contradiction. By doing this God proves to us that He can do it, that to do it is within His nature. And He Himself to be more great and rich and sovereign than we had ever imagined. And our ideas of His nature must be guided by this, and not vice versa.”

- Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, 186.

I have often come across the idea that God must be (by definition) absolute, or beyond our knowledge, or utterly different. We have a rich tradition of philosophical reflection upon the idea of God. However, many of these ideas are human projections of our wishes and fears, negations of what we are: finite, visible, mortal. While a theist may be happy with calling God infinite, invisible and immortal, a Christian should feel uncomfortable. Barth goes further: a Christian should consider such ideas pagan because they have not taken what God has actually revealed of himself in Christ seriously and centrally. We don't bring our preconceived notions of divinity to Jesus to see if they fit. It is from Jesus that we get our 'image' of God. Jesus is the great iconoclast.

Of course, there is a corresponding error in the opposite direction: that knowledge of God in Christ is simple, obvious, straightforward and exhaustive. This second arrogance, the presumption that we know everything of God, that God is not a problem interrupting and overturning our knowledge, is the ugly twin of the arrogance of projecting an a priori Christ-less image onto God and assuming that he is therefore safely defined as unknowable. Either way, God becomes innocuously contained, either inside or outside the sphere of our language and knowledge.

"Is he - quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion."
"That you will, dearie, and no mistake," said Mrs Beaver; "if there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just silly."
"Then he isn't safe?" said Lucy.
"Safe?" said Mr Beaver; "don't you hear what Mrs Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you."

- C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 75.

Rahner on mystery

"[...] precisely the believer actively engaged in theology knows better than anyone else that every theological statement is only truly and authentically such at that point at which man [sic] willingly suffers it to extend beyond his [sic] comprehension into the silent mystery of God..."

- K. Rahner, 'Reflections on Metholodology in Theology',
Theological Investigations XI, 103.

Rahner goes to claim that the mystery of God remains - indeed, is perfected - in the eschaton. The beatific vision is not the cessation of mystery, but the point where we finally grasp the blessedness of it.

"Now we see as in mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.' (1 Corinthians 13.12)

What is the relationship between our present knowledge of God and our hoped for knowledge? Do we desire mystery to depart in vision? Is mystery a negative thing, an aspect of our present fallen imperfections, or does it relate to our very createdness? Even if the latter is also as true as the former (i.e. if both are true: that God is still experienced, at least in some sense, as hidden due to both our sin and our finitude), will this particular creaturely limitation be overcome? Do we want it to?

Life: not a rehearsal

"The notion that this life is no more than a preparation for a life beyond, is the theory of a refusal to live, and a religious fraud. It is inconsistent with the living God, who is 'a lover of life'. In that sense it is religious atheism."

- Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God, 50.

I love how Moltmann affirms life: here, now, bodily, social, contextual, finite, frustrating, painful, hopeful. The attempt to untie this knot through recourse to a hidden, perfect, unchanging, transcendent or ideal world (in the light of which this one is an illusion of appearances to be put away like a child's toy) is futile, escapist and deadly. Fantasies kill. Wake up.
Twelve points for guessing the city these poor bones once inhabited.