On having dirty hands: Clean Up Australia Day

Sermon preached at St Matthew's Anglican, West Pennant Hills
On 1st March 2015, St Matt's held a joint service for all congregations after many parishioners had spent the morning cleaning up local parks and streets as part of Clean Up Australia Day.

Scripture readings: Psalm 104 and Romans 8.18-27.

When I was growing up not far from here, I had zero interest in my parents’ garden. For me, it was too much hard work - tending, watering, weeding - for too little payoff. With the impatience and selfishness of youth, I expected my efforts to result in immediate tangible personal benefits.

But now, I have a garden of my own: citrus trees, a blueberry bush, passionfruit vine, basil, tomatoes, zucchini, silver beet, basil, kale, leeks, capsicum, various herbs (including basil), a compost bin, a couple of worm-farms, some basil and a beehive. I love it! And I'm trying to inculcate an interest and appreciation in my two little kids that I never managed to gain until I was almost 30.

Some things take time to recognise. The patience, attentiveness, humility and willingness to get my hands dirty that I spurned as a youth are now things I cherish and seek to foster in myself, ever mindful of how fragile my grasp on them is.

Soil is now something I have learned to love. The opening chapters of the Bible speak poetically of humans being fashioned out of the soil. Indeed, even the name ‘Adam is a Hebrew pun, being the male form of the female word ‘adamah: soil, dirt, ground. ‘Adam from ‘adamah. The pun even (kind of) words in English: we are humans from the humus, a slightly unusual word for topsoil.* We are creatures of the dirt, relying on dirt for almost every mouthful of food.
*Technically, the dark organic matter in it.

And so I’ve come to love my worm-farms and compost: watching dirt form in front of my eyes. Seeing my food-scraps return again into the nourishing foundation of life from which they came.

But my garden in Paddington is apparently built on a rubbish dump. It seems like every time I dig, I come across broken glass, plastic, old bits of metal. My two year delightedly finds bits of glass and comes running excitedly to show me and I am caught between anxiety that he’s going to cut himself and pride that he is learning to cherish the soil and wants to keep it free of rubbish.

I often find myself wondering: what were they thinking, these people who apparently smashed their bottles into the soil and dumped random bits of plastic? Were they neighbours chucking things over the fence? Was it a former resident who was particularly careless? Was it the result of some long forgotten landscaping that brought in rubbish from elsewhere?

When we moved in, the house hadn’t been lived in for almost 12 months, and the backyard was overgrown. Gradually, as the garden has taken shape, we’ve been cleaning up the mess. And it feels good to be part of setting things right, even if it is in a small, very localised way. This little patch of dirt from which I’ve removed a few dozen bits of glass and plastic, is now cleaner and healthier than it was before.

And I bet some of you have had something of a similar experience this morning: taking a small patch of land and improving it, removing rubbish, cleaning it up, making it a little bit more healthy, more right, less polluted. Maybe you’ve wondered at those who dumped stuff – whether out of carelessness, apathy or haste. Maybe you’ve even got a little angry – it can feel good to be fixing something, and when you don’t know who was responsible for breaking it, it is easy to indulge in a little self-righteous harrumphing.

It also feels good to be working with others, doing something useful as a team, making the local area a little better for everyone. This is an act of service, an act of commitment to a place, an act that affirms that as creatures of the soil, it is right and fitting that we seek to take care of our little patch of it, even trying to clean up the mess that others have made. Both gardening as well as cleaning up the land, are very human acts – they are a kind of work that affirms our connection to the humus.

And when we turn to our passages this morning, we see that they are not just human acts, affirming our creatureliness, they are also, in an important sense, God-like acts. Cleaning things up out of care for others is to be a bit like God.

Our first reading, Psalm 104, is a wonderful poem celebrating the creative and caring concern God has for all of creation. Yahweh, the God of Israel, is here revealed as being the creator and sustainer of all creatures, great and small. God’s care extends not just to humans, but to the great family of life, the community of all creation. Written long before modern ecological science or the development of the concept of biodiversity, nonetheless, this psalm celebrates the diversity and abundance of the more-than-human earth. The psalmist notices the various habitats of animals, both domestic and wild, the times and seasons of their existence, and asserts in faith that Yahweh is the source and provider of all life, feeding and watering birds of the air, beasts of the land and even the monsters of the deep that so fascinated and frightened the inhabitants of the ancient near east.

And the striking thing is, there is no hint here that God’s care is exclusively or even primarily for humans; this psalm does not give us a human-centred view that assumes everything really belongs to us and exists to be used in our projects. No, God cares for humans in their labouring during the day, but the same land is then the abode of wild beasts at night that are also in divine care. God causes grass to grow for the cattle, but God also feeds the wild lions, the wild donkeys, the creeping things innumerable that scuttle under the waves. These animals were not only outside of the human economy, but at least in the case of wild lions, actively a hindrance to it. God’s providential care embraces even creatures that make life more difficult for people.*
*This point, and the language of the community of creation, is indebted to Richard Bauckham's Ecology and the Bible: Rediscovering the Community of Creation. Highly recommended.

Now, within this community of creation we do have a particular human vocation, a weighty responsibility placed upon us to reflect the image of God, to show forth God’s own caring concern for other creatures, to manage and steward the land in such a way that the blessing multiplies and grows. We are indeed invited to be gardeners. But Psalm 104 keeps us from getting too cocky, too ambitious, too self-obsessed in this task. We are to reflect and participate in God’s loving authority, which is always directed to the good of the other. Yet this authority is to be exercised as creatures. We are not demigods, halfway between God and the rest of creation, we don’t float six inches above the ground. We are pedestrian creatures, creatures of the dirt and to dust we will return. Fundamentally, we belong with all the other creatures, under the care of God, and if we are then invited to join in that task of caring protecting, it is precisely as creatures. We care for the soil as those who are deeply dependent upon it.

And this is a good reminder to us on Clean Up Australia day. It is so easy, especially in a modern industrial society, to act as though we are above or outside of the rest of life on the planet, rather than intimately connected to it in a vast web of life. Getting our hands dirty today hopefully did some local good, helped make a little part of the world somewhat better. But as we look at our dirty hands, this can also re-ground us as creatures of the soil and we can remember again our dependence upon crops growing, rain falling, soil remaining healthy, biodiversity remaining robust, pollutants being minimised, climate being stable. We have never before in history been so powerful, never before had such amazing technological wonders; but never before have we had such a massive, and largely detrimental, effect upon the habitability of the planet as a whole. There isn’t time this morning to recite the familiar litany of statistics, but they are indeed dire. I’ll just pick one: that as best as we can calculate, the number of wild vertebrates living on the planet has declined by about one third during my lifetime. There are all kinds of factors contributing to this: habitat destruction, hunting, overfishing, climate change, but our stewardship is failing if we are squeezing out these creatures, who are also dear to the one who created us.

And so there is a darker side to today. Our second passage hints at this. In Romans 8, the apostle Paul paints a vivid picture of creation groaning, as though in childbirth, in great pain, in bondage to decay.

If you have the passage in front of you, you’ll notice that there are actually three things groaning. First, there is creation itself, waiting with eager longing, yearning for the day when the current conditions of frustration and decay are no more. Just pause there for a moment and notice the content of Christian hope in Paul’s vision: “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God”. The creation itself: this is not a salvation that is purely for humans. We are not to be whisked off a dying planet away to a heavenly realm somewhere else. The creation itself is groaning, yearning, hoping. The creation itself is to participate in God’s great renewal, of which the resurrection of Jesus was the first taste. The Christian hope embraces earth as well as heaven – which ought to be no surprise to those of us who regularly pray for God’s will to be done "on earth as it is in heaven".

The second thing groaning is “we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for […] the redemption of our bodies”. Again, the Christian hope is bodily – we hope for a bodily resurrection, just like Jesus'. But more than this, groaning is a normal, healthy part of the Christian life. Paul is no triumphalist, who thinks that discipleship consists of ever-greater thrills and bliss. No, we follow a crucified messiah and our fundamental experience is of frustration, which is the necessary precondition for hope, for who hopes for what is already present, already manifest? Groaning is spiritual – not grumbling, mind you – but groaning, a deep yearning desire for all that is wrong to be set to rights. And that deep desire is inspired by God’s Holy Spirit, since it is those who have tasted the first fruits of that Spirit who groan. There is way in which being a Christian ought to lead us to being less content, less satisfied, less ready to make our peace with a broken world as though such brokenness is acceptable.

But if we keep reading our passage, we find that not only is creation groaning, not only are we groaning, but the Spirit also groans. In verse 26, where the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words, it’s the same Greek word Paul used earlier for our groaning: this discontented yearning for the renewal of all things, this deep desire for the resurrection of Jesus to be expanded and applied to all creation, extends into the heart of God. God too groans.

We are again, therefore, invited to be godly. If Psalm 104 helped us to be a little like God in caring for a community of life that extends beyond human projects, Romans 8 teaches us to be a little like God in yearning for the renewal of all things. These two passages give us a way of looking at the world in which the rest of creation is not merely a backdrop to an exclusively human drama. We discover wider horizons as we come to see ourselves as creatures in a community of life, as sharing with all life a fundamental dependence upon God’s provision and interdependence with other creatures. And we are invited to see ourselves as sharing with all creation a fundamental frustration, a desire for our brokenness to be healed, our pollution cleaned up, a desire grounded in God’s own desire that all things be made new in Christ.

Because the pollution degrading our lives isn’t just the rubbish dumped in a local park, it isn't even just the rubbish we’re collectively dumping into the oceans and atmosphere, largely out of sight and not as easily cleaned up with a pair of gloves and some elbow grease, pollution that is altering the very chemistry of the air and water, changing the climate, acidifying the oceans. Even more than these, the pollution degrading our lives is also the rubbish we allow into our hearts when we place ourselves at the centre of our own lives, when we live as though we were something other than creatures in a vast web of life, when we pretend that salvation doesn’t include the rest of creation. All this needs to be cleaned up too.

And so in the context of these passages, our efforts today become far more than just being good citizens, or kind neighbours, or taking pride in our local area, or seeking to make some amends for times we may have trashed the place. In the grace of God, they can become a little taste of the Psalmist’s vision of true creaturehood, a little taste of Paul’s Spirit-filled discontentment with disorder. In God’s hands, our efforts today can become another step on a journey into following Jesus with our whole lives, a journey that may break our fingernails, that may break our hearts, but which is the only path towards true joy.

On making hell on earth

Recently, I was challenged again about why I speak so frequently of ecological degradation when people are going to heaven or hell. On reflection, I could have given a number of answers.

I could have said that Christ is Lord of all of life and so all of life is worth talking about. I could have pointed out that it would not be odd to find a doctor spending a lot of their time talking about health, or a lawyer spending a lot of their time talking about legal matters, so why find it odd to hear an ecological ethicist talking frequently about ecological ethics? I could have said that the dichotomy between evangelism and loving our neighbours is ultimately a false one that misunderstands the gospel as a cerebral message requiring assent and assumes a zero-sum game in a context where things are far more complementary. I could have illustrated the previous point from my own experience, where after having spent many years employed as an evangelist and evangelism trainer for at least part of my job, I find myself today having more gospel conversations flowing naturally from my activities related to ecological ethics than I think I've ever had before. I could have pointed to the numerous places in Scripture where verbal witness and practical love are assumed to go hand in hand.

But instead, I went with this:

In the final judgement, God will destroy the destroyers of the earth. Those who knowingly and wilfully persist in harming their neighbour are living in ongoing rebellion against their Creator, whom they disrespect by participating in de-creation. Those who steal from future generations and cause little ones to stumble are denying the gospel of grace and the power of the resurrection. Those who seek to uphold the power of the powerful in their oppressive ways face a God who will humble them. Those who cause suffering through their own foolishness should expect no reward for it. Those who are found to have burned all their oil when the master returns will be cast out. Those who fail to adorn the gospel in lives of kindness place barriers in the path of future evangelists. Those who pretend they are not dust, co-creatures with all life that received God's original blessing deny their humanity. Those who dissolve the bonds of life re-crucify the one in whom all things hold together.

I believe in life before death.

And in the resurrection of the body.

Therefore, matter matters.

Impossible hope

A sermon preached at today's dawn Easter service at Reservoir Park, Paddington.

But the angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said."

- Matthew 28.5-6a (NRSV)

Impossible. The execution was thorough. The tomb was sealed. The dead are dead. Cellular degeneration begins when the flow of oxygen ceases. The Galilean preacher was merely the latest victim of imperial oppression. His startling claims vanished as he gave up the ghost.

Cruelly for the disciples, the world did not end on Friday, but Saturday’s sun rose on a world unchanged, indifferent to the execution of another pitiful Jew. Abandoned to the catastrophe of a failed messianic promise, the disciples are scattered sheep. Self-preservation instincts kick in as they flee and hide, bitterly awakening from their three year dream. Pilate’s wife tries to banish her nightmares with a stuff drink. Pilate breathes a sigh of relief, feeling that he somehow dodged a javelin. Joseph of Arimathéa keeps his head down after his rash act of generosity to a condemned man. The centurion can’t shake a lingering unease. Simon of Cyrene digs a few splinters from his shoulder.

The sun shuffles its westerly way and another day departs. Sabbath rest. Sabbath grief. Sabbath shock and disillusionment. Sunday dawns and a new week begins, as it always has. The globe turns and life goes on.

"Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said."

Impossible. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The human frame returns to the humus from which it came. The worm turns. The circle of life. Our atoms are recycled. The extinction of the individual into the cosmic ocean of being. Entropy is all.

"He is not here." Impossible. The world will not stand for resurrection. The finality of death is the one certainty on which we may rely. The grave’s silence reassures us that our failures, faults and fumblings will be washed away by memory’s receding tide, that our self-destructive habits, our myopic obsessions, our petty bickering and fruitless labour are ultimately ephemeral, excusable, indeed already on their way into the oblivion of time.

"He has been raised." Impossible. The wounds humanity bears, the wounds humanity inflicts, can be staunched, but not ultimately healed. All the forests bulldozed, all the rivers poisoned, the wetlands drained, the coral reefs bleached, the oceans plundered, the glaciers melted, the climate heated, all the species lost, lost, lost. These wounds, these open wounds, may one day close – whether or not human hands remain to bind them. But the scars will persist.

"Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said."

Impossible, surely.

But imagine: what if it were true? Yes, it would be an amazing biological miracle. Yes, it would mean that Pilate’s guilty verdict has been overturned by God. It would mean that the disciples who abandoned Jesus in his hour of need could have a second chance, a fresh start. It would mean that Jesus’ amazing claims to represent God in word and deed have been vindicated. It would mean that God has indeed publicly appointed Jesus as Messiah. It would mean that death’s ubiquitous triumph has been breached; its power to silence, to shorten, to sully has been compromised and the trumping threat of all tyrants has been weakened. Yes, it would mean that acts of love, of hope, of tenderness and compassion, are not merely heroic defiant gestures in the face of an uncaring universe, but instead are lisping attempts at speaking the native language of the cosmos.

"He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said."

Impossible. But if this were true, it would mean something even more exciting. If Jesus is indeed God’s Messiah, the representative not just of God to humanity, but the one in whom the future of all humanity and all of creation is revealed, and if God raised Jesus from the dead, then that is a picture, a promise, a precedent of what God intends to do with the entire creation (1 Corinthians 15.21ff). If Jesus has been raised, God promises to raise our bodies too. If Jesus has been raised, God promises to liberate the entire groaning creation from its bondage to decay, in the words of the apostle Paul (Romans 8.18ff).

But how? The details are not spelled out; the tomb is empty, the angelic message is brief, the recorded meetings with the risen Christ tantalisingly under-narrated. But the implication seems clear. If Jesus has been raised, then no longer is it possible to hope for redemption from the world, for escape, for flight from the impossible conditions of mortal life into an otherworldly bliss. If Jesus has been raised, Christian hope can no longer speak of redemption from the world, only the redemption of the world.

God did not give up on Jesus. He didn't throw his body in the rubbish and start again. And God hasn’t given up on us or on his world, despite all our problems. We don’t need to be afraid. He is not the kind of builder who walks into a house, notices the shaky foundations, the peeling paint, the broken windows, leaking pipes and says, “tear it down, start again!” God is not a demolishing developer. He is into transformative renovation, renovation of our bodies, renovation of his good, very good creation. To renovate something is to make it new. Amongst the last words spoken by God in the scriptures is the wonderful promise: “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21.5). If God raised Jesus from the dead, then God has started to keep this promise.

If God raised Jesus bodily from the dead, leaving an empty tomb and a living man who could be touched and embraced, then matter matters to God. Our bodies matter; our ecosystems matter; our art, food, sex, music, laughter all matter. God has said ‘yes’ to our embodied existence, yes to our planetary home, yes to our humanity, yes to every act of love, hope, tenderness and compassion. Yes to forests, fields, frogs and fungi. Yes to our neighbour and yes to each of us.

If we accept the angel’s word, the resurrection of Jesus does not answer all our questions, it only generates more: what does it look like to embrace life in light of following one who has been through death? How can we face our own death when Jesus has walked out the other side – not just the resuscitation of a corpse but the transformation of a life into something genuinely new? How can this message touch a society bent on self-destruction and seemingly willing to take most of life on earth down with us? The resurrection does not answer all our questions, but it says, in the deepest way possible, that such questions are worth asking. It invites us onto a dangerous path, where we are invited to follow Jesus in taking up our cross, putting aside our hopes of riches, of security, of fame, of comfort – not because these desires are too big, but because they are too small. We are instead invited to hope for nothing less than the renewal of all things. To hope: and thus to find ourselves unable to put up with an as yet un-renewed world. This hope doesn’t pacify us, distracting our gaze to some otherworld and so rendering us passive. No, we hope for the resurrection of the dead and the renewal of all things, so how can we sit idly by while our neighbours suffer? We hope for all things to receive the fullness of life that we glimpse in the risen Jesus, so how can we treat non-human life as expendable resources, as raw materials for our short-term projects? How can we remain content with the status quo when the regularity of the one immutable law – the law of death – has been shattered? The resurrection invites us into a grand experiment in resistance: resistance against the tyrants who wield the fear of death; resistance against the logic that says the only things of value are things with a price tag; resistance against the advertising lie that happiness lies in our next purchase; resistance against the comforting apathy of seeing my neighbour’s plight as someone else’s problem. The resurrection of Jesus, if we begin to suspect it might be true, invites us into the humble service of a suffering God and a groaning world.

"Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said."

What if it were true? No, no: impossible. Surely an impossible dream. Better to roll over and go back to sleep. Better to ignore old wives tales. Better to enjoy some soothing religious rituals on a Sunday from a comfortable intellectual distance. It’s safer that way.

Amen.

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.

The good news of Holy Saturday

Between the falling curtain of Friday's tragedy and the silence, confusion and laughter of Sunday comes a dramatic pause. Saturday is not merely interval, but closing credits. On Saturday, the future has disappeared from view and the dreams of yesterday dissolve into tears and dread. Cruelly, the world did not end on Friday. The sun has risen once more on a world unchanged, indifferent to the execution of another pitiful Jew. Abandoned to the catastrophe of a failed messianic promise, the disciples are scattered sheep. Pilate's wife tries to banish her nightmares with a stuff drink. Joseph of Arimathéa keeps his head down after his rash act of generosity to a condemned man. The centurion can't shake a lingering unease. Simon of Cyrene digs a few splinters from his shoulder.

The sun shuffles its westerly way and another day departs.

Yet Holy Saturday is what puts the "and" into "cross and resurrection". Without this day of rest, this day of regret and grief, then the story would jump straight from death to new life in a way that may confuse the two. Without Holy Saturday, we may be tempted to think of the resurrection as the secret meaning of the cross, of death being but a door to a better life, of the purpose of life being escape from this vale of tears, of the soul as trapped by the body's prison. We may leap directly from Calvary to the burning hearts within the disciples and conclude that the resurrection is a metaphor for their inner renewal in the face of death, a new liveliness of fellowship and encouragement as they remember the one whose presence and words had touched them so deeply and wonder at the mysterious fact that his death did not erase their appreciation of him after all. Or we may surmise that the departing spirit of Christ took with him the relevance of the man Jesus, left behind his body and earthly identity as a mere cypher, the abandoned vessel through which the divine Logos had communicated with humanity. Without Holy Saturday, Christianity threatens to become some version of Gnosticism.

But Holy Saturday is good news. Its very gloom is an assurance that despair need not be reconciled with decay, that death need not be interpreted as a secret friend, that perseverance is not futile stubbornness but has instead grasped hold of one of the deepest and strongest threads in existence: the faithfulness of God to his creation. It is a dark and dreary day, not to be prematurely disturbed by rumours of an as yet incomplete renewal.

So do not banish the doom from this day, for it is what holds open the space between cross and resurrection, gives the momentary pause that lets us distinguish the two, a holy hiatus in which despair is at home and hope impossible.

Only on a Holy Saturday can the God of impossible possibilities be properly worshipped.

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?

The end is nigh? Apocalyptic thought and our present distress

Apparently, the apocalypse has already come and gone. Did you miss it?

The relation of apocalyptic thought to our present and likely future distress is an interesting and complex question, not easily answered in a few sentences. I've recently been reading a book edited by Stefan Skrimshire titled Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination, which I mentioned back here. As is usual in an edited collection of essays, quality and relevance vary considerably, but the theme is an important one. How do our images of "the end" shape our understanding (or misunderstanding, as the case may be) of climate change?

For some activists, the pace and scale of anthropogenic climate change on our current trajectory represents an existential threat to the present order of the biosphere, including the human order of a globalised industrial civilisation of almost seven billion and rising. The language of apocalyptic is borrowed in order to try to gain some traction with policy-makers and the public. It matters not whether this borrowing represents a reflexive reliance on a thread of thought with its roots in religious discourse or the deliberate appropriation of concepts and tropes that still inhabit our imagination and so which will resonate widely. The goal is to induce an emancipatory shock, a recognition of our situation as extreme, a justification for emergency measures that disrupt the usual flow of commercial, political and social life with a radical reordering.

Some Christians, noting the borrowing of apocalyptic language by activists, are inclined to ignore the whole thing as another human attempt to claim control of even how the world is going to end. Instead, affirming that the end is in God's hands alone, they argue that any claims of humanity bringing about the end by our own efforts (even inadvertently) must be treated with extreme suspicion.

Personally, while it is difficult to get a good grip on the magnitude of the threat represented by climate change without recourse to some very strong language, I think that it is best to remain agnostic about the relationship between our preset distress and threats and the divine promises relating to ultimate realities. It may be that there is some link, but there is no particular reason in my opinion to think so. Even if our actions lead to the downfall of our way of life and the utter transformation of our society into something so different that in hindsight it is appropriate to speak of industrial civilisation having experienced a self-induced collapse, this need not be the end of the world. To use a line that is growing increasingly common, the end of the world as we know it is not necessarily the end of the world.

And where this cuts the mustard for me is that sometimes apocalyptic thought can become a lazy way out of ethical deliberation. Apocalyptic becomes lazy where it is in the service of a fatalism that assumes our destiny is doomed by the greater power of nature (whether acting blindly, under its own authority as a personified (and angry) mother earth, or as the instrument of God's inexorable judgement) or which conversely rejects the possibility of social self-destruction in principle. In each case, the future is seen as closed and human actions as ultimately irrelevant, in which case, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. It can also be lazy where it is used to create panic and a desperate acceptance of whatever medicine is closest to hand. This is a kind of non-emancipatory shock that stuns the hearer into passive acceptance of the salvific social, economic and/or political solution that swiftly follows the apocalyptic account.

Denying knowledge of the relationship between our time and time's telos keeps open the space for neighbourly care. It does this not by rendering apocalyptic inscrutably distant ("since we can't know when the end will come, then let us ignore the coming of the end altogether"), but constantly relevant. In Christian apocalyptic, the hidden meaning of history is revealed to be the stage of divine action, not in competition with human action, but as the previously unknown judge and liberator of human action. Since the day of divine judgement approaches like a thief in the night, unbidden and unobserved, the wise servant knows that her actions are made more weighty, not less. Instead of paralysing fear or enervating schadenfreude, she is liberated to conduct her faithful service in reverent hope of divine vindication. By such acts, she is not heroically securing the future; saving the world (or the present world order) is not her motive or modus operandi. Instead, she trusts that because the hour of her vindication approaches, she has time to prepare, to reflect with prudence on her ability to be a blessing in the limited time she has received. Waiting patiently, she need not dread the outcome of history, but is free to love her neighbour as an instantiation of her wholehearted love for the master with what strength and wisdom she has received. It may be that the immediate future holds suffering, even vast suffering, but not yet the end of all things. In which case, her actions undertaken in hope are not in vain; they are secured by the promise of the resurrection, and thus they are freed from the impossible burden of having to deliver her own life or the continued existence of her society.

And so, there is a sense in which the apocalypse has indeed already come, in the sense that apocalypse means "revelation", an unveiling of what was hidden. After Christ's coming, Christian believers now see the world and its future in a new light. No longer do the dark shadows of anticipated difficulties leave us blindly stumbling along in denial, distraction, desperation or despair. Once relieved of the responsibility to pursue survival above all else, we see the future as a stage on which faithful words and deeds may witness to the redemption of history through the cross and resurrection, and to the coming renewal of all things.

Evangelicals ought to be greener than the Greens

Guest post by Mick Pope

What does the gospel say about caring for creation?
Evangelicals should be at the forefront of creation care, regardless of the issue. The Bible is far greener than the Greens can ever be precisely because we don't "hate humanity" (as the Greens are sometimes accused of doing) but should have a proper biblical anthropology in which humanity is made by God from the good dirt and called by God to the noblest of tasks. However, one of the problems with some strands of Evangelicalism at various points of history is that it hasn't taken biblical anthropology seriously enough. Because we belong with the dust from which we were made and will be bodily resurrected, matter matters, including matter that isn't human.

Genesis 1 makes it clear that the Earth is the divine temple and that humans are the idols/images in that temple (interestingly, the word used for "image" in the ancient Greek translation of Genesis 1.26-27 is the same word elsewhere used for pagan idols), representing God to the rest of creation. This rules out any negative views towards the dominion mandate, since it is in God's image that we are to rule.

Psalm 104 is oft neglected and makes a couple of things clear. Firstly, God cares for creatures that (at the time) lay outside of the human economy, indeed for creatures like lions that were often harmful to the human economy, because he took delight in them for their own sake. It is a Psalm in praise of God's own creative wisdom. Notice too how the Psalmist places human economic activity alongside that of his care of the rest of creation. It is a small step to see that if God cares for and tends the wild places, we have no right to interfere with that, and as we carry out dominion in his name we should be also caring for wilderness, not to our own detriment but not to its neglect either.

The third important passage is Romans 8:19-25, which shows how intimately our future and that of the non-human creation are tied together. Creation groans for its own liberation as it has suffered under human misrule because of our idolatry. Note a solid biblical critique of materialism and paganism - we can't afford to leave creation care to atheists or pantheistic Greens since it is our calling. Still, when those groups take caring for creation more seriously than us they shame us. Note too that if creation waits for liberation we don't "save the Earth" but we do act in hope for the future. Just as when we seek to be more holy we don't save ourselves but live in hope of our final sanctification.

So caring for creation matters for Evangelicals.

What about climate change? Is it disingenuous for Christian organisations like Ethos to support the mainstream scientific view without giving equal time to those who are sceptical? As a meteorologist and a PhD who has followed the debate I'd say the science is pretty sound, and that we at Ethos are following the understanding laid down by one hundred and fifty years of direct observation of temperatures, at least a thousand years of proxy data from various independent sources, the best models of the day that can only reproduce the twentieth century trends with greenhouse gases included in the model, and a whole slew of research based on various observations of temperature extremes, changes in rainfall patterns, melting glaciers, spreading tropical diseases and so on.

Addressing climate change is part of a much larger project. Evangelicalism has much to repent of (in my opinion) and has and continues to miss its mission of creation care and opportunities to live out the gospel.

Dr Mick Pope is a meteorologist and coordinator of Ethos Environment. An earlier version of this post appeared as a comment on the Ethos site.

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.

It doesn't have to be this way

"This foundational theological belief in the sovereign rule of God in the risen Jesus Christ can be the basis for an attitude of confidence without lapsing into an ugly triumphalism or a defensive paranoia. The sovereignty of God is the basis not for a martyr complex, but for true martyrdom – which is witnessing to Jesus Christ come what may. A persecution complex is essentially self-interested and even narcissistic. A life lived for Jesus Christ, on the other hand, risks itself entirely for the good of the other without regard for self – knowing that it entrusts itself to the God who raised Jesus from the dead."

- Michael Jensen.

Michael is talking about why a particular denomination or church doesn't need to fear its own demise, though his key theological claim here (which lies at the centre of his PhD thesis on martyrdom) is not far from the centre of my own thesis.

The good news of the risen Christ means that Christians don't need to fear squaring up to whatever social, political or ecological challenges that may already exist or may soon arise. We are free to pour ourselves out in loving service of neighbour for the glory of God, entrusting ourselves to the God who raised Jesus from the dead. We can do the hard work of thinking through how best to love our neighbours in a rapidly changing world, where a complex variety of interconnected goods clamour for our attention in patterns both persistent and novel.

Why does the good news banish our fears? Or rather, why does it enable us to face them squarely and yet be undaunted, requiring no distraction, no promise of a silver bullet, no paralysing despair, no frantic scramble to save ourselves? In faith, hope and love, Jesus walked willingly into the valley of the shadow of death. We can follow him without being alone, without needing to vindicate ourselves, without needing any guarantees that the path will not be bumpy or difficult. Where he has gone, we follow.

I have finished a number of my recent posts suggesting that "It doesn't have to be this way". The possibility of another way is discovered as we walk in the footsteps of the one who carried his cross to Golgotha. And it begins with surprise, wonder and joy at the birth of a baby amongst beasts. Advent is a season in which Christians are to wait, to pray, to hope: it doesn't have to be this way.

A few dead flies for your perfume

Michael Wells, the best catechist I've ever had (yes, ok, he's the only one I've ever had, but he's still the best), has been writing some interesting pieces over the last few days. First he wonders "what must I do to be saved from an anemic gospel?" and then he notes that Jesus rose early, while it was still dark before pondering whether unanswered prayer might all be a joke.

UPDATE: Mike seems to be particular busy recently. Here's one on grumbling and an excellent one on contextual theology (a.k.a. ethics!).

Perplexed but not in despair: Christian pessimism III

In two previous posts, I have been reflecting upon Karl Rahner's account of what he calls "Christian pessimism" through a reading of Paul's self-description in 2 Corinthians 4.8 as being "perplexed, but not in depair". The first post summarised Rahner's take on what it means to be perplexed and how this is a universal human condition, not dissolved by Christian belief. The second post highlighted his asking the question of whether such a condition is at all compatible with Christian hope that rejects despair. And in this post, we shall briefly examine Rahner's attempted resolution of this difficulty.

Rahner's response to the experience of perplexity is to push it back into the Christian experience of God, even into the content of eschatological hope, to make it the crux of the beatific vision:

"[Christians] experience their radical fall into the abyss of divinity as their deepest perplexity. They continue to experience this darkness, always more intensely and more bitterly, in a certain sense, until the dreadful absurdity of death. They see that this experience of darkness is confirmed by the fate of Jesus. At the same time, in a mysterious paradox, they feel that this very experience is sent to them by God and is the experience of the arrival of God near them. The perplexity and the fact that it is lifted by God's grace are not really two successive stages of human existence. God's grace does not totally remove the perplexity of existence. The lifting, the ouk exaporoumenoi, accepted and filled with grace, is the real truth of the perplexity itself.

"For if it is true that we shall one day see God as he is, immediately, face to face, and if he is seen there precisely as the ineffable, unfathomable mystery that can be accepted and endured only in love, that is, in a total yielding up of self, the fulfillment for Christians is the height of human perplexity. Compared to it, all our riddles, our ignorance, our disappointments are but forerunners and first installments of the perplexity that consists in losing ourselves entirely through love in the mystery that is God. In the bliss of accepting the infinite mystery, that is, in absolute perplexity, all our partial perplexities, bewilderments, and disappointments disappear. The reverse is also true. As we expect and accept this end of our existence, our present perplexities are not removed, but encompassed. We are liberated, because they no longer dominate us. They have become the occasion and the mediation of our welcoming of the unfathomable mystery that gives itself to us and causes to accept it in love.

“While we are thus freed from every enslaving power and domination, the world remains what it is: the task, the challenge, the battlefield, with its victories and its defeats, as they succeed and overlap each other. We are unable to control them completely; we must accept them with their own perplexities. Within the ultimate freedom and even serenity of those for whom night and day, defeat and victory, are encompassed by the reality of God who is for us, nothing seems to have changed. We remain the aporoumenoi. And even the fact that we are more than saved and liberated aporoumenoi remains mysteriously hidden from us (often or forever, I do not know). But even then the fact remains that our perplexity is redeemed.”

- Karl Rahner, "Christian Pessimism" in Theological Investigations XXII
(trans. Joseph Donceel; London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1991), 161-62.

Rahner's argument assumes that the human experience of God is not just similar to all the other perplexing aspects of human existence, but that it is the ground for them all. Life is perplexing because God himself is perplexing. The cross then becomes the revelation and confirmation of what we apparently already knew: that God's is dark and mysterious, his ways unfathomable and eternally strange.

And so the groaning of creation, which echoes the groaning of the Spirit, is no passing condition, but is itself the foretaste of what all communion with God is always like. We will never really know; we can just become content in and with our ignorance. We may never actually be liberated from the frustrations of existence; we will simply make our peace with them. Or even if we don't, there is some sense in which we are already redeemed because to be perplexed is itself to be redeemed.

I find this account initially tempting, as it seems to embrace a radical theologia crucis. The vanity and frustration of inexplicable injustice are brought into the very heart of God. Yet pushing the groaning of creation into the eschaton and into the being of God, Rahner has actually capitulated to despair. We are redeemed, but we might never know it. The mystery of the universe is that the universe is a mystery. And the same goes for God, but more so.

There is no room here for liberation in anything but our perspective. Liberation means coming to see that my trifling little puzzles are as nothing compared to the all-surpassing divine puzzle. It is a council of despair that builds not resistance but capitulation to the injustices of the world. It treats the incarnation and death of Christ as revealing something we more or less already knew (namely, that the mystery of God cannot be known, only experienced, accepted and endured). It largely overlooks the resurrection as a divine promise of transformation. It makes the unknowability of God more fundamental than his drawing near to us in Fatherly love, fraternal humility and Spiritual illumination.

Of course, this short piece can’t be expected to say everything that needs to be said even on the topic of Christian pessimism, but there is a worrying Gnostic flavour to his comments here. Taken on their own, they imply that salvation consists not in the world being changed, merely our gaining an insight into the secret truth lying at the heart of it, or rather into the fact that we shall never know and can’t know the central mystery. It is a redemption of our mind and eyes, or perhaps just a lowering of our hopes and aspirations, but the world stays largely as it is. The cross reveals but does not seem to atone.

Rahner's concept of Christian pessimism is an important one, but his account of how this pessimism is to be integrated with not giving way to despair is too neat. Paul can face his perplexity without despair, not because perplexity is already a taste of God, but "because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will bring us with you into his presence." (2 Corinthians 4.14). This is what keeps him going on the difficult road of his apostolic mission. This is what makes Christian pessimism possible. Our life might look and feel like taking up a cross, denying ourselves, following Jesus into anguish, loss, difficulties, threats we cannot overcome and death. But God raises the dead.
Image by CAC.

On being evangelical: a question of loyalty

The gospel is a critical agent in human hearts and history. To be evangelical (to be a gospel person) is to affirm God's good world through cross and resurrection: that is, not simply and straight-forwardly to say "yes" to everything as it is, but to see it through the double lens of cross and resurrection, in which human pride and culture and institutions and traditions and "evangelicalism" (and "post-evangelicalism" and "anti-evangelicalism") are judged and found wanting, but then also raised to God's new life. To be a gospel person is to be against the world, for the world. It will also sometimes mean being against "evangelicalism" for the sake of the gospel. The good news of Jesus doesn't let us sit comfortably where we presently are, but draws us forward into the future promised by the cross and resurrection of Christ. And so to be evangelical means being open to critique, open to new light breaking forth from God's good news, which remains good and remains new. To be evangelical is to accept and offer "critique from within" and to allow my own proud stance of wanting to view things critically from the outside to be itself crucified.

If we belong to God and his coming future, and to the future of this world, we groan at the inadequacies of this world and at the inadequacies of all attempts to anticipate the resurrection of the dead.

This conception of being evangelical is not defined by loyalty to particular cultural traditions or to one party on certain contested social and ethical disputes, far less by loyalty to a particular political movement. It is not even defined by loyalty to the Holy Scriptures, at least not directly. To be evangelical is to be loyal to the Christ who meets us in and with the good news of the kingdom of God and to allow that loyalty to shape all our affections and desires, our fears and hopes, our identity and destiny.

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.