Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Old, Busted, and Bizarre
If you have no faith in God and no faith in man you end up like this guy that wrote on the BBC a while back.
When you don't believe in God and the man is entirely mechanistic, hopelessness is the natural result. It is unavoidable and predictable. What is amazing is that this hopelessness persists in the face of the facts. It is proof of the old maxim that if you don't believe in God, you will believe in anything.
And the biggest problem is that this form of nihilism is creeping into the church. When I read over and over and over again about the need for environmental stewardship, it all seems to be crisis mode stuff, not hopeful stuff.
I am struck by the dance between form and substance. We argue continually in the church that it is the substance that matters and that the form is secondary, we can alter it to suit the circumstances. And yet, as we have abandoned the old forms the things that lie at the very root of what it means to be the church are eroding. Or, did the ideals erode first and the substance only follow?
In the end, I don't know for sure which is why the battle has to be fought on all fronts simultaneously. Bonnie has recently argued for the importance of sacrament. She did so partially in response to a post I did on environmental expressions of the social gospel. She adds to my argument that transformation is necessary, by pointing out the importance of sacramental practice in transformation. She is right. We need form and we need substance.
Otherwise, we will just be hopeless....
We are now in "overshoot"; our numbers and levels of consumption having exceeded the Earth's capacity to sustain us for the long-term.Does anybody remember Paul Ehrlich, who predicted the demise of humanity on similar grounds would have been complete a couple of decades ago? I am truly amazed that an idea so old and disproven still sees the light of day, but there it is. The fascinating question in all of this is why the traction?
And as we remain in overshoot, we further erode the Earth's ability to support us.
When you don't believe in God and the man is entirely mechanistic, hopelessness is the natural result. It is unavoidable and predictable. What is amazing is that this hopelessness persists in the face of the facts. It is proof of the old maxim that if you don't believe in God, you will believe in anything.
And the biggest problem is that this form of nihilism is creeping into the church. When I read over and over and over again about the need for environmental stewardship, it all seems to be crisis mode stuff, not hopeful stuff.
I am struck by the dance between form and substance. We argue continually in the church that it is the substance that matters and that the form is secondary, we can alter it to suit the circumstances. And yet, as we have abandoned the old forms the things that lie at the very root of what it means to be the church are eroding. Or, did the ideals erode first and the substance only follow?
In the end, I don't know for sure which is why the battle has to be fought on all fronts simultaneously. Bonnie has recently argued for the importance of sacrament. She did so partially in response to a post I did on environmental expressions of the social gospel. She adds to my argument that transformation is necessary, by pointing out the importance of sacramental practice in transformation. She is right. We need form and we need substance.
Otherwise, we will just be hopeless....
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