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By Peter Harris
FIRST CENTURY Athens exhibited many of the features of
our own times; so it is not surprising that Paul’s message in Acts 17:
22-31 can resonate strongly for us.
He was talking in a city that was cosmopolitan and
pluralist, a novelty-minded cultural crossroads. It lay at the heart of a
region where Greek was spoken widely and to which the pax Romana had contributed social
stability, so travel was relatively straightforward for the empire’s
citizens, as it is for us.
On a regional scale, the same kind of hegemony existed
there which we see more widely now as the consequence of globalization. As
a result, when Paul looked for a hearing for his message he did so among
many others seeking the same kind of response, even if his gospel made
unique claims.
Knowledge and ignorance
Perhaps that was why he began by observing that
knowledge and ignorance seem to grow in equal measure in a rapidly
expanding intellectual universe.
We could make the same observation about our own times.
The hoped for connection that has been the promise of cheap travel,
internet, free telephony and the rapid transfer of information seems to
have delivered the phenomenon of distance as effectively as it has
facilitated global community.
All the statistics show the rich becoming richer and
rarer as the poor become poorer and more plentiful . . . Though we consider
ourselves to be well-informed, major diseases such as arsenicosis, which
afflicts more people worldwide than are affected by HIV/AIDS, remain
largely unreported.
The casualties of Africa’s wars are numbered in
millions, and yet they are rarely in the headlines of the Western world.
Events in Angola, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo or Ethiopia have
no impact on our own lives, and so simply do not figure in the picture we
hold of the world.
These simple examples serve to show that information
and mobility alone cannot make the connections which the Christian gospel
urges on us.
The narrative of our information follows our interests,
which all too often are reduced to the merely commercial. Technology, in
turn, serves the meaning of the markets, so it is now far more difficult to
form relationships that will follow the logic of a truly human set of
connections.
Those relationships are born when we recognize that we
share a common Creator, and that where we live is not merely our
environment, but his creation. In the commercial world, legal and political
fictions can make it extremely hard to find out who is responsible for
what; questions of responsibility and rights have never been more difficult
to determine.
When Paul asks us to recognize that because we share a
common Creator, we form an indivisible community, he makes his appeal to
the human heart, the place of potential transformation.
All of us know that those hearts beat everywhere, not
least behind the walls of apparently impersonal institutions, but it often
takes a crisis to bring the disconnects to light. Among them a failure to
understand the link between the environment and the people who live in it
can be the most tragic.
Agents of transformation
Throughout history, Christians have been agents of
profound social transformation. Now, we could become agents of a similar
environmental renewal.
In the 18th century, the Christian conscience was
awakened to the scandal of slavery; a similar awakening seems to be taking
place as we come to terms with the current distress of creation and take
better note of its glory. We can begin to believe that creation concerns
might finally make it into the mainstream of how we live out our faith.
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Christian thinking for over 150 years has struggled to
find a coherent way to place our social engagement within a framework of
eternal priorities.
So if our new call to care for creation is not to end
in a kind of dry eco-pharisaism or in another ephemeral episode in the
ongoing drama of popular Christian culture, we need to understand how the
log-jam originally arose.
I believe it came about as we adapted the gospel to our
human needs and that it will be eased as we learn to frame our lives
and what we owe to creation, within a prior call to serve our Creator.
To reapply Paul’s famous discourse about love in
1 Corinthians: “Even if we preach about climate change, or make sure
we use public transport and re-cycle our paper, it will be worth nothing if
we do it for our own benefit.”
It will be even worse if ‘creation care’ is
taken on as good tactics, a shrewd move in a church effort to be relevant .
. .
A community that is directed towards knowing “the
God who made the world and everything in it” is a far cry from an
organization that is set up to meet an artificial hierarchy of human needs.
False criteria
If we take human needs as prior in a world where we
imagine the ‘spiritual’ to be immaterial, then it follows that
we will rank the importance of different kinds of work by dangerously false
criteria. The stage will be set for an inevitable downgrading of the true
significance of much human activity that glorifies God and serves his
purposes.
The resulting logic can only lead us to abandon the
times and places in which we live, with all their uncomfortable,
distressing and intractably material realities, in favour of an ill-defined
but idealized future. Major sections of the New Testament are given over to
arguing why it is a catastrophic wrong turning for Christian believers . .
.
Paul’s message is that wherever we are and
whoever we are, we owe our existence to a loving God, and we will discover
the meaning of our lives as we find relationship with him. Life itself, as
a created gift lived in particular times and places, is going to speak to
us of the Creator, if we can hear it. . . .
Paul’s emphasis in Athens on the significance of
time and place should make us instantly skeptical if we hear Christians
arguing that we have to make pragmatic choices between ‘saving
souls’ and feeding the hungry or between dealing with poverty and
looking after ‘the environment.’
For the Christian, our believing is understood as a
worshipful response to the living God who “made the world and
everything in it . . . the Lord of heaven and earth . . . [who] gives all
men life and breath and everything else.” In this world, God’s
people, the body of Christ, are seen as the first fruit of the new creation
– a kind of priesthood for creation.
Peter Harris is founder of A Rocha. The preceding piece
was excerpted from his latest book, Kingfisher’s
Fire.
August 2008
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