Monday, July 12, 2010
Hmm...
What makes someone a bad person? Is someone considered a bad person or do they just do bad things? Where is the line drawn between the two?
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Imagine
Often times our prayers can be summed up into this sentence, “deliver us from evil.” We pray for inner-peace instead of inner torment, we pray for safe travels instead of trips ending in tragedy. We pray for God to guide us instead of us wandering around running into walls. We pray for political and ethical peace in the world instead of people wanting to be terrorists. We pray for children not to die from starvation everyday but for food, love, and protection to be provided for them and their families. We pray for comfort, we pray for love, we pray for joy, we pray for patience, we pray for kindness, goodness, and faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. All which seem to be the opposite of evil. In doing this we tend to suppress evil, placing it into a compartment in the back of our minds, hoping it will never make its reappearance in our lives. In doing this we neglect to realize that evil is real and powerful and by not recognizing this, we have gotten ourselves into a position where we react to the sudden appearance of massive evil, whether this be personally or nationally, in an immature and unwise fashion.
This is not to say that these are prayers that should be left un-prayed or not even selfish ones for that matter. God’s ultimate purpose after all is to ride the world of evil altogether and to establish his new creation of justice, beauty, and peace. And it’s clear from the very beginning that this was not intended as a distant goal in which all we can do is wait in passive expectation for this future fulfillment. God’s future has already broken into the present in Jesus, and the church’s task consists of implementing the achievement of the cross and anticipating God’s promised future world.
Anticipating God’s promised future world does not mean to imagine a world without terrorists and dictators, without communism and corruption. That would represent a kind of shallow, dualistic thinking. Though there are millions of people in the world who if invited to imagine the world without evil would include these things on their list of wishes, there is great danger in this dualistic way of thinking. It begins to create an us-and-them disjunction which says, “ ‘our’ way of life is ‘good’ while ‘theirs’ is ‘bad.’” Dualism also tends to breed this kind of paranoia. Where we begin to think that the whole system is rotten including congress, the media, the military, Hollywood, so on and so forth.
In the same way, anticipating God’s promised future does not mean to have a progressive way of thinking where ‘might is ALWAYS right.’ World War I was justified on the principal of the “survival of the fittest.” This kind of thinking has all too easily led to wars and rumors of wars. Today this doctrine is widely accepted and believed and even preached from pulpits in many parts of the United States. The whole way of thinking is absurd.
As Christians, we are called to contend with the problem of evil in a different way. If we desire to confront the problem of evil we must adopt an approach which is neither that of the dualist or progressivist. We must address the problem of evil on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus. We must learn to imagine a world without evil and then to think through the steps by which we might approach this goal, RECOGNIZING that we shall never attain it fully during the present age but that we must not, for that reason, live passively in the present day in the present world.
We need to awaken our creative imaginations which seem to have gone into hibernation after this long winter of secularism and point it in the right direction. We need to enliven our imaginations to be energized, and lively, not walking around in circles over the same ideas of the past. And the Christian imagination must be disciplined so that it is not easily swayed or thrown about between the ONLY two extremes offered by the political pendulum of today. Nor must we assume that all creative ideas and writings are serving the cause of the Kingdom of God. How can we as Christians reeducate our minds so that we can become conscious of living between the victory (won by Jesus) and the ultimate renewal of everything? Surely there is a HUGE opportunity here reserved for those Christians with an integrated worldview and with the longing to love God with heart, mind and soul to find this new way, perhaps to even lead the way forward. Perhaps this is a wonderful opportunity saved for those Christians who can capture this glimpse of truth without faltering into pantheism on one hand or negative “realism” on the other. Perhaps this is a blessed opportunity for those Christians who are creative enough to not only draw attention to the way things are but also to the way things are meant to be.
This is not to say that these are prayers that should be left un-prayed or not even selfish ones for that matter. God’s ultimate purpose after all is to ride the world of evil altogether and to establish his new creation of justice, beauty, and peace. And it’s clear from the very beginning that this was not intended as a distant goal in which all we can do is wait in passive expectation for this future fulfillment. God’s future has already broken into the present in Jesus, and the church’s task consists of implementing the achievement of the cross and anticipating God’s promised future world.
Anticipating God’s promised future world does not mean to imagine a world without terrorists and dictators, without communism and corruption. That would represent a kind of shallow, dualistic thinking. Though there are millions of people in the world who if invited to imagine the world without evil would include these things on their list of wishes, there is great danger in this dualistic way of thinking. It begins to create an us-and-them disjunction which says, “ ‘our’ way of life is ‘good’ while ‘theirs’ is ‘bad.’” Dualism also tends to breed this kind of paranoia. Where we begin to think that the whole system is rotten including congress, the media, the military, Hollywood, so on and so forth.
In the same way, anticipating God’s promised future does not mean to have a progressive way of thinking where ‘might is ALWAYS right.’ World War I was justified on the principal of the “survival of the fittest.” This kind of thinking has all too easily led to wars and rumors of wars. Today this doctrine is widely accepted and believed and even preached from pulpits in many parts of the United States. The whole way of thinking is absurd.
As Christians, we are called to contend with the problem of evil in a different way. If we desire to confront the problem of evil we must adopt an approach which is neither that of the dualist or progressivist. We must address the problem of evil on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus. We must learn to imagine a world without evil and then to think through the steps by which we might approach this goal, RECOGNIZING that we shall never attain it fully during the present age but that we must not, for that reason, live passively in the present day in the present world.
We need to awaken our creative imaginations which seem to have gone into hibernation after this long winter of secularism and point it in the right direction. We need to enliven our imaginations to be energized, and lively, not walking around in circles over the same ideas of the past. And the Christian imagination must be disciplined so that it is not easily swayed or thrown about between the ONLY two extremes offered by the political pendulum of today. Nor must we assume that all creative ideas and writings are serving the cause of the Kingdom of God. How can we as Christians reeducate our minds so that we can become conscious of living between the victory (won by Jesus) and the ultimate renewal of everything? Surely there is a HUGE opportunity here reserved for those Christians with an integrated worldview and with the longing to love God with heart, mind and soul to find this new way, perhaps to even lead the way forward. Perhaps this is a wonderful opportunity saved for those Christians who can capture this glimpse of truth without faltering into pantheism on one hand or negative “realism” on the other. Perhaps this is a blessed opportunity for those Christians who are creative enough to not only draw attention to the way things are but also to the way things are meant to be.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)