[THO] The Insufficient Response

It took a bit of wrestling but I have been convinced that a deep cosmological shift is required of Christians. The problem with the operative cosmologies such as the young earth or stewardship paradigms is that they are blinded by their anthropocentrism. I used to think that you could overcome this with an ecojustice or ecofeminist critique. But you can battle the injustice of androcentrism and still have a horribly arrogant vision of humanity.

It is this anthropocentric arrogance that is the real achilles heel. By placing ourselves at the centre of the universe we assume that all that was and is exists only for us. The world is really only a temporary sandbox in which we play until the real deal arrives. But the problem is the real deal has arrived and Jesus didn't come to take us away, but to send us as well into the Earth. And it isn't a pie in the sky dreamworld he is concerned with here, but a restoration that happens as the age to come breaks into the present, which is also the locus of its final inbreaking. We are saved for the world, not from it.

Now this salvation orientation is not a plunge into the world, but rather a transformation that happens within the world. As we follow Christ into the world that God loves, you know the one He created and called good, then we are transformed into Christ for the world, so that salvation can come to all the world. This is incredibly cheapened if we think it stops with people. That is why our narrow cosmologies are quite insufficient.

We can do great things out of stewardship and ecojustice paradigms. But if we are just mitigating the risk of our own discomfort while waiting out the eschaton then we miss all that God has in mind. We also miss what the whole Earth groans and waits for. Not to mention the complete arrogance of such a position, why would we expect to move to an otherworld when we've so violently raped the world we have been given?

The vision of the universe that science presents is amazing. It is like the thickly starry night of a country sky, you realize how small and insignificant you really are. When we humble ourselves before God and God's creation our response takes on a needed dimension. How can we know that we emerged from billions of years of evolution in an ever expanding universe the smallest segment of which is beyond our ability to comprehend, how can we realize this and go on treating our home like our personal garbage dump? How can we any longer allow the widescale massacre of entire species, biocide in which we are also complicit? How can we continue to buy into the sickness of commercialism which produces engineered for the garbage heap products which simply waste the last of our precious fossil fuels to make? How can we continue to dump poisons into our own drinking water, so much so that we have an entire industry of stealing and reselling water to the poorest of the poor? The answer is we can't. When the gravity of our own culpibility hits us we are forced to take a restock of our lives. It is arrogant to think otherwise.

But many will continue to live in the comfortable little narratives that make them so heavingly minded they are of no earthly good. Such forget that the promise of Jesus in the Revelation is He will return to destroy those who destroy the Earth. I think it is time we took Jesus seriously.