Although I’ve been speaking this way for a few years now, I was surprised by this quote:
The world is now facing an oil crisis few predicted and even fewer are prepared for. It’s impossible to understate how crucial cheap oil has become to our way of life. It’s shaped how we get our food, what we buy, where we live, how we work, and the way we play. Cheap oil opened up the world to millions of travellers via discount airlines, allowed thousands to buy their first homes in sprawling suburbs, and enabled consumers to get their hands on ever cheaper goods, shipped just in time, from around the globe. Now economists say all of that is at risk. Exactly how the end of cheap oil will change our lives is still far from clear. But change them it will, in profound and dramatic ways. If the price of oil continues to climb to US$200 a barrel, it won’t just be that people will have to drive a little bit less or skip the family trip to Disneyland. Across the board the cost of living will explode, not just for luxuries but basic necessities as well. To hear some experts tell it, we’re headed for nothing short of Oilmageddon. At the very least, they say, the age of plenty is over.
It’s not the content which surprises me, but the source: Macleans Magazine. If Canada’s largest newsweekly is reporting on this, maybe it’ll start sinking in, right?
John Milbank is an irascible Christian critic of all things secular, insofar as they cling to the myth of neutrality that has run rampant during the modern era. In an interview at The Other Journal, Milbank discusses the phenomenon of the “new” atheism, supposedly secular politics, and some of the interesting historical ways in which these movements developed.
Always blunt and sure to be controversial, Milbank’s critique is wide-ranging, touching on topics such as sex, politics, the role of the media, and the philosophy of selfhood. I usually like to give quotes, but this interview really just needs to be read.
Colin Beaven of No Impact Man (who I introduced here back in December) has a fantastic post up titled “What I’d say if I was wrong about climate change.” It’s a very positive piece which celebrates the changes and initiatives that have taken place in response to climate change, pointing out that these things would still be good even if climate change would turn out to be false.
It also reminds me of a comment I left in a post here over a year ago debating the validity of the claims of climate change, where I said the following:
[Apart from the debate over the truth or falsity of climate change,] I would still come to the conclusion that we need to fundamentally change our living arrangements, for reasons of morality and justice. Our part of the world is, by and large, exploiting the rest of the world in order to maintain its opulent standard of living. I believe in a God who in Jesus has called us to lives of radical love for others, which it seems does not include a life marked by conspicuous over-consumption at my neighbor’s expense.
It just so happens that this is the kind of life-style that will bring about a change in global warming, if it is occurring. I am convinced that it is. But more importantly, I am convinced that, as always, following the way of Jesus is the best way within this world.
One of the interesting things about all of this is that it reveals the need to think more deeply in the areas of ethics and justice; to move beyond a merely consequentialist conception of ethics to… well, I’m not quite sure, to tell the truth. We live in a society that is used to thinking in terms of cause and effect, and it’s difficult to think otherwise.
As a Christian who has heard enough smatterings of Hauerwas, I do think that ethics is always already theological, and I think we should be honest about this fact and work out our ethics in coversation with the stories and traditions that tell us who we are. For Christians, this includes our belief that love (agape) will have the last word in history. Out of this story, I can only say that the activities of greed and consumption at the expense of my neighbors in the world are to be deplored, whether or not they are producing climate change.
After some good discussion on Cities, Neighborhoods and Fear, I was drawn right into Eula Biss’ wide-ranging reflection on living in a “bad” neighborhood in greater Chicago, called No-Man’s Land. (HT: Revealer) Touching on topics from Little House on the Prairie to gentrification, Biss provides a meditation on fear and American culture that is well worth your time. Here’s a little excerpt:
Now that we share a bookshelf, I am in possession of my husband’s dog-eared, underlined copy of Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear. Every society is threatened by a nearly infinite number of dangers, Glassner writes, but societies differ in what they choose to fear. Americans, interestingly, tend to be most preoccupied with those dangers that are among the least likely to cause us harm, while we ignore the problems that are hurting the greatest number of people. We suffer from a national confusion between true threats and imagined threats.
And our imagined threats, Glassner argues, very often serve to mask true threats. Quite a bit of noise, for example, is made about the minuscule risk that our children might be molested by strange pedophiles, while in reality most children who are sexually molested are molested by close relatives in their own homes. The greatest risk factor for these children is not the proximity of a pedophile or a pervert but the poverty in which they tend to live. And the sensationalism around our “war” on illegal drugs has obscured the fact that legal drugs, the kind of drugs that are advertised on television, are more widely abused and cause more deaths than illegal drugs. Worse than this, we allow our misplaced, illogical fears to stigmatize our own people. “Fear Mongers,” Glassner writes, “project onto black men precisely what slavery, poverty, educational deprivation, and discrimination have ensured that they do not have—great power and influence.”
This should be the final post in this series, after having introduced the topic, praised some of its impulse, criticized notions of perfection in the early church and a disregard for history. Now, on to my final bit of criticism, and hopefully a word about how to go forward.
I only addressed one part of the ahistoricism inherent in the myth of primitive perfection in my last post, the other is this: it absolves us from the responsibility of dealing with our painful history as the church. We can simply pretend that it was “those people” (which means Catholics, of course) who did bad things and delude ourselves into thinking that we do nothing of the sort.
Another problem with this ahistoricism is that it also ignores the fact the evangelicalism grew out of a specific historical context for specific historical reasons. And yet modern evangelicals continue to pretend that it’s only the Bible which influences their faith and practice, keeping them ignorant of the ways which their history has most definitely shaped them. The problem with this is that many of the historical reasons which caused evangelicals (and their fundamentalist forerunners) to look back to the Bible have now been divorced from these historical reasons. Answering today’s issues with yesterday’s answers proves nothing.
Instead, I think that we need a church which recognizes that we’ve historically been a bunch of assholes (and continue to be). Instead of thinking we can divorce ourselves from this history and return to a primitive perfection, we instead need to live out our sorrow for what the church has done and is doing that is counter to the love of God. We need to accept that the past 2000 years of church history have shaped us profoundly, and we need to draw on the strengths of that history to deal with the problems of that history and the myriad of ways they express themselves in the world we find ourselves in.
This is a profoundly difficult (or even impossible) task, one that should clue us into it being the right path, since we will absolutely need God’s presence, wisdom and guidance to do so. And one of the lessons I think that I have gleaned from the history of the church is that it has always been this way. Every generation has required those who would follow after Jesus in ways both new and old that connected to their own context. Faithfulness is not a formula that says “sola scriptura” or “tradition,” but rather the path of holy fools who only look back to clarify the way forward.
My last post in this series criticized the assumption that the early church was somehow perfect and we should therefore attempt to be just like them. This post will criticize the other assumption in the myth of primitive perfection, that this is something which we could even do if we wanted to.
The problem with this assumption is that it completely ignores that we are historically existing people, passing over the past 2000 years of church history. It supposes that humans (I’m pretty sure that Christians still qualify as humans) exist within space and time. (This criticism forms much of the heart of my just-completed thesis.) There is no way to magically connect the church existing in the NT and the church as it exists today. While there are definitely many things that are the same or similar about the context then and now, there is also much that is completely different.
Any attempt to be faithful to God and his work in the world today must recognize that we always have a new situation before us that our history and experience do not give us the direct knowledge of what to do. We must always rely on God for today; we must always take the leap amidst uncertainty. This is faith.
This doesn’t mean we pitch the book of Acts out the window. It means that we don’t read it to somehow retrieve the “good old days,” but instead we read it to say something like:
This is the story of how the earliest followers of Jesus struggled to be faithful to God and the leading of the Holy Spirit in an incredibly difficult situation. While our situation is not the same and difficult in very different ways, we also need to learn this faithfulness. This is the story we’re a part of, and we must know what it means for us today so as to remain faithful. God, we desperately need your wisdom so as to see how to live this story today.
