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Despite my best efforts, I seem to always end up awake late at night with some existential rhetorical question stuck in my head. We had the School of Theology at Vintage earlier tonight and we were talking about what the costs of being a Christian are. Obviously, here in America at least, modern day Christians don’t have to fear Roman soldiers breaking down their doors and feeding them to the lions, but that doesn’t mean our lives are all honey and lattes. One of the main things we talked about is how crazy it seems when you start looking at what Jesus said it takes to get into heaven. Time and again you read of Him giving people tasks that are impossible. For a person to enter Heaven based on their own merits requires them to be absolutely perfect and blameless. Since this is impossible in a post-fall world, it is by the grace of Jesus we are able to cross that hurdle and gain entry. Now, think about this for a second, what if Jesus ministry had been based around the idea that if you just tried hard enough or had good enough intentions you could gain entry to Heaven? Suddenly there is no need for the cross, no need for grace, no need to be compassionate and love your neighbor. The fact perfect adhearance to the law (ie the Old Covenant) is the only way a person can gain entrance to Heaven is one of the things that makes what Jesus says make any sense at all. Jesus doesn’t so much tell us to ignore Rabbinic law as He provides an end around for post-fall creation to be reconciled on the cross. By becoming the final ultimate sacrifice under the old covenant, He broke down the barriers and made it possible for us to attain the impossible.
Imagine taking all of the worst things about Christianity, the Crusades, the Salem Witch Trials, the Inquisition, Manifest Destiny, the brutal subjugation of the New World and Africa, the guilt, the poor treatment of women, the persecution of men like Galileo who dared to oppose the Church on questions of science, the legalism, the closed-mindedness, the hypocrisy, the apathy toward suffering, everything, all the worst of the worst, and then threw out everything else. No love, no compassion for the suffering, no Mother Theresa, no C.S. Lewis, no Wounded Healer, no grace, no acceptance, no love for right and justice and peace and hope. Just a painful trudging through the horrible bleakness of a broken world until finally one day we die and melt away into nothingness. This is the world of the Golden Compass, this is the Christianity Philip Pullman, this is the world he believes we live in. I don’t want this to sound like a flat out rejection and denunciation of the books (which as you might guess I just finished) but rather as a rebuttal.
First off, on a literary point, I was frustrated with Pullman because I felt like the first book, The Golden Compass, was far and away superior to the other two books in the trilogy. I felt like he had a clear focus to the book and it was exciting and daring and then the further into The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass I got the more the books started to loose their focus and sound more and more like propaganda. Characters randomly popped in and out of the story, what seemed like things that should be major plot points ended up being little more than a paragraph before being passed by, there was no liberating meaning to anything. It’s as if Pullman decided to turn the phrase, “life sucks, then you die” into a trilogy. That is one of the things I don’t understand about atheism as a whole however. It isn’t really an alternative to Christianity. It is Nihilism. It is nothingness. There is no reason to strive for justice and peace and righteousness because in the end nothing matters. You pass from this world into nothing. As the character of Mary struggles with in the book, it is freeing but leaves you feeling disconnected. Even as a political theory Anarchy promotes the idea that when we strip away government and artificial command structures, man will naturally choose what is good and right. Pullman just says live for the present because there isn’t anything else. I refuse to accept that premise! I reject it on the basis that I have inside me a compulsion to be compassionate and seek to help others even when I gain nothing more than the feeling that by doing right I have somehow made the world a better place. I believe in doing right because I look at the world and see it scared and broken and longing for some meaning to the pain and suffering we see every day and I want to give it some hope. As long as we are striving to love each other and be good and caring people I think we will make a difference and I feel it is my faith calling me to these things.
I am angry, in a way, with Pullman for not representing all of Christianity. He only chooses to represent the corrupt and deceitful portions that seek to use guilt and sin as a club with which to batter people into submission to a worldly authority while taking some perverse pleasure in claiming they are saving souls. I can only imagine when the final day of judgement comes all those who have done wicked deeds in the name of God will look at those they persecuted and weep when they see how their victims exalted all the more in Heaven for their suffering. I don’t purport to be any kind of saint myself but I can only hope one day when I am judged God will take joy at the times when I strivved to make some kind of difference in the world. That might be what angers me most with Pullman, the idea there is no ultimate justice.
Not everyone can be a C.S. Lewis or Mother Theresa or Desmond Tutu or Dietrich Bonhoeffer but I don’t think God calls us to be. I hope though that when non-believers encounter true followers of Jesus their lives are made better for it and they can’t help but ask the reason for their hope.
I was talking at work today with a friend who just found out that a guy she grew up with was killed in a car accident this weekend. This combined with Dan’s first Sunday back after his dad’s passing, I’ve been thinking a lot again about the eternal dance of life and death and faith. The more I think of it the less scary and confusing it becomes. I know that must sound incredibly strange to read so let me try to explain. As I’ve written about before, when I read the first question and answer from the Heidelberg Catechism I can’t help but feel at peace with the reality of my mortality. It is strange sometimes to realize that at any given moment, any number of completely random events can occur that can end life, car crashes, random shootings, freak heart attacks, and yet, the knowledge God has a purpose for my life and until that purpose is fulfilled, not a hair on my head will come to harm, how powerful! At the same time, acknowledging the broken state of our human nature frees us from the fear of death when it does one day come. When we come to accept we can never achieve perfection in this lifetime or state, how beautiful it becomes when we are made complete in the presence of our loving Savior!
I read through this article on Rolling Stone after seeing a blog post about it on Dan Kimball’s Vintage Faith blog. The article is an interview with a British scientist named James Lovelock who believes we are all doomed and that the end is just a few brief decades away. Lovelock has argued, beginning in the 1970’s, the Earth is a giant superorganism we have pushed past its sustainable tipping point. Since I am not a climatologist, it is a little hard for me to argue with Lovelock’s science, what I can debate him on is call to action, or rather lack of it. For someone who is so convinced we have caused the end of life as we know it, Lovelock is surprisingly cynical about what we can do to stop or reverse the damage we have done to this point. I do agree with him when it comes to how sincere the “green business” movement is. Ever since I learned about the Step 2 Cotton Subsidy program and the power of the corn and sugar lobbies in Washington I’ve been skeptical of the long term practicality of things like e85 Ethanol as an alternative fuel (same with hydrogen fuel cells for cars). But this doesn’t mean we should abandon movements by large businesses to switch to CFL’s or run their AC a little less during the summer. I think Lovelock is right about nuclear power too. People see Chernobyl and mushroom clouds every time someone mentions building a new power plant but the fact remains that it is one of the cleanest and most efficient ways of generating power. Hydro is not a growth market because of the huge environmental footprint of new dams and wind and solar are far from able to generate power on the scale needed to completely replace fossil fuel based technologies. I also like that he takes issue with Christians who say we should only concern ourselves people because God will take care of the planet. God may have given man the ability to subdue the planet but we have been woefully silent when it comes to being good stewards of Creation.
The other problem I have with Lovelock is the way he can’t see past the impending disaster. If large portions of China become un-inhabitable like Lovelock says, are the Chinese really going to invade Siberia? Unlikely. Issues like this can and have been worked out. The population of the island nation of Tuvalu already has standing plans to move to New Zealand (among other Pacific island locations) should the sea level rise to the point of covering their islands. Now, obviously it is easier to move 10,000 people than 1 billion, but when faced with either finding a diplomatic solution or going to war, governments will overwhelmingly choose the diplomatic solution. Human civilization is a “living” superorganism just as as Lovelock argues the planet is. Lovelock views humans and their actions as predictable and fixed rather than variable and independent. People will adapt. Will their be massive famines and huge losses of life in the third world? I don’t doubt that. You don’t have to look further than your daily newspaper to realize that the West is largely indifferent to loss of life in Africa and South Asia. Time and again the West has proved that if you aren’t one of us, you are on your own. My point is, though, I see it more likely the West will retreat into technology based communities than collapse into hunter-gatherer tribal societies.
I’m certainly not perfect when it comes to my energy consumption. I certainly use a lot more power than I need to with my love of computers and other gadgets, but I think it is important to take small steps at reducing our personal footprint. Maybe Lovelock is right and simply changing your light bulbs won’t make a difference at this point. But if that is the case, then ever time you turn the thermostat down and put on a sweatshirt instead of cranking up the heat, think of it more as training for the future when we all live in Canada and Siberia than doing your part to save the environment.
