Essentials

Details

Written by: Chris Appleby

Essentials Spring 2017

Details

Written by: Chris Appleby

Essentials Summer 2017

Details

Written by: Sally Shaw

Sally Shaw urges evangelicals to recognise the importance of creation care, pointing out some of the ways that some evangelicals are becoming more involved.

Sally Shaw is studying post-grad theology and is involved with A Rocha Australia

Now is the time for Evangelical Christians to get more involved in creation care. Now is the time to reflect on the implications of our theological interpretations when it comes to caring for God’s creation. The Paris Climate Change Agreement in December 2015 has shown us that significant action to curb climate change needs to happen not just with Governments but with each of us.  Evangelical Christians in Australia are starting to recognise the importance of creation care, but there is still much to be done. In July 2015 Gospel, Society and Culture: Creation Care was published by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Australia in NSW.  It is an important report that leaves no room for complacency. It quotes Beisner et al who argue “To reject environmental stewardship is to embrace, by default, no stewardship. The only proper alternative to selfish anthropocentrism is not biocentrism but theocentrism: a vision of earth care with God and his perfect moral law at the centre and human beings acting as his accountable stewards.”   This paper complements the 2012 Lausanne Global Consultation on Creation Care and the Gospel, which built on the 2010 Lausanne Cape Town commitment, and is a significant voice from which we can learn.  

I had the privilege of being invited to join this Consultation. It was a gathering of theologians, church leaders, scientists, and creation care practitioners from 26 countries, who met to develop a more deeply biblical understanding of creation care.  Our aim was to create a document, ‘a call’, that the evangelical church around the world would be able to hear and respond urgently at the personal, community, national and international levels.

The final Statement made a number of specific calls for action, including the need for:

• an integrated theology of creation care that can engage seminaries, Bible colleges and others to equip pastors to disciple their congregations
• a theology that examines humanity’s identity as both embedded in creation and yet possessing a special role towards creation
• a theology that challenges current prevailing economic ideologies in relation to our biblical stewardship of creation and
• a theology of hope in Christ and his Second Coming that properly informs and inspires creation care.

Hearing these calls requires us to put aside our presuppositions and re-read God’s word through a new lens, recognising that it is the Christian worldview that gives the only viable basis for care of the natural environment. On this basis we should not withdraw from environmental concerns simply because we feel that other approaches to environmental care are flawed. Rather, we should be all the more concerned about the issue, just as other world-views give people reasons to be concerned about the environment. Like all genuine moral responses, these are signs of God’s common grace.  We, as Beisner et al say “should be ready to enter the debate, to present and to act on the clear Christian reasons for creation care, since they can provide the metaphysical basis that ecologists are yearning for.”   

Organisations such as A Rocha Australia  and Hope for Creation   are examples of evangelical Christians taking wholistic action to help curb the environmental injustices of this earth. In addition, the Seminary-Stewardship-Alliance, a consortium of evangelical seminaries and theological colleges in the USA and Australia, is seeking to take on this challenge, both in the curriculum, on campus and in other ways.

These calls and examples should compel us in our passion for justice and our love for God, our neighbours and the wider creation to urgent and prophetic ecological responsibility, seeing the biblical doctrine of creation as an essential part of the gospel story.    

Sally Shaw

Details

Written by: Peter Corney

Tolerance or a Contest of Power?

How todays ‘tolerance’ has become repressive.      

By Peter Corney

The Catholic Archbishop of Hobart has recently been taken to Tasmania’s anti-discrimination commission for distributing a pastoral letter on the doctrine of marriage to the church's members! The complainant also seeks to have all church schools forced to promote LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) awareness, tolerance and behaviour. This is a misguided, repressive use of the law and a suppression of free speech and freedom of religion.  

As well as the many serious concerns this raises about our democratic values, it also highlights the unsatisfactory drafting of our anti-discrimination laws that generally are far too broad and do not have sufficient protection of freedom of speech.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to conduct an intelligent, reasoned, respectful and open public debate on issues of values, morality, ethics and religion without fear of legal action and the resulting suppression of free speech.
Behind this repressive and dangerous atmosphere lies a radical change in the way we understand tolerance and intolerance.

The traditional or liberal view of tolerance is based on the following two key ideas which can be expressed in the following way: (1) it has an egalitarian view of people. Every person is equal and has an equal right to their views and beliefs and a right to express them respectfully. (2) It has an elitist view of ideas. Not all ideas, views and beliefs are equally valid or sensible, some are true, some are false, some are just, some are unjust, some are dangerous and some are just plain silly. So while everyone has a right to speak not all views and beliefs are right. This is what we might call ‘principled tolerance.’
The current view of tolerance and intolerance turns this on its head. (1) It has an egalitarian view of ideas and beliefs. All ideas, views and beliefs are equally valid (a relativist view) and therefore should not be critiqued. (2) It has an elitist view of persons. Only persons with this relativist view about ideas have a right to speak in the public forum. All others with a different understanding about ideas and truth and who wish to contest people’s views and critique them, no matter how respectfully, may not speak! If they do they will be branded intolerant and discriminatory.

There is also another more sinister force at work here. Some lobby groups have worked out this change that has taken place in people’s view of tolerance and intolerance and exploit it very skilfully in the media and public forums to suppress criticism and reasoned argument about the particular ideas they are promoting. Many in the media are easily drawn into this strategy.  For a diverse society sensitive to any ethnic, religious or cultural divisions that might create disharmony or public disorder this sensitivity is a very easy but cynical button to press for strategic campaign reasons.

The new view of tolerance and intolerance owes a great deal to Post Modern thinking and its anti- foundationalism and rejection of objective truth which has reinforced the relativist position. The English philosopher Roger Scruton has a very apt and ironic comment on this trend in contemporary thought; the very reasoning that sets out to destroy ideas of objective truth and absolute value imposes a political correctness as absolutely binding and a cultural relativism as ‘objectively true’

In the end all this leads to the death of the contest of ideas and the emergence of our very destructive default position, the contest of power. In the battle of “the will to power” eventually one side imposes by force their will on the other by unethically suppressing their right to dissent by either ridicule and closing down discussion or by the force of laws like our current anti vilification legislation that while well intended were poorly drafted and while never intended to restrict the right of free speech can be used to do just that. This ‘violence’ to the other is the beginning of the destruction of our liberal society.

Details

Written by: Karen Morris

Understanding Jesus and Muhammad
By Bernie Power

If you ever talk to Muslims about faith, then Bernie Power has written the book you need. There are many books about Islam or the person of Muhammad written to inform Christians, but this book is actually for Muslims. Finally, we have a book we can give away, written specifically with the questions of Muslims in mind.

Understanding Jesus and Muhammad explains the truth about those history-changing men for the person wanting to make an informed decision. It is honest and hard hitting without being aggressive or offensive.

There are numerous unexamined ‘defeater beliefs’ (see Deconstructing Defeater Beliefs by Tim Keller) deeply ingrained in Muslim thought, and Bernie addresses them in a way that is warm, expert and accessible. The book reflects Bernie’s love of the Bible; deep knowledge of the Qur’an and Hadiths; and his love for Muslims.

Each chapter was originally a pamphlet Bernie wrote to explore difficult ideas with Muslims. Among the chapters are pairs such as:

‘The sinlessness of Jesus Christ’ 

‘Was Muhammad Sinless?’;

’The miracles of Jesus’ and ‘Muhammad and miracles’;

’Jesus, violence and peace’ and ’Muhammad and violence’.

Presenting these and many other important topics (Women, Trinity, Death, Resurrection and Faith) in this way provides a transparency and intelligibility about the issues.

Bernie worked amongst Muslims in Asia and the Middle East for decades and his fluency in Arabic, his passion for Muslims and his PhD in the hadiths are the foundation for the genuine expertise evident in this book.

I have already read this with a friend, and many wide-ranging discussions ensued. Don’t miss the opportunities you have to do the same. Buy it, read it and give it away to your Muslim friend.

Karen Morris

Details

Written by: Ben Underwood

Living with a Wild God

A non-believer’s search for the truth about everything
Barbara Ehrenreich
Granta, 2014

I have developed a habit of reading Christian memoirs, especially those writings which reflect on a conversion of one kind or another. Lately I’ve enjoyed Thomas Oden’s A Change of Heart, Peter Hitchen’s The Rage Against God, Esther Baker’s I Once Was A Buddhist Nun and Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic, among others. Now Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Living with a Wild God, is resolutely not a Christian; she refuses monotheism, rejects any idea of a perfect God with a good plan for our lives. Yet she was, as a teenaged atheist, driven to discover ‘what’s really going on here?’(p37), that is, what is life about? What is the meaning of it all? Living with a Wild God is about that quest of hers, which she dropped for most of her adult life of writing and social activism, but has returned to in her seventies. The book a very personal wrestle with her upbringing, her attempts to build a foundation for knowledge and, centrally, her desire to come to grips with an overwhelming mystical experience she had as a young woman.

Ehrenreich’s unfinished business with the events of her young life is dramatically described at the beginning of the book. While her personal papers were being sorted and sent off to a university library for preservation, she kept back  

‘a thick reddish folder or envelope of the old fashioned kind, tied by a string. It had survived for about forty-eight years through god knows how many moves from state to state and from one apartment to another. In all that time I never opened it and never mentioned or referred to it. But somehow I had always remembered to pack it in the bottom of a suitcase, no matter how chaotic the circumstances. Future graduate students could snicker over my love affairs and political idealism if they were so minded, but they could not have this.’ (pX)

In the folder was a series of loose leaf, intermittently produced, personal writings from her teenaged years that led up to ‘an event so strange, so cataclysmic, that I never in all the intervening years wrote or spoke about it’ (pXII). Ehrenreich knew that these papers required ‘a major job of exegesis, a strenuous reconstruction of all that I once thought was better left unsaid’. Hence Living with a Wild God, and if that doesn’t intrigue you, I don’t know who you are.

The quest begins in Ehrenreich’s awareness of the brevity and apparent futility of life. Her family raised her to reject religion in favour of an anti-authoritarian atheism, and to embrace thinking as the road to the answers to questions that trouble you, and so Ehrenreich seeks to exercise her sharp young mind in pursuing her quest to make sense of life by thinking. There are a couple of problems she faces in this. One is finding a sure place to think out from. The rationalist Ehrenreich tries to begin with radical doubt, and quickly discovers that there’s ‘simply no way to get from “I” to “not I” once you’ve boxed yourself in to what I later learned is called Western dualism’ (p37). Ehrenreich seems genuinely to have struggled to be anything but a solipsist until her early twenties, and even after that she was not really convinced about the reality of other minds until she had children (p218).

Another difficulty she has in her quest is that she began to experience episodes of altered perception, moments where, ‘something peeled off the visible world, taking with it all meaning, inference, association, labels and words’ (p47), where ‘all that was familiar would drain out of the world around me’ (p49). The teenaged Ehrenreich wrote that, ‘it is as if I am only consciousness, and not an individual at all, both a part of and apart from my environment. Strange. Everything looks strange as if I’d never seen it before.’ (p49). Ehrenreich can see how a materialist, neurological explanation might account for these episodes, but she is not ready simply to understand these things as mere temporary perceptual breakdowns. She wonders whether they are instead perceptual breakthroughs—glimpses of the substance of things lying under the named world.

But then these episodes of dissociation are completely surpassed by an experience she has at seventeen. Early one morning, walking in an unfamiliar town, returning from a skiing trip,

‘I found whatever I had been looking for since the articulation of my quest, or perhaps, given my mental passivity at the moment, whatever had been looking for me.’ (p115)

‘[T]he world flamed into life. … It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once … the only condition was overflow.’ (p116)

After that she knew

‘that the clunky old reality machine would never work the same way again. I knew that the heavens had opened, and poured into me, and I into them.’ (p117)

That was the day ‘the truth arrived in all its blinding glory’, but Ehrenreich felt it was an experience she could neither speak nor recapture, although it divided her life decisively into ‘before’ and ‘after’. It was an experience she could not make sense of, and as she writes her memoir, she interprets the experience as affecting her as a trauma, a catastrophe, knocking her into a spin and leaving her feeling like a failure, unable to testify to the truth she had encountered. Then it was time to go to college pursue the ambition of becoming a scientist that she knew would win her father’s approval. Ehrenreich seeks a new start in ‘the data, the theories, the mathematical and physical rules that other, more knowledgeable people had come up with’ (p145)

Yet even in the lab she is haunted by the idea that there is an Other seeking her out. Her thesis involved seeking to measure the ways voltage varied with current in silicon electrodes, but the voltages would not settle on fixed values, they oscillated in ways no-one expected, or could explain. Unhappy, unappreciated and under pressure, she wonders whether she is encountering ‘something that was attempting to communicate with me through the voltage tracings, if only I could make out the message’.  

There’s much more in this narrative about Ehrenreich’s early life — her difficult relationships with her father and mother, for example, and the book is an engaging and frank attempt to reconstruct the inner life of the young Barbara. But what I wanted most of all to know is how she would finally try to integrate her ‘Encounter at Lone Pine’ with her view of reality. When she does do this, in the final chapters, she refuses to countenance any consideration of God, theistically understood. From what she writes, she seems to do this out of sheer determined prejudice, believing for various unarticulated reasons that God is some kind of easy non-answer, a refusal to think. It feels like there is also deep loyalty to her family way operating here. I must say this seems itself an easy and probably unfair shutting down of the possibility theism might be true. What she is prepared to try to integrate into her atheism is that there may really be an Other or Others: living (although perhaps not organically), intentional (although not necessarily benevolent or moral), perhaps emergent within the universe and present to us in various ways (through nature as well as in experiences like Ehrenreich’s). Ehrenreich’s last words in the book are ‘it may be seeking us out’ (p237).

What shall we say to this? This is the inner world of a particular card-carrying, vocal atheist. Who’d have known, if Ehrenreich did not have such candour, and the conviction that she owed it to her younger self to write this book? Ehrenreich is doing what we all seek to do to various degrees, that is, to make sense of the world as we experience it. Reading Ehrenreich’s own testimony to her experience, it hardly seems like a narrative confirmation of atheism, a world devoid of transcendent glory. Rather it seems like it’s a world where it’s hard to shake the idea that Someone is there, encountering us, and seeking our attention.

Ben Underwood, WA