DEEP LIFE
09/05/24 10:32
Spirituality is not something separate from life, from the world, from animals and landscapes. Spirituality is about ‘being’. All of it.
‘In Him we live and move and have our being.’ We always did. With the incarnation we have the agency and communion of the trinity woven into our person. The Lord’s Table is much more than about the cross. It’s about the fact that the cross paves the way for us to be one substance with Christ. PURPOSE The purpose of God and the salvation of Christ embraces the creation. ‘Christ our life’ means that Christ is all of life. ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only Son. The world finds its meaning and purpose in Jesus Christ. He represents and is personally the law of the Spirit of Life. The fruits of the Spirit embrace not only character and the virtues but the way we relate to the earth and the creation. This may be virtuous or destructive. This means stewardship of the earth, not killing the earth and not lying to ourselves by denying that we have brought about climate change by the ways in which we have abused the creation. Greed turns life into money. Life multiplies life. NEW CREATION
Myk Habets highlights Torrance’s insistence that redemption is part of the new creation of the creation. “Because creation is purposive it, no less than human beings, has a telos. ‘Somehow it is not just man who has fallen but the whole created order along with him, so that we may not isolate our understanding of human evil from natural evil, or moral evil from material evil, the pain and suffering of human being from the suffering and misery, the pain and travail of the whole creation.’ From this truth Torrance draws the conclusion ‘that real redemption from the power of human sin and guilt involves a radical change in the material world and calls for the complete redemption of the created order’. Torrance’s principle is that ‘God does not abandon his creation when he has saved man, for all creation, together with man, will be renewed when Christ comes again’”. CONSUMPTION CULT ‘The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your people who revere your name, both great and small-- and for destroying those who destroy the earth’ Rev 11.18 NIV.
An obsession with sex as morality to the exclusion of stewardship of the Earth on the grounds of ‘jobs and growth’ is at best misguided and at worst stupid. If we possess a consistent spirituality, we will know that the preservation and renewal of the earth begins now. Care for nature and the being of the earth is not cultish. Materialism, compulsive consumption and globalisation are the cult of Mammon. A Christianity that is restricted to church, moral sexuality, the gifts, assorted anointings and dismissive of the earth is a cult of materialist religious denial.
DULLNESS CULT The dullest person in the room is prone to talk the most. The most ignorant are often the most noisome. The most confused are those who see a predatory society as normal and attempts to save the earth as cultish. They have compartmentalised religion and adopted the cult of vested interests. If killing people is grievous, killing the earth is worse. Jesus is the Saviour of the Earth as much as He is the Saviour of you and of us. We can be whole and holy without wearing a chaff-bag of selfish ignorance over our heads.
