Disclosures: A Christian map of the cosmos

When we doubt and debate our understanding of Christianity are we fixing too narrowly on the God question? To be a Christian is not only a matter of loyalty to a transcendent supreme being; it’s a matter of living within a whole world of perceived reality. God may be the dominant feature of this sacred world but not the only one. I want to set out what it might be like to inhabit a Christian world by suggesting how someone who lives within a Christian cosmos would resolve certain existential challenges and demands.

History

First, the problem of history. By this I mean collective events in time. The home and school. A political party. The electoral process. International affairs. Refugees and immigrants. Trumpized economics. A lethal pandemic. You get the drift. This is all the stuff of history.

The problem is: should one be engaged in this ambiguous and exhausting stuff? Or would one be wiser to go on a silent retreat, walk a labyrinth, join a prayer group, or take up meditation and yoga? I know your answer is likely to be: do both. Did not Jesus withdraw from the world for forty days to meditate on his mission?

True enough; but I’m talking here of prevailing vectors. Which way does the dominant wind blow? And here we need to recall that Jesus’ conduct put him grievously out of step with Jewish temple politics and Roman imperial politics. He was crucified as a sacrilegious heretic on the one side and a subversive revolutionary on the other.

The theme of historical engagement runs through the Bible. “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Active participation in history can be perilous business but if you buy into the Christian world you are left with little other option.

A problem that confronted me in the sixties and seventies was what to think and do about the de-Canadianization of Canadian universities. Two questionable things were happening because of the old boy’s network that saw most teaching jobs go first to Brits and then to Americans while Canadians, with their expensively and laboriously obtained PhDs did not even secure interviews. Second, Canadian history and culture was often ignored as a subject matter. But did this matter? Was not knowledge a universal essence? Was it important to preserve the local, the particular? Not if you were, in effect, a Platonist. But what if you were trying to discover and live within a Christian world? It seemed to me that if you embraced a lifeview of history as important and valuable, you had to take an affirmative stand.

There is a United Church sidebar to this discussion. In 1970, the United Church sold its publishing arm, Ryerson Press, to the American firm McGraw-Hill. Ryerson had a long record of publishing Canadian poetry, novels, history, textbooks. Google lists such authors as A.R.M. Lower, Earle Birney, A.M. Klein, and Alice Munro.

Some of us counseled: go slow, before risking alienation of Canadian cultural knowledge. The highly regarded then-moderator excoriated the critics of the sale, viewing them, it seemed, as nationalistic chauvinists. No doubt, multiple factors were at work in prompting the sale, not least economic ones. But for me, a Christian perspective on history pointed a direction even if it did not offer a knockdown solution.

Nature

There will likely be no problem understanding the dimension of nature in the Christian world. The United Church contains few who deny that humans are causing catastrophic global warming. We may even find Exxon-Mobilites who know it is happening but who, like the cigarette czars before them, refuse to let unpalatable knowledge disrupt the bottom line. I believe United Church people score quite well on the ecological challenge.

It was at one time fashionable to lay the blame for ecological devastation at the foot of the Bible itself. Did not Genesis portray God commanding Adam to multiply and subdue the earth? This is a challenge that needs to be faced, but it is responded to by the key Christian insights into creation and stewardship, Incarnation, and the eschatological new world – all of which function to valorize the material world. Archbishop William Temple once characterized (approvingly) Christianity as the most materialistic of religions. If God looked on his creation and saw that it was good, so should we.

Humans

A third dimension of a cosmology is us. What are we humans really like? The way we treat one another will depend in large measure on what we judge the other person to be like. And we shouldn’t be under any illusions. The record isn’t consistently good. Recently I read Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. The butchery of the eleventh and twelfth century Crusades and of the Mongols in the following century would seem incredible were it not that the twentieth century matches it: In WWI, for example, ten million military killed and the same number of civilians. In WWII, the number: similar.

One of the compelling things about the Christian tradition is it’s stark honesty. It capitulates neither to cynicism nor utopianism. It embraces both sides of a complex story at the same time. On one hand, God has made man a little lower than the angels. On the other, Jeremiah tells us “the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately sick.” These two human propensities -- towards good and towards evil – go on at the same time and frequently infect one another. Everyday life is disclosed as a dialectical mash-up of good and evil. Not always pretty, but at least true.

The Christian tradition reveals divine ultimate reality. But it gives us a lot more. It introduces us into a world where the lineaments of history, nature, and humans are perceptively disclosed.