Repost from October 18, 2008. Posted this on Calvin-in-Common to a fellow with whom I tend to get into religious discussions with. Some of what I address here relates to the topics we’ve discussed over time. Updated Aug 1 2014.

Probably the best way for me to begin is to share with you some of my own thinking lately on some of the matters you shared as well as other related matters. My thought journey, as has yours, is shaped by my work, my reading, and my experiences both private and public.

Thinking in “Ages”

Lately I’ve been pondering the NT’s conception of “ages”. In the NT it is very clear that we live in what is sometimes described by Paul as “the present, evil age” and we await “the age to come”. (I’ll get to a bit of the issue of whether the relationship between NT books in a bit.) In the Synoptics the term used is “kingdom of God/heaven”, in John the English translation “eternal life” (which frustrates me) is more literally from Greek “the life of the age (to come)”. Paul uses a number of phrases, but one of his most dominant is “in Christ”. Paul also strongly uses the comparisons of perishable/imperishable, flesh/spirit (he uses is contrast in multiple different ways and they are sometimes tricky to discern), but again often “the present age” and “the age to come”. Part of what I’m learning I need to do in ministry is to give my people a vocabulary that tracks with them but also communicates more accurately some of these concepts so lately my term has been “the age of decay” which I take from Romans 8:21.

The Speed of Time

Allow me to make an observation about time and human existence. The only difference between the 20th century genocides we rightly abhor and what we have all come to call “normal” is speed and to a certain degree observable, intentional, direct human agency.

• 100% of people die.
• 100% of human relationships will either fall apart in time or be destroyed by death.
• 100% of human culture will be lost to death and destruction: all of the music, all of the art, all of the literature, all of the creative/imaginative/beautiful thinking and expressions.

Humanity is a Scientific Blip

If you watch the history or discovery channel you will learn that right from the time of the big bang the universe has contained within itself a limited amount of energy, and according to the most recent discoveries by the physicists using the Hubble telescope the universe will continue to expand and grow colder. Closer to home the sun, upon which we are completely dependent for life on this planet will itself in a matter of billions of years no longer give us a nice, stable environment. Its fuel too is limited.

Closer still we have both the ongoing processes of volcanism which continue to keep the planet warm and alive as well as continue to change the shape of the continents and the chemistry of our atmosphere. There will be volcanoes and super volcanos that erupt drastically changing what we have come to depend upon as a stable environment. There are, of course, other issues out there like cyclical ice ages, meteor strikes and human threats such as nuclear war and global warming.

When all of this is said and done it is abundantly clear realistic expectations are that humans will be a dominant species on this planet for a geologically and cosmically brief instance and then one thing or another is going to wipe us out, likely long before we would be realistically able to traverse the immense distances of space in order to find another suitable environment to keep future generations alive.

Even if we could manage through technology to secure for our descendants a story line beyond our own planet’s ability to sustain us, the clock is ticking on the universe and it is doubtful that any human intervention imaginable could impact that reality at that scale. The great hope given by all the cheery physicists in these programs I show to my children is that all of us are likely to personally be long dead so that we will never have to experience it.

From Below All Meaning Requires Human Imagination

From the perspective of what I just laid out nothing any of us value in this world matters beyond any value that we give it based on a sense of experiential or emotional pleasure.

When I think this all through I am rather amazed at how aptly the New Testament concept of “age of decay” fits. Everything in this world has a shelf life. Everything you have will be taken away from you by death. In fact, this process proceeds before your very eyes. We all take steps to retard this inevitable decay, but given the timeline of the universe the relative success of our efforts are laughable. It is all hair coloring. Our economic bailouts, our wars against terrorists, drugs, poverty, hunger, aids, our international institutions, our art, our literature, it’s all vanity. None of it will last, and in fact we see this clearly enough to make us nervous, anxious creatures.

Our Curious Anxiety

Our anxiety, however, is interesting because why should we expect anything different? None of us have ever experienced anything other than this “age of decay”, yet all of us long for permanence, for meaning, for a land that is imperishable and that is populated by imperishability. This desire seems near universal. Isn’t this what ancient pyramid builders sought through their monuments? Many, many cultures had the seeking of this imperishability as their greatest good, their central focus. The Greeks would transcend time through fame. Our culture is frankly crass and unimaginative, we just try to use money and power. But all seem to seek it. Why should we seek such a thing?

Bible as Library vs. Bible as Unified Story

Modern scholarship has tended to emphasize the discontinuity of Biblical books and there are indeed differences between the books. There are also difference between all of the parts and systems of my body. You could easily take me apart by systems and note the differences between them all. We also know, however, that if you decide to combine them, you have a different thing than simply the accumulation of the parts.

Seeing the Bible as a whole is indeed a different thing than seeing simply 66 separate books, just like seeing all the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers as separate items gives you a different thing than seeing them all together. Seeing all the works of Shakespeare as a unit is a different thing than seeing them as simply an bunch of plays and poems.

Christianity has emerged not simply from the separate books but in fact from the assertion of their union even though their union wasn’t assumed at the time of their writing. Subsets of that can naturally be seen in the books of Psalms and Proverbs. I don’t see that as a big stumbling block. You can say “they don’t speak with one voice” or you can say “Let’s hear all their voices and perhaps we will hear a choir singing one very long song” where the voices and parts, though with some angularities and puzzles at points have for thousands of years now been embraced as a unity.

Christianity 

Christianity (as I see it, at least, and as I have come to see it through this Reformed tradition) asserts that this Jesus of Nazareth comes to undo this present age of decay and to make this whole world, whole history, whole universe holocaust become in fact untrue. I don’t believe any other religion makes anywhere near such a claim. Many religions offer its adherents some escape into a non-material happy estate, and in fact many American Christians have reduced Christianity into such a thing. Much of what I hear you react against both in the telling of Christianity and the Bible I react against as well.

When I hear many people talk about Christianity it seems to me that they imagine it is some special knowledge or religious party that if you pledge allegiance to it you get some sort of favored status on the basis of your wiser, shrewder choice, and subsequently get an afterlife apartment in Santa Barbara while those others get some hot slum with bad neighbors. Many people like yourself recoil from such a thing and assert “no just God or universe would institute such a program, and I don’t want to be party with people who assert such a thing.”

Do You Qualify By Moral Performance?

What is interesting to me, however, is that I also find a broad consensus by many on a notion of an non-material afterlife that is determined by moral performance in this world. Just today I spoke with a man visiting his disabled wife in the care home who told me about some of the bad things he did in Vietnam and how he is working hard to make up for those things done in war, things that still plague him at night in his dreams, by taking care of his wife.

Many, many people, even those who are very agnostic or doubtful about any personal existence beyond the grave, seem to hold to sense of reward or punishment. Karma has become a popular term, except when those others suggest that those born disabled in this world are simply reaping the consequences of poor choices in previous lives.

I find those who presuppose afterlife destinations based on this worldly moral performance indeed have some very sliding scales. Afterlife punishment seems to be warranted for genocidal dictators, child molesters, and anyone who really ticks me off and falls on my bad list. What seems universal in this group is that each individual asserts that they have something close to the right standard to evaluate moral performance, even those who in many other circumstances laud moral relativism as the only reasonable way to bring harmony between cultures and groups.

Jesus of Nazareth

Again, Christianity asserts that this Jesus of Nazareth in fact came 2000 years ago to undo and end the age of decay. He announces it in Luke 4 and states that the undoing of the age of decay began “today”.

The undoing of the age of decay is in fact something that is beyond us. We can see all around us, that all of our powers can only retard the decay for ridiculously tiny bits of time, kind of like the sand walls my children construct at the shore. They can hold back the water with the sand as long as they keep adding sand but we all know that their efforts will not last.

Christianity also makes a second claim, which is close to being as audacious as the one I just made.

It is that this present age of decay is in some strange way, directly related to us, both in its inception and its destruction. It asserts that humanity is in a triangular relationship both with the creator and the universe. It asserts that the intent of the creator was to make us the stewards of this universe: we depend upon the creator for our very selves, and the universe depends upon us. Our rebellion against the creator somehow also brings the rebellion of the universe against its manager. This rebellion in fact brings about or initiates or activates the age of decay. Thus, it is in the undoing of the rebellion that the age of decay is also undone (Romans 8).

Now there are some real issues in this telling that I am fully aware of and many ones that I am unable to fully reconcile. I’d love to say there weren’t, but what would be the point of that. Can you reconcile our current understanding of the “big bang” with a possible rebellion narrative that would have had to take place but a few million years ago with the advent of homo sapiens? There are lots and lots of others too, most of them pretty public.

Should these issues drive me to simply reject Christianity as I understand it?

“Should” is always a funny word when it comes to humans and their professed beliefs?

• Should the current banking crisis cause those who believe in the goodness or efficiencies of “markets” to re-evaluate their economic professions?
• Should the explosion of knowledge and sources of information cause political liberals to abandon their notions that moral lackings in people is fundamentally attributable and correctable via education and experience?

Belief, evidence, and having all the problems resolved are notoriously variable in human professions. The universality of this, in fact, is an enormous challenge to some worldviews that assert that people are rational and morally good or at least correctable, and that fixing us is simply a matter of time and technology.

All Belief Systems of Challenges

What we in fact see, is that every belief system or world view has significant challenges and problems. A modern/secular worldview that attempts to be agnostic (at least) about God or the spiritual faces the gripping admonition of Nietzsche to throw off theistic vestiges of morality or “ought” and only live in the “can”. Attempts at purely empirical and scientific worldviews face the dilemma that the speed of scientific paradigm change has made their basis for belief both highly unstable and emotionally dark. This worldview has zero solution to the 100% historical human holocaust and therefore no platform to support either meaning, purpose, “ought” or our present understanding of “rights”.

Judging Between Worldviews

All belief systems must be judged on their assets and liabilities, but we are course not impartial judges.

To me any belief system that simply asserts to be “merely mine”, in other words not true for others, isn’t worth much. If that were the case I would simply default to what is most pleasing and most easy for me, to assume that I alone in the universe matter and that everything should in fact be my way and about me. I would be a very angry and frustrated God at the indifference shown by the rest of you in refusing to serve and honor me as such!

No, I’m looking for bigger fish. I want nothing less than the end of the age of decay. I want an end to the 100% holocaust and to the sheer waste and disastrous loss of all culture, beauty, thought, meaning, love, charity and everything else besides. I also recognize, however, that the greatest holdout of all of human history in fact lies within my chest, my heart.

We are the Hard Case

I often remind the people in my church that in all of the stories of the Bible, God’s greatest opponent is us. He can make rivers stand up like walls, stop the sun, feed thousands of people from a few loaves and fishes, but he spends that immense, wandering library of a book wrestling with us, and with me. In that moment I see the connection between the age of decay and my own heart.

If God could sustain this perishable world, and do all that he would need to do over billions of years to arrive at a small blue planet with fragile, relatively hairless bipeds who in the course of a few thousand years utterly dominate this globe to the point of being quiet capable of destroying it, then he could easily recreate this universe in imperishability.

The holdout, however, is me and my kind.

If given an eternity of time, and limitless power, we would do to that world exactly what we’ve done to this one and each other.

• I am the problem.
• I am the source of all human misery together with the rest of you.
• We are God’s greatest challenge.
• We, as fellow human beings, have demonstrated the fact that we are unable to deal with each other, and so we incarcerate, alienate, hate and kill one another. We can’t stop ourselves.

One of Us

So what would it take to undo all of this? It would have to be one of us. He would have to live within all of the limitations of time and space. He would have to do more than teach. Mere teaching clearly is insufficient to tackle this beast. He would have to be blameless and the natural and expected outcome of one being blameless would need to take place, he would be slaughter by us. He would need to accept it voluntarily. He would also need to undo it and undo it for us as well. This is the Christian story. This is why the Christian Christ is indispensable, fully God and fully human.

One Thing For Us to Do

Now there are of course lots of things left to be addressed.

• How exactly can every sad thing become untrue?
• How exactly is this present perishable age tied to the next?
• If we can hold out in this one, can we hold out in the next?
• Is participation in the next age possible today?
• Can we opt out?

To me, however, addressing the age of decay and its undoing is the most important thing to do. What could compare to it? It isn’t escapism, because all that is done within the age of decay that is in fact beginning to participate in the age to come translates into it which somehow gives a meaning to active work in this world that no other profession can.