Failed Revolutions, Fossil Capitalism & Freedom From Sin
Here’s your weekly roundup of everything I’ve curated or created online, April 28–May 4, 2024.
Thought-Provoking Content
Red Dynamite Places Adventists Alongside Protestant Culture Warriors by Rob York in Spectrum:
It is, in fact, easy to read a book like Red Dynamite, point fingers at the opposite movement and congratulate one’s self on being part of the correct intellectual current, but books such as these do remind us that most ideologies today have problematic roots.
Canada’s Population Growth Is Exploding by Don Kerr in The Hub:
In total, Canada witnessed about 800,000 housing starts over the 2021-2023 period, whereas over this same period, Canada’s population grew by over 2.5 million.
Canada will be well served into the future by returning to and maintaining a predictable rate of population growth and avoiding the rather abrupt shifts experienced most recently. A majority of Canadians have long been supportive of Canadian immigration policy. The recent mishandling of this file has jeopardized this consensus. Hopefully not irreparably.
Karl Polanyi’s Failed Revolution by Thomas Fazi in UnHerd:
Prior to the 19th century, Karl Polanyi insisted, the human economy had always been “embedded” in society: it was subordinated to local politics, customs, religion and social relations.
Markets and trading in commodities are a part of all human societies, but in order to create a “market society”, these commodities have to be subject to a larger, coherent system of market relations. This is something that can only be accomplished through state coercion and regulation.
Toward a Genealogy of Fossil Capitalism: On Mohamed Amer Meziane’s The States of the Earth by Ed Simon in Los Angeles Review of Books:
Secularization ... is “nothing other than a belief in the existence of this world as the only real one: the certainty that it is here below, on the earth, that salvation can be realized, through unlimited enjoyment ensured by a continual growth of riches.”
Transcending Obsolescence by Walter J. Scheirer in Athwart:
Flashing forward to the early 1990s, the openly Christian executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, was setting an agenda for the Internet era that would encompass creation and communion—elements that would prove irresistible to counterculture enthusiasts in Silicon Valley and conservative Catholics alike. Ripatrazone surfaces a remarkable article published by Christianity Today that recounts an encounter Kelly had with virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, one that led him to a profound spiritual revelation. Kelly came to believe that the ability for programmers to create wholly new digital environments was most importantly a luminous “vision of the unbounded God binding himself to his creation.” This new act of creation was enabled by the capaciousness of computer programs and the unbounded reach of information networks. Such capabilities are familiar enough to the public, but are not typically associated with Christian spirituality.
Wired’s editorial board would converge on Kelly’s agenda of not only seeking to understand a rapidly changing globe, but also to fix it in constructive ways. But they needed to put some intellectual heft behind that agenda to get the techies, who tended to fixate on technical minutia rather than technology’s broader social context, onboard. In this regard, McLuhan’s ideas were seen to be explanatory and instructional in just the way Silicon Valley required.
In the realm of ideas of the early 1990s, when a more disconnected critical theory that stopped at its own critique was prevalent, it was a bold turn. Backing the “canonization” of McLuhan, the first issue of Wired provided a conversation between the WELL’s Brand and feminist social critic Camille Paglia on the primacy of the media, with Paglia recalling as a graduate student: “We all thought, “This is one of the great prophets of our time.’”
“In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.”
A Generous Creedalism by Shawn Brace in Reimagining Faith:
After nearly three years of study, ... I think it’s both inevitable and advisable that a faith community has some sort of creed.
Friendship in the Good: A Retrospective of Sorts by Jake Meador in Mere Orthodoxy:
The world is good. Our bodies are good. They are just not our highest good. Jesus's point is that there is no higher good than knowing God, and that we can love good things so much that they cause us to lose sight of that highest good.
Yet Not I, But Through Christ in Me: On Becoming Free From Sin by Esther Louw:
The new birth that Jesus spoke about to Nicodemus is the new life that we live when we die with Him on the cross by faith and are spiritually resurrected with Him.
Devotional
Water and Dirt
Toward the middle of his account of Jesus’s life, John recalls his followers putting Jesus in an awkward position: “Now as [Jesus] was passing by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, ‘Who sinned, this man or his parents, so that he was born blind?’” (John 9:1–2).
That may seem like a weird question to us, but Jesus’s disciples believed strongly that God rewards good works and punishes evil-doers without accounting for what the Bible says about how bad outcomes can happen naturally (for example, Ecclesiastes 9:11). The “very good” creation that God made “in the beginning” (Genesis 1:1, 31) was damaged when humanity chose to choose for ourselves what is good and what is evil. This means that, in the words of Yeats, in our world “things fall apart.” For, as Paul put it in a letter written a couple of decades after Jesus’s ministry ended, “The creation was subjected to frustration” in “slavery to decay” (Romans 8:20, 21).
According to Jesus, there was an opportunity in this man’s particular tragedy: “Neither this man sinned, nor his parents, but it happened so that the works of God could be disclosed in his case” (John 9:3).
Then Jesus does the work of God: “After having said these things, he spat on the ground and made mud from the spittle and rubbed the mud over his eyes. And he said to him, ‘Go wash in the pool of Siloam’ (which means ‘sent’). So, he went and washed and came back seeing.” (John 9:6).
We have already found in Genesis 1 that God creates new things out of water. Genesis 1 tells the creation story from the top down, emphasizing God’s extraordinary power to make things happen by his Word through formulaic repetition of words. But Genesis 2 tells the creation story from the bottom up, showing in simple prose how God is so intimately connected with his creation that when creating he even gets his hands dirty. For, in Genesis 2, we find that God creates new humans out of dirt:
“Then the Lord God handfashioned the human—dry humus from the ground—and breathed into his nostrils breath of life, and the human became and living being” (Genesis 2:7).
There is wordplay going on here in the original Hebrew. The word for “human” is “adam,” from which we get the name Adam that appears later in the story of the first man. The word for “humus”—the dirt from which God handfashioned the first man—is “adamah.” This means that we humans are identified with our bodies; we are not less than our physical makeup.
But we are also more than our bodies because it takes something else to make us alive—the breath of life. This word for breath is a synonym for “spirit” in the Bible. It is a mysterious quality from God that makes the difference between a lump of organic material and a breathing body. It is why humans can make babies by combining living reproductive cells but have never been able to create even a single living cell from scratch in a laboratory.
When Jesus combined water and dirt to heal the blind man he was showing his body—ours by extension—mattered to him on the same heavenly and earthy terms on which God had made the human body in the first place. John included this detail because he recognized in Jesus’s healing touch that same hand that the Bible said had originally fashioned humanity. Jesus was doing the work of God because he was God creating again the man’s sight lost from his birth to creation’s decay.
We all experience that decay at various rates. Eventually, life-breath leaves our bodies and returns to God, and our bodies rot and return to the ground (Ecclesiastes 12:7). Then we are no longer living beings. But John saw in the creation pattern of Jesus’s miracles a potential for a fuller re-creation that could overcome death.
“Now indeed Jesus did also many other signs in front of the disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that, by believing, you may have life in his name” (John 20:30–31).
Fragment
On Sola Scriptura in the New Testament and History
The apostolic church held the canon of Scripture (including the writings of the apostles, 2 Pet 3:16) to be authoritative in matters pertaining to salvation (2 Tim 3:16). But it also had extra-canonical trustworthy sayings (1 Tim 1:15, 3:1, 4:9; 2 Tim 2:11; Titus 3:8) and extra-canonical traditions (1 Cor 11:2; 2 Thess 2:15, 3:6) that were authoritative for the church. So the NT does not teach a view of the canon as the only source of authority.
The magisterial reformers also appealed to the traditions of the church. This article has a good summary of Heiko Oberman's classification of this view as T1, versus the Roman Catholic (T2) and the radical/dissenting view that says we need no other authoritative sources at all (T0):
T0 is the "only Scripture" view of sola scriptura, translating it in the Latin nominative case. But the magisterial reformers used sola scriptura in the ablative case: (salvation) by Scripture alone. For them, Scripture was all sufficient for salvation but not the only authority in the church.
As an Adventist, I accept at least one non-canonical source of authority (Ellen White), but as an Adventist I am also not comfortable with giving any non-canonical source a normative role. I've written more on this here.