The Whole Fairy Ring

It has been a spell since I have written much on food issues, but it has never been far from my mind. And then the brief post yesterday reminded how important the whole issue is.

The world is full of friendly rivalries, and when they get unfriendly in any serious way, most people observing can see it for what it is — a personal problem. Fords and Chevrolets, PCs and Macs, microbrews and macrobrews, and so on. There are other preference choices that ought to be in this category, but for some reason they are not. Do you want your corn fresh or store bought? Or, more accurately, do you prefer having corn that is store bought, as opposed to not having superior fresh corn? Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer choice. Nobody (and by this I mean nobody here) has any complaint whatever against Christians who use their Christian liberty to seek out food they like, and who eat it with gratitude and zest. It doesn’t matter if it involves sushi, tofu or Skippy peanut butter. Thanksgiving sanctifies all foods, and go, team.

So in what follows, if the food issues discussed are in this adiaphora category for you, covered over with multiple layers of gratitude, well, then, good for you and I am not talking about you. But if the sentiments are religious or quasi-religious (as they frequently are these days), then I am talking about you. Foodism in America constitutes a significant false religion, and there are way too many Christians who do not realize the extent of their syncretistic compromises. There are multiple issues involved, and they are all connected. As Luke, my son-in-law puts it, these are not individual mushrooms. Get sufficient distance and you can see the whole fairy ring.

There are three basic points to make here, and Lord willing, they will be developed at greater length later on. First, foundationally, Christians have been drifting into an adoption of a sentimentalist hermeneutic instead of a rational and logical hermeneutic. God gave us minds so that we could study and understand. But even in conservative Christian circles, there is a rising suspicion of intellect that is quite alarming. Secondly, Christians have been giving way to a spirit of murmuring and ingratitude, even though God gave us hearts so that we could be grateful. And last, because we have inverted head and heart, we have found ourselves saddled with a guilt-ridden, works-righteousness approach to our daily bread. How many Christians torture themselves with self-rebuke because they aren’t “eating healthy enough?” They didn’t have a whole lot of time for lunch yesterday, so they didn’t walk the three blocks necessary to get that bean sprout sandwich, and instead just stopped at the street vendor on the first corner. Instead of feeling guilty, though, they ought simply to have thanked God for the hot dog. What? Too spiritual to thank God for a hot dog? We have the problem summed up right there.

I said we have inverted head and heart. God gave us minds to think with and hearts to thank with. Instead we use our hearts to think about the world as we would like it to have been, and we use our minds to come up with rationalizations for our ingratitude. We are a murmuring, discontented, unhappy, ungrateful people. And because we think we want salvation from our discontents, we cook up one cockeyed thing after another. God will be pleased if we eat raw foods, or unprocessed foods, or brownish foods, or unsprayed foods. God will be so pleased if we eat organic apples that were sprayed with that all natural coyote urine instead of being sprayed with that unnatural tetragylcyramadamboni.

We think we are well-advanced in worldview thinking, as we like to call this nonsense, when we actually haven’t gotten past “God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food.”