GRACE & PEACE
“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16 11)
Growing Dominion, Part 22
We have to live up to what God has given us in Christ before we can go on to maturity. Another way of putting this is that we have to master our kindergarten and elementary school lessons before we can go on to grad school. The kindergarten of the Christian faith concerns faith, hope and love, overflowing gratitude to God, a demeanor of forgiveness to others, and other such practices against which there is no law.
The graduate school of Christian worldview thinking would address the biblical approach to nuclear power plants versus coal, the use of pesticides in the growing of crops, the question surrounding our emerging American empire, choices between various cancer treatments, and so on. And Christians who have not mastered the basics are not qualified to address the more complicated issues. If you cannot run with men, how can you run with horses?
So let us not be children in our thinking, and, where we cannot help being children, let us at least recognize that we are. A Christian worldview of agriculture, the power grid, medicine, etc. is not a worldview held by anyone who happens to be a Christian. In other words, no one who is regenerate has an automatic right to get “into” something, and then declare ipse dixit that this is the more biblical approach. Thoughtlessness never works anywhere, and unexamined assumptions have frequently caused us to lurch into great follies. In the name of “stewardship,” we cannot simply declare that mass transit is the preferred option over cars. It might be, but let’s think it through carefully, shall we?
A knee-jerk response to the fad de jour invariably leads to unintended consequences. Twenty years ago, the bumper sticker exhortation was to “split wood, not atoms.” But of course, when it comes to air pollution, wood is just about the dirtiest fuel available. The fact that a wood fire looks better in an L.L. Bean catalog is not but a triumph of style over substance. Thinking these things through together (in community, as God’s people together, not as individualists shilling a product or a lifestyle) will help us avoid the Diet Coke phenomenon. For every action, there are unintended consequences. And Christian worldview thinking will seek to anticipate those, or at least be able to recognize them when they inevitably appear. Returning to the example, those who think like adults will notice that the invention of Diet Coke did not result in lots of surplus American pounds disappearing. Trimmer waistlines everywhere! Rather, it kind of “paid for” that double fudge brownie.