Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Reimagining Christianity 1.3


Affirmation 3: Loving God includes celebrating the God whose Spirit pervades and whose glory is reflected in all of God’s Creation, including the earth and its ecosystems, the sacred and secular, the Christian and non-Christian, the human and non-human.
Perhaps that is another way of asking "WWJD?" -- what would Jesus drive? One would think that this affirmation would be essentially noncontraversial, what with evangelicals joining the conversation and even the green movement.
Of course, when one affirms that the glory of God is reflected in the non-Christian as well as the Christian one is treading dangerously close the the radical Paul -- in Christ there is no Jew or Greek. At its deepest level, Paul's call for unity is not a call for "conversion" to Christ but rather an affirmation of Paul's faith that the reality of Christ marked God's decisive "yes" to all the world, not simply to the small part of the world that related to God through the community of practice gathered around the traditions of Judaism.
I suppose, though, that a call to reflect our deepest convictions in the way we actually live -- what we drive, what we purchase, how we tread on the planet -- is probably a far more difficult challenge for most of us that grappling with the theological implications of this affirmation. So, how do we make these decisions? What are we driving? What toys are we using right now, to read and comment?

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