Easter Workshop 1981
GOD AND THINGS Kate Tristram
By ‘Things’ I mean everything, whether alive or not, that belongs to our world and is not human. I leave aside the possibility of other ‘worlds,’ including a world of pure spirits, whether good or evil. In our world the human race has established domination over ‘things’ and is in a position to destroy them at will, though of course man might destroy himself too in so doing. To achieve the right relationship with ‘things’ is a matter, literally, of life and death.
What is the right relationship? Modern Western man has been accused of ruthless exploitation of the earth and everything in it in his greed. Do you consider this accusation justified? Some other peoples have been known for a tolerant attitude to living things generally, or to some particular species they considered sacred. Some cultures have despised the world of matter and considered it a prison for the spirit, which is happily released in death. Such cultures have generally either treated the human body harshly or else, believing in its basic nastiness, have allowed it to indulge its appetites without restraint.
But the Christian view is that matter, created by God, is neither evil nor neutral: it is good. Man’s body, his physical life, is good; it is to be received as God’s gift and enjoyed. Man is the ‘crown’ of God’s creation in this world, at any rate up to the present, and he has been given a right dominion; man has intrinsic value above that of the rest of creation. He is self-conscious and is in a relationship of conscious response to God and to others.
But this does not mean that he has the right to exploit creation. He is the steward of it, not the master; he is answerable to God. He must balance the satisfaction of his own needs with the needs of other creatures. For God intended his creation to be a harmony. This does not rule out the use of some creatures by others for food, but is does require that the ‘balance of nature’ is respected. It totally rules out wholesale, shortsighted destruction and waste. It puts question-marks against many features of our life-style.
The Christian view of God as Creator means that something of the mind of God can be seen through the world of things. The beauty, variety and order of the world reveal to us something of God. But man is a ‘fallen’ being, and he can close his eyes to all this. Most men have only occasional moments when they sense the presence of the Creator. But in Christian belief God has redeemed man by living out the life of God under human conditions, in one particular life and death. So God has taken to himself our human experience of living as part of a world of material things.
From this it seems that Christians see God in the world in three main ways. They appreciate him through his handiwork, his creation. They may have moments of mystical experience, when they sense the presence of God directly. But thirdly, they also believe God works ‘sacramentally.’ As in the life of Jesus God made a human body the channel of his love and power, so now he takes the material things of everyday life and gives himself to his people through them.
This belief that spiritual reality can be conveyed through material things is called ‘sacramental.’ Any thing at all can become sacramental if God will to reveal himself through it. But the Christian Church uses special sacraments, in particular baptism and Holy Communion. Here it is believed that God uses water, bread and wine to give Himself to man and to unite man with Himself. This is not magic: it would not ‘work’ if God did not will it to work. But when we use these sacraments faithfully we can rely on his promise to be present to us in them. So God makes our material bodies the means of our spiritual growth.
Such a view implies that God, who created the material world, sets a high value on it. Is his material world a purely temporary thing? Will God throw our material bodies on the scrapheap at the end of out lives and the whole world at the end of all things? Or has he a further purpose for this world he loves so much?
The one thing we can be sure of beyond death, whether ours or the world’s, is that God will be the same. His nature will still be love. Because of his love for us we hope for a continuing relationship, that is, life after death. Of the nature of that life some Christians prefer to say nothing. Others dare to state their hopes, and among them the hope that the world we have loved, which has shaped us and become our home, may in some sense be there in God’s final plan. The story of the empty tomb suggests that the one piece of matter which was entirely subject to God’s will, the body of Jesus, was not abandoned: it was transformed. So it may be that it is God’s purpose to take and transform his present material world into the ‘stuff’ of the Kingdom, so that it may be to us, there as here, a home, and the whole creation may be not destroyed but redeemed.
