Stewardshipilicious
Some people at Vic have started Eco-justice Wellington, o yeah. I’ve joined them, and tonight I made us a blog. Hopefully this will become a useful resource, alerting people to nifty events and linking to hot stewardship/ecology articles.
28 responses to “Stewardshipilicious”
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GIVE ME STRENGTH!!!
Do they have women preaching there? Or trees?
You might find Freya Mathews interesting.
Is Freya Matthews interesting in a good way or a bad way? Reading her short profile makes me think that her core beliefs/interests (eg Taoism) are so whacked that a Christian couldn’t possibly find common ground on which to meaningfully discuss ecological issues.
Matt – I am loving this “eco-justice” concept. You should have a slogan – “The fear of nature is the beginning of JUSTICE”! No doubt this group will operate at about the same level as Captain Planet (that seminal cartoon of the early ’90s) – a multicultural group of plucky kids combining their powers to battle against the evils of industrialised society which at its core is run by a motley group of ne’er-do-goods whose sole aim in life is to pollute for pollution’s sake and cackle evilly while they do so. Why is our tax money going to social entreprenuers when it could be going to this worthy cause?
Oo you’ve piqued my curiosity, I must check FM out. Christianity has a lot of common ground for discussing ecological issues with any number of other religions.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see how well the eco-justice group justifies itself. Would appear to be grounded in the fear of the Lord, rather than nature. Because we fear God, we respect His creation and want to learn how to care for it.
If the chaplaincy at Vic is anything like the chaplaincy at Otago University, they gave up the fear of the Lord and the gospel message a long time ago in exchange for a tepid social (and ecological) gospel with no life changing content. Sure they make some good points, but so do abortionists who make sure they use sterile surgical instruments to kill babies.
I don’t know what Otago’s is like, but Vic’s is the money. Gospel central. God’s concern for all of life central. Prayer & Bible central. I remember now they did have a speaker from Otago at a seminar a while back talking about the Radical Orthodoxy movement and he was very excellent too. His name is Gregory McCormick. He made some incidental comments at lunch that day about baptism being the transition from being a individual, lonely and aimless to being a person, part of a Body and in relation to many other persons and Person which I found a rather stimulating thought.
Matthew, I applaud your patience and graciousness in the face of much adversity.
John: “a tepid social & ecological gospel”
i.e. good news about how we relate to each other and the creation. That doesn’t seem so tepid necessarily.
Matt, if you are right about the Vic chaplaincy then that is wonderful. My experiences of university chaplains has not been first hand, but instead through their writings in the university paper which I read pretty faithfully for 5 years. They talked a lot about things like eco-justice and compassion for the poor, and the power of prayer, and positive thinking, and the love of God, but they never talked about the saving work of Christ or about a personal salvation and what that entails (repentance from sin and a turning to Christ). There was no militating against evil or taking stands for righteousness. Not once in 5 years.
A social and ecological gospel is tepid and contentless if it is not grounded firmly in the truth and in the saving work of Jesus Christ for each of us personally. Without this, talking about the environment or care for the poor is a waste of time.
John, cheers for those comments, they’re quite helpful. Helpful to see where you’re coming from. It’s an emphasis I would have shared with you in the past. I think it points to a quite basic struggle in a bunch of different Christian traditions. In the reformed world it is maybe between people who like The Banner of Truth and people who like The Banner. That was too clever by half but I couldn’t resist. It would be more accurate to maybe say Banner of Truth vs Credenda Agenda.
Anyway, from my POV, your ideas look ‘individualistic’. And from yours mine look ‘liberal’, I guess.
Amen to 10. Matt, aside from forsaking the assembly, I support your involvement in the ‘eco-justice’ (just has to have inverted commas round it) group if indeed they are founded on the biblical principles John mentioned.
Perhaps it is worth pointing out that a stand for righteousness certainly covers eco-justice, and compassion for the poor. If we read those things and do not count them as a ‘stand for righteousness’, then I think we have missed a large part of God’s concern:
To realise that God has made me part of His family in order that I can do these things is what “the saving work of Christ” and “personal salvation” looks like in scripture. It is not a theory, it is a new way of life:
Do we ever truly face the fact that God vindicates those who do His purposes over those who think they have His favour because they have “the temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord”?
True, but was John saying anything contradictory to that?
And I would add to the above that I do not have to know the exact mechanism (the ordo salutis) by which God makes me a member of His family.
To treat this mechanism as the gospel is to miss the larger point: that God has made Jesus Christ king. That is the great news that the apostles proclaimed; everything flows from that act, and that act is the gospel. My knowledge of the mechanism for what we call “a personal relationship” or “personal salvation” is one aspect of it. What the gospel means for the whole creation is another aspect of it; but this second aspect does not reduce to the first, as you suggest, John.
God’s restoration of the world to Himself in Christ does not depend on anyone understanding the 5 points of Calvinism; or what we call “justification by faith alone through grace”, or anything else. It is a public, ‘objective’ fact. Insofar as people work out what it means for the creation, because they have some vague idea that God has such a character that He wants creational justice and restoration, then they are living the meaning and intent of the gospel.
And insofar as people like us sit back and mock them for not having this or that aspect of biblical interpretation right, meanwhile failing to do even what they do, we set ourselves up for the wrath of a God who does not care about being merely (and smugly) intellectually correct. He cares about the creation, the world, and the actual-in-practice reversal of sin & its effect, because He loves it.
All of which is not to say that knowing the scripture is not important. Of course it is. Scripture is the heart of the story we tell about God; the reason we know what we do. But meditate on your scriptures, and ask whether God wants, if they must be dichotomised, interpretative correctness or conformity to His purposes.
Tim, John said “There was no militating against evil or taking stands for righteousness. Not once in 5 years.”
So were they talking about mere feel-good frippery for which God has no time?
I can’t help but wonder how “militating against evil” would go down on a modern university campus. Articles in a magazine are probably as much about piquing the curiosity of “seekers” than seriously challenging established believers. As such, they don’t ask hard questions – they’re marketing collateral, made positive and relevant to the target market – and they would provide a distorted picture of the organisation producing them.
Aaron – 15 very long and I don’t understand. I wasn’t talking about the ordo anything. I wasn’t talking about TULIP or about interpretational finesse.
I was talking about the core message of the gospel being a call to recognition by each individual of their sin, a belief in Jesus as your personal saviour and a repentance from sin. This is not “interpretative correctness” this is the essence of salvation. You don’t win God’s favour by being a tidy kiwi or by recycling. You don’t win God’s favour period. Everything you do is a response of gratitude for God’s personal salvation to you personally. Without that personal salvation, you can do all the Greenpeace protests, eco-justice campaigns and hikois that you want and you are still as damned as Hitler.
John: I agree that we don’t win God’s favour, period. But your ‘core message’ is not how Jesus presented his own work, making it about the socio-political consequences of having the long-expected king come, nor how Paul gives content to the gospel (see Rom 1:1-5), making it about the enthronment of the Son as that king, as a descendant of David. Nor does it account for why we baptise infants and call them saved, despite an absence of personal response.
I cannot see how your core message of personal response takes account of any of the quotes I gave in 13, except as providing a more basic foundation than they do for understanding ‘the gospel’.
Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
By the way matt, you do design some very good looking websites. I like the clean lines and lots of white space – this coming from a design philistine.
Thanks John. I try and do sites that aren’t mostly white, but just can’t.
No, judicious use of white space is all good. Although, in my humble opinion, if you want to attain a higher level of professionalism, you should use bright coloured neon fonts that blink rapidly.
On that note, Matt, you should inlcude a link to your web-design portfolio :)
Here are some sites I’ve made in the past: http://techs.co.nz/design/ref.htm.
FireShips!
yeah, fireships is coo