The View from Nowhere

Thomas Nagel, a philosopher, wrote a book: The View from Nowhere, which included observations on death.

His defining observation was:

I am concerned with the adequate recognition of my eventual annihilation itself. There will be a last day, a last hour, a last minute of consciousness, and that will be it. Off the edge.

Page 225

Then I go to David Horowitz' book Radical Son. He writes of his thoughts of his parents: "...not even now that they had been returned to their primordial dust...It seemed to me a metaphor for life itself, which sets us free only to bring us relentlessly back to earth.

In his earlier years, Horowitz had been a major player in the 1960 USA student commitment to a communist revolution in the USA...on the basis of what he now terms a powerful "crypto-religion" that transformed into "..cultural Marxism, which denied the very idea of the individual and revived Marx's class as a war against racial and gender oppression."

This sought (seeks) to obliterate the individual, the only locus of suffering and the only source of personhood and its values.

Yet, if one considers that we are but dust and will return to dust, nothing about the individual as having inherent value remains.

It only exists, because we are made like God, and by God: Genesis 2:7.

Only two religions

 There are but two religions: worship of the creation, and worship of the creator.

The first step is to figure out what you are worshipping. Then establish the grounds for worship of the creator instead of the creation or creature.

And worship? Simply turning to the one worshiped as the orienting ground of your life and thought. The choice in simple terms: dust (the creation) or mind (the living creator).

 But here's the issue with worship of the creature/creation: it is seeking a resolution of the dilemma of the human condition from within the domain that hosts that condition. Like trying to lift yourself by your boot straps. No. The resolution has to come from outside the grand system of corruption that we are in: thus the Creator enters the creation, taking on human nature to overcome the corruption, demonstrated in the resurrection. And as tangible as our life and the creation itself: within the stream of history that we are also in.

Rescue comes really, and only from outside the sinking ship; not by moving its deck-chairs.

The church to join?

 How do you find a church to join?

Here's a tip: look for one like the one in this letter from a minister to his church as it looks to the year ahead.

This is a small country church in a large enough town.

The congregational committee started to meet for this year.  The committee members are A, B, C, D and F (names obscured, of course), and they will look after rosters, music and training readers.

We have four adult Bible classes for first half-year:

The Rector                   Practical Discipleship

Rector's warden           Genesis

Bishop Jones (ret'd)    The Psalms of Messiah

Deaconess Smith        Minor Prophets

There are five home groups this year. Joe Flynn will be the secretary to organize them with the groups being hosted by: Ernest Borgnine, Tim Conway, Yoshio Yoda, Jane Dulo and Lisa Seagram.

Our year started with a thanksgiving prayer meeting in which 20 participated.

Following on from this in February we held our Home Group Launch to which 78 people come (pot-luck lunch and very enjoyable).

Men's Mountain is back after a successful year last year. This year we have some great dinners lined up with speakers from far and near, including Bishop Jones talking about his adventures in the bush with Leon Morris all those years ago.

The Men's Mountain project this year is to help St Eric's at Junee with their first steps towards prison ministry. We'll be staying on a wheat farm! St Eric, as you man know, is the patron saint of Law.

The first of our community seminars was for our older folk, or those with older parents and dealt with aged care options and legal concerns.Brad and Janet organized it.

Our next community seminar will be on managing the work-life-kids-rest-hobbies balance. It will be in May, details to come later.

This year our sermon pattern will be each month:

1st Sunday: OT

2nd Sunday: NT

3rd Sunday: Theology

4th Sunday: Society, that is apologetic and social issues with a biblical critique.

The 5th Sunday,  when it occurs will be on an aspect of church history.

Of course the names have been obscured (with the cast of McHale's Navy), but you get the drift. It's  a little church that you've got to love!

A lifeless galaxy?

 In a book launch speech, James Franklin uttered this memorable line:

"The explosion of a lifeless galaxy is just a firework, the death of a human is a tragedy".

Right on both counts, but wrong in coupling the two.

If the evolutionary view is right, then life came from the cosmos and is derivative of it. It has no inherent value because the cosmos has no inherent value. It contains no locus of value. It is axiologically neutral.

This morning at our ecclesium the prayer said words to effect: 'from the beginning of time, millions of years ago...' then went on to list the very forces at work which are the outcome of that very same materialist conception of the world.

He has bolted his Christian understanding onto the very world view that seeks to undo the Christian understanding.

It was a pulling-the-carpet-from-under-one's-own-feet moment.

Yet Genesis has it differently.

God is the father of live and he 'breathed' it into Adam whom he formed from the ground. Adam connected both, then, to the material world, and the life of God.

God, creating in the days of our experience shows our place in the hierarchy of dependency of creation, and before God as one 'like' him. God shows his active presence in that creation; working in the 'space' he has created by creating over the very days that constrain and govern the tempo of our experience of that domain. God with us indeed. God's action, like ours: in time the basis for fellowship.

12 essentail reads

 A friend crafted a list of books to give to a contact he'd made with a book store assistant. The assistant had not before encountered a Christian who could make his faith dynamic, inviting, and interesting. She wanted to know what to read.

The Bible of course: gospel of John. But also some books to help build the context (the 12th is my suggestion...only because I wanted 12 books; a good dozen, or maybe 13: a baker's dozen):

1. The Screwtape Letters: Lewis

2. The Great Divorce: Lewis

3. Schaeffer's Trilogy: Schaeffer -- Three books that set Western cultural history in a Biblical context: The God Who is There, Escape from Reason, He Is There and Is Not Silent.

4. Degenerate Moderns: Jones

5. The Devil's Delusion: Berlinski

6. Does God Exist?: Miethe/Flew

7. Darwin on Trial: Johnson

8. Sick Societies: Edgerton

9. In Defence of History: Evans

10. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Scruton

11. A Fatal Conjunction: Kimm

12. The End of History: Windschuttle

13. Destructive Generation: Collier and Horowitz

Our credal recitation today

 Congregational recitation of a creed is an important part of our collective worship. Also good, mind you, for private devotional contemplation. Maybe do it once a week, slowly think through a creed (maybe not the Athanasian; it's a little long).

Whether it's the Apostles or the Nicene, particularly, we are reminded of the basic structure of our faith's foundation. So commit both to memory!

Today we used an important passage in the New Testament instead of one of the early creeds.

There appear to be a number of credal passages in Paul particularly. We recited this one (Colossians 1:13-22):

He rescued us from the  domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of  His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For  by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him.

He  is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.

Although [we] were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, yet He has now reconciled [us] in His fleshly body through death, in order to present [us] before him holy and blameless and beyond reproach.

What to we call our buildings?

We don't have a generic name for a church building.

Cathedral = the seat of a bishop (where his 'throne' is; rather pompous).

Minster = large building built as part of a monastery, doesn't apply.

Abbey = a type of monastery, so that's out.

Chapel = typically an adjunct facility as part of a large building, e.g. a cathedral, a large church assembly building such as a minster, a large home; adopted for a non-conformist meeting/assembly hall, sends wrong message, so, no.

Church = WRONG. This is a group of people.

Auditorium = close, but implies a one-way activity.

Meeting hall = too boring, but accurate, 'church meeting hall'? Too cumbersome

I've got it!

Eccleseum.= the assembly place of a church. Perfecto!

There we are: already a word in use:

https://www.spsnyc.org/sermon-library/sitting-together-intentionally-parashat-trumah-2021