A misunderstanding of sin – it’s lost it’s meaning, people only see it as a sex issue.
Sin: failure to love.
Theology of neighbour love: provisions of the Torah, parable of the good Samaritan, feeding the five thousand, etc.
15,000 die daily from water related diseases.
Estimated that by 2010 50 million people could be climate refugees.
God’s requirement for justice: Isaiah 58.
What can we do?
• Prioritize relationships over things.
• Reduce overconsumption & waste.
• Think, work & produce more locally.
• Sabbath & Jubilee implications for rest; importance of rootedness, etc.
Today I’m taking part in a conference organized by local Edinburgh churches looking at the issue of climate change. There is an excellent line up of keynote speakers and breakout sessions, so I’m really lookig forward to it. I will, of course, be plugging Christian Aid as much as possible! We have a stand at the conference that will have loads of our resources on it, and I’ll also be asking people to sign a Countdown to Cppenhagen pledge card! I’ll hopefully post notes from sessions tonight or tomorrow.
At Greenbelt (which seems like a looong time ago now…) I got to hear Brian McLaren speak on the topic of “postmodern & postcolonial”. It was really interesting to me, so I’ve typed up some notes from the session – would love to hear your take on it too!
Literary criticism – where does the meaning in a text lie?
“It’s not easy having no faith either.”
Disentangling our faith from modernity
“Don’t depend only on intellectual history, also look at social history.” – Alan Roxborough. It’s not only driven by intellect but by social issues.
The flipside of the northern postmodern conversation is the southern postcolonial conversation.
How do you reconcile being followers of Jesus & being part of the system of colonialism?
A gospel that avoids inconvenient truths – what happens when you see the gospel through colonialism.
In the years after WWII, its almost as though the Holocaust became the catalyst to wake up to the horrors of the last 2 centuries – the horrors of colonialism, of the indigenous peoples, etc.
William F Butler – “They [communists] do not understand that the gates of hell will not prevail against western civilization.”
To what degree do we need to imagine a faith that is not a western religion? Its as much an African or a South American religion as a western one.
The Bible is a book written by the colonized (the Jews) – its dangerous when we read it as the colonizers. For example, when talking about poverty, people quote Jesus saying “the poor you will have always” – but Jesus is quoting Deut 15 – very different!
One of the assumptions of colonialism is that everyone has to play by the same rules. Now the question is which rules – the UK ones – or the African ones?
In a time when we’ve slipped back into preemptive war, we have to rediscover preemptive peace-making.
The conquest of Canaan would actually justify terrorism more than empire.
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