This year celebrate Jesus’ resurrection with only the best chocolate made by child slave labor? Disturbing…
http://www.laborrights.org/stop-child-labor/cocoa-campaign
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_exploitation_in_the_chocolate_industry
http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/24/news/international/chocolate_bittersweet.fortune/
or settle for slave free chocolate if you have to.
Interesting article from CNN on whether or not monogamy is realistic in our day and age.
As Western society moves farther from its Judeo-Christian roots it will only become more confused about foundations for meaning, value, morals, ethics, and a vision for the good/virtuous life. Christianity roots monogamous marriage relationships in a transcendent God who embodies love and who himself enters into covenant with humankind. The character of our relationships are meant to be rooted in the character of his relationships.
Without the transcendent, how does one develop a guiding vision for human relationships? Personal preference? Psychological studies? Ultimately no foundation is found and the best one can do is to construct meaning for oneself and the best a culture can do is to disapprove of only the most horrendous violations of others while providing no normative guide for the next generation.
Augustine argued that for one to be virtuous, his/her loves must be rightly ordered. That is, one must not only love the right things, but in the correct order. One may love (desire) good food, but if one loves it more than one’s children it becomes a vice. One may love one’s children, but to love one’s children more than God it becomes a vice.
Christians affirm a doctrine of Original Sin. Humans are born into a condition of sin, including wrongly ordered loves, and only a life united to God can begin to heal this situation.
It appears to me that our economic system currently seeks both to efficiently meet our loves (desires) regardless of their right ordering. And it marketing arm of our economy seeks to increase our desires in ways that consistently lead to their wrong ordering. Companies are happy to have you be obsessive about their products.
This leads me to several conclusions:
First, we must not place our hope in Capitalism to solve the deep social and spiritual problems of our nation. It promises no such thing. In fact, we ought not be surprised if it actually is an efficient means of bringing greater fragmentation and brokenness to fruition. It efficiently meets our desires, even if those desires ultimately lead to shattered lives.
Second, we ought to be very suspicious of groups which seek to re-order our desires based on their financial profit. If a virtuous life is a life of rightly ordered loves, we ought to be thoughtful and protective of who influences the order of our loves. Marketing is concerned to increase our desires so that they may find profit, not so we may live a moral life.
This morning I jumped on YouTube and typed in “commercial.” The video below popped up first.
It seems to me that this commercial serves as an example of a pattern I’ve noticed throughout advertising today. Advertisers often no long sell products and services, they now sell religion.
What does this commercial sell? It sells a goal, a telos, a purpose for the boy’s life. It sells an identity, a meaningful identity as a Porsche lover and owner. It does not simply sell an object, a car, but rather traffics in the categories of meaning, value, purpose, and identity. These values have traditionally been reserved for religion.
When I observe advertisers in North America it appears to me that the vast majority of them have given up on trying to simply sell goods and services. You rarely see commercials plainly enumerating the characteristics of a product. Rather they focus on selling meaning, value, purpose, and identity and attempt to attach their products to these values. In short, they traffic in religion.
These messages are in direct competition with the message of the Gospel that Jesus is Lord. We need to address these messages not merely as temptations to unwisely spend money or care more strongly for material things than we ought, but also and more importantly, as competing ideologies to the message of Gospel. The story of Jesus Christ makes absolute claims on where meaning, value, purpose, and identity come from in this world. We ought to be very wary of those who not only make claims to the contrary, but do so insidiously, “we’re not selling meaning, we’re just selling products,” and with near complete penetration into our everyday lives.
How many advertising messages are we exposed to on a daily basis? 500? 1000?
Think about it, radio ads, TV ads, internet ads, t-shirts, bumper stickers, billboards…
On the surface they all sell different products and services, but in reality they are ALL selling the ideology of Consumerism. They sell us the idea that we ought to approach life as consumers, our responsibility is to ourselves to seek our own happiness in every facet of life above all else.
No group in the history of the world has been allowed such complete penetration into the daily lives of the general population.
Doesn’t it affect us?
Is there any bigger threat to the Church today than consumerism? Is there any bigger threat to communities attempting to follow Jesus than consumerism? I am beginning to believe no.
I don’t mean small “c” consumerism, “I like to buy new shoes more often than I need to” consumerism.
I mean big “C” Consumerism, consumerism as an approach to every aspect of life. This approach tells us that we are disconnected individuals, we owe nothing to family or community or church, but rather we owe it to ourselves to make ourselves as happy as possible, and the way we do that is to pursue whatever desires we currently feel as far as possible. Insofar as they are legal and don’t hurt anyone they are good.
This big “C” Consumerism shapes our decisions about what church to attend (whatever we like the best, until something better comes along), where we are to live (often where we can make the most money, sometimes where we can have the most fun), and how we spend our time (what profits us, even appeals to serve others come under the guise of how they will make us feel good about ourselves). The Gospel is presented not as a story of forgiveness leading to a call to mission but a story of forgiveness leading to a more fulfilling life (in the past the emphasis was heaven, but in our comfortable, long living society we tend to put the emphasis on present, not future, benefits).
more tomorrow…
I had an interesting conversation with a friend about reverse mortgages this past weekend. It seems to me that the idea of spending every possible dime one has access to before dying reeks of hopelessness and despair (I’m not addressing every instance of employing a reverse mortgage but rather its embrace at a popular level within a culture). A community with a vision for the future will be a community that saves and invests in the future. Only a community with no vision for the future or a hopeless vision will insist on spending everything you can.
I’m taking a class in the history of Christian Spirituality. Naturally we deal with much which has been written hundreds and even thousands of years ago. The text for the course is “Thirsty for God” by Bradley Holt. Speaking of reading old books he quotes Lewis who writes,
“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books… Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny… We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it… None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books… The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.”
-From Lewis’ Introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation
I’m loving chapter 2. In it he argues that Pastors are historians, they help be see the story they are in. He points to the book of Ruth, this story of ordinary people living ordinary life, where God works in the background to bring redemption. Its a small story, one might say. And yet it ends with a genealogy which connects Ruth to the line of King David and eventually to the line of Jesus the Messiah. Her small story is nestled within the Big story.
Peterson desires Pastors to be those who help people see God in the ordinariness of life, and to see their small stories as not isolated random events, but part of a much, much bigger story.
Trying to study theology is a bit like the mouse trying to study the Cat.
-Bruce Hindmarsh, from lecture on friday
How did so many disembodied concepts emerge from a tradition whose central commitment is to “the Word become flesh?”
-Parker Palmer
Are you familiar with the Lausanne Covenant and the Manila Manifesto?
Evangelical believers from around the world came together to pen these two excellent documents penned in 1974 and 1989 respectively outlining the mission of the Church in the world. In fact, in Cape Town in 2010 a third gathering will be taking place updating further the evangelical call to outreach in our world.
If you’ve read or used them, what do you think?
Change in any community or organization is difficult. It often leads to disagreement and hurt. But how we handle this conflict is vital to our witness.
“Disagreeing Christianly is one of the most powerful forms of incarnational witness the church can practice.” -Darrell Guder
Why is it that our Churches and para-church organizations often preach Christ but when disagreement comes, power and control take the day rather than sacrifice, service, and the cross?
“The way we change is itself a form of witness.” -Darrell Guder
Churches and para-church organizations have to change. Worship styles change. Budgets change. Staff members are hired and let go. Restructuring happens. Programs are begun and ended. New organizations begin, others need to be ended. Mission statements evolve. Old traditions are let go of, new traditions are begun.
The world is watching not merely what changes we make but how they are made.
Is our goal Jesus Christ but our method of the world, our does the way we go about changing itself have a cruciform shape?
Honestly this is not an issue I have ever found myself thinking much about before. Growing up I was part of churches that practiced open communion (by open I mean not limited to members of the church or denomination, but usually it was explained that communion is meant for Christians) and I thought all churches were that way. I was so unaware of the idea of closed communion that in college I visited a Catholic Church with a friend and took communion there as well because I thought, “I’m a Christian, communion is for Christians, what’s the problem?” Little did I know that the Catholic Church did not approve of my stance.
I sympathize with those who would like to restrict communion to only those who have been baptized or to only those who are members of the local congregation (I sympathize less with those who desire to close communion based on denomination, this seems to me based less in community and more in dividing over theological particulars). In our individualistic consumer oriented society, true commitment to community is a rare thing, even in the church, and closed communion would take steps to redress this.
In the end, however, I don’t believe I can justify to myself taking the step of either closing communion based on baptism or based on church membership. Honestly, it’s a gut feeling as much as anything. It rings of humans desiring to be in control of things. It reminds me of the Pharisees who, “shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces (Matt. 23:13)” and who hold to “the traditions of men” over the commands of God (Mark 7:8). It feels like rules that we are making up to guard communion, not directions given to us by God.
Is communion more meaningful to me, if you are excluded from it? Are we afraid of people taking communion unworthily? If that is the case, following Paul’s teaching on the subject, it seems we should be more concerned about excluding the wealthy in our congregations who are thoughtless towards the less well off than excluding the un-baptized or non-members (1 Cor. 11:17-33). Yes, baptism seals our identity and communion reaffirms it, but does this necessarily lead to the conclusion that we ought to forbid people to take communion prior to baptism? I don’t think so.
While I affirm the desire to increase the importance to communion in worship, the connection between communion and community, and to properly instruct on what communion means before it is taken, I am not ready to take what I see as the significant step of barring certain people (un-baptized, non-members) from communion without more Scriptural evidence (barring people based on issues of Church disciple is a separate issue in my mind).
who I am and who I could be 
Recent Comments