a comment that grew into a post

This started out as a comment on Anthony's post.

About Berry's essay: it came from an address he gave at a Baptist seminary. Obviously, he tailors his comments for a very specific audience. I've never seen another of his essays where he uses biblical text as much as he does here. It does seem practical (in the cause of preserving the world) to speak to people in a language they understand. This essay won't persuade everybody, but it resonated with me.

Anyway, I linked to it in light of Kev's original question:

"How should our communities or faith communities embrace the present and the natural world?"

My faith community is rather amorphous at the moment, and those I'm most connected with now don't need to be convinced that the world and the life in it are worth protecting. However, a few years ago I was in a conversation with my brother- in-law, who could fairly be called a religious "fanatic" who thought “it will all be fixed when Jesus returns”. I gave him Berry's essay to read, and at the time, he wasn't too impressed. The bible teaches that this world is passing away and that ushering souls into heaven is all that matters. More recently he lost his job as a mega-church pastor and has been talking about consuming less, conservation, and service to the poor. I don't know how much this development is related to Wendell Berry, but I'm sure the essay hasn't had negative consequences in his life.

Like the Terpstras and Nicki, I'm the kid of a pastor, and while I have issues with my religious upbringing, Christianity still informs my life--it's the way I can make sense of the world. I haven't dealt with anything as huge as the suicide of a family member, but I talked with Kev and Nicki about this recently--Do we live with the resentment/bitterness that Reece does, having grown up in pretty conservative Christian families? How did we individually work through those issues as we more or less broke away from our religious past? I wonder if people would like to talk about their experience with this.

For me, it was my introduction at age 18 to the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, who opened up the possibility of creativeness (rather than obedience only) in the Christian life. To be made in God's image is to be a creator. Those were ideas that sort of threw on lights for me, when my experience had been that being a Christian was mainly about having the right theology. Berdyaev was recognizably Christian, but he greatly enlarged my concept of what being a Christian could mean. From there I started to deal with the problems of biblical interpretation that Anthony brings up.

It became pretty obvious to me that interpretation is subjective, but I never got to the point where I thought that interpretation is useless or that all interpretations are equal. I don't think sustainable farming and the crusades are morally equivalent. Sure, my judgment about that is subject to my experience and is culturally constructed. But that's what I've got to work with. So, I vote for interpretations that move us in the direction of love for our neighbors and reverence for life.