The Earth is the Lord's: Part 4 - Proper Unworldliness

"The sense of the transcendent is the heart of culture, the very essence of humanity. A civilization that is devoted exclusivley to the utilitarian is at bottom not different from barbarism. The world is sustained by unworldliness."

"In our zeal to change, in our passion to advance, we ridiculed superstition until we lost our ability to believe. We have helped to extinguish the light our fathers had kindled. We have bartered holiness for convenience, loyalty for success, wisdom for information, prayers for sermons, tradition for fashion." And I want my %&$! money back.

The Jewish understanding is that "the tasks, begun by the patriarchs and prophets and continued by their descendents, are now entrusted to us. We are either the last Jews or those who will hand over the entire past to generations to come. We will either forfeit or enrich the legacy of ages." We Christians must also deeply consider this. We are interconnected, we are part of the one universal church and we must not forfeit the deposit of faith passed down to us ... the apostolic tradition that we are called to live out and pass on to our children. Our life is meaningful.

Heschel goes so far as to say: "The gravest sin for a Jew is to forget what he represents. We are God's stake in human history... We carry the gold of God in our souls to forge the gate of the kingdom. There is a war to wage against the vulgar, against the glorfication of the absurd ... Loyal to the presence of the ultimate... we may be able to make clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinite."

Bishop Kallistos Ware (now Metropolitaton Kallistos) lectured on the church at Princeton almost 10 years ago and he said the calling of the church in our modern age was to tell the world what it meant to be human. The world has forgotton. We have forgotten that man is more than man ... that we are in the image of God.

He said: "We sit bowed before our computers, but we do not see the face of our sister or our brother ... we are in great need of a renewal of our Christian understanding of what it is to be a person, what it is moreover to be a person in relationship. We need to understand personhood, not as something closed in upon itself, but as something creatively open to others, and that means, as I see it, one of the urgent task of the here and now is to relate the human person to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity." Here is the lecture.