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Rapture theology and the end times

Image: George Frederick Watts, Chaos (c. 1875).

With global anxiety increasing as we face threats in so many areas, how should we—as people of faith—respond?

It is clear that humanity is facing a number of existential crises: sea-levels rising, more frequent “weather events,” insect numbers decimated, oxygen levels in the sea declining, species extinction, plastic pollution, toxic air . . . and the list could go on. When we add to this political posturing, social inequality, the rise of nationalism, and nuclear arms proliferation we end up with the perfect storm. Many are anxious. Is this the end of the world? So prevalent is anxiety in the current climate that one paper recently presented us with the “A-Z of climate anxiety: how to avoid meltdown,” subtitled: “With the climate emergency putting our mental health at risk, Emma Beddington presents an everyday guide to eco wellbeing.” This may, perhaps, result in some personal comfort but offers little hope for the planet. Continue reading “Rapture theology and the end times”

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Reflections on reality and the incarnation

On re-reading this article seven years later, I find this philosophising a bit tedious, even pretentious. I’ve left it here on my blog as it represents a milestone on my Musician’s Journey. I was just trying to get my head round the nature of reality . . .

The great divorce

The effect of the Fall — however one conceives that primordial divorce of humankind from the divine — was to close us off from eternity: we were exiled from the Garden of Eden.(6) At first sight it might seem as though we were sent out into an eternal night, a limitless expanse of time and space — exiled wanderers, banished for ever from the ‘island’ Garden, now guarded by angelic sentinels. (The picture that comes to mind is that of an impoverished local populace excluded from some a lavish health resort built by a foreign investor.) This picture though, in many senses, reverses reality, for is it not the Garden that is the threshold of eternity, and the ‘exterior’ that is bounded?

The ultimate boundary, the threshold, if you like, of the carceral realm in which we live, is death. Space and time may well stretch beyond the horizons of infinity, but for fallen mortals this is of little comfort if the end of our travels, the destination of the journey, is oblivion. The irony is that the Fall was an attempt to become god-like; a sudden dash for freedom —  to flee from the ‘tyranny’ of subservience to God. Ironic because we exchanged an infinite divine horizon for a finite one, and found ourselves trapped in what philosophers optimistically call ‘totality’, an immanent sphere divorced from the transcendent. (SEE NOTE 1) Continue reading “Reflections on reality and the incarnation”

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The measurement principle – encountering divine love

One of the first things I learned as a physicist was the Measurement Principle. Roughly speaking, it states that you can’t measure anything accurately because the measuring process will inevitably affect the thing you are measuring. Now in normal life the effect is minimal and probably would not affect your shelf-building project or the purchase of new shoes, but in the case of sub-atomic particles the effect is more drastic. Instead of using rulers you have to use underground particle accelerators and such things which explode apart the thing you want to measure and (if I’ve understood correctly) you then measure the resulting debris with rulers.  Continue reading “The measurement principle – encountering divine love”

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The edge of darkness – thinking about reality

As a physicist (though I confess a poor one) I conceive of God’s creative act as that of an explosive sun. God exploded us into existence, gave birth to us, and we orbit around him like the rings of Saturn, cosmic dust. But in his desire for children rather than angels, the centrifugal forces of his love spun us outwards to the edges of his gravitational influence, to the cusp of oblivion. Here, at the fragile discontinuity between light and darkness, a small force from our own weak will can take us beyond escape velocity into outer darkness, or on a trajectory back towards his heart. The choice is ours. The centrifugal force of God’s dangerous creativity is balanced, on a knife edge, with the centripetal force of his inexorable gravitational love.

It is a choice between the darkness of independence, a slide towards the frozen inertness of absolute zero, or to be consumed in the embrace of nuclear love. I have made my choice.