Lonely new world
Paff, William
sions, and mixed motivations. While acts of selfishness that do harm to others for personal advantage, or acts of going along with evils to avoid pain and loss, are not necessarily determined,...
...It originally defined that civilization...
...Come for an academic year or a single semester...
...The human race as one species could be said to fall "in Adam" as well as to be redeemed by Christ...
...The result of making utopia a matter of political organization and action in this world has thus far included totalitarianism in the realm of politics and culture, and Faustian scientific adventure, eugenic in purpose but nihilistic in practice...
...It regards humankind as entirely autonomous, existing within a moral framework entirely of its own creation, responsible only to itself...
...Such has been its role, at least since the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the emergence of modern science...
...It has bestowed upon the rest of the world industrial technology and successive revolutions in theoretical and applied science...
...He acknowledged that this certainty was eventually disappointed...
...Christ's redeeming work is bringing a new creation to birth, a future Eden...
...Sabbatical Office * 6896 Laurel Street, NW * Washington, DC 20012 Phone: 202.726.8800, ext 5216 * Fax: 202.726.1716 * http://www.wtu.edu Commonweal 9 January 28, 2000...
...Yes, also, to the concept that a self-conscious knowledge of good and evil is the required prelude for sinning...
...As I compare my evolutionary account of Original Sin with the catechism's exposition, I see a fairly good fit...
...John Locke rested a major part of his thought on the concept of natural rights...
...Until the twentieth century, religion was central to Western civilization...
...Yes, as evolutionary psychologists and Christianity affirm, we are one corporate body or human race (or species) that through genetic inheritance shares a psychic unity...
...We could agree too that death truly enters human history when human beings have developed the self-conscious intelligence to fear the extinction of the conscious self...
...Humans are by nacre wounded...
...Given the evolutionary evidence, [ would surmise that the biblical time line misidentifies the past with the present and future...
...The record of this period is one of secular political and scientific utopias substituted for religion's expectation of a salvation located outside of time and history...
...Antigone, for example, who defies the will of King Creon in order to fulfill her duty to bury her brother, killed in fratricidal conflict, does so because of her conviction that unwritten laws exist-that they "live always and forever, and no man knows from where they have arisen...
...The West has generated the most important forces in modern political and economic history: imperialism, nationalism, Marxism, liberalism, capitalism, ideological totalitarianismand now globalism (considered as an ideological movement of global economic deregulation and integration...
...No one can say what will happen in the new century and the new millennium...
...The monotheism of the Jews, and of the Christianity that developed from Jewish origins, was central to the moral identity of the West...
...However, there are Greek sources, as well, for the central Western belief that a moral Commonweal 8 January 28, 2000 authority--a moral destiny that must be respected--exists outside human history...
...The late Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin has written about the nineteenth-century liberals' certainty that "solutions to the central problems existed, that one could discover them, and, with sufficient selfless effort, realize them on earth...
...While acts of selfishness that do harm to others for personal advantage, or acts of going along with evils to avoid pain and loss, are not necessarily determined, they are inevitable...
...The beauty and goodness of the world, the wonders of humanity's innate capacities for thought, language, art, and love create the desire for the company of God...
...Some financial assistance...
...Popular religious belief in the United States still remains strong, but American elites today are as secularized, or nearly so, as those in Europe...
...LONELY NE W WORLD ~N ~ l giver ~ he arrival of the new millennium raises a question I have not seen discussed, and which seems of general concern because of the leading role the West plays in the world, and can be expected to continue to play throughout the new century, if not the new millennium...
...The United States has replaced Europe as the leading actor within Western civilization, but Europe and North America remain intimately linked...
...His complete wholeness and integrity, his wholehearted loving union with God wins us salvation from sin...
...My concern in writing this is simply to note that we in the West enter not only a new millennium, but truly a New Age, when humanity has declared its radical autonomy, its absolute freedom to do whatever it choosesalone in the universe...
...Harmony never existed in the past, but instead lies in the future...
...This belief in a "natural" law to which men and women are morally obligated was taken for granted by the authors of the American Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789...
...AT ThE WASHINGTON THEOLOGICAL UNION, today's ministers renew themselves for the church of tomorrow...
...However, the West has changed in one significant respect...
...We may disagree over the sources of human sin and woundedness, but not about who heals...
...Classical Rome, with its cultural roots in Greece, became Christian with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century...
...batical m i n i st e r s world church, a sabbatical that refreshes, stretches, reinvigorates THE WASHINGTON THEOLOGICAL UNION'S SABBATICAL PROGRAM offers a choice of certificates, classes with distinguished pastoral theologians, a range of workshops, regular spiritual direction, days of reflection, social activities, all in a community of friendship and faith...
...One difference in my evolutionary account and the catechism's is the latter's claim that our human ancestors personally rebelled against God at some specific time in the past, and thereby destroyed an original harmony among God, humanity, and the natural world...
...In 1900 this was not so, but since the 1914-18 war and what followed, the secularization of thought among Western elites has become all but complete...
...9 1999, The Los Angeles Times Syndicate ugh a mix of reflection, ay< play...
...The idea exists in Greek philosophy and is demonstrated in the classical tragedies...
...The new millennium will be one in which, on present evidence, in the West, both majority and elite belief in God is all but totally unseated, and many would undoubtedly say that this is a good thing...
...Since the nineteenth century, however, the Western consensus of belief in an external moral universe, to which all owe obedience, has very widely broken down...
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...The UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights takes for granted that such "rights" exist, even though no political sovereignty has proclaimed them...
...It makes a difference because for the first time in Western history there is no general acknowledgment of an external standard or reference for how humans and their states should conduct themselves...
...This is a fundamental change because it means that the West today no longer acknowledges the existence of an external rule giver or moral authority...
...In contrast to the nineteenth century, there no longer is general deference to the Christian God, or serious acknowledgment that such a deity might exist...
...Easy access to events in Washington, DC...
...5216 Attractive on-site housing...
...Given the evolved inner divisiveness of human nature we can see why the concept of Original Sin is necessary...
...Possibly these are misleading precedents...
...She has to do what is right, whatever the desperate consequences...
...Others would ask why it makes any difference...
...As the firstborn of a new creation groaning toward fruition, Christ transforms human nature...
...Western thinkers have attempted to construct a rational secular alternative to this moral structure...
...Christ fulfills our desire...
...The West continues to be the conceptual, economic, industrial, and scientific dynamo for the world, setting the terms by which all the rest function...
...Our sense of longing for paradise springs not from the past but from the imprinted image of God in the human creature...
Vol. 127 • January 2000 • No. 2
