A BHT Must Read: Wendell Berry’s Unconfident Take on the Gospels. If you are one of those people who finds Berry to be consistently challenging and often uncomfortably truthful, you will appreciate this wonderful essay. Even if you are not comfortable with all of his emphasis on environmentalism, you have to give him credit for a “creational” reading of literature and philosophy. He’s one writer who isn’t afraid of hard questions or applications.

When Jesus speaks of having life more abundantly, this, I think, is the life he means: a life that is not reducible by division, category or degree, but is one thing, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material, divided only insofar as it is embodied in distinct creatures. He is talking about a finite world that is infinitely holy, a world of time that is filled with life that is eternal. His offer of more abundant life, then, is not an invitation to declare ourselves as certified “Christians,” but rather to become conscious, consenting and responsible participants in the one great life, a fulfillment hardly institutional at all.

To be convinced of the sanctity of the world, and to be mindful of a human vocation to responsible membership in such a world, must always have been a burden. But it is a burden that falls with greatest weight on us humans of the industrial age who have been and are, by any measure, the humans most guilty of desecrating the world and of destroying creation. And we ought to be a little terrified to realize that, for the most part and at least for the time being, we are helplessly guilty. It seems as though industrial humanity has brought about phase two of original sin. We all are now complicit in the murder of creation. We certainly do know how to apply better measures to our conduct and our work. We know how to do far better than we are doing. But we don’t know how to extricate ourselves from our complicity very surely or very soon. How could we live without degrading our soils, slaughtering our forests, polluting our streams, poisoning the air and the rain? How could we live without the ozone hole and the hypoxic zones? How could we live without endangering species, including our own? How could we live without the war economy and the holocaust of the fossil fuels? To the offer of more abundant life, we have responded with choosing the economics of extinction.

I’m convinced every time I read the Gospels that our systematic theologies do great damage to the place of the teachings and ministry of Jesus. Learning to see and think and feel in the way Jesus does in the world is a task so intimidating that I am not sure we realize to what extent we’ve said, “It just doesn’t matter.”

Yesterday, we had a revivalist in chapel. Quite zealous and sincere, but I am always left wondering what this promise of instant salvation from a few sins has to do with the lives we all live in the world; with the deep relationships that we decide to avoid; with the unique responsibilities of being a real, alive, image of God in God’s world. You hear nothing from the evangelical view of salvation that brings depth to life. You almost hear the end of life with the acceptance of Christ. Nothing else is supposed to matter very much. It sometimes seems so crass and shallow.

Life more abundant is always about heaven. Berry says it is about a life without division. With all those dichotomies removed and all things held together. That seems to be Paul’s vision of reality in Ephesians and Colossians. But where is it from American evangelicals? Getting involved with Jesus is like getting involved with selling insurance.

Anyway…read Berry. He is provocative.