21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

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worldly abstraction, or a commitment to progress at all cost, then I agree with this criticism. What is being worshipped in today’s societies? It seems to be a Promethean conquest of nature, a belief that everything can be explained and somehow turned to our advantage to give us ever more luxurious lifestyles. But what of those who still point us towards alternative sorts of worship?

When Christianity is considered, some strange issues can be noted. The Garden of Eden is a separated place, split off, it seems, from wild nature. That split has been carried forward into our treatment of nature and even our treatment of our own bodies and minds in modern culture. Raj Patel and Jason W. More (A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things) in particular note the damage done by the separation of nature and society. A similar distinction is identified by Evan Eisenberg (The Ecology of Eden) as ‘mountain’ and ‘tower’. The Christian God is an abstract God and His immanence is often disregarded in favour of His transcendence. Meanwhile, the Christian’s future utopia, the New Jerusalem, is a place of sanitised perfection, only reachable by death. There is no room for messiness, failure or ambiguity in that world. Again these ideas are reflected in modern secular culture, with its deferred gratifications and its shiny techno future in which nature has no place.

So, what do Christians worship? The stories of Eden and the New Jerusalem suggest an ambiguous message at best. The only redeeming feature is that God was made manifest in the person of Christ. As such,

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