God's Purpose in Creation
Even a hermit who drinks from a well and gathers wild berries is subject to the depredations of our teeming world, if only because of air pollution. The idea that religion, in our case Christianity, can be separated from politics is preposterous, if not far-fetched but to make any sense of a social proposition we need to articulate the nature and reality of the "Good news."
I am going to consider this theme briefly before looking at the train crash which has wrecked our chances of being good evangelists.
For any 'middle of the road', average Christian, as opposed to those on the wilder fringes, God is love; and God created the world in love; and God created us in love so that we could worship and love God and love each other freely. We were, Jesus said, to express this love in action not judgment. Indeed, on that last point when people ask "what would Jesus do", by which they almost always mean "how would Jesus react", the default answer is that he would have done nothing, which rather puts a damper on the judgment theme which is so prominent in some forms of Christianity which sound more like orthodox Judaism. But, anyway, the point is that the teaching of Jesus and the writers of the Epistles is characterised by uncalculated, non contractual social action which is even more generous than the most generous provisions on gleaning and the Jubilee in the Book of Deuteronomy because it is non contractual. In building the Kingdom on earth in love we are to be child-like, even, one might say, naive; we are goaded, if that is the right word, by the lilies of the field that neither toil nor spin and we are haunted - or at least I am - by my own possessions; every time I buy a new CD I wince; but I still buy it.
So, we have set out before us the clear, simple purposes of creation based on worship and love.
This is the shortest section of my talk because it's theoretically the simplest, but I now have to go on to the complication of theodicy.