This is, almost without argument, the most powerful generation in the history of the world. The average person has capabilities at their finger tips that defy imagination. With the advent of the internet (which really just takes off in, what, the late 90s?) people find themselves made all but boundless. They are not bound by time or space. They have access to the sum total of human knowledge, and can push the tools of creativity to near limitless heights. People have the potential to organize and move resources like never before.
I said in an earlier post that people today enjoyed comforts that were at one time reserved only for royalty, but it really goes beyond that. People have powers and abilities that are equivalent to those that the Greeks attributed to their gods. Flight, incredible speed, vast stores of knowledge and the ability to get what one wants with minimal efforts...these were once powers attributed only to divinity.
What's more, this could lead to new spiritual heights. I know my understanding of the Bible, of theology, of philosophy and of mystical practices the world over have been greatly expanded because of internet access. In that sense, the internet has helped me achieved states of being beyond what I'd otherwise have been able to achieve, even with God's help. I just wouldn't know how to navigate the Christian life as well without it.
Why, then, has the time period since the advent of the internet been one of the worst of the last fifty years? Why is the internet being used to proliferate WMDs, organize terror groups, and create very disgusting gutter porn? The simple truth is this: we are sinners, and all of this power does not guarantee it will be used properly. If anything acts as evidence for the assertions about sin nature found among theologians, it is the last decade or so. Reinhold Niebuhr once said wisely that humanity gets more and more powerful, and reaches ever greater cosmic heights of good and depths of darkness but that neither one becomes more predominant over time in the overall. When he made these observations he was really echoing the general thrust of the Book of Revelation. For all the strains made to connect specific images in that book to historical events, it is this broader apocalyptic conviction that history will reach titanic heights of good and evil that really has born out to be prophetic.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the 1940s looked forward to the world shortly 'coming of age', and realized that the main problem of the present age would be the problem not of weakness but power. The world before struggled with how to make sense of the divine in the light of human suffering. The future world, from Bonhoeffer's perspective, would struggle with how to make sense of the divine in light of human power, which he saw as quickly expanding beyond any set limits. Bonhoeffer was, to my mind, a prophet, who failed to realize just how direct his access to God was. This insight was truly a revelation.
Bonhoeffer thought that the problem of power, like the problem of suffering, could only be made sense of in the illumination of the image of Christ as God suffering. Jesus Christ, the living incarnate Jesus Christ, a religionless encounter with God, would be the only way to find some island of sanity in the chaos that would come from a massively powerful humanity. Had satan not killed the man, he may have found the key to the path to such a divine encounter, but devil won his spoils on that one.
Yet theologians never really took up this call, and I think it is time they did. We must struggle with what a 'word come of age' means in light of the Cross, and in light of Jesus Christ as the presence of God. I feel it is my duty to try to in some small way contribute to that effort, though I know it must be done by men smarter and better known than I am. I will at best lay some seeds that germinate into the life of a person who may actually come up with a solution, and a new way to approach God in this world. My own contribution is only to link what Bonhoeffer was doing with the projects of the process theologians, who see God as ultimately affected by and responsive to the world. The same God that suffers through self-giving also empowers, and it should not surprise us that such power has become ours in light of the true nature of God. God's power is to give power away, His suffering is our failure to use that power in the way it is intended. This is the beginning of a sketch of an idea. But I think it has merit. Do you?
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