Apr 10 2009

Tools for Change – 1

charlatan

There is an old Doctor Who episode where the crew of a crashed spaceship, after many generations, degenerated into two warring tribes, the Tesh (from the technicians) and the Sevateem (from the trained pioneers, the survey team).* The remaining wreckage became religious artifacts used for various superstitious rites which were originally very practical operations for planetary conquest.

The reason most of the Bible seems culturally irrelevant to modern evangelicalism is because it is a tool for change. Our culture has moved so far from biblical thinking, so distorted from the heavenly pattern, that we don’t recognise the original ‘cast’ when we see it. We want to change our culture, and we have the tools. We carry them around with us in leather cases. They sit in racks in the pews. But we have lost the plot. The Tesh hide in gnostic academies. The Sevateem degenerate into superstition. The alien jungle terrorises them both. They war with each other and the planet goes unconquered.

*The villain turned out to be the damaged computer which was behaving like a capricious Greek god. We have no excuse. It is not our God that is malfunctioning, but us.

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