Andy Crouch | The Christian and cultural renewal | Part 01

Thank You Philippa and David and all of you for being part of this today I think it's very easy for us to forget how innovative and revolutionary and unprecedented was the idea that there was a God who was concerned about everything this is not a natural idea for human beings the gods of the pagans were phonic gods located in a field or a stream or a grove concerned with that place or that aspect of reality the high God if there was a high God who had made things was distant unengaged and in many of the myths in the ancient Near East and in the greco-roman world in which Judaism and then Christianity began the story of the creation of the world was often an afterthought or a byproduct of some other more important story more important to the gods and this idea that there was a God who had made everything is one of the most radical ideas in the whole history of human civilization and human belief and it's told as we're so familiar with but it's so easy to forget how radical this was in these first pages of our Bible in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth the earth was without form and void and a darkness was on the face of the deep while the I never know how to translate Ruach spirit breath wind all the same word in Hebrew hovered over the waters then God said let there be light and there was light God called the light day and the darkness he called night and God saw that the light was good and there was evening there was morning the first day Genesis tells a story of a God who is intimately and in a way you might say systematically committed to everything three days of ordering in which God separates the most fundamental elements of creations so the first day is the separation of light from dark and I'm so fascinated that this is where Genesis begins this ancient story in pre-modern by thousands of years and yet in our modern digital world we know that the most basic unit of information is a single bit which is represented as signal or no signal one or zero energy above a certain threshold energy below and that's the smallest amount of information you can represent in signal or no signal isn't it fascinating the genesis begins by saying God created signal and no signal light and dark then the second day the separation of the heavens from the earth and the third day the separation of the sea the waters the watery firmament below from the dry land the first date three days or days of or during the second three days go back and fill each realm of order with abundance so that on day four which corresponds to day one God fills the realm of light and dark with two great lights the Sun that lights every day the moon that reflects light we now know at night but then also scatters in the heavens the abundance of stars and you would look up and in the ancient Near East before they had electric lights that cause us to look up and we would say how many stars are there and we'd say oh three or four at least you'd look up and you'd see thousands of stars and the bright in the in the dark and dry air of that part of the world and you'd think oh there must be thousands but actually there are billions of galaxies not just billions of stars each of those galaxies containing billions of stars that there are trillions of stars that this realm of the dark night sky is filled in a way that we only could dimly sense as pre-modern people and now can probe to the very edge of our cosmos and see it's full of abundance all the way out Dave five corresponds to today to the creatures starts a team swarm to use the language of justice one in the sky and the seas the schools of fish the flocks of birds day six the grant the dry land begins to with creatures so that the basic pattern of Genesis is order + abundance structuring with filling and not filling with just a few things but with an abundance of things so I had a little formula for you when you have order and abundance together you have a flourishing world and the story of Genesis one is of God creating a flourishing world I happen to be a fan of two-by-twos so I want to give you a quick one here this is not a linear kind of creation that simply proceeds from disorder to order instead it's a it's a creation with two qualities both order and abundance and we can trace what the alternatives would be if you had neither order nor abundance lower left corner you'd have nothing that's that's actually what Genesis says the world was at the beginning without form no structure and void nothing filling it that's just the nothing out of which the world is made if you have abundance without order you have my teenage daughter's bedroom which has a great abundance of clothing but no seeming structure to it and I'm always a little worried whether she's going to emerge in the morning safely it's chaos it's just it's just random randomness with no structure but of course you could also have a order without abundance upper-left and that would be um oh you have order in abundance together a different order from our slides but let's go to the upper left next which is actually a machine a machine is a system that has lots of structure but no surprise no unexpected results no teaming and of course this is what the Enlightenment thought the world was the Enlightenment thought the world was governed by very simple natural laws which indeed it is that acted on very simple things we might think of them as atoms or little billiard balls and they just bounced around in perfectly regular ways perfectly predictable ways so that when Laplace was explaining to Napoleon how this world worked and had what Wars and was asked well where's God in your story he is said to have said well sorry I've had no need of that hypothesis I don't need a God in a world that is like a vast giant clock and simply ticks along without any intervention and also without any freedom but now we know on the other side of special and general relativity and especially quantum mechanics that at the deepest layer of the world it does have beautiful order and structure and yet is also full of freedom and possibility all the way down at the deepest level you can't speak of natural laws you can only speak probabilistically at the deepest levels of the world and that possibility latent in reality bubbles up through the structures of reality yes through a classical layer of physics but then up emerging into the incredible complexity of our world that simply cannot be described in clock-like or machine-like fashion it's a cosmos not a machine order plus abundance and every once in a while human beings get to see it I want to show you just a picture of our a little video of a couple of human beings who get to see ordered abundance it's a very simple kind of fuzzy YouTube video and these are good Millennials so they got home and they put it on YouTube and added a soundtrack to it so maybe we can just show that little moments a collection of starlings is called a murmuration and sophie windsor clive and liberty smith got to see it and experience it and other worshipful profanity in the midst of it some of you caught and it's not until God has introduced into his creation these image bearers that he actually looks at everything he had made and says it's very good because the image bearers are first of all simply going to they're simply going to behold this world in its beautiful order like a flock of starlings that do behave and beautifully ordered pattern ways but also in completely abundant unpredictable free ways and they are just simply going I love that laughter at the end I mean that just that unforced like I cannot believe I just saw this and then they're going to further order the world the work of culture is adding structure to the world putting in a video adding adding a soundtrack adding music they're going to you know what is music but ordered abundant sound and they're going to explore all the possibilities of the world adding order and abundance to it this is the first basic work of culture part of what you do every day and whatever you do is introduce certain kinds of structure into the world around you and it unlocks potential and possibility in the world in the way that whoever designed and built this space this sanctuary did it with all kinds of principles of order and yet it isn't merely a machine it actually is a space that becomes capacious for a kind of human expression whether some music or silent contemplation that is more than simply a kind of rectangle without the order we couldn't have it but with the order we find this incredible abundance and then Genesis 2 tells the story of God creating an ordered abundant environment which is a garden and it says the trees of the garden were good for food and a delight to the eyes and that introduces a second little equation for you utility and beauty that the world is meant to be characterized both by utility good for food and by beauty just a delight to the eyes and when you have utility and beauty together you have flourishing as well human beings haven't always followed the script of this story sometimes we've represented the world as almost entirely mechanical you can think of the art of piet mondrian and and the high modern moment when human beings thought maybe really all we can do is do something almost completely geometric in those rectilinear paintings of Mondrian and then others thought well maybe the world is actually more like just pure chaos and so you can think of the art of Jackson Pollock who almost completely seems to just kind of cast paint randomly over a canvas and there there's no easily apparent structure but the most compelling art I think brings these two together and my friend the Japanese American artist Makoto Fujiwara takes both Mondrian structure and order in this painting golden summer where he has these squares of gold leaf in a certain kind of structure but also has Pollock like a loud paint to just splash on the canvas has put these two together it's when you have order and abundance together and when you have things that are both useful and beautiful together that you have really helpful culture I had a musical example of this but I have to skip it because I am going to keep to my 17 minutes but I'll just say what it was I I thought about playing you John Cage's 4 minutes and 33 seconds which is very easy to play because it's just silence it's just letting the chaos of what happens in silence be the music and John Cage's best friend was Pierre Boulez who created music that was absolutely completely structured and as hard as it is to listen to a caged piece with it's complete chaos it's even harder to listen to a piece that's constructed entirely in mathematics so I will not make you listen to it after all but actually even these artists who in some ways I think missed the plot of order in abundance even they saw it because you go back to Mondrian let's go ahead and look at that again and you realize he hasn't just created a completely rectilinear grid he's actually exploring the abundance that comes even with the most minimal structure there's kind of shimmering that happened there's these placements of color that little tiny bit of orange over to the right that's this assertion of humanity in the midst of the grid and then when you actually go back and look at Pollock you realize actually there's incredible structure even in the most seemingly random painting there are figures that seem to emerge from these paintings as you see spend more time with them it is of course bounded within a rectangle it's not pure randomness a human being has involved has been involved in doing this because the world is not a machine and because the world is not pure chaos human beings can explore it in all kinds of ways and one person who does this is my wife so I have a picture of her I miss her a little bit she's back at home in Philadelphia but my wife Catherine is a physicist and she takes lasers which are highly structured kind of forms of light and bounces them around this equipment in the background and eventually hits a little set piece of semiconductor material I am by the way using words I have no idea what they mean but I I've been trained properly it's kind of like Bruce Springsteen's to try to speak German and what happens is when you bombard a particular kind of semiconducting material with a femtosecond laser you get this spontaneous formation of these incredible spikes and this is at the nano scale this is electron microscope a picture of what is now called black silicon which these little spikes allow photons to like fall down in the inside and at least in the u.s. I would now make a Hotel California reference that photons check in but they never leave so every photon is captured it's perfectly black because no photon bounces back out and it allows for incredible accuracy of detection and incredible efficiency of solar power because we can turn that with the semiconductor into electricity and the world turns out to be capable of this if human beings will just arrange to have a femtosecond laser bombard some silicon super simple right and the amazing thing is my wife does this and she also next slide does math this beautiful simple whatever these things are electromechanical something it's it's beautifully ordered and yet capable of incredible abundance so what is our everything assignment it's to add dimensions of structure to the world that unfold the abundance of the world that's your first assignment secondly it's to create things that are both useful and beautiful and let me give you just two more dimensions andand with this the world is full of amazing material but it's also full of meaning and so human beings create both material and meaning and David already mentioned the last dimension which is cultivating and creating cultivating taking care of the world and creating adding something new to the world and this finally gives us a picture of all the things we were meant to do so you could create material it can be anywhere on this sort of spectrum two-dimensional kind of options you can create material that's the work of inventors of many kinds of Engineers but you can also create on the symbolic level that would be creating fiction poetry you can cultivate symbolically pass it on keep what's already there good that would be the work of Education and you can cultivate the material world and that would be things like plumbing now it occurs to me that of all the things on this chart and implied by this chart the one that I am most grateful for is plumbing actually right and so it's not just the cultural you know we often think that culture creators are the fiction writers the film writers there's you know songwriters and they have a very important role to play but I am also incredibly going for the plumbers and actually I don't really want a creative plumber come to think of it I like I don't my power to say I'm actually a postmodern plumber I have a new vision for plumbing no keep it good it's already good keep it good but it needs to be added to add to it and if we do this we are bearing the image of the one who looked at everything in MIT he had made and said this is very good

Channel: Christ Church London

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Keywords: church, culture, andy crouch, cultural renewal

Id: Bpuw_AG_e1c

Length: 16min 59sec (1019 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 05 2018