Suspending Assumptions

Here are three more thoughts about immortality:

1. The first quote from Presence in yesterday's post, is in the first person plural.  I was following the theme of leadership yesterday and so didn't focus on how the assumption of immortality affects all of us.  The issue behind the quote from Presence is global warming and related issues.  Yes, there is a sense in which we all live as if we will live forever until something happens that causes us to recognise and challenge that assumption.  Even then it is easy to forget and lapse back into it.  It is of course one of the constraints we all encounter as mortals.  I will return to this when I move onto Wesley's doctrine of sanctification.

2. It is odd though that I should see immortality as a negative.  Christians, our atheist friends never tire of reminding us, believe they are immortal; that they have a ticket to heaven and the rest are left to the vagaries of chance and necessity.  This is deep theological water and I don't want to go into too much detail at this stage.  Suffice it for now, to link this observation to sanctification too and simply observe there is a world of difference between the presumption of immortality and the eternal life Christians participate in as a result of God's grace.

3. And then there is the point I want to focus upon today; the link I see between immortality and tidiness.  The second quote from Presence yesterday, says it all.  To be immortal is to take leave of reality and subscribe to the view that one last push in terms of my ideology or organisation is all that's needed.  Even if it were possible for a tyrant to marshal everyone into a particular mould, what happens when the tyrant dies? 

One of the earliest steps in soft systems analysis is to identify tasks and issues.  Any human system will present many areas for the activist to address.  These are the tasks, the things which need to be done.  Issues are the barriers to implementation of the tasks.  These are the conflicts and disagreements that tend to resist the desired changes.  Sometimes it is more helpful to address the issues rather than the tasks.  The issues address the reality of the soft system; make us remember that ours are not the only interests at play.

In Presence, they write about the ability to suspend assumptions.  I may be perfectly correct about the tasks I wish to undertake but there are others around me who see things differently.  There is always value in asking why they see things differently; are they onto things I need to consider before I act?

Our concern should be to learn from diversity and to see the presence of order in apparently chaotic systems.  This is quite different from attempts to impose order upon systems.  The Christian faith in the early 21st century is undeniably complex, it seems to have become more complex in recent years so that the old approaches can no longer make much difference.  But this is not to say that amongst the chaos there are not opportunities for unity; the challenge is to make them visible.