The shape of our world is not what God had in mind. We were made to be managers of Creation, with full authority over all things in this universe. We gave it away; we traded it for something which did not come in the package. The break was irreparable in one sense. Creation is no longer under our authority. On this plane of existence, we are fallen, we are broken and the entire universe around is affected by that. Whereas we once had an instinctive union with Creation, now it is opaque and hostile to us, and rightly so. We long to escape, but until our individually appointed departures arrive, we are bound under a situation which cannot ever be optimal.
However, it can be optimized. God has not left us in the dark, but has offered a covenant which permits us to make our way in this fallen world. It applies to all humanity as humans in this world. If we embrace it as it is offered, not blindly through the lens of our Western materialism, but through the somewhat mystical approach of the culture in which it was revealed, then we can expect to have a decent life, an optimal existence here in the Shadow Lands.
A critical element in that covenant is recognizing there are limits to what we can do. This is not something we can simply implement once like a wind-up toy and let it go. The nature of covenant is a living and developing relationship between persons. It is utterly personal in nature; it cannot be objectified. There is no shred of stasis, but a moving target, as in a living thing. The objective is not simply to stay alive, but to bring you closer to the light, to improve upon your current moral understanding and fellowship with the Creator. It requires a certain dependence, a dependence which is necessary, justified, and exclusive.
Attempts to break that dependence will hinder, sicken and deaden that living covenant. It will lead to a plethora of deadening in our understanding and in our conduct, building hostility between us and Creation. Only in our hubris can we imagine regaining control over Creation, because that pathway is closed on this side of death. Since the very beginning, fallen men have sought ways to escape this prison, ways of reclaiming our lost mastery. The desire itself is proof we are unworthy, that we are in violation of the moral order revealed in the covenant.
Nothing hinders us from examining our world, of making the most of our knowledge of concrete reality. However, if our approach assumes there is nothing else we need to know beyond the knowledge our human talents can extract without revelation from God, then all the answers are inherently false. It won’t matter how successful we seem to be in manipulating our material reality; without that moral grasp, it will always be wrong, coming up short. If we compound things by rejecting the notion we can’t get it by ourselves, we are begging for destruction in ways we dare not imagine.
There is no fine point of balance, no boundaries or markers. There is no thin line of departure, because God’s moral laws don’t work that way. There are degrees of departure from the moral commitment to do it His way, and some things are more horrific than others, with matching results. Our hubris in Western Civilization is rejecting the revelatory input from the start. We assume a man-centered approach, that mankind is the measure of all reality. If man cannot fathom it by mere human talent and intellect, then it does not matter, not worth examining. The path to turning away from this unspeakable hubris is a long, long way back, so searching for safe limits is simply not a valid question.
This is the context in which I condemn the likes of genetic research and GMO. We cannot grasp what we are messing with here. The attempt to make nature into a manipulable factory for our convenience is inherently hostile to God’s revealed covenant. Examine the actual results of where this has been going all along. The motive of such research has ever been a matter of profit for the producer, not the welfare of the consumer. Time and time again, when we discover some harm from GMOs, the corporations have fought tooth and nail, even to the point of committing murder, to avoid anyone even hearing about it. Those of us who adhere to the ancient natural ways of nutrition and health know instinctively there is a right and wrong approach, that there are limits we dare not attempt to transgress. Even if it comes from a paganized reverence for nature as a god, it is still closer to the ultimate truth revealed by God versus the utter rejection of Western Aristotelian epistemology.
Our flagrant violation of the necessity of dependence on factors we cannot ever hope to understand does violence to Creation. It reignites the fires of condemnation when God drove us out of the Garden. When we presume to remove too far the constraints of obligatory dependence for the basic necessities of life, we beg God to destroy us. That He has been patient this long shows His gentle nature. That we presume this patience crossing many generations means He doesn’t care is poking Him in the eye, daring Him to act. He lets us go with great sorrow, knowing He must eventually allow us to harvest the wrath for which we have been begging.
It’s here now.
