Sunday, January 23, 2011

quote of the week, january 23-29, 2011

It is sometimes easy to get the impression that Christians take a dim view of things - that they are much more in favor of indifference than caring. [...] Far from caring too much for [matter], we are forever busy beating it out of its natural shape into fetishes and status symbols which are more to our liking. Matter itself gets very few chances to speak. And therefore the usual sermons against it are off base. It isn't matter that's opposed to spirit - the two were designed to go together; what is opposed to spirit is perverted matter, uncared-for-matter, unloved and unlovely matter. And matter doesn't get that way on its own steam. It is perverted precisely by being cared for irrelevantly by spirit, by being loved, not for what it is, but for what it does for me and means to me.

True enough, Christians are told to deny themselves material things, but it's very easy to miss the point. The goal of all Christian self-denial is the restoration, not the destruction, of nature; the removal, not of matter, but of perversion. (Capon 1965:110-111)


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References:
Capon, Robert Farrar. (1965). Bed and Board: Plain Talk about Marriage. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

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