Kruse Kronicle

Living in a material world

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by

mwkruse
in

Christian Century: Living in a material world

… This critique echoes the routine laments that name materialism as the sum of the human problem. This is an analysis that invites the corollary suggestion that in order for all to be well, all we really need to do is be more spiritual. What I have come to believe, however, is that materialism is not exactly the problem, and that being more spiritual is not exactly the answer. …

… This leads me to the most pregnant of ironies I have come to embrace about materiality. The problem, I think, is not so much that we like stuff too much; rather it's that we don't like it enough. Before you cry heresy, let me explain. We acquire things, but then quickly tire of the things that seemed so important when first obtained. We replace rather than repair because we have such fickle and passing romances with our things. The real soul danger is not exactly in liking things too much, nor in owning them, nor in caring for them well. In fact, there can be great virtue in such a caring relationship with physical things.

The soul danger lies in the insatiable longing to acquire new things one after another, more and more things, as if the getting of them somehow proves our worth in comparison with others, as if the having of them can fill the emptiness. It's this insatiable drive to acquire stuff rather than the stuff itself that's the problem.

The attempt to stuff more and more stuff into that unfilled place in our souls that only God can fill becomes, of course, idolatry—making what God made into god. The problem is not that this is a material world. Madonna got that part right; it is a material world. God made it that way, and as God said repeatedly, it is good, in fact very good. In Jesus Christ, God has definitively entered into that very good materiality to claim it, bless it and transform it.

Comments

4 responses to “Living in a material world”

  1. David Avatar
    David

    Good summary about stuff. Somthing that I think hinders the work of God (if such a statement is possible) but what i mean is that stuff gets people side tracked and stuff becomes a type of idolatry.
    Guess we all like comfort a little too much. & God didn’t call us to a life of comfort…wish I had a better perspective on stuff, since it all belongs to God in the first place.

    Reply
  2. phil_style Avatar
    phil_style

    reminds me of the Mercedes advert currently on TV here in the UK..
    “they say that as soon as you get something, you don’t want it anymore…… that depends on what you get”.

    Reply
  3. John Avatar
    John

    But where does the materialist world-view come from?
    Like all world-views it is an extension or expression of the understanding or mis-understanding of the nature of the body–whatever the body is altogether.
    The materialist world view reduces every body to the gross meat-body level of existence ONLY.
    As does exoteric religion. Indeed they both share the same anti-Spiritual reductionist assumptions about what we are as human beings, our relationship to the World altogether, and our relationship to The Divine Reality. God is either completely absent or entirely other, and therefore effectively absent too.

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  4. John Avatar
    John

    The entire human world is now ruled by the point of view of scientific materialism.
    Scientific materialism, combined with reductionistic exoteric religion has deprived humankind of all profundity of view relative to what we are as human beings, to the nature of the conditional world altogether, and relative to the Divine Reality.
    Scientific materialism is now a global cultural program or power seeking meme, which has so effectively supported the grossly bound human motive to achieve a perfectly independent state of “self-sufficiency” that, as a result, the human collective has brought itself to the point of global destruction and universal despair (or at best a naive “realist” hopefulness).
    Re global destruction: The recent Avatar film provided a suitable parable for our time. Having “created” a dying planet, the entirely godless techno-barbarian invaders were compelled by the deadly logic of their cultural script to invade more vulnerable places (as indeed power mad Westerners have always done).
    At a base level the film was about the “culture” of death versus the culture of life as lived by the Navi.
    It was therefore interesting to observe the completely predictable right-wing group-think response to the film.
    They all loudly supported the techno-barbarian invaders– the “culture” of death.

    Reply

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