There have been various responses to the announcement by Iain Banks that he is suffering from incurable cancer of the gall bladder. One of the pieces written already, almost as a premature obituary, has reflected on the image of the future that Banks has created in his Culture series of science fiction stories.
John Butterworth writing in the Guardian said;
'In his Culture novels, Banks has created what as far as I know is the only convincing utopia in print.
Dystopias are relatively common in fiction. You take a bad trend, give it more technology, and extrapolate. They can be terrifying and salutary, and powerful writing about them may help avoid their realisation. But describing utopia seems to be harder. You have to deal with, and incorporate, the flaws. And what is a person, when there are no struggles? What is life for, when everyone already has everything they want?
Religions have the same problem as Sci-Fi here, I think. Hell, with fire, demons, liver-tearing-birds or whatever, can be quite a convincing threat. But heaven lacks conviction.
Banks writes of a human race which knows itself, in which human beings have practically complete control over their own lives.'
There is an unintentional observation here that Christians need to consider very seriously. We have been very good and creative in drawing pictures of the hell that we need to avoid, complete with flesh tearing demons and never ending fire, but the picture of heaven we create is anaemic at best. We have allowed images of angels sitting on clouds to dominate the popular mind partly because our focus has been on salvation as 'being saved from', interpreted as avoiding the unpleasant scenarios, but we have failed to really work with Jesus' own statement that he had come in order to bring life in all its fulness and so consider where salvation, 'being saved in order to', takes us. True, there has been much done to identify the qualities of Life in all its Fulness but we have fought shy of attempting to draw a picture of what that life might look like. There are no works that I am aware of that attempt to create a picture of a Christian Utopian future, the images of Banks and others are entirely secular. Immortality is achieved through technology and any sense of life transformed is similarly the product of bio-technological advances.
The question for Christianity is whether there really are no permissible images that would enhance the Christian image of heaven? We have, after all, taken huge liberties of conjecture in painting pictures of hell!
Is it unreasonable, for example, that we might envisage a future in which we, both individually and as a race, are engaged in some way as mentors to other species on other worlds and that we are actively engaged in the development of the Universe albeit in ways we cannot yet imagine? There are enough comments in the Bible to suggest that being given responsibility and being drawn into the ongoing creative work of God is much more the character of our future than simply surviving into some kind of static state of bliss.
Another trap we fall into is to speak all too willingly of 'life after death'; but surely that is to deny the message of the resurrection of Jesus which speaks instead of the defeat of death and gives us clues as to the nature of life that has been transformed, taken on into dimensions of existence that are currently beyond us.
The image contained in the 21st chapter of the book of Revelation, of the New Jerusalem into which the Kings of the Earth bring their splendour and in which God and humanity lives together is also a potent and positive image of how things will be. Again, it is a dynamic image very different to the pale and static image of simple survival.
Maybe we need some creative and powerful Christian fiction that is unafraid to speculate and of course to be wrong in the detail but confident in its underlying theology of God's plan for partnership with humanity and prepared to state that the future in partnership with God is dynamic and exciting.
No comments:
Post a Comment