Common Grace for the Common Good
E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-8308-9626-4
Verlag: IVP
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Wasserzeichen (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
Outreach Resource of the Year
Christianity Today Award of Merit
Leadership Journal Best Books for Church Leaders
Book of the Year from Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds Bookstore
Is it possible to know the world and still love the world?
Of all the questions we ask about our calling, this is the most difficult. From marriages to international relations, the more we know, the harder it is to love. We become cynics or stoics, protecting our hearts from the implications of what we know. But what if the vision of vocation can be recovered—allowing us to step into the wounds of the world and for love's sake take up our responsibility for the way the world turns out?
For decades Steve Garber has come alongside a wide range of people as they seek to make sense of the world and their lives. With him we meet leaders from the Tiananmen Square protest who want a good reason to still care about China. We also meet with many ordinary people in ordinary places who long for their lives to matter:
- Jonathan who learned he would rather build houses than study history
- Todd and Maria who adopted creative schedules so they could parent better and practice medicine
- D.J. who helped Congress move into the Internet Age
- Robin who spends her life on behalf of urban justice
- Hans who makes hamburgers the way they are meant to be made
- Susan who built a home business of hand-printing stationary using a letterpress
- Santiago who works with majority-world nations in need of capital
- George who has given years to teaching students to learn things that matter most
- Claudius and Deirdre whose openhearted home has always been a place for people
- Dan who loves Wyoming, the place, its people and its cowsVocation is when we come to know the world in all its joy and pain and still love it. Vocation is following our calling to seek the welfare of the world we live in. And in helping the world to flourish, strangely, mysteriously, we find that we flourish too. Garber offers a book for everyone everywhere—for students, for parents, for those in the arts, in the academy, in public service, in the trades and in commerce—for all who want to discover the virtue of vocation.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Introduction. On Learning to Be Implicated
1. To Know the World and Still Love It?
2. If You Have Eyes, Then See
3. The Landscape of our Lives
4. Knowing Is Doing
5. Come and See
6. Vocation as Implication
7. The Great Temptations
8. Learning to Live Proximately
Epilogue. But Are You Happy?
Prayer for Vocations
Acknowledgments
Notes
Introduction
On Learning to Be Implicated
Whenever I have encountered any kind of deep problem with civilization anywhere in the world—be it the logging of rain forests, ethnic or religious intolerance or the brutal destruction of a cultural landscape that has taken centuries to develop—somewhere at the end of the long chain of events that gave rise to the problem at issue I have always found one and the same cause: a lack of accountability to and responsibility for the world. Václav Havel, in Civilization It began with a phone call from the State Department. “Would you come spend an evening with the leaders of the Tiananmen Square protest? They are going to be in Washington and have some questions to ask.”1 That was at least fifteen years ago now, but I have not forgotten that night—and I will not. Sometimes we meet people, sometimes we have conversations, that change us forever. The questions they asked all focused on their desire to return to China someday, because—in their own words—“We love China.” Politically personas non grata in China, they wanted a good reason to go home, one that could be sustained even in the face of suffering, of prison, of death. They were willing to do anything that might be required of them, but they wanted a reason to care about their culture. After many questions, there was one that mattered most. In various ways they put it like this: “We have been reading the philosophers of the world, asking each, ‘Do you have a good reason to be responsible for history? And is your reason sustainable, philosophically and politically?’ We have not been satisfied, and we wonder whether the Christian vision is different. Does it have a better answer? We wonder what you think.” That one night turned into another a year later, and it only added to the weight on my heart. Though much of my life is conversation, I have rarely had a more intense three hours than I had with one man that second night. He had been one of the principal leaders of the protest and had finally made it out two years after Tiananmen, as he put it, “crawling from Beijing to the border.” A very thoughtful and articulate person, he had the most heart-searching questions about guilt and grace—and he wanted answers. Over the years I have agreed many times to meeting more of these men and women who have shown unusual courage at relatively young ages. Now I am getting to know folk who describe themselves as “the post-Tiananmen generation.” To a person, they have learned from the generation before them, and from what I can see they are even more committed to China, its future, and for love’s sake, their responsibility. Their passion for China has stirred me, and I have listened to their longings. So when I was asked yet another time to go further up and further into my involvement with the Tiananmen leaders, I said yes again. This time it was the Beijing Film Academy that invited me, the main film school in China, and they wanted me to speak to their graduate students and professors.2 I had to sign various documents before going, promising that I would say nothing “counter-revolutionary.” But they also asked if I would bring the film Amazing Grace, the story of William Wilberforce and his friends who gave their lives for the abolition of slavery. It had not yet been screened in China, and these lovers of film wanted to see it. Because of my long collegiality with Walden Media, the company was glad to give me many copies to bring along. As I pondered what to say, I chose to step more fully into the evenings I had had with the Tiananmen leaders ten years prior. In a word, they loved China, and yearned to be part of its future. And now, more than ten years later, I was being given the opportunity to speak into the hopes and dreams of the some of the best young storytellers in China, and because of the astounding popularity of Chinese cinema, their visions would shape the society. We first watched Amazing Grace, and as I sat there among the hundreds of students and professors, I was chilled. The film tells the tale of people who, for the love of England and the world, committed themselves to changing the laws of their land—for God’s sake. They were men and women who saw themselves implicated in history, responsible for history, and gave the years of their lives to see their culture transformed. The longer I watched, the more sure I was that it was a profoundly counter-revolutionary story. My only comfort, as I pondered my future there, was that they had asked me to bring the film. I called my lecture “Good Stories, Good Societies.” Having been attentive to Chinese film for many years, I knew many of their best directors and films—each were in fact graduates of the Academy. I spent the first part of the lecture explaining why these stories and storytellers were worthy of the students’ attention, as well as that of people the world over. But I also introduced them to the thinking of two gifted artists, the American novelist Walker Percy and the Czech playwright Václav Havel. Percy describes the novelist as “a physician of the soul of society,” and in his essay “Another Message in a Bottle,” he argues, “Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.”3 That insight has become foundational to me, and it is a rare day that I do not draw upon it in conversations. Havel, the playwright-become-prisoner-become-president, in all of his essays and addresses wrestles with the question of human responsibility, especially related to social and cultural conditions. He understood that, after generations of the domination of his country by the Nazis and Communists, unless the Czech people took responsibility for their future, there would be no future. I offered the film students and their professors these words of his: “The secret of man is the secret of his responsibility.”4 And so I twined together the arguments of Percy and Havel with their own filmmakers, showing how some of their best films reflected insights about the truth of the human condition, especially about the nature of responsibility. I spoke from a manuscript I had prepared as someone standing beside me translated, sentence by sentence. When I finished, I looked out into the auditorium, wondering if anyone had understood. For a few seconds there was silence. Then a young woman raised her hand and asked a very perceptive question. Someone else did too, and then the room was alive. There were no academic games; instead they each asked honest questions and wanted honest answers. For my part, I will simply say that I loved them for their seriousness about things that matter. This past year, I was asked again if I would go to China, this time to Shanghai and by a group that has been long committed to asking and answering questions of great consequence. So I spent a week in the most populous city on earth, a city with four times as many skyscrapers as New York City. I had no idea what to expect from such a place, but for a week I lectured, speaking this time to people not only from China, but from all over Asia: Mongolia, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, India and others. They too wanted to talk about culture and their responsibility for the unfolding of the histories of their respective countries. They wanted good reasons to care and had chosen the language of story, a metanarrative that would make sense of everything: God, human nature and history. It was not unlike that evening in Washington fifteen years ago. I was once more with people who cared about their cultures and wanted good reasons to do so, reasons that could be sustained over time. Why is it that we care? Why is it that we see ourselves implicated in the world, in the way the world is and isn’t—and in the way it ought to be? And why does it seem that some do not care? I have thought about those questions for most of my life, and they continue to run through my heart. As I have reflected on why I care about China, I know that the reasons are complex. Some of it has to do with the reality of China’s increasing position in the globalizing political economy of the twenty-first century. If we are paying attention to what is going on, we have to be interested in China. Some has to do with the long history of my life and the strange “China moments” that have threaded their way through the years. As a boy, I was fascinated by Chinatown in San Francisco, often visiting there from our home in Davis, California. As a young adult, I lived in a commune in the Bay Area and spent many evenings in that same neighborhood, deepening my love for its people and its food. Twenty years later, my father was invited twice by the Bureau of Specialists in Beijing to come to China and share his expertise on the growing of healthy cotton. He came back full of stories and love for the Chinese people. But I also know that a lot of it has to do with hearing the hearts of men and women who love their culture and who want more than anything else to be part of its future. They see themselves as responsible for China, for love’s sake. And China needs them. But life for most of us does not carry the weight of Tiananmen. The reality is that our lives are very ordinary. In their own ways, of course, my Chinese friends see their lives like this too. How could they not? Apart from being horribly plagued by hubris, we do not see ourselves as history might. We live among ordinary people doing ordinary...
