“..For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished..” 2Pt3v5-6
🕰🌌 “..the heavens existed long ago..”
Peter is making an argument about an unseen future from an unseen past using the testimony of scripture and nature. By contrast scoffers scoff at eschatology. First century climate-change deniers, like we today, self-save by abstracting ourselves from time’s perpetual consequentiality. We are convicted and condemned by the testimony of history and the environment or we are blythe occasionalists fanning fiction, nostalgia and a utopian hereafter. We live in sight of a looming horizon, the imminent unseen past and future both bearing down upon us. I beg you now consider time, on the brink of the nick of time and that you seek the faith to believe that you can take responsibility for your consequences and that you can be reconciled with your past.
“Things have a substance with the capacity and motive to spill over, not only the object-object divide, but also the temporal side-by-side. There are chasms in time, between moments, which undermined and overmined understandings fail to vault. No strobic frequency to the stop-motion flickbook fashioned by the occasionalist will overcome the tragic discontinuity of moments, the fetishised and unbridgeable pausality of an Instagrammed life. By contrast, Things as we understand them are protagonists, caused and causing, albeit vicariously, according to Harman. They consist in a malleable substance, ruggedly and mutatably enduring through a continuity, moment by moment, from glory to glory. .. Thus the Being of a Thing is, in any moment in time, a springing forth from its potential, and at the culmination of any continuity of time, a Thing manifests its history of bodying forth and through. In this way an oak’s form is a celebration, that at every preceding moment something was happening. .. Things unfold. This is initially an affront to Occasionalism’s notion of time as a pausality of moments each unbridgeably divided. The notion that essences endure across time is both mundane and profound, it divides the world into those at peace with eternity and those anxiously building against it.” PPJ - The Thing Is, 2013
💦 “..out of water .. through water .. with water..”
What even is water and it’s wateriness? What is the watery abyss, and what is living water? This may be spooky but in a world with no mere metaphors, Christianity needs a more enchanted account of God at work in his creation in water.
🙈 “..deliberately overlook..”
“[Modernity’s] rules and processes “generate a world that is destroyed...” and “they do so with a ferocity and speed which could make someone from outer space believe – if it were not patently absurd - that it is being done on purpose” Christopher Alexander
Climate change deniers.. they, we, are “f**king up the world” (also ref Christopher Alexander), and if viewed from any level of detached observation, it would be hard not to conclude that they, we, are doing it on purpose. Deliberately overlooking the evidence of God, the need for contrition, the possibility of redemption.. Given this diabolical intent, given there is another player on the pitch, it is vital to be appropriately serious about this. And Peter is. So, memory and vigilance. So the mental fight. So gird up your loins. Stay alert. Stay cognisant.
In this boozy season of food on food, this stodgy stay-in-doors season, cloying claggy wrapped up with you and yours season, this sentimental familiarity breeding contempt season. Be mindful.