Seeking the Possible in the Midst of the Fallen
by Dennis Peacocke
Until Christ returns, there is no way back to the Garden of Eden. When He does return, we will go eternally beyond it. So here we are stuck in the middle with the “now” but “not yet” of God’s Kingdom. We are seeking what is possible in the midst of the fallen, bordered by cynicism and despair on the one side of the cliff and idealism and utopianism on the other. Both extremes are killers: one through drugs, dissipation, and all forms of self-destructiveness, and the other guilty of killing multiple millions through idealistic Fascism, Communism, and lesser “isms” of innumerable sorts. In the center is the reality of biblical faith, that often mercurial substance which, when properly handled, gives us a measure of divine equilibrium in the midst of the Fall.
Plato is the political “father” in the West of the politics of salvation. Though his ideas were rife with Greek dualism, he sounds incredibly “God-driven” in his quest for the community of man to be led through social leaders who call man to a constantly upward vision. Aristotle, on the other hand, represents the politics of compromise amidst the tensions of conflict and “what is possible.” If Plato was the idealist, Aristotle was the realist. Life for Aristotle, and his innumerable followers throughout history, is a constant dialectical interplay requiring wisdom to envision people to a measure, but pragmatism to keep in check their driven and conflicting self-interests.
If Plato was Ronald Reagan, Aristotle was Lyndon Johnson. Using this somewhat “stretching” analysis between Plato and Aristotle, President Bush is clearly a platonic leader and his European critics are Aristotle’s children. This is the heart of the pragmatist’s fears of Mr. Bush and his latest sermon on the politics of salvation through democracy in his recent inaugural address.
This tension between “the possible” and the limitations of the fallenness of man and his insidious self-interests, moves constantly back and forth between our own individual personal lives and expectations, and our socio-political lives. What is possible, and what is “unrealistic”? What is naively idealistic, and what is the fruit of true faith? It is a constant dance, a constant unresolved dilemma. It is true no matter where our “level” of play is because it is God’s sharpening stone for the souls of men and women who have not fallen off into a permanent stupor of cynicism, idealism, or insanity.
Indeed, when I share and converse with people, I hear the dance in their voices and in their words. I see it in their eyes and in their body language. I see it in the faces of people wherever I go around the world. The dance is on. And when the dance is not present, I see something worse than the tension and frustration the dance can produce. I see death. When the dance is over and the person or culture is “set” in the resting place of despair, there is only death. It is the tension that keeps us truly alive between the Kingdom and fallenness, and that is...
the bottom line.
