Loss of Transcendence - Lesson 7

So in conclusion to this session, let me speak more spontaneously about how radical we need to be today as Christians. I was privileged when I was Oxford to have a friend that was a fellow Christian at Jesus College. He’s now called Sir John Houghton. And Sir John Houghton was one of the Nobel Prize winners for climate change. But how climate change happened with him was that he was a physicist and often the best discoveries are when you turn against the trend of the day to do something that is innovative at the risk of your own profession. Everybody in his day as a physicist in the Cold War was becoming a nuclear physicist because that was what was needed for that generation of détente with Russia. He decided to do stratospheric physics.

And as a stratospheric physicist, he was very unpopular. But he stuck at it. He eventually became the director of meteorological services in Britain for weather forecasting and one thing led to the other and then he got engaged with a group of international physicists in climate that were beginning to study climate change. It was a long journey that he took and he ended up when he was given the Nobel Prize with his fellow physicists as the vice-chairman of the panel of scientists on climate change that were awarded their decoration of the Nobel Prize.

Now, John is the first voice with other Christians to lead in climate change today. That’s a radical change of attitude that we all have. Ironically, there are other changes that have taken place, which Nancy Duarte—who is a devout Christian and worships at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church—in the tech world, she launched Al Gore on climate change because as a politician a political voice had to be heard as well as a scientist. Then she launched Steve Jobs, not just for the launching of Apple, but really of tech change that now we’re facing a new world of artificial intelligence that we call tech change. That’s the second one. The third one is much closer to home because it’s with my own son, but my son is a business consultant. He was involved in crying out against the craziness. And one of the things that the business community today understand better than most Christian scholars is that you should never store knowledge. Knowledge should be acted on immediately.

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And so now Christopher has had the hard training of being on his own as a business consultant and shouting out. You shout out the truth.

And the truth that he’s now shouting out has been adopted by Ogilvy & Mather, which is the world’s brand company, for now proclaiming a truth and that truth is, thirdly, something that may be voiced next year by Nancy Duarte: climate change and tech change need human change. How do we have human change? When we go back to the original, basic commandment of all commandments love shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, that the identity is of a Christian, not to be an individual, but to have a theological identity as a person. And a person is a self for the other. Now, you hide that from the secularists because they would scorn its source. And you have to hide a lot from secularists today, but you speak the truth without using theological language, you see.

And so what is human change? Human change is the denial of narcissism. And individualism is the road that the American history has gone from day one, from the very beginning. It was a continent that was colonised by individuals in the 17th century to have the monarchical self, the self that says we’re all kings, as was the debate of the civil war. The levellers were saying we’re all kings. Well, it’s dangerous to be a king on a new continent. The second mythology that has compounded the mythology of America, of its individualism, is the rise of the proprietorial self, that what you colonise, what you clear of the swamp and the forest, is your own property. That proprietorial self was the colonists’ mandate. And then, of course, there is in the 18th century the rise of the romantic self, the Rousseauian self, that I am the possessor of my own consciousness.

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Well, this cocktail is a poisonous cocktail for American culture today because in the context of these three things, we have de Tocqueville coming as a political observer in 1830. And he said there’s a strange experiment, a unique experiment, in the history of mankind that is taking place in North America and that’s the rise of the individual. Well, the rise of the individual is destroying us in America today. The narcissism that is its basic premise is the end of Western civilisation. That’s what we’re facing when we become radical Christians. And so it’s that reality that with solemnity we have to say there can be no climate change, there can be no rebuttal against artificial intelligence, unless we realise that we’re persons in Christ as our identity. There has to be human change. So never in the history of mankind have we faced a moment of such gravity as we’re facing today.