Consumerism has long been understood as having the notorious reputation for obscuring the line between what we want with what we need — ever seducing us with a shiny object or a siren song to imagine ourselves made whole . . . by various superficial means. But there is something even more insidious in the way that consumerism frames our reality, as if we somehow had a self-existent significance. Because while we’re busy sorting out our wants from our needs, we have already unwittingly accepted the premise, that our wants and needs are of paramount concern to how we exist – placing on the back burner the very pressing concern of why we exist in the first place.
I have long pondered the words of St Augustine, who observed that ever since the fall of man, man has been haunted by the non-existence from which God spoke him out of — which is another way of saying that our own existence feels alien to us apart from God. And where there is an unease with existence, an ambiguity of purpose inevitably begins to create a vacuum that the consumerist ethos will be more than happy to fill. But in the same way that salt water is not only incapable of satisfying thirst, and can only increase it – the consumerist illusion of self-existence can only serve to widen the crater of our disaffection.
So not only are we haunted by the nihilism of our own fallen nature, but we also live with the consumerist impulse to fill that void with impermanent solutions incapable of ever satisfying our deepest needs. This invariably causes us to experience our world as disposable – because when the value of everything is measured against the transience of what it might mean to me . . . then everything gets tossed eventually. This is the type of pragmatism that animates the atheist mindset — for if the universe doesn’t have an innately transcendent value, then everything in it gets assessed in terms of survival pragmatism . . . and the self-serving illusions such a pragmatism invariably portends.
So I’m not surprised when an atheist believes that we all live in a universe that is at odds with us, making survival priority number one. But I’m a little surprised when I hear Christians speaking of this world as if it were a sinking ship, thereby making of Jesus nothing more than a lifeboat means to an afterlife solution to their survival . . . as it sounds disturbingly similar to the atheist’s rationale. To believe that creation was plan A, but now God has somehow moved on to plan B — is to believe in a disposable world . . . a world that God is simply tossing into the trash bin like a burnt waffle. But is this really the right way to understand our salvation?
If we have made ourselves the point of salvation – then we’ve missed the point almost entirely! And we’ve likely missed it because we’ve accepted a self-involved consumerist notion of meaning and significance – placing ourselves at the center of existence. Christ death, burial and resurrection is, first and foremost, a glorification of God – for it places God righty at the center of all things. Because if we are to ever be reconciled to our own existence – it will not be on our own terms . . . it will be found in the loving mercies of God who reconciles us unto himself. For this is the very heartbeat of the gospel.
“All these impermanent things . . .”
Chasing Light 