Back to the Garden

Sermon delivered at St. Margarets, Saturday, January 26th, 2019 Texts: Nehemiah 8, Psalm 19, Luke 4:14-21   Introduction In an oft ignored letter to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany in 1615, [1] an Italian mathematician made the case, following the teaching of early Church fathers like Tertullian, that God has been revealed to humanity in two books, the book of nature and the book of scripture. Several decades earlier, the Council of Trent, to push back against the rampant interpretive pluralism and uncontrollable printing of the Protestant Reformers, had decreed that only those scholars who were licensed by the Church were allowed to exegete scripture – effectively preserving the professional authority of the Church’s magisterium. Picking up on this move, this Italian thinker argued that God’s other book of revelation, the book of nature, was written in a language that is best understood and interpreted by professional mathematicians and those well versed in natural ph...

The rise of secularism is by now the dominant form of life in our post-christendom society. This development has been hailed as a disaster by some and a great victory by others. One of the hallmarks of our secular age is its disenchanted character - the cosmos is no longer apprehended as obviously shot through with divine presence. In other words, a cup is just a cup. The loss of access to a transcendental beyond continues to be mourned and resisted even by the non-religious. In reaction, our culture has become obsessed with recovering and appropriating oriental and arcane practices that offer the promise of some sort of connection with the transcendent beyond that culminates in a consumerist orgy of self-denial about the starker realities of modern life. While much could be said about the forces of consumer capitalism and atomizing neo-liberalism that have created the broad appeal of such practices in popular culture, my interest is primarily in the recovery of Christian conte...