Story, we all retreat into private individualism for a bit of sanity and safety.
Perhaps the primary example of our lack of attention to the Christ Mystery
can be seen in the way we continue to pollute and ravage planet earth, the very
thing we all stand on and live from. Science now appears to love and respect
physicality more than most religion does! No wonder that science and business
have taken over as the major explainers of meaning for the vast majority of
people today (even many who still go to church). We Christians did not take
this world seriously, I am afraid, because our notion of God or salvation didn’t
include or honor the physical universe. And now, I am afraid, the world does
not take us seriously.
Hope cannot be had by the individual if everything is corporately hopeless.
It is hard to heal individuals when the whole thing is seen as unhealable.
We are still trying to paddle our way out of this whirlpool, and with a very
small paddle! Only with a notion of the Preexisting Christ can we recover
where this Jesus was “coming from” and where he is leading us—which is
precisely into the “bosom of the Trinity” (John 1:18). “I shall return to take you
with me, so that where I am you also may be” (John 14:3), the Christ has
promised. That might just be the best and most succinct description of salvation
there is in the whole New Testament.