[This short essay is a lightly edited chapter from my recently released book, The Shape of Reality, a newly released and freely downloadable book. This is the concluding chapter of the last part of the book, titled What Have We Done and Where Should We Head?. The other two chapters in that last part were published as The Knowledge Possessed by a Creature and From the Ideological Frying-pan to the Ideological Fire. I would hope these chapters would stir many to read the entire book which is a small step forward on what could be a substantial expansion of qualitative reasoning power for many fields of thought generally considered to be opposed, in some sense, to mathematics and physics. The expansion of power comes from tools and concepts borrowed from mathematics and physics which have discovered, to the shock of some, that what is quantitative is shaped from (my favored terminology) more qualitative, that is—more abstract, layers of being (also my favorite terminology as I don’t believe that creaturely knowledge or creaturely thoughts can come from anything but created being).]
We need to do better if we are to deal with our problems. We may or may not be able to rescue Western Christian Civilization; we may or may not be able to build something new if that Civilization completes its ongoing and ugly collapse; if all else fails, we may or may not be able to contribute to a new Christian Civilization on the Pacific Rim or in Eastern Europe—the most likely centers for a new Christian Civilization in my opinion. We should try whether or not there be much chance of success.
What else do we have to do which is more important or more potential fun than exploring God’s Creation with mind and heart and hands and then trying to understand and spiritually integrate and act upon what we discover? What could better prepare us to share God’s life in Heaven?
Appreciating the glorious project in the previous paragraph, a project not to be completed in this mortal life, we can see that this is the best way to build a pilgrim Body of Christ—a civilization at least approximating the true Body of Christ, however incompletely and imperfectly. We can see that a Christian Civilization comes into being as it develops such a rich and complex understanding and feeling and doing of the acts-of-being which God manifested in Creation. We can see that we start this project only by coming to at least somewhat appreciate and nurture our communal human being. Only a group of communities approximating what is needed for a rich and complex civilization can build themselves into a singular human being, a communal human being of the best sort we can be in this mortal realm—one human being awaiting only its head, Jesus Christ, to be a perfect and complete human being.