This post was written by Patrick Rist on August 23, 2007
Recently I watched a PBS program on the ongoing “water wars” in the American West. Specifically, this program was about the burgeoning growth of Las Vegas, NV, its voracious appetite for water, and its push to acquire water from the sparsely populated, and mostly agricultural northern part of the state.
One northern Nevada citizen expressed a view that was simultaneously commonsensical and naïve: he said that a city like Las Vegas should limit its growth to its available water resources.
On one hand, this would make sense (putting aside for the moment the obvious fact that by that standard, there really shouldn’t be a city where Las Vegas is). But on the other hand, it struck me that there was nothing so antithetical to the “American Creed” than the idea that we might somehow be limited by our natural surroundings.
When I say the “American Creed,” I’m being a bit facetious. But I think we know intuitively that there are certain ideas or concepts that are either broadly true of American life and history, or that we like to believe about ourselves. These are largely unexamined, widely-accepted values or goods – notions like “success,” “individualism,” “progress,” and the like.
As with any creed, along with the things we believe, there are also a number of things we cannot abide – and I would argue that the possibility of “limits” is one of them. It seems too negative to Americans to suggest that there might be or should be a limit to economic expansion, to individual choice, to personal success. We live in a nation that was founded on the principles of self-government, unbridled by inherited privilege, and on edge of a seemingly limitless wilderness waiting to be settled. We come by our abhorrence of limits honestly.
So far in the history of our nation, science and technology has enabled us to ignore limits – particularly in the natural environment. Another part of the American Creed is the “can-do attitude.” The call of President Kennedy to put a man on the moon may have led directly to the automatic response of “We will rebuild!” in New Orleans after Katrina. It would have been seen as “un-American” to ask, “Wait a minute – do we really want a city this far under sea level?” It would have certainly been politically suicidal.
Now we see the momentum of science encouraging the idea that limits simply don’t exist, particularly in the realm of genetics. If it can be done, it should be. To call this into question is like the Pope refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope.
And yet if we are interested in being Christian before being American, we need to look carefully at the concept of limits from a biblical perspective. The story of the Fall would seem to imply that we will inevitably encounter limits in our lives; the story of the Tower of Babel would seem make it explicit.
God’s law is rife with limits, which is why it is so hateful to the unregenerate. What could be more limiting, for example, than to be told that you should only have sex with one person in your entire life? But if God’s law is a major clue to his very character, then what does it tell us about how he views the concept of limits?
Nor are limits unknown in the New Testament. There is “no other name” but that of Jesus by which we can be saved; an inconvenient truth if there ever was one.
All this is merely prologue – it doesn’t answer the specifics of what limits are appropriate and which aren’t. My point is that Christians should not be allergic to entertaining the idea of limits in the personal and public spheres.
· If you’re like me, you may view those who openly talk about limits (particularly environmentalists) as having unrealistic and even anti-human political agendas. Is this always true, though?
· How might the American dislike of limits affect how we hear the gospel?
· How do we balance a legitimate concern about limits with political freedom?
· Is the notion of limits something that we can introduce into our classrooms? How would it interact with notions of personal responsibility and agency?
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