Mr. Shiao Chong is the Christian Reformed Chaplain serving at York University. He directs a student club at York called Leadership, Culture & Christianity, under the auspices of LOGOS Campus Ministry. Chong is also a published writer, contributing regularly to the Christian Reformed Church’s magazine, The Banner, and various other Christian publications.
“We [still] need to counter the world’s standards of identity and worth based on performance, on biology, on comparison/competition, on acquisition, on conformance, or on exclusion . . . From a biblical perspective, our identities and self-worth are rooted in the relationships we have with God, with our fellow humans, and with God’s creation.”
Today Comment reprints reflections from 2004 that are equally imperative seven years on.
A question that surfaces in different forms.
One of the most popular questions I have come across on campus from both struggling Christians and skeptical non-Christians is why does a good and all-powerful God allow so much evil and suffering in the world? The very fact that the question is posed shows the almost universal consensus that something is very wrong with the world and that evil and suffering is somehow not the way it is supposed to be.
In 1967, historian Lynn White Jr. published a provocative article titled, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (Science, 155, March 10, 1967), which suggested that Christianity, especially the command in Genesis 1:28, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth,” (NRSV) was responsible for our current environmental crisis.
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