Hi I'm David Bell
Welcome to this episode of Through the Year
with John Wesley.
I am a believer.
I believe in radical amazement.
Where every aspect of the universe in which
we live is sublime.
In this universe, love can transform everything.
But I am also a realist.
Human beings can be wicked and cruel.
There is a hard edge to life.
In this universe there is is no such thing
as fairness or justice.
There is only selfish control.
Who has the power will inevitably abuse it.
But there's another face to nature itself.
Physical processes wreak havoc on life.
Carbon based life is both benign and malevolent,
or so it seems.
Anything but neutral.
What does it mean to live in this universe
of bipolar disorder?
This question has always haunted Christian
thinkers.
It has surfaced in a variety of ways down
the centuries ever since Jesus Christ cried
aloud on the cross,
My God, my God why have you forsaken me?
When the Wesleyan missionaries came to New
Zealand from the 1820s on inevitably that feeling
would arise.
The clash of cultures would be fuelled by what
we can call the war of myths.
We all live in and for and by our mythologies,
recognized or not.
Tangata whenua - the first people of the
land - had their beliefs, their myths and
structural norms.
The colonial missionaries had a quite different
set of myths and norms.
War was inevitable.
But this wasn't just war about land, territory
and sovereignty.
It was also, to borrow another phrase, worlds
in collision.
It's a rich and complex history, and needs
to be seen from different angles.
But today, as the church universal lives through
another phase of the war of myths,
this history may offer unexpected insights.
The bipolar aspect of nature is a clue.
Nature, in fact, is neither benign nor cruel.
It is our thinking that makes it appear so.
It is our actions and how we interpret them
within the forces of nature that give rise
to our myths and stories.
As we think so we become.
In Maori mythology karakia or prayer orders
the universe.
In Christian mythology prayer or karakia orders
the universe.
What we think about the universe we project
onto the universe.
This is just as true in science as in religion
and mythology.
The Copernican revolution which put the sun
at the centre of universe instead of the earth
is a revolution of the mind.
The universe, nature if you will, hasn't
changed at all.
Not one iota.
The ideas in our heads changed.
The bipolar universe is the result of thinking
from a bipolar perspective.
It's disordered.
Malevolent nature is the result of malevolent
thinking.
A user-friendly universe is the result of
being user-friendly.
When John Wesley set out his informal curriculum
for clergy,
his deliberate inclusion of science and geometry
prepared a fertile ground.
Some of the Wesleyan clergy in New Zealand
would find that the seeds of the theory of
evolution
could take root, grow and flourish.
Other clergy couldn't adjust so easily.
By the end of the land wars
not only were Maori and Pakeha having to tell
their individual and collective stories
into a new mythological framework
but Christian thought  also was
having to adjust to the world-wide warfare
of science and religion.
In the upcoming episodes of Through the year
with John Wesley we will look at how particular
clergy coped with it all.
But first we need to journey to nowhere,
to Erewhon.
And that's where we are heading next week.
See you then and thanks for watching.
