31
Aug
2011
John Peck (conversation)
Charles Strohmer talks with John Peck, British theologian and philosopher, about how dramatically his life – as a Christian – changed with the discovery that God’s wisdom was for all of life.
Read the interview here
I still feel that even if the book is taken in a relatively superficial or ‘mind-knowing’ level it has the capacity to spark a genuinely biblical response to all aspects of the secular environment. In that sense, the Gospel is dynamite!
Dear Peter, Thanks for your letter. I can appreciate your reference to being ‘dead’ to the world; there seems to be many different ways of experiencing this, and I suspect it’s because we all have individual experiences of living in this world. Not everybody would ‘die’, and then write a book about it…. Shalom, J.P.
John & Charles,
I thank you for a very revealing book of rare quality and content. So often we know nothing of our religion which is practised mechanically without any reference to its proper application to the external world. The internal spirit must manifest in the wider world, something we find quite difficult to arrange within ourselves. This is mostly due to the make-up of our culture or, rather non-culture. I use culture in the wider context of inner awareness which recognises our true role in working ourselves into life with purpose and meaning over and above personal aggrandisement. But to devote time and energy to the collective so as to raise the life of just one person.
That wider world has to know the source in all its events and activities and we need to arrive at a solution to how we integrate our true purpose to life so that we reflect true human qualities. However, I firmly believe to do this we have to transcend our thinking. For that reason we have to be very careful that those who read the power of what you have written in Uncommon Sense do not reduce it to a `mind-knowing exercise`. It has to be experience within our being; that experience is the growth of the soul on earth (heaven on earth) whilst we inhabit this world, and so that we die to this world whilst being part of it and recognising our responsibilities. We are then free to die physically. Experiencing this death on earth is something which is very rare and it is not a temporal experience. For reasons I cannot explain one is chosen to experience this in this life and only by knowing the vibration of that experience of what is above enter into us are we then aware that this is beyond the temporal.
Best wishes,
Peter