Chapter 4 - Cultural Context

This chapter grasped me for the first time since beginning this work. Polkinghorne deals here with a number of different situations grouped by the way in which we view our world around us. He talks abou the way society currently views time from a "present" point of view not thinking of consequences or future requirements. It would have been a good oportunity at this point to illustrate this point by the responce of many individuals to the concept of globel warming as an issue that is not important as people see it affecting other generations not their own. Polkinghorne focuses on the way in which tradition has in the past played an important role in determining the way we act in the present and how in our "carpe diem" society distances us from thinking about tradition and any time other than the present.
Once again he quotes Moltmann when talking about the way in which our attitudes have been affected by our experiences in the twentieth century and the horrors witnessed in that century he quotes:-

"Consciously or unconsciously, the eschatological thinking of the present day is determined by the messianic visions of the nineteenth century and the apocalypictic terrors of the twentieth century. What hope can be justified, once we wake up to the messianic dreams and resist the apocalyptic anxieties"

Polkinghorne talks about our inability to live inside a vaccum uncouncious of the cultural effects on our thinking and he talks about hot and cold memory, cold memories being focused on the present and hot on the past and he talks of the way in which hot memory isn't always a good thing recalling the effects of tradition on secterian violence in Northern Ireland
I especially like the way Polkinghorne uses the example of literature to emphesis his point on the state of eschatological thought linking the prevelence of happy endings in films and books with an insight of eschatological hopefulness that in the end all shall be well.

Polkinghorne comments on the inadequacies of Science at expressing the depth of human nature and the uniqueness of human personality and this is the crux of the situation for me. God loves our individuality and our uniqueness and as Polkinghorne points out the tiny difference in DNA between himself and Mozart is part of the highly significant difference between an off-key whistler and a musical genius. (although her doesn't say which is which lol)