The burden of the Gospels: an unconfident faith: the gospels present us with peculiar questions, ones that we can't escape and can't really answer

Christian Century, Sept 20, 2005 by Wendell Berry

If we take the Gospels seriously, we are left, in our dire predicament, facing an utterly humbling question: How must we live and work so as not to be estranged from God's presence in his work and in all his creatures? The answer, we may say, is given in Jesus' teaching about love. But that answer raises another question that plunges us into the abyss of our ignorance, which is both human and peculiarly modern: How are we to make of that love an economic practice?

That question calls for many answers, and we don't know most of them. It is a question that those humans who want to answer it will be living and working with for a long time--if they are allowed a long rime. Meanwhile, may heaven guard us from those who think they already have the answers.

Wendell Berry is the author of more than 40 books of fiction, poetry and essays. This essay is excerpted from the The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays, by Wendell Berry, to be published in November by Shoemaker & Hoard. [c] Wendell Berry, 2005. Reprinted by permission of Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers (an Avalon Publishing Group imprint).