6. Entropy and extropy
Entropy is the inexorable tendency of all systems to run down. It describes the move from order to disorder. (It is easier to mess up your room than to straighten it up!) More technically, entropy is a measure of a system’s disorder. Science calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Physical fact: Every system gradually moves from order to disorder as energy is consumed. This is true in an overall, physical-cosmic sense, and it carries through to the smallest ecosystem. Without continuing input of new energy, a system will become dead or inert. Our physical bodies are good examples: We keep them renewed or refreshed, but not forever.
Spiritual fact: Our spiritual life is affected by what happens to our bodies and to the physical world around us. We live in an entropic world.
Spiritual-physical fact: While we are in this timebound life, there is no full escape from entropy. However, prayer, Christian koinonia and communion with God do lift us out of the entropic dynamic to some degree.
I suspect that spirit is not subject to entropy—rather, that it is a dimension of spacetime existence only. Satan has an interest in seeing us succumb to entropy spiritually as well as physically, however—that is, in our whole being, as well as in the decay of creation.
I use the term extropy here, meaning the effect of God’s creative and sustaining energy on matter, including our own lives. Extropy is the process by which God overcomes creation’s “bondage to decay” (Rom. 8:21), renewing the church by a dynamic that is not simply its own and by the Spirit preserving the created order and drawing it toward the kingdom of God in fullness. Creation healed, restored and freed for further flourishing.
I suppose extropy in this sense is another word for God’s love and grace. The wonder of love is that in loving, new energy is created and released. So, for example, a loving church is a powerful church. A church energized by love is a living witness to the inbreaking of God’s Spirit in the present, and an inbreaking of the ultimate reality of the kingdom of God. Here extropy is at work, not just entropy.
This is part of the ecology of the church, of our own lives, and of the interface between spirit and matter.
The End and the Beginning
Bottom line for Christians: Everything—creation, grace, awakening, justification, sanctification, discipleship, giftedness, ministry, mission, the kingdom of God, creation care, history—should be understood ecologically in this physical-spiritual way.
This could creatively shake up theology, discipleship, mission and the church’s impact on the world.
