ABSTRACT
During the twentieth century, the world became, for the first time, a single economic fact, a single global network of forces of production, distribution and exchange: a global market. And while that market, as at present structured, makes a minority of mankind immensely rich, it deepens the destructive poverty of many millions more. In the development of such a genuinely global imagination, Christianity undoubtedly has a part to play. The suspicion that story-tellers spin false fables, and that truth is therefore to be sought elsewhere than in narrative, goes back at least as far as Plato. However, it took its most powerful hold on Western culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The culture of Enlightenment sought explanation of everything, through measurement and rigorous description, from nowhere in particular. As well as the distinction between ‘mind’ and ‘matter’, and the distinction between ‘soul’ and ‘body’, there is another distinction, familiar to every reader of the scriptures, between ‘spirit’ and ‘flesh’.
