Lviv in Context (4): Language

Indo-European is understood to be the root language of almost all the languages spoken by Europeans today. It developed into ten major branches. Those important to understand the linguistic context of Lviv, our microcosm, include Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Hellenic, and Italic.

Balto-Slavic eventually branched into Baltic and Slavic languages. 

Slavic developed in three directions: East, West, and South. Old East Slavic was the language spoken by Daniel of Halych, founder of Lviv in the mid-1200s, and by his descendants into the 1300s. Later it evolved into today’s Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian.

Lviv in Context (3): Religion

Let us define civilization as the enduring combination of society and culture, existing in a given area, defined primarily by one religion. This would mean that the organization of a society, its major cultural forms, and its dominant type of individual mentality are informed by, or give expression to, the major religion of a given area. I stress religion as the defining reality of civilization because it is religion which provides the most compelling beliefs, values, norms, goals, and stories. 

Lviv in Context (2): God's Good Creation

Introduction

We witness to Jesus in a certain context. Many ways exist by which we might describe it. One way is by identifying the country in which we live and by establishing the relationship between where we live and important cities nearby. We did this yesterday for Lviv, our representative city, in “Lviv in Context (1): Geography.”

Another meaningful way of defining context is in terms of God’s good creation: the land, water, and air (habitats) and all the animals and plants (species) that fill them. We witness most clearly to God as creator when we live in ways which respect the integrity of the habitats and species he purposefully created to serve as the context of our tufluvian relationship with him.

Lviv in Context (1): Geography

To witness clearly to Jesus Christ, we want to keep our thoughts and words concrete. We may do so in two ways. One, and most importantly, we may relate how we think and speak to Jesus Christ. Two, we may relate how we think and speak to the other people and creatures in the place where we live.

We will be using the city of Lviv as a microcosm, as a smaller more comprehensible world, to better understand how we might witness more concretely to Jesus Christ there and anywhere else in our larger world. To benefit from using Lviv as a microcosm, we need to know—concretely—where it is. We will do that today by identifying the geographic position of Ukraine as a country and that of Lviv as a city in relation to others cities.

The Global Technological System: Uncontrollable and Incomprehensible

Jesus invites us today, as Christians and churches, to respond creatively to the challenges of our times. To do that, we must have a rigorously realistic understanding of those challenges. Sadly, we don’t. We continue to diagnose today’s ills as political problems in a societal context. This is a diagnosis made invalid by technological growth at least one hundred years ago. Jesus invites us to understand that the most significant challenges we face are the destructive consequences of our technological context. Happily, Jacques Ellul helps us to understand these challenges in his book, Perspectives on Our Age (1981).

Our Three Overlapping Contexts: Creation, Society, and Technology

In Perspectives on Our Age (pp. 59-84), Jacques Ellul speaks about the three interrelated contexts in which we now live: creation, society, and technology.

     
He begins briefly by describing our technological context: the city. He points out that it is a totally artificial context, composed of nothing but the products of technology, and practically devoid of life except for us human beings.

     
He then gives us a quick glimpse of how difficult it is for us humans to leave that context. Even when we find ourselves in a purely creational context, such as in a forest or at a lake, we quickly turn on a radio, TV, or, now, smartphone to reestablish our familiar technological context. Whew!