FEBRUARY 16 2019
THE WORLDS TO COME
Human kind cannot bear very much reality. -(Archbishop Thomas in Murder in the Cathedral)
It’ll take a few years before I have read all the books in my library, but I am making headway. Last week it was the turn of T.S. Eliot’s MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL which I bought in 1981 in North Bay of all places. I am slowly finishing Homer’s ODYSSEY, which I bought in 1994. It brings back memories when in 1948-49 I had to read it in the original Greek. At my final verbal exam in June 1949 the examiner, a professor in classical languages, asked me to translate a section, such an important event that on its successful outcome depended my entire school career where I was tested – both verbal and written – in 6 languages and 7 branches of science. That Homer exam still haunts me after 70 years, so perhaps this explained my reluctance to read it.
That self-examination brings me to take a closer look at the world around me, because in order to know what I know, I must feel.
That emotion was brought home to me last week when I made a financial decision that was based on my assumption that human extinction will occur in my lifetime. It is becoming to me increasingly clear that today’s insect losses are a serious global problem. “The evidence all points in the same direction,” said Prof Dave Goulson at the University of Sussex in the UK. “It should be of huge concern to all of us, for insects are at the heart of every food web, they pollinate the large majority of plant species, keep the soil healthy, recycle nutrients, control pests, and much more. Love them or loathe them, we humans cannot survive without insects.”
That is the reality and “human kind cannot bear very much reality”.
Statements like this move me emotionally, not so much for my sake, being now well into my 91st year, but for our offspring, still steadily increasing. My emotional reaction to this and other calamitous news caused in me a spontaneous and brief bout of weeping, tears and sobs that overwhelmed me. This unexpected outburst proves to me that my feelings confirm what I know. Human kind cannot bear very much reality, but when it does, it hits home.
WHERE ARE WE GOING?
Last week I also re-read Walter Brueggemann’s REALITY, GRIEF, HOPE. “There’s no doubt”, he writes, “that the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 587 B.C.E. is the defining historical event in the literature of the Old Testament.”
I was struck by the similarity of Israel’s plight – the destruction of the temple and the Holy City and the ensuing exile – and today’s destruction of creation, God’s Holy Temple. Sad to say, we have become so estranged from our life-source that this life-killing event does not even register with us anymore.
Today’s weather events remind me of the TEN PLAGUES in Egypt, needed to convince the Pharaoh to ‘let the people go’. Here too ever worsening weather disasters this winter – and the season is only half-way gone – will also fail to convince the nation, until ‘all the first-born have died’, which already is starting to happen via the opioid crisis and suicides.
Brueggemann writes, “YHWH wants to flee the scene, unbearable as it is….wanting to be elsewhere, to ‘weep day and night.’”
Imagine the situation today, where creational carnage is universal. He cites 2 passages which, he says, points to ecological collapse, Jeremiah 4: 23-26, and Hosea 4: 3.
“I looked on the earth, and behold, it was formless and void;
And to the heavens, and they had no light.
I looked on the mountains, and
behold, they were quaking,
And all the hills moved
to and fro.
I looked, and behold, there was no
man,
And all the birds of the
heavens had fled.
I looked, and behold, the fruitful
land was a wilderness,
And all its cities were
pulled down
Before the LORD, before
His fierce anger.
And Hosea 4: 3: “Because of this the land dries up, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea are swept away”.
A closer look at today.
Here’s an excerpt of a column by Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times earlier this week.
“The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet: death by water, death by heat, death by hunger, death by thirst, death by disease, death by asphyxiation, death by political and civilizational collapse.
And should they escape death, your children and grandchildren might subsist instead through proto-apocalyptic ruin. There is a strong chance that warming will reduce global economic output by more than 20 percent and a chance that output could fall by half — a toll you might better describe as at least one, and possibly two or three, Great Depressions. War will not merely break out; a continuing, all-out resource war might be the steady-state of the next chapter of human civilization…..
“Four degrees of warming will wreak devastation unparalleled in human history. Hundreds of millions will die prematurely, large sections of the planet will be rendered uninhabitable, great herds of humanity will be on the run, and in the most prosperous remaining places, economic growth of any kind might be the exception rather than the norm.
“That’s the current path.”
We live in interesting times.
Walter Brueggemann, America’s foremost Old Testament scholar, again, ”It is clear that limitless, undisciplined use of fossil fuels, coupled with Enlightenment rationality, provides the distorted content of the ideology of American self-deception.”
Yes, indeed, human kind cannot bear very much reality.
Instead of heeding the warnings of impending climatic disasters, the USA is doing the opposite: Trump has rescinded the limits imposed by the previous Obama administration in the misguided notion that these restrictions will impede ECONOMIC GROWTH, the mantra of so-called Evangelical Christianity.
The Worlds to Come.
It does not take a prophet to predict the future. There is a host of signs out there that already have determined what will happen. You may say that I am a pessimist, but this is not the case. Take Climate Change again. So far the most pessimistic predictions have been proven to be far too optimistic: imagining and planning for the worst-case scenarios are far more effective than placing blinkers on our eyes and ignore the obvious.
The obvious is that we live in a Finite World which means that it is mathematically impossible to continue our ways of life permanently. However, human kind cannot bear very much reality.
We are so locked in our luxurious life that it has become impossible to change. The bitter truth is that we have created an impossible future for our progeny which we claim to love, but we love our enchanted lives even more.
APOCALYPSE NOW
The Book to read today is REVELATION, also known by its Greek name APOCALYPSE, which does not mean final disaster, but does mean that the ultimate truth is being revealed.
Revelation 12 plainly reveals that all things will come to their destination, that all false fronts will fall away and the full horror be revealed.
Now, in the last days, Revelation reveals that the spooky, frightening figure of the dragon “who seduces the entire world” will be REVEALED. It is plain to the discerning eye that all falsehoods to which we have been exposed, are coming into full view. Yes, there is a lot of FAKE NEWS out there.
A look back.
Of course what’s happening today is not a sudden event. During all of history the battle has raged between the powers of evil and the power of good: Cain murdered his brother; Lamech spouted his haughty, offensive language; those who started to build the tower of Babel defied God by their actions; the princes of the ancient Ur of the Chaldeans forced Abram to flee; the Egyptian king threatened Moses and pursued him later; Philistines, Moabites, Edom and Ammon, they all suppressed Israel, and so did Nebuchadnezzar, Antioch Epiphanes and Herod. It’s a long list of kings and potentates who all in their time and in their way were forerunners of the grand drama now unfolding.
Revelation 12: Then another sign appeared in heaven: a huge red dragon with seven heads, ten horns, and seven royal crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars from the sky, tossing them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman as she was about to give birth, ready to devour her child as soon as He was born.
That refers to Jesus in the manger, that supposedly powerless and helpless Child, but destined to triumph over all evil powers.
So, how will the world end?
I really don’t know. I think it will be a combination of events, with an enormous earthquake to begin a succession of disasters, with nuclear bombs being part of the destructive mix. I believe that the start will be something quite surprising, but, because everything is connected to everything else, equally fatal. It could be the disappearance of insects; it could be sudden outbursts of METHANE from melting permafrost and Cyclades from the Arctic Ocean. ARCTIC NEWS reported last week that “Mantle Methane, Methane Hydrates, Pingoes, Perma Frost, Fracking, are emitting Methane NOW over 40 – 50 Billion Toxic Tons of Carbon each year Globally”. It could, indeed, be a total nuclear war, the expression of total foolishness.
The truth is that today people regard themselves autonomous, act on their own, and never realize that they are being led.
That was and is the case then and is now. These ill-fated decisions, involving both climate and war, contain something of God’s sense of humor over against this proud world, the chuckle that the poet of Psalm 2 already had heard: “The One in heaven laughs, the Lord scoffs at them.”
The final judgement is upon the world in the form of natural disasters, earthquakes, pandemics, and so one, all happenings which neither human technology nor medical science can prevent. It will reveal itself in the inevitable self-destruction of the culture.
Emperor Nero set his own capital, Rome, on fire. He had no clue what he was doing. He had not the faintest idea that his act foreshadowed the horrible fate that as a sword hangs today over all human might and civilization.
Humanity, totally estranged from God, has become drunk on her own delusion and impressed by her own grandeur: this same humanity ends itself by means of her own radical self-destruction. She bombs herself into oblivion, destroys what she has built, commits suicide. World history is, indeed, a suicidal tale; world history is nothing else but a leap into the abyss. That is what humanity does without prompting: God does not have a hand in all this.
Revelation calls for a world-ruler before the end comes. Well there IS a world-ruler: the need for fossil fuel rules the world. Everybody and everything is dependent on the ‘essence’ (the French word for fuel = essence), as fossil fuel is totally essential to keep the military and industrial machine of all nations running smoothly. We may buy the occasional all-electric vehicle and have a few solar panels –I have three- but manufacturing these and obtaining the basic materials all require oil.
The immediate world to come, fashioned by fossil fuel, is shaping up to be disastrous, so disastrous that “And if those days were not shortened, no flesh would have been saved; but because of the chosen, shall those days be shortened.” (Matthew 24: 22)
THE OTHER WORLD TO COME
Then there is the other scenario as related in Revelation 21: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”