JANUARY 5 2014
HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?
(Part 1)
Introduction
I intend to write a series on the above theme. So far it looks like it will have at least 5 instalments, possible as many as 10. Perhaps it will become a book: just kidding. It’s easy to write a book: it’s publishing that’s the hard part. So, no book.
Back to my topic. Francis Schaeffer (1912-84) posed the question of How Should we then Live? in which he traced Western history from Ancient Rome until the time of writing (1976) along three lines: the philosophic, scientific, and religious.
Both in his book and in the later film series he advocated a return to biblical living, believing that in this way we would be able to fashion a faithful way of life and be an example for a just society. As we all know, the Bible can be explained in different ways. The segment of society that read the book and saw the videos followed the interpretation of Jerry Falwell. His conservative movement subsequently degenerated into the Tea Party poopers, the Christian Right, the Prosperity Gospel crowd and lately the Republican Party which cut off unemployed aid and food stamps to needy recipients. Oh yes, these people also deny Climate Change. Where New York City is building dikes to protect it from rising waters, North Carolina, a Republican stronghold, a state very much subject to hurricanes and storm surges, refuses point-blank to erect protecting walls, instead relying on God to save them from drowning. In short Schaeffer’s book suffered from the Law of Unintended Consequences, resulting in the total opposite of what the Bible teaches on ‘loving one’s neighbour’.
The title How Should we then Live? is taken from Ezekiel 33: 10, the King James Version. This text in the NRSV reads in full: Now you, mortal, say to the house of Israel, Thus you have said: “Our transgressions and our sins weigh upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live?”
Paul D. Hanson, a Harvard professor, in his book The People Called starts out to say that “There is no life that is not community. And no community not lived in praise of God.” Commenting on Ezekiel he states that this entire bible book is structured around a series of visions that portray Yahweh’s response to the sacral impurity of the land, an element that Schaeffer and his later followers neglect to mention, a situation that finds its New Testament equivalent in Romans 8: 22: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in pain of childbirth right up to the present time”. If that was true in Paul’s time in around the year 50 A.D., how much more is this the case in the year of the Lord 2014.
It is with this all-encompassing groaning in the background that I will start this series, and begin with outlining where we are on the time-line of history.
We live in ‘ending’ times.
Geert Mak in his study of a Frisian village a few decades ago traced the development of that tiny town from an integrated self-sufficient economy to a place where its spirit was killed and God disappeared.
There, in Friesland, in that unique Dutch province, Geert Mak’s story is about farmers and money, about the small merchants and the encroaching city, about the new people who were and remained strangers. It’s all about the years in which everything was sacrificed on the altar of progress, how machinery eliminated the farmhands, how the automobile killed the small independent stores, how commuting to the city resulted in a village full of outsiders. That’s how God died there. All this made true Paul D. Hanson’s thesis that “There is no life that is not community. And no community not lived in praise of God.”
Everywhere in the world this process is repeating itself thanks to the automobile, not only killing community, but also killing the planet. Gone is the agrarian era, the period when life was determined by tradition and parental authority, by stable norms, by a quiet pace of life and certain standard of attitudes.
Yes, we live in ‘ending’ times. Here’s why.
In the first few centuries Anno Domini the church was a tiny persecuted minority. Emperor Constantin gave the church in the year 313 the freedom of religion and a short time after, church membership was a ticket to promotion. In the following centuries –during the entire Middle Ages – everybody was automatically a member of the church and there was a strong connection between church and state.
Now we have entered the godless era: God has left the public scene as the church has ceased to be an influence in society. Ninety nine percent of children in public school have never been in church and know nothing about God and even less about Christ who often is an unknown among the church members as well. Jesus’ wondering (Luke 18: 8) “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” is close to fulfillment.
There are also multiple other endings, some good. In the past few decades we have seen the end of white supremacy. This period started in the 16th Century with mostly European nations colonizing almost all of Africa and a good part of Asia, and has now effectively ended. But also, just as small villages within a country lost their soul, the same is now true for entire countries, where capitalistic domination rules, where the world has become more uniform by stifling religious expressions and losing colourful traditional hallmarks.
Endings also are taking place on a sociological plane. Fortunately male supremacy is gone. But also the typical male trades and jobs are vanishing rapidly, and in many ways men are at a distinct disadvantage in an economy where the service industry is expanding while factory jobs are disappearing quickly. The End of Work is approaching, with robots taking over everywhere even in low wage countries. With women achieving financial independence and with birth control eliminating the matter of child-bearing, with artificial insemination becoming more acceptable, the need for marriage and men is being questioned.
Especially on the ecological scenery the endings are endless. A few years ago Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature in which he lamented that Climate Change would completely alter our natural make-up, create impossible challenges for trees to cope with higher temperatures and cause animals unable to adapt soon enough to changed climatic conditions. Already birds are far fewer in number while frogs, snakes, honey bees and butterflies are threatened everywhere. The same holds true for fish.
There is the growing awareness that the End of Oil is near. That’s the title of another book I have. Right now we are consuming crude oil at the rate of around 30 billion barrels per year or 85 million barrels per day. For a global civilization that is based almost entirely on a plentiful supply of cheap fuel this is going to present some considerable challenges. If we look over a 40 year period, from 1965 to 2005, we see that by the end of it, humanity was using two and a half times as much oil, twice as much coal and three times as much natural gas as at the start, and overall, around three times as much energy: this for a population that had “only” doubled. This simply means that our average carbon footprint had increased substantially, mainly because China and India have come on stream in the global consumption race.
Not only are we entirely dependent on crude oil for all our fuel and materials, but without cheap crude oil, and natural gas to make nitrogen fertilizers, we could grow no food. Take soya beans grown in Brazil. These beans are not consumed locally but are transported around Brazil and around the world. Oil-derived fuels are necessary not only to run the tractors and combine harvesters, but the trucks, ships and planes to move the crop onto the world markets. In addition, we see the vast clouds of dust being thrown up behind the marching army of mighty machines which represents the loss of top-soil, which means that we not only face The End of Oil, but also The End of Soil, because even if we could solve all our energy problems, we are consuming the living and fragile portion of the earth’s surface that is our ‘adam’, our soil, and upon which we are utterly dependent to grow any food at all. We have “lost” around one third of our soil in the past half century – much of this through unsound and unsustainable agricultural practices – which does not bode well for the survival of a surging human population.
Another feature is that this land was once rain forest, which has been cleared to use the land for farming: trees needed to absorb our CO2. That same soil becomes unproductive within only a few years and so it is necessary to move on and do the same land-rape again and again.
There also are increasingly signs that Climate Change – warmer temperatures and more volatile weather – will decrease crop yields, exactly at a time when more people eat a beef-based- grain-fed diet, which brings me to the question of potable water. It takes 1000 tons of water to produce one ton of grain. This is especially a crucial question in China with 1.3 billion people to feed, and the lowest per capita amount of water available in the developed world. Already 3.3 million hectares – 8 million acres- of agricultural land – almost the size of the entire country of the Netherlands – is totally unfit for growing, due to pollution, and much more land only marginally so. Cancers is now the main cause of death.
There are many more ‘endings’, such as ‘the end of pensions’ since longer lives and bottom-feeding yields play havoc with actuarial calculations. With more people unemployed, or disabled, or worried sick, or simply living longer, all feeding at the federal pay- trough and lower tax revenues, public assistance may also become a perk of the past. Who knows: the way money is being created out of nothing, we soon may see The End of Money as well. It also is becoming apparent that we are witnessing The End of Privacy thanks to the NSA, the US- operated National Snooping Authority. Another nightmare is the End of Stable Weather. Insurance companies have an immense problem on their hands: How to calculate adequate premiums for the Great Unknown: the future weather? Should I mention the End of Sexual Discrimination? That too is a sign of the End .
Does all this signify “The End?”
With so many endings at work it is legitimate to wonder whether indeed we are at what Francis Fukuyama wrote in his 1992 book “The End of History?” His words: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
How wrong he was. In the 22 years since he made this statement we are experiencing the end of democracy, being replaced by a dictatorial regime in Russia, by plutocracy of the financial institutions and North America and by the rule of bureaucracy in Europe.
I am afraid that there is no happy ending. The momentum of ‘endings’ is unstoppable. There is no way back: there only is a going forward to the inevitable “End”, because we can no longer restore what has been lost; we can’t even re-imagine a natural way of life because we have burned all bridges to the past.
Since we can only minimally revamp the way we live, what we can do and must do is to take bearings where we are, change our expectations for the future and mentally and if possible physically adopt a fundamentally different way in which we move and have our being.
Never before in the history of the human race have we been confronted with such challenges and never have we been more ill-prepared to cope with these problems. There is a saying: The future belongs to those who prepare for it. That is especially true for those who believe in the New Creation to come. The time of transition is passed. We are now in the future which will dominate the 21st Century.
Next week part 2: how all major religions have failed to take the ‘Gospel of the Earth’ into account.