November 24 2013
How come we keep on running to the abyss?
I don’t know whether you ever had a conversion. I did. It happened in 1973, now 40 years ago. That year I received a book each from two different friends. The first one was a Dutch book and dealt with life after death: Sterven.. en dan?, which means We die… then what? It opened my eyes from believing in heaven to seeing that our eternal destiny is a renewed earth. That completely changed my outlook on life. A bit later another friend gave me The Limits to Growth, a rather technical book with all sorts of graphs and tables and computer projections, basically saying that in the future we will hit limits in mineral use and in agriculture. Then Climate Change was not yet an issue.
Both fit in with the aim of my blog which is to convey a sense of urgency in affecting a change of attitude, similar to my conversion, even though I fully realize that it is beyond my persuasive power to do so. If there is somewhere one single person in the world reading my blog (this past week I had 2073 visitors, with the USA having the most readers, followed by Israel and China) who undergoes such a change of mind, my life has not been in vain. My conversion, which has been a slow process, makes me now realize that the Bible is a tool, a necessary tool to understand God’s plan for creation, but a tool nevertheless, a means, not an end.
Here’s my reasoning.
God’s initial intention was to have Adam and Eve, which the Bible depicts as the first human pair, to start a new humanity in a perfect earth. That plan did not work as they somehow sold the creation God had deeded to them, to his adversary, the Satan. However that was not the end of the matter. God, in his love for the cosmos, allowed his Son to be sacrificed as payment for buying back his beloved world. Even though that payment has been made, the final closing of the transaction will not take place until Jesus returns to his world, giving Satan a free hand till then. Also a time-span of a few thousand years was needed to develop the full potential of the earth and test the ultimate know-how of humanity, something that is coming to an end, as all things now are back-firing, including all religious expressions.
Religion will cease?
Yes. Look at Revelation 21: 22. There the author writes that “I did not see a temple in the city”, the city being the New Creation, Christ’s Kingdom. That to me suggests that there will be no place for either the Bible or the church in the New World to come. Neither will there be marriage, as Jesus himself said when questioned on that topic (Luke 20: 35). Well, take a look around. Already we see these developments as, it seems, marriage is going out of fashion. Today the largest group of people in the Western world are the singles – adults who live alone. The church too is losing ground left and right, even though ‘religions’, all sorts of them, are flourishing. Last week the synod of the C of E met discussing the situation in the Church of England, which is losing its status as a dominant place in society because the young are abandoning it in droves. The archbishop of York, Dr. John Sentamu, compared wrangling within the church to ‘rearranging furniture when the house is on fire’. The archbishop of York has warned the Church of England that it must end its internal arguments and focus on spreading the word of God and attracting new worshippers if it is to avoid obsolescence. In a passionate address to the General Synod on November 18 , John Sentamu said it was time to “evangelise or fossilise”, adding that teaching people about Christ was as central to the church’s mission as worship. He added, “Reorganising the structures, arguing over words and phrases while the people of England are left floundering amid meaninglessness, anxiety and despair….On the label, the church tin says: ‘Open here for salvation, peace, hope, purpose, love, Kingdom … but when it is open, inside the tin we so often find humbug, or – if we are Anglicans – fudge.” So they approved female bishops.
The word ‘evangelize’ comes from the Greek ‘eu’ and ‘angelos’ the ‘good’ ‘message’. But the church is no longer sure what ‘the good message’ is. What does the church expect? That the same, tired way of communicating – the sermon- that hasn’t worked in the past, will this time bring different results?
The problem is that the church has a one-dimensional view on The Word, confining its product to the Bible only. Creation is God’s Primary Word: the Bible is God’s Secondary Word. Unless and until we see that the one won’t work without the other, no amount of ‘evangelism’ will work.
In the new Creation there will be no church and no Bible: the law of the Lord will be written on our hearts: holistic living will be automatic: that’s why we as humanity are now going through the final phase, learning through trial and error how to live the New Creation Life. Not easy. In all this the final goal is the care for the cosmos, God’s precious work of art. The Bible in all this is a tool, even though it is a necessary one most of the time. Psalm 119: 105 simply says that “Your (secondary written) word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path (in God’s primary created Word.) The Lord Jesus did not die to save the written word. The Bible will disappear when it has become redundant. Jesus died to save the creation, God’s Primary Word.
Another radical thought.
Perhaps for some the Bible is not even needed. Romans 1: 20 hints at that. Freely interpreted this text says that if we really have a close look at creation, if we see how it all fits together as a harmonious entity, where, when we disturb one element- say the climate – the entire structure is affected, seeing the cosmos as a divine miracle, then, yes, we are on the way to salvation. Only God’s eternal power and divine nature – his invisible qualities – was able to construct such a magnificent and majestic totality. “By not acknowledging this we stand condemned” says this text. The corollary, the other side of the coin, is that when we do confess that only an all-wise God could have wrought such a marvelous reality this same God will accept this confession ‘without the person knowing about the bible and Christ.’
Aboriginal beliefs come to mind. They often see creation as holy. I believe that when we see creation as holy and treat it that way, we are closer to God than when we see the Bible as holy, but give no thought to creation at all.
Enough.
It is very difficult to rid ourselves of an addiction. Addiction? Yes, we are suffering from being carbo-holics. (Thanks, L. V. T., for helping me coin that word.) We are addicts when we can’t live without a certain substance. Any negative addiction is fatal. Alcoholics can’t live without imbibing on a regular basis, even when it leads to family breakup, bad health and premature death. Our addiction to carbon does exactly the same to our planet: it leads to a Carbon-corroded cosmos. We can see it in our attitude toward Climate Change. In spite of all the climate summits, promises of “voluntary restraint,” carbon trading and carbon taxes, the growth of CO2 emissions and atmospheric concentrations have been accelerating. In the early 1960s, CO2 ppm – parts per million -concentrations in the atmosphere grew by 0.7ppm per year. In recent decades, now that China and India have industrialized, the growth rate has tripled to 2.1 ppm per year. In just the first 17 weeks of 2013, CO2 levels jumped by 2.74 ppm compared to last year. Does that disturb us? Are we upset? I haven’t noticed it. Nobody has approached me, lamenting that this sudden jump in CO2 levels is suicidal. Perhaps the matter is beyond our capability to grasp. The required global awareness, necessary to handle the current situation, has become impossible to achieve. As a human race we are no longer able to handle our own power. We, as carbo-holics, are incapable to fathom the predicament we are in: typical of an addictive condition.
Of course that means we are marching toward disaster, “sleepwalking to extinction” as the Guardian’s George Monbiot once put it. Why can’t we slam on the brakes before we ride off the cliff to collapse?
Simple. Our addiction is generated by the rich who live off our weakness. Take the tobacco industry. For the longest time it denied that smoking tobacco was a health hazard. Now the oil industry plays down the dangers of Climate Change and especially the Coal Cartel claims that coal is clean or can be used without endangering the planet.
It all boils down to who is in charge of our economy. The Psalms talk about ‘the proud men’s disdain’ for the poor. The rich can – to some extent – escape the consequences of our increasingly dangerous globe.
We live under a corporate capitalist system that no longer can change. The GDP must grow or it dies. Its entire structure is based on ‘more’. Governments too depend on growth. Only then can they pay our generous benefits, our increasing cost of health-care, our ever-growing pension benefits. Growth at the cost of our very basis of life: our soil, air, water. Bernanke and his board has been pumping money into the banks in a desperate attempt to try to induce inflation, so that their debts will be reduced. It is not working. Our world is finite, and we are approaching its limits.
We, small folk, have no voice in this matter. We have little choice but to go along in this destruction, to keep pouring on the gas instead of slamming on the brakes. But we won’t slow down, let alone stop, because we too are addicted to growth: we need jobs, so we always hope that somehow something miraculous will happen.
We are fast approaching the precipice of ecological and economic collapse. The engine that has powered three centuries of accelerating economic development, revolutionizing technology, science, culture and human life itself is, today, a roaring out-of-control locomotive mowing down continents of forests, sweeping oceans of life, clawing out mountains of minerals, pumping out lakes of fuels, devouring the planet’s last accessible natural resources to turn them into “product,” while destroying fragile global ecologies built up over eons of time. Between 1950 and 2000 the global human population almost tripled from 2.5 to more than 7 billion. But in these same decades, consumption of major natural resources soared more than six-fold on average, some much more. Natural gas consumption grew nearly twelvefold, bauxite (aluminum ore) fifteen-fold. And so on. At current rates, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson says that “half the world’s great forests have already been leveled and half the world’s plant and animal species may be gone by the end of this century.”
Until…..
Remember Easter Island. Jared Diamond, a professor of geography in L.A. wrote a 575 page book simply called Collapse, subtitled: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. He devotes one chapter to Easter Island, discovered by Jacob Roggeveen on April 5 1722, Easter Sunday. There that globetrotting Dutchman saw something most astonishing, a landscape with huge stone statutes, but devoid of trees and inhabitants. Apparently the native religion required these immense images, which came at the expense of the native trees, used for transporting logs and scaffolding. Wrote Diamond, ”What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say? Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood”?
The Easter Islanders had a fanatic faith in their stone idols until death. We have a similar misplaced trust in capitalism until death doth us part.
Today the only matter we can depend on without fail is that we can no longer depend on anything, except on one cardinal matter: The Lord made no junk and will not junk what he has made. Christ will return to claim his precious creation. Be part of that newness.