OCTOBER 27 2018
THE SLEEPWALKERS
I have never walked in my sleep. Over the years I have fought while slumbering, thrashing around in my bed, kicking and wrestling with some imaginary intruder, but sleepwalking? No.
So why do I broach that subject?
Well, in my previous blog, MURDER, Christopher Clark used the term in the title of his book, “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914”. Clark writes, the European leaders were “watchful but unseeing.”
I like that phrase: watchful but unseeing. When people ‘sleepwalk’ they are careful not to bump into other objects, but they really don’t know where they are and where they are going: they sort of float without a defined goal, are watchful but unseeing.
That got my thinking, so I searched my book collection and came up with Arthur Koestler’s THE SLEEPWALKERS. He states that by abandoning religion, by leaving God out of the picture, by relying solely on REASON, we drift aimlessly in our world.
Koestler is of the Jewish persuasion – born in Budapest he lived in Israel for a while and settled in London– and writes that with earlier scientists, such as Kepler and Galileo, ‘Apart from reassuring the conscious mind by investing the universe with meaning and value, RELIGION acted in a more direct manner on the unconscious, pre-rational layers of the self, providing it with intuitive techniques to transcend its limitations in time and space by a mystical short-circuit, as it were.’
That is the central theme of the book. He deplores how the relationship between faith and reason, which existed harmoniously earlier in many of the greatest intellectuals of the West, is no longer evident today.
Koestler thinks that modern science is trying too hard to be rational. Scientists today allowed themselves to become “sleepwalkers,” by trying to be guided only by ‘reason’.
He concludes that within the foreseeable future – the book was published in 1958 –humanity will either destroy itself or take off for the stars, (a theme the late Stephen Hawkins seems to favor).
Sleepwalking into eternity.
Well, I am convinced that ‘sleepwalking’ is all the rage today. Not physically, not that everywhere people’s sleep is suddenly subject to erratic roaming, but more in the broader sense of being lost theologically, politically and especially ecologically.
Every day we read of another species under threat: last week it was insects. This week it is frogs.
When we moved to Tweed 43 years ago, the bullfrogs in our nearby pond would wake us up in the morning. They have long gone.
Last week’s New York Times reported, “Frogs are linchpins in the ecosystem, both predator and prey. And they are our watchmen, keeping vigil over our ponds, marshes, lakes and streams, our meadows and our woods, the quality of our water and our air. “If they go silent, there could be bad stuff happening,” says Christopher J. Raxworthy, a herpetologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Like honeybees, whose colonies began to collapse en masse across the United States a decade ago, frogs are portents of the greater ills that could befall our environment — and us.”
Indeed, we are sleepwalking toward the final apocalypse.
We also have become religious sleepwalkers, evident throughout the ecclesiastical spectrum.
One of my favorite books is Tom Hayden’s THE LOST GOSPEL OF THE EARTH. There Tom Hayden – a California legislator – passionately argues that we must reclaim our spiritual bond with the earth, a regular theme of my musings.
He writes, “We divide grace and spirit from nature at our own peril. When we worship a God above, the earth withers from neglect below. We develop a society where everything from human habits to politics and economics exploits the environment with callous indifference. Unless the nature of State is harmonized with the state of Nature our greed and ignorance will eventually take us beyond the capacity of the very ecosystems that support human existence.”
It is sadly true that all religions, from Protestant to Roman Catholic, from Buddhist to Judaism, have lost the earth affinity and so have thwarted the spread of the true gospel.
We automatically pray The Lord’s Prayer, where “Hallowed Be Thy Name” is the very first line after the salutation. We don’t realize that God is totally present in all his expressions: God’s name represents God in entirety. It simply means that whatever emanates from God is holy.
This really means that in our uttering of The Lord’s Prayer we actually say that Creation is as Holy as God is Holy, that by molesting his cosmos – as we do continuously – we curse God.
Yes, we constantly sleepwalk in church. Yes, we continuously sleepwalk through worship as if we are permanently doped up, unconscious, drunk and ‘out of it’. C. S. Lewis once wrote, “The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” That is a typical sleepwalking exercise.
Two of my other favorite authors also point to Sleepwalking. Jacques Ellul is one of them. He was a liberated Christian academic, a professor of law at the University of Bordeaux, France, most famous for his book THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY which was written in 1954, appeared in English in 1964 and which I bought in 1965.
Among my six books written by Ellul is HOPE IN TIME OF ABANDONMENT, which truly is a Cri de Coeur, a cry of desperation, over the condition of the church. I prefer the French title: L’Esp?rance Oubli?e, the Forgotten Hope.
He writes that the church has forgotten the decisive importance of the promise, the approach of the Second Coming, the ESCHATON which comes. “Eschaton” is the Greek word for ‘The final event in the divine plan; the end of the world’, something we are rapidly approaching. He thinks that the church, by not mentioning the Hope of Eternal Life on earth, is totally in the Sleep Walking business, aimlessly drifting from one priority to another, without really going anywhere.
In this he echoes Bonhoeffer who, in his CREATION AND FALL wrote, “”The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end.”
I was reminded of Jacques Ellul by one of my readers who sent me an article which appeared in The Tyee Magazine, written by Andrew Nikiforuk, dealing with Ellul’s classic, THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY.
Here are some quotes.
Nikiforuk writes, “Ellul, the Karl Marx of the 20th century, predicted the chaotic tyranny many of us now pretend is the good and determined life in technological society.
“He wrote of technique, about which he meant more than just technology, machines and digital gadgets but rather “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency” in the economic, social and political affairs of civilization.
For Ellul, technique, an ensemble of machine-based means, included administrative systems, medical tools, propaganda (just another communication technique) and genetic engineering.
The list is endless because technique, or what most of us would just call technology, has become the artificial blood of modern civilization.
“Technique has taken substance,” wrote Ellul, and “it has become a reality in itself. It is no longer merely a means and an intermediary. It is an object in itself, an independent reality with which we must reckon.”
Just a break from Nikiforuk’ s article.
Ellul’s real message fits in with my theme of SLEEPWALKING. He writes that technology which supposedly is humanity’s servant, in actual life will overtake human development unless we take the necessary steps to move beyond ‘technique’ to reclaim our humanity.
Today that prophecy has been fulfilled: we have become enslaved to our gadgets. We now more and more resemble the situation painted in Psalm 115,
“They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.
They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell.
They have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but cannot walk,
nor can they utter a sound with their throats.
Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.”
Actually we have gone beyond what the poet of this Psalm visualized: our robotic devices CAN walk, CAN feel, CAN talk, which makes them all the more dangerous.
Back to Nikiforuk:
He argued that propaganda had to become as natural as breathing air in a technological society, because it was essential that people adapt to the disruptions of a technological society.
“The passions it provokes — which exist in everybody — are amplified. The suppression of the critical faculty — man’s growing incapacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, the individual from the collectivity, action from talk, reality from statistics, and so on — is one of the most evident results of the technical power of propaganda.” So far the The Tyee article.
SLEEPWALKING AND ENTERTAINMENT.
“Amusing ourselves to death”.
Neil Postman, the author of the book by that title, states that in the entertainment television provides us with “soma”, the fictitious pleasure drug in Brave New World that famous book by Aldous Huxley, where the citizens’ rights are exchanged for consumers’ entertainment.
The most striking point of this important book is that “form excludes the content” which means that TV can only convey a limited amount of ideas and knowledge, as opposed to books and literature. Reading allows for reflection, tickles the brain, gives opportunity to go back and memorize, thus allowing for gaining wisdom.
Owing to TV’s shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and “news of the day” becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasizes the quality of information in favor of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is subordinate. In other words, TELEVISION is the ultimate mind-killer, enhancing sleepwalking.
THE GOOD NEWS IS……
So, after all this negative stuff, after outlining why we sleepwalk in the dark, why we go about our lives as zombies, why the entire society is conspiring to prevent us from becoming what we are – the Devil’s ultimate aim – there is good news.
The Good News is that it is possible to find GOD again: we cannot find ourselves and cannot become what we are unless we find God. Bonhoeffer repeatedly has stated: God, we ourselves and the earth belong together. The Belgic Confession beautifully has formulated that belief:
“Article 2: The Means by Which We Know God
We know God by two means:
First, by the creation, preservation, and government
of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book
in which all creatures,
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God:
God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.
All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.
Second, God makes himself known to us more clearly
by his holy and divine Word,
as much as we need in this life,
for God’s glory
and for our salvation.
Let me concentrate on that first aspect, because I believe that today the church, by exclusively dealing with the Bible, has forfeited to be the gateway to salvation.
We must go beyond the Bible, the Scriptures, because interpreting it has led to nothing but confusion, that’s why, in this late stage of history, Creation is more important. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, (Matthew 5: 5) “Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth”. The ‘gentle’ are those who treat the earth with tenderness, with the utmost consideration, who love it as Jesus did.
For now, the Bible makes clear – 1 John 5: 19 – that God’s opponent rules. The evil one has created the perfect conditions to prevent us from coming to God-knowledge, by putting us to sleep, by sleepwalking through the world, making it almost impossible to learn THE TRUTH.
Fortunately the environmental crisis is a wake-up call. Informed people know that Planet Earth is about to die, and Christ is the only answer for remedying this dreadful situation.
The Truth is that Christ died to save the world he made because he loved it beyond anything else. By following his example, by loving creation, and thus loving the Creator, we can inherit eternal life in a totally restored and perfect world.
Only in Him can we do that: it means giving up all sleepwalking, squarely facing the true situation, acknowledge our SIN and start a new life NOW.