January 3 2016
2016 Anno Domini –in the year of the Lord
Horae, dies, menses, anni, sicut umbrae fugiunt.
That is Latin. It means: hours, days, months, years, are as fleeting as shadows.
A new year. A Dutch song plays through my head, which, translated, goes: “Whatever the future holds, God’s hand will guide me.” I believe that. That line is especially relevant for the time we live in.
Last week I read a quote by Karl Barth, a great Protestant theologian and contemporary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Barth wrote, “Theology is done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” When Barth and Bonhoeffer first met in 1931 at an informal gathering at Barth’s residence, Bonhoeffer said, “There is a passage from Luther which says, ‘the godless man’s curse can be more pleasing to God than the hallelujahs of the pious.’ According to an eyewitness Barth shot out of his chair: “That’s wonderful! Where is that passage?”
Years later, in 1942, the two met again at Lake Geneva, where Bonhoeffer asked Barth whether or not he believed that all creation will one day come back again: “Will it be – like Lake Geneva”, to which Barth replied, “Yes! Like Lake Geneva!” Quotes like that bring tears to my eyes. There in one sentence is the core of my belief.
Back to the first quote: “Theology is done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” That’s exactly what I am doing all the time in my blogs: we must see all of life in the light of Scriptures and all of Scripture in the light of today. That does not mean that the Bible is a book that predicts certain specific events, even though, in broad outlines it does that. It tells us that God created, that he gave this creation for us to develop, that we surrendered it to the Evil one who now is in charge, that Christ bought it back at the expense of his life, and that soon creation will be restored to its full glory. Then, finally, we will be able to do what Adam and Eve were mandated to do: develop creation to its full potential.
I do believe that all signs point to an imminent return of Christ, which will be preceded by tremendous turmoil, the likes of which humanity have never experienced.
Today we experience the initial tremors, which, in the year 2016, will intensify. So brace yourself.
Ahead lies another year. Climate change combined with the most powerful El Nino will make matters everywhere more risky, so follow Jesus’ advice: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” as recorded in the King James version. My NIV (Matthew 6: 34) simply says, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
I also know that Jesus said, “look at the birds, the heavenly father feeds them, so why worry”. That was good for his time when nature was still in balance, but now matters have changed: the bird population is way down, even as the number of humans has increased exponentially. Jesus always tells us to look at what’s happening around us in nature: when trees and seas fare well, so do we. The opposite is true as well. In Matthew 24 Jesus advises us (verse 32) “Learn the lesson from the fig tree which tells us when the seasons change,” from which I conclude that, when birds disappear and human multiply and disasters become more frequent, the Day of the Lord is approaching fast, at a time we least expect it.
At the beginning of a new year there always are lots of forecasts. One, supposedly reliable source, a Harry Kent who runs his own consulting firm is quite specific: “My forecast today: the stock market will start to crash by early February, if not sooner”. That’s pretty daring, because that’s only a few weeks away. Fact is that institutional money has been fleeing the stock market for months, while the Moms and Pops, the common folk, have kept the shares.
Making prediction is foolishness, especially about the future, someone once said. Almost four years ago, at the time of the Olympics in London in August 2012, I did make a prediction in my Christian Courier column. Here what I wrote in September 2012.
“I don’t like mega churches, but I loved it when 400 million people world-wide heard an old-fashioned sermon at the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics. It happened at the end of the show recalling the sinking of the Titanic, then exactly 100 years ago. The Titanic now is a name synonymous with disaster. The ‘lesson’ was delivered by a regal-looking Emeli Sandé who sang all five verses of Abide with me, the hymn supposedly played while the ship slowly sank into the icy seas. (By the way American TV refused to broadcast this, it being too disheartening). She projected into the planet such biblical truths as: “Change and decay in all around I see,” but also beamed across the globe the glorious gospel of “I need your presence every passing hour. What but your grace can foil the tempter’s power?”
The Titanic reference couldn’t have been more up-to-date. In 2012, one hundred years after its sinking the entire world is in a Titanic mode: drowning in an ocean of debt. The phrase “fast falls the eventide” reminded me of Oswald Spengler`s famous book Der Untergang des Abendlandes, the Demise of the Evening Empire: our Western world, yet few, if any, of the 400 million viewers realized that then and there they may have witnessed “the global swan song”, when she intoned “Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day, earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away”. It may seem farfetched but to me it meant that Brazil’s preparations, already underway for 2016, may well come to nought, because the 2012 London Olympics could well have been the final one.
“Do I today really think that the 2012 Olympics could be the last of the global games?
“Here’s what could very well happen. Today a four year term is like a century, that’s how fast events are happening. Just look at the speed of Climate Change. Next year millions will starve as harvests are down everywhere, with worse to come. The most e-mailed article in a recent New York Times issue was: “Hundred – Year Forecast: Drought.” Imagine no rain year after year!“
That’s what I wrote almost four years in the Christian Courier. The editor did not like it at all: too pessimistic!
Today Brazil is in a lot of trouble. If Harry Kent’s prediction is true – and we will soon find out – and the stock market falls as much as he predicts, then the entire world economy is at risk, heralding times as bad as the 1930-40 depression which was only cured when the 1939-45 war called for millions of soldiers to fight and die and untold material war production of tanks and ships and airplanes revved up job growth and put a stop to high unemployment. That may well mean no 2016 Olympics.
So what are the trends?
Usually what lies ahead is a continuation of the past. 2015 was the year when deflation started. It seems to me that deflation – a fall in prices of commodities, such as steel, coal, oil – will continue, due to overbuilt capacity, especially in China. Also the refugee problem will be with us for a long time, made worse by low oil prices which mean that no money is available to bribe the people in the Middle East, which will fuel the unrest and public dissatisfaction. Angry people kill, meaning millions more refugees.
Here at home, in Tweed, Ontario, I am a member of a board – head the finance committee – to sponsor a refugee family. We only have seen the beginning of this effort to help those displaced by war. It seems to me that this trend will not only continue but intensify. In times of stress, people fight. And stress will be with us, including environmental stress which, at this point is displacing millions of people everywhere: Australia, the Philippines, South America, the Southern USA, and also in Great Britain. In the years to come rising sea levels will force many more millions from their homes.
What is happening in the Middle East is the result of political decisions made 100 years ago when Victorious France and Great Britain divided the defeated Ottoman Empire between themselves and tore up the cohesion maintained by the Turks. Of course Climate Change is something that has been going on since the early 1800s with the start of the Industrial Revolution. We now are facing the consequences of the “sins of the fathers.”
What 2015 should have made clear, and did in a way but not nearly clear enough, is that the world economy is falling apart due to a Ponzi bubble of over-production, over-capacity, over-investment, over-borrowing, all of which was grossly overleveraged: there simply is too much debt out there, and that debt especially applies to our physical world: water, air, soil. Add to this the fact that most of the investments are highly leveraged, which means that typically a loss of just a few percent can wipe out the principal, and a notion of the risks becomes clear.
Janet Yellen’s rate hike in the USA will mean some extra profits for those same banks at the cost of the rest of the financial world, but with growth not going to return for a very long time, and with deflation hitting everything in sight and then some, matters do not look good for 2016 and beyond.
David Stockman, Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget now seems to have firmly caught up with the deflation theme. Stockman too says that we are entering an epic deflationary era with the result that the world economy is actually going to shrink for the first time since the 1930s.
He writes:
“There has been so much over-investment in energy, mining, materials processing, manufacturing and warehousing that nothing new will be built for years to come. [..] .. there will be a severe curtailment in the production of mining and construction equipment, oilfield drilling rigs, heavy trucks and rail cars, bulk carriers and container ships, materials handling machinery and warehouse rigging, machine tools and chemical processing equipment and much, much more.”
You won’t find this in the general newspapers, but here and there people are finally acknowledging that all is not well. Deflation is much more dangerous than modest inflation. Deflation means that the value of an office building that once sold for $100 million is suddenly worth only $60million. Money goes POOF, it disappears: money that appears to be real and present just vanishes, goes up in smoke.
2016 could well be the year when a lot of ‘underlying wealth’ evaporates. Trillions of dollars already have disappeared in the commodities markets, but, again, our media don’t tell us about it, or at least they frame it in different terms. They use deflation to mean falling consumer prices, but then insist on calling lower oil prices at the pump a positive thing, without recognizing that those falling prices eat away at the entire economy, and at society at large.
Trends are all important. Falling prices of oil – disastrous for Canada – and the lowest steel prices in the last decade will create trouble on the employment picture not only at home but also in China and everywhere, because China has been the growth engine for the world economy. The downturn will continue in 2016. Combine that with the “weirding of the weather” and we have a recipe for retrenchment.
If history is any guide then governments, seeing their country slide down into a deep enough pit, may consider going to war. That’s the last thing we need: our fragile cosmos can no longer afford a peace-time economy, let alone all-consuming warfare.
On a parting note:
This year EERDMANS in Grand Rapids will publish two books by Dr. J. H. Bavinck I have translated
In May THE RIDDLE OF LIFE, described as follows:
In the spirit of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, eminent Calvinist
thinker J. H. Bavinck’s Riddle of Life offers a compact and com-
pelling treatise on Christian belief, starting with the eternal
questions that haunt every conscious human being: Why are we
here? Where do we come from? What is our destiny? How should
we live? He goes on to explore essential topics including sin, salvation,
and Jesus the Redeemer; faith and idolatry; God’s great plan
for creation; and the ultimate purpose behind our lives.
This lucid new translation of a classic text will make Bavinck’s
profound reflections on faith and the meaning of human life
accessible to a new generation of seekers.
Later in the year a book on REVELATION by the same author will be published. I will keep you posted.