CO-OWNING THE EARTH
April 10 2010
I always have a number of books on the go, from easily- digested detective to philosophical-religious stuff. I sometimes read the latter 3 or 4 times, for the simple reason that I am a slow learner. One of my repeat-reads is The Hidden Face of God, by Dr Richard Elliot Friedman, an expert in Old Testament language but equally at home in the New Testament.
In the book Prof Friedman traces the disappearance of God, and mentions that Jesus Christ always describes Himself as “son of man,” a term that appears in the Hebrew Bible 109 times as ‘ben adam’ which, he writes, simply means ‘human being. It literally says ‘son of the earth’.
Dr Friedman also devotes a lot of space to Friedrich Nietzsche, the author of Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus spake Zarathustra), from which he quotes a very peculiar passage: “To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing.” Nietzsche’s call to “be true to the earth” also had a decisive influence on Bonhoeffer’s spiritual development as well. In his Creation and Fall he writes, “God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together. This means that sinning against the earth is the same as sinning against one’s neighbor.
Think about that for a minute: “To sin against the earth is the most dreadful thing!” It reminds me of Psalm 51:4 “O wash me more and more from my guilt and cleanse me from my sin,” and (6) “Against you, you alone have I sinned”.
The passage makes eminent sense to me. We confess that God made the earth. That makes the earth holy. This earth, says Romans 8, is now deeply suffering from the sins we commit against it. Especially we Westerners sin against the earth continuously. I see it as a classical case of ‘lese majesty’, an offense against “The Sovereign Power.” It is doubly curious that, although a majority of North Americans still believes Global Warming is real, that percentage is falling, with the lowest number among conservative Christians. Global Warming, or perhaps more accurately Global Weirding, is a direct consequence of ‘sinning against the earth.’
If I am correct in my reasoning, then the churches should be in the forefront of advocating measures that stop or at least lessen the dangers of Climate Change and forcefully agitate against pollution, and practice all means of conservation, perhaps even promote house churches to cut back on driving and maintaining a large building used only a few hours per week.
I know I am powerless to make people change their minds about anything, including environmental issues: no level of evidence can shake the growing belief that climate science is a giant conspiracy cooked up by fanatics like me and governments to tax and control us. I cannot change people’s views. Even Jesus, in spite of all his miracles, was killed because He did not buy into the one thing that people wanted: a Davidic-like Israel and deliverance from the Roman oppressor.
Today I see a striking paradox: now that Jesus is soon to establish His earthly Kingdom, the New Creation, for which we pray every time we recite “Thy Kingdom Come,” the overwhelming belief in the larger church is that Heaven is our destination, and not this earth. To believe otherwise would entail treating this earth as God’s domain, and an admission that we effectively co-own this earth. That would rob us of our temporary easy life, made possible by abundant fuel supplies, now on the verge to disappear.
Yes, Peak Oil peeks around the corner. New studies show that peak oil is due in 2014. Kuwaiti scientists have updated oil predictions previously based on the famous Hubbert model, which had correctly predicted in 1956 that U.S. oil reserves would peak within 20 years. The new multi-cycle Hubbert Model, used by the Kuwaiti scientists evaluated oil production trends of 47 major oil-producing countries, showing how many countries have already hit their peak including Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Russia, Norway, the U.K., China, Iran, and Indonesia. Another report was published last month by the UK Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security. Britain of course will have parliamentary elections in May and the authors noted that the next government is likely to be dealing with declining oil production, to start by 2014. Peak oil, by the way, is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline.
In future columns I will try to picture what life would be like with an ever shrinking oil supply.
Bert Hielema (bert@hielema.ca) had a successful maple-syrup season: a lot of work, but the result was sweet. His blog is ‘hielema.ca’