MARCH 1 2015
THERE’S NO WAY BACK
Just as we try to do everything possible to stay healthy so too we must do the utmost to keep the earth in the best possible shape, because the earth and we are one. We are not stewards but owners of the earth. Psalm 115: 16 is quite explicit on that score. It says that The Highest Heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to humanity. And that makes sense. There also is a saying that ‘possession is 99 percent of ownership,’ so that too indicates ownership. Of course there is some validity to the claim that it is God’s earth. He created it after all. It is like a painting: I may buy a famous piece of art, which makes me the rightful owner, but the treasure always is identified by the original creator, such as a Picasso or van Gogh or, in music, Bach or Beethoven. That’s how it is with God: our cosmos will always be identified by God as the creator, even though he gave it to us.
We know what we have done to the earth and the lower heavens: irreparable damage, never to be reversed, on the contrary, it will get worse and worse, as is evident from the weird weather we are having. The deterioration we experience will be the topic of many discussions this year and the awful truth is that nothing will change: There is no going back.
Environmental damage is a form of debt. When I borrow money to buy something today, and when I then start using that product, its value goes down, but the debt increases because of interest. Debt, any debt, makes it more difficult for me in times to come because this future obligation hampers my life today because my debt cuts into my buying power, which means that in the months and years ahead I have less money available.
The same is true for environmental debt. We continually borrow from the atmosphere. We use the air, soil, water without regard to the eventual clean-up cost which all lands on our shoulders later in our lives or on future generations to clean up. It’s impossible to enjoy the same benefits tomorrow as we do today without paying much more because the environment debt also carries a penalty. The best way to handle this is to repair the damage now which costs money and time, but will prevent much greater hardship in the near future. Will we do it? No. Our entire life style is built on growth and thus more pollution. In the vocabulary of politics and business there is no concept of going back and cutting down, only growth matters.
What is the church going to do?
Our debt trap reminds me of the Lord’s Prayer, the most popular prayer in churches, a prayer we know by heart, but we fail to know its deeper meaning. The entire prayer is probably one of the most misunderstood sections in the Bible, at par with John 3: 16, where the line “God so loved the world” is generally read as “God so loved the human race.” The misunderstood parts center on the Kingdom and on Debt. Both Bonhoeffer and J. H. Bavinck repeatedly emphasize that the line in the Lord’s Prayer “Your Kingdom Come” is a fervent plea for the establishment of God’s New Earth where righteousness reigns, where everything that was wrong on our current earth will forever be corrected. Then there is the line in that prayer “Give us this day our daily bread”, which is completely mistranslated. There is a Greek word in that sentence – epiousios (Google it to confirm my statement) – that actually does not point to today but to the future. So “Give us this day our daily bread” is not a plea for a constant supply of bread, but really means to ask for the power to prepare for the Kingdom that is to come in the future. After all, Jesus’ entire mission was eschatological, and had everything to do with the coming Kingdom, the New Creation. His sacrificial death was solely for the purpose to ensure that the New Creation was to come in all its glory. His death served to pay for all the environmental debt we accumulated through thousands of years of abusing the planet. Thus “Forgive us our debt as we forgive our debtors” basically refers to all the ‘debts we have inflicted upon creation’, which can never be made good if they depended on us humans to do so. Actually the original text mentions ‘trespasses’. Anything that hampers God’s holiness is a trespass, an illegal entry. When we harm creation we trespass on God’s holiness. We do that all the times and so does everybody else, that’s why we must forgive others as well.
Without Christ there would not be a way back no matter how hard we try. Too bad that by and large almost without exception, the Church rather sticks to the old, and erroneous, version of the Lord’s Prayer. It prefers the engrained interpretation because it is much easier this way and does not call for a totally different approach. That does not mean that there is no place for the church anymore: there is.
There is a vital place for the church
We cannot do without the church, even though fewer and fewer people see it that way. However, in these last days where all the bills, also for the environment, are due, the church’s approach must become completely different. Bonhoeffer, in his Creation and Fall, starts his book with the remarkable words: “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, it proclaims from the End.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, killed by the Nazi regime weeks before the end of World War II, called himself an ‘Anthropos Teleios”. Anthropos is the Greek word for ‘a human being.’ In the Sermon of the Mount Jesus uses the term ‘teleios’ to indicate how we should live. In Matthew 5: 48 Jesus tells us ‘to be teleios as my heavenly father is teleios,” the word usually translated as ‘perfect.’ I do a lot of translating I know that translating is often a guess game. Just as the Lord’s Prayer contains mistranslations so does the Sermon on the Mount. Here the word ‘teleios’ refers to the Greek ‘telos’ as we find it in ‘tele’vision, and ‘tele’phone, both referring to ‘telos’ the Greek word for ‘far’ or ‘end’. The correct translation of Matthew 5: 48 could thus quite well be Consider with everything you do the ultimate outcome and act accordingly.
Don’t expect the church at large to change and live that way. It is too entombed in its customs and superstitions to ever be able to change. There will be places where this will happen, but they will be the exceptions.
Fortunately more and more books and people start tuning into a different melody, one away from heaven and Rapture and more emphasizing the Redemption of all Creation. Where this does not happen, the church has been relegated to the margin. I admire the Pope and his vision. He just appointed scores of new cardinals, but the fact that his church gives no voice to females and its belief that good works can earn salvation indicate the irrelevance of the largest denomination in the world.
At an environmental bible study I attended a few weeks ago it was said that Christianity is really growing in Africa and China. This was seen as hope for the world, because an important environmental scientist, Dr. Schindler of the University of Alberta, himself an unbeliever, had said that the only hope to save the world is to become a Christian. The problem with this is that the fastest growth of Christianity is of the Pentecostal kind, and its main platform is “Rapture”, that erroneous teaching that in a flash Christians will suddenly be swept up to heaven, away from this sinful earth, leaving the godless to fend for themselves in an increasingly satanic environment. A book that has rivalled the Bible in popularity was The Great Late Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. The title says it all. The New York Times called it the Bestseller of the Decade. By and large both the Catholic and the Protestant church have little use for creation, even though the current Pope has called pollution a sin against God, and I admire him for it.
Of course there are exceptions to this, mainly in the so-called neo-Calvinist tradition, but there too the idea that we are going to heaven is so engrained in all its teachings and its hymns especially, that it is almost impossible to undo the heaven heresy. When, years ago, in an article I wrote for the Presbyterian Record I expounded my misgivings about heaven, a letter to the editor called me a heretic, and the editor himself gave me a book disputing my claim.
Here’s what J. H. Bavinck wrote in his Between the Beginning and the End: A radical Kingdom Vision: “A human being, adam, belongs to adamah, the life?bearing earth. With every sinew of his existence he is tied to the earth, which bears him and feeds him.” Bonhoeffer wrote essentially the same in his Creation and Fall: “I belong completely to this world. It bears me, nurtures me and holds me…. God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.”
These two Reformed theologians are now coming back into fashion, and that is a good sign, and also an indication that we are speeding to the End when more and more of the final Truth is being revealed.
Let me cite one example of what sooner than later will engulf the entire globe. Last week I read an article on Egypt. It stands and falls with the river Nile which is Egypt’s life line. When some 70 years ago Egypt had 23 million people, had a good supply of energy, and the Nile yielded an abundance of fish, the country was self-sufficient in food and energy. Since the annual floods from the Nile River no longer occur, thanks to the Russian built dam, the sediments and silt that were carried all throughout the region are trapped, and as one scientist explains, “Sediment is primarily retained in an extremely dense network of irrigation and drain channels, and also in wetlands in the northern delta” This lack of natural fertilizer has resulted in an increase in erosion of the river and Nile Delta, and an increase in the use of chemical fertilizers. Chemical fertilizers have to be imported and thus cost money for the farmers that grow their crops, and it also causes pollution of the surrounding environment due to runoff. The chemical fertilizers contain high levels of Nitrogen and Phosphorous which are harmful because they flow from the cropland to the water. Both of these elements are known to cause an increase in algae and algal blooms; algal blooms and the increasing erosion present a problem to fish because both contribute to an increase of particles in the water, which can occasionally clog the fish’s gills, suffocating them.
Now Egypt has a population of 70 million and with the energy sources depleted, with polluted land and fish stocks also down, Egypt has reached the stage of ungovernable. That is increasingly the case also in Africa and China where sand storms darken the days.
There is no way back.
There’s no way back. Seven Billion Two Hundred Million people populate the finite earth. All make claims on the soil, the water and the air, and do so with utter disregard of the ultimate consequences. Already in the Garden of Eden the economic prevailed over the aesthetic. As natural disasters multiply at an unprecedented pace, the End of Life too is approaching with increasing velocity. Nobody knows the exact time of collapse. Only God does. But that it is coming is beyond doubt.
So what must we do? That is today’s dominating question. In the first place we must be aware of the lethal forces we have unleashed. To state that we must remain optimistic because otherwise our grandchildren have no future, is baby prattle. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” is an ancient saying. In the Fourth of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20: 4) it explicitly says that we shall not worship any other than God. By making economic growth our idol – and we all are guilty of this – the sins of the fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers will be punished to the third and fourth generation through our abuse of the world God solved so much (John 3: 16).
There’s no way back, only a way forward, and thus our prayer should be one of forgiveness and for the speedy coming of the Lord and his New Creation in all its glory.