SUNDAY AUGUST 9 2015
THE TALE OF TWO CITIES
On Thursday August 6 2015, two political debates were held in North America, one in Toronto, Ontario, the other in Cleveland, Ohio. The first one featured 3 men and a woman, with a male moderator who was quite passive and befitting being Canadian, quite polite. And so were the four people. They were, of course, politicians. Nobody else does such crazy things as debating the economy, the environment and national security. I believe those were three topics.
The one woman was Elisabeth May, the leader of the Canadian Green Party a party of two members in Parliament in Ottawa. The other three were men, all professional politicians, paid by the public purse. If Ms. May is Green, Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, also there, is the opposite. He has the worst environmental record of any major country. That’s why he should be booted out.
Of course, there are lots of Green People in Canada, I am among them, but that does not mean that I vote green. It’ll be a lost vote in my rural – green by color but not by conviction – riding. My riding goes Conservative.
Harper has been the ruler of Canada for a decade and most people are sick of him, fed up is the better world. He has the following of the Christian segment of the population but he is an enemy of the environment. I am not sure how that is possible, because, according to the church This is Our Father World. But OK that is a small matter and somewhat of an inconsistency among church people who often take their cue from their American brothers and sisters, adherents to the American Religion which, says Professor Dr. Harold Bloom, goes under the label of Protestant Christianity but has ceased to be Christian.
Perhaps, no, not perhaps but most assuredly, Christianity must be redefined in terms of 21st Century standards. Common Christianity, the Pentecostal – Southern Baptist kind tends to be Gnostic, a heresy the Apostle John condemns in no uncertain terms, but being a gnostic is much easier. It preaches heaven as our destination. P. M. (stands for Prime Minister) Harper is one of those gnostic guys, and so the earth can suffer. The more it suffers, the sooner comes the RAPTURE, the pagan belief that the true believers will be fetched up – raptured – to heaven while folks like me will stay on the evil earth. Yes, Gnostics think that the earth is evil, actually is created by an evil spirit.
There also were 10 men in Cleveland, also all rapture adherents. That Trump man was among them, who only believes in himself: he is the greatest, the best and the cleverest and all the others are dim wits. It says something about the American psyche that he leads in the polls. Americans…. No I will not condemn them. There are a few good ones, but especially the Republican majority are dumb, dumb, dumb, and so these 10 professional politicians, believe it or not, in other to get their vote, they are forced to act dumb. That is what politics does to a person.
Thank goodness: Canada is different. Just imagine: in Canada a confessed Socialist leads in the polls, while that young man Trudeau– 43 years old – is the son of a famous Socialist and probably also is one. So where in the USA the word SOCIALIST is a curse word, almost as bad as being a Commie or a follower of the Taliban or the ISIS, that terrible outfit in the Middle East, in Canada we even have states – we call them provinces – with a Socialist government. Just a few months ago ALBERTA, the most Harper-ite area, went red, not red for Republican but Socialistic Red. So Harper is scared. I really pray that he will not make it.
Oh yes, that debate in Canada. Quite polite. Nobody was shot, nobody was cursed, all very Canadian. I read in the New York Times that these 10 debaters in Cleveland got quite the grilling from the three moderators, especially from the woman on the panel. Of course these questioners were not the run of the mill Republicans.
Back to Toronto.
I am at heart a Green guy, but my riding is a Harper stronghold. The sitting member is a nice fellow: promoted from the backwoods to the back benches. The MPs as we call them – meaning Member of Parliament and not Military Police – are seated in the House in order of importance. The PM and his ministers sit in the front row and so on.
Oh yes, that debate in Canada. Nothing spectacular. I will vote strategically, which means that whoever of the three Harper opposition leaders has the best chance to unseat a Harper-trained-seal gets my vote.
So do I have political convictions? Not of the secular kind. I do vote. As a Canadian by choice I have never failed to vote. In a sense I vote in protest because it has become my sincere opinion that just as the church, political parties too have become meaningless. Perhaps these words create the wrong impression. I am not an anarchist and I am not anti-Christian. I strongly believe in good government and a viable church. But it is becoming my ever firmer opinion that the problems we face as a nation and as a church can no longer be solved.
Let me start with the church, which plays an important part in my life. Bonhoeffer’s advice to the Church of Christ, in his introduction to Creation and Fall, is: “To witness to the end of all things, to live from the end, to think from the end, to act from the end, to proclaim its message for the end.” I believe that Bonhoeffer is right.
I better elaborate here because you may not go to church: not too many people do nowadays. I can only do this by quoting another of my favorite people, J. H. Bavinck. He says that there are two kingdoms. Politicians paint a utopia in their quest for votes. The kingdom they promise when elected is one of full employment, low or no inflation, never deflation, a great environment, and low taxes. All are mostly lies, because we now know that all this has become impossible due to our raping God’s creation.
Bonhoeffer and Bavinck point to the Utopia that is coming: God’s Kingdom. You see God created this world, and it was perfect. Somehow we listened to God’s enemy, the Evil one, who whispered in our ears that we too could be god, be like Don Trump and have it all. So we sinned against creation. Jesus, in principle, restored that creation, and, when he returns he will bring the New Kingdom. That’s ‘the end’ Bonhoeffer is talking about. That is the message for the church, to look forward to the coming of the Kingdom, the restored earth and work for that goal.
I’d wish that the church would follow Bonhoeffer’s recommendation. Then the church would suddenly become a hot item, because, finally, it would have become relevant.
And here the church – and its irrelevance – intersects with politics. Politics would suddenly gain prominence if it too would deal with reality and not simply talk about growth, job creation, and slaying deficits, none of which will happen, but sincerely work to restore creation.
Well, let me tell you: all is not well. We are entering the final phase of Western civilization, and it ain’t going to be pretty. Bonhoeffer’s advice to the Church of Christ, in his introduction to Creation and Fall is, and I repeat: “To witness to the end of all things, to live from the end, to think from the end, to act from the end, to proclaim its message for the end.”
In this the church fails miserably. What must be done today is to prepare for the time – and it can come soon – when Climate Change will either fry us out, because of lack of water and dangers of fires, or drown us out. The hundreds of thousands of refugees from Africa and Asia, seeking some sort of livable life in Europe are proof that large sections of the earth – which God called good after each phase, and did so seven times when it was completed – are now so bad that dust storm take people’s breath away, literally. We better get used to extremes, also in politics, also in crime, also in all fields, because degradation of the environment and of people’s psyche goes hand in hand.
But in these debates, neither in Canada nor in the USA, anybody even hinted at them. All I heard were platitudes, downright lies, such as boasting that jobs can be created. How? By going into more debt? By spending more on infrastructure? Ah, Japan did that, paving roads to nowhere. China did that, building millions of apartments, complete cities with shopping centers, where nobody lives, six lane highways with not one vehicle on them. Lots of jobs were created, and now, now what? Debts, Debts, Debts, were the result. The only trouble with debt is that it has to be repaid. Either by the lender, who goes broke if it is not paid, or by the borrower, who might declare bankruptcy. So in the end everybody suffers and is worse off.
You want an answer to the malaise everywhere? So is my other favorite theologian, J. H. Bavinck.
Here is a direct quote of his book Between the Beginning and the End: a Radical Kingdom Vision. In his conclusion of the chapter on The Kingdom, he writes: The human kingdom is a utopia, an idealistic impossibility, something that is and is not, something that arises but cannot last. Building the Tower of Babel fails every time it is attempted. Over against all these kingdoms God makes his own kingdom come. These human kingdoms resist God’s plan with every fiber of their being; they act like demons in their fuming rage against God’s intention.
So what is God’s Kingdom?
God’s kingdom includes the sea and the plants, the mountains and the valleys, all that that was and is and is to come – all of it, all of creation, incorporated in a great and mighty whole. God’s Kingdom is the place where all things are in their rightful position and where everything can fulfill its function and work toward its potential in complete harmony with all that surrounds it. The kingdom is synonymous with light, peace, joy, service to God – all in harmonious veneration.
That is what Bonhoeffer refers to when he writes that the church must witness to that end. Here the church fails miserably. Yet all signs are there that we are running to the end, hell over heels, is the expression I believe. Do we hear that when we listen to the tales these politicians spin in the two cities? Have we heard them say that this world now is full of our junk and empty of what was there originally, when God created it and all was good?
We are blind and our politicians and our church leaders fail to show us the way. Of the ten in Cleveland nothing even remotely related to this was heard. Of the four in Toronto, a few words of caution were uttered, but also hardly anything relevant.
Believe me soon we will be in for a rough ride. Deflation is the worst of all economic perils. It is on the way, with miraculous China heading the pack. We live in a finite world, where the doctrine of Infinite Growth is the Devil’s Holy Grail. He knows he is defeated, and like a true fanatic, he is redoubling his efforts, and our politicians in all cities are his eager executives.
The tale of two cities is not really about Cleveland and Toronto, about Republicans and Democrats, about Harper and his opposition. They all are on the one side, are all in the same camp, in the camp of Babylon.
The real tale of two cities involves the two cities named in the Bible: Babylon, the bastion of the Evil one, where Cleveland and Toronto find their home and The New Jerusalem, representing God’s Kingdom to come.
Make your choice.