AUGUST 14 2020
TINA?
TINA is the new-old-acronym. Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady of England, casted the expression when she proclaimed: “There Is No Alternative” (to the Capitalistic system.) And, yes, the terrible truth is that she was right: we live and die with our existing economic enterprises because ‘There Is No Alternative’.
Thus TINA really indicates that we have been suckered, been bamboozled, been falsely fooled. Our entire economy – a word of Greek origin, meaning ‘the law of the land, of the oikos, the house, the world in which we dwell – has been constructed on the faulty premise that ONLY an oil-based society can give us the luxuries we crave. The underlying assumption always has been that the earth can be exploited ‘ad infinitum’ on the erroneous assumption that it has endless resources and constant cosmic cooperation. We now are discovering that our curse is TINA because all our eggs are in the Carbon Basket.
A New Paradigm Needed.
As the TINA ‘truth’ has been exposed as basically flawed, the time is ripe for a new paradigm, a totally different set of rules, to be applied to all of society, including the church, because also our theological themes no longer work: we, Christians, have nothing to say anymore to society, because we too have adopted the TINA theology and have integrated ourselves with the ruling reign whose only outcome is death. Electronic speed has replaced reflection and meditation. Instead of carefully cultivating and then expanding our religious heritage, we have stuck to the old. Alienated from the cosmos that fashioned us, we have succumbed to the machine, and so have become the machine, witness our church buildings with it paved parking lots.
The Plague.
You and I know that a plague is roaming the land, easily recognized by the masks we wear. The real mask our society is hiding is the revenge we undergo by a retaliating earth, because violence begets violence. The cure for that is not a mask: it’s the opposite of one: we must expose our real face, our destructive conduct, our suicidal bent. We must publicly confess the harm we did and daily do to God’s earth and thus to God before we can attack the Pandemic.
The naked truth is that our face-covering is a sure symbol of the sickness and curse we have inflicted on the cosmos. We have to deal with that masquerade first before we can find a cure for the VIRUS. As a human race we must confess – and the church must initiate that process – that we have been wrong, that we cannot return to the old system because it is killing God. We must admit that this gradual TINA process has altered our religious nature.
In our demystified and secularized world there, apparently, is no longer a place for the idea of God: that is too old-fashioned, too humiliating, because it fosters dependency and challenges our humanity, even though we conveniently forget our total reliance on fossil fuels. Still there is a kernel of truth here: we no longer can use the church as a crutch. The current anti-gathering situation is testing that concept, and clamors for a new beginning and a new language. That too needs reflection and communal consultation, because the price for ‘progress’ is too steep, the cost for continuing means certain death as it requires the End of Nature and the acceleration of our dehumanization. Failure to implement this means the end of the church as we know it.
Enter Le Mileu Divin.
This past week my attention became focused on a Roman Catholic Priest, born in France in 1881: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I remembered that I had a book by him, bought many decades ago, as it still had a 75 cent price tag, and was never read.
What a treasure! I increasingly see God’s guidance in my life. The book, in English, sports the French title because the word ‘milieu’ is difficult to translate. “Milieu” means more than ‘environment’, means more than a social sphere, more than different societal classes: it’s all of that and more. “Milieu Divin” indicates that the world in which we live and move and have our being, is holy, is God’s precious work of Art.
And it is exactly there where the ALTERNATIVE lies. Teilhard, at the conclusion of his book, writes, “One day, the Gospel tells us, the tension gradually accumulating between humanity and God will touch the limits prescribed by the possibilities of the world. And then will come to end.” (As an aside: this erudite priest wrote this in 1927 while teaching in China.)
TINA has a certain limit. Exactly because “There Is No Alternative”, that limit is fast approaching, that END is very near. Teilhard, in good Calvinistic fashion also wrote, “The whole process out of which the New Earth is gradually born is an aggregation underlaid by a segregation”. That needs some clarification: ‘aggregation’ means making a ‘whole’ from separate parts. ‘Segregation’ indicates separation from that ‘whole’. God will make everything ‘whole’ and entrust this wholeness to those who have NOW worked for that ‘wholeness’.
That is the message, the ‘new’ message the church has to proclaim will it be relevant.
Teilhard, who has a doctorate in paleontology, the study of fossil animals and plants, connects traditional concepts with his scientific insights. In his Le Milieu Divin, his Divine Milieu, he convincingly argues that we must detect God everywhere in the Universe, inspired by Paul’s writing in Colossians 1: 15-20, where it says that “In Christ all things (Ta Panta) hold together,” and in Acts 17, “For in Him (Christ) we live and move and have our being.” For Teilhard God is a self-revealing, comprehensive reality, not merely an unknowable idea.
Just before he died in New York City in 1955 at the age of 74, he wrote, “The joy and strength of my life will have lain in the realization that when the two ingredients – God and the world – were brought together they set up an endless mutual reaction, producing a sudden blaze of such brilliance that all the depth of the world were lit up for me.”
Ever the obedient priest, but also a professional paleontologist he refrained from writing his evolutionary findings when Rome forbade him to publish them.
Teilhard very much echoes Bonhoeffer and J.H. Bavinck. I do well to quote Bonhoeffer here who too was a visionary person. He wrote, “God is either 100 Percent real in the world or not at all: there is no third possibility. God’s reality cannot be divided into religion on the one hand and reality on the other….It is impossible to experience the reality of God without the reality of the world, or he reality of the world without the reality of God….Worldly existence and Christian existence are not simply two sides of a coin but they are at one and the same time the whole coin. If this is not the case the church degenerates into a ‘religious society’ fighting for its own existence and thus automatically no longer God’s church in the world…. Without God, without humanity we lose the earth: God, Humanity and the Earth belong together.”
J. H. Bavinck, in his Between the Beginning and the End: A Radical Kingdom Vision, writes that our salvation and the salvation of the cosmos, go hand in hand: we can’t have one without the other.
Is TINA, is There is No Alternative, absolute?
No. There is an Alternative. Instead of fondly favoring fossil fuels, we must seek God’s favor, confessing, “God, I have sinned, and from now on falteringly and even hesitantly, I will try to have an alternative life-style, loving God’s earth in word and deed, loving myself, and my neighbor, and wholeheartedly live in the hope of the New Creation.”