DARE TO……..….
A few days ago, at the (new) Tweed Library the librarian handed me a book she had just received: Elizabeth Kolbert’s UNDER THE WHITE SKY, THE NATURE OF THE FUTURE. I have her previous book, THE SIXTH EXTINCTION, subtitled “an unnatural history”, in which this gifted writer relates – as the title indicates – the disappearances of species before our very eyes and suggests that this event is likely to be our most lasting legacy, forcing us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human. I am sure the Lord on Judgement Day will ask me about this as well, so I better be prepared. In Under the White Sky, she describes a process in which we, poor humans are trapped in some sort of technology supposed to replace the (divine) original, and not really succeeding. The ‘White Sky’ refers to an experiment to blog the sun to fight HEAT, causing our ‘blue sky’ to turn ‘white’, and, perhaps the sun to turn red.
Not surprisingly, “The Sixth Extinction” ends on a sour note: “It – the extinction – will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have – or have not – inherited the earth.” That’s the book’s very last sentence. It totally clashes with the Bible which says that “the righteous will inherit the land” (Psalm 37: 29), but then she never alludes to any ‘religious’ concepts, even though her predictions are quite biblical.
Dare to have hope!
Disturbing scenarios.
No doubt, Kolbert paints a bleak picture! Both books made me cry! Literally! The ‘Nature of the Future’ is a poor second or third to the nature I grew up in. Even though we are employing the full extent of our technological knowhow to restore the damage done to ‘nature’, we are failing miserably. Compare this to what my Bible tells me (Haggai 2: 9), “The glory of this present house (to come) will be greater than the glory of the former house,’ says the Lord Almighty”. As always, there is a choice: Kolbert’s Nature of the Future, or God’s Nature of the Future.
Dare to compare!
Major changes ahead.
I don’t know about you, but I believe that we are on the cusp of major environmental changes, all for the worse. Biden, Trudeau, all the world’s so-called enlightened leaders have only one mantra, one rule to rule it all: Economic Growth. It reminds me of the economist Kenneth Boulding who, in 1966, coined the well-known statement “anyone who thinks that economic growth can go on forever is either an idiot or an economist.” Or a politician, I should add.
I am convinced that what I read in 1 Corinthians 1 is true: “God will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” Kolbert, in her latest book, sums it up, “This book has been about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” Today we experience the fallacy of human wisdom that is not grounded in divine wisdom. Our self-reliance, our independence from God, our total disregard from creational wisdom, has over the centuries grown further and further away from divine, and now has reached a decisive point where all solutions are seen as technical. Jacques Ellul, 60 years ago, warned about this in his The Technological Society. It’s all to evident that God is destroying the wisdom of the ‘wise’. To sum up Kolbert’s books: We are starting to realize that our world has a fatal bout of cancer. All we are doing is to prolong life is by applying ‘chemotherapy’, unpleasant, but necessary.
Dare to admit our stupidity!
My mental stress.
The toll of the Pandemic goes beyond the physical: We, humans, are a totality: our body, mind, spirit, form a unity: when one aspect suffers, our entire being feels the impact. Let’s face it: we live in the full knowledge of our demise as humans. Of course, we all are mortals, but live knowing, realizing, that everything around us now has an expiry date: That is unique, that has never happened before, not even when 600 years ago the Black Plague killed more than half the population.
Dare to admit the truth!
And then there are our guilt feelings: what we have wrought is our own creation, has come about by listening and abiding by our baser instincts, by our own greed, by giving in to ease and comfort, and pushing back our saner options.
Here we are: faces buried behind a piece of cloth, deadly afraid to expose our real face, our real personality. The Bible is quite clear that sin has its own punishment: “Your wickedness will punish you.” (Jeremiah 2: 19), and Proverbs 1; 31, “you will eat the fruit of your ways.”
Dare to repent!
Take Climate Change.
Here’s a quote from Kolbert’s latest book by Dr. Dan Schrag, of Harvard, and a ‘genius’ grant winner, “If we stop C02 emissions tomorrow, it’ still going to warm for centuries…So, in that sense, we’re already at 2 degree Celsius. We’re going to be lucky to stop at 4 degree Celsius. That’s not optimistic or pessimistic. I think that’s objective reality.”
Better get used to it: we are in the final stages of ‘sinful’ humanity. I know, ‘sinful’ is a dirty word nowadays, even the church shies away from this concept. It reminds me of Dr. Lynn White who, some 50 years ago, wrote a paper in which he argued that ‘[Western] Christianity is the most anthropocentric [human-centered] religion the world has seen’. He concludes that the modern technological conquest of nature that has led to our environmental crisis has in large part been made possible by the dominance in the West of this Christian world-view.
Of course, the church argued against this, but Dr. White was 100 percent correct in his assertion. Had the church, from the beginning, seen the ‘heaven heresy’ as an abomination, as a direct result of Greek-pagan philosophy, and had regarded the cosmos as divinely composed and thus ‘holy’, rather than fleeing the world to a safe ‘heaven’, today’s catastrophic conditions might have been avoided. Still: Semper Reformanda, always try to reform the church, remains my aim, impossible as it is.
Dare to reform!
Dare to believe!
We have declared God dead. The church, by promoting the heaven myth, is co-responsible for a ‘nature’ that now resembles our technological prowess and by killing it, has effectively killed God in the process. Sorry. That is the dirty truth. Kolbert has done us a great service by ‘telling it like it is’. The church already in the year 313 became a Constantinian Institution, existing for its own sake. Jesus always condemned ‘religion’, simply wanted us to be ‘human beings’, fully reliant on God, fully dependent on his creation as God’s most wonderful book.
I love the wording of the Belgic Confession. Here’s how it defines God’s Word:
We know God by two means:
First, by the creation, preservation, and government
of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book in which all creatures,
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God: God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.
All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.
Second, God makes himself known to us more clearly
by his holy and divine Word,
as much as we need in this life, for God’s glory
and for our salvation.
Let me emphasize that first line: We know God First by his creation: THAT is God’s Primary Word, his DIRECT LOGOS.
Dare to believe!