July 15 2023.
WIR KONNTEN NICHTS TUN. (We could do nothing)
On May 13 I wrote that “The next six months will decide the fate of the world”. Now, on July 15, it is perfectly clear that the future looks dark, very dark, ominous, downright perilous. The naked truth is that the physical earth, as we have fashioned it in our likeness, is beyond salvation, while AI is about to destroy ‘the humanity’ in us.
The recent past.
Eight years ago, when the UN Paris Accord was signed, there was a glimmer of hope that a structural change was still possible, but the world ignored the worsening weather-related events, and soldiered on as if nothing was amiss. Then we still had the false hope that the clock was stuck at Five Minutes to Twelve, seduced by the misdirected goal that ‘now is the moment when, if we act, we can avoid the consequences’, but we sat on our fat fannies, and failed to act. In consequence the atmospheric warming is accelerating; the polar icecaps are melting, the glaciers are disappearing, the forest fires are fiercer than ever, and the extinction of all species of animals continue to sadden us, while ecosystems face universal destruction. Today we live in the Apocalypse. António Guterres, the UN secretary, coined it correctly: ‘we are on a highway to hell with our foot still on the accelerator”, while all scientific reports, from whatever source, are being ignored.
O yes, a lot of good things happen! We now have solar and wind energy; we now have electric cars and bikes; we now have better insulation and recycling, have perma-culture and carbon credits.
But the problems accelerate even faster: plastic micro-pieces poisons sea-life everywhere, even detected in the deepest ocean crevices and the highest Himalaya summits.
My great-grandchildren.
My 13 grandchildren have grown up, still having been aware of the croaking of frogs, the humming of insects, of life before Covid. My eight great-grandchildren now live in a world where heat hovers, where unpredictable storms threaten, where gentle rains turn to floods and threaten once secure construction, where winds harbor hurricanes, where lack of rain cause crops to fail, where our human societal life more and more mean disasters, diseases, dried-out regions, inhabitable places expanding.
We now live in an era which James Lovelock labeled, “The Revenge of Gaia.”
Gaia?
James Lovelock who died last year on his 101st birthday, was not a Christian, but he did coin a Christian concept: the earth as a living entity. Dr. Douglas John Hall, in his What Christianity is NOT, praises Dr. Lovelock for recognising that ‘the earth is a living reality, not merely a collection of inanimate substances and processes. To see the world as alive leads us to a better way of understanding both the world and ourselves in it.’
I have often quoted Bonhoeffer who saw creation as God’s revelation -His WORD – to us, in perfect accord with the Belgic Confession. Just as “Religion’ killed Jesus, so our actions toward the Living Creation, constituting killing Creation is a form of killing God.
A different life is needed.
We must re-examine our life, from beginning to end. No more automatic partaking in the way of Western life, geared to consumption, geared to waste, geared to immediate satisfaction. Everything we do must be evaluated in light of eternity, where our future lies, eternal life on a new earth which is waiting in the wings. Life must be lived in total awareness of the future that awaits us: the new world, where righteousness dwells, the transition to a society where the lamb lives with the lion.
Are we helpless?
When the German people after the war, learned about the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered, without a public outcry, they said, “Wir konnten nichts tun”, we could do nothing. Of course, they could do something: they could have prayed, remembering that Jesus was a Jew. Praying for Jews was praying for Jesus, just as praying for Creation is praying for God.
It’s too late to change what happened. Past-history now determines post-history. Post-history means that we must live the New Life that is to come. The excuse that we can’t do anything about the ‘fate of the earth’, was not valid about Jews in 1940-45, and is not valid about the earth today. The first thing we can do is ‘pray’, pray for Christ’ return, and then, the more difficult matter, try, TRY, to live the New Creation Way, live, think, probe, assume, dream, yes, ‘dream!’, how to live sustainably, how to live the full life Jesus wanted us to live.
Christ did not start a new ‘religion’. Religion, as we have seen, kills. Christ wants us to live, LIVE! And that to the full. (John 10:10)