January 21 2017
EXODUS: come out of her.
Abram left his ancestral home not knowing where he would end up. The people of Israel, by leaving Egypt, made the word EXODUS a by-word. So it is no surprise that we too are called to do the same, judging by: “I heard another voice from heaven say: ‘Come out of her, my people,’ so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues. Revelation 18: 4.
Last week I wrote that “We must create ‘neo-monastic church communities’ as places of formation for modern Christians.” And my comments were: “I know that this is difficult in our subdivided world, where each is on his/her own in their separate dwellings. Monastic means communal living, as in a convent or monastery, but then for families. It is something that need to be explored and, who knows, the future may impose this sort of living on us. Curiously in the October 9 2003 issue of the New York Review of Books, discussing Father and Son McNeil’s book, The Human Web, the authors recommend the formation of primary communities: ”Religious sects and congregations are the principal candidates for this role.”
I believe it is time to seriously think about this. It also is advice given to us in both Isaiah and Jeremiah. Jeremiah 51: 9 is quite explicit: “We would have healed Babylon but she cannot be healed; let us leave her and each go to his own land, for her judgement reaches to the skies, and rises as high as the clouds.”
That Babylon – the present world – is a failure beyond healing is evident from the Trump victory: it signals the definite end of the present political and economic systems. America and our entire Western world have been built on creational domination and exploitation of the most vulnerable. These crimes are now backfiring on us. Trump’s assertion to “make America great again” is nothing else but an empty and evil boast. Yes, our present situation, our total economic system is beyond repair. The rise of Trump, the eager ally of the Antichrist, makes this abundantly clear.
The employment situation is a case in point.
In THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY Jacques Ellul, the eminent French philosopher and astute Christian, accurately describes the present state of affairs. He writes that “technique has become indifferent to all the traditional human ends and values by becoming an end-in-itself…..which has nothing human in it to which we must accommodate ourselves as best we may…… In the technological society we humans are but a single tightly integrated and articulate component.”
Now in 2017 we are, indeed tightly integrated into The Technological Society. I blame this on another product of the Technological Society: Television.
Neil Postman in his classic AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH has phrased it correctly. In our Brave New World Postman writes “we are moving toward some preordained paradise, and technology is the force behind that movement.”
Technology’s march is indeed relentless, but the “paradise” paradigm is no longer possible because there is no leisure without work: television has robbed people of the ability to live. There simply is no across the board solution to the unemployment situation: their brains had become dulled by the BOOB TUBE and now even more by the incessant silly chatter on the many media tools.
This is not the first time.
It happened before in the early 19th century. That’s when the first generation of workers had the experience of being suddenly thrown out of their jobs by automation. But rather than accept it, they fought back—calling themselves the “Luddites” – and staging an audacious attack against the machines.
In the first decade of the 1800s, the textile economy in Great Britain went into a tailspin. A decade of war with Napoleon had halted trade and driven up the cost of food and everyday goods. Fashions changed, too: Men began wearing “trousers,” so the demand for stockings plummeted. The merchant class—the overlords who paid hosiers and croppers and weavers for the work—began looking for ways to shrink their costs.
That meant reducing wages—and bringing in more technology to improve efficiency. Huge factories were built where coal-burning engines would propel dozens of automated cotton-weaving machines. And the owners grew rich. The Luddites were not so much against progress: they revolted because the owners made millions while the workers starved.
Today is no different: the rich have grown richer while the poor now have TRUMP, the ultimate conman. Today the redundancy of labor, supplanted by efficient machines, will create an enormous “useless class”, without economic or military purpose. So what will happen to this human surplus? Cannon fodder as was the case in the 1930’s?
Trump boasts that he will create “Twenty Five million new jobs”. How about the loss of jobs of the same number!
TRUMP and his illiterate legions hotly blame foreigners and immigrants for taking their jobs, and that is true to some extent, but the real culprits are Robots and computers which are taking over the work place where once humans toiled. So will TRUMP outlaw robots and computers?
We simply cannot set back the clock to the 17th Century when wind and water fueled economic life. Yet eliminating fossil fuels has become necessary: increasing its use – as the now TRUMP regime wants to do – will hasten the Day of Reckoning.
The new man in Washington wants to implement across the board tariffs and fines, cajoling companies with threats and empty bombast, which may actually have the opposite effect, upsetting the delicately balanced economic system and the carefully calibrated international agreements. It may suddenly bring on the day of reckoning, paying the price for unprecedented pollution, and negation of the human spirit caused by as Postman so aptly phrased it AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH.
We live in a world gone mad.
Let’s not fool ourselves: we are in for the most terrible of times. The rumblings are all too evident, in the weather, in the economy, in the deteriorating state of the global health, in the TRUMP tragedy, in the irreparable Middle East drama: it’s time for the people of God to extract ourselves from political, economic, self-destructing circumstances that inevitably will lead to total disaster.
Yes, let me be honest: my Calvinistic tentacles, my Bible-based opinions tell me that we will self-destruct. I now suspect that Climate Change is the deciding factor with the Arctic holding the key, the place where untold trillions of tons of methane are about to emerge. Before the final denouement, before our entire world will go up in flames, we will experience wars, famines, mass migration and state failure. These are the Horsemen of the coming Collapse of Industrial Civilization.
The Titanic to come.
Just as in the case of RMS Titanic, when this ship called industrial civilization sinks there will not be enough life boats, and those that there are will not be fully utilized. That is the reason why we must leave before everybody tries to do it at the same time.
Leave? If not, what?
We are back to the ABEL-CAIN situation.
That needs some clarification. So let me take an example from the Bible.
You may recall how the two first sons of Adam and Eve were quite religious and made an offering to Yahweh. God accepted Abel’s gesture of devotion, but rejected Cain’s, because he was not sincere in his approach to God. This infuriated Cain so much that he killed his brother. Religious strife is still with us and is often among the most ferocious.
Cain fled and we read that he built a city, signifying that the human desire to exclude God from creation is the prime motive behind the founding of the city.
Cain, who murdered his brother Abel, is the first city builder. He called it Enoch, which means a New Beginning.
Jacques Ellul in his book THE MEANING OF THE CITY mentioned that it was Cain’s intention to re-make the world over again, with not the Garden of Eden but the City as the new paradise.
Ellul wrote: “Cain has built a city. For God’s Eden he substitutes his own, for the goal given to his life by God, he substitutes a goal chosen by himself. The city is the direct consequence of Cain’s murderous act and of his own refusal to accept God’s protection. ….The city is opposed to Eden….God’s creation is seen as nothing. Cain made a new start, a start no longer seen as God’s beginning, but of human making.
“And thus Cain, with everything he does digs a little deeper the abyss between himself and God….. With Cain’s beginning with Enoch, we have a sure starting place for all of civilization. Paradise becomes a legend and creation a myth……..Cain takes possession of the world and uses it as he wishes…….It is man’s highhanded piracy of creation that makes creation incapable of giving glory to God. Cain bends all of creation to his will.”
Today we see this clearly in the aims of Trump: no consideration of nature whatsoever.
In his book Ellul does not glorify the country over the city, because, today, by and large, the countryside simply has become an extension of the city. Geert Mak in his Dutch book “How God disappeared from Jorwerd”, eloquently described how a small Frisian village lost its tradesmen, its specialty stores, its very soul, when commuters bought its houses, and relied for their purchases on city-based big block merchandize, so effectively killing the village’s economy. The same is true everywhere in the Western world.
Ellul mentions that too when he writes that, “Babylon is not A city, it is THE city……..When the wrath of God is loosed, she is struck first…. She is the very home of civilization and when the great city vanishes, there is no more civilization, a world disappears…..The very fact of living in the city directs a person down an inhuman road. They are taken into the service and worship of a somber goddess.”
Is that the end? Does Ellul in his THE MEANING OF THE CITY offer no hope?
He does. He points to the NEW CITY to come, a city the exact opposite of the city Cain founded, and in which we now live, which has to be destroyed, as she was and still is the representation of human security and human thinking and human intentions.
In the new city, the City of God, the Lord’s presence will be constant, his spirit all pervasive. And promises Revelation 14: 13: Our good deeds will follow us there. Writes Ellul: “The new city is founded in humility, constructed in the acceptance of God’s decisions. ……….Just as the new city is the accomplishment of what we humans were never able to realize, she is also the exact opposite of the earthly city….and the exact counterpart of what we humans had wanted to do.”
Properly speaking the new world to come will totally reflect God’s will, will be a world where communion with God is perfect and for all who live there.
I believe that it is later than we think. The Bible also says that the collapse will be sudden and unexpected. ARCTIC NEWS keeps on raising the alarm. Here is what this blog says, dated January 16: “The outlook is terrifying. As I calculated last year, surface temperatures of the atmosphere could rise by some 10°C or 18°F within a decade, i.e. by 2026,” making true 2 Peter 3: 10-13, I might add.
Last year, 2016, the global temperature was well above 1.5°C. At the North Pole in December 2016, it was 6.58°C (11.84°F) warmer, already releasing mega amounts of methane!
“‘Come out of her, my people,’ so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues. Revelation 18: 4.”
We have to reorient our goals, away from the City of Man to the City of God where SHALOM reigns, where full harmony within all spheres of life and within all humans, animals and plants will be universal.
Can we still form communities where we are at peace with God, his creation and each other? Can we still create ‘neo-monastic church communities’ as places of formation for modern Christians? Or is it too late? Is the seductive power of the CITY too great?
Pray without ceasing and may our works follow us into eternity.