HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE (CONCLUSION)
Making Peace with the Planet.
March 23 2014—–Part 12.
Fifteen years ago, in St.Paul, Minn., I bought at the Luther Seminary bookstore A Testament to Freedom by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, containing the essential writings of the German pastor and theologian who joined the resistance against Hitler and was executed in 1945 a few weeks before Germany collapsed.
This 545 page paperback now looks pretty shabby, with lots of high-lightings and comments. In 1932, when Bonhoeffer was 26 years old, already having a double doctorate, already an assistant professor, he wrote an essay on Dein Reich Komme (Your Kingdom Come). On its margin I wrote: “This makes me cry,” and even now, while rereading this it chokes me up because no other writer has so clearly, so provocatively, with such youthful abandonment written about the Kingdom.
So what was it that so resonated with me? After stating that Christianity had become an out-dated replica of heaven, a cluster of sacred shrines and hallowed sanctuaries, all picturing magic escape routes from earthly turmoil, he wrote that faith should be embedded in the way each Christian becomes strong in his or her service of earth and its people, evident in everything we do, including the market place, where we buy, sell, dig, invent, move, whatever. That is a message that then and now resonates with me. Bonhoeffer, 80 years before Climate Change was wreaking havoc everywhere, wrote: “We disdain the earth… because we want to be better than the evil earth…so we are open to the religion of otherworldliness. (In other words: escape to heaven.) We have fallen into secularism, and by secularism I mean pious, Christian secularism. Not the godlessness of atheism or cultural bolshevism, but the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth. God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.” Once, in a meeting with Karl Barth, Bonhoeffer, to Barth’s great delight, quoted Luther: “The godless man’s curse can be more pleasing to God than the hallelujah of the pious.” He also wrote: “This pious secularism also makes it possible to preach and to say nice things. (However) the function of the church is to witness to the resurrection of Christ from the dead, to the end of the law of death of this world that stands under the curse, and to the power of God in the new creation.”
Everything we believe is interconnected to everything we believe. If we believe that upon death we leave this earth to end up in heaven, then we also believe that the earth is evil, and that God is imperfect, having created an evil earth. Bonhoeffer writes: “Only they who love the earth and God as one have faith in God’s Kingdom.”
Ridderbos, Bavink, Bonhoeffer
Herman Ridderbos, a Dutch theologian, in his classic The Coming of the Kingdom, writes that “the kingdom is the new ideal form of human society and Jesus’ commandments are intended to bring about its realization.”
This means that Ridderbos, J. H. Bavinck and Bonhoeffer speak the same language. They agree that the Kingdom is God’s creation, this earth, the soil we live on, the clay that constitutes us, the “Adam”, the dust from which we originate. We can only make peace with the planet – and with God – when we see this earth as holy.
That’s why Jesus tells us to Seek first the Kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well? (Matt.6: 33) The ‘righteousness’ mentioned here refers to God’s righteousness, pointing to Micah 6:8, where we are asked to: “Act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.” Jesus demands the absolute sacrifice for the sake of the kingdom, which entails that our first duty is to seek the welfare of God’s creation, to see the earth as God’s holy gift to us. When we harm it, we harm everybody, every single human being, every animal and plant, nullifying the command to ‘love your neighbour as yourself.” Once Jesus’ command to ‘promote the thriving of creation’ has penetrated into our reluctant brain, and become part and parcel of our personal profile, once this primary truth that loving creation is our first and foremost duty in life, then Jesus promises that our life will find fulfillment; then he assures us that everything else in life will fall into place.
Traditional Christianity no longer relevant
Traditionally Reformed Christianity has viewed life through the spectacles of the church, and, until a few generations ago, when economic development was still within the boundaries of ecological limits, this was the way to go. Thanks to creation destroying oil, in my lifetime, the world’s population has more than tripled. We now need 10 oil calories to produce one food calorie, with the result that by our wanton, licentious, self-indulgent, hedonistic way of life, we have dug our own grave. We now are confronted with “the Limits of Growth” and are daily discovering that the way we go no longer can be sustained. Suddenly everything must be seen in a different light. The question: “How Should we then live?” is taking on a totally different meaning, and calls for a new way to live.
Can we re-create God’s Kingdom here? Should we try?
Enter Wiebo Ludwig
There was a man in Alberta, in a way a maverick, a messianic Christian preacher named Wiebo Ludwig, who died last year. Wiebo is a product of the same background as I am, with the same characteristics: a Dutch immigrant, of Christian Reformed stock, stubborn, striving for self-sufficiency, a touch of self-righteousness. He started a small Christian community in the remote north of Canada’s oil province, sabotaged at least one wellhead by pouring cement down its shaft and blew up others. The Canadian authorities, along with the oil and gas barons, demonized Ludwig as an eco-terrorist, an odd charge given that they were and still are the ones responsible for systematically destroying the environment and the planet.
Wiebo felt that our society was in a spiritual crisis, rather than an environmental or an economic crisis,” David York’s film “HYPERLINK “http://www.wieboswar.com/trailer.html”Wiebo’sHYPERLINK “http://www.wieboswar.com/trailer.html” War” is a good portrayal of Ludwig and his fight with the oil and gas industry. Wiebo felt that our addiction to fossil fuels, rampant consumerism and materialism, breakdown of family units were all symptoms of a society that has lost its root connection to God. Further, he felt that we are in a kind of end-times state, where the forces of good are in a terrible struggle with the forces of evil.
He was one of our era’s most effective figures of resistance against the oil and gas industry, and also a devout Christian, which I am as well.
Ludwig grasped the moral decadence of the consumer society, its unchecked hedonism, worship of money and deadening cult of the self. He retreated in 1985 with his small band of followers into the remoteness of northern Alberta. His community, called Trickle Creek, was equipped with its own biodiesel refinery, windmills and solar panels—which permitted it to produce its own power—a greenhouse and a mill. Its members, who grew their own food, severed themselves from the contaminants of consumer culture. However, Ludwig’s flight from evil only ensured that evil came to him: his land happened to be atop one of the largest oil and gas reserves in the world in the form of sour gas, a neurotoxin that if released from within the earth can, even in small amounts, poison livestock, water tables and people.
The oil and gas companies soon began a massive drilling effort. At first, like many other reformers and activists, Ludwig used legal and political channels to push back against the companies, which were drilling on the edge of his 160-acre farm. He spent the first five years attending hearings with civil regulators, writing letters—he even wrote to Jane Fonda—and appealing in vain to elected officials, government agencies, the press, environmentalists and first nations groups. His family—he had 11 children—posted a sign in 1990 that decried “the ruthless interruption and cessation” of privacy; “the relentless greedy grabbing of Creational resources”; “the disregard for the sanctity of the Lord’s Day”; the legislation of land and mineral ownership policy “that does violence to the God-given ‘right to property.’
His war against industry illustrated the cost of our addiction to hydrocarbons: Our materialistic way of life is based on the destruction of groundwater, the devaluing of rural property, the invasion of rural communities, the poisoning of skies with carcinogens, the fragmentation of landscapes.
How do we combat creational injustice? Do we, like Ludwig, block roads by downing trees and disable vehicles and drilling equipment?
When, after two leaks of hydrogen sulfide sour gas from nearby wells—which forced everyone on the farm to evacuate and saw numerous farm animals giving birth to deformed or stillborn offspring, as well as five human miscarriages or stillbirths within Ludwig’s community—and after the destruction of two of his water wells, he declared open war on the oil and gas industry. Was he right to blow up oil and gas facilities, because he had to fight back to “protect his children”?
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, accompanied by private security agents hired by the oil companies, spent millions to investigate and attempt to halt the sabotage. Ludwig’s farm was occupied by police five times and searched for incriminating evidence. The police and Encana Corp. infiltrated Ludwig’s tight community with an agent provocateur who, to prove he could be trusted, blew up a well owned by what was then Alberta Energy Corp., now Encana. The explosion, although orchestrated by the police and Encana, was publicly blamed on Ludwig. The oil company also brought in a “terrorism expert” from Toronto to speak at local town hall gatherings—York captures one of those talks in his film—and the expert warned residents of the rising “terrorism” of religious cults led by fanatic, charismatic leaders.
Ludwig, whose knowledge of the terrain allowed him to outfox hundreds of police officers, was never caught in an act of sabotage, but he probably had a hand in damage at hundreds of remote well sites estimated at $12 million. The federal government in Ottawa, in desperation, considered sending in the army. Ludwig was finally arrested in 2000 on five counts of property damage and possession of explosives and imprisoned for 18 months. He spent his time in prison reading and thinking.
But violence begets violence. And the more Ludwig blew up facilities the harsher became the intrusion of the state.
Ludwig’s gravest mistake was his decision or the decision of someone in his small community, to fire on two trucks carrying rowdy teenagers. The sons and daughters of oil and gas workers roared through the group’s compound at about 4 a.m. on June 20, 1999. Karman Willis, a 16-year-old girl, was fatally shot by someone on the farm, and a second teenager survived a wound.
Ludwig, before he died at age 71 after refusing chemotherapy for esophageal cancer, turned away from violence. The renunciation came a year or two after his final bombing campaign. He would read, with his family, Jacques Ellul’s 1969 book Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective. Ellul, like Ludwig’s Dutch father, had fought in the resistance against the Nazis in World War II.
Ellul wrote: “The Christian should participate in social and political efforts in order to have an influence in the work, not with the hope of making a paradise (of the earth), but simply to make it more tolerable—not to diminish the opposition between this world and the Kingdom of God, but simply to modify the opposition between the disorder of this world and the order of preservation that God wants it to have—not to bring in the Kingdom of God, but so that the Gospel might be proclaimed in order that all men might truly hear the good news.”
Initially Ludwig was more like an Old Testament Prophet, a rigid patriarch. In that he reflected the present day church, also organized along hierarchical structures, where mostly women are excluded. He, later in life, saw the error of his ways. Will the church, still organized along an Old Testament trajectory, and still heaven-bound, reform itself?
Making Peace with the Planet
In 1990 I bought a book in Toronto: Barry Commoner’s Making Peace with the Planet. Dr. Commoner was the director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queen’s College in New York City.
In many ways Making Peace with the Planet means making peace with God who created the planet. Right now we all are at war with God’s world: there’s very little peaceful about our daily activities. We all, without exception, have more or less become allies of God’s great adversary, whose sole aim is to destroy God’s precious creation, the world he loved so much. Commoner provides us with a blueprint that can be followed by all who love the earth, and by doing so express love for its maker. He formulated four laws of ecology which provide us with definite guidelines for wholesome living.
(1) Everything is connected to everything else.
(2) Everything has to go somewhere.
(3) Nature knows best
(4) There is no free lunch.
Barry Commoner wrote this book in 1975, almost 40 years ago. In Connection with “Everything is connected to everything else”, he used the example of fish. He wrote that a fish is not only a fish, but also a producer of organic waste that nourishes aquatic plants and microorganisms, all elements of an intricate network, all beautifully compatible, so that there is no waste, because “Everything has to go somewhere.” The early Christian symbol also was a ‘fish’ of which the Greek word is ICHTHUS, an acronym for Iesu Christi Theos, Uios. Sooteros, Jesus Christ, God, Son, Saviour. Fish belongs in the ocean. Because we have eliminated much of the fish there, the jellyfish the main food for fish, no longer has a predator and has mushroomed, filling the oceans everywhere. In a new book by Lisa-Ann Gershwin Stung: On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean she sees the jellyfish as an ‘angel of death’, a harbinger of planetary doom. The outlook for the sea, Gershwin writes, is essentially apocalyptic because these jellyfish are ‘marine weeds’: hardy, fast-growing, fast-breeding, adaptable and tenacious. The disappearance of FISH is just another sign of the disappearance of ICHTHUS, that age-old Christian symbol.
The vanishing of fish illustrates that collapse is in the cards. We see this also in the air we breathe, now saturated with Green House Gases. We see this also in the debt we have created, both monetary and environmentally. There too we are gambling with the very basics of our existence.
When Commoner coined “Nature knows best”, he entered the religious sphere. Making Peace with the Planet essentially means acknowledging what Psalm 19 so eloquently states:
“The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.
The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple.
The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes.
The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever.
Yes, “There is no free lunch”.
The Bible tells us that the wages of sin is death. The result of our riotous living is death, because the death of the oceans, the death of pure air, the death of soil, all point to our own death through sinning against creation.
Making peace with the planet is a prerequisite for making peace with God. The apostle John says it all: “This is love for God (expressed in love for creation): to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world.” (1 John 5:3).
This concludes my series on How Should we then live?
Next week an essay on the book of Job, which, in my opinion, is the most up-to-date and inclusive book of the Bible.