December 13 2015
Is there still a Christian Life Style?
Many a moon ago Francis Schaeffer wrote a book entitled “How then shall we live?” concentrating on Bible reading and prayer, not unlike the way the orthodox Jews and the conservative Muslims use their holy book. At the time I basically agreed with him, but no longer. I have graduated to people such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and J. H. Bavinck, and, I guess, have developed my own way of thinking, stimulated by these great men. Bonhoeffer, so extremely ahead of his time, labeled the life of most of the church-going public as ‘pious secularism’, an apt articulation because his description points to combining our creation destroying life – as secular as it comes – with what is generally understood to be Christian morality.
“How then shall we live” is not easily answered. I am sure that I am at odds with the major segment of church-going people in believing that there is no heaven to which we go upon death. I do believe that God created us to dwell on earth now and in our eternal state. That emphasis totally colors my view of “How then shall we live?” That notion implies that the manner in which I live today has to resemble the conditions I expect to see in eternity, a perpetually stable state. That is a tremendous challenge, because our entire way of life today is dominated by two factors: a wasteful existence totally dependent on carbon energy and a spiritual view of life that has an escape- to – heaven – orientation. It is nigh impossible to free ourselves from these conditions, both seen as the gospel truth.
Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t what you know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure, that just ain’t so.” This is especially true as far as ‘the heaven-thing’ is concerned. We are so convinced that Christian people go to heaven, that we never question that assumption. And this is the teaching the church has sold to its public. That’s also the reason why we simply have difficulty changing our creation-destroying habits.
So, what must we change in order to somewhat resemble a creation-friendly life?
I believe there is only a piece-meal approach. Just one example: meat-eating. I know I have talked about this before. Again and again I read how devastating the livestock industry is for the increase in global warming. It is barely mentioned in climate summits. Yet livestock and their byproducts, as Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn point out in their book, “The Sustainability Secret,” account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51 percent of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Methane and nitrous oxide are rarely mentioned in climate talks, although those two greenhouse gases are, as the authors point out, respectively, 86 times and 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide. Cattle, worldwide, they write, produce 150 billion gallons of methane daily. And 65 percent of the nitrous oxide produced by human-related activities is caused by the animal agriculture industry. Water used in fracking, they write, ranges from 70 billion to 140 billion gallons annually. Animal agriculture water consumption, the book notes, ranges from 34 trillion to 76 trillion gallons annually. Raising animals for human consumption takes up to 45 percent of the planet’s land. Ninety-one percent of the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest and up to 80 percent of global rain forest loss is caused by clearing land for the grazing of livestock and growing feed crops for meat and dairy animals. As more and more rain forest disappears, the planet loses one of its primary means to safely sequester carbon dioxide. The animal agriculture industry is, as Andersen and Kuhn write, also a principal cause of species extinction and the creation of more than 95,000 square miles of nitrogen-flooded dead zones in the oceans. Yes, the COP 21 agreement, just concluded in Paris, has no provision for this at all, assuring that Climate Change will go well beyond the 2 degree C. mark.
In order to do your tiny bit, try becoming a vegetarian.
A person who eats a vegan diet, they point out, a diet free of meat, dairy and eggs, saves 1,100 gallons of water, 45 pounds of grain, 30 square feet of forested land, 20 pounds CO2 equivalent, and one animal’s life every day.
Therefore, it seems to me that today, given the dangerous circumstances we have created, to the point where the viability of modern life is at stake, part of the Christian – read responsible- life style ought to be the vegetarian one. Not necessarily vegan, that means no milk and eggs, but at least a meatless diet. My wife and I have had this diet for many decades and we have done well with it.
And that brings me to agriculture in general.
When Adam and Eve were in Paradise, they had a healthy diet by eating from the trees and plants that were there in abundance. Michael Pollan, in an article in the New York Times a few years ago, wrote: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”
That’s what my wife and I do, mostly home-grown. And that’s what Adam and Eve did in Paradise. When they were expelled from there and trees and plants suddenly were no longer cooperating, they were forced to starts growing their own food: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.” (Gen. 3: 17). That’s true even now, in spite of pesticides and Monsanto.
I am city-born and raised but my grandparents were country folk, low tech, down-to-earth farmers. At that time- before World War II and, of course, also during the war – they practiced agriculture the way their parents and grandparents had done with horses and simple tools and hard work: lots of time to think as they milked the cows by hand and spread the manure over the land.
They did not see the change to mechanized farming, requiring elaborate machinery and expensive tools. They were true environmentalists, loving the earth, preserving it, enriching it. Farming was, well, just something farmers did, not an ecological question.
Today, being environmentalist is expressing concern over pollution in human communities and the need for wilderness preservation, while farming today has become just another arm of industrialization, which really means that there is no solution to environmental problems without facing the problem of agriculture. It has changed from a benefactor of humanity to one of the most destructive practices of the modern age.
Wes Jackson has been a modern-day critic of factory farming. He points out that our species’ fundamental break with nature came roughly 10,000 years ago when Adam and Eve, the humanity then, started farming. While gathering-hunting humans were capable of damaging a local ecosystem in limited ways, the shift to agriculture and the domestication of animals meant humans for the first time could dramatically alter ecosystems, typically with negative consequences. While there have been better and worse farming practices in history, soil erosion has been a consistent feature of agriculture, making agriculture the first step in the entrenchment of an unsustainable human economy based on extraction.
Agriculture’s destructive capacity was ramped up by the industrial revolution that began in the last half of the 18th century intensifying the magnitude of our assault on ecosystems. This revolution unleashed the concentrated energy of coal, oil and natural gas to run the new economy that dramatically increased productivity, transforming all manufacturing, transportation, and communication, also radically changing all social relations. People were pushed off the land and into cities that grew rapidly, often without planning. World population soared from about 1 billion in 1800 to the current 7 billion, which was made possible by the application of those industrial processes to agriculture. Vaclav Smil estimates that 45 percent of the world’s population—more than 3 billion people—would not be here without the Haber-Bosch process, creating fertilizer from natural gas, which in the early 20th century made possible the industrial production of ammonia-based fertilizers from atmospheric nitrogen, which greatly expanded food production.
We are trained to think that new technologies mean progress, but the “advances” in oil/gas-based industrial agriculture have accelerated ecological destruction. Now soil from immense monoculture fields drenched in petrochemicals not only continues to erode but also threatens groundwater supplies and creates dead zones in bodies of water such as the Gulf of Mexico. Also modern farming is a primary contributor to reductions in biodiversity and declines in ecosystem health.
The fact that agriculture is failing takes many by surprise, given the dramatic increase in yields made possible by that industrialization of farming and the use of those fossil-fuel based fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. But this is what Jackson has called “the failure of success”: Production remains high while the health of the soil continues to decline dramatically, and so short-term success masks the long-term unsustainability of the system. The Germans have a beautiful word for that process: Schlimmbesserung, an improvement that makes matters worse. We have less soil that is more degraded, and there are no technological substitutes for healthy soil; we are exhausting and contaminating groundwater; and contemporary agriculture is dependent on a finite fuel source.
More and more people recognize these problems, which has meant more produce coming from home gardening, urban farms, and community-supported agriculture. But Jackson points out that about 70 percent of the world’s calories come from annual grains that take up about 70 percent of the world’s cultivated land. That’s why The Land Institute’s research into “natural systems agriculture” investigates ways that monoculture annual grains (primarily wheat, rice, and corn) can be replaced by perennial grains grown in polycultures (mixtures of plants that don’t require new planting every season)—farming that mimics nature instead of trying to subdue it. Jackson points out that when left alone, a natural ecosystem such as a prairie recycles materials, sponsors its own fertility, runs on contemporary sunlight, and increases biodiversity. Natural systems agriculture is one attempt to produce enough food while adding to ecological capital rather than degrading it.
The industrial economy treats the world as either a mine from which we extract what we need or a landfill into which we dump our waste. While there’s no telling whether perennial polycultures are going to be the key to sustainable agriculture, it’s clear that intensifying the industrialization of agriculture is a losing bet. The modern worldview ignores the fact that everything that supports life on the planet operates in cycles. Jackson offers a powerful image of what has gone wrong: The best symbol for nature is a circle; agriculture is a human attempt to square the circle; industrial agriculture flattens the circle into a straight line on the model of a factory’s mass production.
Is there still a Christian life style?
Frankly I am afraid that this is no longer possible. No matter what we do somehow we ‘sin against creation.’
My ‘earth-oriented’ vision has changed my total faith-life. Yes, I still immensely value the Bible and prayer, but I am becoming ever more conscious that – as Revelation 21: 22 clearly indicates – both Bible and prayer no longer have a place in the New Creation. I increasingly see Creation as God’s Primary word, his direct revelation, and the Bible as God’s Secondary word, his indirect revelation. Creation therefore is more holy than the Scriptures.
In my faith-life the most important Bible text is John 3: 16 where it says that God loved the world – everything created everywhere – so much that he sacrificed the life of his dear son to buy it back from the Evil One.
There’s something else I want to emphasize: 1 John 5: 19 explicitly says that “We know we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”
That’s the situation we live in now: That’s why it is so difficult to live a truly Christian life style. The entire world is under the control of the evil one, who has promoted the Heaven Heresy as proclaimed in most Christian hymns, at most funerals, and as Mark Twain so aptly put it: “It ain’t what you know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure, that just ain’t so.”