March 17 2013
OUR WORLD TODAY
The Home Stretch
Somehow we have labeled the period from the years 1000-1500 as the Middle Ages, implying that the subsequent centuries comprise the End Ages. I disagree. I believe that the 500 years, from 1500 to about 2000, were a special period, a time when everything came to its full potential. We now are in the final, downhill stretch of history, signified by “The End of Things,” a time when, as Economist Herman Daly put it, “the elites who make the decisions have figured out how to keep the benefits for themselves while ‘sharing’ the cost with the poor, the future, and other species. It is a time when empty-world economics with its emphasis on spurring economic growth by the accumulation of man-made capital has run its course.”
End-time is, just as dying, a very unpopular topic, but it is confirmed by such books as The End of Nature, The End of Science, The End of Oil and The End of Growth. They all indicate the finality of life. That the war from 1914-1945 was The War to End all Wars found its proof in the failures of the follies of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Time is running out. Global warming is proceeding at a much faster rate than was predicted by the International Panel on Climate Change: polar ice is disappearing at a rate which is far more penetrating than predicted, threatening the release of vast quantities of 20 times more potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere from melting permafrost and from enormous deposits of methane concentrations on the ocean floors. Other feedback loops may be introduced as drying of the Amazon basin and Australia’s interior makes these and other regions vulnerable to forest fires ignited by lightning flashes.
We are also in an unprecedented situation in other fields. Thanks to cheap energy= cheap food, we sired 7 billion people. Now we are in danger of an overshoot: too many mouths have created high oil prices, high food prices, species loss, air pollution, shortage of clean water, soil erosion and disease explosion made worse by antibiotic resistant drugs. Its financial effects are wealth disparity, debt default, nations unable to collect taxes and forced to cut back on benefits, resulting in riots just to name the most obvious The immediate most likely result is financial collapse. The West is like the Prodigal Son. It has squandered its heritage, but now that people realize their plight and return to Father State, Papa too is bankrupt. No warm welcome or fatted calf for us spendthrifts.
Recommendation One: if possible have extra cash on hand- at least $500 in small bills – just in case.
One consequence of the world being on its last legs is The Age of Fraud, especially in the money market. Revelation 22:11 – the last chapter of the Bible – confirms that: “Those who do wrong will increasingly do so; those who do right will persist in their good ways.” The Age of Fraud is evident everywhere, including in our self-deception that “matters will turn out fine”, or “science will find an answer”, or most common “I don’t want to think about it: too frightening”.
Today much of what hear or do are at best half-truths. Much of what we eat and drink is contaminated and falsely labeled: it is engineered to look good, but looks deceive as they often make us obese and cancer-prone, saturated as they are with salt and sugar to make us addictive to these poisons for the sole purpose of generating profits for the multi-national corporations. If “We are what we eat,” then that too bodes ill for the future.
Everything created is sacred, especially real food. Jesus prayed before eating, and many of us still do this. If food is holy then so is proper farming. I will probably get sued for this, but in my book Monsanto is a satanic enterprise. The name itself is blasphemy: Mon-santo refers to sanctus: holy. It is as far from holy as the devil is from Jesus. Why is Monsanto evil? Because it tampers with seeds so that farmers cannot use them for next year’s crop: that is anti-creational and hurts, especially the poor. Monsanto seeds will prove to be a curse in the long run.
My grandparent-farmers were deeply religious: they knew that for their well-being they depended on God giving rain and sunshine at the appropriate time. Now water is mechanically pumped from the Ogallala aquifer (already rapidly decreasing) or irrigation from other sources, all in danger of running out or low, while fertility is furnished by chemicals containing potassium, nitrogen and phosphorous. The result has been that we no longer need to believe: science – Monsanto – ConAgra – has all the answers. So farms have become factories without a roof. Since oil equals food, and oil equals poison and is finite, oil is another sign of the last days.
Another reason why we are in The End-Times is that people are becoming conscious of yesteryear’s missteps. I remember that in 1965 I received, as a member of a book club, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. I gave it away without ever reading it. I simply was not ready for new insights: too comfortable, but somewhere between 1970 and 1973 I got converted, was born again to different insights, including hearing Dr. Evan Runner coin “Life is Religion”.
Yes, all of life is religion. By and large organized religion has separated nature from grace, heaven from the earth, and soul from the body: the so-called the spirit/matter dualism. According to this belief the church’s business is the soul not the soil, yet for God the ‘soil’ is at least as important as is soul. The German word for ‘worship’ is Gottesdienst, which means ‘serving God’. We do that also when we devotedly work the soil. That’s why I like Bonhoeffer who said: “God, the Human Race, Creation belong together.”
Recommendation Two: prepare for the End. See life as one: everything is religion-oriented, even for the agnostic, probably turned off from the church by its staleness and lack of ‘all of life is religion.’
We now are in the home stretch. The industrial age is behind us. The carbon-based abundance is being forced into abandonment. The old order is dying and a new age is struggling to be born: a shifting of emphasis, away from the consumer society, and preparing for the Lord’s Age to come, which means getting ready for a life-style of eternity, a truly sustainable existence as the first step.
We need a new approach to life. The old approach of treating the earth as dead matter, as ‘being dominated’ is back-firing. Globally matters are beyond repair. It is simply inconceivable that the Seven Billion of Us will suddenly see the light and start living sustainably, which actually is no longer possible, because we rely so exclusively on carbon-based productivity that the outcome is guaranteed: collapse. That is not pessimism: that is the cruel reality.
Recommendation Three: we must acknowledge where we have gone wrong, pray for forgiveness and re-assess the situation. For almost all of us that is all we can do, while embracing the belief that everything is holy. Peter tells us to “live holy and godly lives”. (2 Peter 3: 11), which for today means ‘living as green as possible”, because soil is as important as soul. He urges us to make the earth “The home of ??????????, of dikaiosunè , which, my good friend Sylvia Keesmaat has pointed out to me actually means ‘justice’ in this context. Righteousness is something personal, justice is all-embracing, pertains to all of God’s creation. The way we have lived and still are living, is sin. I can’t put it any other way. We must strive for an eternal life-style, one of true sustainability.
Sustainability is now a popular word. It generally means that we are willing to try solar energy and windmills and drive a hybrid, while maintaining our comfortable life. Sorry, that won’t be enough. A complete re-orientation is needed, which include a new kind of spirituality, seeing that all of life is religion. Religion is simply one of many possible means of expressing one’s spirituality. The cardinals, who elected a new Pope, were engaged in ‘religion’. Spirituality is seeing all of life as sacred, regarding it as being in harmony with the totality of the divine creation order. That’s what the apostle Peter meant by living just lives. Churches are religious institutions, but often lack the true spirituality; they are often in the grip of the ‘world’ which promotes the separation of religion from science and society. Descartes (famous for “I think therefore I am- cogito ergo sum”) sought to do that. This mechanistic worldview has supported industrialization without an active role for the sacred, separating mind from matter, people from nature, people from each other, the body from the mind, and the mind from the soul. It is the world’s dominant religion affecting all of us, including church people.
It was not so in earlier times. Native attitudes reflected what Chief Seattle may have said: “Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. We did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”
True sustainability is about “justice for everything and for all.” It reflects ‘loving your neighbour as yourself; it reflects loving God above all: and that really means loving everything- soil!- that God has made. How can we love God without loving his creation? How can we love J.S. Bach without loving his music? He probably was a difficult man to live with, outliving his two wives and siring 20 offspring. Genesis tells us that when God had finished creation: “God saw everything he had made and found it very good.” In essence he said: This world is beautiful. Take good care of it; do not ruin it…I place it in your hands: it now is yours”.
And that brings me to food and farming. Sustainable agriculture is rooted in the need for being in harmony with the order of things, which is a spiritual state. It means farming in harmony with creation. It means fitting farming to the farmer and the farm. It means farming in harmony among people – within families, communities, and societies. It means farming in harmony with future generations – being good stewards of finite resources. It means farming for eternity, ready for food production for the New Earth. Only a muscle-powered type of gardening can fill that bill.
As always, Christ will not do anything without us and we can’t do anything without him. He will make all things new, but that new must start with us. No use dwelling on the past, on that poisonous partnership we had in the carbon-based coalition. Leave it behind. Start a new way of doing things, including food production.
Dr. Barry Commoner, not a Christian, in his book The Closing Circle, (Alfred Knopf, New York, 1971), was one of the three persons instrumental in my conversion. The other two were Dennis Meadows of The Limits of Growth and Rev. B. Telder who wrote a (Dutch) book questioning heaven: After Death: What? (Sterven..en dan?) Where Meadows made me see that the earth’s resources are finite, Telder made me realize that heaven was a Satan ploy. Commoner, a biologist, coined the Laws of Ecology. Here they are:
(1) Everything is connected to everything else. We are discovering that with Climate Change. Disturb the delicately balanced chemical composition of the atmosphere, and the entire world is in turmoil, from the Arctic to the Rainforests.
(2) Everything must go somewhere. There is no such thing as waste. Nothing disappears. It is simply transferred from one place to another. Our universe is a closed system. We are locked in a sealed chamber from which nothing can escape.
(3) Nature knows best. Given time, and absence of people, the cosmos will heal itself. The Lord created the world in such a way that all the evil done against it will disappear. That means that the Lord, in his grace, will cause a period to appear where no human beings will be able to disturb this remedial process. After that a chastened and wiser humanity will emerge.
(4) Nothing comes free. We have built a lopsided world where we have never calculated the true cost of doing business, totally ignoring the environmental damage. We now are in the process of paying for this immense lack of proper accounting.
We are in the final stages of world history. It will be met with denial because it is a frightening prospect. For believers also it will be a bumpy ride for a while but in the end it will be rejoicing because Revelation 21 tells us the glorious future: “There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain….I am making everything new.”
Starting next week I will begin a series dealing with “The Church”.