HISTORY SOMETIMES JUMPS
Our World Today
I am not a historian, just a student with a keen interest what why we are where we are in our fragile world. Here is what I have observed. History does not flow: it sometimes jumps, sometimes lies dormant, and on occasion it even retreats. Take the Fall of Rome – 450 AD. It marked a set-back as, after that event, it seemed that the world went asleep. When it woke up Islam had emerged all of a sudden, a scene so scary that for 200 years, from 1096 till 1291 Christianity started the infamous Crusades, still a burning issue in the Middle East.
After this the world suffered from a deep depression when the Black Death decimated its population. Once this pandemic had taken its course, the world surged ahead thanks to the printing press and the resultant Reformation about 1500.
Sometimes history goes underground. It did with Jesus and the spread of the Christian Gospel. Jesus was just a footnote in the secular press of his time: only Josephus, the Jewish historian mentions him briefly. Christianity emerges as a secular force only with Emperor Constantine, who was finally baptized on his death-bed, around 325 AD. Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman, in one of my favourite books, The Hidden Face of God, calls such an unrecorded world-wide event as the spread of Christianity “Cosmic Resonance”, when a highly important happening vibrates through the world by word of mouth, without attracting the attention of the authorities. And, indeed, the Gospel message works best underground: a pious whisper here, an act of charity there, and the Good News spreads.
When religion became Corpus Christianum, became the Imperial Church and basically a secular force, it used the Roman Empire as a model for organization: the Pope modeled himself on the office of Emperor, while the generals were called (arch)-bishops. Even their attire was borrowed from the imperial household: the copes, the chasubles, miters, fans, bells, censers used in ceremonies, all were blatantly copied from the daily observances of royal households. That’s how Christianity lost the pace of subversive momentum: it changed from pure enthusiasm to world power, from a word of mouth movement to authoritarian orthodoxy. Then already certainty replaced “seeing through a glass darkly,” something still true today. One reason why the church resembles its original model, dating back 1700 years, is that the laity became comfortable and saw any innovation as heresy. And its leaders complied, refusing to change with the times, confirming what Upton Sinclair pointed out long ago: it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Yet the world is changing rapidly. We now see events evolving at neck-break speed. Already in this short year our world today has seen happenings of global importance that nobody had predicted. In other words Black Swan sightings, defined as the impact of the highly improbable. All are ‘nature’ related: drought and floods caused rising food costs and fuelled the sudden awakening in the Middle East and a jump in oil prices, and an enormous tsunami hit Japan’s nuclear plants, of which the real impact is yet to be felt, while an unprecedented number of tornados is ravishing the US South.
It looks like history is making up for lost time: everything screams: wake up, wake up. It seems that at last we have bitten off more than we can digest. That was already plain in the Gulf of Mexico Oil disaster, and is becoming even clearer with Japan’s nuclear reactors and the Middle East turmoil. It is also evident in the economy where the experts really have no solution to the money troubles in Europe and the USA.
Today history leaps, rushing to the Telos, Greek for the End. This reminds me of Matthew 5:48, “Be ye perfect, as I am perfect.” The Greek word used there is ‘teleios,’ of which a better translation is ‘holistic.’ A holistic person always considers all factors including the possible unintended consequences. Teleios has as root the word ‘telos’ which we know in ‘tele’-vision and ‘tele’-phone, and means ‘the goal far away’. Bonhoeffer called himself an ‘anthropos teleios’, a human being who wanted to be ready for “The Kingdom to Come,” the goal all Christians profess to pursue.
Why do I think that the End is near? Jesus lamented that (Luke 18:8) “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
Today all religions are in crisis, witness their internal strife. The Shia-Sunni conflict, dormant for 1354 years when Mohammed was murdered in 657, is flaring up again, especially as the elite are Sunni and the common folk Shiite. Christianity too is battling internal division, vividly on display within the US congress where the divisions between Republicans and Democrats have all the hallmarks of a religious warfare. ”Organized religion will go the way of the dinosaurs in nine Western democracies,” reports CNN. “Religion will be driven toward extinction in Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands”, researchers conclude in a new paper. “It will also fade in Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, and Switzerland”, they predict. “If you look at the data, ‘unaffiliated’ is the fastest-growing group,” said the paper’s lead author.
New growth is only seen in so-called ‘house churches’, which, when the apostles started their mission was the original way of meeting, now done especially in China, where Christianity thrives underground. Having everything in common as in the early Jerusalem church will take place when Our World Today reaches a tipping point.