THE CHURCH IN FLUX
Chapter 25
How then shall we live? (Continued)
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
For her sins are piled up to heaven
(Revelation 18:4)
The above text is not an isolated passage of Scripture. The same plea can be found in Isaiah 52:11, where this prophet makes an identical entreaty when he tells the people of Israel to “Depart, depart, go out from there!” That ‘there’ is idol worship, is the defiling of God’s name, which, in current language means to stop any further polluting of the earth, the creation which carries God’s name. Polluting is like defacing the Mona Lisa, but then on a universal scale. That text is preceded by the beautiful words depicting the proclamation of the New Creation, “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!” That captures the new mission of the church, the Church in Flux.
Jeremiah too tells us to get out, but in starker terms. In Jeremiah 51:45 he foresees the present time, when (verse 44) “The nations will no longer stream to him. And the walls of Babylon will fall. (45) Come out of her my people! Run for your lives! Run from the fierce anger of the Lord.” He had made that call before in the same chapter (verse 6) and justifies this sudden departure in verse 9: “We would have healed Babylon (would have liked to convert the entire world, impossible now, as related in the parable of the ten bridesmaids) but she cannot be healed; let us leave her and each go to his own land, for her judgment reaches to the skies, it rises as high as the clouds.”
What does all this mean for us today? Does this mean that I have to go back to the land where I was born? No. it means that “in the House of the Lord are many mansions” which means that we, each in our own way, must prepare for the Kingdom, God’s new creation, to come, which goes back to the original question “How then shall we live?”
In earlier chapters I have outlined the Covenant, and have repeatedly referred back to that concept.
In that covenant that God made with his people he, in unambiguous terms, made him self equal to us, by offering a partnership, where God would share all he had with us if we were to share all we had with him. What God expects us to do, as our part of the Covenant is quite concisely captured by Micah (6:8) where it says, “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
It’s as simple as that, except that we have forgotten that to act justly applies to all God’s work, trees, soil, air, fish, animals, people. And to love mercy means to treat animals as our neighbors, while to walk humbly means to continually praise God for the gift of Creation.
Now, as the prophets have written, God’s judgment reaches to the skies, her sins are piled up to the heavens, an eerie prophecy of air pollution and Global Warming.
Of course we can’t get out of this world. As the laws of ecology state: nothing disappears, as everything is connected to everything else, as everything must go somewhere. We too are finding out that nature knows best and that there is a price to pay for everything as there is no free lunch. In simple terms this indicates that we cannot disassociate ourselves from this world and its problems. But we must somehow cut the ties with the system that is in charge, a system that is ruining God’s world. Perhaps we can call it Capitalism, which pursues ‘creative destruction’ even though Communism has been equally destructive and Socialism too has been a willing partner in pursuing Economic Growth: all have stolen from creation to pursue happiness, which was seen as gathering as many toys as possible without regard for the environmental consequences. As Herman Daly in his book Beyond Growth has argued “We should strive for sufficient capital wealth, efficiently maintained and allocated and equitably distributed, for the maximum number of people that can be sustained over time under these conditions.”(p. 220).
There is an economist speaking in his special jargon. I should note that the goal is not maximum per capita wealth but ‘sufficient’ for a good life, over time’, always taking in consideration not only the well-being of the human race- which until now has been the only concern of the vote-buying officials- but acting so that our actions benefit all of cosmos. As I have argued, we, as the human race and the land are engaged to be married. As soon as Christ returns, the marriage ceremony will take place.
I earlier have shown, referring to Job, who was converted from an ego-centered fellow to a eco-centered man, and in the parable of the 10 bridesmaids, that there is more to being a Christ-follower than going through a prescribed routine. We have to think outside the box and that means to think outside the contours of organized religion. “Come out of it” doesn’t mean to leave the church just as it doesn’t mean that we must leave the world – which is impossible anyway – but it does mean that we free ourselves from the constraints the organized systems place on us.
All along I have hinted, perhaps even more than that, have suggested that we must go back to house churches. That is not good enough in this day and age. Life is more than church. Life is religion. This means that our next step is much more radical than meeting at a certain place, where a limited number of people pray, sing, read scripture and share insights.
We must go beyond that, and do so in various ways. E.F.Schumacher, in his Small is Beautiful wrote already in 1973 that “the modern industrial system consumes the very basis on which it has been erected…. lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.” He already then recommended that a new life-style is needed with new methods of production and new patterns of consumption. He approvingly quotes Thomas Aquinas who defined a human being as a person with brains and hands, enjoying nothing more than to be creatively, usefully, productively engaged with both his hands and his brains, and recommends exactly a full-orbed life. He points out that “rather less than one-sixth of the total population is engaged in actual production. With a fully employed person, allowing for holidays, sickness and other absence, spending about one fifth of his total time on his job, it follows that the proportion of “total social time” spent on actual production is roughly, one-fifth of one-third of one-half = 3.5 %. The other 96.5 % of total social time is used in other ways, including sleeping, eating, doing jobs that are not directly productive.” He suggests to give ourselves a goal to increase productive time six-fold to 20 % in which to actually produce things, employing hands and brains. He writes,” Think of the therapy of real work; think of its educational value.”
That sort of successful, creative, life-enhancing activity took place in the Celtic Christian Communities which Ian Bradley describes in the book by that name. Under the heading of “Colonies of Heaven – the Monastic Model”, the title Ian Bradley gave to these communities, he calls them “perhaps the most striking feature of Celtic Christianity.” Writes he: “For Christians in the British Isles between the fifth and the eleventh centuries, the monastery rather than the parish church was the primary focus for worship.”(p. 2) This sort of monastery was not a monkish affair, but involves entire families, married, single, men, women, married priests and single clergy as well.
In the preceding chapters I have argued against heaven in no uncertain terms. Thus to name such communities today ‘Colonies of Heaven’ is inappropriate. Our emphasis should be on preserving the earth: calling them New Creation Colonies would be a better designation, even though the name sounds somewhat pretentious.
As always, matters are open to experimentation. To quote Ian Bradley again: “To establish places on earth which speak of Heaven [- or, in our context, of a Renewed Earth -] is certainly fundamental to the Christian faith and practice in the British Isles in the so-called Dark Ages [the 6-11th Century] …. It is most definitely a vision that we need to recapture if Christianity is to shine again in our own perhaps even darker age.” (pp. x, xi)
In short, I have related what the Bible says about the Christian life in particular, how it has to re-focus on living the New Life on a New Earth, in a world now increasingly threatened by irreversible destruction. I also have stated that today our world is basically ruled by God’s great Adversary, the Satan, whose only aim is to destroy God’s world, a peril not at all recognized by ecclesiastical institutions which have closed their eyes to present-day dangers and only see an escape to heaven as the way out. Seeing the situation in this light, I have argued that it is imperative in these last days to witness of Christ’s impending return in ways that try to simulate the New Future.
How this should be implemented cannot be prescribed in any detail, as “there are many mansions in God’s house” which suggests that there are multiple ways to play with this concept. It is well-known that the Lord delights in variety: not one of the untold billions of people who ever lived was ever precisely identical, not even identical twins. Not one leaf is exactly the same as another, not even one snow flake, so variety is the spice of life, provided that the basic principles of glorifying God in all our works remain its foundation.
As usual the world is already busy with this concept. “Transition” is the new name of the game, where the buzz word is resilience, with its implications of being skilled, being ready, being confident, and therefore being optimistic about The Day After Tomorrow. We know that The Day after Tomorrow is when the Lord returns. The world sees Transition as the new concept of green and sustainable and eco-once hot, now almost clichés, and subject to corruption by the market. A resilient person is one who can adapt to new circumstances.
Transition was founded by Rob Hopkins, an English academic, who wrote in his Transition Handbook that he has “found a way for people worried about an environmental collapse to invest their efforts in ongoing collective action that ends up looking more like a party than a protest march.”
He hits the right note there, as I have described in my book From Eternity to Here, a Bible-Fiction Tale. Hopkins showed his students The End of Suburbia and they all got supremely depressed, before resiliently bouncing back to found Transition! In short, the film is about how in 1956, a geologist named M. King Hubbert, using a bell curve to chart the world’s petroleum reserves, predicted that global oil production would peak sometime around the year 2000 and then decline rapidly. Energy companies, government officials, academics, and environmentalists disagree on whether the peak has happened, or whether it’s five, 10, or 20 years down the pike. It’s impossible to know a precise date, because between half and two thirds of the world’s oil is in the Middle East, and those nations treat information about their reserves as if they were state secrets. However, since 2005, world oil production has not increased, even though global demand continued to rise until the recent recession.
The descending slope of Hubbert’s bell curve is very steep, so if oil sources are depleting, the stuff will stop flowing faster than we can kick our addiction. Given that our electricity, our transportation, and most of our goods depend on oil, we’re pretty screwed.
This is where Transition taps in. The movement offers a framework for planning an orderly and even a “prosperous way down” the curve, to quote a book well known among Peak Oilers, to a world with less oil. Transition is about communities-in particular “re-localizing” them, and this you probably know something about: eating local and buying local, but also manufacturing local. It’s also about “re-skilling”-learning to do the things our great-grandparents knew how to do, such as growing food and building things. Most importantly, Transition is about resiliency, or, as Hopkins says in his book, “a culture based on its ability to function indefinitely and to live within its limits, and to be able to thrive for having done so.”
So it seems the time is right and the circumstances ripe to prepare for the real Great Transition, from the Old World to the New World.
The Church with a Capital C is in a state of Flux. The church with a lower case should be resting in peace, should be pursuing shalom, but instead it is rusting to pieces, slowly descending to nothingness, because nothing ever remains the same. Its present form does not reflect the reality of tomorrow, a life to be lived to the full in a renewed creation. The course we are following today is the way of death. The course we must follow is the way of Life, eternal life in a creation deeded to us as heirs of the Kingdom.
When the Lord returns he must find us busy in preparing for that heritage. “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city (Revelation 22:14).”