THE CHURCH IN FLUX
Chapter 3
Can we predict when Christ returns?
Nobody knows the exact day of the Lord’s return. Jesus in Matthew 24 admits that not even he has the actual information: “No one knows about that day or the hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son but only the Father.”
That to me is a significant statement. It suggests a difference in knowledge between Jesus and God. What’s going on here? Here’s what I think, lies at the bottom of this problem, and I’ll have to take a little detour to get there.
The Great Commandment is – Mark 12:30 – “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” That’s easier said than done, because how can we love something or someone we cannot see, and will never see? So, how do we love God, who lives in inapproachable light, who nobody can see or ever has seen (1 Timothy 6:16)? How do we love Handel or Bach? We love them by perfecting their music. That’s how we love God. We love him by loving what He loves. John 3:16 says unequivocally that “God so loved the world – the cosmos – that He gave his one and only Son as an offering, a payment, to redeem his creation” Buy it back, in other words.” More about that in a next chapter.
This statement which Jesus quoted to Nicodemus in the book of John is the most abused piece of Scripture. Even Helmut Thielicke in his The Trouble with the Church falls into the trap of equating the word ‘cosmos’ in that verse with ‘humanity’. That error is one of the causes why the church is in so much trouble. Another one, equally serious, is to equate the church with the Kingdom of God, while the real Kingdom is God’s beloved world, His cosmos.
Of course God loves the human race, but He does so as a part, perhaps the most important part, of his cosmos, his well-ordered creation, indeed His Kingdom. This means that the most simple and straightforward way to love God is to love his creation, something the church has sorely neglected to do.
This earth, his beloved cosmos, is the expression of God’s existence and God’s love. This earth, all of us, is there for only one reason: God wanted us to be there. We are God’s projection on the screen of this earth: we are made in his image. That also means that God can never be separated from his creation, can never be known without the earth and those who dwell therein. How would anybody know about God if we were not there, or if the world wasn’t there? God needs the earth to make heaven, where God dwells and his angels abide, real for us. He needs the earth to show who He is and what He sees as the purpose of his creation.
Simply put: by loving creation we express our love for God in the most direct and effective way. That also implies that by studying creation we are getting to know more about God, which actually means that we, by investigating the world and they who dwell therein, we are practicing theology. However we should not fall into the trap to make creation god: that is Pantheism. What is correct is to see God in everything: Panentheism.
After this interlude back to Jesus’ admission that he had no clue when he would return. Yet, I think I can figure something out on that score. The key to knowing when Jesus will come back can be traced to the state of God’s cosmos: the riddle of Jesus’ return lies in the earth itself and what we have done and still are doing to it, a concept which involves “Primary Productivity.”
What is meant by “Primary Productivity?” Any changes in the make-up of the earth is connected to “Primary Productivity,” a concept that indicates the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the sum of earth’s plant energy that makes our lives possible. It is in essence “the total budget of life.” Once that budget is spent, when all our cosmic credit has been exhausted, life is no longer possible.
All humans and all animals eat either plants or eat animals that eat plants. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. It is this very activity that is now in danger.
When Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden, Primary Productivity was at its peak: 100 percent. After the Garden of Eden, the number of people rose quickly, starting agriculture and making cities possible of which Cain was the prime mover. As a result Primary Productivity started to decrease.
In our age of rapid population growth and an even faster increase in the use of natural resources, this phenomenon has accelerated with earth-breaking speed. Consider the following quote from The Ingenuity Gap by Dr Thomas Homer-Dixon: “We are moving so much rock and dirt, blocking and diverting so many rivers, converting so many forests to cropland, releasing such huge quantities of heavy metals and organic chemicals into air and water, and generating so much energy, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen compounds that we are perturbing the deepest dynamics of our global ecosystems. Between one-third and one-half of the planet’s land area has been fundamentally transformed by our actions: row-crop agriculture, cities, and industrial areas occupy 10 to 15 percent of Earth’s land surface; 6 to 8 percent has been converted to pasture; and an area the size of France is now submerged under artificial reservoirs. We have driven to extinction a quarter of all bird species. We have used more than half of all accessible fresh water. In regions of major human activity, large rivers carry three times as much sediment as they did in pre-human times, while small rivers carry as much as eight times the sediment. Along the world’s tropical and subtropical coastlines, our activities – especially the construction of cities, industries and aquaculture pens – have changed or destroyed 50 percent of mangrove ecosystems, which are vital to the health of coastal fisheries. And about two-thirds of the world’s marine fisheries are either overexploited, depleted, or at their limit of exploitation.”
Dr Homer-Dixon is talking about the decrease in “Primary Productivity” here.
There have been at least two efforts made to figure out how Primary Productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other by a Christian biologist Stuart L. Pimm, professor of biology at Duke University in Durham N.C. They both have concluded that we humans consume about 40 percent of Earth Primary Productivity, 40 percent of all there is. That percentage may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet: we, the 6 billion plus, have simply stolen the food, we, the rich, a lot more than others.
So, what has all this to do with Jesus’ return? I will explain that in the next chapter.