The prohecies of Daniel - part 7

My favorite historian is a Frenchman by the name of Fernand Braudel. At the end of his magnum opus Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800 which was published in 1979, he made a series of predictions as to where he thought the European economy was headed. Every single one of them were wrong.

More recently, my November '09 copy of Scientific American came in the mail with a cover that reads: "A plan for a Sustainable Future, How to get all energy from wind, water and solar power by 2030." In the article, the authors give a lightly detailed description of a zero fossil fuel world. The kick off date for this little utopia is next month when world leaders meet in Copenhagen for an energy summit.

I give the above examples to illustrate a point: if you are going to make predictions about the future and, unlike Daniel, you don't have angels feeding you inside information, then you need to at least be conversant in two areas -- history and science.

Braudel's knowledge of human behavior was good, but his science was lacking, particularly in the area of geology. he didn't know that Western Europe lacked the geological resources to compete in an expanding, global economy. First, Soviet Russia collapsed because its most valuable export (oil) became historically cheap when the Saudi's glutted the market in the late 80's. Then the North Sea started running short of a lot sooner than many thought and now Western Europe is becoming an energy slave to a suddenly resurgent (but no longer Soviet)Russia. Still, Braudel's predictions were the definition of steely eyed perfection compared to the Sci Am article. Mr. Braudel died in 1985, but if he hadn't, the laughter brought on by a pair of scientists telling him that there was any chance of a binding resolution coming out of Copenhagen -- and of the participant nations actually abiding by said resolution -- probably would have killed him.

Science is necessary because one needs to know how all this material stuff in the observable world around us interacts. History comes in handy because human beings tend not to obey all the obvious laws of cause and effect and just because it's in our long term best interests to cut our fossil fuel usage doesn't mean that it's going to happen. History draws a rather nasty trend line on that one.

The reason I bring this up now is that we have come to the "half a time", the period of decline in church influence from which there is no rebound -- not on this earth anyway. Let's sum up:

The first time involved a genocidal campaign or three from pagan Rome, but the more significant decline came when the pagans were forced to call themselves Christians and Christianity's identity was watered down with pagan beliefs. The second and third "times" are so close to each other in chronology that if you drew them out on a time line the two circles would actually overlap. Christians get a little too cosy with Celtic paganism, kill each other, kill pagans, kill each other some more. At the end of the third time Christianity sees itself as two separate entities(Catholic and Protestant) and both of these entities looked to increase their number of followers. Now, if you think that competition between the two sides had nothing to do with following push to send missionaries out over the entire world and that it was purely agape love that drove the process, well... God bless your tender heart. The good news is that the worldwide mission movement was still fairly early in the process when Catholics and Protestants called off their hostilities and stopped fighting each other in every city not named Belfast. By the 1800's the politics were on the back burner, and missions because people just really need Jesus became something of a reality.

Then came Darwin.

It's not like he created materialism, of course. But when you convert two thousand years of history into a few blog posts you have to make do with broad brush strokes; Darwin was the icon. By the mid 1800's, when worldwide missions were just beginning to hit their stride, another movement was hitting something else. They usually don't call themselves materialists -- sounds too negative -- but the stated belief that there is nothing outside of the material world, no Heaven, no hell, no spirits, no nothing except what you can see and taste and touch and measure is properly called "materialism".

The last hundred and fifty years in a nutshell: materialism seems to flourish in materially wealthy societies. No surprise there. When you have it in abundance, you tend to focus on it. Just in the last decade, the materialist community in the United States is taking on an ugly tone towards us religious folk. Go to a bookstore and you will likely find an entire section of books devoted to "debunking" Christianity. Many of these books do not look at us kindly. We get compared to Nazis, parasites, anything and everything unintelligent. Turn on the tube and you can watch Christians painted as weirdo-freaks on just about every major station. Materialism and Christianity have been staring each other down for the four hundred years -- staring without blinking for the century and a half -- and now, snarling for the last decade. The only thing left is for Christianity to absorb materialist thinking the same way it did Greco-Roman and Celtic Paganism. And yes, it has already started.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine railed against our church's decision to change to name of its Bible study classes to "lifegroups", thus removing anything from the name that sounds religiously kooky (it's on the linked site, downtoJesus.com). Now this is a fairly harmless if somewhat annoying example of just what happened in earlier times. The church tried to appeal to the dominant culture. It did... and managed to water itself down to such a degree that it the result was a whole flock of people, now affiliated as "Christians" who were still subservient to the dominant cultural belief system. You can probably think of a hundred ways that the current church is pandering to the materialists, and maybe a few ways in which it has incorporated materialist thinking.

It won't end well.

As for the next spat of Christians dying in mass? That's already started too. As to when it goes global, that's where the science comes in. In the next post we leave Daniel and let Isaiah show us what the city of the future looks like.