1. SCRIPTURE – KEY TO THE FUTURE

Chapter 8: How is the Scripture Good News?

Although this development of the matrix dynamic of scripture and good news is far from complete, it is timely to draw some threads together an attempt to see a comprehensive picture that may be emerging.

What is being advanced throughout this exposition is the advocacy before all humanity that the scriptures, Hebrew and Apostolic, holds the key to humanity' s long term survival on this (or any other) planet. Without this key, humanity is dead, the crises overtaking us terminal. The scriptures contain the message of humanity' s salvation in this life.

The nature of the crisis facing us hardly needs spelling out any longer. Climate change, whether or not it is man-made, is occurring at a rapid pace and could render most of the currently inhabited regions of the world scarcely habitable at all, certainly not for today's vast urban conglomerations. Climate change alone spells devastation bringing a sudden and dramatic drop in planetary population. The end of the era of cheap oil, which could come upon us at any time because it will be triggered not by the final exhaustion of the last drop of oil but by the realisation that oil production has passed its peak and is in terminal decline. This crisis will trigger the implosion of modern society, built as it has been on cheap and plentiful oil. Resources of all kinds are becoming exhausted and we are consuming renewable resources faster than they can be renewed. Resource bankruptcy is an absolutely inevitable future for humanity, compounded by pollution and other forms of degradation of air, water, soil and the food chain. Chemical and radioactive toxicity is taking its toll and, as civilised systems break down in the future, processes currently holding toxic sites in check will break down also. Then there is the danger of new disease, of nuclear conflict, or breakdown in order releasing social chaos.

In 2009, as I write, an economic crisis of global proportions is in full swing and it is too early yet to know whether the world of global leaders can be effective in confronting and stemming the crisis. This is just a small foretaste of what lies ahead.

The central question in our world is, what can save us?

The options that appear open to us are political will and concerted action across the entire international spectrum, radical ecological action and changing values and way of life, development of new technologies, new economic models, discovery of new energy and material resources and achievement of global social justice. In addition, we'll need to be able to establish viable and self-sustaining colonies off-planet.

Now if humanity is ever to know 'salvation' it will certainly manifest all of these. Yet none of these have any chance of succeeding. That is why, even though we are unquestionably called to mend our ways and change, it could only be the incurable optimist who could truly expect that, in the time frame we have which is extremely limited, global humanity can meet and overcome the obstacles to the degree of change required. Even then, issues such as climate change, although we can possibly affect its speed and intensity by reducing the levels of human-generated CO2, is now in a self-generating cycle that is unstoppable. Whatever future humanity has on the planet, it is going to be under very different and probably quite hostile climactic environmental conditions. Likewise, nothing we can do now can do anything more than delay by a short period the moment of the oil crisis. Because we will not know we have passed the peak for some years after it has happened, we may already have crossed the Rubicon and there is no going back.

If there is going to be any future at all for the human species on earth, it will come only from a profound change that will take place in our whole being as living in society. On the other side of the crisis -- and we may be talking centuries or even millennia -- global society, if there is any at all, will be root and branch different from anything we know today or have known in the past. It will be a completely new culture and from that culture a totally different way of thinking and acting, a new way of living.

I am not here projecting a utopia or in any way a perfect society. This future global society too, like us, will be plagued by ceaseless problems and confront life-threatening challenges. Apart from anything else, it will inevitably inherit the legacy we leave it, a legacy of environmental toxicity, depleted and degraded resources and the like.

It will, however, be a 'better' society. I say this, first, because if it were not better it would simply not survive. This I say, though, from a place of faith: a confidence that surviving humanity will know that its survival is by grace and that it is a grace community, a transformed global community.

For such a change, affecting the inner-most reaches of the human psyche and transforming everything it is and does, can only arise out of a real and vibrant spirituality. Humanity's 'salvation' spring from religion or it will not happen at all; that religion will be universal, embracing the whole human community globally -- or it will not happen at all.

We can be quite sure that such a universal religious embrace will not arise out of any kind of imperialistic triumph of the Christian Church, evangelical, Catholic or Orthodox. As noted earlier, where existing ecclesiology dominates society, the effect on that society is deleterious not creative. To quote the first letter of Peter, "Now is the time for judgement to begin in the household of God". It is within the Christian community that the vast cultural change is pioneered.

At the heart of that change lies the testimony of the historical memory, enshrined in scripture and liturgy. The Hebrew and Apostolic Testaments, together with liturgy, call the community constantly to its foundational memory, of being destroyed -- totally -- and finding, through pure grace beyond any human effort, reborn life in a totally transformed community, with a new way of life, a new culture. The memory does not stop at the crucifixion and emergence of the apostolic church but embraces the lives of the saintly community down through the centuries -- the witness right into our own age of the indestructibility of a community that lives by faith, open to grace, hearing the word of the Spirit.

When we confront the whole human crisis with a memory alive and focused on the cross, we may see indeed a future of unimaginable suffering, loss, destruction and death -- but we will know with absolute and unshakeable certainty that on the other side of the crisis lie is a new, transformed life for humanity.

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