10.09.08

Shock Doctrine, 9/11 Truth and Economic Earthquakes…

Posted in culture, life happens, transition at 11:31 am by len

Entering the Wreckage..

This past weekend my daughter brought home a DVD that identifies itself as part of the 9/11 Truth Series. We watched about 45 minutes of footage on the weekend, looking at the collapse of the World Trade Center from the perspective of building demolition experts, as well as raw physics. Fascinating and worrisome. There are unanswered questions about the collapse of the towers, and in particular the collapse of Building 7, which was essentially undamaged.

Given the meltdown in the US economy, and the reverberations throughout the world, one wonders at our current location. This morning on CBC on the way to breakfast I caught part of an interview with Margaret Atwood on her new book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Margaret is a respected Canadian author who has always had a fascination with debt. It began, she relates, when she prayed the Lord’s Prayer as a child. She noticed that some versions of the prayer asked for forgiveness from sin, others from debt. It turns out that this theme is common in the great faiths. What great faith could really claim to be comprehensive in human affairs that says nothing about economics in human communities?

What really caught me today, however, was how we are all in the same boat. On the one hand a millionaire may stare in the face of the credit crunch and wonder if he can access the resources he needs for his business; on the other hand those of us with ordinary mortgages wonder if they will be sustainable by 2009.

The result of all this uncertainty: fear. And that is where the resources of the Gospel become relevant.

He cares for the sparrows: he knows our frame.

In this world we have tribulation: but he has overcome the world.

In the short term we may rediscover community: that we need one another. We really are all vulnerable when divided. Strategically, this may be another incentive to shift resources from large buildings and large staffs. Jonathan R. Wilson writes,

“The church does not exist for itself.  Just as any account of Christian virtues is ultimately for the sake of witness to the gospel, so also any account of the church as the community of those virtues is ultimately for the sake of its witness to the gospel.  This is vital because of the corrupting power of institutions.  As MacIntyre shows, virtues and the practices that form them (and are formed by them) depend on and give rise to institutional structures.  Yet institutions tend to take on a life of their own.  Their acquisitiveness and competitiveness tend to corrupt the very virtues and practices that formed them and that they were meant to sustain.  This happens in the church when the life of the church is directed toward sustaining the church rather than sustaining a witness to the gospel.”

Jonathan R. Wilson, Gospel Virtues: Practicing Faith, Hope and Love in Uncertain Times, 43

In this new location we may be forced to rediscover the priesthood of believers. But these conditions don’t only create positive response, they also generate opportunists, false messiahs who have “the answer.” In times of great insecurity, people look for easy answers and quick fixes. As a friend remarked this morning, crisis brings out the best and worst in us. Authoritarian leadership isn’t a solution: it only creates further vulnerability. We need careful thinking, slow movement, and careful response. And.. we need to grieve. Chris Erdman writes

“.. the collapse of Christendom is a crisis that can no longer be denied.  Nor can the church’s dislocation from its once privileged position in American culture be expertly managed by highly functioning and competent pastors.  We are trained in the skill sets of life within a modern world in which technology and technique provide answers to every problem, but those skills are not helpful now and our over-reliance on them only proves that the assumptions and practices of the dominant culture have co-opted our imaginations to a way of organizing our lives according to technique rather than the Bible.
“But hard work and the competent management of our technological resources won’t allow us to continue living in denial; we are standing in the wreckage of our cherished past and unable to engineer the future.  Our denial has kept us from grief.  And until we learn to grieve we cannot move forward.  Any good pastor, who cares for the bereaved, knows that.  But we haven’t identified ourselves as bereaved persons living amid cultural wreckage.”

“Christendom is no more, and the church, like it or not, must go into exile and there find its true missional identity.  But pastors—themselves frightened by the chaos, unclear about what it means for the future, and made anxious by the anxious people who listen to their sermons, pay their salaries, and cannot help but define the church and its ministry by the standards of the culture around them—will opt to try to hold the center and deny the reality of collapse.
“The pastoral work we need today begins here with this first step toward grief, the work of telling the truth by daringly naming our deadly compromises…”
Entering the Wreakage, 2003

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