4 thoughts on “So the end times #2”

1. I just finished reading an article in the Guardian about auterity deniers, those ultra rich folks who claim there hasn’t real austerity yet but there should be – faster and deeper cuts to the govt. I find the response of these elites to the continuing economic crisis (mostly of their own making) quite remarkable. They appear to lack any imagination at all. They cannot imagine that we are moving, have moved, will move into something new and different. They cannot imagine that all those oppressed folks who they seek to deprive of everything through one cut or another, will never really rise up and rebell. Somehow, it will all remain as it was, I guess as long as they also finance the government of the day, and the cost of increasingly militarized and violent police forces. So it seems to me that such folks (maybe being really rich truncates your creative imaginative side, we know it changes your brain in other ways so why not that too) are fixated on chronological time without any thought that something else might exist or break in and disrupt it.

   But then, of course, one can get too fixated on kairos time, to the point of choosing not to work or chasing end time scenarios endlessly. I guess the real struggle is for all of us who recognize and have the imagination to see kairos time but exist nonetheless in the realities of chronological (I have to eat and sleep and grow old). But better the imagination that allows me to see the possibilities of the Kingdom, and struggle with the possiblities of it, than the brain dead responses of the ultra rich.
   c.

   • The pain of following Christ is not the simple thing of doing what is right (how do we work that out?) but the horrendous tension of hope and imagination. You have nailed that one here.

   • I guess these points fit even better under the fourth post in this series. From what you say though, Cheryl, and very much with Martin’s response… I was looking again a while ago at the headline historians who have studied the processes of the collapse of the Roman Empire. This, in part, was because I was trying to understand something of Andrew Perriman’s position on the judgment of the pagan world as it is predicated in Revelation.

     It was the work of Toynbee and Burke, and to a slightly lesser extent the work of the economists like Rostovtzeff and von Mises. I will plunder Wikipedia here for ease and sheer laziness, (not a bad summary article, actually) I quote:

     In contrast with the declining empire theories, historians such as Arnold J. Toynbee and James Burke argue that the Roman Empire itself was a rotten system from its inception, and that the entire Imperial era was one of steady decay of institutions founded in Republican times. In their view, the Empire could never have lasted longer than it did without radical reforms that no Emperor could implement. The Romans had no budgetary system and thus wasted whatever resources they had available. The economy of the Empire was a Raubwirtschaft or plunder economy based on looting existing resources rather than producing anything new. The Empire relied on booty from conquered territories (this source of revenue ending, of course, with the end of Roman territorial expansion) or on a pattern of tax collection that drove small-scale farmers into destitution (and onto a dole that required even more exactions upon those who could not escape taxation), or into dependency upon a landed élite exempt from taxation. With the cessation of tribute from conquered territories, the full cost of their military machine had to be borne by the citizenry.

     An economy based upon slave labor precluded a middle class with buying power. The Roman Empire produced few exportable goods. Material innovation, whether through entrepreneurialism or technological advancement, all but ended long before the final dissolution of the Empire. Meanwhile the costs of military defense and the pomp of Emperors continued. Financial needs continued to increase, but the means of meeting them steadily eroded. In the end, due to economic failure, even the armor of soldiers deteriorated and the weaponry of soldiers became so obsolete that the enemies of the Empire had better armor and weapons as well as larger forces. The decrepit social order offered so little to its subjects that many saw the barbarian invasion as liberation from onerous obligations to the ruling class.

     Obviously this reads like a rather better written post from a blog about how both the city and western political economics has ‘developed’. It is a partial view, enhanced greatly by the work of Tainter in his ‘Collapse of Complex Societies’. But what struck me, in line with Martin’s response, is not just that we have failed to see the connection, or failed to imagine the kingdom, even. It is the possibility that the modes of judgment, of transformation, can be repeated if the circumstances themselves are repeated. The question then becomes at what point during that process of decline does a new imagination become possible to hear… and who will provide it? Who are the godly Barbarians?

2. Reading your post Cheryl, I’m reminded of Walter Brueggemann’s writings, where he analyses the OT and highlights the complacency of those (rich and in power, both inside and outside the Temple) who thought things would never change – those in Israel and in captivity… We perhaps should expect the same today as people haven’t really changed.

   Living with, and in, that tension of hope and imagination that Martin mentions is a prophetic act in itself (look at Jeremiah) and although, as he says, is horrendous, is also essential and violently (in the Spirit realm) takes the kingdom by force pulling it into our earthly dimension… Worth it, I feel.
   J x

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