[Dialogue] 12/27/12, Spong: Learning about Europe’s Economy and Christianity’s Place in it

Thu Dec 27 10:53:08 PST 2012

     HOMEPAGE        MY PROFILE        ESSAY ARCHIVE       MESSAGE BOARDS       CALENDAR

	Learning about Europe’s Economy and Christianity’s Place in it
	Throughout the past few years, and certainly as a factor in the recent American presidential race, the state of the economy has been front and center. An important aspect of this debate is our sense of increasing globalization that ties all nations into a single world economy. The Dow Jones Average has been whipsawed by the economic crises in Europe, for example, with the almost daily threats of economic collapse in Greece, Italy and Spain. Most people do not yet embrace how deeply interdependent the world has become economically and, especially, how interdependent world banking has become. The potential collapse of the economy of Spain was feared because it would bring with it the collapse of most of the major banks of the world including the United States. So, I made it my business while in Europe recently to get a first hand look at those things that now threaten us all economically in this global village that our world has become. Each nation seemed to be approaching the crisis differently.
	My first stop was in the United Kingdom where Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, has opted for an austerity approach to the threatened economy of his nation. Unrest is obvious as the price of university education in the UK has tripled, health care cutbacks have been instituted and the Value Added Tax (VAT) on all purchases has been raised significantly, thereby inflating the price of every purchase. As a result of this strategy, the economy of the UK has slipped back into a recession and unemployment is still very high. France had an election in May in the midst of this European crisis and the Socialist party came to power. True to his party’s standards, France’s new President Francois Hollande opted to address the crisis by pushing for higher taxes on the wealthy and more public money to alleviate the economic stress of the masses. In was an approach that was the exact opposite of the United Kingdom.
	Meanwhile, the economies of Greece, Italy and Spain have been put under pressure from the European Union to put their fiscal houses in order as a pre-requisite for receiving the monetary assistance that would make national bankruptcy no longer inevitable. Germany, whose economy is Europe’s strongest, has become as a consequence the dominant political power in the continent, accomplishing through economic means what that nation sought to accomplish through military might in World War II. Rising from the ashes of defeat, a prosperous Germany now faces the response that all dominant powers always receive. Yes, there is gratitude from those Germany is able to rescue, but there is also resentment and thus hostility flowing from those forced into frugality against their wills. Spain totters on the edge of economic disaster with a conservative right wing government. Its unemployment rate is above 25%, and constant demonstrations that recall the memories of the Spanish Civil War mark its national life. Both Greece and Italy face ongoing political upheaval. It is of great interest to this American observer to see that whatever government is in power, whether liberal or conservative, is either blamed for the economic turndown or for not having done enough to restart economic growth. The fact is that in an interdependent world, the tide of the world economy will carry all nations and the particular government in power at the time will rise or fall on that tide with little or no ability to change that nation’s circumstances dramatically.
	Whether we were in the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Hungary or Spain, the consensus was that the world’s economic collapse of 2008-2009 has been stopped, but that the progress out of that deep hole has been too slow to keep hope alive. The future at worst is bleak, and at best is not clear. As is always the case there will be overt political fallout for all those in power, whether liberal or conservative, until a full pattern of economic growth is established.
	There were several other things that also became obvious to me as we journeyed through these formative nations in Western civilization. The first is that boundaries are falling away in Europe faster than most of the people are emotionally prepared to accept or to admit. The common currency, the Euro, has brought a new sense of unity to the countries of Europe that most Europeans have not even imagined before. England still has its Pound Sterling, Sweden its Krona, Hungary its Forint, but the Euro has become a powerful sign of European oneness. The European Common Market now sets policy for all the member states on working conditions, environment, health standards and pay scales, which among other things are designed to make men and women doing the same work equal in compensation. Nation states resent this imposition on their sovereignty, but they recognize the impossibility of going on their own economically and so they bite their tongues and accept it. Grumbling is high, action is minimal.
	The second insight I gained on this trip was that the migration of people across Europe in search of employment is wide open. Citizens of the European Union no longer need to clear passport control to enter a member nation. Business leaders fly regularly from London to Moscow, Paris to Stockholm, Copenhagen to Rome, Zurich to Madrid in the same way that American business people criss-cross this nation by air on a daily basis. It is no longer a “foreign” trip. The populations of every European nation are today deeply integrated. One business I had the chance to visit had employees from Germany, Hungary, Austria, Serbia, Croatia, Ukraine, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. They all spoke German and English as well as the language of their own country of origin. Once there is economic unity, which is not far from being present now, political unity will surely follow. There is no illustration in history that might suggest otherwise. With people crossing boundaries that once seemed invincible, political unity will surely follow and the loyalty of citizens to a United States of Europe will in another century or so be at least competitive with if not deeper and more significant than loyalty to one’s nation of origin. That is the pattern that we have followed in the United States where today for most Americans, loyalty to this nation supersedes the loyalty to the state of our origin. Rapid population mobility makes that inevitable.
	My third insight was that in this scenario, it does not seem to matter that nation states of the past are today breaking into even smaller ethnic states: The Czech Republic and Slovakia have replaced Czechoslovakia. Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Slovenia are today where Yugoslavia once stood. The Soviet Union has dissolved and in its place are now Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Uzbekistan and others who are now self-governing units. Belgium is considering a split between its Flemish and its Walloon citizens. Scotland is about to vote in a referendum on Scottish independence. None of these smaller nations alone would be viable economically, but as States in the United States of Europe they can have the best of both worlds. Local autonomy is merging with corporate and national interdependence.
	My fourth insight was that Europe has one other reality with which it must deal. It has a history filled with dark chapters, marked by war, torture, genocide and the experience of being both the conqueror and the conquered. There is about much of this history a deep, corporate guilt. We saw this best in Hungary, a land that has been overrun constantly in its history, first by the Mongols, then by the Turks, the Hapsburgs, the Germans and the Soviets. Its history is filled with pain, deprivation and defeat. It also knows anti-Semitism and it still recalls the Jews who once lived in their midst, but who are no more. That is also true in Germany, Austria and Spain. We saw places where synagogues once stood, but are now marked by memorial monuments. We saw Jewish cemeteries that had been destroyed and desecrated. We saw public buildings into which Jewish tombstones had been placed as a kind of trophy. We saw memorial shoes planted on the bank of the Danube Promenade in Budapest, erected to mark the place where hundreds of Jews were lined up and shot with their bodies falling into the river to be washed by its tide into the Black Sea. We also saw the dark side of Communism, a system built on the dreams of equality, but which in actuality descended into the reality of slavery. We talked with Hungarians whose parents and grandparents had been removed to the Soviet Union as “war reparations laborers” to work almost as slaves in Soviet work camps and who were never heard of again. Europeans have known dictatorships of both the right and the left. They have known oppression and murder, dislocation and tribal hatreds. They see hope in an emerging sense of European oneness. They embrace that hope gingerly, not sure whether they can trust it, but seeing no alternative. They are in the vanguard of an emerging new trans-tribal consciousness that sees humanity as one, that now understands the fact that cooperation is better than war. They are also becoming aware that all religions in their past have been more divisive that helpful, that human consciousness does not stop at any boundary whether it be nationality, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or religion. A new world is being born. No, it is not an easy or comfortable world, but it is now seen as an inevitable world.
	With that new world, a new religion will of necessity also evolve. It, like the nations of Europe, will not deny its past, but it will have to transcend the limits that marked that past, surrender most of its irrational claims to have ever captured truth in its traditional religious forms and allow itself to evolve into something it has never been before. The changes in Europe make this an exciting time to be a Christian. The evolution of consciousness will require an evolution in religion. Christianity will be and must be changed into something it has never been before. Hopefully, we Christians will merge the treasures of our past with the dreams of our future. Europe, battered and bruised by its past, is prepared, I believe, to lead the world into that future. I hope a revived and open Christianity will be willing and able to be part of that tomorrow.
	~JSS
	Read the essay online here.

	Question & Answer
	Colin T. Bent from Tulsa, writes:
	Question:
	I noted your use of the term “Post Christian world.” What do you mean? For some time it has come to me that when Jesus used the term, “I will be with you to the end of the eon” it meant to the end of the Christian era and that is the time we are in now. Am I totally confused or muddled with my thoughts here, or am I on to something?
	Answer:
	Dear Colin,
	My sense is that you have blurred some important distinctions and this has created a problem for you. First of all, you seem to be assuming that the text you quote, not exactly accurately, should be literally applied. That is a misuse of scripture. None of the words that we attribute to Jesus result from either a tape recording or an eye witness report. The particular text you are quoting is from Matthew’s gospel and it reads, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” It is attributed to the Risen Christ, and is part of the first quotation in any source that was said to have been spoken by Jesus after his crucifixion. In the opening chapter of Matthew, the annunciating angel says to Joseph that the baby’s name will be called Emmanuel which means “God with us.” The words attributed to the risen Jesus in Matthew’s gospel are designed by that gospel writer to complete the circle and to demonstrate that Jesus accomplished in his adult life what the annunciation prior to his birth proclaimed that he would be. It is, therefore an attempt both to affirm and to defend the messianic claim being made for Jesus by his followers.
	The end of time surely did not refer to the end of the Christian age because no one knew at the time Matthew was written, that there would be anything called the Christian Age. The followers of Jesus when Matthew was written were still members of the synagogue. There is no evidence that Jesus meant to establish a new religion or that he would have or could have said or used the words that you attribute to him.
	What did dominate the early Christian movement was the anticipation of the end of the world, which, they believed, would be marked by the second coming or the return of Jesus. This hope seems to have declined by the time the Fourth Gospel was written and John’s version of Pentecost or the coming of the Holy Spirit begins to be substituted for the literal second coming of Jesus. Pentecost stories appear only in the book of Acts and in the Fourth Gospel, both of which appear to be works of the tenth decade.
	Now, with that in mind, it is clear that Jesus did not promise to be with us to the end of the Christian era. The author of those words meant the second coming of Jesus, which would in that period of history mean the end of the world.
	What I mean by a Post-Christian era is that we have arrived at a time in history when the Christian Church or the Christian faith no longer dominates the life of Western Europe and the United States. The erosion of this influence began with the work of Copernicus and was brought to full fervor in the Enlightenment with the work of such people as Galileo and Isaac Newton. Christianity’s influence in Europe and in the United States today is minimal and, where it is influential, it appears to be so in the most negative of ways: Witness the Church’s war on women, which includes not only its negativity to both contraception and abortion, but also its still widely voiced hostility toward those who want to have women be priests, bishops, archbishops and Popes If that were not already enough, we could also point to the church’s continued prejudice against homosexual persons and its ill-fated attempt to diminish the insights of Charles Darwin. Ours is today a secular society and hence a Post-Christian era.
	I hope this helps.
	~John Shelby Spong

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