At Westbourne Grove Church, we are currently doing a series of teachings aimed at renewing the intellectual foundations for our engagement both with the Bible and with a world going through tumultuous upheaval. An extravagant and presumptuous ambition, I know, but you’ve got to try.
For me, it is an opportunity to implement much of the narrative-historical hermeneutic that I have argued for and used on this site and in other writings. I’m not putting myself forward as a model speaker—far from it. But I’ve enjoyed doing these talks, the response has been pretty good, and perhaps they will give others hope that the church can be shifted on to more solid biblical ground as it braces for the shockwave of the age to come.
The audio quality of this one is not great, and there’s no live video, just the slides. But it gets better. The text below the video is not a transcript but an overview of the topic.
The consumption of the planet’s resources—food, land, natural materials, fossil fuels—and the failure to deal with the waste products are central characteristics of modern societies. Scientific progress, technological ingenuity, and cheap energy have produced a massive acceleration in consumption over, let’s say, the last hundred and fifty years, with too little attention paid to the social and environmental costs. Climate change is probably the most serious effect, but there are related harms: other forms of pollution, eco-system damage, biodiversity loss, a growing human dependence on technology, and so on.
Perhaps these effects will prove manageable in the long run, but as things stand, there are good reasons to believe that over-consumption is having a disastrous impact on the ecosystems that sustain human life and culture.
At the personal level, there are repeated warnings in the Bible against the perversion of desire, which is covetousness. You shall not covet what your neighbour has (Exod. 20:17). You shall not covet the gold and silver from which the images of the nations’ gods are made (Deut. 7:25). Jesus taught: “be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Lk. 12:15). James attributes quarrels and fights to covetousness (Jms. 4;1-2).
But we are looking for the larger narratives that explain human behaviour and account for the actions of God. In this case, it is the trajectory from Babel as proto-empire, through Babylon, to Babylon the great, which is Rome, that best anticipates the over-consumption of the modern era.
Babel was not the first great city, but it was the first attempt to defy the creation order, to breach some implicit boundary between earth and heaven, to promote and aggrandise humanity (Gen. 11:1-9). The judgment that “nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them” (11:6) is prescient; it identifies both the wonder and the terror of technological advancement.
The king of Babylon greedily gathers peoples in his dragnet, and by this imperial predation he “lives in luxury.” The prophet asks, “Is he then to keep on emptying his net and mercilessly killing nations forever?” (Hab. 1:17).
Babylon the great is the great consumer society, which “glorified herself and lived in luxury” (Rev. 18:7). The angel pronounces the fall of this great imperial, and the kings and merchants of the earth, who profited from her immoral wealth will weep and mourn over her destruction (18:9-13).
So can we now again prophesy, on the brink of a crisis of over-consumption: “fallen, fallen is the great consumer society”?
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