I led again this year a tour to Germany to study the life and times of Martin Luther, a German Reformer of the Sixteenth Century. It was a smaller group than last year – there were nine of us. This fortunately allowed us all to get to know each other very well. There were an interesting bunch of people. There was one Anglican minister from the Guildford diocese whose knowledge of the Reformation was staggering, an interested Protestant from Northern Ireland, and three married couples from in and around London.
Amongst the married couples the eldest was eighty and in retirement an author of books on Climate change. He had some very interesting ideas on what was happening not based on the last thirty years but on the two thousand or so. He pointed out that there were cycles to some degree influenced by sunspots. These cycles were of a few years, approximately eleven and a half years, the more sunspots, the hotter it was. There were also other, longer cycles maybe as long as four hundred years. For instance in the Seventh Century there was a mini-Ice-age in which the Thames regularly froze over in winter. He had done a study of the effects of changes in the weather on peoples’ behaviour. In cold spells there tended to be lots of unrest and wars. So in the mid-Seventeenth Century there was in England the Civil War. Looking at the cycles this man thought that we were in for another cold spell, particularly as in the Sunspot cycle we were enter a period without sunspots.
His ideas to a great extent dominated the holiday. We all listened with interest. One of his books is entitled ‘The Great Storm’, and came out two years ago. The Great Storm for him was not only weather. It was economic and political too. He felt that the level of indebtedness was so high in America that there could be a great stock exchange crash like that of 1929. In fact he believed it has already began with the so called ‘credit crunch’. Recently I visited a man who had his television on. “What are you watching?” I said. “The share prices,” he returned. It wasn’t good news. I got the opinion that he was watching those share prices with fear and trepidation all day long. He was watching his wealth sink and sink. I believe that there are hundreds of thousands of people like that man across the country today.
The Bible tells us that the unexpected comes when we least expect it, like a thief in the night. There is the story that Jesus tells of the man who sits back and says to himself that all is well, and that he will build more barns for his produced. In today’s terns we would build more warehouses, or open a new ISA accounts. In the story Jesus tells it is the expectation of the man that the good times can only continue. He was dreadfully wrong says Jesus.
Wealth doesn’t bring happiness. What it brings is self-reliance. We trust that we are in control of our destinies, like that man building extra barns. However God is still there, and when we come to him, he is ready and waiting for us. When the crash came in 1929 the Churches were suddenly full. Nobody knew what to do, but their feet did. They found their way to Church and there they prayed. They quickly re-found the God whom they had forgotten beforehand as the share prices went up. Is the present credit crunch as we call it is the tip of an iceberg? If the Climate-change-man is right, then, he says, society will need something to return to, like the Prodigal Son returning to his father. I cannot claim that I have any insider information on this point, and as a religious man, like so many other religious people, I am prone to ‘Millenarianism’, that is the belief that things like this will happen. I read the prophets of the Old Testament, and they are full of such dire warnings of collapses It becomes me as a religious man to feel that something like this is not only possible, but likely. But I don’t know.
What if this man is right? What if the Great Storm will arrive and end the comforts and ease that we have enjoyed so long? While we have enjoyed these comforts many others in the world have starved or lived under dreadful oppression. And what have we done? We have expected our governments to do something, but few us have personally done anything. The Bible tells us that when the judgment does come, it comes because the people did precisely as we did, nothing!
We shall see! If there is a great crash, the man said, the welfare state as we know it would be unaffordable, the social security system too. Most of us will hope that this is the mere pipe-dream of a silly old man. But you know, house prices dropped £18,000 in Redbridge in July 2008. In the papers they said that it was a blip. Of course, that’s what they said before the crash in 1929, a blip, an opportunity to buy. But what if they continue to fall another £18,000 in August? When I went to Wittenberg, a beautiful medieval town in Germany where Luther lived most of his life and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, I noticed that the number of tourists was down by two-thirds. I questioned people and they said, it was a bad year, next year would be better. “Well it’s the credit crunch isn’t it? People are worried.” And Luther Tour had a two-thirds drop in numbers too, the same ratio. Is that due to the credit crunch?
All in all, we don’t know. What we do know is that the Bible tells us to be ‘Awake’. In Greek, in which the New Testament is written, the word is much stronger than the English ‘awake’. It is like the word ‘be rigorous’, ‘be alert’. When Jesus says ‘Watch and Pray!’, it is the same word, ‘Be wide awake, look ahead, look out, be intent, because when it happens it will be like a thief in the night.’
On Luther Tour as we went around together we all felt that we were preparing together for something important. We shared our ideas, we swapped material, articles we had with us, some of which we had written ourselves, and they all appeared to fit in. My desire to lead the Luther Tour was to prepare for a new Reformation, like that of Martin Luther five hundred years ago. We all felt that it would come.
I think the cycles of world history are about every five hundred years. The Reformation was nearly five hundred years ago and marked the end of the world as had existed in the Middle Ages. That world had existed for seven hundred years from the time of Charlemagne till Martin Luther. The twentieth century was a wild century. Unexpected events occurred. It was frequently violent, but it ended well for those of us in the Western world. What of the new century? Will that be wild too? Things are already changing. We see China decidedly at the top of the tables of Olympic medals, which matches her new economic power. She was nowhere a hundred years ago. She has a population four times the USA and her economy is still growing at double figures. There is also the worry about Iran, a maverick nation amidst a maverick Middle East. Things will happen, things which it will be impossible to predict, and they may happen very soon.
The great thing about our Biblical Faith is that we believe that God is in complete control. Nothing will happen that will separate us from him. But let us pray, and hold fast to him. The future belongs to God, and if we believe in God, the future also belongs to us.
Father Robert
September 2008
