The Alternative

The Alternative

What remains is faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.

– 1.Corinthian 13.13

Love builds on hope, hope builds on faith

We always believe in something, that is what our operating system needs. With humanism, the West freed itself from the church and God, and believed only in itself. With this new self-image, mountains were moved. Technical development increased rapidly, we believed that we would be able to solve all problems, answer all questions, without needing God at all. But disillusionment has long since set in, this unbridled optimism has long since disappeared. Even before the two world improvement projects failed in the last century: Communism and National Socialism. The basic mood that we humans are the problem became more and more widespread. The world would be better without us! Above all, the world would be better off without the West, which has screwed everything up. Anyone who consumes 15 minutes of news has at least been given an argument that we are to blame for everything. Everything is so bad and hopeless! We infect others, because of us the glaciers melt, because I drive a car, people starve in other parts of the world. Maybe I can buy some peace by donating money, which others can use to repair the damage. But secretly we know that such actions are more of the same, and only ride us deeper into pessimism. Everything has become so terribly mechanical. We put every conceivable problem into numbers and statistics. They look intelligent, but do little to help us. Love and hope do not thrive, on this „non-belief“ in ourselves. The way we have dealt with Corona is a declaration of bankruptcy of our faith, our world view. Actually, the West has given up on itself. And yet the less technologically developed countries are emulating it. Somehow understandable, they want to belong to it economically. Technology and prosperity are a seductive facade that conceals the fact that behind it there is no longer any faith on which hope, or even love, can flourish. On the contrary. What we think we have mastered are cold numbers and statistics. With them we build mechanistic, soulless totalitarian systems, because we believe to control them. Do we not see how paradoxical this is? No human being dreams of being manipulated and made docile by fear. No one wants to be just a cog in a machine, however perfect it may be. Why do we do this to ourselves? It is a dead end. More control, more numbers, more manipulation and fear, even bigger global one-size-fits-all solutions, even more synchronization, this is the template for a horror movie, but not the dream of mankind!
We need again a faith on which hope and love can flourish. Let’s bring God back into the game. We are more than the sum of the atoms that make up our bodies! This world is more than the product of evolution. What is so terrible about acknowledging that there are things greater than us? We didn’t invent this world, and we won’t be able to control it, not even the climate.
Jesus, the Son of God, lived under Roman rule. His core message was: „God’s kingdom is near! You are loved, wanted, and the question of guilt is settled“. What a liberating message! It is OK if we want to shape this world, but in cooperation with the one who is the source of life! The Kingdom of God is just as close as we are willing to engage with the Creator, to let Him guide us. He wants to continue to shape this world with us. In the beginning he gave us a wonderful garden, in the second last chapter of the bible John prophetically describes the new city Jerusalem coming from heaven to earth: A city like an enormous cube: 2256 km long, wide and high, made of gold, glass and precious stones, it obviously lacked language! This city still exceeds everything we can imagine today, and it is just one city, there will be more! God has no problem with progress, with technology, with development, that is not the problem. He still wants us to discover many things, but in collaboration with Him. A kingdom has a king, and he sets rules that make successful living together possible. We need generations of thinkers who will explore the rules of this kingdom anew, translate them into our languages and formulate applications for upbringing, education and laws. The kingdom of God is our future. It means liberation and empowerment of the individual. Responsibility and diversity, not power in the hands of a few. Beauty, creativity, development in every relationship, not more state, more control, more law, more uniformity. The kingdom of God builds on individuals who feel loved and wanted by God, and reconciled with him. In the kingdom of God, individuals are empowered to build sustainable, diverse, just communities. Networks of teams grow beyond themselves and create solutions for the good of all.
Utopian? Yes, as long as evil clings to our every cell, we would do well not to overestimate ourselves. But that is the comforting thing about the kingdom of God, it is not our kingdom, but his kingdom, and he will reach the goal with us. How, we do not know exactly, but that is not our problem. We are invited to be part of this kingdom every day. To live, hope and love from our identity in him. To be first of what is to come. To live supernaturally naturally. There is nothing wrong with us imagining what an ideal world will look like. It will not come into being without vision.
We will not create the new world, but God, as He is, will not create the new world without us.