Foundation, Empire -and the mission of the church

 I've been watching the TV series 'Foundation'. I read the books about 50 years ago (I know!) but scarcely now remember anything but an outline and some character names. A lot has happened in my life since I read the series and now watch it adapted to television. For one thing, I committed my ways to Christ and have a role which involves official ministry in the church's mission.

In the intervening years, a constant companion for me has been concern for ecology, for creation. Latterly this has become a more urgent concern and I have realised that we have collectively run out of time. We are living on borrowed time. In fact, some of us, globally speaking, are not even living on borrowed time. All through my adult life I have unconsciously (I now realise) assumed that we would have time, that there was time to persuade and to change and to head off the worst. That assumption, that naive hope, has now been stripped from me.

The situation of living on borrowed time  needs to be spelled out in greater detail. And this is where the connection in my mind with Hari Seldon and Foundation starts to kick in. In Foundation, the scenario is that the Empire is about to decline and collapse, giving way to a dark age, an age of vast human suffering and misery. For me that scenario has clicked with the likely paths our own current civilisation seems to be on. Whatever happens now, some global warming is 'baked in' and we have already seen the kinds of effects it is having. The prospect is that such effects will continue and worsen. How much worse is unknown. 

It seems likely that parts of the earth will become uninhabitable for humans. It seems that there will be greater extremes of weather, including drought and storms. It is inevitable that coastal and low-lying cities like London will have to find ways to cope with encroachment of tides or be abandoned in part or wholly. The clear implications of that basket of effects will be population movements, migration. We should also reckon on food supplies becoming erratic as land becomes unsuitable for cultivation. This "erratic" food supply will, as usual, be dire for the most vulnerable and stressful for those who are usually less vulnerable. More migration. These kinds of stresses in the past have exacerbated intercommunal and international tensions. We might be unsurprised to see wars or at least armed 'incidents' and also insurgencies, civil disorder and revolutions.

So, in many ways, it wouldn't be unfair to call what we are embarked upon, a "dark age". An age when more and more people die, suffer loss, are undernourished, unhoused and displaced, fall into servitude, are brutalised, exploited and traumatised.

None of this is to imply that things up to the moment have been idyllic (far from it), just to say that it could -probably will- get worse by a number of measures. This too reminds me of the Foundation story. The dark age is relative, the Empire is cruel and brutal in keeping order but one catches glimpses of many people living lives which are at least okay: materially speaking they are well fed, have homes and good things in their lives -provided they don't threaten Empire's power. However, the dark age multiplies the detriments. In both Foundation and in our real world trajectory now, the further dangers are that human collective knowledge and now-how are eroded making reconstruction harder. This can be further triangulated with the medieval period in western Europe -the so-called dark ages*- where the monasteries played a role in preserving information which could later be retrieved and added to. They also, let's note in passing, played a role in healthcare, agricultural know-how and sometimes, at their best, in protecting the interests of ordinary people or at least mitigating some of the worst effects of bad, venial, governance.

It has been interesting to note the portrayal of responses to the prognosis of Seldon and psychohistory in the Foundation story. Again, there are parallels. There is denial on the part of those in charge and a 'shoot the messenger' reaction. Tick: we are seeing that. There is a prioritising of dynastic concerns which minimises the responses. Tick. -Our billionaire overlords seem to be doing something rather like that, abetted (gaslit, cajoled, wealth-groomed) by those who hold the formal reins of governance.

As I've already nodded towards, there is a parallel too in the 'solution'. In the books and the TV series, the Foundation is set up to provide a repository of knowledge for reconstruction, and a means to help shorten the dark age. Interestingly, and making the parallel more visible, the Foundation spawns an order of monks, in effect, whose mission is to try to help shorten the period of darkness and to keep alive the 'light' of knowledge and humanity (in the sense of 'humane'). I can't help thinking that Asimov was giving a hat tip to the role of monastic communities in the European dark ages*.

This is what I think we need to take on board with regard to the mission of the churches in the coming century (or centuries). We need to be asking "what is God doing and calling us to collaborate with?" In answering that question, we may do well to consider the role of the churches (including monastic expressions) at their best during the 'dark ages' in western Europe. We would do well to consider also how they failed or fell short. In writing that, I'm also mindful that I have written 'western Europe' several times. I'm somewhat aware that we might also look at churches in other parts of the world during times of civilisational stress to learn from their experiences. And given that there are commonalities of desire for human flourishing and spiritual disciplines, it may be also that the experiences of people of other faiths can help us to consider our vocation as churches. And that's not to pass up that the encouragement to people of other faith traditions to similarly dig deep to retrieve their own resources to help human flourishing in such challenging circumstances. It wouldn't be the first time Christians have learned from other faiths. It is strongly arguable that the Renaissance was greatly indebted to the re-discovery of classical learning and manuscripts held and preserved by the Islamic nations which became available as a result of the Reconquista in the AD1400s.

We would do well also to consider the understandings we have amassed about sociology, economics, psychology as well as the physical sciences and their related technologies. It may be that capacity for advanced research in the latter is diminished but the ways of understanding and thinking can enable better adaptation for communities to changing conditions and harsher natural conditions. It is important also to consider that we have been coming to understand that some indigenous perspectives and accumulated understandings of biomes and skillful human living in them are worthy in seeking human flourishing. The collective wisdom and learning can inform people settling and/or adapting in new conditions. The attitude, at their best, of respect for natural process and reflexively understanding interconnection, an ecological instinct almost, is valuable. The attitude of considering how we might be good ancestors and trying to take the long view is one that we need to take on board. Not doing so is part of the reason why our civilisation is failing now.

As churches, then, we might consider our own part in Foundation. Not for a galactic empire, but for human flourishing in the long term on the only planet we have. The only planet we have been entrusted with. As churches, 'Foundation' means discovering together God's mission in the present keeping an eye on the likely future. It means adapting and renewing our discipling, our engagements with our communities, our structures (for surely we cannot continue as we are). We will need to listen to the Spirit and one another's discernments to "hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches". We will need to learn disciplines of simplicity of life, corporate discernment, and humble, patient learning. We will need to learn the discipline of sitting light to our preferences and to let of some, perhaps many, of the things we have grown attached to in the way that we 'do church together'. We will need to become peacemakers in earnest and set our hands to the plough of learning how to do that work (and find ourselves blessed in it!). We will need to face and process our own grief and bereavement of the kind of life we have come to expect and hope for, and our collective guilt in making the world worse for our afterbears (opposite of forebears). We will need to learn how to minister among the shocked and traumatised, the cynical and the dispirited (having faced those things ourselves).

I feel like this could be the introduction to a series of fuller considerations of those different dimensions to what I suspect we are called to. And probably some more too. Maybe I'll be able to do that. I'm sensing that the five marks of mission may be a helpful frame to hang some of that consideration on.

Well, a blog post is meant to be provisional, and that seems to be what this is! Let's see if I can pick up some of these strands in the coming weeks and months.

Footnote

*The term "dark ages" is contested by historians because there were at times some very good, hopeful and even progressive things occurred during the period often named such. However, as a label for a time when civilisational collapse, whether partial or more wholly, takes place, it serves. Especially as it is explicitly part of the Foundation storyline.