Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Luke 12:32
So what is the kingdom of God’s promise? My understanding is that it is everything that we need to grow in our understanding of ourselves and him.
My sense of this moment in time is that the kingdom is going to be a new social paradigm.
For those who have been following some of my previous posts, the crisis that we are facing bears and eerie resemblance to the Fourth Turning predicted by some generational historians. If their theories are accurate, we will have to create a new social order to survive this crisis – the kingdom.
What is fascinating about this whole financial scenario is that it ultimately is the death knoll for the concept of self-regulating markets. What we are going to see now is whole new global regulatory structure which will enforce more conservative investment practices and prevent institutions from getting into the upside down position that they found themselves earlier this year.
The US will have less influence in this system than it had in the past because, among other things, we were the ones who promoted the strength of the unregulated market. Asia, Russia, and the Middle East have a bigger role in this new system because they are the winners in the current global economy.
The other casualty is the conservative fantasy of small government. The election this fall will only serve as evidence of something that most thoughtful people already know.
The era of conservative influence is over. When the conservatives running the government were staring down the barrel of the gun of global financial collapse, they abandoned their principles and embraced the biggest package of government socialism that we’ve ever seen. Our government has adopted a policy of nationalization of a significant portion of our financial infrastructure.
So when you begin to unravel this conservative fantasy, it leaves a lot exposed. The conservative/libertarian ethos is that an individual should be completely accountable for their own actions. They are solely responsible for their own success or failure. So by extension, if government just left everyone alone, defended the borders, and kept the peace – the marketplace would sort everything else out by rewarding the just and punishing the unjust.
What this crisis (and really the last eight years) has proven is that this philosophy no longer works in a globally connected economy. We are interconnected and co-dependent. Our attempt to go it alone, in one great last grasp for conservative greatness, has left us battered and weak.
The more cynical in the audience might take this a step further and suggest that those in power only used conservative principles to gain power. When it served their purposes, they were conservatives. When it was their own money on the line, they suddenly morphed almost overnight into liberals advocating big government socialism.
So where do we go from here?
What the Four Turnings researchers predict is that a new leader will emerge to help define this new social order. The old divisions will evaporate as we all realize that our collective survival requires a new identity.
My sense is that we need leadership which can embrace a new global role for both government and citizens. Our opportunity is to become leaders of this a new emerging globalism because our interdependencies and our problems can no longer be defined by our borders or our old ideologies.
Financial markets, global warning, stateless terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and continued conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq all require multi-national solutions. Our ability to be a leader in those solutions will depend on our ability to put our own internal differences aside and embrace this new globalism ourselves.
Our opportunity is to become a leader in forging new alliances to marginalize stateless terrorism by addressing the root causes that give it life.
Our opportunity is to become leader in building a new carbon-neutral economy.
Our opportunity is to embrace the real promise of the American dream for all those who are willing to work for it regardless of color, creed, birthplace, or sexual orientation.
We are going to need everyone in the boat pulling on the oars to raise our country out of the problems it is currently confronting. The good news is that we have a generation of young people eager to take on that role. The bad news is that in order to accept the kingdom that our Father is poised to provide to us, we have to be willing to give up our previous closely held beliefs about what it might look like.
When you vote in November, spend a little time evaluating which of the two men running has the vision to lead us to this new social order.
#1 The Kingdom of God has nothing to do with a social order. Your “progressive thinking” is progressing right away form the bible. Sorry to be so harsh. I only become irritated with you when you clearly quote the bible out of context and apply it in ways that suit your thoughts.
The Kindom of God is “Christ in us.” It is Jesus. It is opposite of the world view. It is light in darkness. It is in no way a new social order here on earth. It is the works of Jesus, the blind seeing, the deaf hearing, people being delivered from denomic strongholds, prostitutes being freed, drug addics coming clean, adulterer’s being heald. People turning from their wicked ways and confessing their sin and belief in Christ. That’s the kingdom that Jesus spoke about. Do a word search on “Kingdom” and read all the verse in the new testiment that kingdom pops up in. It is quite different Jeff then what you are suggesting
#2 We will not have less influence going forward. Need proof, the dollars is strengthing rapidly. Why? We are the only currency anyone really trusts. The economies of the rest of the world are imploding. Russia is in free fall. For as bad as we are doing they are significantly worse off. Their stock market is off 80% or more. We are still the wealthiest, strongest economy in the world. We’ve hit a bump caused by the community reinvestment act that forced freedie and fannie into a terrible position and leaned heavily on commercial banks to do the same. We’ll get out of it like we always do.
#3 We are still a center right country. Trust me. Conservitism is not dead. Staring down a barrel as you discribed it but the barrel was created by a socialist program.
I wouldn’t consider the banks nationalized. The gov’t bought shares in privite institutions. What happens when everything recovers and they sell these shares and make billions? The tax payers will have been made whole and we all will be wondering why we didn’t have the forsite to invest portions of social security in the market at the same time. (opps some did have this forsite, they were called dangerous and “Risky.”)
#4 The conservitive fantasy which you speak is responsible for the creation of the wealthest nation that has ever been. Some fantasy huh?
The gov’t should have stepped aside and let the market do its magic. The problems that occured was due to the gov’t NOT doing it’s job. They created the mess via the community reinvestment act. That was not free market capitalism. Have you wondered why we have no public view of the villians in this story? The dems wanted the heads of Enron, Gobal, etc in the early 2000’s. Why no lynch mob now? BECAUSE IT”S THEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This has nothing to do with a self regulation free market. It’s because the dems created a program that WAS NOT a free market program. Now don’t get me wrong, many bank heads made stupid, stupid mistakes. They should have found a way to say no to lending pratices that were absurd. Zero money down and loaning 125% of the value of the home were insane. They forgot their history lessons from 1925 – 1929 that caused the great depression. But, The community reinvestment program forced it down the markets throat.
#5 Your closing returns to a thought that God wants a social order here on earth that is some how political….again you are deviating greatly from the bible. Read revelations about your one world gov’t that you seam to be speaking of. Trust me, as a Christian, I am in no hurry for this to occur.
Keith,
Good to hear from you again.
You must have missed an earlier post of mine regarding the CRA.
http://www.blogsmonroe.com/christianpolitics/2008/10/the-unjust/
There’s a link to a businessweek article with details on how the CRA had little or nothing to do with the problem.
Since I wrote that blog, I heard a program on NPR that put the final piece in place.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90327686
The REAL cause was the unregulated free market in its simplest and most elegant form – supply and demand.
Third world countries like China and India were making a lot of money selling stuff to us ($70 Trillion!). They needed a safe place to put that money. Greenspan discouraged them from putting it in US Treasuries, so they decided that the next safest investment was US mortgages. The problem was that the demand of money looking for investments exceeded the supply of qualified mortgages. So unregulated brokers came up with more and more creative ways to write riskier and riskier mortgages, and still could not satisfy the international demand for these securities.
While everyone was making money, it seemed like a great idea. Even the brokers themselves knew that it wouldn’t last, but some were in so deep they couldn’t extract themselves.
It’s just like trapping monkeys. You hollow out a coconut. Tie it to a tree. Drill a small hole that a monkey can just fit his hand through, but not get his fist out. Then drop in a piece of banana. Come back the next day and you will have caught a monkey because they will allow themselves to be captured rather than let go of that banana.
I’ll comment on the bible references in another post.
Jeff