Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

February 2012.

Our world today

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born: in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms will appear.”

Antonio Gramsci, Marxist thinker

“I will make everything new.”

Jesus Christ, the beginning and the end.

We all have heard of the “Ten Lost Years,” from 1929-1939, usually labeled The Great Depression, which was more severe in the North America than elsewhere.

When this economic disaster started here, some 22 percent of the labour force worked on farms. Between 1929 and 1932 most of these jobs disappeared as agriculture became a victim of its own success thanks to better seeds, better fertilizer, better farming practices, and especially widespread mechanization, fueled by an abundance of cheap oil. The result of this accelerating productivity caused output to increase faster than demand, resulting in much lower prices. That, combined with a sudden influx of millions of surplus workers, changed the structure of the economy. It was this, more than anything else that led to rapidly declining incomes. Farmers then (like workers now) borrowed heavily to sustain living standards and production. Because neither the farmers nor their bankers anticipated the steepness of the price declines, a credit crunch quickly ensued as farmers simply couldn’t repay what they owed.  As a result the banks too became a victim of declining agricultural incomes, and thousands of them went belly up.

Then WWII war came to the rescue: the conflict with Germany and Japan revved up the industrial base and employed the millions of idle bodies, enlisting them both in the army and in the arms industry. Overnight the deep depression disappeared.

Fast forward to today. We now find ourselves in a similar situation as 80 years ago, courtesy ‘progress’ again, this time not through greater farm efficiency but through enhanced computer power, the software revolution, and the globalization of jobs, dispatching them to lower wage countries, China in particular.

For a while the reckoning was postponed as rapidly rising real estate prices, fueled by cheap money and cheating banks, created the illusion of wealth, until the housing bust came.

Economists blamed the debacle in the 1930’s on tight money, so this time the experts did the opposite: they poured trillions in to the banking system, without producing a cure. Bankers got their big bonuses, but the common folk kept on suffering.

Indeed, the old is dying, the new cannot be born, and a great variety of morbid symptoms are appearing. The USA now has 6.6 million fewer jobs than 4 years ago and 23 million would like to work but have dropped out. Also wages have been falling, and poverty is rampant.

What we are experiencing in 2012 is again a fundamental re-alignment of the economy. Just as 80 years ago the jobs of farm hands never returned – now 2 percent of the labour force produce more food than the nation can absorb – thanks to shipping jobs to Asia, and greater productivity, we again have a permanent surplus of labour.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, an economist at Columbia University, suggests that in the   current situation the best solution is to concentrate on two fields for the jobs of the future: education and health, expanding the service economy well beyond the current 70 percent. At the same time this Nobel Prize winner suggests that we better prepare for a much lower living standard.

Making the service sector bigger is easier said than done. In the USA already 17 percent of GDP – Gross Domestic Product – is spent on health care – more than in any country – with a very low success rate. The same holds true for education. The vested interests in both fields are just too difficult to dislodge.

My proposal is different. It is plain that the old order is dying. In 1939 war was the cure. That is no longer an option – even though some Republicans would like to attack Iran. The only way to heal our situation is to make peace with the physical world by imagining the new creation to come. Bonhoeffer starts his 200 page Creation and Fall (dealing with Genesis 1-3) with these remarkable words, “The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”

The Greek word for ‘end’ is telos. Jesus in Matthew 5:48 tells us to be ‘telos- minded’ – “be telos-minded as I am telos-minded “- (teleios is the Greek word there), which really means that now already our life must reflect the ‘perfection’, the ‘whole-ness’ of the New Creation.

January 2012.

OUR WORLD TODAY

It’s now well into 2012. Some people associate the year 2012 with disaster, thanks to the movie by that name, which in 2009, predicted that this year the earth would be struck by calamities so immense that only a few would survive.  However, just as George Orwell’s prophesies for the book 1984 – written in 1949 – did not come to pass in that year, so 2012 will not see the world turn upside down, even though there are signs that not all is well in the Western world.

Perhaps a phenomenon called “collective consciousness” might play a role: if enough people believe that something disastrous will happen, it just might, no doubt influenced by the bad news out there. Just look at the monetary system: it’s not too far-fetched to believe that the entire banking business might collapse someday. John Kenneth Galbraith, in his The Great Crash 1929, called the chapter preceding THE CRASH “The Twilight of Illusion.”  To me it seems that today we live not in the twilight, but in the dark night of illusion, brought on by our pious faith in perpetual progress, the ‘unknown known’ which simply ignores the everyday realities of diminishing returns and limits to growth, and by our stubborn belief that the future will always be better than the past. That’s why we allowed trillion dollar deficits, and also convinced ourselves that our pollution problems would be solved with improved technology, another illusion, that false belief which we intuitively accept as true. Curing debt with more debt and treating pollution – caused by technology – with more of the same, reminds me of Matthew 12 where Jesus was accused of driving out demons in the name of the prince of demons.

As we go deeper into the teenage years of this century, one thing is sure: it will be a decade of deleveraging: we’re in for at least 10 years of paying off over-due bills, pushed aside, waiting for economic growth that refuses to come.  Debts are always paid, either through inflation, with money of less value – the more likely scenario – or deflation, lower prices and wages, both signaling hardship. Paying for our climate overshoot will result in more floods, more ice storms, more tree-breaking winds, more drought and failed crops, increasing living costs everywhere.

Sorry, young people, just as the Roman Catholic Church keeps on apologizing for sexual crimes, we, older people, must keep on saying sorry for leaving you with an immense mess: a world changed beyond recognition, in which species disappear at a rate 1000 times faster than before, and in which everything we’ve taught you – based on our life style – is vanishing right before your eyes. We still piously sing “This is our Father’s World”, but we, at best, have treated his world with callous indifference. Don’t repeat our mistakes. Don’t make money your goal. Instead handle our living planet with the reverence it deserves.

Keep healthy habits: run, walk, bike, ski. Not for nothing the bible emphasizes that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. I know you young can take a lot of abuse, but there always is a price to pay. Poor diets, watching too much TV, sitting too long in front of a computer screen, may not kill you, but will lead to decades of chronic disease: prevention is better than curing, especially as future health-care dollars will become far less plentiful. Choose a mate with extreme care and seek to be part of a viable community.

Don’t rush into anything. Christians have eternal life, and, as Revelation 14:13 says “Your deeds will follow you in the New Creation.” So investigate everything, and discover what has lasting value. Remember Creation is God’s primary word. The best way to love God is to love creation. Treat her with all the care you can muster, for our health depends on her health. Oil-based enterprise is no longer the answer because of its toxicity. Renewal is the key, which is also the key ingredient of the New Creation.

Happiness is to be “in the Lord.” It means to be consciously busy to seek the best for people and the earth. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in Creation and Fall “Without God, without our brother and sister, we lose the earth (because)… God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.”

We are in the earth, of the earth. The sum total of being a creature is that we completely belong to this world, because it bears us, it nurtures us and embraces us. Any heaven-oriented teaching is from the devil, because it denies God’s very Word of creation.

Bert Hielema lives in rural Tweed, Ontario where he tries to practise what he preaches of which he does too much.

DECEMBER 2011

OUR WORLD TODAY

Am I a heretic?

I am always thinking. Often I muse on bible passages that puzzle me, which has given me the incentive to slowly change my focus from Scriptures alone to combining it with the Created word, a fusing of Spirit–inspired writings with God’s direct revelation in creation. Not surprisingly this has led to different ideas.

It all started with that famous text “God loves the world, the cosmos, so much that he offers his only begotten son as a ransom to wrest it out of the grip of the Great Deceiver”. In the concept of cosmos I include everything we can see, probe, think, paint, compose in music or prose or poetry, build theories upon and write philosophical treatises about.

For me that definition of cosmos and the coming of the cosmic Kingdom are at the core of my quest for salvation. For that end God has given the Scriptures to provide us with “a lamp for our feet and a light for our path” (Psalm 119:105) in our pilgrimage from where we are to the coming Kingdom. Actually Romans 1:20 suggests to me that even without Christ and the Bible, a person on Judgement Day, just by seeing creation as a miracle and honouring its maker, might plead that as sufficient ground for salvation, because billions never have heard true gospel preaching, and a gracious God will make allowances for that.

Colossians 1:15-20 is for me one of the most poignant passages of Scripture, because it described that Jesus sees Himself as the first-born of the entire creation. First-born means that He was indeed the first human being and existed before anything else. He almost always calls Himself “the Son of Man”, Humanity Personified. In His very humanness, in His ultimate loving kinship with all his fellow creatures, Jesus is, simultaneously, the image of the invisible God. He makes God’s love visible so that we can fully experience this love. We, women and men, are made “in his image”: we physically look like Jesus, who, as God, has entered into His creation, and so affirms that God, we and the earth belong together. Forever.

As the first human creature ever He created the entire cosmos, all that lives, moves and has its being. He created this by Him and for Him. That to me explains why we, his brothers and sisters, his look-alikes, are also so immensely creative, evident in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Hildegard van Bingen, Rembrandt, Bach, van Gogh,  as well as such eminent scholars as Luther, Calvin, Bonhoeffer, Bavinck, Louise Pasteur, Barbara W. Tuchman, Einstein, and such technical giants as Steve Jobs.

Jesus has gone for me and for his creation through death, where He too has been the first, because nothing in my life happens which He Himself has not first experienced: pain, loneliness, sickness, deep sorrow, and even my death. God, for my salvation, has deemed it necessary that in the life of the man Jesus his total fullness is present, so that we too and everything else, have been reconciled, have been set aright. In his glorified human existence he is our Mediator with the Father. That’s how I read Colossians 1:15-20.

I believe that we are under-selling ourselves, a typical Calvinistic trait. After all Psalm 8 calls us “little less than a god,” and Psalm 82:6 suggest that “You are gods, and all of you children of the Most High.”

Since Jesus created it all, any act to harm creation is an assault on the holiness of Jesus. I see The Lord’s Prayer as an eschatological instrument, centering on The Kingdom – the New Creation – to Come. Therefore to “Forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors,” must be seen in that light as well, asking Jesus to be merciful when we sin against God’s beloved creation, harm its holiness, and asking us not to point fingers to others who do the same.

I also see Revelation 22:2 that way. The statement that “The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations”, has long been a puzzle to me. Global Warming is a direct result of our machinery spewing Carbon Dioxide. The leaves of the tree are the healing agents there. Creation has her own mechanism for restoration, now overwhelmed by the immense amounts of man-made Green House Gases. Once the carbon-based poisons are eliminated – which will be in the New Creation – the leaves of the trees will do the rest.

At Christmas we celebrate Christ’ second birth: His first-birth took place ‘in the beginning.’

Is this comprehensive approach to the gospel really a heresy?

Bert’s new books, The Shortest Day, and Day without End, are available by contacting Bert@hielema.ca