JANUARY 17 2016
REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH!
Last week I started to read Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I was struck by one sentence, “I entreat you, brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.” Another sentence stayed with me – also decades ahead of his time: “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence…”
Nietzsche`s rebellion against the church originated from the preaching of the Heaven Heresy, still particularly predominant in the church today. The much maligned Nietzsche was a genius. His father and both his grand fathers were Lutheran preachers, one even a bishop. He was also slated to join the ranks of clergy but, seeing that the church was dead and so concluding that God was dead as well, he changed course and at a very young age became a professor of classical languages.
“Remain true to the earth!” Certainly a timely reminder. Our downright cruelty to the earth is all too evident: in the natural world there are too many people who see the earth as something to be exploited for personal gain, resulting in shrinking soil fertility, disappearing potable water, and climate change, signalling immense future problems.
By the way: in response to my plea to discuss THE NEW PARADIGM article of late December, two people reacted: a land surveyor in British Columbia and my brother in the Netherlands. Thank you both. The request for discussion went to a variety of people, including a Christian periodical. I realize that my thesis is rather radical, so here follows more elaboration, because more discussion is needed, since the future of the church is at stake. That is no exaggeration.
My brother sent me an electronic copy of a Dutch Christian Journal, with the intriguing name: ONDERWEG, which means EN ROUTE, traveling from one point to another, in this case alluding to the journey we all make from Here to Eternity. That particular issue dealt with THE END TIME which the article says we are now experiencing, and I concur. It contained some biblical givens, pointing to the signs now so clearly evident. The articles were good orthodox Christianity. A retired professor did point out that Revelation is quite explicit on the coming of the New Creation, also mentioning the book by N. T. Wright: Surprised by Hope, its subtitle being Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church. A reader commented: “If this book is true, then my whole life has to change.”
Of course, I have been writing about this for as long as I can remember, starting in 1972 when I was ‘converted’ to this point of view. Later, by reading Johan Herman Bavinck and translating three of his books, all proclaiming this very truth, I became even more convinced of this point of view.
This past week I also read a lot of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who knew that his time was short: at the age of 39 he was killed by the Gestapo (Geheime Stats Polizei or Secret Police) weeks before the end of WWII. One statement really stayed with me:
“God cannot be understood without the world, nor the world without the God who has entered it in Jesus Christ.”
Here I hear an echo of Nietzsche’s words: Remain true to the earth!
Why did Bonhoeffer write that it takes creation to understand God? In his Creation and Fall, dealing with the first three chapters of the Bible, Genesis 1-3, he writes, “The human being is the human being who is taken from earth…. The earth is its mother…. It is God’s earth out of which humankind is taken….. Its bond with the earth belongs to its essential being. Human beings have their existence as existence on earth.
Johan Herman Bavinck says essentially the same. In his Between the Beginning and the End: a radical Kingdom Vision he writes,
“A long time ago, the Bible tells us, God fashioned the first human pair from the earth. The Hebrew word for soil is Adamah, from which Adam comes. The word adam reminded the Israelite immediately of the first Adam who was taken from the soil of the earth, hence the well-known saying: soil we are and to soil we shall return. Just as we have red clay and black soil, we too have people of different colors. The word ‘adam’ typifies the human race in its unbreakable unity. We all come from the earth and we all go back to the earth. Earth-bound we are, forever. We, the human beings, are adam, and belong to adamah, the life-bearing earth. With every sinew of our exis-tence we are tied to the earth, which bears us and feeds us.”
So far J. H. Bavinck.
Back to us humans who, by and large, regard soil as disposable. We trample on it, pave it wherever we can, and, stupidly build our cities on its most fertile sections, because that sort of earth is good for digging and drainage, so we abuse it: it’s only dirt after all.
Yes, soil is treated as dirt that’s why we regard it with contempt. Yet all human life depends on it. Ancient Sanskrit texts have warned us: “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it will grow our food, our fuel, and our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it and the soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it”. Yes, destroy the earth and we destroy ourselves, and that’s exactly what we are doing.”
Back to Bonhoeffer who wrote,
“God cannot be understood without the world, nor the world without the God who has entered it in Jesus Christ.”
That makes sense. We cannot understand Bach without his music or van Gogh without his paintings. That’s why we cannot understand God without his creation. The Scriptures have been given us to make that possible. In these LAST DAYS we have to implement the words of Psalm 119: 105: “Your word is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path (in creation)”. With the two divine words at the ready – Creation and the Scriptures – guided by the Living Word that came to us in Jesus Christ, we have to outline a life that reflects God’s will now and for eternity, meaning that the current format of the church service has to change from the exclusive elaboration of the written word to a meaningful integration of both the created and the written word, fully recognizing that the created word, God’s direct revelation, has priority over God’s revelation in Scripture, his indirect word.
For most people God means little or nothing at all. For the bulk of those who go to church their quest is centered on heaven, but since we are of the earth, and eternally bound to the earth, this could mean a life lived in denial. This is all too evident in the USA, the most ‘Christian’ of the Western world. There Christianity has become so distorted that people like me are almost ashamed to call myself Christian. Nowhere in the world is the ‘world’ more abused and more reviled than in the USA where the average person generates 15 tons of CO2 per year, while the world average is less than 5 tons.
Bonhoeffer’s words, stating that we cannot find the God who has entered into the world in the form of Jesus Christ, unless we see and treat the world as originating from God and thus holy, are today more true than ever. Even though there may be churches that proclaim that truth, hardly any hymns reflect that belief.
Can the churches still change? Or will they just disappear without people noticing?
Bonhoeffer talks about the churches in Germany during the Hitler regime how they meekly went along with the Nazi regime, even openly endorsed it. Nietzsche already saw the church’s ineffectiveness, so became an open critic, falsely labeled as an atheist. Why? Because he said: “I entreat you, brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.”
It more and more seems that churches will simply fade away. The Guardian reported last week that church attendance in the C of E, the Church of England (in Canada known as the Anglican Church) has decreased to less than 2 percent of the population. In Tweed, Ontario, where I live, the Anglican Church closed a few years ago, while church attendance in other churches is down drastically as well. Apparently we don’t need God anymore. Actually I don’t think that is true: in these days of general dissatisfaction, only the Christian Religion has the answer, but not in its present form.
“If this is true that we don’t go to heaven then my whole life has to change” remarked a reader of the N. T. Wright book.
And the change lies in fully recognizing that this earth is and remains for us our habitat into eternity. That implies that we must incorporate the essence of the earth into our lives: make it an integral part of our spiritual and material make-up by being “True to the Earth”. As the 2 B’s, Bavinck and Bonhoeffer have written: “God cannot be understood without the world, nor the world without the God who has entered it in Jesus Christ.”
Going about understanding this is a communal enterprise. Bavinck has stated that,
“There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved by him. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all-wise will of him who live and rules for ever.”
That is what I missed in the Dutch ONDERWEG piece. Our whole life has to change, and, that change has to start in the church, unlikely as it sounds in this day and age where the average age in many churches is well beyond 70 years of age. I deeply believe that if the church were to make this its primary objective – and it should because God cannot be understood without the world – it would draw in the younger generation which faces a very dire future without much hope. They too have to be “Surprised by Hope.”
Since that is so unique and so unusual, indeed requires a PARADIGM SHIFT, it needs a thorough explanation and a careful introduction, as well as eloquent elaboration, because it means that much of the theological education of the minister will have to be redirected from pure Bible explanation to practical ‘lessons’ that are geared to a total integration with the real world, using the know-how and the expertise readily available within the congregation or the community at large.
Today the ’sermon’ type service has proven to be outmoded and outdated, witness the steady decline in church attendance over the past decades. Also the lecture-type presentation is the least effective of all modes of communication. That too has become all too evident. It is time that churches update their message and the way the Good News is presented.
That way points to integrating the spoken word with the created word. “If this is true that we don’t go to heaven then my whole life has to change” remarked a reader of the N. T. Wright book.
That change starts in the church as the Communion of Saints. The Apostles Creed has a line which affirms that we believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting.
We must now prepare for that everlasting life. There is a saying that the future belongs to those who prepare for it. The same applies to eternal life: The Future in the renewed earth belongs to those who prepare for it. The success of the church stands and falls with that message.
Oh yes, last week’s blog completely disappeared from my computer. I was pretty philosophical about it, reasoning that it was not to become public. My main point was that the financial fiasco we are facing is something structural: too many older people receive pensions and medical care which must be financed by a much smaller and less prosperous work force: simply impossible.