JANUARY 7 2017
THE CHURCH AND CREATION
It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.” – Mark Twain
That church development is often derailed is not surprising, given that it is a human institution, yet discovering that all churches today, in 2017, are basically off track, took me a long time to fathom.
Actually, this is not surprising, considering history.
Some 2500 years ago the elite of Israel, its nobility and the church officials were deported to Babylon, led as hostages away from the Promised Land because the people of God had forgotten about God, even though ‘religion’ was thriving. Fortunately, some of them, such as Daniel and his friends managed to take the religious treasures with them, the old scrolls and the ancient papers that related their history.
There, far away from Jerusalem, they saw it as their holy duty to record what had happened to the Chosen People in the past, tracing their version of history all the way back to the days of Creation. Oral transmission too was used.
To these farsighted people we owe much of the Hebrew bible, because there, in the solitude of their exile, they had the time, the means and the opportunity to think and reflect, guided by the Holy Spirit. During that 70 year sojourn, somehow the true gospel became clear to them. There they recorded it and prepared the people of Israel for the coming of the Messiah.
Back from the Babylonian exile, again in the trusted environment of their own country, they really tried to live by the Law of Moses, restoring the Year of Jubilee, as the Lord had commanded, but soon formalism and church law prevailed and they again fell into the old trap of relying on outward adherence to the Laws of Moses.
Is there a lesson for us today?
In some way the same happened with the Dutch emigrating from the Netherlands to Canada in the early 1950’s. They too in their relative isolation, through their church communities blew new life in the religious heritage of the pre-war days in the Netherlands.
Now, it seems to me that in Canada among the Reformed community forward thinking has stalled, just as what happened soon after the exiles returned to the Promised Land after 70 years exile in Babylon.
The rise of Christianity.
Looking back 2000 years, we know that the Old Testament Church had grown stale. It took Jesus three years to convince a few people that the time was ripe for a change. That certainly indicates to me that it’s not easy to steer people in a different spiritual direction.
Fortunately, after Pentecost, and with Paul’s conversion, Christianity was preached world-wide. However, it soon became affected by Platonic thinking, while the church, thanks to its success, organized itself along the lines of the Roman Empire: Pope, Cardinals, Archbishops, bishops, and priests resembling the political structure of that day.
This year it is exactly 500 years that Martin Luther challenged the then Universal Christian church. We call it THE REFORMATION. By and large Luther brought the Bible back to the masses. Just as Paul could bring THE WORD, thanks to the PAX ROMANA and the koine dialectos – the universal language then – Luther too was blessed with the onset of the printing press and the subsequent rise of mass reading, which greatly accommodated the spread of the Reformed gospel.
Today: where are we?
We now are in situation similar to the time Jesus came, and Luther nailed his 95 theses on the Wittenberg church. Pietism has triumphed: the banner of heaven has been hoisted high. People are so sure that they’ll end up high up there, that no argument, no ‘proof text’, no concrete evidence will convince them. BUT…………It’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.”
Last week I sat across from a lady – a devout Christian – to whom I tried to explain that ‘cosmos’ – the word mentioned in John 3: 16 – means all things created. Her reply was: it applies only to people. It has nothing to do with animals, with trees, with flowers.
So: WHAT IS THE GOOD NEWS TODAY? Is it THE OLD TIME RELIGION, GOOD ENOUGH FOR ALL?
The old time religion is purely heaven-oriented, and/or so institutionalized that it amounts to the same thing.
A new approach is needed, made possible by Jesus, who called for combining the created word with the written word, in preparation for our future, the new creation.
A book by Dr. J. H. Diemer “NATUUR EN WONDER” or “Nature and Miracle”, points that way.
Diemer joins the ranks of Bavinck and Bonhoeffer by equating THE KINGDOM to the original Garden of Eden, and to the NEW EARTH which Jesus will bring with him when he returns, establishing a ‘religion-less Christianity where all dogmas, all confessions, all statements of faith are discarded, including church buildings, all ranks and offices, as the true sanctuary is the universe, God’s Holy creation.
Diemer was a biologist who died young, at age 40, in June 1945, just after the war, from malnutrition and punishment suffered in a German prison camp.
He wrote in Dutch and I paraphrase to avoid his academic language: “Faith in God motivates us to assume leadership in the created order of all things.
“Adam, at his new birth, powered by God’s word written in his heart, had the mandate and the desire to look at the exact nature of everything created. Infused by God’s Spirit, he was enabled to see the possibilities inherent in all created beings and structures. The cultural task of the first human pair filled with the Holy Spirit was to see the place of everything created, animals, trees, weather, and assign what fitted where.
“That was the cultural task God gave Adam in the beginning. That task is still ours today. God gave creation to us as the human race to serve, to maintain and to develop as God’s Kingdom on earth.
“In Paradise the human race was perfectly fit for this task. Their faith simply made that possible. They obeyed God’s Word to the letter, and, empowered by God’s Spirit, all of nature responded to Adam’s leadership. In this way all happenings in nature were directed toward service of God’s Kingdom.”
So far, so good. Then….
“Through the fall into sin, all of nature from the low amoeba to the highest form fell away from God and the fallen creatures became sinful trespassers, offending God’s basic law.
“From now on the law of sin became nature’s dominating force. The functions of all created matters were separated from the divine directions based on the laws that God had given through faith in Him. Sin redirected human ambitions to operate as independent forces which resulted in fights among themselves to gain the upper hand. Instead of serving and building and maintaining God’s Kingdom we served the kingdom of darkness and were engaged in destructive, estranging and dissolving activities, threatening to destroy God’s Kingdom.
“That is the curse that now hangs over the earth because of sin, all too evident today.
“In Christ all of nature has been radically redirected to God’s service. Christ has again placed God’s Kingdom in the hearts of the believers. That belief must be re-activated in our time of environmental distress, because through the fall into sin we no longer want to obey the directions prescribed by God, and so become willing servants of the Satan. We withdrew from our original mandate and convinced ourselves that we could function independently from God.
“Now we have disorder instead of order, exploitation instead of normal development, destruction instead of construction, decay instead of unity, chaos instead of cosmos.”
So far the Christian biologist, Dr. J. H. Diemer.
This struggle is out in the open but the outcome is assured, thanks to Christ’s life, death and resurrection. Bonhoeffer and Bavinck also affirm this, stating that “Christ did not bring a religion: he brought us LIFE.”
Our life must be fully lived in the context of THE KINGDOM. In spite of what Rome tells us, the church is not the Kingdom. In spite of what Reformed thinking tells us, the church, school, family, do not comprise the Kingdom.
Christ’s kingdom is on the way, already faintly present in our life. God’s kingdom, perfect in the Garden of Eden, will again be perfect in the New Earth to come.
The word ‘church’ comes from the Greek ‘kurios domo’, the house of the Lord: a misnomer because the universe, the cosmos, is the house of the Lord.
Today one of the most thriving businesses is to decommission church buildings. The Actinolite United Church – just north of where we live – is now ‘the Marble Art Centre’. The word ‘marble’ points to its marble stone structure, at one time mined in that hamlet. The former Tweed Anglican Church is for sale. The church we attend can seat 300 people, more than double the total gathered in the 4 other churches on a typical Sunday. The only time young people are possibly exposed to prayer and Bible reading is when their grandparents are buried.
Today, in our post-modern world, church buildings, by and large, have become an anachronism, no longer in tune with the times. Their high ceilings – reminiscent of heaven – make them energy hogs; their hymns are often in praise of heaven; their sermon approach is outmoded, dating to the pre-TV era; these monologues promote sheep-like attitudes, devoid of incentives to foster maturity; their parking lots are an ode to GMC and Ford and Japan; their organizational setup smacks of authoritarian tendencies; their Sunday worship an incentive to sever nature from grace, promoting an unhealthy and thus unchristian dualism.”
We have to go back to our original mandate which is that we were charged to develop God’s creation in such a way that it honors God, the creator, who, in the Bible is often described as the creator of heaven and earth.
Our task is the same as Adam’s: to beautify Paradise and enhance her possibilities. It is not a one-dimensional matter of singing and praying: it’s task is all-embracing, getting dirt under our nails; lovingly tending God’s soil, out of which we were shaped.
In these days where one calorie of commercial food takes 10 calories of carbon, growing one’s own food is not only creation-God- friendly but an act of worship. By inserting a seed into the earth we commit a holy act because the earth is holy. The entire Lord’s Prayer is a fervent prayer for ‘the kingdom to come’. In that prayer our plea to ‘forgive our trespasses’ refers to our constant sins against creation, while the line “as we forgive those who trespasses against us” is a recognition that we all are caught in the-trespass-against-creation trap.
Our worship should never pause. Reducing our carbon footprint should be a continuous concern. Sunday gatherings should be much more community minded, where singing, praying, sharing wholesome living tips, bringing produce and exchanging news a regular feature. The old – Acts 2 – is new again, which today means that, with churches often far away, we should meet in each other’s homes, and, where congregations are large, split it in units of 20 or so, with emphasis on walking to certain central points.
Today, using the Internet for spreading the Good News of the Kingdom has two original advantages combined: borderless like the Roman Empire and English as the universal language.
Again we all should be continually carbon footprint conscious, and always try to picture ourselves in circumstances visualizing our eternal life in THE NEW CREATION. There is that old saying: the future belongs to those who prepare for it.
Mark Twain coined “It’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.”, but
Hebrew 11: 1 tells us: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”
Today we see a creation in its last phase, because of sin. Christ has promised us a new earth where harmony and shalom is guaranteed forever.
P.S.
You do well to look at ARCTIC NEWS and listen to the 20 minutes interview with Dr. Peter Wadhams who is an ‘expeditionary’ scientist and Emeritus Professor of Ocean Physics from Cambridge. Peter Wadhams’ observations of the Arctic ice for over 4 decades makes him one of the worlds authorities on the subject.