July 14 2013
If you want to be part of the approaching perfection, prepare now.
Greek philosophy has influenced Christian theology
If you want to be part of the approaching perfection you have to get rid of the notion that upon death you’ll go to heaven.
Where in the world does this ‘heaven’ heresy hail from? It is based on Greek philosophy. Plato saw death as a happy escape from the body, that’s why Socrates, condemned to death for misleading the youth, drank the poison gladly. That’s where the nature/grace theology originated, the start of the so-called body/soul split and the earth/heaven dualism. Christianity, by and large, has adopted this pure pagan platonic premise. Get rid of this dichotomy, ban the unhealthy thinking that the earth is evil and escape to heaven the future.
I know the heaven notion is deeply ingrained in the Christian psyche. Old hymns mentioning ‘earth is a foreign strand, wilderness waste’ and ‘prostrate before Thy throne to lie and gaze and gaze on Thee” are still deeply part of the church even as the Bible clearly says that “God lives in inapproachable light whom no one has seen and nobody can see” (1 Tim. 6:16). When I still had TV I once saw Billy Graham being interviewed by Larry King who pointedly asked him what would happen when he dies. Billy said: “Jesus will take me by the hand and bring me to God”, contrary to what Jesus himself has said that (John 4:24) “God is spirit and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth,” and John repeatedly writes that God is invisible. No even Moses, whom God called his friend, was allowed to see God.
Yet the ‘heaven’ fiction continues, and it has a grain of truth. When we die our spirit is vested with Jesus. Nevertheless says John 5: 28, 29, “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out- and those who have done good will rise to live and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned.” 1 Cor. 15: 18 confirms this and so does 1 Thess. 4: 15 where it says that ‘those who are alive – at the Lord’s return – will have no advantage over those who have fallen asleep”, asleep being the biblical term for having died. Should I mention the last verse in Daniel? “As for you, go your way to the end. You will rest, and then at the end of days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.”
Billy Graham is wrong. Preachers who promote heaven proclaim an improper paradigm. Going to heaven implies that the earth is no good, that God has failed to do a proper job and will abandon the earth, in essence admitting that God is fallible. Who are we to treat as disposable something that God after each act of creation called ‘good’ and when the totality was in place called ‘very good’? Are we wiser than God?
My opinion and that of an increasing part of the church is that God made no junk and will not junk what he has made. Our future is here, right here, on this planet, that’s why we must make peace with the planet before the perfection of the New Creation, the Kingdom, arrives.
Of course it is much easier to believe in heaven because that relieves us from caring for the earth. Again this past week I heard a sermon on John 3 where verse 16- God so loved the world, the cosmos- was interpreted as saying God so loved the human race. The Greek text does not say ‘anthropos’ meaning mankind in general, but ‘cosmos’ which includes the whole ball of wax, everything that exists.
We are of the earth which bears us and feeds us
One of my most treasured texts is Psalm 115:16: “The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to men.” That brings me to a quote from J. H. Bavinck, the book I translated with the title The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming. He writes:
In the word adam the ears of the believing Israelite attuned to the Old Testament heard a variety of sounds which for us no longer resonate in the word ‘human,’ at least not to that extent. The word adam reminded the Israelite immediately of the first Adam who was taken from the dust of the earth. That made the word eminently suitable to typify the human race in its unbreakable unity. The Israelite here sensed something of the fact that humans are earth-bound. A human being, adam, belongs to adamah, the life?bearing earth. With every sinew of his existence he is tied to the earth, which bears him and feeds him.
I like that: with every sinew of our existence we are tied to the earth, which bears us and feeds us. The Highest heavens belong to the Lord: we own the earth now and into eternity.
The traditional church generally had a different idea. Ever looked closely how most churches have been designed? Their high ceilings and their steeples both are reminiscent of or pointing to heaven. Many of the frescoes in the St. Peter’s Basilica portray heavenly scenes. Compare that to the works of art in Solomon’s temple which were decorated with images of palm trees and flowers. In 1 Kings 6:29 we are specifically told that Solomon had all the walls of God’s house adorned with wooden sculptures of cherubim, palm trees and open flowers. The inner holy place was completely depicted as a garden of golden flowers, suggesting to one commentator that: “Perhaps the palm trees represent the trees in paradise, guarded by the cherubim (Gen. 3:24). What is striking is that all the wall adornments—except for the cherubim—are replicas of flowers.” In other words, the temple represented the beauty of the earth.
We can’t do the impossible
How can we prepare ourselves from an eternity which, by definition must last forever?
Good question and also impossible. As a human race we have gone too far. All calls for prudence, for halting the march toward environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on carbon emissions, are being ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, the increased droughts, rapid melting of glaciers and Arctic ice, monster tornadoes, vast hurricanes, crop failures, floods, raging wildfires and soaring temperatures, we are bowing almost eagerly before the gods of hedonism and greed, expressing our belief in the eternal wellspring of material progress. We are in the process of destroying the trees, the planet’s heat shield, these miracle workers cooling temperatures beneath them by 10C and blocking cancer-causing ultraviolet rays. They are robust filters of our air and water, and soak up climate-warming carbon dioxide. Forests slow the runoff of rainfall. Many of the world’s damaging floods are really caused by deforestation.
We can’t do it. We have gone too far. That’s where faith enters, faith that Christ will return and bring with him a renewed creation where we will have the opportunity to make a new start and avoid the mistakes of our sinful lives.
I have a book by the name of Making Peace with the Planet, written by Barry Commoner who died a few months ago, former director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College in New York. Will church goers ever discover that they can only peacefully die when they have made peace with the planet? Why is it that many non-church people put us to shame in this regard? I know why. The simple reason is our supposed escape route: heaven, a false premise which has caused our earth to wither.
In his book Dr. Commoner defines the four laws of ecology. If we want to be part of the approaching perfection we have to do more than going to church. Just as we memorize the Lord’s Prayer and know some hymns and bible texts by heart, we must make the laws of ecology part and parcel of our lives.
The four laws make eminent sense. Here they are:
(1) Everything is connected to everything else.
(2) Everything has to go somewhere
(3) Nature knows best
(4) There is no such a thing as a free lunch
The Laws explained.
(1) Everything is connected to everything else.
This reminds me of a passage in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book Creation and Fall. There he wrote that “God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.” Not only is everything connected to everything else, also every person is connected to every other person, to God and to the earth. The apostle Paul wrote that when one person suffers every human also suffers. That also applies to everything created: when creation groans (Romans 8:22) we all suffer as well. Why has the church not caught on to that? The heaven curse again. Dr. Commoner uses the example of the car which, to no one’s surprise “has properties that are hostile to their environment.” The tragedy in Lac-Mégantic can directly be traced to the car. Every day world-wide some 3000 people are killed in automobile accidents alone. Climate Change can be traced directly to the use of a car. Making peace with the planet is not a simple matter. The least we can do is limit the use of motorized transportation and more and more engage the two legs God gave us. Pray for forgiveness every time we use the car or fly.
(2) Everything has to go somewhere.
Nothing disappears. Commoner writes that “there is no such thing as waste.” When we drive a car the engine converts the fuel to energy and CO2 which haunts us now every day in the form of Climate Change thanks to the closed system in which we live. Plastic, another oil product, when burned in an incinerator produces carbon dioxide and dioxin, both agents in Global Warming and cancer. No wonder the incidence of cancer is accelerating: half of the population will suffer from some sort of cancer in their lifetime. Making peace with the planet will go a long way in battling that dreaded disease.
(3) Nature knows best.
We in our arrogance have created thousands of new man-made substances that often play a destructive role in living things. Monsanto comes to mind also, with its GM- genetically modified – seeds. All these ‘modern’ inventions are nothing else but satanic ways to make extra money and will eventually backfire in the form of new diseases and natural catastrophes. They are different from natural compounds; they lead to environmental changes and again to more cancers. No wonder our bodies without exception harbour scores of chemical poisons, even in new born babies. Making peace with the planet means relying more and more on environmentally friendly, natural, organic foods, of which the best are the home-grown variety, produce grown without pesticides and commercial fertilizer. God created a perfectly balanced system which we disturb at our own peril.
I know it is not easy. In my garden I also grow potatoes. Every day I have to go through my plants to pick off the Colorado beetle larvae, or they will eat my plants and reduce the yield. Nature knows best, something we have to re-learn in our technological society. Prayer is an important part also when growing food.
(4) There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Commoner writes that a free lunch, the air and water we use, is really a debt. A debt is an acknowledged but unmet cost. Climate change is a debt on all of humanity, especially on future generations. Nuclear power burdens our grandchildren and their grandchildren with the obligation to safeguard the spent fuel for ever. Our budget deficits will cost them enormous sums in untold trillions. Remember this when praying The Lord’s Prayer with the line “Forgive us our Debts”: our environmental debts also are beyond calculation.
We all have the impossible challenge to make peace with the planet which we can only do when we have made peace with our Maker who created heaven and earth and will never abandon the works of his hands. We need never despair because a new creation is on the way, thanks to Christ, the Son of Man, humanity personified.
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Next week some more on this: the possible religious implications.