November 17 2013
It is time for the church to change its focus.
What is the church’s focus now?
I have been a faithful church goer for about 80 years. That qualifies me to discuss the church and its focus, which, in my experience has always been the Bible, the Scriptures, the Written Word. All sermons and songs were and still are centered on the Book of Books.
When I was young the church was at the centre of life: twice to church on Sunday, youth meetings, tremendous devotion and loyalty, especially during the war in the Netherlands 1940-45 when the church also was the social centre.
After the war, after study, after a compulsory spell in the Dutch Army, I immigrated to Canada in 1951, where the same focus prevailed, with again the church being an important part of life, on par with getting married, establishing a family and starting a business. Quite soon Christian education became part of the package: being member of boards and committees both on the local and provincial level, also involved in other Christian endeavours to the point where my life seemed to revolve around these matters. The timeframe here was about from 1957 till 1965, the year I became an elder and was, for the first time, directly involved in the church as an organization. Somehow I didn’t serve out my three year term. Let me say that ever since then I have seen the church in a different light: a very human institution. Pierre Berton, not a churchgoer, was, in 1966, commissioned by the United Church in Canada to take a look at the church. His assessment was captured in the title of his book: The Comfortable Pew. Comfortable and comfort can be poles apart. The church is in the comfort business: the paradox is that this should make people uncomfortable, especially now.
The times have changed.
We no longer live in comfortable times. Jacques Ellul, professor of law in Bordeaux, France, in his book Hope in Time of Abandonment, wrote in the Preface that his book has to be seen in the light of “The decisive importance of the Promise, the approach of the Second Coming, the Eschaton which comes (his emphasis)”. The title of the French original was L’Espérance Oubliée, which means The Forgotten Hope. The English version gave a different emphasis: hope, unlike the original French version. Having Abandonment in the title reflects Ellul’s belief that God has turned his back on us and is silent. Ellul wrote: “It is my belief that we have entered upon an age of abandonment that God has turned away from us and is leaving us to our fate”. He adds that this does not mean that religion is gone: “Never have people believed as much, everything and nothing…… the modern world is loaded with religion…. The most can be said that man has completely desacralized the natural environment but has transferred all the sacred to the cultural and the social (and, I may add, the economical.)”
He is not alone in this. Richard Elliott Friedman, Professor of Hebrew in California, wrote in his The Hidden Face of God, that the phrase “God hides his face” occurs over thirty times in the Hebrew Bible. He singles out Deut. 32: 20: “I shall hide my face from them; I shall see what their end will be.” With these words God gave humanity the opportunity to go on their own, to live without God, God’s reasoning being that if they are so wise, if they think that they have grown up and can fend for themselves, I will give them a free hand.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer mentions this also when he wrote that “So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him.” (Letters from Prison.)
And that is exactly where we are as the year 2013 is coming to a close.
A new necessary phase
I believe we now are in a new phase in the history of humanity in which we must prepare for the ‘age to come’, the age of ‘The Kingdom’, when we are indeed totally on our own. Adam and Eve were far too naïve. Next time, when the new Paradise appears, God wants experienced people to steer creation, people who learned by trial and error to live holistically.
As a society we live totally without God. True God is still real on a personal basis – there’s where the church comes in – but politically, economically, socially, we live under a Satanic rule. J. H. Bavinck, in his forthcoming book The Kingdom, writes that “We are now faced with a development in creation that we cannot understand and control, but of which we daily experience its terrifying consequences. We now see God’s work of art embroiled in the power of demons. Satanic forces have thrown themselves onto nature, onto us humans, onto the entire radiant creation.” He later sets out to describe the Kingdom, which is to come in the New Creation and will encompass the totality of cosmos, from the most basic amoeba to the highest form of development, the human race.
That now Satan is in charge is beyond dispute. The horrible hurricane that hit the Philippines is just one of the many signs that we have unleashed satanic forces.
This week there is another Environmental conference going. Reports the New York Times: “The typhoon that struck the Philippines produced an outpouring of emotion on Monday at United Nations talks on a global climate treaty in Warsaw, where delegates were quick to suggest that a warming planet had turned the storm into a lethal monster.”
I was at U.N. environmental conference # 8 in the year 2000 in The Hague, the Netherlands. There, 13 years ago, nothing was accomplished. Again nothing concrete will emerge in Warsaw either, because on each nation’s agenda Economic Growth is still the priority. We are ‘fiddling as Rome Burns” as the expression goes.
As usual, the world is ahead of the church.
The world only has ‘the world’. The general belief in the church is that people go to heaven, a heresy Satan has successfully sold to the church. I believe that’s why the church is at a dead end, and loses members left and right. That eternal life will be lived on this our very own earth, is a foreign concept to almost the entire faith spectrum, from Islam to Judaism to Christianity. It’s different for the secular world out there who only have our planet.
The world is waking up to the future, if any. Here is what Robert Jensen, full professor of Journalism in Austin Texas writes: “Individually and collectively, we have failed to create just societies or a sustainable human presence on the planet. …My conclusion: There is no way magically to solve the fundamental problems that result from too many people consuming too much and producing too much waste, under conditions of unconscionable inequality in wealth and power.” He continues: “When we reflect on our history as a species and the nature of the systems that govern our lives today, the sensible conclusion is that the steps we need to take won’t be taken, at least not in the time frame available for meaningful change. This is reality, and sensible planning should be reality-based.”
He writes: “Hope is for the lazy. Now is not the time for hope. Let’s put hope aside and get to the real work of our understanding our historical moment so that our actions are grounded in reality. My thesis: Our task today is not to scurry around trying to hold onto the world as we know it, but to focus on how we can hold onto our humanity as we enter a distinctly different era of the human presence on the planet, an era that will challenge our resolve and reserves. Call it collapse or the apocalypse or the Age of Aquarius—whatever the name, it will not look like anything we have known. The future will be defined by the continuing drawdown of the ecological capital of the planet well beyond replacement levels and rising levels of toxicity, with the resulting social conflict exacerbated by rapid climate destabilization in ways we cannot predict specifically but that will be destructive to human well-being, perhaps even to human survival.”
Dr. Jensen goes where no churches I know go. He says: “Today our moral challenge is how to live on a planet of 4 billion, 3 billion, 2 billion, maybe less. How are we going to understand and experience ourselves as human beings— as moral beings, the kind of creatures we’ve always claimed to be—in the midst a long-term human die-off for which there is no precedent? What will it mean to be human when we know that around the world, maybe even down the block, other human beings—creatures exactly the same as us—are dying in large numbers not because of something outside human control, but instead because of things we humans chose to do and keep choosing, keep doing?”
Of course the Bible in Revelation strongly hints at major disasters to come. This professor from Texas again: “If you think this is too extreme, alarmist, hysterical, then tell a different story of the future, one that doesn’t depend on magic, one that doesn’t include some version of, ‘We will invent solar panels that give us endless clean energy,’ or ‘We will find ways to grow even more food on even less soil with declining natural fertility,’ or perhaps, ‘We will invent a perpetual motion machine.’ If I’m wrong, explain to me where I’m wrong.”
Environmentally and economically we are in a free-fall. Says Jensen: “That brings to mind the old joke about the fellow who jumps off a 100 story building and, when asked how things are going 90 floors down, says, ‘Great so far.’ Advanced technology based on abundant and cheap supplies of concentrated energy has taken us a long way on a curious ride, but there is no guarantee that advanced technology can solve problems in the future, especially when the most easily accessible sources of that concentrated energy are dwindling and the life-threatening consequences of burning all that fuel are now unavoidable. To dismiss these issues because people allegedly don’t like disaster messages is akin to telling people in the path of a tornado to ignore the weather forecast because disaster messages are a turnoff.”
The situation is serious, so serious that we need a new focus.
Christians, supposedly, are the only ones who have the answers. The world is out of options. Dr. Jensen again: “When we come to terms with these challenges—when we face up to the fact that the human species now faces problems that likely have no solutions, at least no solutions that allow us to continue living as we have —then we will work at accomplishing whatever we can, where we live, in the time available to us.”
Remember: Our future is here, that’s why God wants experienced, holistic folk in the new world to come. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:48, tells us to be ‘perfect’. Actually he didn’t say that. He said be ‘teleios’ which means ‘holistic’, always keeping the ‘telos’ in mind, the end result, because we are destined for eternity, the ultimate holistic society. In these last days when all things are falling apart, the message has to change, away from a fictive heaven as our destination, away from our capitalist ‘growth at all cost’ approach, an economic system that magnifies human greed and encourages short-term thinking, while pretending there are no physical limits on human consumption, a true death cult.
“Collapse” is in the cards. It’s time to say that our comfort means not to preach escape to heaven, but to proclaim the ultimate (dis)comfort, that our world’s expiry date is close, and a (re)newed world is on the way. The church is or should be in the business to prepare the faithful for the Kingdom to come: God made no junk and will not junk what he has made.
Part of that message is to grieve for degrading God’s earth to junk in line with Jeremiah: “My grief is beyond healing, my heart is sick within me” (Jer. 8:18)… “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved” (Jer. 8:21). He also prophesied that Jerusalem would fall, the temple be destroyed, the king and priests be exiled. Nobody heeded his call. History will simply repeat itself.
The sad truth is that the church will not change and people will not hear the Kingdom message. People will not hear that we have strayed too far, that there is no way to return to the right relation within the systems in which we live. I know there are those whose heart is sick and whose grieving for creation is deep. When we feel that inner pain then this means we have confronted the truth about our fallen world. Then we are ready to assume our real humanity.
Ellul gave his book the title L’Espérance Oubliée, The Forgotten Hope. The Church, by and large has forgotten the hope, the hope of the Coming Kingdom. Ellul starts his book by mentioning the Eschaton, the last days just before the Kingdom is to come. We live in that period. His last line is Maranatha: Lord come quickly.