JULY 3 2016.
AN APPROACH MORE DIFFERENT.
On July 4 1951 my younger brother and I entered Canada in Fort Erie, Ontario, on the train from New York City where we had landed early that day having sailed on the luxury liner Veendam from Rotterdam, a 10 day journey.
Today, exactly 65 years later, we both have been success stories, both looking back upon decades of service to the communities we found ourselves in and both humbly seeing our children and grandchildren all doing extremely well. Amazing, simply astounding.
Yes, my blog is back on a new computer. The breakdown of my old one gave me an excuse to stop writing for a while. During these four weeks I used my fingers, not to type but to pull weeds, and used my knees not to hold my laptop but to crawl in the dirt and used my hands to push my electric – sun-powered – lawnmower and rototiller. Ah, my garden this year: practically no mosquitoes, few potato bugs, lots of heat and regular rain! Can’t wait to eat my beets and cabbages and potatoes and beans. Nothing better than home-grown stuff!
So why do I pick up this blog-business again?
Well, as a kid I always wanted to become a missionary in what was then the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. That sort of desire is still in me, and since the only world-wide medium is the Internet, that’s where I see my calling. This may sound, and perhaps is presumptuous, but I feel that I have a perspective on matters religious that is different, different from what the churches teach and different from the generally accepted wisdom of the world, but that’s how I feel.
Here’s what I did in my 4 weeks of computer drought. Besides weeding I did a lot of reading. I reread Paul Kennedy’s PREPARING FOR THE 21ST CENTURY. I also went back to my Bonhoeffer’s books and more carefully studied the writings of J.H. Bavinck.
Paul Kennedy – a Yale history professor – wrote that book in 1989. He was correct on Climate Change but entirely missed Japan’s stagnation and the rise of China. Generally his pessimistic view has been born out.
Bavinck taught me a new word: Entgötterung. It contains the word “Gott” which is German for God. The “Ent” there means ‘deprived of’, so the German expression –and the Germans have created a lot of words that are untranslatable – means ‘living as if God does not exist”. In that connection T. S. Eliot got it right when he said that, “Men have left God not for other gods but for no God, and this has never happened before.”
I rediscovered that Bavinck wrote that the created Word is as important as the written Word, the Scriptures. That was more than 50 years ago, as he died in 1965. Now the cries of creation have become louder and louder, clamoring for greater emphasis on the created Word. Can the church, that old wineskin, absorb and preach this new wine, this new message of the growing importance and suffering of creation? Can the church shift from the three S’s: singing, sermons, and supplication, its business model for 2000 years, and give a more than prominent place to creation loving, God’s primary Word?
Let’s face it: God is gone.
God is barred from public intercourse. Religious consciousness has practically disappeared. For almost everybody God is dead. He has become the great irrelevant. The only mention of God is in the now so popular OMG – Oh My God. Whenever I hear that now so current expression I am inclined to ask: “Who and where is that God of yours?”, but I am afraid that I won’t get a reply.
Look at today.
There is no doubt that a world without God is a frightening world. The political system is not working: whoever you vote for, the same people win, the ones who control the money. Political funding ensures that parties have to listen to the rustle of notes before the bustle of votes, a line George Monbiot gave me. These problems are compounded by electoral systems that ensure most votes don’t count. This is why a referendum – as in Britain – is almost the only means by which people can be heard. Welcome to BREXIT and as in all revolutions – including the TRUMP mania – more confusion is guaranteed.
Our culture is no longer working. Look what’s happening everywhere: all that is left is a globalized shopping culture. Now that the SHOP TILL YOU DROP attitude has ceased to dominate it is torpedoing an economy that depends on it. We are sunk.
So what must we do? What must CHRISTIANS do?
I mentioned that both my brother and I look back upon decades of service to the communities we found ourselves in. As Dutch immigrants from a strict Reformed background we both were soon involved in what we then called KINGDOM BUILDING. My brother became a minister in the Christian Reformed Church, the favorite destination of Dutch immigrants, and I within a year was self-employed, giving me the freedom to sit on boards of various organizations, including church councils, helping to build schools, colleges, universities. We were instrumental in the building of a full range of Christian educational institutions, also branching out in such fields such as publications, mental health, labor, you name it.
What I suspect now is that we – the Dutch immigrants – have identified ourselves too much with these institutions: Look Lord what we have done! We have arrived!
But we never arrive, not until the Lord returns.
I also read a long article in a Christian College periodical by a man whose opinion I value, also because we have a first name in common “Egbert” and are both from the North of the Netherlands.
I am referring to Egbert Schuurman, P. Eng, Ph.D., a professor emeritus of Reformational Philosophy at several state universities in the Netherlands. His presentation had as aim to help Christians in politics to acquire a better vision in a rapidly changing culture. The speech was given in 2011, thus 5 years ago, and, I believe, it already is out-of-date in that short time.
Let me mention the positives. Schuurman is a great proponent of the Kingdom idea, something I also have stressed repeatedly. He categorically states that “The Kingdom of Christ is not of this world. But even as creation sighs and groans, Christ’s Kingdom will triumph!” In tune with both J. H. Bavinck and Bonhoeffer he states the “Christ is the meaning of history……Christ Kingdom will only come in its fullness beyond the horizon of earthly time.” I fully agree.
Yes, we have not, we can never build, THE KINGDOM. That is Christ’s doing.
However, in these five short years since he wrote this article, history has accelerated beyond anything previously. In my long life I have seen culture go from the horse and buggy stage to supersonic flight, from small organic farming to large destructive agricultural practices, totally ignoring the holiness of creation.
I agree with the other Egbert that: “The Reformation- in 1517 – did so to the glory of God, the Renaissance for the glory of man. In the eighteenth century the movement of the Enlightenment linked up with the latter, radicalizing and popularizing it.” ….”With the further radicalization of the Enlightenment in our own day, however, we seem to have gotten stuck.”
We are stuck.
There’s where we are now: we are stuck, witness Brexit, witness the rise of Trump. When people feel their world is vanishing, they are an easy prey for magical thinking and demagogues who blame immigrants. Fact is that people are feeling deeply anxious. It’s the story of our time: the pace of change in technology, globalization and climate have started to outrun the ability of our political systems to build the social, educational, community, workplace and political innovations needed for many citizens to keep up. We have globalized trade and manufacturing, and we have introduced robots and artificial intelligence systems. It’s left a lot of people dizzy and dislocated.
Especially in Climate Change the heat is on, setting the stage for massive world-wide food shortages. Already in China pollution from factory farms has wrought havoc in the air and water, so China has begun a push away from a meat-centered diet to a return to small-scale, organic farming and a switch to vegetarian diets, but the trouble is that a seven billion plus world population can only survive on an oil-based, factory-farmed meal ticket, insuring the death of creation.
Schuurman is also right when he writes that “The scientific-technical domination of the entire world, reinforced by one-sided economic development not only restricts humans in their freedom but threatens to deplete natural resources, pollute the environment, and destroys nature.”
So what does he see as the solution?
Schuurman consistently points to the Kingdom and its coming, which should be the aim of all Christians, especially for politicians of which he was one, having been a senator in the Dutch
parliament for 28 years.
However……………….
I disagree when he writes that ”God does not allow humans in their conceitedness to disrupt everything to the bitter end….Sometimes disasters can put humans back on track.”
That’s not how I read Revelation when the rule of the Antichrist will encompass the entire world. Climate Change, a direct result of technology, affects everybody and everything. It is simply too late to mend the current situation.
HERE’S WHERE I AM DIFFERENT.
For one thing I live in the country, where I use some mechanical tools – all solar powered – to aid in my growing a substantial portion of what we eat. People in the city cannot function without technology, yet, in the final analysis all technology depends on highly polluting fossil fuels, even the manufacture of solar panels and windmills totally relies on these sinful substances.
I also missed in Schuurman’s essay the mention of the HOLINESS OF CREATION, which I call God’s primary word.
Jesus, in his prayer, as recorded in John 17, especially asks his father to empower his followers who, with him gone to heaven, are on their own in an evil world, because, as 1 John 5: 19 indicates “We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.” That evil is now universal.
Since Schuurman’s presentation in 2011 a lot has changed. In my opinion, in view of that “Entgötterung” symptom, people no longer are able to grasp what Christianity is all about, having acquired a completely different mindset. Also, by and large, the churches no longer preach or understand the Kingdom Message, basically making them obsolete. No wonder people are voting with their feet.
So what do I suggest?
Just as the Old Testament writings were basically organized during the Great Exile in the 6th Century before Christ when some 12,000 of the Israel elite were transported to Babylon, and there in isolation were able to organize what we now know as the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament, so now too we must go into some sort of exile from the world to prepare for the New Creation. A couple of Scripture passages point to that: Jeremiah 51: 45 and especially Revelation 18: 4. Both texts urge us to abandon our sinful, godforsaken society “so that we will not share in her sins.”
Ouch. That hurts. Fact is that we all, Christian and non-Christian, in these last days, depend for our comfort in life and death on the energy derived from fossil-fuels. We now see this result in the global cancer that affects the climate everywhere, where even the most pessimistic predictions prove far too optimistic.
Perhaps my wife and I, living amidst an abundance of trees, always aware how pests and weeds daily remind us of the curse the occupants of the Garden of Eden brought on us, has given us a taste for a different eternity, more in line with the Paradise expectations.
Does that make me DIFFERENT? Is my notion that we go into some voluntary exile really something that needs to be explored? Or is it an escape from a collapsing economy?
My suggestion does mean a drastic departure from a society that is rapidly becoming impossible to maintain and has largely abandoned any notion about God and the Coming of the Kingdom, the promised New Creation.