JULY 31 12016
B & B and another B
Bombast & Baloney? Bed & Breakfast? Bach & Beethoven?
Yes, the B & B stands for two people whose names start with “B”: not Bach and the other guy, but Bonhoeffer, Dietrich and Bavinck, Johan Herman.
Both Bonhoeffer and Bavinck have given me new insights which I want to share with you because we live in an age of acrimonious agitation and obdurate obfuscation, making it difficult for people to find the TRUTH.
Fact is that we all must rely on others to find out what is really important in this day, where confusion is so common and where even those in authority in state and church, simply do not know where to go and what to do. That’s the problem with the approaching END TIMES, where the status quo has expired and the terrible new has not yet come.
I trust these men. They speak eternal truths, are literally down to earth and have the right perspective for the future.
The lives of these two “Bs” overlapped: Bavinck was born in 1895 in the Netherlands and died there in 1964. Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 in East Germany, now Poland, but lived most of his life in Berlin. He was hanged by the Nazi Regime in 1945 after about a year in prison.
They did not know of each other, yet their thoughts on Christianity, their views on the Kingdom and the earth, their ideas on eternity were strikingly similar.
Why have these two persons played such an important role for me? What’s so significant that they shaped my life?
They made me feel fully human. They gave me a view of eternity that moved me to tears. They gave me back my personhood. That was necessary because I was raised in a very ‘heaven-oriented’ family and church. Both men taught me not to look up, but to stay firmly with my feet on the ground.
Bonhoeffer writes that “The Kingdom of God is a purely eschatological concept.”
What does that mean? This means that the Kingdom of God will come after the ‘eschaton’, when this world has run its course, when we humans have almost succeeded in destroying this planet, and Christ returns and brings with him The Kingdom, the New Creation.
Here’s something that brings tears to my eyes. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that “It is only out of the future (from the perspective of the coming of the Kingdom) that the present can be lived…We are children of the future.” In other words: “We don’t belong to the world dominated by evil (1 John 5: 19).”
Bonhoeffer was much younger than J. H. Bavinck when he made his most significant statements. I think that he realized that his life would be cut short. Also he was not an official in the church, so he could be – and was – much more radical. He said: “we have fallen into secularism, and by secularism I mean pious, Christian secularism. Not the godlessness of atheism or cultural bolshevism, but the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth…. This pious secularism also makes it possible to preach and to say nice things…..The function of the church is to witness to the power of God in the new creation. …. Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from the world to other worlds beyond; rather he gives us back to the earth as its loyal children”. That is truly revolutionary.
When Bonhoeffer wrote this he was in his twenties. By that time he had a double doctorate. When World War II broke out – in 1939 – he was 33, was in the USA and was offered a position of professor there, but he decided to return to Germany, fully well knowing that, because he was fiercely against Hitler, he probably would not survive.
J.H. Bavinck was a churchman, an ordained minister, a professor specializing in missions. As such he worked in Indonesia, then a Dutch colony, known as the Dutch East Indies and later taught at the Amsterdam Free University.
Bavinck is more explicit when he describes how the KINGDOM will be when it comes. He writes: “In the first place we must realize that God’s Kingdom has a cosmic character, which means that it comprises the entire world as we have come to know it. Not only are we humans part of that Kingdom, but it also includes the worlds of animals and plants. Yes, even the angels are part of this wider context: they too have a place in the harmonious totality of God’s Kingdom.
“This implies that all parts of the world are attuned to each other. Nowhere is there a false note, a dis¬so¬nant that disturbs the unity, as everything fits harmoniously into the greater scheme of the totality. This applies both to each individual specimen but equally to the various circles or spheres found in creation. The celestial bodies follow their orderly tra¬jectories and do so according to God’s royal will, obeying his voice. And so the stars in their courses sound a melodious note in the great concert in which all creatures participate. The mountains rise up high above the water-saturated earth, their proud summits piercing the clouds; yet even these mountains are nothing but servants of Him who has planted and secured them by his power. On every page the Bible makes plain that the meaning of creation resides only in the one overarching motif: the motif of God’s Kingdom. That is why Scripture and Creation are never at odds: they always form a unity where the one reinforces the other.”
Yes, that resounds with me. Perfection in a perfect world is what awaits us in eternity. It seems to me that in the short spell we live under the regime of evil (1 John 5: 19 is unambiguous there: “the whole world is under the control of the evil one”) maybe 90 years if we live carefully, makes our sinful life now the proving ground for the New Creation.
Both these men have identical views on the Kingdom which is to come, simply following Jesus’ command “Seek first the Kingdom”, so prominent in Jesus’ teaching and so missing in the church.
What other similarities are there? They both have identical views on the earth.
Bonhoeffer first.
The direct quote I found in his essay DEIN REICH KOMME, Your Kingdom Come. There he writes: “Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from this world to other world beyond (no heaven destination for him, I might add); rather he gives us back to the earth as his loyal children.”
The first book published by Bonhoeffer was a commentary on Genesis 1-3, not surprisingly called CREATION AND FALL. The book actually was a series of lectures at the university where he taught at the tender age of 25. There he elaborates on the matter of THE EARTH. Here are some quotes.
“Technology is the power with which the earth grips people and subdues them. The earth is, therefore, no longer OUR earth (The automobile is a good example), and thus we become strangers to the earth………Without God, without our brother and sister, we lose the earth….. God, brother and sister and the earth belong together”
This leads me to conclude that
BLESSED ARE THEY WHO HAVE LIVED THAT WAY BEFORE THEY DIE: THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.
Why? Says Bonhoeffer: “I completely belong to this world. It bears me, it nurtures me, it holds me. The soil and the animals are the world in which I live, without which I cease to be.”
Bavinck uses almost the exact words in his book BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END, a Radical Kingdom Vision. Noting that ‘hanging’, as on the cross, is such a cursed matter as it separates us from the earth, he writes: “Contact with the earth is an essential element of life. We are taken from the earth, we belong to the earth, and we live through the earth. Our bond with the earth is so strong that we cannot for a moment imagine existing apart from the earth, and hanging (as Jesus did) breaks the contact with the earth.”
Further elaborating on the significance of the EARTH he writes: “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 some-thing of the fact that humans are earth-bound. A human being, ADAM, belongs to ADAMAH, the life bearing earth. With every sinew of his exis-tence he is tied to the earth, which bears him and feeds him.”
Bavinck further explains what the KINGDOM means when he writes:
“The nature of the Kingdom of God was not intended to be static but dynamic. It was not destined to continue for ever and ever in the same shape and form. On the contrary, from its very inception the Kingdom contained an incentive to develop, perfect and unfold all its potentials and powers contained in it. This means that from its very beginning the concept of history was entailed in the idea of the Kingdom. When we say Kingdom we say history. The total reality of the Kingdom could only become manifest in history. From the very first day of creation the Kingdom had the full range of powerful options. It contained possibilities that would require a slow process to come to full fruition. The entire process, however, was subject to God’s will.”
So what does the NORTH AMERICAN CHURCH teach about these two essential elements, KINGDOM and EARTH?
For this I rely on another “B”, the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Dr. Harold Bloom, who calls himself an agnostic Jew.
He writes that in North American churches Gnosticism rules. The word comes from the Greek word ‘gnosis’ which means “knowledge”. Harold Bloom, America’s foremost literary critic in his book THE AMERICAN RELIGION claims “The United States of America is a religion-mad and religion-soaked country. We think we are Christian. But we are not. The American Religion is post-Christian, despite its protestations, and even in that it has begun to abandon Protestant modes of thought and feeling.”
Bloom argues in his book that the American Religion masks itself as Protestant Christianity, yet has ceased to be Christian.
Dr. Bloom laments: “we are, alas, the most religious of countries, and finally only varieties of the American Religion will flourish among us, whether its devotees call it Mormonism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, or what-ever-you-will. And the American Religion, for its two centuries of existence, seems to me irretrievably Gnostic. It is a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the-self, and the knowledge (gnosis) leads to freedom, a dangerous and doom-eager freedom, from nature, time, history, and community.”
Dr. Bloom coined a new word. Where the word EVANGELICAL has its root in the Greek word EU-ANGELOS, the Good Message, he calls THE AMERICAN RELIGION “KAK-ANGELOS, THE BAD NEWS”.
That BAD NEWS has spawned The Late, Great Planet Earth.
THE LATE, GREAT PLANET EARTH is another good example of American religious thinking. The book outsold the Bible there. Dualistic America sees the earth, God’s pride and joy, as evil. No wonder Republican politicians, the Christian people’s representatives, have no regard for the environment and pursue warlike policies, anything that will destroy the earth and bring on Armageddon. The churches there are consumed by a premillennial eschatology. They read in the Bible that the Rapture will take place when all believers will be taken up into heaven before the great tribulation and Christ Second Coming, to establish a Thousand Year Kingdom on Earth.
The word “RAPTURE” comes from the Latin verb ‘RAPIO’ which means ‘to seize in order to keep’. (Rapio, rapere, rapui= I have seized, raptum= I have been seized). Our word ‘RAPE’ has the same root. How peculiarly appropriate that RAPE and RAPTURE has a common root. Supposedly ‘rapture’ means that God will seize people in order to keep them in his kingdom.” Nothing is further from the TRUTH.
Because we have failed to see the EARTH as God’s earth, our eternal dwelling place, now and in eternity, we are on the brink of extinction. It is generally acknowledged that humanity is entering a new, dangerous and ultimately fatal condition. It is no longer a matter of one civilization falling, to be replaced by another, such as happened when Europe arose after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Now all civilizations are endangered and none can survive as autonomous, independent entities as in the past. It is in this sense that we are now moving to a historical stage that is beyond civilization.
The sad thing for many and at the same time the exhilarating TRUTH for others is that THE KINGDOM IS AT HAND. Both Bonhoeffer and Bavinck have prepared us for this situation.