July 1 2023
I am worried.
‘Sinning against creation is sinning against God’.
An Iowa meteorologist is resigning from his television station because he developed post-traumatic stress disorder after threats over his climate change coverage.
Jeremiah 26 has a similar story. This great prophet experienced an identical treatment as the weatherman: Jeremiah told the religious elite that their actions carried consequences: Both told the truth, and both received death threats. Here’s the biblical version: But as soon as Jeremiah finished telling all the people everything the Lord had commanded him to say, the priests, the prophets and all the people seized him and said, “You must die!
I too, tell an unpopular truth. Look at Matthews 24:29 and Acts 2:20: “The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.” That is happening now, July 2023, as the ash and smoke of forest fires lethally fills our lungs: with 4 months of burning to go!
Or is it too late?
In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, humans everywhere believe there is solution to the mess we are in, and, perhaps there is, if we set the clock back 150 years, dismantle the automobile structure, return to local food production, mow the grass with a scythe, milk cows by hand, get light from candles, cook with wood, and heat with woodstoves, all theoretically possible, but practically impossible.
Believe me: We have gone too far. Blame ‘Religion’.
Blame ‘religion’. Too simplistic? No. Today the reigning religion is Gnosticism, evident in our disdain for the earth and everything material, a lifestyle to which we are so devoted that we are blind to the truth, the unpopular truth, so well described throughout the Scriptures: Jesus died to renew creation! The saving of souls only is the old-time religion of Gnosticism.
The new time religion is captured in John 3: 16: “God so loved the cosmos”, a truth the church has never fully endorsed and implemented. The ‘cosmos’ indicates ‘all of creation’, everything fashioned by God’s hand. Yes, blame the American Religion, Gnostic to the core.
Gnostic?
My NIV Study Bible, introducing John’s letters, describes Gnosticism as the most dangerous heresy. It lists these points:
Body, any matter, is evil; Creation is evil; God is spirit, and thus good.
Salvation is escape from the body to heaven, achieved through special knowledge-gnosis.
Christ’s true humanity is denied.
Yes, Creation is seen as evil.
Since creation is evil, Climate Change is welcomed and encouraged: the sooner the earth vanishes, the better says Hal Lindsey’s in The Late Great Planet Earth: heaven is our destination!
All churches have been affected by this heresy. All churches have spires, pointing to heaven.
Matthew 24, depicting today, mentions the concept of Abomination: “When you see standing in ‘the holy place’ (pointing to God’s creation/cosmos), the ‘abomination’ that causes desolation – let the reader understand”. It simply points to climatic pollution. The phrase, ‘let the reader understand’ means that only when it happens, can we grasp the tenor of the text.
That brings me back to that weatherman in Iowa, a very religious state: a very Republican state: They go to church. In the USA church is synonymous with ‘religion’. Harold Bloom, that great American professor of humanities at Yale, and English at New York University, and translator of the Hebrew Bible, wrote The American Religion, with as subtitle, The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. His analysis is that American Christianity has ceased to be ‘Christian’, has succumbed to ‘Gnosticism’, affirmed by Bonhoeffer decades earlier.
Bonhoeffer visited the USA twice. After his second visit he noted that “American Christianity was pragmatic, morally courageous, oriented toward social activism, and individualistic but was also entirely theologically unmoored”. Bonhoeffer found that American theologians placed little emphasis on the fundamental theological questions: the Crucifixion, the resurrection, salvation, grace, and redemption. “There is no theology here,” he wrote in a letter to a friend.
In his essay “Protestantism without Reformation,” Bonhoeffer offered an explanation for this situation. “American and continental Protestantism developed differently. While European Protestantism emerged from a revolt against the established religion, Catholicism, American religious communities were the product of the pre-Reformational English tradition of dissent launched by John Wycliffe, a 14th-century priest who challenged certain church teachings. That was at the time when the Roman Catholic Church reigned supreme.
What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one, which makes me to conclude that ‘Sinning against creation is sinning against God’.
This means that: “Human salvation and planetary salvation go hand in hand”, and, as we are now experiencing: “Crimes against creation carry their own punishment.”
I am worried. Does this mean the end? Are we ready?