April 15 2023
IS HALF A TRUTH, A LIE?
All writing is biographical. So…..
In my younger years I sat twice through church-services often lasting close to 2 hours. Then, in those pre-TV days, as a teenager, after the evening customary Catechism sermon, I would attend a young men’s meeting, discussing topics of interest from a biblical perspective, kindling a life-long interest in matters Christian, especially education and politics.
Today this sounds so old-fashioned and even odd. Yet it gave me a critical and well-founded opinion on church and Christianity.
A bit more background.
In the Netherlands, before and during the war 1940-45, thanks to such influential leaders as Abraham Kuyper, politics and education became the focus of Christian thinking, resulting in Christian schools from kindergarten to university, first entirely financed by parents.
My grandparents, born in the 1870’s, sacrificed a portion of their meagre money to make this possible. Thanks to consistent political action, the Dutch government relented and paid for confession-based schooling, starting in the early 1920’s.
In Canada.
I came to Canada in 1951, married my fiancée in 1953, and our first child was born in 1954, with 5 more to follow (one died shortly after birth). They all went to parent-financed Christian schools, just as my grandparents did. Fortunately, from 1952 till today, thanks to carbon-fuels, increasing industrialization engendered ever greater affluence, making the financing of private Christian education possible.
And the churches?
In the late 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to Union Theological Seminary looking for a “cloud of witnesses.” What he found instead disturbed, angered, and perplexed him. “There is no theology here,” he wrote to a German colleague: “They preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed… namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life.”
Bonhoeffer did for American Protestantism what Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, did a century prior in his cultural and political analysis of the USA. What Bonhoeffer discovered was, if possible, more significant than the observations of the French aristocrat: Protestantism in America was a “Protestantism without Reformation.”
“Protestantism without Reformation”.
Pope Francis is a pious and sincere person, who tries to carefully reform his church, but is imprisoned by tradition, a power equally important as the Bible. The same is true for Protestant churches. Their basic message is: God saves our souls and then we go to Heaven.
But that is a half-truth, which constitutes a lie.
Jesus came to save us as total persons: He taught us how to live in the cosmos which he created and called good SEVEN times. John 3: 16 tells us that, ”God so loved the cosmos, that he sacrificed his Son to buy it back from the Satan”. Believing THAT gives us eternal life, right here on earth.
Revelation 11: 18 is quite explicit. We now experience God’s wrath, evident in the revenge of creation, which God has so structured that harming it carries its own punishment. That text tells us that God will “destroy the destroyers of the earth”, and, I believe, will “reward those who fear God’s name”, those who see Creation as holy, evident from Psalm 24: “The Earth is the Lord’s and all it contains: the trees, the seas, all creatures great and small.”
Psalm 146:7 has words that have long been a mystery to me: “He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The LORD sets prisoners free”, especially that final phrase, “He sets prisoners free.”
I believe that we, in the wealthy West, are prisoners, both of the food system and of carbon energy. For the sake of shelf-life, food is super-refined, robbing it of much of its essential nutrition. Our North American cities, with its suburban layout, can never have a functioning mass transit, so their inhabitants have become slaves to carbon energy.
IS HALF A TRUTH, A LIE?
Often in my long business career people asked me whether I was born again, meaning that Jesus was my Lord and Savior. I simply said yes, but my answer implied Romans 1: 20:
“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse”.
Salvation includes creation which is God’s Direct and Primary Word, while the Scriptures are God’s Secondary and Indirect Word. Creation is eternal: the Bible is temporary.
“Brother/Sister are you saved?”, is an all- inclusive affair. I believe that God in his mercy will admit to his holy eternal creation those who by their lives have shown it to be of divine origin, expanding the concept of salvation, to include the redemption of the person and of creation: you can’t have one without the other.