Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

How should we then live? Part 11

Is the demise of Christianity a good thing?

Christianity has deep Jewish roots. In Jewry the Sabbath was diligently kept from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, infants were circumcised on the 8^th day and the strict Mosaic diet prescribed in the books of Moses was faithfully adhered to.

That all ended when Jesus died on the cross. At that moment the curtain of the Jerusalem temple was torn in two from top to bottom (Mat. 27: 51), signifying that a new phase in worship had begun: suddenly temple worship, the Old Testament laws, the Jewish religion based on the books of Moses, became outdated.

Drastic ceremonial changes took place after Pentecost with the visible appearance of the Holy Spirit: instead of worshiping on the Sabbath, the last day of the week, the new converts made Sunday, the first day of the week their focus of celebration, in memory of Jesus Christ rising from the grave on the first day of the week. The act of circumcision was abolished and replaced with the symbolic act of baptism, signifying the cleansing of sin, and temple worship was abandoned to be replaced by the simple and more inclusive act of prayer and community gatherings in peoples’ houses.

For the Jesus’ followers this change from the Hebrew religion, with the temple at its centre, with priests and high priests, with the sacrifice of animals, with the obligatory temple tax, with the stated religious festivals, was total.

It took a while to enact these new measures. Conservative Peter was a reluctant convert: it required a special intervention by the Lord to convince him. And that is OK. Traditions are important, and drastic changes take time. When one of our daughters lived in Beverly Hills, my wife and I once went to a service in a Messianic synagogue there, where all the old-time Jewish rituals were observed, including the required yarmulke, but where the sermon was on Corinthians: quite impressive, actually.

The most decisive phase yet.

Now we are at another phase: the final phase in my opinion, even more radical. Jesus himself hinted at that, I believe. We usually portray Jesus as the kind shepherd figure, a person to whom children flocked and women were attracted. There also is much more controversial side to him: he was accused of being a glutton and drunkard, was scorned for being homeless, celibate, disdainful of kinsfolk, a friend of outcasts, without fear for his own safety, careless of Jewish purity regulations, critical of authority, a scourge of the rich and powerful. Based on that expect the unusual from him.

So when – as recorded in John 4: 15 – Jesus in his typical unconventional manner, talked to a promiscuous woman in Samaria of all places, a city out of bounds for Jews, he told her that eventually worship would no longer take place in Jerusalem, or on her holy mountain, or anywhere else, whether that is your church or synagogue or temple of mosque, whether in Mecca or Rome or Amritsar. Jesus again: “true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.” That to me suggests the eventual end of formal religion of whatever stripe. At least that’s how I read this.

There are other hints. Stanley Hauerwas – whom Time Magazine called the most influential theologian in North America – in Approaching the End (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids) writes that “We may be nearing the end of Christendom,” which he calls “a good thing,” because it will restore the “recovery of the eschatological character of the gospel”. He says that “the first task of the church is not to make the world just but to make the world the world, which is rightly understood only in the light of these eschatological convictions.” (Eschatological refers to the end of all things.) In other words, the church’s preoccupation with heaven is totally misdirected: its focus should be on the earth and its ultimate renewal.

In this he completely echoes Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, in his introduction to his book Creation and Fall, writes that “The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.” In my long-time church exposure I have never heard a sermon emphasizing this, and, I believe, this will not happen either, because the church is too set in her ways. Perhaps Jesus in the Sermon of the Mount, as recorded in Matthew 5, provides a clue as well: if any part of the body causes sin, or fails to live up to its task, cut it out. In that same vein, if allegiance to the church is stronger than advancing the vision of the New Creation, it is better to relegate it to a lesser place.

My personal experience is that neither society at large not the church in general is eager to embrace that ‘end’ concept: it simply is too uncomfortable. When the 2012 Olympics were held in London a six-minute segment of the opening ceremony was omitted by NBC in its U.S.A. television coverage, because the editors felt that the hymn “Abide with Me”, a song of lament, was not suitable for the American audience. They reasoned that the US public had to be protected from death and from a sung message expressing the end of Life. The exact same thing happened with me. When I wrote my regular column on this episode for a Christian paper, it was refused. Here are some excerpts of that article:

Was that “The Global Swan Song?”

I don’t like mega churches, but I loved it when 400 million people world-wide heard an old-fashioned sermon at the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics. It happened at the end of the show recalling the sinking of the Titanic, a name now synonymous with disaster. The ‘lesson’ was delivered by a regal-looking Emeli Sandé who sang all five verses of Abide with me, the hymn supposedly played while that brand-new ship slowly sank into the icy seas. She projected into the planet such biblical truths as:  “Change and decay in all around I see,” but also beamed across the globe the glorious gospel of “I need your presence every passing hour. What but your grace can foil the tempter’s power?”

The Titanic reference couldn’t have been more up-to-date. In 2012, one hundred years after its sinking the entire world is in a Titanic mode: drowning in an ocean of debt. The phrase fast falls the eventide reminded me of Oswald Spengler`s famous book Der Untergang des Abendlandes, the Demise of the Evening Empire. In our Western world, perhaps a few, if any, of the 400 million viewers realized that then and there they may have witnessed “the global swan song”, when she intoned Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day, earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away. It may seem farfetched, but to me it meant that Brazil’s preparations, already underway for the 2016 Olympics may well come to nothing, because the London Olympics could well have been the final one.

Here’s what could very well happen. Today a four year term is like a century, that’s how fast events are happening. Just look at the speed of Climate Change. The most e-mailed article in a recent New York Times issue was: “Hundred – Year Forecast: Drought.” Imagine no rain year after year! (Now true for California and many other regions.)

We are in a real quandary: we have based our society on continuous growth, allowing large pensions, expensive medical and educational structures, libraries and museums, but in a shrinking world all these will become millstones around our necks, sinking the economy as sure as the Titanic. Put the blame on money and its lenders. No wonder Dante in his Inferno consigned usurers to the lowest pit of the seventh circle of Hell.

July 27 2012 was a memorable day: then, it seemed to me, the Global Swan Song echoed through the cosmos. Multitudes of many millions heard the message: Abide with me, fast falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, Lord with me abide. Change and decay in all around I see.” But also “Who like yourself my guide and strength can be? In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.”

That message was judged too controversial for a Christian audience.

Total Renewal

I sincerely believe that we live in earth’s final days. In the Lord’s Prayer we ask for “Thy Kingdom Come.” Augustine has said: “We can’t do anything without God, and God won’t do anything without us.” That means that we must ready ourselves for the Coming of the Kingdom, with God’s help.

When the Old Testament rituals were replaced by the Christian counterparts, many changes took place. Now we need to go even further than the Christians did in the early church. Metanoia is the new buzz word: total renewal. That concept signifies not a partial life-change but something far more.  Renewal is a factual dying and being born again as a “new creature,” a transition from one particular world to another, from one causing death and pollution to one of permanence and durability. The only place in the first three Gospels where the world renewal appears, points to the end-time and thus contains a clearly eschatological directive. Matthew 19:28 speaks of “the” renewal of all things.” Through “renewal” we are directed toward the end-time, to the new age, the new time-period in which Christ will be Lord. To be human means to stand between Primeval Time and End-Time, between the Ultimate Beginning and the Terrible End. The road between these two extremes of many, many millennia is a road of an untold number of wars, of cruelty and injustice, of sorrow and tears, yet also of always hoping and always trying. Primeval Time and End-Time are at the same time very close together: they meet in Jesus Christ. His coming in the world ushers in the end-time, the new age, the new world. He gathers all things together again into the meaningful whole of God’s eternal kingdom, the New Earth to come. Then will be fulfilled what he said: “The old is gone: see, everything has been made new.”

The old is gone. That also means that ‘all formal religion’ is gone. That is not only a good thing, but also necessary. Bonhoeffer refers to that when he mentioned ‘religion-less Christianity’. In his opinion, this can only happen in a world that is no longer religious. That condition makes it possible for the world and for us who live in it to become aware of ourselves and our eternal place in God’s beloved world. Only then can the reality of Christ have a greater impact on “a world come of age” than when the world wears disguises of religion.

Let’s face it: the world has already gotten rid of God. It’s only when we acknowledge that, says Bonhoeffer, that “Jesus Christ takes possession of the world become of age.” It is Bonhoeffer’s wish that, when ‘religion’ has disappeared, there will be a ‘reformation’ of glad tidings so that they permeate the whole of human life and not merely the religious dimension of human existence. He writes that “it is God’s will that we know him in life and not finally when we die; in health and strength, and not finally when we suffer; in our actions and not finally when we sin.” (His emphasis)

With The End approaching we now must try to live the life of THE KINGDOM, the life of Eternity, a concept much wider than the church.

Here’s what J.H. Bavinck says in the forthcoming Between Beginning and End: A Radical Kingdom Vision (Eerdmans Grand Rapids).

“It is impossible to visualize the immense difference between the majes­tic, harmonious unity of creation as it emer­ged from God’s hand, and the frantic, demon?dominated planet in which we, the cursed human­ity, dwell after the fall into sin. The Kingdom is in shatters. That is the profound tragedy con­fronting the life of the world. This goes far beyond the fact that we have torn up its cohesion: it actually means that God has surrendered his own creation to Satan and his followers, whose only purpose is to abuse it and destroy it. The Kingdom, after all, com­prises all things, all plants, all animals, all people, all angels. The King­dom includes the sea and the land, the moun­tains and the valleys, all that was and is and is to come; and all of it is incorporated in a great and mighty whole. The Kingdom is the place where all things are in their rightful place and where everything can fulfill its function and deploy its potential in complete harmony with all that surrounds it. The Kingdom is synonymous with light, peace, joy, service to God, in harmonious vene­ra­tion. Where the Kingdom is being destroyed, where this structure comes apart at the seams, there is decomposition, brokenness, frag­men­tation, enmity, contra­diction, meaninglessness, darkness, death. The Kingdom is the smile of God’s good pleasure: “See, it was very good.” With the breaking of the Kingdom God hides his face. Psalm 104:29 reads: “When you hide your face, they are terrified.” The glow fades away; something akin to the pall of death covers the world.”

For us to live the way of The Coming Kingdom entails a total metanoia, a complete new vision of what life is all about. The church can be a help in this matter, but only when it serves as an example of this kingdom living.

Seeking affiliation with Greenpeace and with The Suzuki Foundation is one effective way to evangelize. These devoted people already have the welfare of creation in mind, something Kingdom-seekers also must strive for. The modern martyrs are those who obstruct “Growth at all Costs”, who try, imperfectly, to become completely creation friendly, who with every action wonder whether this will harm creation, because ‘creation is holy’. Hauerwas, in his recent book Approaching the End (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids) is the first theologian I know who called Creation ‘Holy’.

The church, by exclusively centering her fallible focus on the Bible – God’s written Word – and by her inability to integrate her message with God’s Holy Creation-Word, runs the danger of losing the all-encompassing totality of The Word and thus the basic message of the Kingdom. That’s why the church could become or already is an obstacle to salvation.

“Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life (LIFE in the New Creation!), and only a few find it”. (Matthew 7: 14.)  Jesus’ very words!

P.S. I base the above on John 3:16: God so loved the cosmos, the world we live in, so much that he offered his son as sacrifice to restore it. If God’s love for creation is so immense, isn’t ‘loving creation’ the least we can do?

Next week: the final instalment of How Should We then Live?

HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?

Part 10

THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY

“The people of the West have discovered history. Perhaps this has been their greatest discovery. With their farseeing periscopes they have pulled the heavenly bodies so close that they had to give up their secrets. They have split the atom into its basic components. They have penetrated the mysterious forces that keep the universe together. All those discoveries were magnificent, but the most important one of all is that the human race discovered history. It is this that has changed its own existence and has given life on earth a new, glorious perspective.”

That’s how Johan Herman Bavinck starts his eagerly awaited book with the telling title of Between Beginning and End: A Radical Kingdom Vision, soon to be published by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids.

Thanks to history which spawned a book with the title of The Rise of CHRISTIANITY we have an idea why people chose the Christian Way. It has given us a historical perspective on happenings almost 2000 years ago. In it Rodney Stark, the author, professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington, explained how and why early Christianity was so successful. Now that we experience the exact opposite – church closings, denominations struggling with diminishing numbers, confusion in the ministerial ranks – it makes sense to find out how a tiny and obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman Empire managed to dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith of Western civilization. It may even tell us how to reverse the downward trend.

In my series of How should we then live, The Rise of Christianity will be followed by The Fall of Christianity. That makes sense: nothing rises forever, eventually there is a fall. It is my opinion that, given the current ecclesiastical situation, one that is, I think, beyond reform – some tinkering here and there will not help- the fall of Christianity is not only inevitable but even necessary to pave the way for the New Creation where the Bible and the Church are no longer relevant: more about that in Part 11. Don’t be alarmed: there is a historical precedent for such radical change.

There’s no doubt that the Christian movement has had a phenomenal growth. The author consulted various sources and concluded that the number of Christians grew 40 percent per decade, from a mere 1,000 in the year 40 A.D. to 1,500 10 years later, to 7,500 at the turn of the year 100, to more than 200,000 a century later, increasing five-fold to more than 1,000,000 by the year 250, numbering 6,300,000 in the year 300 and almost 34 million in the year 350 when almost half of the then world population was nominally Christian. It helped that Emperor Constantine himself was favourably inclined toward the new movement.

Who became Christians?

For most of the 20^th century historians and sociologists were of the opinion that, when the Way was at its infancy, Christianity was a movement of the dispossessed – a refuge for Rome’s slaves and impoverished masses. They based this on 1Cor. 1:26-28 where Paul writes that there were not many of the wise, mighty and noble. But there were some, and those who joined were quite prominent. In the church of Corinth was Erastus, ‘the city treasurer’. Then cities were like states. In other words he was the minister of finance, not a mean position. Pomponia Graecina in Rome was a woman of the senatorial class. Already Jesus, in his wanderings, attracted high-class women whose husbands occupied prominent positions in the land. Far from being a socially depressed group, some now argue that the lower classes were disproportionally under –represented in the early church. To me that make sense. Here’s why.

Human nature has not changed all that much in the last 2000 years. The Romans pacified the masses through games and food handouts. Today the majority of people, thanks mostly to TV, too have become more passive and no longer open to persuasion. Then as now members of new religions –like Christianity- were almost always members of the more privileged classes. Two thousand years ago what Christianity taught was certainly totally different: love your enemy, no adultery, don’t get rid of unwanted girl babies, don’t divorce, don’t bear arms, all principles completely out of line with the then reigning philosophy.

It is obvious that people don’t switch allegiance to a new faith if they are happy where they are: for many Christianity offered a viable alternative. Is that true for today as well? That’s next week’s topic.

Since Christianity then promoted pacifism – the Jews too refused to bear arms – there was a risk of persecution, especially since the new converts rejected emperor worship. Yet even the most brutal persecution of Christians was haphazard and limited, and the state ignored thousands of persons who openly professed the new religion. The ones most vulnerable here were the leaders who when imprisoned hoped and prayed to rely on their friends and relatives in high places  – often within the imperial family- to use their influence to obtain pardon.

Another myth was that the mission of the apostles among the Jews was a failure. That was true among the very orthodox section. However, a large part of the Jews in the diaspora had become Hellenized, the equivalent of being secular. Their number was quite large: there were many millions of Jews spread around the then known world, perhaps as high ten percent of the world population of some 60 million.

Rodney Stark posed three propositions:

• New religious movements mainly draw their converts from the ranks of the religiously inactive and discontented, and those affiliated with the most accommodated (worldly) religious communities.
• People are more willing to adopt a new religion to the extent that it retains cultural continuity with the conventional religion with which they are already familiar.
• Social movements grow much faster when they spread through preexisting networks.

Based on these three theses he concluded that Christianity offered twice as much cultural continuity to the Hellenized Jews as to Gentiles, with the result that a lot of Jews accepted Jesus as the Messiah. Luke, the author of the bible book Romans, relates how Paul, arriving at a new city, always first made his way to the local synagogue.

Epidemics and Conversion

In his 1200 page CHRISTIANITY the First Three Thousand Years Diarmaid MacCulloch does not mention epidemics. However, he does point out that “What really offended (the non-Christians) was: Christian secretiveness and obstinate separation into their own world…… Yet the separateness and dogmatism of the early Christians were as much strengths as weaknesses; they produced a continuing stream of converts. This inward-looking community could attract people seeking certainty and comfort, not least in a physical sense. Christians looked after their poor – that was after all one of the main duties.”

Please note: Christians then formed their own communities.

Rodney Stark cites a different cause, one which proved even more successful, but came at a high personal price. In the year 165, when there were approximately 150,000 Christians in the Roman Empire, a smallpox epidemic, lasting for 15 years, killed from a quarter to a third of the empire’s population, including the then emperor Marcus Aurelius. At the first onset of the disease the heathen pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them on the roads before they were dead and treated unburied corpses as dirt. The Christians, on the other hand, showed their values of love and charity, nursed the ill back to health, often at the expense of their own life. All this resulted in substantially higher rates of survival, while their unstinted service to the ill and afflicted drew in immense number of converts. Claims the author: “Had classical society not been disrupted and demoralized by these catastrophes, Christianity might never have become so dominant a faith.”

Johan Herman Bavinck commented on the early days of Christianity. He writes: “With a degree of nostalgia do we remember how in the ancient church baptism was experienced as real renewal. Then coming out of a pagan culture and the enchantments that life there offered, people would hesitantly approach the cross of Jesus Christ, where they would gradually being taken in by his word which displayed a new life in which only Christ was Lord and King. When then, at last, such persons, drawn from darkness, experienced baptism, a new world would open for them. That meant that they would often be shunned by their old friends, perhaps even their own parents, but they were received in a new circle, the communion of Christ and they would stand with that congregation in the life-connection of the risen Saviour. In the most perfect sense that was real renewal as the old was indeed a matter of the past, and look, it now all was new! In its ultimate sense the fact of baptism can only be compared with the Flood that once had consumed the ancient world, of which baptism, literally, was the symbol. Through that global baptism an old world, doomed to demise, drowned forever, and a new world arose, a world filled with God’s precious promises. Baptism meant forsaken the world and becoming a new person for the sake of Christ. It was submerging in Christ and again rising up in him. Baptism was the entrance to a new world, a new heaven and a new earth. It was custom at one time to assume a new name to show once and for all that the old person was dead and a new one was born in Christ. That is how radically people experienced the transition from the old to the new, from Adam to Christ, “The old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Cor. 5:17.)

This is an aspect Rodney Stark did not mention. Leaving the pagan Roman world and adopting the Christian way, meant a complete re-orientation. Conversion then was total. Just imagine the re-adjustment. Paganism too required all, as the Emperor was God, not unlike now when Capitalism is all-consuming. Allegiance to the Roman Ruler was mandatory. Festivals involved total allegiance. Converting to Christianity meant that everything was up for change: family relations, eating habits, living arrangements, living in new Christian communities. Yet these new converts still had to go out into the world, a world that lived under the full control of the evil one. They were still surrounded by secular life as it played out in the masses, in their own environment. Their work or job situation was in peril as well. Could they still make a living, now that they were estranged from neighbours and family?

A long time ago, when I was in business to appraise properties, I was asked by a business owner whether I was ‘born again.’ To me it was an embarrassing question because I knew that what he meant with ‘born again’ and what I understood it to be was totally different. For him it was enough if I answered in the affirmative. How could I explain to him that it involved much more than speaking in tongues and declaring Jesus as my Saviour? Yet today having the name of ‘Christian’ means very little: most people call themselves that way. For some it means attending religious schools and attending church. For most it may not even mean attending a service, something which is happening in ever decreasing numbers. Culturally there really is no difference between ‘Christians’ and non-Christians: we all drive cars, we all hope that the economy will grow, even though it means more pollution. We all hope to go to heaven, even though the Bible never mentions that. For many it means that the correct way to organize a church is along hierarchical lines, with priests, bishops, cardinals, usually excluding women.

In the old world, with The Rise of Christianity, the new converts were faced with totally different circumstances. Christians then and now are called to life, and that to the fullest. This week I was really struck by Matthew 7: 13-14: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction (to me this suggests the Capitalistic way), and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” What could that mean?

 

I will probe that question next week in Part Eleven: The Fall of Christianity.

 

HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Part 9.

                                                             DO ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS?

Last week I cautioned that, in preparation for eternity, our current life style must much more focus on the way we treat creation. Every scrap of paper comes from wood pulp; every kilometer we drive harms all of creation, but especially the flora section of the environment.

I am more and more beginning to believe that we can only be part of the New Creation – and we are speeding toward its coming witness the turmoil everywhere, both environmentally, politically and economically – when we now regard God’s work of art as sacred, which, naturally, must also include the animal world, and the question:  Do Animals have rights?

My wife and I have been almost exclusively vegetarian for many decades. It all started in 1972, now more than 40 years ago, when I bought a book Diet for a Small Planet where I discovered that it takes many pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat. Realizing the plight of billions who go hungry, we went off meat then and there. It helps that meat eating is not very healthy: fatty, full of pesticides, often saturated with antibiotics, making us more susceptible to infection. Physically we have done well on our meat-less diet, eating a lot of green stuff and many bean varieties, basically in line with the Mediterranean diet.

Just like trees, animals too are an important part of creation, and just as we have to learn to see trees as our indispensable allies so too we must see animals as friends and companions, creatures from which we can learn.

Job was of that opinion. Here is a quote: “But ask the animals, and they will teach you; or the birds of the air and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hands is the life of creature and the breath of every human being.” Job 12: 7-10.

 One of my dear friends loaned me two books on Animal Rights: “Do Animals have Rights?,” by Alison Hills, an easy read which gave a measured approach, and “The Case for Animal Rights,” by Tom Regan, a hard slog and much more radical. In it he refutes the still current view that the animals we eat, hunt, and experiment on are, in the words of Rene Descartes, “thoughtless brutes.” His opinion is that animals are sophisticated mental creatures who have beliefs and desires, memories and expectations, who feel pleasure and pain and experience emotions, and like us, animals have a basic moral right to be treated in ways that show respect for their independent value.

Is he right?

We all know that chickens are kept in cages and cows in confined conditions, not unlike people in faraway countries, packed in favelas, in shantytowns, and other make-shift slums. Last year a fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, killed hundreds of people because they could not escape their packed places. We condemn it where it concerns people. Should we also agitate against the same situations for animals?

In Genesis 2 God named the first couple Adam and Eve. Later that same human pair were, in turn, given the task to name animals. It seems to me that this signifies that we have a certain power over animals, which is plain in later biblical episodes.

At first, in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve apparently were vegetarians, eating only from the plants and trees, actually the only creation-friendly way for permanence. Later, with Noah, this changed. Abraham provided (Genesis 18:7) the Lord with meat from a calf, tender and good. The same happened when the Prodigal Son re-appeared. Jesus ate fish. Also the Bible is full of animals being slaughtered for ceremonial purposes.

I am sure these ‘biblical’ animals were free-ranging, and the fish was not raised in off-shore fish-farms. Now most of what we eat is mass-produced in cages, closed pens and force-fed for quick maturity.

All this commercial raising of eggs or broilers or calves or fish is only possible because of cheap and abundant energy, either fuel oil or propane. The recent disasters in the Gulf of Mexico, train derailments lately and the production of Tar-Sand oil are real signs that the easy energy has been used and that EROI or Energy Returned On Investment becomes ever smaller, with the result that the fuel price creeps up, and air-and water pollution is growing by leaps and bounds, heralding hard times ahead. Just as heat at the hint of a hand or cool at a computer command is conditional upon carbon availability, so the raising chickens in cages and cows in crowded quarters will soon become impossible as the Peak Oil-clock stands a few seconds before mid-point, meaning that the days of using ten energy calories to produce one food calorie will vanish.

 We need new approaches to living

As an aware Christian I believe that we should welcome the days when chickens revert back to their natural pecking order and contended cows roam the green grass pastures where they can thrive naturally.

But back to my original question: Do animals have rights? Yes, they do. Do chickens and other incarcerated animals have rights? Yes, they do. Just as the people in Bangladesh and elsewhere have the right to be housed decently, and live comfortably, so, if my Bible is true, animals too have the right to exercise their freedom of movement. Job’s words thousands of years ago are still relevant today. What we have lost is the wisdom animals can teach us. We no longer have the ability to understand what the birds are trying to tell us. We no longer know how plants can enlighten us. We are paying lip service to the knowledge that in God’s hands are the life of every living being – animal, birds, plants – and the breath of every human being. It is exactly our ignorance of “the wider world out there” that has led to the mechanization of animal production.

However, our first duty is to see that people everywhere in the world live in humane conditions, as God has named them and they are made in His image. As long as this is not the case, we cannot demand that animals have priority over humans.

Elephants are an excellent example of community living.

I found an amazing article in the Winter/Spring edition of The New Atlantis, some 22,000 words, too long to reproduce here.

Here is how it started: “The birth of an elephant is a spectacular occasion. Grandmothers, aunts, sisters, and cousins crowd around the new arrival and its dazed mother, trumpeting and stamping and waving their trunks to welcome the floppy baby who has so recently arrived from out of the void, bursting through the border of existence to take its place in an unbroken line stretching back to the dawn of life.

“After almost two years in the womb and a few minutes to stretch its legs, the calf can begin to stumble around. But its trunk, an evolutionarily unique inheritance of up to 150,000 muscles with the dexterity to pick up a pin and the strength to uproot a tree, will be a mystery to it at first, with little apparent use except to sometimes suck upon like human babies do their thumbs. Welcome to the world: This newborn hasn’t yet stood up and stretched its legs, let alone figured out how to use its trunk.

 Its appendage is flailing off its face to breathe, drink, caress, thwack, probe, lift, haul, wrap, spray, sense, blast, stroke, smell, nudge, collect, bathe, toot, wave, and perform countless other functions that a person would rely on a combination of eyes, nose, hands, and strong machinery to do. Once the calf is weaned from its mother’s milk at five or whenever its next sibling is born, it will spend up to 16 hours a day eating 5 percent of its entire weight in leaves, grass, brush, bark, and basically any other kind of vegetation. It will only process about 40 percent of the nutrients in this food, however; the waste it leaves behind helps fertilize plant growth and provide accessible nutrition on the ground to smaller animals, thus making the elephant a keystone species in its habitat. From 250 pounds at birth, it will continue to grow throughout its life, to up to 7 tons for a male of the largest species or 4 tons for a female…..

When this new-born elephant is twelve or fourteen, she will go into heat (“estrus”) for the first time, a bewildering occurrence during which her mother will stand by and show her what to do and which male to accept. If she conceives, she will have a calf twenty-two months later, crucially aided in birthing and raising it by the more experienced older ladies. She may have another every four to five years into her fifties or sixties, but not all will survive.

Some more excerpts of this article.

 From a religious, anthropocentric perspective, it might be said that while animal virtues do not entail morality for the animals themselves, they reveal to us the goodness in creation; as the medieval theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena (that same person I mentioned in my Gnostic Article, The Real American Religion a few weeks ago) wrote, “In a wonderful and inexpressible way God is created in His creatures.” From a more biological view, it might be noted that people mostly do not choose their dispositions either, that behavioral tendencies are more determined than we like to tell ourselves, and that blame and credit for such things are often misapplied in human contexts too…..

One of the major clues that elephants have something we would recognize as inner lives is their extraordinary memories. This is attested to by outward indicators ranging from the practical — a matriarch’s recollection of a locale, critical to leading her family to food and water — to the passionate — grudges that are held against specific people or types of people for decades or even generations, or fierce affection for a long-lost friend…..

Like humans, most traumatized elephants do not become violent, but just absorb their hurts in confusion and sadness and respond to them in other familiar ways. In The Dynasty of Abu (1962), the zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson recounts the story of an elephant named Sadie, who was practicing but failing to learn a circus routine. Finally she gave up and bolted out of the training ring, causing her to be chastised (not cruelly, he stresses) “for her supposed stupidity and for trying to run away.” At this, she dropped to the ground and dumbfounded her trainers by bawling like a human being. “She lay there on her side, the tears streaming down her face and sobs racking her huge body.”

In almost half a century of close association with the Abu [elephants], including and even after reading a substantial part of the vast literature concerning these majestic creatures, I have not encountered anything that has moved me so greatly, and I write this in all seriousness and humility. Its ineffable pathos constantly brings to mind that most famous verse “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). What on earth are we to make of a so-called “lower animal” crying?

But the latter idea — that humans, although capable of conscious self-direction, are as mutely carried along by the force of selection as your friendly neighborhood amoeba — simply elides the question, while the former raises many more; the tiger is as much God’s creature as the lamb. In any case, the capacity for “choosing” is a binary conceit that gestures at something much fuller, an inner realm of awareness, selfhood, and possibility. In other words, a soul.

So far these quotes. Questions abound. That we can learn from animals is a biblical concept. The truth will become evident in the New Creation.

In my book Day without End animals are our friends. There you will find a scene describing a soccer game between lions and tigers with elephants as goal posts and huge grizzly bears as goalies. Find out who the referee is.

Go to Lulu.com and look for the book below.

In my next blog I will conclude this series with: The Rise and Fall of Christianity.

Day Without End

Price: $2.50 (downloadable ebook) or  $7.54 (paperback)

A brief description

God is nothing without his creation, is nothing without His earth, is nothing without the human race. We too, we are nothing without God. God needs the earth to show who He is and what the meaning of his creation is. We can only prove that we love God when we show love for his creation, while God’s love is evident in our love for fellow humans. Day Without End shows that we have learned our lesson, that we, with God’s law written on our hearts, are finally ready to live in God’s creation, to explore his infinite Body, in the way it was originally intended. Of course, to accurately visualize a renewed earth under a renewed heaven is impossible. Yet if we don’t think about the Hereafter, we cannot have one, because it’s exactly there where we all will have our final destination. In the mystery of God becoming a human being, it is evident that this earth and not heaven is God’s permanent dwelling place.

 

 

HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Part Eight

  

The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

(Revelation 22: 2.)

 

About four years ago one of our five children gave me on Father’s Day a remarkable book: The Global Forest by Diana Beresford-Kroeger. From it I learned that trees not only breathe and communicate, provide shelter, medicine, and food but they also connect to everything else in nature, even influence our minds: the very sight of trees has a healing influence on sick people, and invigorate us all.

The author also relates something ominous. It involved a sacred dream making its way in the world today. It came from an elder of the Hopi people. It is a vision quest of death. Before he was about to die, the elder asked that the people of all nations pay attention to the trees of the forest. One such tree entered his dream. It held a circle of light in its trunk. The light came from the power of the sun. This was transferred to all the creatures of the earth as a life force. This dream is a warning to all people to respect nature, beginning with the trees of the forests, because the web of all life as we understand it depends on the tree.

We live in an era of the great rape of creation. The universal loss of forests foreshadows the finality of life. Trees can live without us, but we cannot live without trees.

The most astounding happening in the last 100 years has been how Hitler in 7 short years, from 1933-1939, rose from a relative nonentity to the greatest threat of the 20^th century, a grave peril that took 6 years to overcome. Now it certainly looks that the 21^st Century will be dominated by our very own self-induced disaster: Climate Change, which already in 2014 has become a world-destroyer. It is our utmost duty to fight this menace as well. Will we? Or are we too dependent on our carbon slaves? When the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention.

Here’s what is happening. North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. Two years ago, in urban Texas, the prolonged heat there killed more than five million shade trees and mega millions more in parks and forests. In the Amazon, prolonged severe droughts are decimating the rain forests. Should I mention that millions of hectares are clear-cut there also to make room for soya beans and other crops? Trees also fueled Australia’s fires during this year’s record heat, and the same is true in California, where forests fires now are a year-round event.

Every tree that dies or burns adds to Global Warming as trees breathe oxygen and inhale CO2.  Dying trees mean a dying planet. There is no doubt in my mind that ‘the creative destruction’ of capitalism will persist to its bitter end, when money, the all-consuming Mammon, will have accomplished what has been Satan’s aim from the beginning: to destroy God’s creation. Just as Jesus had to go through death to achieve life, the Bible tells us that creation too has to go through death to achieve life, and this time we humans are the cause.

The New Testament, in 2 Peter 3: 10, makes clear that the days of the world are counted and that the end will come unexpectedly: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”

My particular emphasis this week is on that poetic sounding sentence in the Bible’s very last chapter where the presence of trees restores what we have destroyed:

“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

Let me start with ‘nations.’ When in Matthew 28: 19 Jesus gives us the Great Commission the same word ‘nations’ is used. It actually does not refer to individual countries, but to everything connected to people, such as races, sexes, ethnic and faith communities, economic classes, families, and tribes. Thus “the leaves of the trees are for the healing of all humans in the world”, and that healing also applies to the world itself, because humans and earth are one.

The last two chapters of the bible, Revelation 21 and 22, picture a world where, as yet, no humans are present. But there are trees, lots of them.

The Garden of Eden had an identical development: everything there had to be in perfect shape before humans could appear. It is my argument that prior to the saints’ arrival in the new creation, the presence of trees will be instrumental for them to enter a virginal, pristine, unpolluted planet. I believe that the earth must first go through a recuperating process with trees as the primary agents of healing, because, basically, there is nothing wrong with God’s world that time – and the absence of sinful humans – cannot heal. And time is immaterial for the Lord for whom a day is as a thousand years.

We know about forest fires: they are a natural phenomenon, needed to rejuvenate forests, because a fire will kill the old and sick and bring to life the buried seeds. Peter was right about the all-consuming fire. For the new creation to come, our worn-out world needs a total conflagration to reveal the new to come, and trees play an enormous role in this process.

For that purpose a closer examination of what trees do is necessary.

We all know that trees are the lungs of the world. For humans to have one hundred percent pure air and ‘live forever’ a totally clean environment is required: hence the need for the new world to be fully filled with forests of trees.

But trees are more than oxygen providers. The tree’s underground system is as important as its foliage: the roots and its capillaries are just as essential for the welfare of the earth as the more visible branches, because a tree stands in its own decomposition. Much of the tree sheds its own weight many times over to earth and air, eventually becoming grass, fungus, and promoting the life of insects, birds and mammals. It is the cooperation of these many ‘by-products’ that make a tree so rich – they exist because of the tree, belong with it and function as part of it. Birds nest, squirrels burrow and eat fungi, and insects prune and assist in decomposing the surplus leaves and activate essential soil bacteria. Animals are messengers to the tree and trees act as a garden for animals, providing an excellent example of life depending on life. A tree is a total being that involves minerals, plants, animals, debris and life. The sum of these elements make up the ‘tree cooperative’. All this has to be in place before the saints are coming home.

“The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the human population and for the earth itself.”

The leaves absorb the CO2 but the unnatural extra supply of Carbon Dioxide and a rapidly decreasing number of trees has now made our weather so unpredictable and even deadly. The leaves themselves are marvels of ingenuity. Many trees have leaves that differ from one species to another. This diversity is found in the leaf’s anatomy. Some leaves have a waxy cuticle on their upper surface. These leaves repel water and attract particles that are water insoluble. The undersurface of the leaf is downy. This down is composed of thousands of fine hairs, all only a few microns in size. These hairs are multiplied in the full canopy into trillions of fine hairs. All this holds the answer to the curse of pollution of whatever kind because this microscopic world of the leaf within the tree canopy acts like a fine-toothed comb for the air.

The new earth, covered with healthy trees will completely heal the earth and clean the air, making it the perfect place for the ‘redeemed of the Lord, who will enter singing’ (Isaiah 35: 10) on the way to embrace their new abode.

So what else do I know about these leaves? Leaves have twice the specific heat capacity as soil, meaning plants can be about 9 degrees Celsius warmer than their surrounding environment. Consequently trees moderate extreme temperatures and humidity so it is tolerable enough to accommodate life. The leaves catch the rain, some of which the tree absorbs, and the remainder returns to the air through evaporation. Any rain that falls through the canopy has, on its way down, collected plant cells and nutrients and is much richer than regular rainwater. This through-fall is then directed to shallow roots, and serves all the needs of growth in that forest. Therefore trees use, collect, enrich and properly direct water so it can best be used in the forest system without human intervention.

Trees are not just here to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen for us to breathe. Their purpose reaches much farther. Trees fight drought, prevent soil erosion, stabilize earth, shade us from sun, are key in the conservation of water, provide us with heat, control the effects of wind, provide shelter for animals and encourage biodiversity and nutrients for soil. God created trees because the trees are life: Yes, the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

Trees are not only for the earth: the seas too benefit as do the inland streams. Revelation 22: 2 this time: “at each side of the river stood the Tree of Life.”  Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrives, so does the rest of the food chain. Fishermen have planted trees along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.

Before the humans can return to paradise, trees have to clean it for them. Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of soaking up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phyto-remediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution: indeed the leaves of the tree are cosmic healers!

So it makes perfect sense that the Bible starts with the Tree of Life, ends with the Tree of Life and has at its centre the Tree of Golgotha where our eternal life was assured. These three ‘trees’ are symbols of all trees explaining that simple sentence in the last chapter of the Bible which says:

“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

What does this mean for “How Should We Then Live?”

Every piece of paper comes from a tree. Every kilometer we drive brings pollutants that affect trees adversely. I know it is not possible to live ‘without sin’, and yet…. Revelation 22, that very last Bible chapter, verse 11, has some strange words: “Let those who do wrong continue to do wrong; let those who are vile continue to be vile; let those who do right continue to do right; and let those who are holy continue to be holy.”

Those are mysterious words. They suggest to me that we must redefine sin. We must include sin against trees as part of our lives, clothe ourselves in other garments, so to say, live by different standards, change our entire mindsets, orient ourselves away from the realm of death, which is the current orientation, and embrace hook, line and sinker, the shalom of eternity, the Way of Life Eternal which awaits us in the New Creation.

These words also suggest to me that, while sinners persist in their evil behaviour God’s people will grow in grace. It reminds me Deuteronomy 30: 19: “I call the heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live….”

 

Next week Part Nine: Where do animals fit into the larger picture?