Our World Today

Posted on December 15, 2013 by Bert Hielema

DECEMBER 15 2013

THE GAME IS OVER. CARPE DIEM.

Last week I saw a picture, taken in the Arctic on December 3, showing methane rising from the Arctic Ocean and entering the air we all share, the methane count reaching as high was 2425 parts per billion. On November 9 that level exceeded 2661 parts per billion (ppb). In the past this count has always been quite low because methane is locked in the permafrost, which now no longer is ‘perma’nent.

Methane, (CH4), is a much more potent greenhouse gas than Carbon Dioxide (CO2). While CO2 levels are counted in ppm (parts per million), and methane in ppb they are directly comparable because in their lifespan methane has an influence on the weather more than a 1000 times stronger that the global warming mass of a cloud of CO2 of the same mass.

Huge methane clusters are positioned deep below the Arctic Ocean surface holding vast amounts of this lethal gas. Just one part of the Arctic Ocean, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS), contains 1700 Giga tons of CH4. A Giga ton is a large amount, a bit more than 11,000,000,000 regular tons.  A sudden release of just 3% of this amount could add over 50 Gt of methane to the atmosphere, and experts consider such an amount to be ready for release at any time, because the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.  The amount of carbon stored in hydrates globally is now estimated to be 63,400 Gt, according to a recent calculation by Klauda & Sandler, enough to incinerate the entire earth.

Just let those figures sink in for a moment as the methane moves up and out. The total methane mass in our atmosphere right now is 5 Gt –Giga tons. The 3 Gt that has been added since 1750 accounts for almost half of all global warming.

Imagine what kind of warming would take place if the methane in the atmosphere suddenly grew by 1100 percent: its impact would threaten to destabilize sediments under the Arctic Ocean and trigger further methane releases. Such a positive feedback would cause the world to heat up, not gradually, not a fraction of a degree at a time, but with a sudden leap. The Big Bang in reverse.
This could well mean that the game is over. Carpe Diem, live it up!! There’s nothing we can do – of course there’s something we can do – but the bitter truth is there’s nothing we will do to prevent our world to go up in flames. That’s perfectly plain from what happened in Warsaw a few weeks ago.

What happened in Warsaw put the icing on the cake of Global Warming.

There in Warsaw, Poland, the COP 19 – which stands for the Conference of the People – met. This is the 19th time the UN convened somewhere in the world to come to a solution on Climate Change, also known as Global Warming. It’s better called the 19th COP-OUT.

Last week I read an analysis on what really happened there. Harald Welzer, 55, who teaches social psychology at Flensburg and St. Gallen Universities in Germany, was my guide here. His most recent book is “Selbst denken. Eine Anleitung zum Widerstand” (“Think for yourself: A Handbook for Resistance”). I found his essay in Der Spiegel, a German weekly. I will present the gist of his remarks, interspersed with my comments, paraphrasing and editing.

Frightening stuff

 

He writes: “When the United Nations Climate Change Conference wrapped up in Warsaw the weekend before last, it did yield a result despite what most observers and disappointed NGO representatives believe. The unofficial result was that the world in general has stopped any efforts to do anything about global warming. In other words, climate change has been definitively removed from the global policy agenda. It has been given a free hand thanks to Capitalism.”

He continued: “The intense concern over climate change triggered by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports in 2007 and widely popularized by Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” has disappeared. At that time even Angela Merkel made an appearance in the Arctic as the “climate chancellor,” decked out in a red all-weather jacket.”

Here’s what really happened there. The United States’ lack of interest in an international treaty was camouflaged by its argument that gas extracted by fracking is more climate-friendly than coal, even though a recent report discovered that much more methane escapes by this process than originally stated. In Japan, the Fukushima disaster and resulting phase-out of nuclear power has provided those responsible with an excellent argument for why the country now needs to burn more coal in order to stay economically competitive. And Australia, Poland and Russia have never really grasped why global warming should stop anyone from burning everything the oil rigs, mines and pipelines have to offer in the first place. China? The world’s largest polluter? Its dirty coal will keep our Dolla(d)ramas stores stocked so that we can save a few pennies.  Canada? That country calls its tar sand derived oil ‘ethical’ because its Prime Minister is an unbeliever as far as Climate Change is concerned.

Capitalism has triumphed

The people promoting Capitalism are of the opinion that technology will come to the rescue: “of course we will find a technical solution to this problem,” is the reasoning of the executives of the oil and coal companies, exhibiting the typical hubris of the rich. That the world will grow warmer by three, four or five degrees Celsius has become of secondary importance. The primary goal is the growth in national economies which require an ever-growing dose of energy so that their business models are to continue functioning. Seen in that light all scientific projections are mere theories. Business and clever software will find a fitting solution.

A good example of the wrong paradigm can be found in Greenland where the exact opposite happened. There the temperature dropped some 1500 years ago. The Vikings left Greenland – which had been really green – in part because they clung to animal husbandry despite practically having to carry their cows out to pasture in the spring, because the lack of winter feed had left the animals too weak to walk. The Vikings would have just needed to come up with the idea of eating fish instead, but to them that seemed as inconceivable as renouncing the idea of growth does to nations today. The Vikings believed they could not live without cows, just as we believe that a high quality of life rests on expanding the resource sector.

New Race for Survival

The Warsaw refusal to set limits to CO2 emissions has set off a new race: which part of the globe, in this world of boundless resource exploitation and unfettered pollution, will manage to remain the least affected by Climate Change. Economically powerful societies here have a considerable head start over those who embraced capitalism later or have the misfortune of being located in the wrong part of the world. These are the so-called “failed states”, where their inhabitants have little legal protection or where there are no obstacles to ravage land, water and raw materials of all kinds: they will suffer the most.

In these circumstances we can expect that the search for minerals will intensify as they become harder and harder to find. The scarcer a resource, the greater the unmet demand for it, and thus the higher the asking price, and the more we, consumers, will pay for the end product, be that oil or iron or food products. The greater the demand, and the smaller the supply, the more favorable the conditions are becoming for the suppliers. Scarcity is thus, in principle, good for business.

The capitalist economy, in fact, has had great success with this principle. No other economic system in history has generated and distributed more wealth in such a comparatively short a span of time. However, this expansion taking place in a finite earth, will sooner than later begin to consume itself.

A fanatic is a person who has lost direction and redoubles his effort.  

What each country is aiming for is to extract as much oil and gas as is possible. ‘People in the know’ know that The Game is up, and so the fuel-fanatics redouble their efforts to get to the last drop of oil or chunk of coal. That “Earth Summits” and “Climate Conferences” to save the planet keep on happening, even though none of these have ever resulted in real change, let alone to a reversal of the trend: they are mere window dressing. Every nation is out to keep its economic advantage. The US cannot possibly fail to exploit the ‘fracking’ advantage. Canada cannot possibly fail to exploit the tar sands. China and Australia cannot possibly fail to exploit their coal fields. Failure to do so would be an impediment to growth. So nothing ever changes. Carpe Diem: seize the opportunity to create an economic advantage.

This also applies to the Climate Fighter. All these global gatherings, all these climate research institutes, all these concerned scientists have a vested interest in Climate Change: it gives them jobs, prestige, a public forum, but none of that will reduce CO2 emissions: on the contrary they even contribute to their annual increase, because they are part of the larger system.

Is there another way?

Capitalism, according to Schumpeter, thrives on ‘creative destruction.’ It constantly needs to invent new ways to entice customers to do away with the old and embrace ‘the new and improved’ version of something useless. This axiom has now led to ‘creation destruction’ and we have been eager participants in this ultimate game, ultimate in the sense that it is testing – and now exceeding- the limits of the earth.

It’s an entirely new ball game. The first thing we must do is to analyze what we have been doing and still are doing. It is no longer business as usual, neither can we give up and claim that our little effort does not amount to anything anyway. It does, because our personal salvation is at stake.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer starts his book Creation and Fall with the remarkable words: 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. Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am to do a new thing.(Isaiah 43: 18-19).

That simply means that we need now a new way of thinking and a new way of living. The church needs a new m. o., a different ‘modus operandi’, in line with what Bonhoeffer writes. Forget about the old. Preaching has to be recast. The old truths no longer work. We have heard it all before and the main result has been to turn off the young people. Sermons must focus on what is the come. Of course we need church services. Of course we have to pray and sing and encourage each other. Of course we need bible readings. All these have become more necessary than ever, but we have to use the Written Word as an introduction to and nourishment for preparing ourselves more and more for the Created Word, that solid firmament on which we now live and whose newness is near. Hebrew 5: 14 tells us that ‘solid food is for the mature.’ If we are not mature by now we will never learn, after all the church is in the business to make people grow and be an instrument to make all things new. That includes the practical day-to-day consumption of food and business and energy saving ways, and healthy life style, a way of living that can ease our transition to the New Creation, the End of which Bonhoeffer speaks. The church has to counter the destructive ways of Capitalism which professes that “the lust for money is the source of all good,” totally opposite to the words of Scripture.

The Game is up. The methane monster is the newest and ultimate menace. Once it explodes, the Day is here.  Carpe Diem really means: Seize the Day. Carpe Diem really means that we must embrace the Day of the Lord’s coming, make it our own, totally identify with it and live accordingly.

 

 

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Our World Today

Posted on December 8, 2013 by Bert Hielema

December 8 2013

THE AGE OF DENIAL

Just after I had decided to write a series on “How then shall we live?” trying to combine the Creation Word with the Written Word I went to the local library where a book sale was going on. There I bought for $5.00 three books, one by Robertson Davies, a children book to read to our 5 and 7 year old grandchildren when they are here at Christmas, and a book by a number of authors, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, with the intriguing title of Covenant for a New Creation.

I very much believe in divine guidance, and I saw this as an affirmation that in the coming year I must pursue this difficult, self-imposed assignment to struggle with the question “How then shall we live?” in these last days.

Some of you may recognize the topic: it is the title of a book by Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984), who with his wife ran L’Abri, a retreat in Switzerland some 50 years ago. I will write more about this book and this couple in my first blog in January.

Yes, I very much believe that we are living in the last of days. All signs point to that. Jesus, in that revealing 24th chapter of Matthew, with the heading Signs of the End of the Age, gives some indication in verse 32. He points to a tree – Jesus often takes examples from creation – a fig tree in this case. Here is that passage: “Now then learn this lesson from the fig tree: as soon as the twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see all these things, you know it is near, right at the door.”

What things are so plain to see for those who have eyes to see? The most glaring sign is “the great abomination” mentioned in that chapter, referring to the world-wide pollution of which Climate Change is the most pronounced feature, which also indicates that we live in The Age of Denial, especially relating to these final matters.

 Denial persists

Last week I read an article in the December 2 New Yorker: Letter from Handan with the title In the Air, and subtitled: Discontent grows in China’s most polluted cities. Here is an excerpt: “There’s a joke that a Handan person went to Switzerland and the air was so good that he began to feel sick from all the oxygen. So they quickly hooked a tube to a car’s exhaust pipe and he sucked on that for a while until he felt better.” Denial anyone?

The truth is that China’s pollution- this great abomination, which is getting worse – is influenced by the same religious misconception as most Christian thinking. Back to the article: “For much of the past two millennia, Taoism (which places a high value on closeness with nature) was politically eclipsed by Confucianism, with its more worldly concern for family and society. Mark Elvin, a professor emeritus of Chinese history has argued persuasively that China’s disregard for the environment has roots in this heritage. The ideal Confucian ruler saw the mastery of nature as part of humanity’s triumph over barbarism.”

Is it any different in the Western World? The observation Lynn White, a professor of church history, made in 1967 is still very relevant today. He wrote a scathing essay in the most prestigious scientific journal in the USA, the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His article entitled The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis was widely read and reprinted in thousands of environmental studies published in the decades following its appearance in Science.

Dr. White focused on the environmental attitudes and values set out in Genesis and how they might have fostered ill-treatment of nature in Christendom throughout the ages. He argued, in effect, that since it is written in the first few chapters of the Bible that human beings alone among all creatures were created in the image of God and given dominion over nature and charged to subdue it, the Jews and Christians, taking this message to heart, attempted to live by its light. They regarded themselves as beings apart from the rest of nature, licensed by God to rule over it and bend it to their purposes. After two thousand years of putting this vision of the human-nature relationship into practice with increasing success, the 20th century’s technological wonders and the 20th century’s environmental crisis are the end result.

In my next year’s series on How then shall we live? I will explore and critique this further. Suffice it to say that by and large the church still adheres to a dualistic view, and thus most certainly is part of The Age of Denial.

During 2013 I have written my weekly blog of some 2000 words and have been encouraged by the increasing number of visitors from all over the world. It looks that my blog will have close to 70,000 visitors in 2013, well over double the number in 2012. Only the Lord knows whether I have changed anybody’s mind, given that we live in The Age of Denial.

Why this denial?

People in general, continue to avoid serious thought about human population growth, the predictable effects of global warming, the degradation of the oceans, and even the depletion of top soil in the Midwest. Believe it or not, but Peak Oil is still an issue today, and will be increasingly so in the years to come even though there now is a temporary new supply, which will actually speed up The Coming of the Lord because fracking releases a lot of extra methane and other pollutants. Don’t get fooled by this fracking frenzy, which is proclaimed as the new Saviour of the United States.

My regular readers may remember that I have written extensively about the issue of Peak Oil. Basically, it is the observation that there is only so much easily obtainable oil. Let me use a graphic example. Imagine an erect penis. Place this full-blooded male member on the centre of a timeline of 10,000 years. For the first 5000 years the line is flat. Then suddenly there is this Eiffel Tower structure, depicting the sudden onset of oil, its peak and its demise, spanning no more than 200 years. For the next 5000 years the line again shows nothing. That illustrates our oil usage: no more than 200 years of a-historic extravagance. Right now we are at the pinnacle, around the point when we have used half of what was originally there. The second half, however, lacks the easy extraction of the first, because fields become depleted, new fields are smaller, are harder to find and take much more energy to develop.

The United States hit its peak oil production around 1970, and it has been in decline ever since. It’s true that with improved technology, we can squeeze a few more drops out by drilling deep offshore, slant drilling, and steam cleaning the tar sands, but these are expensive and highly polluting methods. We have probably been at or around the point of peak oil for most of this decade.

The economic effects of peak oil are as obvious as they are frightening. The most immediate result is an increase in oil prices, something which will slow down economic activity. For the sudden entente with oil-rich Iran look no further than Peak Oil. There was a period in which Saudi Arabia could influence the world’s rate of oil production by turning up the flow, but even that is a thing of the past. Fact is that we will be spending the rest of our lives, and our children their own lives, dealing with the consequences.

On a personal note.

This past week we had our TV re-connected after doing without it for 2 years. Now that we again have an opportunity to visualize what’s going on the world out there, our television set just sits there, not used for days on end. I simply don’t feel inclined to waste my precious time. I am already sorry that there was a special deal from Bell TV. Oh well, the Olympics coming up and the World Soccer tournament, so OK, one can’t be ‘culturally deprived’ forever. The greatest danger of TV is that we won’t deal with reality and remain in denial. Peak oil is just one of the big denials we persist in holding onto. Global warming is obviously the other, as our political discourse shows only too well with conservative Christians voicing the most vocal opposition to this issue. It is severely sickening how people who regularly go to church have no clue how deeply they offend God by this denial which turns off potential Christ believers. TV is controlled by Capitalism which has a vested interest in the status quo and is financing propaganda campaigns solely to squash the communication of scientific reality. When you hear a United States Senator call global warming a hoax, you know we have a big problem. When it’s the Republican Party policy, it’s an even bigger problem. To my shame, “Conservative’ Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister, is also a Global Warming denier.

Yes, population growth. When I was born in 1928 there were some 2 billion people, mostly well fed, but very few obese. Today there are more than 7 billion and obesity has become a global plague. Even though projections are that the human population of the world would be in excess of 12 billion people by the end of this century, this will never happen. When we consider global warming, declining supplies of petroleum, the expanding population, and depletion of soil quality, we are looking at the perfect storm for humanity.

So what are the remedies? That’s why I am starting that new series, not that I expect that the world will change direction. That just won’t happen. That also is not my motivation. My sole aim is to prepare people for the New Creation to come, something we have to practise now if we want to be ready for Christ’s return.

There are signs of hope. 

One of them is the new pope by the name of Francis, who chose this name to show his affinity to Francis of Assisi, who wrote

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is error, truth;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek

To be consoled as to console;

To be understood as to understand;

To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

The sign of hope is that, in his address to the world-wide Roman Catholic Church, he condemned the capitalistic system. No other pope before him has ever done so in such clear language. Pope Francis said: “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”

Thanks to Capitalism a large segment of America’s workforce is under employed. Millions in North America don’t make enough money, working for Wal-Mart and other big box retailers, to feed themselves properly. They require food stamps, a feature that, thanks to the Republican Party, has been cut back. They are the victims of what the Pope refers to as “trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.”

The pontiff also wrote:  “While the earnings of a tiny minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies, which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. … A new tyranny is thus born. … The thirst for power and possessions know no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule. Behind this attitude,” Francis wrote, “lurks a rejection of ethics and a rejection of God.” That is because ethics inevitably represents a judgment that “makes money and power relative.”

Will it make a difference? That is not the issue. Jesus proclaimed the same message and even now, after Two Thousand Years his words too are not being heeded. Yet, in the end, when he returns, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord. We all have to be Anthropoi Teleioi, people that keep the End – the telos – in mind.

 

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Our World Today

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Bert Hielema

DECEMBER 1 2013

A PEEK INTO A FUTURE WITH PLENTY OF PEAKS

 We live in interesting times, perhaps the most intriguing period ever. Even though, for the last 7 decades, ever since 1945, the world has dramatically changed, many more changes are coming, none for the better.

Before the World War 1914-1945 – which killed Ten Percent of the people who were alive in 1900, more than 100 million, mostly men – almost all people had a rural connection. My grandparents worked only with real horse power. The horse was a friend of the family, and all their cows had names, were part of the larger household. The chickens enjoyed so much freedom that sometimes they became a road hazard. Now most people live in cities, cows have computer chips, extensions of the robot milk machine, and chickens? Don’t ask.

Oh, the good old times in my youth!! Yes, I mean that. No I am not nostalgic: then times were much better than for today’s young people. In my youth we created our own entertainment, played games of our own invention, often outside, and there were plenty of jobs. I saw how my parents and grandparents, in spite of the dirty Thirties, lived in tranquility, had real community, lots of visiting with friends, enjoyed home-made music and acting, were members of choirs and brass bands, enjoyed a viable church life and often had group outings on the bike.

The Oil Change

Oil changed all that, heralding the onset of alienation: it made God disappear. Jacques Ellul, professor of law in Bordeaux, France, in his master piece The Technological Society explained how people do only things for which they are emotionally ready. The pre-war society was not mentally prepared for the passivity that is now so prevalent. Perhaps the killing fields of Europe had such a psychological impact on people that they became conditioned to welcome the oil economy, which has dominated the world ever since. Shooting and bombing, seeing people maimed, undergoing incarceration in concentration camps, observing how the European Jewry was eliminated, experiencing the physical destruction caused by warfare, perhaps spiritually prepared people to embrace the carbon-laden community, the eco-killing society that is now on the verge of eliminating us all. Only highly extreme events are able to evoke our emotions, soon forgotten. By and large we are beyond deep-rootedness, incapable to engage in heartfelt empathy. It reminds me of Jesus complaining “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.” (Matt. 11: 17).

Perhaps society has always suffered from lack of empathy. Paul, in his letter to the Romans (Rom. 13: 11), complains that “the hour has already come for you to wake up from your sleep.” That’s one reason why the bible is still relevant, because the people are still asleep and the preachers, by and large, fail to rouse them, even though “salvation is nearer than when we first had faith”, to continue that same text.

Today’s attitude reminds me of Rev. Martin Niem?ller (1892 -1984) who was a prominent Protestant pastor in Germany. As an outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler, he spent the last seven years of Nazi rule in concentration camps. He is best remembered for the quotation:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Socialist. 

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out–  Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me.

In connection with our present planetary predicament here’s my variation:

Climate Change first hit the Maldives, but I did not speak out–

Because where I live, the sea is far away.

Then a tsunami hit Fukushima, but I did not speak out–

Because I don’t live in an earthquake prone area.

Then a super typhoon hit the Philippines, but I did not speak out–

Because no hurricanes have ever been reported here.

Then Climate Change hit us all, and there was nobody left to speak for me.

Fundamental changes.

In my lifetime the world’s population has more than tripled. The world economy expanded some 15-fold, energy use increased 20 times and industrial output expanded by a factor of 40. Nothing even remotely like this has ever happened before in a finite earth. If I were to draw a graph then every item mentioned would go straight up. The higher it goes, the more fragile the expansion: it is not like a mountain that has a broad base and were the top is as solid as its footing. No, here the climb up has only one basis: the cosmos-killing production of oil, gas, coal. Solar and wind power play no part in the energy game, or better, energy gamble. In the last 60 years we have used ten times more energy than our forebears did in the millennium preceding 1900.

It is on that shaky foundation that we have built on 21st century existence. No wonder matters are back firing.

There is a beautiful passage in Ecclesiastes:

What has been is what will be,

And what is done is what will be done;

And there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there a thing of which it is said,

“See this is new?”

It has been already, in the ages before us.

There is no remembrance of former things,

Nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to happen

                                                            Ecclesiastes 1: 9-11

These words are now out of date. There is something new under the sun: it is the story of environmental change around the world. Humans, under the obedient guidance of the Great Satan, have been the willing allies of his Imperial Majesty, the Prince of this world – as Jesus labelled him.

We delight in the possession of new gadgets. People get stabbed on Black Friday in the USA, the day after Thanksgiving there, celebrated just last week. They are there to grab one of the new toys that need no imagination or personal know-how, except some technical manipulations, tools that keep us from personal interaction, from eyeball-to-eyeball exchange.

Of course, there have been a lot of unparalleled prosperity and advances in science and medicine, in transportation and communication. Still all this comes at an ultimate cost: Climate Change. We, all 7.1 billion of us human beings, have managed something no previous generation could ever accomplish, thanks to oil: we have upset the balance of the earth.

A few weeks ago the 19th Climate meeting took place, under the auspices of the United Nations. The Nineteenth! Every other year the experts gather from all over the world in the thousands at considerable expense to the climate to hammer out a climate pact. Somehow the fuel for airplanes is exempted from the carbon count: of course: all these government and UN officials can only come by flying machines, the highest polluting agents in the world. In none of these 19 meetings, from Kyoto in Japan to The Hague and now in Warsaw, anything has ever been accomplished. In the meantime pollution has accelerated, and is still peaking. Finally a UN official has admitted that the goal of a temperature increase of 2 degree Celsius is now impossible: it will be more than 3.6 degree Celsius, which in reality means Hell on Earth. The Ice Age came about when the temperature dropped that much.

Peak Oil?

Peak Oil? Not by a long shot. I know I predicted Peak Oil more than 10 years ago. I was wrong. The high price of oil has unleashed new supplies: the highly frightful fracking folly. The US energy department said North America will add 1.5 million barrels per day (m b/d) of oil supply this year, mostly from shale, and 1.1m b/d next year. This new supply is coming just as Iraqi Kurdistan opens a new pipeline to Turkey. Iraq’s output crashed to 2m b/d over the summer as al-Qaeda attacks reached a crescendo, but Baghdad claims output is poised to recover. The International Energy Agency expects Iraq to triple supply to 6 million b/d by 2020. And now the world’s energy companies under the guise of US diplomacy have concluded a new accord with Iran. The Saudis are furious: not only will this lower the price of oil world-wide, but also the people in Tehran worship Mohammed in a different way than the Saudis do, and that is dangerous: the smaller the religious differences, the greater the fury . The tinder-box Middle East is in the grip of a Sunni-Shia civil war comparable in ideological ferocity to the clash between Catholics and Protestants in early 17th Century Europe. There too both parties worshiped the same God, but in a slightly different way. That war lasted Thirty Years from 1618-1648 and devastated Central Europe. The Saudis need a high oil price – a minimum of $100 per barrel – to keep its restless population from revolting. The Iran agreement is nothing else but appeasing capital. The West needs growth – even when the fate of the Earth is at stake. According to one report issued for the Warsaw conference, just 90 corporations worldwide are responsible for two-thirds of the greenhouse gas buildup over the past 200 years that is driving global warming. These corporations—mainly giant oil and gas monopolies and coal mining companies—cling to their profit interests in the face of threats to the survival of the human race.

Interesting times, anybody?

We live in interesting times. We face the final battle: the forces of life, including the ecosystem, are being transformed into forces of death. The monster Typhoon Haiyan is only one of the first tragedies. Nature and global elites seek to exploit the planet’s last drops of blood and its repressed masses are joining to make the days of descent squalid and terrifying.

In these extreme times we will have to navigate our way. In our current world full of peaks, we have to find security. If there is no radical change – and it does not look that way – we will be forced to choose how we will die, whom we will cling to, what we will risk. Wisdom is required. Where will our allegiance lie? Who will be our God? Will it be Capitalism? Or will it be the Maker of Heaven and Earth? It reminds me of the prophet Elijah on the Mount Carmel when he cried, “If the Lord is God, follow him; but is Capitalism is God, follow it.” The choice is stark: Life or Death.

Is there a peak in our Future?

There already are lots of peaks. In a sense it now is Peak Everything. We already have peak population. The fact that we have growing pollution means that we use up more air than the atmosphere can absorb. Wide-spread unemployment means that we have more people than the labour market can absorb. Low return on money means that we have more money than the economy needs. Polluted water means that we have Peak clean water. Peak everything means that we are in for a long period of decline, going down-hill, affecting our financial systems, food supplies and personal welfare. All this will also severely affect our personal psychological coping mechanisms.
Yes, we are in for a dangerous period of adjustment, until we have learned to live within the Earth’s resource limits, which will only arrive in the New Creation. Better get ready.

In my 15 years of blogging, I have mentioned that if China can manage to grow without endangering its population, there is hope for the world. That is not happening. True, China’s economy is still growing rapidly, more than doubling in size every eight years. China consumes more than twice as much coal as it did a decade ago, the same with iron ore and oil. It has quadrupled its highways, and has almost five times as many cars. It also has unprecedented pollution problems, affecting water and air, endangering billions of lives. China has no alternatives to coal to fuel its industrial machine, meaning that pollution there will grow unabated.

China is as vulnerable as a china teacup, which, when dropped, shatters into a thousand pieces. That will happen to China. The same holds true for the entire world economy: built on the shaky foundation of ultra-polluting carbon fuel. In a world of Peak Everything, be prepared for the worst.

Starting in 2014 I am planning to write a series on “How then shall we live?”, trying to combine the Creation Word with the Written Word, something I have advocated for some time. What we need is a Creed for the Cosmos, a New Creation theology.

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Our World Today

Posted on November 24, 2013 by Bert Hielema

November 24 2013

How come we keep on running to the abyss?

I don’t know whether you ever had a conversion. I did. It happened in 1973, now 40 years ago. That year I received a book each from two different friends. The first one was a Dutch book and dealt with life after death: Sterven.. en dan?, which means We die… then what? It opened my eyes from believing in heaven to seeing that our eternal destiny is a renewed earth. That completely changed my outlook on life. A bit later another friend gave me The Limits to Growth, a rather technical book with all sorts of graphs and tables and computer projections, basically saying that in the future we will hit limits in mineral use and in agriculture. Then Climate Change was not yet an issue.

Both fit in with the aim of my blog which is to convey a sense of urgency in affecting a change of attitude, similar to my conversion, even though I fully realize that it is beyond my persuasive power to do so. If there is somewhere one single person in the world reading my blog (this past week I had 2073 visitors, with the USA having the most readers, followed by Israel and China) who undergoes such a change of mind, my life has not been in vain. My conversion, which has been a slow process, makes me now realize that the Bible is a tool, a necessary tool to understand God’s plan for creation, but a tool nevertheless, a means, not an end.

Here’s my reasoning.

 God’s initial intention was to have Adam and Eve, which the Bible depicts as the first human pair, to start a new humanity in a perfect earth. That plan did not work as they somehow sold the creation God had deeded to them, to his adversary, the Satan. However that was not the end of the matter. God, in his love for the cosmos, allowed his Son to be sacrificed as payment for buying back his beloved world. Even though that payment has been made, the final closing of the transaction will not take place until Jesus returns to his world, giving Satan a free hand till then. Also a time-span of a few thousand years was needed to develop the full potential of the earth and test the ultimate know-how of humanity, something that is coming to an end, as all things now are back-firing, including all religious expressions.

 Religion will cease?

Yes. Look at Revelation 21: 22. There the author writes that “I did not see a temple in the city”, the city being the New Creation, Christ’s Kingdom. That to me suggests that there will be no place for either the Bible or the church in the New World to come. Neither will there be marriage, as Jesus himself said when questioned on that topic (Luke 20: 35). Well, take a look around. Already we see these developments as, it seems, marriage is going out of fashion. Today the largest group of people in the Western world are the singles – adults who live alone. The church too is losing ground left and right, even though ‘religions’, all sorts of them, are flourishing. Last week the synod of the C of E met discussing the situation in the Church of England, which is losing its status as a dominant place in society because the young are abandoning it in droves. The archbishop of York, Dr. John Sentamu, compared wrangling within the church to ‘rearranging furniture when the house is on fire’. The archbishop of York has warned the Church of England that it must end its internal arguments and focus on spreading the word of God and attracting new worshippers if it is to avoid obsolescence. In a passionate address to the General Synod on November 18 , John Sentamu said it was time to “evangelise or fossilise”, adding that teaching people about Christ was as central to the church’s mission as worship. He added, “Reorganising the structures, arguing over words and phrases while the people of England are left floundering amid meaninglessness, anxiety and despair….On the label, the church tin says: ‘Open here for salvation, peace, hope, purpose, love, Kingdom … but when it is open, inside the tin we so often find humbug, or – if we are Anglicans – fudge.” So they approved female bishops.

The word ‘evangelize’ comes from the Greek ‘eu’ and ‘angelos’ the ‘good’ ‘message’. But the church is no longer sure what ‘the good message’ is. What does the church expect? That the same, tired way of communicating – the sermon- that hasn’t worked in the past, will this time bring different results?

The problem is that the church has a one-dimensional view on The Word, confining its product to the Bible only. Creation is God’s Primary Word: the Bible is God’s Secondary Word. Unless and until we see that the one won’t work without the other, no amount of ‘evangelism’ will work.

In the new Creation there will be no church and no Bible: the law of the Lord will be written on our hearts: holistic living will be automatic: that’s why we as humanity are now going through the final phase, learning through trial and error how to live the New Creation Life. Not easy. In all this the final goal is the care for the cosmos, God’s precious work of art. The Bible in all this is a tool, even though it is a necessary one most of the time. Psalm 119: 105 simply says that “Your (secondary written) word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path (in God’s primary created Word.) The Lord Jesus did not die to save the written word. The Bible will disappear when it has become redundant. Jesus died to save the creation, God’s Primary Word.

 Another radical thought.

Perhaps for some the Bible is not even needed. Romans 1: 20 hints at that. Freely interpreted this text says that if we really have a close look at creation, if we see how it all fits together as a harmonious entity, where, when we disturb one element- say the climate – the entire structure is affected, seeing the cosmos as a divine miracle, then, yes, we are on the way to salvation. Only God’s eternal power and divine nature – his invisible qualities – was able to construct such a magnificent and majestic totality. “By not acknowledging this we stand condemned” says this text. The corollary, the other side of the coin, is that when we do confess that only an all-wise God could have wrought such a marvelous reality this same God will accept this confession ‘without the person knowing about the bible and Christ.’

Aboriginal beliefs come to mind. They often see creation as holy. I believe that when we see creation as holy and treat it that way, we are closer to God than when we see the Bible as holy, but give no thought to creation at all.

Enough.

It is very difficult to rid ourselves of an addiction. Addiction? Yes, we are suffering from being carbo-holics. (Thanks, L. V. T., for helping me coin that word.) We are addicts when we can’t live without a certain substance. Any negative addiction is fatal. Alcoholics can’t live without imbibing on a regular basis, even when it leads to family breakup, bad health and premature death. Our addiction to carbon does exactly the same to our planet: it leads to a Carbon-corroded cosmos.  We can see it in our attitude toward Climate Change. In spite of all the climate summits, promises of “voluntary restraint,” carbon trading and carbon taxes, the growth of CO2 emissions and atmospheric concentrations have been accelerating. In the early 1960s, CO2 ppm – parts per million -concentrations in the atmosphere grew by 0.7ppm per year. In recent decades, now that China and India have industrialized, the growth rate has tripled to 2.1 ppm per year. In just the first 17 weeks of 2013, CO2 levels jumped by 2.74 ppm compared to last year. Does that disturb us? Are we upset?  I haven’t noticed it. Nobody has approached me, lamenting that this sudden jump in CO2 levels is suicidal. Perhaps the matter is beyond our capability to grasp. The required global awareness, necessary to handle the current situation, has become impossible to achieve. As a human race we are no longer able to handle our own power. We, as carbo-holics, are incapable to fathom the predicament we are in: typical of an addictive condition.

Of course that means we are marching toward disaster, “sleepwalking to extinction” as the Guardian’s George Monbiot once put it. Why can’t we slam on the brakes before we ride off the cliff to collapse?

Simple. Our addiction is generated by the rich who live off our weakness. Take the tobacco industry. For the longest time it denied that smoking tobacco was a health hazard. Now the oil industry plays down the dangers of Climate Change and especially the Coal Cartel claims that coal is clean or can be used without endangering the planet.

It all boils down to who is in charge of our economy. The Psalms talk about ‘the proud men’s disdain’ for the poor.  The rich can – to some extent – escape the consequences of our increasingly dangerous globe.

We live under a corporate capitalist system that no longer can change. The GDP must grow or it dies. Its entire structure is based on ‘more’. Governments too depend on growth. Only then can they pay our generous benefits, our increasing cost of health-care, our ever-growing pension benefits. Growth at the cost of our very basis of life: our soil, air, water. Bernanke and his board has been pumping money into the banks in a desperate attempt to try to induce inflation, so that their debts will be reduced. It is not working. Our world is finite, and we are approaching its limits.

We, small folk, have no voice in this matter. We have little choice but to go along in this destruction, to keep pouring on the gas instead of slamming on the brakes. But we won’t slow down, let alone stop, because we too are addicted to growth: we need jobs, so we always hope that somehow something miraculous will happen.

We are fast approaching the precipice of ecological and economic collapse. The engine that has powered three centuries of accelerating economic development, revolutionizing technology, science, culture and human life itself is, today, a roaring out-of-control locomotive mowing down continents of forests, sweeping oceans of life, clawing out mountains of minerals, pumping out lakes of fuels, devouring the planet’s last accessible natural resources to turn them into “product,” while destroying fragile global ecologies built up over eons of time. Between 1950 and 2000 the global human population almost tripled from 2.5 to more than 7 billion. But in these same decades, consumption of major natural resources soared more than six-fold on average, some much more. Natural gas consumption grew nearly twelvefold, bauxite (aluminum ore) fifteen-fold. And so on. At current rates, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson says that “half the world’s great forests have already been leveled and half the world’s plant and animal species may be gone by the end of this century.”

Until…..

Remember Easter Island. Jared Diamond, a professor of geography in L.A. wrote a 575 page book simply called Collapse, subtitled:  How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. He devotes one chapter to Easter Island, discovered by Jacob Roggeveen on April 5 1722, Easter Sunday. There that globetrotting Dutchman saw something most astonishing, a landscape with huge stone statutes, but devoid of trees and inhabitants. Apparently the native religion required these immense images, which came at the expense of the native trees, used for transporting logs and scaffolding. Wrote Diamond, ”What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say? Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood”?

The Easter Islanders had a fanatic faith in their stone idols until death. We have a similar misplaced trust in capitalism until death doth us part.

Today the only matter we can depend on without fail is that we can no longer depend on anything, except on one cardinal matter: The Lord made no junk and will not junk what he has made. Christ will return to claim his precious creation. Be part of that newness.

 

 

 

 

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Posted on November 17, 2013 by Bert Hielema

November 17 2013

It is time for the church to change its focus.

What is the church’s focus now?

I have been a faithful church goer for about 80 years. That qualifies me to discuss the church and its focus, which, in my experience has always been the Bible, the Scriptures, the Written Word. All sermons and songs were and still are centered on the Book of Books.

When I was young the church was at the centre of life: twice to church on Sunday, youth meetings, tremendous devotion and loyalty, especially during the war in the Netherlands 1940-45 when the church also was the social centre.

After the war, after study, after a compulsory spell in the Dutch Army, I immigrated to Canada in 1951, where the same focus prevailed, with again the church being an important part of life, on par with getting married, establishing a family and starting a business. Quite soon Christian education became part of the package: being member of boards and committees both on the local and provincial level, also involved in other Christian endeavours to the point where my life seemed to revolve around these matters. The timeframe here was about from 1957 till 1965, the year I became an elder and was, for the first time, directly involved in the church as an organization. Somehow I didn’t serve out my three year term. Let me say that ever since then I have seen the church in a different light: a very human institution. Pierre Berton, not a churchgoer, was, in 1966, commissioned by the United Church in Canada to take a look at the church. His assessment was captured in the title of his book: The Comfortable Pew. Comfortable and comfort can be poles apart. The church is in the comfort business: the paradox is that this should make people uncomfortable, especially now.

The times have changed.

We no longer live in comfortable times. Jacques Ellul, professor of law in Bordeaux, France, in his book Hope in Time of Abandonment, wrote in the Preface that his book has to be seen in the light of “The decisive importance of the Promise, the approach of the Second Coming, the Eschaton which comes (his emphasis)”. The title of the French original was L’Espérance Oubliée, which means The Forgotten Hope.  The English version gave a different emphasis: hope, unlike the original French version. Having Abandonment in the title reflects Ellul’s belief that God has turned his back on us and is silent. Ellul wrote: “It is my belief that we have entered upon an age of abandonment that God has turned away from us and is leaving us to our fate”. He adds that this does not mean that religion is gone: “Never have people believed as much, everything and nothing…… the modern world is loaded with religion…. The most can be said that man has completely desacralized the natural environment but has transferred all the sacred to the cultural and the social (and, I may add, the economical.)”

He is not alone in this. Richard Elliott Friedman, Professor of Hebrew in California, wrote in his The Hidden Face of God, that the phrase “God hides his face” occurs over thirty times in the Hebrew Bible. He singles out Deut. 32: 20: “I shall hide my face from them; I shall see what their end will be.” With these words God gave humanity the opportunity to go on their own, to live without God, God’s reasoning being that if they are so wise, if they think that they have grown up and can fend for themselves, I will give them a free hand.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer mentions this also when he wrote that “So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him.” (Letters from Prison.)

And that is exactly where we are as the year 2013 is coming to a close.

A new necessary phase

I believe we now are in a new phase in the history of humanity in which we must prepare for the ‘age to come’, the age of ‘The Kingdom’, when we are indeed totally on our own. Adam and Eve were far too naïve. Next time, when the new Paradise appears, God wants experienced people to steer creation, people who learned by trial and error to live holistically.

As a society we live totally without God. True God is still real on a personal basis – there’s where the church comes in – but politically, economically, socially, we live under a Satanic rule. J. H. Bavinck, in his forthcoming book The Kingdom, writes that “We are now faced with a development in creation that we cannot understand and control, but of which we daily exper­i­ence its terrifying consequences. We now see God’s work of art embroiled in the power of demons. Satanic forces have thrown themselves onto nature, onto us humans, onto the entire radiant creation.” He later sets out to describe the Kingdom, which is to come in the New Creation and will encompass the totality of cosmos, from the most basic amoeba to the highest form of development, the human race.

That now Satan is in charge is beyond dispute. The horrible hurricane that hit the Philippines is just one of the many signs that we have unleashed satanic forces.

This week there is another Environmental conference going. Reports the New York Times: “The typhoon that struck the Philippines produced an outpouring of emotion on Monday at United Nations talks on a global climate treaty in Warsaw, where delegates were quick to suggest that a warming planet had turned the storm into a lethal monster.”

I was at U.N. environmental conference # 8 in the year 2000 in The Hague, the Netherlands. There, 13 years ago, nothing was accomplished. Again nothing concrete will emerge in Warsaw either, because on each nation’s agenda Economic Growth is still the priority. We are ‘fiddling as Rome Burns” as the expression goes.

As usual, the world is ahead of the church.

The world only has ‘the world’. The general belief in the church is that people go to heaven, a heresy Satan has successfully sold to the church. I believe that’s why the church is at a dead end, and loses members left and right. That eternal life will be lived on this our very own earth, is a foreign concept to almost the entire faith spectrum, from Islam to Judaism to Christianity. It’s different for the secular world out there who only have our planet.

The world is waking up to the future, if any. Here is what Robert Jensen, full professor of Journalism in Austin Texas writes: “Individually and collectively, we have failed to create just societies or a sustainable human presence on the planet. …My conclusion: There is no way magically to solve the fundamental problems that result from too many people consuming too much and producing too much waste, under conditions of unconscionable inequality in wealth and power.” He continues: “When we reflect on our history as a species and the nature of the systems that govern our lives today, the sensible conclusion is that the steps we need to take won’t be taken, at least not in the time frame available for meaningful change. This is reality, and sensible planning should be reality-based.”

He writes: “Hope is for the lazy. Now is not the time for hope. Let’s put hope aside and get to the real work of our understanding our historical moment so that our actions are grounded in reality. My thesis: Our task today is not to scurry around trying to hold onto the world as we know it, but to focus on how we can hold onto our humanity as we enter a distinctly different era of the human presence on the planet, an era that will challenge our resolve and reserves. Call it collapse or the apocalypse or the Age of Aquarius—whatever the name, it will not look like anything we have known. The future will be defined by the continuing drawdown of the ecological capital of the planet well beyond replacement levels and rising levels of toxicity, with the resulting social conflict exacerbated by rapid climate destabilization in ways we cannot predict specifically but that will be destructive to human well-being, perhaps even to human survival.”

Dr. Jensen goes where no churches I know go. He says: “Today our moral challenge is how to live on a planet of 4 billion, 3 billion, 2 billion, maybe less. How are we going to understand and experience ourselves as human beings— as moral beings, the kind of creatures we’ve always claimed to be—in the midst a long-term human die-off for which there is no precedent? What will it mean to be human when we know that around the world, maybe even down the block, other human beings—creatures exactly the same as us—are dying in large numbers not because of something outside human control, but instead because of things we humans chose to do and keep choosing, keep doing?”

Of course the Bible in Revelation strongly hints at major disasters to come. This professor from Texas again: “If you think this is too extreme, alarmist, hysterical, then tell a different story of the future, one that doesn’t depend on magic, one that doesn’t include some version of, ‘We will invent solar panels that give us endless clean energy,’ or ‘We will find ways to grow even more food on even less soil with declining natural fertility,’ or perhaps, ‘We will invent a perpetual motion machine.’ If I’m wrong, explain to me where I’m wrong.”

Environmentally and economically we are in a free-fall. Says Jensen: “That brings to mind the old joke about the fellow who jumps off a 100 story building and, when asked how things are going 90 floors down, says, ‘Great so far.’ Advanced technology based on abundant and cheap supplies of concentrated energy has taken us a long way on a curious ride, but there is no guarantee that advanced technology can solve problems in the future, especially when the most easily accessible sources of that concentrated energy are dwindling and the life-threatening consequences of burning all that fuel are now unavoidable. To dismiss these issues because people allegedly don’t like disaster messages is akin to telling people in the path of a tornado to ignore the weather forecast because disaster messages are a turnoff.”

The situation is serious, so serious that we need a new focus.

Christians, supposedly, are the only ones who have the answers. The world is out of options. Dr. Jensen again: “When we come to terms with these challenges—when we face up to the fact that the human species now faces problems that likely have no solutions, at least no solutions that allow us to continue living as we have —then we will work at accomplishing whatever we can, where we live, in the time available to us.”

Remember: Our future is here, that’s why God wants experienced, holistic folk in the new world to come. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:48, tells us to be ‘perfect’. Actually he didn’t say that. He said be ‘teleios’ which means ‘holistic’, always keeping the ‘telos’ in mind, the end result, because we are destined for eternity, the ultimate holistic society. In these last days when all things are falling apart, the message has to change, away from a fictive heaven as our destination, away from our capitalist ‘growth at all cost’ approach, an economic system that magnifies human greed and encourages short-term thinking, while pretending there are no physical limits on human consumption, a true death cult.

“Collapse” is in the cards. It’s time to say that our comfort means not to preach escape to heaven, but to proclaim the ultimate (dis)comfort, that our world’s expiry date is close, and a (re)newed world is on the way. The church is or should be in the business to prepare the faithful for the Kingdom to come: God made no junk and will not junk what he has made.

Part of that message is to grieve for degrading God’s earth to junk in line with Jeremiah: “My grief is beyond healing, my heart is sick within me” (Jer. 8:18)… “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved” (Jer. 8:21). He also prophesied that Jerusalem would fall, the temple be destroyed, the king and priests be exiled. Nobody heeded his call. History will simply repeat itself.

The sad truth is that the church will not change and people will not hear the Kingdom message. People will not hear that we have strayed too far, that there is no way to return to the right relation within the systems in which we live. I know there are those whose heart is sick and whose grieving for creation is deep. When we feel that inner pain then this means we have confronted the truth about our fallen world. Then we are ready to assume our real humanity.

Ellul gave his book the title L’Espérance Oubliée, The Forgotten Hope. The Church, by and large has forgotten the hope, the hope of the Coming Kingdom. Ellul starts his book by mentioning the Eschaton, the last days just before the Kingdom is to come. We live in that period. His last line is Maranatha: Lord come quickly.

 

 

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Posted on November 12, 2013 by Bert Hielema

November 10 2013

John 3: 16: For God so loved the world….: houtoos gar ègapèsen ho theos ton kosmon

The Greek original is there for a particular reason. That sentence contains two words in the Greek that we all know: agapè and cosmos. The verb ègapèsen has agapè nas its root. It means “unconditional love”. My 2000 pages Webster dictionary defines cosmos as “The world regarded as an orderly harmonious system”.

I am always extremely puzzled that the church only pays lip service to John 3: 16. Tell me: if God unconditionally, without a grain of reservation, with everything God possesses, loves the cosmos, do not we, who claim to his followers, have that same holy duty?

We know the words of John 3: 16: they have been set to song, they are among the most quoted in the church and also the most misinterpreted. Of course God loves us, but his loving us is included in the totality of the cosmos. God equally loves the trees, the soil, the air, the birds, everything that lives.

Something else that never fails to astound me: how can we say we love our neighbours when we poison their air, contaminate the water, etc. etc. which we do all the time. We sing in church “’This is my Father’s world” but once out of church we drive away without ever given a thought that by slamming the door of our vehicle shut, our minds are equally shut to the air pollution we generate in God’s harmonious divine order. “Sin bravely” said Martin Luther, and I agree, but should we not at least pray for forgiveness because we have painted ourselves into such a corner that our entire existence depends on driving a car?

I guess the sad truth is that we, all of us, are in the grip of money: you, me, basically everybody. This is not because we want that but because we have allowed ourselves to become so entangled. We have become victims of a system that has been devised by the Satan whose aim is diametrically opposed to God’s. Where God wants harmony and cosmos, Satan wants destruction and chaos: his sole aim is to destroy God’s well-ordered system.

The more perceptive among us are discovering that money, far from being harmless, is actually the great destroyer. Because of the subdivisions we live in, we are forced to own one or more automobiles. To be able to drive from our far-flung residences and work-places we have paved the woods, mined the mountains, eaten the seas, eliminated species, causing all the large land and sea animals of the earth and most of the birds to become extinct. Money is at the root of all this.

Yes, we live in a society obsessed with money, an infatuation that equally applies to all religious institutions. Money is the most important rule in today’s society and the acquisition of it is seen as its highest goal. Money makes the world go round and goes around the world with a velocity equal to the speed of light and in torrents unequaled in history: the daily flood amounts to Trillions of Dollars. Because of Money the global economy is like a jet plane, fast, comfortable and when it crashes, its fall is also spectacular. And fall it will.

And what has all this to do with Jesus?

When Jesus came to earth, forever to retain the status of both God and Human, he could have been a human being of any description, stature, degree and condition; and yet he chose to be poor. The English poet Christopher Harvey said of him in the seventeenth century:

It was Thy Choice, whilst Thou on Earth didst stay,

And hadst not whereupon Thy Head to lay.

 No wonder that throughout the Middle Ages Jesus is appearing not just as God, but as a pauper. Curiously the fastest growing Protestant movement in the USA preaches the theology of prosperity, which promises material success as well as eternal salvation. With such a complete reversal of what Jesus portrayed in his life, we do well to investigate the relationship between Jesus and money a bit closer.

I am convinced that Jesus had some basic misgivings about money – just as some of us do at times- because we all know that wealth and its acquisition makes people do crazy and often dishonest things. “The love of money is the root of all evils,” is Paul’s warning to Timothy and this probably was one reason why Jesus did not like money. I think that with Jesus there also was a deeper reason, something very personal. I get the impression that Jesus went out of his way to avoid contact with money and was even loath to touch the stuff. Why do I make that assumption? Well, Jesus has a perfect recall of everything, past, present and future and so had perfect insight, hindsight and foresight into everything. We will recall that his betrayal, his suffering and death was directly associated with money. How would we feel – how would I feel – if I know that money would eventually kill me? Well, I think that this view governed Jesus’ attitude towards money and perhaps even towards economic theory.

Jesus and Money

Here are some concrete examples. Take the feeding of those thousands: Jesus knows that if these people had gone off to buy bread and fish in the neighbouring stores, the merchants, being good businessmen, would have suddenly increased the prices of these basic food items because of greater demand. The law of supply and demand is certainly not a latter-day invention: it has existed as long as people have traded. That’s what economics is all about: charge high when everybody needs it. It happened in Ontario and Quebec with the prolonged blackout during the ice storm: the few candles available tripled in price overnight in the disaster areas. So what did Jesus do to forestall this price-gouging? He simply by-passed the economic law of supply and demand and created bread and fish ex nihilo- out of nothing- well, almost out of nothing.

Then there is that so uncharacteristic incident where Jesus almost went berserk when he chased the money changers out of the temple, upsetting much more than the tables. After all having these business people do their work in the temple was an age-old tradition and necessary to keep the Jewish house of worship functioning properly because only certain kinds of money were accepted in the temple. How else would the pious supplicants obtain the proper animals for sacrifice? I think it was money and its abuses that made Jesus so angry. Another, more indirect, indication: I find it curious that Judas, the unredeemed among the disciples, carried the purse and handled the finances: Judas, who loved money more than Jesus. In the end he ended up with thirty pieces of silver and then discovered that money as an idol wants our very lives. In that sense we are much closer to Judas than to Jesus. With ‘we’ I include all people in the over rich West. Also to me a tip-off was Jesus’ great disdain for the nominal value of currency, evident when Mary spent perhaps a year’s income on that precious oil. “So what,” Jesus remarked, “So what if such a large sum was spent. It is only money.” Or consider the occasion when Peter was asked if Jesus would pay the temple tax. “Of course,” is Peter’s immediate reaction, “of course Jesus pays.” But for Jesus this was not such a straightforward matter. Why this reluctance to pay the temple tax? Well, I have my theory about this. I think Jesus knew that perhaps this very money given to the temple was going to buy his life and ensure his death.

And then, in an ironic twist, with almost a touch of black humor, Jesus shrugs his shoulders and says: “OK, not important. Let me not major in minors. Go to the lake, catch a fish and there you’ll find a silver coin enough for the both of us.” I like that. Jesus is never skimpy. And, of course, with this gesture, he shows that all the fish in the sea and- by implication- the cattle upon a thousand hills, are his.

Here we see Jesus’ royalty coming through. Queen Elizabeth never carries a wallet. Wherever she goes on an official visit, she goes free. Jesus is the same and much more so. Here he shows that he is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, but people do not recognize him that way.

Dualism exposed

Remember that familiar encounter with the Pharisees who were out to trick him? They asked Jesus whether Jews should pay the Roman head-tax. The story is well known. Jesus calls for a denarius (No, he does not carry money on him) and asks; “Whose image?” They dutifully answer, “Caesar’s.” Jesus replies: “Give to Caesar what belongs to him and to God the things that are God’s.”

Here is a story we have grown up with in the church. On it we have based the separation of church and state and have interpreted this to mean that there are two important divisions in society: God- religion – and the State. Well, we live in times where all automatic responses need to be questioned, so let me try another angle. In the first place Tiberius, the then emperor, could not possibly have owned the coin any more than the heirs of George Washington or Queen Elizabeth have the legal right to the bank notes which carry their images. In his compact answer Jesus touches upon two important segments of society: the political-economic reality represented by Caesar and money on the one hand, and the eternal as expressed in the Kingdom of God on the other. He implies in the political part that, no, he would not support an armed revolt or even passive resistance to Rome, and in the economic sector Jesus asserts that the tax and the coins themselves are simply a human device and that all of life, including money, is a matter of faith. That the latter is becoming more clear every day with Mr. Bernanke, the great money wizard, fabricating $85 Billion every month, $1 Trillion a year. Jesus then already implies that the value of money is sheer fiction. The only matter that counts is the eternal – God’s kingdom- which is at hand.

So here is a curious twist in the historical explanation of this incident. Where Jesus, by his life and in this particular instance proclaims an almost puritanical and revolutionary renunciation of the world of money, today we explain this passage to mean exactly the opposite. Where Jesus saw only the Kingdom – which includes all things, also money – as the dominant factor of his life and his followers, and money at best a minor player, today, based on this very text we believe that there are two realms of equal importance: Caesar, the State, represented by taxes- money – and the Church- God- Religion- in charge of the sacred. Here we are face to face with a dilemma: where Jesus abhorred money by all indications because it contributed to this death, we adore it. Where Jesus lived without money, our lives are centered on it. Jesus once made a radical statement: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” In our Western world everything is about money: the stock market, the strength of the dollar, the price of gold, three items mentioned in almost every newscast. Let’s not kid ourselves: Mammon is God, the Dollar is King in the world and its possession a holy grail. We now put a price tag on everything. First on Jesus – 30 pieces of silver – and now also on the rest of creation: indeed money has become the great destroyer. We all participate in that criminal act, even as we drive to and from church. Jesus was sold for the price of a slave: we are selling creation to serve us as a slave. We, as 6 percent of the world’s population cause 40 percent of the world’s pollution, in perfect accordance with the aims of Capitalism which defines itself as Creative Destruction. I am more and more inclined to think that Capitalism and its exponent, the global money economy, is the Anti-Christ, focused more and more on credit-debit-pin numbers such as 666, the almost perfect number, never to attain ‘7’ the perfect one. I think that’s why Jesus feared money because he foresaw how destructive it would be for him, for his creation and for us.

He died so that we too could be included in his life, a resurrection life, a far better life than we can ever live in a money society. If we want to share in that life then we must regain a new sense of value; we must reset our priorities to have our treasures expressed not in money but in love, in genuine compassion for all God’s creatures, humans, animals, trees, flowers, air, water.

In the final analysis, what does John 3:16 really mean?

The text means that God loved the cosmos so passionately that this love even surpassed the love he had for his son. For us this means that we too must love the cosmos also above the love we have for our spouse, our children or grandchildren. Think about that when mounting that carbon-fed iron horse. At stake is eternity.

 

Next week:

Is it time for the church to change its focus?

 

 

 

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