Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

Our World Today

August 11 2013

Ancient events: current repercussions.

The bible is not a history book. The bible is not a handbook for any science, except for theology. The bible simply tells us that God created the cosmos ‘in the beginning’ whenever that may be, of which the human race became a part. It also relates that God gave the human race ownership of creation. There they had a faultless start, but then somehow were enticed to sell God’s creation to God’s enemy. Later God sacrificed his son to redeem (the French bible uses ‘racheter’ which means ‘buying back’ or ‘repurchase’) creation from the grip of his great adversary. Just like a ‘van Gogh’ painting will always be associated with that artist, even though he no longer owns any, so in the same way creation will always be ‘the Lord’s’, even though for the time being ownership has changed.

Colossians 1: 15-20 gives us some insight what took place ‘in the beginning’.  Here is my liberal not literal version of what Paul wrote there:

“This human being Jesus of Nazareth is precisely in his unconditional love for humanity the image of the invisible God.

Jesus Christ makes God’s love visible for us and so enables us to experience this love also.

Jesus Christ lived as a human being, reason why God too wants to be seen as a human being. In Jesus Christ we see God at work for us.

As the first-born of the entire creation Christ is the prototype of our humanity.

In his human existence Christ has made clear what God himself has intended for us as well, because the universe, everything that exists, has been created by Christ and for him.

For all of us Christ went through death because, in solidarity with all humans, he would be the first in everything, including the firstborn from among the dead.

Nothing happens in our lives that he himself has not experienced first: sorrow, loneliness, sickness, pain and even death, because in him God has chosen to dwell in his entire fullness to reconcile everything to him by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.”

Here is something that I think is possible. I am always amazed how we humans are so clever, so inventive and artistic and so exceedingly smart. Colossians 1 tells us that everything without exception is the work of Jesus. Based on that I am inclined to think that he, being fully human and possessing ultimate wisdom and knowledge, called, as the first human being ever, everything into existence. He created us in his image, which to me suggests that we not only look like him, but also have some of the brainpower he possessed, which accounts for the fabulous accomplishments we as the human race have achieved.

Let me backtrack a bit to Adam and Eve and especially Cain and Abel, the first sons of Adam and Eve. These two young men represent an eternal motif: good versus evil: God versus Satan. Cain and Abel are two siblings as different as brothers can be. Cain was a man of action who worked the land, tamed animals. Abel was a shepherd, slow in pace, contemplative, not a go-getter. Somehow Abel understood God’s plan for creation, relied on God’s law, studied the way of nature, and marveled at God’s goodness.

Cain was different. Because his parents had insisted, he too went through the routine of worship but really thought offering an animal to God pretty silly stuff. He noticed Abel’s contentment, his happiness, his lack of uptightness and realized his own anxiety and his own restlessness. Cain saw Abel’s close contact with God Creator and his jealousy and anger grew.

The Lord God also spotted Cain’s unhappiness and discussed it with him, something Cain resented. God asked “What’s the matter with you, Cain? How come you are so strained and uncomfortable? You know the way. Your parents have shown you.”

Cain knew the way alright. He also knew that God favoured Abel’s way. Cain started to hate God and his anger centred on his brother. With his mind in turmoil he thought: “I, Cain do all the work aro0und the place. I toil from dawn to dusk and beyond. And Abel, the pious bastard, what does he contribute to the economic wellbeing of our family enterprise?” So, at one time when Abel had forgotten to close the gate and his sheep had accidently strayed into a field ready for harvest, his anger boiled over and he knocked him cold. Abel’s head hit a sharp stone and he bled to death.

When Cain saw what he had done, he left the scene of the accident.

Then God got into the act again.

“Cain, where is your brother Abel?”
Cain kept going. Stubbornly he refused to listen to God. He tried to ignore God, acting as if he did not exist.

“Cain, I know exactly what you are thinking. You may try to ignore me, but that is impossible.”
Stubbornly Cain plodded on. Then suddenly he yelled, “Leave me alone.  Am I my brother’s keeper?  I don’t know where Abel is and I don’t care.”

“Cain you killed your brother. Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. Creation, holy creation groans because of his blood. Do you realize what you have done? Because of this murder you are under a curse and because of Abel’s blood the ground is cursed as well.”
“But God, I couldn’t help it. I don’t deserve such punishment. Your sentence is too heavy. I made an offering to you but you did not want to accept it. I’ll no longer be under your protection and whoever finds me will kill me.”

Then a strange thing happened. God made a promise to Cain. God condemned Cain for killing his brother, yet God protected him, promised him that he would be safe from others. God allowed him to develop his world in the direction he wanted to go.

Why did God give Cain such freedom?

Strange as it may seem, God did this for the sake of his covenant people. God wanted to speed up the development of creation. God wanted a faster pace of progress in the world.

Cain, driven from his fields, uprooted from a slow-moving agricultural life, God gave Cain carte-blanche to bend God’s creation in an effort to mold it into his image.

Until now, until Abel’s blood flowed, God’s protection had enabled life to go on quietly, serenely, imperceptibly slow. There was still a great deal of stability, a good deal of affinity between the human race and God’s creation. Cain had shattered that closeness. He now introduced insecurity, the taste for blood, a desire for revenge. Cain, his arms raised in defiance to God, had broken this covenant bond. No longer does he have a home because murder destroys a home. Now he is a fugitive, a vagabond. Cain, the insecure wanderer, who yet craves for security, Cain is promised protection by God, a God whose existence he denies, in whose promise and covenant he does not believe. The tragedy of Cain, the tragedy of the Human Condition is that the human Cain will always be in search of a home.

So where does Cain search?

Cain turns his eye and his desire to Eden, to the lost paradise, and this too is the perpetual quest for humanity. The search for a home, for Paradise Lost is nothing else but the human desire for God’s presence, the God Cain and humanity in general, rejects. Cain, in search for a home, in search for security, builds a fortified city.

It is now impossible to imagine life without the city. People even in the most remote regions depend on the city. The pensions cheques, the TV programs, our tax notices, they all come from the city. The city, the place of human progress is the direct consequence of Cain’s murderous act and of his refusal to accept God’s protection. Yet without Cain humanity’s progress would have been drastically slower and Jesus’ birth and Second Coming would have been delayed by many millennia.

Cain built a city. For God’s open paradise, Eden, he substituted his closed fort. He called his city Enoch which means New Beginning. Cain is going to make the world over again in his image. God’s creation is seen as nothing. God did nothing. A new start is made, a new beginning. Cain, with everything he does, digs a little deeper the abyss between himself and God. Each solution to a problem becomes a new disobedience, each invention, each remedy a new offense to God. With Cain paradise has become a legend, creation a myth. Cain, in his city called “New Beginning” takes possession of the world, and molds creation to his concepts.

The City, what is it?

The City is a centre of crowds, of churches, of cathedrals, of concert halls and commercial premises. Many people of God live in the cities yet, basically, a city appears to be a place where human desire to exclude God from creation is the prime motive. The city is where people display a remarkable unity to be separated from God. The city is a place built by humans for humans where constant efforts are being made to exclude any divine intervention or power.

Perhaps 50 years ago there was still a country and city separation. Now there is no difference. Food production, with monstrous tractors and so much energy intensive machinery, has become just as heavily dependent upon a total energy packet as the city. The modern farmer is no more than an extension of the city system. Today the globe is basically an immense city. The city now is based on one factor only: economic growth, progress at the expense of creation, progress at the expense of human survival.

Yet the city, Cain’s answer to Eden, to Paradise, is God’s way to prepare his people for the New Jerusalem, the City of God.

The city is now the place through which every Christian has to pass. The City is Our World Today. The World is the City. We must be in the City but not of the City. We must work for the betterment of the City.

For Cain, when he founded the City it was first of all a monument to show his pride and display his defiance to the God whose existence he even denied. Now God has used Cain’s pride and is now using our pride to bring everything to its full potential. The city depends on progress, on permanent economic growth. Once that stalls, the city is in trouble. Detroit is not the only city that no longer functions. Basically all cities everywhere are under a death warrant. All depend on economic growth to pay for the upkeep of its infrastructure, its sewers, water, electricity and roads. Once growth stops, cities degenerate. And growth is stopping. The One Trillion Dollars Bernanke is pumping in the US economy each year is the last desperate gasp to revive the economy by artificial means, and it is not working. Climate Change is the icing on the cake of decay.

We now have entered civilization’s final stage. The Tower of Babel was something God could not tolerate because (Genesis 11:6) “nothing has become impossible for humankind”. Last week I read that people are experimenting with implanting certain ideas into the human mind: nothing now is impossible. Today eerily resembles the visions of Nineteen Eighty Four that dystopian novel by George Orwell published in 1949. In it he visualizes a world of perpetual war – today -, omnipresent government surveillance – today- and public mind control where an ‘Inner Party’ elite – the banks – persecutes all individualism and independent thinking. That to me suggests another Tower of Babel event, something God will not tolerate and in which he will actively intervene by establishing his kingdom.

The City of God is on the way. Cain’s city, that ancient event, is having its repercussions even unto today. It could never last because its foundations are based on human endeavour. The City of God has Christ at its foundation.

Next week, all week, our entire family – some 25 children and grandchildren – are at a retreat in Estes Park Colorado. I will probably have no time to write my column. That’s why this column also is a few days early.

Come out of her, my people.

 Where to go?

 “Come out of her”, says Revelation 18:4. Come out of what? Come out of a system that destroys the world. There comes a Day of Reckoning because there is no free lunch. For years we have been playing the game of easy money, supposedly harmless energy but it is becoming more and more evident that it has come at a huge cost to the citizens of all countries, and their children while the wealthy have profited. We, the poor taxpayers of the world, have bailed out the fraudulent banks and insurance companies, with their big bosses taking home billions in bonuses.

We live in an insane world. “Come out of her, my people” urges the Bible on several occasions. In Isaiah 52: 11 the prophet pleads with people to get out the trap of idol worship. In Jeremiah 51:45 the text reads ”Come out of her, my people, run for your lives!”, referring to the same situation as in Revelation: the greed factor. That same Jeremiah chapter – verse 9 – has an interesting note: “We would have healed Babylon, but she cannot be healed.” That somber phrase also applies to the situation today: the world suffers from so many different diseases: monetary deterioration, environmental degradation, unstable weather, psychological malaise, water shortages and droughts – the list goes on – that she cannot be healed. There is no shame in abandoning her.

In Jeremiah’s time leaving godless Babylon was still possible: the old country, the sacred soil of Israel was still there, in ruins, but possible to restore.

Now Revelation 18 also urges people to get out: “Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues; for her sins are piled up to heaven and God has remembered her crimes.” Is there still a place of refuge? We are told to leave Babylon, now synonymous with the world we live in. Where do we go? There is not one place on earth that is spotless; there is not one speck of soil that is safe; there is not one molecule of air that is not soiled; there not one drop of water that is not unsanitary. There is nowhere to go. When Jerusalem was besieged in 70 AD people still could escape to the hills. Today there is no escape from the disasters that are in store.

 No place left? Where do I go?

When Jesus was relaxing with the Mary-Martha-Lazarus family, Mary sat with Jesus, while Martha was busy serving them and was getting more and more steamed up because she thought her sister too should be in the kitchen getting the meal ready. No quick frozen meals in a micro wave then: everything from scratch, the way all meals should be. Martha was not a woman to hide her feelings, she bluntly told her sister to get cracking. Jesus looked at her and said: “Martha you worry head, Mary gets the priorities right.”

Luke 10:38 relates that the house was owned by Martha, and that her perhaps younger sister and brother lived with her. I picture Martha as a business woman who through her dealings become quite successful and was a bit of a bossy type, not untypical for leading church women. In that sense Mary was probably a dependent while Lazarus perhaps suffered from same sort of ailment: his death might not have been entirely unexpected.

On any other occasions when there had been visitors, Mary always knew her place and helped out. Not in this case when Jesus was the guest. She saw Jesus as special, while I think Martha saw him as a celebrity. Mary had the keener insight and Jesus confirmed this. Other women, quite high class ones, helped Jesus financially, says Luke 8. Did Martha want to impress Jesus with her cooking skills and show off her business acumen?

Matthew 24 is also part of the bible. Jesus tells us there – verse 32 for instance- that we must look around us, including observing nature, trees in particular, to detect what’s going on in our world. Later in that so contemporary chapter he again urges us to keep watch.

Can we still do anything?

I don’t want to rehash all the signs of the tiredness of the planet. That same lethargy also has affected our physical and mental state. Most of us just drift along. I know that there are people who are trying to outlive the End of the world but we know that this is impossible. What is there for us left to do? We have painted ourselves in a corner. We are caught in an impossible situation. We have created a society that is completely dependent on carbon fuel which comes with a totally annihilating guarantee. What can we do?

What we have is a crisis of imagination. Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same mind-set that created it. We don’t need more people like Martha. We need people like Mary of Bethany. The time for action is over. There is no escape from the onslaught awaiting us and which will affect us all.

The bible does not say what Jesus and Mary discussed, but I can guess. They were not talking about run-of-the-mill-matters. Mary had questions about life and death, about here and eternity. Jesus had answers. We are in the same predicament: we have questions about the life and death of the planet and Jesus has answers. That is not a cheap shot of ‘Jesus saves’, of ‘Jesus has all the answers’. Fact is that he throws the questions right back to us, because we know what to do. In these last days we are faced with the same questions how to live and what happens after death, after the death of our planet, the time when we meet Jesus. We need to reassert our humanity. When we meet Jesus in person we want to be in the best physical shape possible for our age and circumstances. When we meet the Lord he must find us doing the right thing. Our bodies are the temple of the spirit. Colossians 1:15 tells us that Jesus is the first-born of all creation. I interpret that to mean that in the beginning Jesus’ very first act was to turn himself into a human being. When creation was ready to receive the human race, you and I were fashioned using Jesus – the first-born of creation – as a template: that’s why we are created in the image of God. We should not underestimate ourselves. We – all of us without exception – are God’s children and, with Jesus being the Son of God, we too are daughters and sons of God. We meet Jesus as our brother and sister.

We need to regain our potential. Here is what one non-Christian fellow writes: “To survive the implosion / collapse, you are going to need outstanding nutrition. This means that right now is a good time to focus on dropping all the junk from your diet and eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, super-foods and high-grade nutritional supplements. I especially want to encourage you to boost your intake of medicinal herbs with special properties that help protect you from stress. Herbs like ginseng and turmeric are amazing natural medicines. In terms of more mundane nutrition, I urge you to boost your intake of natural vitamin C, B vitamins, zinc, magnesium and potassium.”

There is a lot of truth in this. We should always keep in mind our primal origin and our ultimate destination, reason why we must, as closely as possible, follow the health guidelines that ensure our best body conditioning. Remember we are meeting our Maker.

Here is another line from that same report: “Now is also a good time to start juicing if you don’t already practice it. Juicing is one of the best ways to bring high-density nutrition into your body. As you do this, I strongly recommend you add one quarter of a beet root to every batch of juice you make. Beetroot boosts athletic endurance while also lowering blood pressure. It helps you chill out, in other words, while also giving you more stamina when you really need it.”

This same fellow writes: “If you hope to survive the collapse of society, you will need to go to great lengths to protect your own sanity so that your own brain functions at a high level, even when under stress.”

The above comes from secular sources, but it applies to us just the same.

My take on ‘how to opt out’.

My personal advice:  One good step is to get rid of television. It serves no good purpose because TV basically is a tool of the system that is destroying the earth. Watching TV is a zombie experience, involves a process of deactivating the brain. In these last days mental activity, brain alertness, sharping one’s wits are more necessary than ever. Our entire system is geared to make us dumber. On the way to meet the Lord we must be totally with it, both mentally and physically. We are about to meet the Lord, the creator, our creator. Not something to treat carelessly.

So get yourself in shape both mentally and physically: mens sana in corpore sano, which means ‘a sound mind in a sound body’. We have to meet Jesus as equals. No, that is not a typo. We are God’s children and that means that Jesus – God’s son – is our older and wiser brother but still a sibling, whether male of female. Yes, we can also see him as a wiser sister. Jesus had 12 male disciples but it was the women who looked after him and had a much greater belief in him than the men. The women stayed with him all the way on the road to Golgotha while the men abandoned and betrayed him. Peter in his three-fold betrayal interpreted the feelings and opinions of all his buddies. The women came to the grave first; the women – see Luke 8 – supported him financially, some occupied very important functions. Jesus was way ahead of his time in giving women a role in his mission.

I have said it before and will say it again: we don’t know when the Lord will come back. Of all the people in Jerusalem only old Anna and old Simeon had that mysterious feeling that they would witness the most important event in the entire world: the arrival of the long expected Jesus. These two seniors, a man and a woman, were the only representatives of the entire human race.

Where are the Simeons and the Annas today? We have to find them and join with them, perhaps in the church, the equivalent of the contemporary temple, perhaps at a small house gathering planning the parousia, the re-appearance of the Messiah.

Let’s hope that there are thousands of such little clusters everywhere going about their daily routine but somehow in touch and preparing for His coming. Is there that longing? Is there that fervor for his coming? Is there what J. B. Phillips once wrote in his translation of Romans 8: standing “on tiptoe” to await his reappearance? The Dutch have an expressing: “reikhalzend”. My dictionary translates the word as ‘eagerly awaiting’. It has the same feeling as ‘on tiptoe’, meaning that a person stretches his or her neck to see better and at the same time stand on his or her toes to get a better view. That is the sort of mentality we should have in our expectation of his coming.

Why are the people of the church so reluctant to even entertain the End of the world as we know it? This past week I read that forest fires are raging in the subarctic, the most unlikely place to have it. The boreal forests there are the last major vastness of trees to absorb the oceans of carbon we pump into the atmosphere every day. Once the permafrost melts and releases the methane there I expect a sudden surge in temperature sufficient to engulf the entire earth in one overwhelming conflagration, exactly as the bible tells us. All signs point to a unique event. The apostle Peter mentions it. We better take his word for it: “The day of the Lord will come like a thief….the elements will be destroyed by fire and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”

The Lord is looking forward to this: that’s why it is called “the Day of the Lord.” Are we?

July 21 -13

 Our World Today

 Dangerous Religious Musings

 The Lost Gospel of the Kingdom

 Saturday’s – July 13 – the Globe and Mail, its Focus section, caused me to become quite agitated. For years I have been writing that we are in the Final Phase of human history, something that is difficult to visualize when nobody else makes this same claim. Suddenly this is changing. What I read in Canada’s National news paper was quite frightening. Here’s what the headline said: One disaster after another- it can mean only one thing: the End of the world. This by the Globe’s book editor who also wrote ”I do not believe in God per se, but I believe in our ability to destroy ourselves, promptly. And in a sense, that’s faith.”

Faith without Religion, faith without believing in God. It reminds me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He loved to quote a saying by Martin Luther ”the godless man’s curse can be more pleasing to God than the hallelujahs of the pious.” Here is a godless man’s curse – the end of the world is terrible because it spells doom and gloom, and brings a curse on everything.

Let me carry that a bit further.

The heading of this section is  ”The Lost Gospel of the Kingdom”. The book editor referred to this – without realizing it. The Kingdom is God’s earth, which we are destroying at an ever more rapid rate. I have yet to hear a sermon on that topic. Preachers usually do an adequate job explaining a passage from the Written Word, but almost always fail to relate it to the Created Word, so much so that the impression is created that the Scriptures are God’s only Revelation, which– again- brings me to the Kingdom:  the gospel of the kingdom is lost in the church, and once lost, the King no longer counts – what is a King without a Kingdom! – and thus God is lost as well.  In that case all the Hallelujahs of the pious amount to little. When such is the case God puts a higher value on the curses of the godless than on all the church’s piety.

Hmmm. It sometimes is really dangerous to carry an argument to its bitter end.  I imagine these remarks will not sit too well with the church and its faithful.

Reliigon is divorced from real life

Actually what I am writing is not all that new. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote on this first. A word of Bonhoeffer. He was a brillaint theologian who consciously experienced the end of the world while under a death sentence from the Hitler hordes in godless Germany in 1943-45. He was hanged in April 1945 just before the Third Reich collapsed. He was 39. While in prison he was able in his mind to visualize the end of society with ’Religion-less Christianity’ and a ’World without God”, basically the state we find ourselves in now, 70 years later.

Walter Brueggemann – who is an Old Testament theologian and also a prophet writes that theological education- seminary schooling (required training for future preachers) –  must involve a comprehensive critique of society. He says this because we live in a culture that is false and that will dehumanize and destroy us. Brueggemann says that the church by and large accomodates to the current culture and so lacks the critical power to take capitalism to task. That is also the reason why the church lacks the Kingdom perspective.

Bonhoeffer saw this quite clearly. For him life was religion but when he studied the church scene he observed a religious scene separated from reality, faith divorced from life, the church not playing any part in people’s daily routine. In other words he observed  life lived without religion at all, except for such ancient ceremonies as marriage and baptism and an often less than stellar quarter-hour sermon on Sunday. With marriages in decline, births becoming less frequent, even these official functions are performed less and less. Whatever is left of religion is becoming a facet of fanaticism, not only in the Middle East but also in North America where the Rapture craze and the Wealth worship have turned religion into a farce. The Rapture theory is based on a single text in 1 Thess. 4: 17. It is not mentioned anywhere else in the Bible. We should treat it as we do some other passages, such as stoning adulterers or women being silent or Jesus’ claim that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom, because by biblical standards every one in the Western world is rich.

Mammon rules.

Let’s face it: money is a much more powerful agent in society than God. So much so that we see it as an almost divine right to have our huge houses and drive our carbon-spouting cars and take delight in our cute gadgets and have our far-away holidays and ample pension plans. We wouldn’t have a clue what to do with ourselves if all that fell away one day. We, as a society, would cease to function without all of the accumulated wealth. Even if we as individuals would say we have enough, our rulers would still demand growth, or else they cannot keep up the welfare state.

The bible is quite open: you can’t serve God while also worship Mammon. I believe that Mammon wins hands down. When the next big financial crisis hits – which is all but inevitable – we won’t just have a financial crisis, we’ll have a crisis of faith as well, because the real God in Western society is Mammon. Once Mammon falls what will take his place? (I assume that Mammon is male.) Will people turn to the church en masse? Unless the church makes a complete switch from individual salvation, from “Brother-sister are you born again?” to the Gospel of the Kingdom and doing whatever to save creation in anticipation of the return of the Lord, this will not happen.

Bonhoeffer and Bavinck: two theologians, one voice. Both say that Christ calls us not to a new religion but to Life.

The church has lost the Gospel of the Kingdom. Writes J. H. Bavinck in his forthcoming The Kingdom- Speed Its Coming: “It is God’s intent to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one over­arching harmony. There is no such thing as individual salvation. All sal­vation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved in him. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the King­dom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all?wise will of him who lives and rules for ever.”

That entails a totally different gospel: not Rapture proclamation, not the Wealth Gospel, nothing like that: there is no individual salvation: only as part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God- his cosmos for which he gave his life- is eternal life possible.

This brings me back to Bonhoeffer. He also saw religion as a totality: everything created is holy. There is no division between sacred and secular. In the text in Matthew 5: 45, which is translated as “Be perfect as God is perfect” the word for perfect is ‘teleios”. Bonhoeffer called himself an ‘anthropos – man- teleios’. The better translation of teleios is holistic, based on the root which is ‘telos’ which means ‘the far away end’. Thus in everything we must keep ‘the end’, the kingdom, in mind, always consider the ultimate outcome and based on that perfection – which is the hallmark of the Kingdom – we must base our life. If the church – formal religion- fails to aim for that purpose then it forfeits its raison d’être.

“Extra ecclesiam nulla salus” said Cardinal Ratzinger who resigned as Pope Benedict XVI. The Latin means ‘there is no salvation outside the church’.  Not true says I.  While I am writing this, for a brief moment I wondered whether there is salvation inside the church. Fortunately I know better. Yet, if we take Jesus as an example, then we see that he himself lived quite un-religiously, quite contrary to the then customary views on religion. That’s why Bonhoeffer said that “God comes to us in his own ways independently of the religious images we make of him and independently of the religious requirements we impose upon him.”  He also said that “God’s path to man is a highly a-religious path… Christ does not bring a new religion; rather, He brings God….Jesus does not call us to a new religion but to LIFE.”

Can I tie this together?

The best thing I ever did was translate J. H. Bavink’s Dutch book which I gave the title of The Kingdom- Speed Its Coming. I translated it on a whim, suddenly, after having had the book for many decades. I never dreamed that a publisher would pay me a substantial sum – indeed thousands of dollars – as an advance on royalties. I based the title on 2 Peter 3: 12: “as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.” Having been a Bonhoeffer aficionado already, I also became a devoted admirer of Bavink’s writings, because I noticed a lot of similarities between the two theologians even though they never met or even knew of each other. Both lived in the first half of the 20^th century. Both came from a generation of theologians.  Both wrote extensively on The Kingdom.

Here is what Bonhoeffer wrote in an essay – written in German naturally under the title Dein Reich Komme or Your Kingdom Come, a line we in our church recite without fail every Sunday.

“We are otherworldly – ever since we hit upon the devious trick of being religious, yes even ‘Christian’ at the expense of the earth…

We disdain the earth; we are better than it….When an explosion seems imminent, who would not be so human as to quickly mount the chariot that comes down from the skies with the promise of taking us to a better world beyond? ….We are weak; we cannot bear having the earth so near, the earth that bears us. We cannot stand it, because the earth is stronger than we and because we want to be better than the evil earth. So we extricate ourselves from it; we refuse to take it seriously….We are weak and we weaklings are open to the religion of otherworldliness. ….Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from this world to other worlds beyond; rather he gives us back the earth as its loyal children.

We have fallen into secularism and by secularism I mean pious Christian secularism. Not the godliness of atheism or cultural bolshevism but the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth…..This pious secularism also makes it possible to preach and say nice things……The function of the church is to witness to the resurrection of Christ from the dead, to the end of the law of death of this world that stands under the curse, and of the power of God in the new creation.

Bonhoeffer also writes that “Technology is the power with which the earth grips people and subdues them. And because we are no longer in command, we lose ground. The earth is therefore no longer our earth, and thus we become strangers to the earth…..Without God, without our brother and sister, we lose the earth: God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together…I belong completely to this world. It bears me, it nurtures me, and holds me.”

Last week I quoted J. H. Bavinck who wrote: “With every sinew of our existence we are tied to the earth, which bears us and feeds us.”

Any doctrine, any church teaching that proclaims otherwise, any hint that we are going to leave this earth, is false teaching. Bavinck and Bonhoeffer are two sides of the same coin.

By and large all religions adhere to this otherworldly theology, and do so with ever greater force. Don’t pay any attention to it. Our present state and our future life are right here. Cherish the earth. Care for it. Indeed love it and do everything possible to preserve and even enhance it. It’s the only one we’ll ever have.

Next week I may skip: too many social obligations. It’s also summer: vacation time. But then I am a bit of a workoholic. So…. who knows.

July 14 2013

If you want to be part of the approaching perfection, prepare now.

Greek philosophy has influenced Christian theology

If you want to be part of the approaching perfection you have to get rid of the notion that upon death you’ll go to heaven.

Where in the world does this ‘heaven’ heresy hail from? It is based on Greek philosophy. Plato saw death as a happy escape from the body, that’s why Socrates, condemned to death for misleading the youth, drank the poison gladly. That’s where the nature/grace theology originated, the start of the so-called body/soul split and the earth/heaven dualism. Christianity, by and large, has adopted this pure pagan platonic premise. Get rid of this dichotomy, ban the unhealthy thinking that the earth is evil and escape to heaven the future.

I know the heaven notion is deeply ingrained in the Christian psyche. Old hymns mentioning ‘earth is a foreign strand, wilderness waste’ and ‘prostrate before Thy throne to lie and gaze and gaze on Thee” are still deeply part of the church even as the Bible clearly says that “God lives in inapproachable light whom no one has seen and nobody can see” (1 Tim. 6:16). When I still had TV I once saw Billy Graham being interviewed by Larry King who pointedly asked him what would happen when he dies. Billy said: “Jesus will take me by the hand and bring me to God”, contrary to what Jesus himself has said that (John 4:24) “God is spirit and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth,” and John repeatedly writes that God is invisible. No even Moses, whom God called his friend, was allowed to see God.

Yet the ‘heaven’ fiction continues, and it has a grain of truth. When we die our spirit is vested with Jesus. Nevertheless says John 5: 28, 29, “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out- and those who have done good will rise to live and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned.” 1 Cor. 15: 18 confirms this and so does 1 Thess. 4: 15 where it says that ‘those who are alive – at the Lord’s return – will have no advantage over those who have fallen asleep”, asleep being the biblical term for having died. Should I mention the last verse in Daniel? “As for you, go your way to the end. You will rest, and then at the end of days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.”

Billy Graham is wrong. Preachers who promote heaven proclaim an improper paradigm. Going to heaven implies that the earth is no good, that God has failed to do a proper job and will abandon the earth, in essence admitting that God is fallible. Who are we to treat as disposable something that God after each act of creation called ‘good’ and when the totality was in place called ‘very good’? Are we wiser than God?

My opinion and that of an increasing part of the church is that God made no junk and will not junk what he has made. Our future is here, right here, on this planet, that’s why we must make peace with the planet before the perfection of the New Creation, the Kingdom, arrives.

Of course it is much easier to believe in heaven because that relieves us from caring for the earth. Again this past week I heard a sermon on John 3 where verse 16- God so loved the world, the cosmos- was interpreted as saying God so loved the human race. The Greek text does not say ‘anthropos’ meaning mankind in general, but ‘cosmos’ which includes the whole ball of wax, everything that exists.

We are of the earth which bears us and feeds us

One of my most treasured texts is Psalm 115:16: “The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to men.” That brings me to a quote from J. H. Bavinck, the book I translated with the title The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming.  He writes:

In the word adam the ears of the believing Israelite attuned to the Old Testament heard a variety of sounds which for us no longer reso­nate in the word ‘human,’ at least not to that extent. The word adam reminded the Israelite immediately of the first Adam who was taken from the dust of the earth. That made the word eminently suitable to typify the human race in its unbreakable unity. The Israelite here sensed some­thing of the fact that humans are earth-bound. A human being, adam, belongs to adamah, the life?bearing earth. With every sinew of his exis­tence he is tied to the earth, which bears him and feeds him.

I like that: with every sinew of our existence we are tied to the earth, which bears us and feeds us. The Highest heavens belong to the Lord: we own the earth now and into eternity.

The traditional church generally had a different idea. Ever looked closely how most churches have been designed? Their high ceilings and their steeples both are reminiscent of or pointing to heaven. Many of the frescoes in the St. Peter’s Basilica portray heavenly scenes. Compare that to the works of art in Solomon’s temple which were decorated with images of palm trees and flowers. In 1 Kings 6:29 we are speci­fically told that Solomon had all the walls of God’s house adorned with wooden sculptures of cherubim, palm trees and open flowers. The inner holy place was com­pletely depicted as a garden of golden flowers, suggesting to one commentator that: “Perhaps the palm trees represent the trees in para­dise, guarded by the cherubim (Gen. 3:24). What is striking is that all the wall adornments—except for the cherubim—are replicas of flowers.” In other words, the temple represented the beauty of the earth.

We can’t do the impossible

How can we prepare ourselves from an eternity which, by definition must last forever?

Good question and also impossible. As a human race we have gone too far. All calls for prudence, for halting the march toward environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on carbon emissions, are being ignored or ridiculed. Even with the flashing red lights before us, the increased droughts, rapid melting of glaciers and Arctic ice, monster tornadoes, vast hurricanes, crop failures, floods, raging wildfires and soaring temperatures, we are bowing almost eagerly before the gods of hedonism and greed, expressing our belief in the eternal wellspring of material progress. We are in the process of destroying the trees, the planet’s heat shield, these miracle workers cooling temperatures beneath them by 10C and blocking cancer-causing ultraviolet rays. They are robust filters of our air and water, and soak up climate-warming carbon dioxide. Forests slow the runoff of rainfall. Many of the world’s damaging floods are really caused by deforestation.

We can’t do it. We have gone too far. That’s where faith enters, faith that Christ will return and bring with him a renewed creation where we will have the opportunity to make a new start and avoid the mistakes of our sinful lives.

I have a book by the name of Making Peace with the Planet, written by Barry Commoner who died a few months ago, former director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College in New York. Will church goers ever discover that they can only peacefully die when they have made peace with the planet? Why is it that many non-church people put us to shame in this regard? I know why. The simple reason is our supposed escape route: heaven, a false premise which has caused our earth to wither.

In his book Dr. Commoner defines the four laws of ecology. If we want to be part of the approaching perfection we have to do more than going to church. Just as we memorize the Lord’s Prayer and know some hymns and bible texts by heart, we must make the laws of ecology part and parcel of our lives.

The four laws make eminent sense. Here they are:

(1)    Everything is connected to everything else.

(2)    Everything has to go somewhere

(3)    Nature knows best

(4)    There is no such a thing as a free lunch

The Laws explained.

(1)        Everything is connected to everything else.

This reminds me of a passage in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book Creation and Fall. There he wrote that “God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.” Not only is everything connected to everything else, also every person is connected to every other person, to God and to the earth. The apostle Paul wrote that when one person suffers every human also suffers. That also applies to everything created: when creation groans (Romans 8:22) we all suffer as well. Why has the church not caught on to that? The heaven curse again. Dr. Commoner uses the example of the car which, to no one’s surprise “has properties that are hostile to their environment.”  The tragedy in Lac-Mégantic can directly be traced to the car. Every day world-wide some 3000 people are killed in automobile accidents alone. Climate Change can be traced directly to the use of a car. Making peace with the planet is not a simple matter. The least we can do is limit the use of motorized transportation and more and more engage the two legs God gave us. Pray for forgiveness every time we use the car or fly.

(2)    Everything has to go somewhere.

Nothing disappears. Commoner writes that “there is no such thing as waste.” When we drive a car the engine converts the fuel to energy and CO2 which haunts us now every day in the form of Climate Change thanks to the closed system in which we live. Plastic, another oil product, when burned in an incinerator produces carbon dioxide and dioxin, both agents in Global Warming and cancer. No wonder the incidence of cancer is accelerating: half of the population will suffer from some sort of cancer in their lifetime. Making peace with the planet will go a long way in battling that dreaded disease.

(3)        Nature knows best.

We in our arrogance have created thousands of new man-made substances that often play a destructive role in living things. Monsanto comes to mind also, with its GM- genetically modified – seeds. All these ‘modern’ inventions are nothing else but satanic ways to make extra money and will eventually backfire in the form of new diseases and natural catastrophes. They are different from natural compounds; they lead to environmental changes and again to more cancers. No wonder our bodies without exception harbour scores of chemical poisons, even in new born babies. Making peace with the planet means relying more and more on environmentally friendly, natural, organic foods, of which the best are the home-grown variety, produce grown without pesticides and commercial fertilizer. God created a perfectly balanced system which we disturb at our own peril.

I know it is not easy. In my garden I also grow potatoes. Every day I have to go through my plants to pick off the Colorado beetle larvae, or they will eat my plants and reduce the yield. Nature knows best, something we have to re-learn in our technological society. Prayer is an important part also when growing food.

(4)        There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Commoner writes that a free lunch, the air and water we use, is really a debt. A debt is an acknowledged but unmet cost. Climate change is a debt on all of humanity, especially on future generations. Nuclear power burdens our grandchildren and their grandchildren with the obligation to safeguard the spent fuel for ever. Our budget deficits will cost them enormous sums in untold trillions. Remember this when praying The Lord’s Prayer with the line “Forgive us our Debts”: our environmental debts also are beyond calculation.

We all have the impossible challenge to make peace with the planet which we can only do when we have made peace with our Maker who created heaven and earth and will never abandon the works of his hands. We need never despair because a new creation is on the way, thanks to Christ, the Son of Man, humanity personified.

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Next week some more on this: the possible religious implications.