Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

April 7 2013

The final Reformation?

A case can be made that some history runs in cycles. Major religions, for instance, seem to be born every six hundred years. Moses and the emergence of the Yahweh worship took place some 1200 years before Christ. About 600 years later the world saw the birth of three separate religious streams: Zoroaster in Persia, Confucius in China and Buddha in South East Asia. Then the Christian Religion took off with the death of Christ, while Islam saw its rise with Mohammed who lived from 570-632. Due to the Crusades – 1096-1291-  the 100 year war between France and England -1337-1453-, and especially the 14^th Century Black Plague pandemic which killed at least one-third of the European population, the next religious event, the Protestant Reformation,  had a long time in coming with Martin Luther acting as catalyst in 1517. Now, with the speeding up of history thanks to our carboholic addiction, 500 years later we are due for what I call the Final Reformation.

If the Church were a business it would have been redundant or bankrupt a long time ago, loosing ‘customers’ continuously. In spite of the growth of some churches in North America, the overall ecclesiastical scene is negative: somehow organized religion no longer appeals to the masses.

We – my wife and I – attend the local Presbyterian Church. A couple of disastrous ministers caused a lot of people to leave. The average attendance dropped from 50-60 to 25-30, with the old guard staying put and the young people leaving. Perhaps our church is not a good example and I may be out of touch, attending a so-called mainline church. But I am not wrong when I know that the more popular churches are not in the creation-saving business and have no Kingdom perspective whatsoever. Instead they concentrate on saving ‘souls’. Years ago, doing an appraisal on a business, the owner asked whether I was born again. I found the question somewhat embarrassing because what I thought was meant by being born again and what I presumed his notion would be were probably two entirely different things. So I guess I mumbled something and went on with inspecting the premises.

Of course in the Presbyterian Church you never ask a person whether he or she is born again. Perhaps we should, and explain what it means. So what does it mean? Jesus told Nicodemus that a person should be born again. Old Nick too found it troubling: he had never heard of such a thing. In that sense he would have made a good main-line Christian. However, whatever was meant before by being born again has, I believe, now taken on a new form.

Johan Herman Bavinck, in his The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming – soon available through Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Mich. – has no use for individual salvation, the still common explanation of re-birth. He wrote: “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. (emphasis mine). 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 (including animals from Ants to Zebras, I might add) are again unified under the one and only all?wise will of him who lives and rules for ever.”

“There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal”. If this is true, and I believe it to be, then the church needs to undertake a drastic revision of its modus operandi, an entirely new approach to the Good News. Since the current model of “Brother (sister) are you born again?” doesn’t seem to work anyway why not try a different Way?  What should take its place?

Let me take a little detour while you mull this over. The Heidelberg Catechism asks us what our only comfort is in life and death. For practically all people in the West it means embracing a certain religion, one that is not the biblical kind. We all somehow are part of that religion, pressed upon us by the sheer force of events. The surrogate God that western civilization adores, hesitantly in the 19th century and with increasing conviction and passion now is ‘Progress’. Today, when we hear the politicians speak and the national budget makers compile their calculations, they religiously claim that ‘Progress’, that economic growth will deliver us from all evil. We speak of ‘Progress’ with the fervor of converts, religiously believe in its omnipotence and infinite benevolence, and have adopted it as the core doctrines of our civil religion, and made it central to our contemporary notions of meaning and value, as Christianity was before the Age of Reason.

Just as all idols, Progress is failing us. The gods of our age are abandoning us as more growth inevitably results in faster Climate Change and higher pollution. Just look at China! Actually it certainly looks that we have entered the age of no-or even negative growth, which means that we have to look for a different god.

Here the church has a golden opportunity.

In the last chapter of The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming entitled “The Road to Life”, J. H. Bavinck writes: “With a degree of nostalgia we recall how in the ancient church bap­tism was experienced as real renewal. Coming out of a pagan culture and the enchantments that life there offered, people would hesitantly draw near to the cross of Jesus Christ, where they would gradually be taken in by his word which displayed a new life in which only Christ was Lord and King. When then, at last, such persons, drawn from darkness, experi­enced baptism, a new world would open up for them. That meant that they would often be shunned by their old friends, perhaps even their own parents, but they would be received in a new circle, the church of Christ, and they would stand with that church in the life?connection of the risen Saviour. In the most perfect sense that was real renewal as the old was indeed a matter of the past, and look, all had become new! In its ulti­mate sense the fact of baptism can only be compared with the Flood that once had consumed the ancient world, of which baptism was the con­trast, the antitype (1 Pet. 3:21). As then, so now, through baptism, an old world, destined for destruction, drowned forever, and a new world arose, a world filled with God’s precious promises. Baptism meant for­saking the world and becoming a new person for the sake of Christ. It was submerging in Christ and again rising in him. Baptism was the entrance to a new world, a new heaven and a new earth. It was custom­ary at one time to assume a new name to show once and for all that the old person was dead and a new one was born in Christ. That is how radically people experienced the transition from the old to the new, from Adam to Christ. “The old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Cor. 5:17).”

Back to today and “there is no such thing as individual salvation. All sal­vation is of necessity universal. If that is true, then we have some work to do. The Final Reformation is all about conscious caring for the holy creation: not only believing it but also living it. “I am not my own but belong to my Saviour Jesus Christ,” says the Heidelberg Catechism. It is about time to fill that in. In Colossians 1: 15-20 Jesus is “All and in All”. The Greek words there are ta panta, which includes everything under the sun. Not just us and our soul: all salvation is of necessity universal, because Jesus brings the Kingdom, the New Earth and if we want to be part of that then we must see the cosmos as holy, which means that with whatever we do we must contemplate their consequences. The unintended consequences of Progress are Climate Change and Pollution. The consequence of confessing Christ is a metanoia as intense and as thorough, a switch in our mode of life as drastic as converting from paganism to Christianity, something the early Christians did. Metanoia – being re-born -means as fundamental a shift as an Islam believer experiences when leaving the teachings of Mohammed and confessing Christ as the only Saviour and seeing all of creation as part of God’s holiness. Why? Since there is no such thing as individual salvation, since all sal­vation is of necessity universal, our lifestyle must reflect that. That is the major and perhaps most difficult change Christianity has to make in these final days in order to gain admission to the new creation. As a born and raised Calvinist I realize that the grace of God plays the ultimate role here.

Last week I promised to again consult with Bonhoeffer, who saw God, Creation and Humanity united in an unbreakable bond. When he was in the Tegel prison in Berlin and an accommodating guard smuggled his letters out to his fiancé, family and friends, he wrote on July 16 1944:”Etsi Deus Non Daretur. Living as if God does not exist….. Before God and with God we live without God.” That hints at “and there was no temple there” (Rev. 21:22), and leaves just us and creation. Religion interferes with us being human, since we are created to be one with the earth from which we originate, that feeds us and which, when we die, serves as our resting place, where we sleep until Jesus wakes us up.

J. H. Bavinck says something similar:

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

We are living in the days where God is absent. Among God’s last words to Moses were, as recorded in Deut. 31: 17, 18, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.”

We are in that final stage of history. We are on our own. It could quite well be that it is too late for the churches to experience the Final Reformation. Churches, religious bodies, seem to be too anchored in the world and too cumbersome to change course, also because they depend too much on the existing economic structure to survive.

Of course the Church will prevail. It is as in the days of Elisha when there were 8000 who had not bowed their knee to Baal, many of them unknown to each other because it was too dangerous to seek affiliation with others. At the same time the church cannot go back to the situation of the first Pentecost congregation in Jerusalem. Then society was much more interdependent, living physically close. Today we live in our subdivided and exurban diaspora. The only way to really prepare somewhat for the dangerous times to come- and they will come – is to sell out and form a sort of a monastery for families, living as new-creation-friendly as possible, with a great degree of self-sufficiency, perhaps clustering around a certain profession or trade or institution as is done in rural Africa.

Just as people converting from paganism to the Christian Way in the early days faced alienation from their families and friends, such a switch too would be derided as fanatic and unduly pessimistic: “Progress will come again!” will always be the secular mantra. The Final Reformation entails becoming more and more earth-minded, feeling the kinship with all that is created.

Am I correct? Is my analysis acceptable? Think about it. I may be wrong. My voice is just one of many. In the meantime I am busy getting ready for spring: my seedlings are doing well. The Maple Syrup season was better than last year. A later spring is much more creation-friendly than last year’s far too early one, which resulted in us not having any apples. Today we live much more in a ‘trusting God’ situation because of our self-inflicted climatic dangers. What worries me especially is the ‘bee’ situation. Apparently it is in particular the Monsanto type of seed, impregnated with long-lasting pesticides, that causes bees to die. We are playing with fire when we change the creation order.

Next week: LESS FOR MORE

Toward a religion-less religion?

There’s an interesting text in the Bible, one that especially intrigues me: it’s Romans 1:20. It is an important text because one of the Reformed Confessions explicitly refers to it as a proof text. It is article 2 of the Belgic Confession, the second oldest of the doctrinal standards of the Christian Reformed Church. It dates from 1567, thus almost 450 years old, and exactly 50 years after Martin Luther started what is known as the Reformation, the event when a body of people left the Roman Church to go their own way. This particular article explains The Means by which we know God. The first part of the answer is: First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.”

So what did the apostle Paul write in Romans 1: 20? He said that “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made so that men are without excuse.” In other words: anyone who has eyes to see, a brain to interpret and a mind open enough not to be blinded by science, must realize that behind the riddle of creation is God, the creator who speaks to us primarily through the world we inhabit.

Why does the church rely on such ancient documents? The Heidelberg Catechism dates from 1563. The Canons of Dordt are a bit newer: 1618-19,  while the Westminster Confession, the standard of the Presbyterian Church is the most recent, dating from 1646. Why are there no recent confessions? I am pretty sure that the world- and the church – has changed in those four hundred years. I suspect the trouble is that even if a denomination would try, it could never agree on a new creed. Why is that? French law professor Jacques Ellul – his wife Yvette was Dutch – gives an answer. He writes in Hope in Time of Abandonment that “For centuries the Church has focused on the preaching of faith. That is no longer possible, both because man on the outside is no longer listening, and also because within the Church we are experiencing what I think is an insoluble confusion over what precisely is the content of faith…..The creeds can no longer be the core of preaching today.”

He goes on to say that the church must switch from preaching Faith –the word ‘creed’ comes from ‘credo’ which means “I have faith” – to Hope, hope in the coming of the new creation, hope that is accompanied with prayer. “When we engage in prayer” he says “then hope is born”. That’s why I think, Jesus included “Thy Kingdom Come” in the Lord’s Prayer.

Bonhoeffer says something similar. He starts his book Creation and Fall with these 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.”

J. H. Bavinck, in his The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming – soon to be published by Eerdmans – also sings this tune. In Chapter Three, simply named “The Kingdom”, he makes a point that the church may well take to heart: “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. (my emphasis). 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 (from Ants to Zebras) are again unified under the one and only all?wise will of him who lives and rules for ever.”

Church take note: “There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal”. If this is true, and I believe it to be, then the church needs to undertake a drastic revision of its modus operandi, a complete re-orientation: from religion being a private matter to seeing God in everything. I know this is a form of Panentheism, which says that God and the universe are coextensive, while claiming that God is greater than the universe and that the universe is contained within God. Not to be confused with Pantheism, which literally means that everything is god. This falls in line with Romans 1:20 which says that people are condemned by not seeing God behind creation. To me this also means that the corollary is true:  anyone who looks at the miracle of creation and no longer sees it as a riddle, but a great work of Art devised by The Master Mind or Whatever is excused from judgement and declared righteous in God’s eyes.

If this is true then a person like Albert Einstein is saved. Though he called himself an atheist, he saw himself as a deeply religious man. Here’s what he said:

“To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.”

Einstein in essence affirms the words of a hymn:  “O Lord my God! When I in awesome wonder consider all the works thy hands have made, I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, thy power throughout the universe displayed.”

This leads me to believe that there is salvation outside the church – outside formal religion. I sometimes wonder whether there is salvation within the church. Don’t get me wrong. By and large the people there are the converted: they don’t come to be converted. I know that church services are great instruments of affirming faith, of experiencing fellowship, of sharing the good and the bad and so enhance community, but I doubt whether they do make people see the light and suddenly cause a metanoia, a complete change from being outside the kingdom to being part of it.

We should not forget that the church of his day killed Jesus. It seems to me that the church of today this time is killing God – by killing his creation in the name of religion. Mega-churches seem to do that. They draw their clientele from a wide area, meaning that they can only be reached by the highly polluting car. They offer what I perceive as ‘biblio-tainment’. By that I mean that the Bible is introduced as entertainment, with loud music, overhead pictures and film scenes, an avalanche of words and bible texts, spoken mostly out of context: they are the Wal-Mart of the ecclesiastical scene, killing off the small churches within walking or biking distance of peoples’ homes. Jesus’ saying that ‘where two or three are together in my name there I will be also’ is totally contrary to this trend that “Big is Beautiful”. This mass “religious” entertainment could well result in more atheism, as it advocates that God’s creation is irrelevant. It is also completely the opposite of what Bavinck, Bonhoeffer and Ellul advocate. No wonder the church is in turmoil. What to do? Where to go?  How to preach?

Some 60 years ago Bertrand Russell published his Why I Am Not a Christian. At that time his book caused quite a stir. Russell could not accept Christianity because he wondered how a benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient Deity would allow the emergence of Hitler and Stalin, the H bomb, and I may add, the more recent phenomena, such as Global Warming and World-Wide-Pollution. In his time Dr. Bertrand was so controversial that he was declared unfit to teach philosophy in a New York College.

Today questioning religion is all the rage: books, such as God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens are popular publishing success stories. Hitchens was outraged by the dogmatism of religion, yet he himself had moved from Marxism (he was a Trotskyist) to Greek Orthodox Christianity, then to American Neo-Conservatism, followed by an “antitheist” stance that blamed all of the world’s troubles on religion. Hitchens thus swung from the left to the right, from anti–Vietnam War to cheerleader of the Iraq War, and from pro to contra God. He ended up favoring Dick Cheney over Mother Teresa. Or take The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, also on the best-sellers list for weeks on end. If you want to make money today in publishing, become a religion – or God –basher. Richard Dawkins, for example, writes that “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty unjust control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniac”, and I could go on and on. I guess, from this quote, you can deduce that Dawkins doesn’t like God.

Egbert Ribberink and Dick Houtman, two Dutch sociologists, who classify themselves, respectively, as “too much of a believer to be an atheist” and “too much of a nonbeliever to be an atheist,” distinguish two kinds of atheists. Those in one group are uninterested in exploring their outlook and even less in defending it. These atheists think that both faith and its absence are private matters. They respect everyone’s choice, and feel no need to bother others with theirs. Those in the other group are vehemently opposed to religion and resent its privileges in society. These atheists don’t think that disbelief should be kept locked up in the closet. They speak of “coming out,” a terminology borrowed from the gay movement, as if their non-religiousness was a forbidden secret that they now want to share with the world. It seems that the stricter one’s religious background, the greater the need to go against it and to replace old securities with new ones.

Nevertheless, I think that Jesus would have approved of outspoken atheists. He once said that a person must be either totally in favor of him, or dead-set against him: it’s the lukewarm, the fence-sitters, he despises.

Non-church going people and perhaps a few within the churches themselves are looking for answers and are not finding them within the current ecclesiastical set-up. For many the church is no longer relevant. What is needed is new Reformation where the world we live in, the cosmos, plays a prominent role. More about that next week.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer again. He had a double doctorate in theology, professor in Berlin at the age of 25, hanged by Hitler because he opposed his godless actions, seeing the state of the church, paints an ironic picture of religion. My grandparents on a farm in the Netherlands, had one room, the most beautifully adorned room in the house, where nobody ever came. Bonhoeffer compares religion to such a room. He wrote: “Religion is often like ‘the best room,’ that has nothing to do with work, everyday life and normality. Then it becomes a sugar-coated faith for Sunday mornings that turns Jesus in to a moralizing figure head. The religion of Jesus Christ is not the dessert that comes after the meal, but is the entire meal, applies to all of life.”

He then describes how Jesus actually lived quite un-religiously, how he totally contradicted the customary views of religion of his days. He concluded that Jesus had no use for religion and wanted human beings to do what Jesus himself did, that is being fully engaged in the act of being human.

Bonhoeffer could be quite controversial. He said that just as Jesus abandoned the religion of his days – which cost him his life – Bonhoeffer wondered whether only in a world that is no longer religious, we, the people of this planet, can become aware of ourselves; that the reality of Christ can have a greater impact on a world come of age when we let go of the disguises of religion.

It is possible that I misunderstand Bonhoeffer. Let me think about that for a week so that I can re-read him and find some direct quotes from him regarding this. Bonhoeffer was really an eschatological thinker, no doubt also because he knew that he would die soon: he was executed by hanging on April 9 1945, less than a month before the war was over. He was 39 years old. After five years of enemy occupation, April 9 1945 was the exact day my hometown, Groningen, the Netherlands, was liberated from the Germans, after a fierce 4 day fight with the Canadian Army. Thank you Canada.

Next week some thinking on church reform and re-focus of worship.

The State of the Church.

Not so long ago – say 100 years – most people had a viable church connection. Now many only have a nominal one, except in the USA, the most religious country in the West. With the new pope being from Argentina some statistics there are being quoted: 90 percent of its population is Roman Catholic, but only 7 percent attend mass. The same is true in the Quebec province of Canada. Where we live, in the Municipality of Tweed, Ontario with just over 5100 population there are still 6 churches operating: 2 large Roman Catholic churches (attended by 100 people each, according to the new priest), United, Presbyterian, Pentecostal and Salvation Army. The Anglican Church closed. I am optimistic when I say that 8 percent -400 people- attend church in Tweed on a regular basis. Even then most churches – fortunately not all – resemble more social gatherings than spiritual communities. Their sole service often is self-service and preservation and their vision no larger than the collective interests of the in-group. No wonder Jesus once said: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? (Luke 18:8).

As for me: I am a religious man. I also go to church- Presbyterian. At table my wife and I pray aloud and read at breakfast a Psalm or a portion thereof. We both for decades have written a daily meditation on a text of the lectionary of 400 words on weekdays and 800 words on Sundays in Journeying through the Days, published by the Upper Room Books in Nashville, Tenn. That, more than anything else, has shaped our insight into matters biblical. We both also are products of Christian education on the primary and secondary levels, and, of course come from a long line of Christian forefathers – and – mothers.

I am not a person who mindlessly believes. I question and probe all the time. I believe that Heraclitus was right, a Greek philosopher, who lived from about 540 BC to 480 BC, thus some 2500 years ago, at the same time when the people of Judah returned from Babylon to re-build Jerusalem and the temple.  Heraclitus coined the Greek saying “Panta Rhei, Oude Menei” which translates as “Everything flows, Nothing Remains the same.”  For the Jews the 70 year period of the Babylonian Exile had been one of deep religious questioning. The clash of opinions came to a head when a remnant returned from Persia- Iran-Iraq. The dispute: return to temple-centered worship or implement the divine vision of God as the universal creator and redeemer, recognizing that “Everything changes, nothing is static. Sad to say the conservatives won as usual. When we look at the Roman Catholic Church and Islam as well, we also see little of change: a body of believers gathered in an organizational structure that basically has not altered for more than 1500 years, or in case of the Protestant churches, 500 years. The Greek saying from more than 2.5 millennia ago does not apply to the ecclesiastical scene. So either the church or mosque is right or Heraclitus was.

I recently translated a book by Johan Herman Bavinck: The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming, soon to be published by Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, Mich. In it Bavinck writes:

“At first glance we might see some similarity between a merchant in the Roman Empire and a CEO of a commercial enterprise in our time. They both deal with identical problems; both cope with the laws of economic reality, valid for all ages. But when I search the two lives a bit closer I discover that the comparison does not hold water. They stand at a different point in time and this determines their entire life. History has advanced during those two thousand years, which is why the human problems too are totally different. It is simply not possible to lift a person out of his time?frame and his milieu: we must regard him or her within the context of the totality of that particular period of history in which his life is anchored. Only then do we see that person in his totality. After all, mankind is history. History is not an aspect of his being; no, it is at the core of his life. This is the outlook which modern Western man has acquired on history and on the individual person.”

Does what applies to persons, also pertain to institutions? In my opinion a form of organization that dates from as far back as the Fourth Century can no longer function in the Twenty First Century in the same format. And that includes all organized religion, including Islam.

In the introduction to his highly acclaimed book CHRISTIANITY the First Three Thousand Years, the author Diarmaid MacCullogh writes that “Still in the eighth century of the Christian era, the great new city of Baghdad would have been a more likely capital for worldwide Christianity than Rome. [The Middle East was Paul’s most successful mission field]. The extraordinary accident of the eruption of Islam is the chief reason why Christian history turned in another direction.” This Oxford Professor continues to relate that already in the fourth century the bishop of Rome was referred to as papa (‘Pope’) and became the unchallenged leader of the Western, Latin-speaking Church. As the emperors abandoned Rome, more and more power was flowing into the hands of the churchmen. The church itself assumed the structure of the fading empire.

I think it was exactly by becoming a secular power where the church went wrong. Jesus repeatedly said that “My kingdom has no connection whatsoever with political matters.” The disciples kept on urging Jesus to use his divine powers – resurrecting the dead, miraculously feeding thousands – to re- establish the Davidic Empire, but Jesus always refused, emphasizing that the church must grow from the ground-up and not from the top down. This was the case after the Pentecost event in Jerusalem and later with Paul: word of mouth and charitable living made the early church grow. The ‘extraordinary’ accident of Islam could well have been the direct result of the power grab of the Bishop of Rome. As the post-exile period about 500 years before Christ shows, the church always prefers building physical structures rather than spreading ‘shalom’ fostering human relationships in whatever form. Shalom describes the cosmic harmony that exists where the world and all its inhabitants are reconciled with God. T.S. Eliot defines it poetically: “What life have you if not life together? There is no life that is not in community, and no community not lived in praise of God.”

All religions, but especially Islam and the Church of Rome are typified by their determination to adhere to certain manmade rules, and by refusing to alter them. Had the church been more down to earth, empowering people and encouraging them to approach neighbours at the door-to-door level to live peacefully together, the extraordinary event of Islam might not have happened. (I admire the Jehovah Witnesses for their zeal in promoting its religion.) For centuries the Roman church forbade its adherents to read or have a bible. Even now the Bible is a closed book for most church-goers.

Is it too late now to have true Church Reform? Jesus fervent prayer was for church unity “May they be one as my Father and I are one”. In the New Creation – the Kingdom to come – people will be as united as Jesus and the Father- personified in creation- are one. Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell once suggested that the root of the modern crisis is spiritual. People thought that in a society come of age, they could live without the sacred. Now that they stare into the void of secularization and profanation, which is failing to answer the questions dealing with death, tragedy, obligation and love, Bell believed that this crisis would prepare the way for a ‘return to the sacred’. I am not that optimistic. It seems to me that the situation is more in line with what G.K Chesterton once said: “When we cease to worship God we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.”

Is that what we see now? Is that The State of the Church?

That brings me to today where Religion is very much in the news. The April issue of HARPER’S has an essay on “BLINDED BY THE RIGHT? How hippie Christians begat evangelical conservatives. According to T. M. Luhrmann, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, the Jesus People of earlier days changed what it meant to be a Christian in America. “They made speaking in tongues common. They made reading the Bible literally a mainstream practice. They made the idea of Rapture – the process by which believers will be spirited up to heaven when Jesus returns for the Second Coming – a cultural touchstone.”

All these revolutionary hippies of yesteryear are now mostly the Tea Party, right-wing Republicans. The flag and the fetus is their main political plank. Jesus saw real dangers in the flag as a symbol of nationalism, while the Bible never mentions abortion, which was legal under Roman law, and Exodus distinguishes between the murder of a person and the murder of a fetus. The first is punishable by death, the second by a fine.

In the USA Republicans – about 50 percent of the population – are primarily the church-going crowd, who, paradoxically, see such issues as pollution, resource depletion, Peak Everything, irrelevant, because they will be “Raptured”, a word that has its root in the Latin verb Rapio, rapere, raptum, which my Latin dictionary defines as “to seize, snatch, tear away.” Actually our word ‘rape’ is derived from it as well. Indeed Rapture plays an important role in allowing the ‘rape’ of the earth, God’s beloved creation (John 3:16) to proceed unhindered. The “Left Behind” series, so immensely popular, actually displays the biblical ignorance of this movement. Matthew 24: 39 clearly says that the sinners are swept away while the righteous are ’left behind’ to have another go at rebuilding creation.

Harold Bloom, famous for his commentaries on Shakespeare, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University, America’s most distinguished literary critic, wrote The American Religion the emergence of the Post-Christian nation, in which he examines America’s national soul.

Bloom, an acute observer, argues in his book that the American Religion, which is so prevalent among us, masks itself as Protestant Christianity, yet has ceased to be Christian. He sees American society as dangerously religion-soaked, even religion-mad. Dr. Bloom sees the American religion as a variation on Gnosticism. Gnosticism is so condemned by the Apostle John in his 3 letters that he explicitly warns the church against it. Gnosticism teaches that spirit is good but matter is evil, including one’s body. Salvation is the escape from the body- hence Rapture. Christ’s humanity is denied. All created matter, including one’s body can be treated harshly. I see that as the original cause of obesity, especially rampant in the American South, where the Southern Baptists and the Pentecostal Churches constitute the majority.

Dr. Bloom is quite severe in his pronouncements on the American religion. He writes: “Since I am persuaded that much of what this book describes can be found also in Americanized Catholicism and Judaism, as well as in most mainline Protestantism, much of American religiosity clearly lacks spiritual content.”  At the root of the problems in the North American Church, and the cause of the miserable State of the Church, lies the heresy of ‘going to heaven’, something never mentioned in the Bible. No wonder Dietrich Bonhoeffer once stated that “God has granted American Religion no Reformation.”  Jesus too had his doubts about the church’s effectiveness when he said: “Many are called, few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14).

Carl Jung, one of the first modern psychologists to address the issue of collective madness, makes an interesting observation. He theorized that individual humans possess not only a personal unconscious mind but has also a collective unconscious mind which from time to time becomes activated and generates a form of communal madness. The American Religion with it Gnostic emphasis is a kind of concerted derangement, as all idolatry is. It also has exported this to the Rest of the World, especially South America and Africa where Pentecostalism is rapidly expanding. The result is that most inhabitants of the world are living in cultures committed to infinite growth, consumerism, resource extraction, war, and of course, massive denial that any of these destructive policies lead inevitably to planetary suicide. Thanks to a devilish interpretation of religion humans are united in perpetuating universal insanity, based on an erroneous illusion which can only have one possible outcome: collapse. Of course there are notable exceptions to this situation, but they are definitely very much in the minority.

Next week I will continue to investigate the church, religion and atheism, and conclude with the task of the church.

March 17 2013

OUR WORLD TODAY

The Home Stretch

Somehow we have labeled the period from the years 1000-1500 as the Middle Ages, implying that the subsequent centuries comprise the End Ages. I disagree. I believe that the 500 years, from 1500 to about 2000, were a special period, a time when everything came to its full potential. We now are in the final, downhill stretch of history, signified by “The End of Things,” a time when, as Economist Herman Daly put it, “the elites who make the decisions have figured out how to keep the benefits for themselves while ‘sharing’ the cost with the poor, the future, and other species. It is a time when empty-world economics with its emphasis on spurring economic growth by the accumulation of man-made capital has run its course.”

End-time is, just as dying, a very unpopular topic, but it is confirmed by such books as The End of Nature, The End of Science, The End of Oil and The End of Growth. They all indicate the finality of life. That the war from 1914-1945 was The War to End all Wars found its proof in the failures of the follies of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Time is running out. Global warming is proceeding at a much faster rate than was predicted by the International Panel on Climate Change: polar ice is disappearing at a rate which is far more penetrating than predicted, threatening the release of vast quantities of 20 times more potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere from melting permafrost and from enormous deposits of methane concentrations on the ocean floors. Other feedback loops may be introduced as drying of the Amazon basin and Australia’s interior makes these and other regions vulnerable to forest fires ignited by lightning flashes.

We are also in an unprecedented situation in other fields. Thanks to cheap energy= cheap food, we sired 7 billion people. Now we are in danger of an overshoot: too many mouths have created high oil prices, high food prices, species loss, air pollution, shortage of clean water, soil erosion and disease explosion made worse by antibiotic resistant drugs. Its financial effects are wealth disparity, debt default, nations unable to collect taxes and forced to cut back on benefits, resulting in riots just to name the most obvious The immediate most likely result is financial collapse. The West is like the Prodigal Son. It has squandered its heritage, but now that people realize their plight and return to Father State, Papa too is bankrupt. No warm welcome or fatted calf for us spendthrifts.

Recommendation One: if possible have extra cash on hand- at least $500 in small bills – just in case.

One consequence of the world being on its last legs is The Age of Fraud, especially in the money market. Revelation 22:11 – the last chapter of the Bible – confirms that: “Those who do wrong will increasingly do so; those who do right will persist in their good ways.” The Age of Fraud is evident everywhere, including in our self-deception that “matters will turn out fine”, or “science will find an answer”, or most common “I don’t want to think about it: too frightening”.

Today much of what hear or do are at best half-truths. Much of what we eat and drink is contaminated and falsely labeled: it is engineered to look good, but looks deceive as they often make us obese and cancer-prone, saturated as they are with salt and sugar to make us addictive to these poisons for the sole purpose of generating profits for the multi-national corporations. If “We are what we eat,” then that too bodes ill for the future.

Everything created is sacred, especially real food. Jesus prayed before eating, and many of us still do this. If food is holy then so is proper farming. I will probably get sued for this, but in my book Monsanto is a satanic enterprise. The name itself is blasphemy: Mon-santo refers to sanctus: holy. It is as far from holy as the devil is from Jesus. Why is Monsanto evil? Because it tampers with seeds so that farmers cannot use them for next year’s crop: that is anti-creational and hurts, especially the poor. Monsanto seeds will prove to be a curse in the long run.

My grandparent-farmers were deeply religious: they knew that for their well-being they depended on God giving rain and sunshine at the appropriate time. Now water is mechanically pumped from the Ogallala aquifer (already rapidly decreasing) or irrigation from other sources, all in danger of running out or low, while fertility is furnished by chemicals containing potassium, nitrogen and phosphorous. The result has been that we no longer need to believe: science – Monsanto – ConAgra – has all the answers. So farms have become factories without a roof. Since oil equals food, and oil equals poison and is finite, oil is another sign of the last days.

Another reason why we are in The End-Times is that people are becoming conscious of yesteryear’s missteps. I remember that in 1965 I received, as a member of a book club, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. I gave it away without ever reading it. I simply was not ready for new insights: too comfortable, but somewhere between 1970 and 1973 I got converted, was born again to different insights, including hearing Dr. Evan Runner coin “Life is Religion”.

Yes, all of life is religion. By and large organized religion has separated nature from grace, heaven from the earth, and soul from the body: the so-called the spirit/matter dualism. According to this belief the church’s business is the soul not the soil, yet for God the ‘soil’ is at least as important as is soul. The German word for ‘worship’ is Gottesdienst, which means ‘serving God’. We do that also when we devotedly work the soil. That’s why I like Bonhoeffer who said: “God, the Human Race, Creation belong together.”

Recommendation Two: prepare for the End. See life as one: everything is religion-oriented, even for the agnostic, probably turned off from the church by its staleness and lack of ‘all of life is religion.’

We now are in the home stretch. The industrial age is behind us. The carbon-based abundance is being forced into abandonment. The old order is dying and a new age is struggling to be born: a shifting of emphasis, away from the consumer society, and preparing for the Lord’s Age to come, which means getting ready for a life-style of eternity, a truly sustainable existence as the first step.

We need a new approach to life. The old approach of treating the earth as dead matter, as ‘being dominated’ is back-firing. Globally matters are beyond repair. It is simply inconceivable that the Seven Billion of Us will suddenly see the light and start living sustainably, which actually is no longer possible, because we rely so exclusively on carbon-based productivity that the outcome is guaranteed: collapse. That is not pessimism: that is the cruel reality.

Recommendation Three:  we must acknowledge where we have gone wrong, pray for forgiveness and re-assess the situation. For almost all of us that is all we can do, while embracing the belief that everything is holy. Peter tells us to “live holy and godly lives”. (2 Peter 3: 11), which for today means ‘living as green as possible”, because soil is as important as soul. He urges us to make the earth “The home of ??????????, of dikaiosunè , which, my good friend Sylvia Keesmaat has pointed out to me actually means ‘justice’ in this context. Righteousness is something personal, justice is all-embracing, pertains to all of God’s creation. The way we have lived and still are living, is sin. I can’t put it any other way. We must strive for an eternal life-style, one of true sustainability.

Sustainability is now a popular word. It generally means that we are willing to try solar energy and windmills and drive a hybrid, while maintaining our comfortable life. Sorry, that won’t be enough. A complete re-orientation is needed, which include a new kind of spirituality, seeing that all of life is religion. Religion is simply one of many possible means of expressing one’s spirituality. The cardinals, who elected a new Pope, were engaged in ‘religion’. Spirituality is seeing all of life as sacred, regarding it as being in harmony with the totality of the divine creation order. That’s what the apostle Peter meant by living just lives. Churches are religious institutions, but often lack the true spirituality; they are often in the grip of the ‘world’ which promotes the separation of religion from science and society. Descartes (famous for “I think therefore I am- cogito ergo sum”) sought to do that. This mechanistic worldview has supported industrialization without an active role for the sacred, separating mind from matter, people from nature, people from each other, the body from the mind, and the mind from the soul. It is the world’s dominant religion affecting all of us, including church people.

It was not so in earlier times. Native attitudes reflected what Chief Seattle may have said: “Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. We did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”

True sustainability is about “justice for everything and for all.” It reflects ‘loving your neighbour as yourself; it reflects loving God above all: and that really means loving everything- soil!- that God has made. How can we love God without loving his creation?  How can we love J.S. Bach without loving his music? He probably was a difficult man to live with, outliving his two wives and siring 20 offspring. Genesis tells us that when God had finished creation: “God saw everything he had made and found it very good.” In essence he said: This world is beautiful.  Take good care of it; do not ruin it…I place it in your hands: it now is yours”.

And that brings me to food and farming. Sustainable agriculture is rooted in the need for being in harmony with the order of things, which is a spiritual state. It means farming in harmony with creation. It means fitting farming to the farmer and the farm. It means farming in harmony among people – within families, communities, and societies. It means farming in harmony with future generations – being good stewards of finite resources. It means farming for eternity, ready for food production for the New Earth. Only a muscle-powered type of gardening can fill that bill.

As always, Christ will not do anything without us and we can’t do anything without him. He will make all things new, but that new must start with us. No use dwelling on the past, on that poisonous partnership we had in the carbon-based coalition. Leave it behind. Start a new way of doing things, including food production.

Dr. Barry Commoner, not a Christian, in his book The Closing Circle, (Alfred Knopf, New York, 1971), was one of the three persons instrumental in my conversion. The other two were Dennis Meadows of The Limits of Growth and Rev. B. Telder who wrote a (Dutch) book questioning heaven: After Death: What? (Sterven..en dan?) Where Meadows made me see that the earth’s resources are finite, Telder made me realize that heaven was a Satan ploy. Commoner, a biologist, coined the Laws of Ecology. Here they are:

(1)     Everything is connected to everything else. We are discovering that with Climate Change. Disturb the delicately balanced chemical composition of the atmosphere, and the entire world is in turmoil, from the Arctic to the Rainforests.

(2)     Everything must go somewhere. There is no such thing as waste. Nothing disappears. It is simply transferred from one place to another. Our universe is a closed system. We are locked in a sealed chamber from which nothing can escape.

(3)     Nature knows best. Given time, and absence of people, the cosmos will heal itself. The Lord created the world in such a way that all the evil done against it will disappear. That means that the Lord, in his grace, will cause a period to appear where no human beings will be able to disturb this remedial process. After that a chastened and wiser humanity will emerge.

(4)     Nothing comes free. We have built a lopsided world where we have never calculated the true cost of doing business, totally ignoring the environmental damage. We now are in the process of paying for this immense lack of proper accounting.

We are in the final stages of world history. It will be met with denial because it is a frightening prospect. For believers also it will be a bumpy ride for a while but in the end it will be rejoicing because Revelation 21 tells us the glorious future: “There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain….I am making everything new.”

Starting next week I will begin a series dealing with “The Church”.

March 3 2013

Clones or clowns?

Some comments on the coming conclave of the Catholic Cardinals.

Last spring I ran a 10 km race and caught up with a runner with whom I talked the rest of the way, an interesting man who had been the head of a provincial police force. When I asked him about the Roman Catholic Church and the sex scandals in his jurisdiction, he was quite blunt: a code of silence on all levels and – his words- affiliation with the Mafia.

Here’s an episode that ties in with that. I noticed it in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s last book. It’s called “The Grand Inquisitor”. It’s a story that Ivan, the atheist Karamazov brother, has composed and recounts to his younger brother Alyosha, the aspiring priest. In it Jesus returns to the earth during the Spanish Inquisition. Ivan says: “It is fifteen centuries since signs from heaven were seen. And now the deity appears once more among the people.” Everyone recognizes him, because a blind man sees and a dead child rises. But the old cardinal, in charge of the Inquisition, takes Jesus to prison and tells him that: “You have no right to add anything to what you have said…. Why have you come to hinder us?” Ivan explains that this is a fundamental feature of the Church that God cannot ‘meddle’ now because “all has been given by you to the Pope. The Church is the authority now.”
The Grand Inquisitor then tells Jesus that he erred when he resisted the devil’s three temptations in the wilderness, where the devil offered him miracle, mystery and might, which the Church has accepted. Jesus, however, wanted them to have freedom of choice. But, says the clergyman, freedom is too difficult and frightful for the masses and so the Church has taken the three awesome gifts for them. The Inquisitor concludes: “We are not working with you, but with the devil– that is our mystery.” Jesus, still not speaking, kisses him on the lips. “That was all his answer.” The Grand Inquisitor opens the cell door and says, “Go, and come no more, never, never.” And the divine visitor leaves.

“Freedom is too difficult for the masses” says the cardinal, but that is an important part of Jesus’ teaching: “The Truth shall set you free”. The church of his day and of today rather not gives the people a free hand. Is the result of this the following?

“Whenever God erects a house of prayer

The Devil builds a chapel there;

And ‘twill be found upon examination,

The latter has the largest congregation.”

Daniel Defoe in The True-born Englishman

I don’t have television but I can quite well picture the room where the cardinals gather: two rows of figures, from top to toe attired in bright red, reminding me of the sea of red that is the permanent colour of most national budgets. It’s also no coincidence that the Bible uses red to portray our sins. Cardinals are, after all, human, just as the new pope will be, if they choose one.

If they choose one? Why do I say that? I say this because this entire ecclesiastical set-up is wrong, is as outdated as the temple in the Old Testament, is as outdated as the Sanhedrin, chaired by the High Priest, the Pope of his day who condemned Jesus to death.

When Jesus died the curtain separating in the temple the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place tore into two pieces, signifying that the temple no longer had a place in Israel, or anywhere else. The church then needed a completely new structure. Jewish worship also was a ‘from the top down’ affair: from high priest, to priests, to the people. Jesus reversed that order. Jesus wanted to see a church that started from the ground up. And that’s indeed the way it grew: by the word of mouth of the small folk, who created true fellowship through their charitable acts.

Back to the cardinals. It seems to me that this time the princes of the church can no longer resort to half measures. As this election approaches, some hope that the shortage of priests, and their damaged reputation and morale, can be remedied by adding married priests, or women priests, or gay priests. But that misses the point. Whatever their sexual status, they will still be priests. They will not be chosen by their congregations (as was the practice in the early church). They will be appointed from above, by bishops approved for their loyalty to Rome, which will police their doctrinal views as it has with priests heretofore. The power structure will not be changed by giving it new faces.

When the Roman Emperor Constantine declared Christianity to be the official state religion the church organized itself taking the Roman Empire as a model: The Pope resembled the Emperor, the cardinals the consuls, the priests the centurions. Jesus had always resisted this sort of structure, one that his disciples had advocated continuously. Now finally the outspoken aim of the Twelve to have the church resemble a worldly power had been accomplished, to the detriment of the Christian movement until this day. Jesus wanted people to have the freedom to make their own often conflicting, often unwise but nevertheless valid decisions. “My kingdom is not of this world,” was Jesus’ mantra, indicating that his kingdom is “The New Creation to Come” for which we all must strive.

The tragic reality is that the just resigned pope appointed many of the cardinals who will elect his successor. Pope Benedict always was a very conservative and somewhat timid theologian. As Cardinal Ratzinger he was in charge of purity of teaching, and as Pope he appointed to the conclave of electors those who agreed with his views, assuring the status quo: clones of his own mindset.

I believe that Benedict, elected at the age of 78, was meant to be a safe stopgap: with him the church could kick the ‘reform’ can down the road one more time. He certainly had no experience in dealing with people in a businesslike way, dogmatic theologian he was. Now that he has retired I believe he will completely withdraw from the intrigues of the inner church, a world no different from the Congress in Washington, where the budget can too has suffered the same fate, with disaster as the inevitable result. Just as all Western nations are at the edge of the abyss, the same is true in Rome in particular and the world-wide church in general. Now that Benedict – which means ‘well-spoken’ – has said his last words, the real question is whether we will see a clone- a conforming cleric, a party-line proponent, the business as usual advocate – or a clown – a courageous eccentric, who will not first gauge what his ecclesiastical colleagues will prefer, all perfect pictures of pure conformity. The church needs a few fools, clowns who, in the way Shakespeare used them, have the capacity to stir things up, to say things that other characters in their ecclesiastical capacity couldn’t possibly get away with saying, people who cut through the pomposity and tell the blatant truth. The blatant truth is that the current model is no longer valid, if it ever was.  What the church needs is a sober look at the world as it really is: godless, at the end of the rope, desperate, crying for guidance in these last fateful years, or in Latin In his ultimis annis fatalibus, which brings me to The Clowns of God.

In 1982 a younger brother, then a project manager in Australia, on his way back to the Netherlands, came via Canada and gave me a book he had bought on his travels: The Clowns of God. It’s all about a pope who – you guessed it – was forced to resign. The pope was in the planning stage to publish an encyclical with the very biblical name of ”In these last fateful years,” or in Latin, the church’s official language In His Ultimis Annis Fatalibus.

A draft of the papal document was lifted from the private papal apartment and given to the Curia, the Vatican cabinet (sounds familiar, doesn’t it).  Gregory the Seventeenth – that was the name of the pope in this book – was forced to abdicate because he claimed to have a vision of the end of the world, of the globe going up in flames, and Jesus’ Second Coming. He believed he was called to warn the world that Christ’ return was imminent. The cardinals give the pope an ultimatum: resign for medical reasons, or we will declare you mentally unfit to continue as Holy Father.

The 1981 the world was pre-occupied with the nuclear dangers. Today the perils are far worse, carrying all the features of finality. Morris West in The Clowns of God, which he wrote in 1981, could not have known the extent of the natural and man-made disasters devastating country after country and ecosystems after ecosystem in the world today. Knowing human nature, this process will never be reversed: matters will only get worse.

The next pope may not be the last one, as some maintain, but I believe that this conclave of 115 old men –average age 72 – all bachelors and supposedly ‘undefiled’ by women (or men), are faced with a final choice. Why? Because the institutional church in whatever category, colour, conviction or confession, Protestant, Jewish, Islam, has become dominantly atheistic. I realize that this sounds like a gross over-reaction, but it seems to me – and I may be wrong, of course – that those (the Religious Right comes to mind) who claim to know exactly what God wants, display a form of self-deification, are making themselves equal to god. This more than anything else has made religion rigid, caused by the failure to admit that the Bible expressly states that we ALL see through a glass darkly. This really means that to know the Truth with a capital T is beyond our grasp. We can only say with a great degree of certainty that it is our Christian duty to devote ourselves religiously – with all we possess – to the betterment of creation and its occupants. There’s where faith enters. To be ‘religious’ without having regard for God’s creation is what Bonhoeffer calls “pious secularism.” Christianity in essence knows three truths: (1) God created the universe; (2) we disturbed God’s harmonious cosmos to the point where (see Isaiah 24) “The earth is split asunder, it reels like a drunkard”; or ( see Romans 8): “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pain of childbirth”; (3) Jesus, by his sacrificial death and consequent resurrection, paid the price and will bring back the renewed earth, the Kingdom, commonly called redemption. The rest is commentary.

The End of the World is predicted in the Bible. We are warned, not only by the Bible but by our clergy to always be prepared because no one, except God, knows when the end of the world will come, but there are definite signs, as Jesus himself outlines with the lesson on the fig tree. (Matthew 24).

The College of Cardinals can ignore the signs of the times, and continue business as usual which is probably what will happen. However, we should pray that the princes of the church, by not electing a pope at all, would send the strongest possible sign that it’s not business as usual.

Let’s face it: a pope is like a president: his power is an illusion. He basically is a P.R. guy, a salesman for an important branch of religion. The conclave, recognizing this, should call Vatican Council III and discuss with all religions the state of the world “In these last fateful years.”

There have been two of these Councils before: Vatican I from 1870-71; Vatican II from 1962-65: now it is time for Vatican III. The need has never been greater. Cardinals are not stupid. Times are different for the simple reason, as Morris West outlined in The Clowns of God, that we are indeed In his ultimis annis fatalibus in these last fateful years.

Electing a new pope without any conditions will simply accelerate the death of the church as more and more people get fed up with the empty pageantry of the moribund system.

It only takes a few clowns to initiate this process. We need modern equivalents of what the Apostle Paul wrote (1Cor.3: 18) “we need to become fools so that we may become wise…. (1 Cor. 4:10) We are fools for Christ.”

Fools in that sense are like the clowns of God, people that go against the established practises and dare to be different. “Unless you become like little children you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” That also applies to the Pope and the College of Cardinals and each one of us.

In the short month of February 4943 visitors went to www.hielema.ca/blog where also this column, books and essays are posted.

My next column will deal with “The Future isn’t what it used to be.”