Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

Our World Today

January 14 2013

Young people pound Ponzi to pieces

In 1920, an Italian immigrant to the U.S. by the name of Charles Ponzi started a business that would buy postal reply coupons in Italy and exchange them for stamps in the U.S., taking advantage of significant price differences due to high postwar inflation. He attracted investors by promising extraordinarily high returns—50 percent within 45 days. He simply used the money of later investors to pay high returns to earlier investors, extracting huge profits along the way. By the time the fraud collapsed, investors had lost nearly $20 million, the equivalent of about $225 million in today’s dollars. Such frauds have been known as Ponzi schemes ever since.

The second-biggest Ponzi scheme is more recent. It was concocted by the New York hedge-fund manager Bernard Madoff, and collapsed in 2008 with losses of approximately $20 billion. But the biggest Ponzi scheme is still happily fooling all of us in the developed economies. We in the Western World, and Japan, have borrowed enormous funds from the future, basing it on a global growth and lots of young bodies. There are strong indications that future growth to fund today’s pensions and medical costs will never come. The young people are saying by their attitude: go and fly a kite; we will not cooperate; we refuse to produce enough children to fund your folly. In other words, young people are pounding Ponzi to pieces.

The result is that, financially all Western governments are in deep trouble. Debt has been accumulated at a frightful pace, and the Ponzi scheme that so well worked for Bismarck, is backfiring: there are not enough young people to pay for the old people’s benefits.

And these obligations are huge: income for life and free medical care, increasing exponentially for older people who become sick more often. The young people are in no position to pay for this: many good jobs have gone to low wage countries and robot technology is threatening to eliminate a lot of other jobs. Good bye Ponzi.

What is happening to these young people? There are two changes in their attitudes. One is religion. By and large young people are abandoning it, and with it they are also letting go of marriage. Joel Kotkin notes in a recent report titled “The Rise of Post-Familialism,” that one of the factors all major world religions have in common is that they make family and kinship central in their lives. Indeed, the more devout young people are, the higher their rates of marriage and the more children they have. Lack of religious values leads to secularism and agnosticism and forestalls family formation.

Then there is contraception which has abolished the old trinity of sex, marriage, and childbearing, and decoupled sex from baby making. And with that link broken, the connections between sex and marriage — and finally between marriage and childrearing — are severed, too.

And this trend line is heading higher. Divorce rates are stable, but cohabitation is now so common that it is crowding out matrimony as the formal form of family formation. Also increasing levels of education push the average age at first marriage higher.

The conclusion is simple. Times have changed. Two trends are irreversible: people live longer, which means immense outlay for medical purposes and pension benefits, while birth rates decline and so what happened in the past no longer works.

Add lower growth – or no growth at all – another leg on which society depended, and the haggling about money and taxes and benefits will only lead to utter stagnation. What cannot continue, will not continue. Young people sense this. They sense a future with little prospect and so intuitively refrain from commitments, such as marriage and childbearing.

Next week’s column will be based on Revelation 22: 2: “The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

JANUARY 7 2013

Deus ex machina; pecunia ex machina.

A peculiar title: all Latin. If you look a little closer you’ll recognize a few words, such as deus – god – and ex- from or out of- and machina, our word for machine. Pecunia may not be so familiar.  It simply means money. Pecunia ex machina, means something like an ATM Automatic Teller Machine, but for banks only: free money, but not really. More about that later.

First about the Deus ex machina.

It literally means God out of the machine. It comes from ancient drama where sometimes a god was needed, so the actors had a god figure suspended above their heads and some stage hand would lower it whenever a god was called for. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian, put to death by Hitler weeks before World War II ended, used Deus ex Machina, as an example of the sort of god that is needed only when special circumstances require his presence, which actually is the way Christianity in general uses God. When all goes well, we can do without him, but when sickness strikes or death or unemployment, we want God there to heal our cancers or avoid death or get us a job.  For the rest, we don’t need him.

Bonhoeffer, while in prison in 1944, waiting to be hanged, writes that usually ‘ religion’ offers only an escapist flight from the real world, and has pushed God to the boundaries of faith, available on call to answer prayers of deliverance and of favour. That sort of act is always partial, while ‘faith’ is something whole, involving all of human life. Jesus calls a person not to a bit of religion, but to life and that to the full.

The famous Dr. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare expert bar none, writes in his “the American Religion” that America is very religious, but of a sort that has ceased to be Christian. His central point is that Gnosticism rules the church, evident in the belief that upon death we go to heaven, discarding the earth is useless and even evil. That’s why the ‘religious right’ doesn’t care for the environment, including Stephen Harper, Canada’s benevolent dictator- Prime Minister. I remember Billy Graham being interviewed on CNN – when I still had television – and a man by the name of King asked him: “where will you go when you die?” Billy’s answer was “Jesus will take me by the hand and bring me to God,” in spite of Paul writing that God lives in inapproachable light, that nobody can see him and nobody has seen him. Apparently the most celebrated “Christian” in the world, is so caught up in the gnostic heresy, separating earth from heaven, that he reads the bible totally with unchristian eyes. Bonhoeffer calls such a belief ‘pious Christian secularism.’ Bonhoeffer also writes; “This is not the godlessness of atheism or cultural bolshevism, but Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth.”  He says that God, the human race and the earth are one. If we renounce the earth – by living recklessly with God’s beloved earth- then we cease to be Christian. After all the most famous text in the bible is John 3: 16, “God so loved the cosmos, our earth, that he allowed his son to be put to death as ransom for  gaining the earth back from the Satan who had acquired it through our sinful action.” Don’t fall for Deus ex Machina.

Pecunia ex machina.

A similar thing is happening with money. It used to be that money had an intrinsic value, was backed up by gold or some other value, such as barter, by which articles of identical value are exchanged. I remember my paternal grandfather, a grocer, making the rounds with his horse and buggy to my maternal grandparents, farmers, and bartering eggs for sugar and coffee and tea. Believe me: that will happen again. In Greece where there is a shortage of Euros, barter is now normal.

Just as God is created ‘ex machina’, so money today too is created out of nothing. This is called ‘quantitative easing’ or simply “QE”. The Washington-based Federal Reserve Bank headed by Ben Bernanke creates money “ex nihilo” out of nothing, as if he were God, $85 billion each month, until unemployment is down to 6.5%. And where do these trillions of dollars go? They go to the bankers who were responsible for the shortfall.

In the Matthew 18 Jesus tells a parable about a man who owed the king 10,000 talents – something like $500 billion. After much pleading the king forgives him this debt, but – here I quote the Bible –“But when the servant went out, he met a man who owed him 100 denarii – perhaps a small mortgage – and refused to hear his pleading and threw him in prison.” When the king heard how ungrateful this banker had been, he reneged on wiping out his $500 billion, and he got prison too.

This biblical parable is coming true today: the government gives the banks Trillions of dollars and the banks refuse to forgive the millions of ‘under water’ mortgages. There nobody goes to prison, reason why this is going to backfire on the financial institutions. Believe me. This ‘pecunia ex machina’ will end badly as it did in the Jesus’ parable.

Our debt levels, especially in the US, Europe and Japan, are higher than they’ve been at any point in human history. All we’ve done now for the last decade is trust a band of bankers and shady officials to fix the problems they themselves caused in the first place: appointing foxes to guard the chicken coop.

Trusting a ‘deus ex machina’ leads to a false religion. Putting our trust in pecunia ex machina’ reflects the false foundation of our economic life.

A true God requires total devotion, all the time. True money must be backed by genuine collateral. Both deus ex machina and pecunia ex machina are based on false assumptions and signal the end of much of what we call organized religion and capitalistic society.

New columns published every Monday morning.

JANUARY 2013

How God disappeared from Jorwerd.

The heading is the title of a book about a village in Friesland, the Netherlands. Geert Mak, the author, entitled it Hoe God verdween uit Jorwerd. A son of a Reformed minister and now a celebrated writer who abandoned the church, he spent time in Friesland where he observed the fundamental changes there during the 1950’s and beyond.

Jorwerd was a typical close-knit rural community, where the grocer, the butcher, the baker, the farmer, the smith all had their respected places until cheap energy gave the farmer the milk machine, eliminating a farm hand, afforded him a tractor, retiring the horse, and was able to buy a bailer, which furloughed another farmhand.  The ascent of the automobile also meant that people could live there but work and shop in the city, with cheaper prices and greater variety, so slowly the baker, the grocer, the butcher lost their clients and within a decade the village lost its soul, and with its soul gone, God too left, evident from the empty churches.

I believe that Jorwerd typifies our present world where God too has disappeared. I base this also on Deut. 32:20: “I shall hide my face from them; I shall see what their end will be”, I believe that God has withdrawn from this world, and that international capitalism has taken over: Mammon now has the final word everywhere. God left ‘to see what we, humans, make of it without his presence.’  My so-called pessimism is based on that premise.

The Jorwerd phenomenon is now a universal event. Manufacturing has gone to Asia, where labour and coal is cheap. We don’t mind the extra pollution and loss of jobs as long as we get bargains. Our personal prayers do not prevent the tragedies that are playing out all over the world with each year hundreds of textile workers burning to death, thousands of coal miners losing their lives, and cancers out of control, as long as we save money. God is gone. He is gone in government, in business, in education with the very odd exception, while still living in the hearts of a surprising scattering of people world-wide.

In the past couple of months I have been translating Dr. J. H. Bavinck’s book, now re-titled We and Our World. It has deeply affected me. Here is one reason why.  “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.”

I concur, and dare say that most churches fail to confess that, let alone live it, because they and their adherents have no kingdom vision. Bavinck writes about the kingdom that “Not only are we humans part of that Kingdom, but it also includes the world of animals and plants. Yes, even the angels are part of this wider context: they too have a place in the harmonious totality of God’s Kingdom.”

Here is another Bavinck quote: “It is impossible to visualize the immense difference between the majestic harmonious unity of creation, as it emer­ged from God’s hand, and the frantic, demon?dominated planet in which we, the cursed humanity, dwell after the fall into sin. The Kingdom is in shatters. That is the profound tragedy con­fronting the life of the world. This goes far beyond the fact that we have ripped 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.” Yes, God is hiding his face.

I believe that to be true. When the Lord asks us to “Seek first the Kingdom” that simply means to seek the welfare of God’s creation, which include animals and plants, water and air, and somehow prepare ourselves for that kingdom to come.

Our efforts to have the cake and eat it too have resulted in a mammoth ‘mammon’ debt too big to be ever repaid.  ‘Environmental debt’ too is totally out of control, and also beyond remedy. By our life style and lack of love for all that lives and moves and has its being, we have caused God to disappear from the world.

This is my very last column. I have decided to write a weekly column exclusively for the web where last year more than 35,000 people visited www.hielema.ca/blog, from all over the world, mostly non-Christians.

For more 30 years this paper has been tolerant enough to publish my not always uplifting writings. When you read this column I have already posted three new articles on hielema.ca. Join me there.

Bert@hielema.ca.

December 2012

Joseph’s nightmare.

Suppose that the Pharaoh, after Joseph had explained those two dreams, had shaken his head and said” “sorry prisoner, you are telling me this just to get out of jail. I don’t believe a word of it.”

Of course we know the real story. The Pharaoh did follow Joseph’s advice and implemented a sound strategy: after seven years of abundance he was ready for seven years of constant crop failures. But Joseph’ long prison stay still haunted him: in his sleep frightful scenes still caused sudden nightmares…  What if….

2013 is looming. What can we expect in the years to come?

We now have had not seven years but seven decades of progress. Every year since 1942, when the USA geared up for war, we grew more prosperous and became richer. Did we follow Joseph’s counsel and prepared for possible lean years? Only Paul Martin, the once Liberal minister of finance, a devout Roman Catholic and good friend of Gerald Vandezande had the guts to stop Ottawa’s deficits when times were good, as did Bill Clinton, whose surpluses were promptly revoked by the religious wrong under Bush junior.

Seventy years spans three generations,  in which we all have grown accustomed to ever better conditions. We’ve forgotten how to live within our means, both financially and environmentally, as continuous growth made borrowing easy while cheap fuel gave each of us one hundred energy slaves 24/7.

Now the times they are a’changing. Don’t call me a pessimist. Do you really believe that, from now on, all seven billion of us will never use a car when we can walk or bike and do whatever necessary to save God’s creation? Do you really believe the oil rich Middle East will suddenly grow peaceful? Do you really believe that China, India, America, Europe become devoted climate lovers? Of course not. So what will happen?

It is clear that the majority of the world’s economies are no longer growing because we live in an increasingly resource-limited world. The world’s most important raw materials – oil, gas, wood, groundwater, fish etc. – are gone, severely reduced or seriously polluted.  Food? Joseph’s nightmare comes to mind, because this time there is no seven year reserve. Lester Brown of World Watch,, in his new book, Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity, convincingly argues that the greatest threat we face is food scarcity — and at 123 pages, the book is packed full of data and analysis to support this. We not only have a growing world population, but also Climate Change, which, with prolonged droughts and super storms and who knows what else, will reduce yields.

Welcome to a new world. After seven decades of unparalleled prosperity we must prepare for leaner times.

Blame it in Obama. Franklin Graham, Billy’s oldest boy, said on CNN that there will be an economic collapse as punishment for the US re-electing Obama. He is right about hard times, wrong about Obama. Fact is that Joseph’s nightmare will come true. We simply have gone to sleep, have been mesmerized by our addiction to cheap fuel and money. In the hearts of hearts you know that this is true. We – my generation, my kids – have creamed it all off. There’s little left for those born after 1990.

The North American standard of living has been propped up since 1942 by imbalances that gave us, the six percent, a quarter of the world’s energy resources and a third of its raw materials and industrial products. That’s going to change. The economic troubles that have been ongoing since 2008 are the foreshocks of that seismic shift, which will see most incomes drop. We are at the limits to growth, now. We are moving into a deepening global deflationary depression, interspersed with dangerous and possibly irreversible shocks to the systems that support our basic welfare. We will lose much of what we take for granted. Prepare for real danger and unpredictability in the years to come.

Climate change is our crowning craziness, accelerating the arrival of the peak of global oil and food production. The good news is the coming of the Kingdom that’s why I am an optimist.

All these happenings are preludes to Christ’s return. We must acknowledge such a view as true and prepare for profound change. We must embrace a degree of self-sufficiency, simply because our life-style now does irreparable damage to God’s creation. We must not only begin working on our food security, but also mentally start to prepare ourselves for these changes in 2013.

Will this happen? I remember Dr. Hendrik van Riessen at a Unionville conference in the early 1960’s say that the more urgent the need for change the less capable we are:  he foresaw Joseph’s nightmare.

Bert Hielema is busy translating Dr. Johan Herman Bavinck’s “De Mensch en zijn Wereld.” My tentative new title is “We and our World.” See also my blog: www.hielema.ca/blog

November 2012

Jesus’ Wife?

Archeologists found a scrap of papyrus, dating from about 400 AD, on which Jesus addresses a woman as ‘my wife’. Was he married? No. Jesus embodies the New Creation. He himself has said that in the New Creation there is no marriage. So that takes care of that, but what about the relationship between women and men? Will the New creation be populated with sex-less creatures? I think not.

As a reformed and reforming person I know my doctrine. The Heidelberg Catechism question 35 says that “He was like us in everything but sin”; the Belgic Confession also states (Article 26) “He made himself completely like his brothers (and sisters)”. Hebrew 4:15 confirms this. I have no trouble with that, but I think the church may, because of the sex thing.

So what about sex? I wouldn’t be here without it and neither would anybody alive or dead, including Jesus who was born from the Holy Spirit and Mary, yet sex is a taboo topic in the church.

There is no doubt in my mind that women fell in love with Jesus and Jesus with them, for the simple reason that he was like us in everything but sin. So, unless sex is sin (Genesis 2:24 actually promotes sex), his knowledge about this matter was more than mere academic. For far too long has the church regarded the human body as an enemy to be conquered. The Song of Songs is not a song of disembodied, spiritual, intellectual aspiration, but one of erotic, bodily love, something at the heart of God’s creation, a downright earthly song of love.

C.S. Lewis wrote The Four Loves. He identified them as Storge- affection, Philia – friendship, Eros- romance, and Agapè – unconditional love. I believe that Jesus experienced all these four loves, yes, including eros, romance.

Is there something wrong with Jesus falling in love? After all he was like us in everything but sin. Falling in love is no sin. Does that mean that he too went through a Sturm und Drang phase as a teenager? Of course.

Ever heard a sermon on this subject? I never did, and I have been going to church for 80 years, something a lot of people have ceased to do: perhaps failing to deal with life as such may be a reason.

I believe that preaching, a form of one-sided broadcasting is out-dated. So what sort of church service do I suggest? After a prominent period of praise and prayer, sermons, either previously posted on line or distributed the Sunday before should be deliberated upon in small groups to promote animated conversations. Lectures are the least effective way of learning. Of course Bible knowledge is prerequisite for such intelligent discourse. “Who do you say I am,” Jesus asked his followers, stimulating discussion. Descartes long ago coined Cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am. Often sermons suffer from this sort of thinking, explaining bible passages with proof texts reducing them to unilateral academic exercises. Jesus, on the other hand, related to life, saying in essence Homo sum, ergo sum: I am a human being that’s why I am.

Both J. H. Bavinck and Dietrich Bonhoeffer tell us time and again that God, earth and we, humans, form an unbreakable covenant, attached to the earth with every element of our existence, because we originate from the earth, which carries us and feeds us. Jesus’ humanity was evident in everything, including upsetting the money men in the temple, something I compare to Greenpeace preventing the slaughter of the whales. Yet we often ridicule or worse, ignore those who fight to preserve our natural habitat. That’s why I support that organization. No wonder Bonhoeffer approvingly quotes Martin Luther’s: “The godless man’s curse can be more pleasing to God than the hallelujahs of the pious.” To me this means that these non-Christians, by trying to save one of God’s unique creatures, could be closer to doing God’s work than the ever decreasing numbers attending the church services. Christ’ favourite self-description is Son of Man, human through and through. We find that a bit frightening, because we rather keep Jesus somewhere up there. Sermons that fail to connect with the here and now, and with the world and those who dwell therein, are often a waste of holy time and may even do more harm than good.

No, Jesus was not married. Yes, he experienced all human emotions: nothing human was foreign to him, except sin. That’s why everybody, with whatever sexual orientation can come to him, because he himself has been subjected to all possible experiences.