Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

March 2012

“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”  – Albert Einstein

It is said that when a frog is deposited in a boiling pan, it right away jumps out, but when it is eased in warm water which then is slowly heated, it blithely burns to death.

I believe this little tale illustrates our society which in the last century has very gradually become addicted to fossil fuel, resulting not only in highly variable climate conditions but also in almost impossible challenges once the supply of finite oil is decreasing.

One of my (many) books is “Something new under the sun”, by historian J. R. McNeill. Its subtitle is: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World.” In it Dr. McNeill writes: “In the last 100 years the number of people in the world has increased by an unprecedented 500 percent.” About energy he notes that: “No other century in human history can compare with the twentieth for its growth in energy use….. The world used 20 million tons of oil in 1900. In 1990 it was 3000 million,” 150 times more.

The consequences of both population growth and our ever expanding oil consumption are truly frightening. The result has been that our earth has contracted a form of leprosy as its skin is being stripped of topsoil; also deforestation and clouds of CO2 have given our planet a form of lung cancer, causing rapid hiccups in its climate, while our growing debts and deficits are deadly for its economy.

Since 2000 we have had extreme weather symptoms, evident in record high and low temperatures and in record high and low precipitation, all related to Global Warming, something Republican politicians deny it exists. Fact is that for the thousand years before 1800, carbon dioxide levels-which regulate climatic activity- remained around 280 parts per million (ppm). Due to industrial activity this ratio increased to 295 ppm by 1900, 310 by 1950 and 360 in 1995, and is accelerating ever faster. We are now experiencing the hottest years in history, and, although surface temperatures increased by only 0.6 degrees Celsius, even such a small increment is causing havoc in the weather.

We happen to live in a world where there is a finite supply of crude oil. No alternative source can provide anything close to the cheap, highly concentrated energy that petroleum provides. Sorry to repeat myself, but in the future we will have to live in a world almost entirely deprived of these highly effective energy sources.

Our use of temporary oil has pampered us into complacency and paralyzed us like the frog in hot water. Our world is extra dangerous because many Christians, who should be in the forefront honouring God’s creation, are among the most outspoken deniers of our air-contamination.  It reminds me of a saying by Luther, the church reformer:  “Sometimes the curses of the godless sound more pleasing to God than the hallelujahs of the pious!” I can well imagine a godless skier cursing when he sees a hymn-singing snowmobiler destroying his ploddingly prepared ski trail.

When we deny a problem we forfeit the future. Yet a different future is forming because soon the gushing of gasoline will be reduced to a trickle. Simply put, we, for the last few generations, have pursued the wrong narrative: we have lived the lie, have chosen the ‘broad way’ which C. S. Lewis called “the easy slope, no sudden turns, the smooth way to hell”. Unless we acknowledge our creation-poisoning, we cannot choose the future, which demands clean, green living.

Actually a shortage of fuel may be a good thing for us, because it gives us the opportunity to free ourselves from our addictive dependence on poisonous petroleum products. I know it can be done. I am old enough to remember how my grandparents before they had electricity were wise in the ways of the Lord. The Thirties in their rural west part of the Province of Groningen had pockets of god-fearing people: vibrant Christian communities where music, poetry, home entertainment were flourishing: yes, labour-intensive, but satisfying and environmentally responsible. Also the war 1940-45 has taught me that human beings are immensely adaptive. Unless we, as clusters of Christians, prayerfully ponder and pursue (ora et labora) ‘new creation-friendly’ ways, Greece’s present predicament provides us with a prognosis of what is to come.

Rereading my column reminded me of an e-mail I received a few weeks ago.

“Although lacking any real commitment to faith, I have found your blog to be both inspiring and in many ways reflecting my own views on life and the current state of the world.

I live in Edinburgh, Scotland, and would be interested in purchasing one of your books.  Obviously price and postage costs would influence my decision to buy, but I would like to know how much your books are, and the cost of postage to the UK. Many thanks for an excellent blog. “

Regards

Martin Smith

I may add that my blog – hielema.ca- received 30,627 hits in 2011. Your reply too is welcome at ‘bert@hielema.ca’

February 2012.

Our world today

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born: in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms will appear.”

Antonio Gramsci, Marxist thinker

“I will make everything new.”

Jesus Christ, the beginning and the end.

We all have heard of the “Ten Lost Years,” from 1929-1939, usually labeled The Great Depression, which was more severe in the North America than elsewhere.

When this economic disaster started here, some 22 percent of the labour force worked on farms. Between 1929 and 1932 most of these jobs disappeared as agriculture became a victim of its own success thanks to better seeds, better fertilizer, better farming practices, and especially widespread mechanization, fueled by an abundance of cheap oil. The result of this accelerating productivity caused output to increase faster than demand, resulting in much lower prices. That, combined with a sudden influx of millions of surplus workers, changed the structure of the economy. It was this, more than anything else that led to rapidly declining incomes. Farmers then (like workers now) borrowed heavily to sustain living standards and production. Because neither the farmers nor their bankers anticipated the steepness of the price declines, a credit crunch quickly ensued as farmers simply couldn’t repay what they owed.  As a result the banks too became a victim of declining agricultural incomes, and thousands of them went belly up.

Then WWII war came to the rescue: the conflict with Germany and Japan revved up the industrial base and employed the millions of idle bodies, enlisting them both in the army and in the arms industry. Overnight the deep depression disappeared.

Fast forward to today. We now find ourselves in a similar situation as 80 years ago, courtesy ‘progress’ again, this time not through greater farm efficiency but through enhanced computer power, the software revolution, and the globalization of jobs, dispatching them to lower wage countries, China in particular.

For a while the reckoning was postponed as rapidly rising real estate prices, fueled by cheap money and cheating banks, created the illusion of wealth, until the housing bust came.

Economists blamed the debacle in the 1930’s on tight money, so this time the experts did the opposite: they poured trillions in to the banking system, without producing a cure. Bankers got their big bonuses, but the common folk kept on suffering.

Indeed, the old is dying, the new cannot be born, and a great variety of morbid symptoms are appearing. The USA now has 6.6 million fewer jobs than 4 years ago and 23 million would like to work but have dropped out. Also wages have been falling, and poverty is rampant.

What we are experiencing in 2012 is again a fundamental re-alignment of the economy. Just as 80 years ago the jobs of farm hands never returned – now 2 percent of the labour force produce more food than the nation can absorb – thanks to shipping jobs to Asia, and greater productivity, we again have a permanent surplus of labour.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, an economist at Columbia University, suggests that in the   current situation the best solution is to concentrate on two fields for the jobs of the future: education and health, expanding the service economy well beyond the current 70 percent. At the same time this Nobel Prize winner suggests that we better prepare for a much lower living standard.

Making the service sector bigger is easier said than done. In the USA already 17 percent of GDP – Gross Domestic Product – is spent on health care – more than in any country – with a very low success rate. The same holds true for education. The vested interests in both fields are just too difficult to dislodge.

My proposal is different. It is plain that the old order is dying. In 1939 war was the cure. That is no longer an option – even though some Republicans would like to attack Iran. The only way to heal our situation is to make peace with the physical world by imagining the new creation to come. Bonhoeffer starts his 200 page Creation and Fall (dealing with Genesis 1-3) 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.”

The Greek word for ‘end’ is telos. Jesus in Matthew 5:48 tells us to be ‘telos- minded’ – “be telos-minded as I am telos-minded “- (teleios is the Greek word there), which really means that now already our life must reflect the ‘perfection’, the ‘whole-ness’ of the New Creation.

January 2012.

OUR WORLD TODAY

It’s now well into 2012. Some people associate the year 2012 with disaster, thanks to the movie by that name, which in 2009, predicted that this year the earth would be struck by calamities so immense that only a few would survive.  However, just as George Orwell’s prophesies for the book 1984 – written in 1949 – did not come to pass in that year, so 2012 will not see the world turn upside down, even though there are signs that not all is well in the Western world.

Perhaps a phenomenon called “collective consciousness” might play a role: if enough people believe that something disastrous will happen, it just might, no doubt influenced by the bad news out there. Just look at the monetary system: it’s not too far-fetched to believe that the entire banking business might collapse someday. John Kenneth Galbraith, in his The Great Crash 1929, called the chapter preceding THE CRASH “The Twilight of Illusion.”  To me it seems that today we live not in the twilight, but in the dark night of illusion, brought on by our pious faith in perpetual progress, the ‘unknown known’ which simply ignores the everyday realities of diminishing returns and limits to growth, and by our stubborn belief that the future will always be better than the past. That’s why we allowed trillion dollar deficits, and also convinced ourselves that our pollution problems would be solved with improved technology, another illusion, that false belief which we intuitively accept as true. Curing debt with more debt and treating pollution – caused by technology – with more of the same, reminds me of Matthew 12 where Jesus was accused of driving out demons in the name of the prince of demons.

As we go deeper into the teenage years of this century, one thing is sure: it will be a decade of deleveraging: we’re in for at least 10 years of paying off over-due bills, pushed aside, waiting for economic growth that refuses to come.  Debts are always paid, either through inflation, with money of less value – the more likely scenario – or deflation, lower prices and wages, both signaling hardship. Paying for our climate overshoot will result in more floods, more ice storms, more tree-breaking winds, more drought and failed crops, increasing living costs everywhere.

Sorry, young people, just as the Roman Catholic Church keeps on apologizing for sexual crimes, we, older people, must keep on saying sorry for leaving you with an immense mess: a world changed beyond recognition, in which species disappear at a rate 1000 times faster than before, and in which everything we’ve taught you – based on our life style – is vanishing right before your eyes. We still piously sing “This is our Father’s World”, but we, at best, have treated his world with callous indifference. Don’t repeat our mistakes. Don’t make money your goal. Instead handle our living planet with the reverence it deserves.

Keep healthy habits: run, walk, bike, ski. Not for nothing the bible emphasizes that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. I know you young can take a lot of abuse, but there always is a price to pay. Poor diets, watching too much TV, sitting too long in front of a computer screen, may not kill you, but will lead to decades of chronic disease: prevention is better than curing, especially as future health-care dollars will become far less plentiful. Choose a mate with extreme care and seek to be part of a viable community.

Don’t rush into anything. Christians have eternal life, and, as Revelation 14:13 says “Your deeds will follow you in the New Creation.” So investigate everything, and discover what has lasting value. Remember Creation is God’s primary word. The best way to love God is to love creation. Treat her with all the care you can muster, for our health depends on her health. Oil-based enterprise is no longer the answer because of its toxicity. Renewal is the key, which is also the key ingredient of the New Creation.

Happiness is to be “in the Lord.” It means to be consciously busy to seek the best for people and the earth. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in Creation and Fall “Without God, without our brother and sister, we lose the earth (because)… God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.”

We are in the earth, of the earth. The sum total of being a creature is that we completely belong to this world, because it bears us, it nurtures us and embraces us. Any heaven-oriented teaching is from the devil, because it denies God’s very Word of creation.

Bert Hielema lives in rural Tweed, Ontario where he tries to practise what he preaches of which he does too much.

DECEMBER 2011

OUR WORLD TODAY

Am I a heretic?

I am always thinking. Often I muse on bible passages that puzzle me, which has given me the incentive to slowly change my focus from Scriptures alone to combining it with the Created word, a fusing of Spirit–inspired writings with God’s direct revelation in creation. Not surprisingly this has led to different ideas.

It all started with that famous text “God loves the world, the cosmos, so much that he offers his only begotten son as a ransom to wrest it out of the grip of the Great Deceiver”. In the concept of cosmos I include everything we can see, probe, think, paint, compose in music or prose or poetry, build theories upon and write philosophical treatises about.

For me that definition of cosmos and the coming of the cosmic Kingdom are at the core of my quest for salvation. For that end God has given the Scriptures to provide us with “a lamp for our feet and a light for our path” (Psalm 119:105) in our pilgrimage from where we are to the coming Kingdom. Actually Romans 1:20 suggests to me that even without Christ and the Bible, a person on Judgement Day, just by seeing creation as a miracle and honouring its maker, might plead that as sufficient ground for salvation, because billions never have heard true gospel preaching, and a gracious God will make allowances for that.

Colossians 1:15-20 is for me one of the most poignant passages of Scripture, because it described that Jesus sees Himself as the first-born of the entire creation. First-born means that He was indeed the first human being and existed before anything else. He almost always calls Himself “the Son of Man”, Humanity Personified. In His very humanness, in His ultimate loving kinship with all his fellow creatures, Jesus is, simultaneously, the image of the invisible God. He makes God’s love visible so that we can fully experience this love. We, women and men, are made “in his image”: we physically look like Jesus, who, as God, has entered into His creation, and so affirms that God, we and the earth belong together. Forever.

As the first human creature ever He created the entire cosmos, all that lives, moves and has its being. He created this by Him and for Him. That to me explains why we, his brothers and sisters, his look-alikes, are also so immensely creative, evident in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Hildegard van Bingen, Rembrandt, Bach, van Gogh,  as well as such eminent scholars as Luther, Calvin, Bonhoeffer, Bavinck, Louise Pasteur, Barbara W. Tuchman, Einstein, and such technical giants as Steve Jobs.

Jesus has gone for me and for his creation through death, where He too has been the first, because nothing in my life happens which He Himself has not first experienced: pain, loneliness, sickness, deep sorrow, and even my death. God, for my salvation, has deemed it necessary that in the life of the man Jesus his total fullness is present, so that we too and everything else, have been reconciled, have been set aright. In his glorified human existence he is our Mediator with the Father. That’s how I read Colossians 1:15-20.

I believe that we are under-selling ourselves, a typical Calvinistic trait. After all Psalm 8 calls us “little less than a god,” and Psalm 82:6 suggest that “You are gods, and all of you children of the Most High.”

Since Jesus created it all, any act to harm creation is an assault on the holiness of Jesus. I see The Lord’s Prayer as an eschatological instrument, centering on The Kingdom – the New Creation – to Come. Therefore to “Forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors,” must be seen in that light as well, asking Jesus to be merciful when we sin against God’s beloved creation, harm its holiness, and asking us not to point fingers to others who do the same.

I also see Revelation 22:2 that way. The statement that “The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations”, has long been a puzzle to me. Global Warming is a direct result of our machinery spewing Carbon Dioxide. The leaves of the tree are the healing agents there. Creation has her own mechanism for restoration, now overwhelmed by the immense amounts of man-made Green House Gases. Once the carbon-based poisons are eliminated – which will be in the New Creation – the leaves of the trees will do the rest.

At Christmas we celebrate Christ’ second birth: His first-birth took place ‘in the beginning.’

Is this comprehensive approach to the gospel really a heresy?

Bert’s new books, The Shortest Day, and Day without End, are available by contacting Bert@hielema.ca

NOVEMBER 2010

Our World today

This is a good news column. World-wide surveys indicate that Canada is the best country to live in, and that people in the Netherlands are the happiest. Assuming that this wellbeing also applies to the Dutch now living in Canada, they and their offspring enjoy the best of all worlds. The news cannot be better.

We all know that we live on perilous planet, in a very worried world. In response people across the globe demonstrate, fed up with governments bailing out the bankers at their expense: that too is good news.

Paul Gilding, the Australian environmentalist and author of The Great Disruption argues that these public protests are signs that the current growth-obsessed capitalist system is reaching its financial and ecological limits. Says he: “I look at the world as an integrated system, so I don’t see these protests, or the debt crisis, or inequality, or the economy, or the climate going weird, in isolation — I see our system in the painful process of breaking down,” which is what he means by The Great Disruption.

In essence he believes that our blind faith in economic growth, our ineffective democracy, our overloading of planet earth is really a form of global suicide.

Recent events in the world of money – the debt crises in Greece, Italy and Spain come to mind – remind me of the kid in the fairy story who cries out what everyone knows but is afraid to say: “the emperor has no clothes”. In other words: capitalism is counterfeit.

Here’s why. For decades we’ve been told that global market capitalism benefits all. The reasoning is something like this: “in spite of the rich getting richer, in spite of corporations focusing solely on profit, in spite of pollution going un-priced and unchecked, we all would be better off. Wealth might not be equally distributed, but the poor would become less poor, those who work hard would get jobs, those who study diligently would get better positions and we’ll have enough wealth to fix the environment.” That capitalistic promise is now being exposed as fraud. That is good news.

Signs are that we could be facing a new depression. If it does, it could well be worse than the dirty Thirties. David Leonhardt in The New York Times explains that underneath the misery of the Great Depression, the United States economy was quietly making enormous strides during the 1930s. Television and nylon stockings were invented. Refrigerators and washing machines turned into mass-market products. Railroads became faster and roads smoother and wider. As the economic historian Alexander J. Field has said, the 1930s constituted ‘the most technologically progressive decade of the century.’

True, the 1930s was a tough time to make a living, with no unemployment insurance, no pensions, but, since society then still was mostly rural-based, nobody went hungry. Technology invented then would later spread world-wide and would power the post-WWII consumer boom.

We now are mostly city-dwellers, always just three days away from starvation, burdened by mega debt, saddled with political stagnation, aging populations, climate problems, continuous financial crises, just to name the most obvious. All this suggests that if our world today – North America and Europe- suffers a severe economic downturn, depression-like destitution will be far more devastating.

Frankly I see us facing a wall, the end of the future, the end of progress and growth, in essence the end of history, because today, apart from the ultra-vulnerable computer structure, there’s really nothing new on the horizon, climate change being the exception.  Examples: Steve Jobs is dead. Space travel has stopped. The Concorde, the ultimate in air transport – 3 hours from Paris or London to New York or Washington – has been scrapped. Nixon, 40 years ago, promised that the war on Cancer would be won. Today not only cancer, but also obesity, Alzheimer’s and diabetes are rampant. Nuclear energy was touted as too cheap to measure: today electricity rates in Ontario have skyrocketed. Average income, in constant dollars, is less now than decades ago. Nothing has really improved in the last thirty years, not health care, not education, not air travel, not work opportunity. Efforts to combat Climate Change have virtually been abandoned. The fate of the Euro is still an enigma and the US Dollar is still in the doldrums, amplifying monetary mayhem. Since our entire system depends on progress, stagnation signals collapse.

To me these are the signs of the fig-tree (Matt 24:32), all pointing to end-times, which means that we have nothing but joy to look forward to: the return of the Lord, and the coming of his glorious kingdom. That is the real Good News!

Bert Hielema daily prays for that Kingdom to come, a topic of his two new books, The Shortest Day and Day without End, available by e-mailing bert@hielema.ca.

October 2011

What makes education Christian?

Tomorrow will not be like yesterday. Today is already different, but

tomorrow, the second decade of the year 2000, will be like no other. Here’s

one reason. This week we ‘celebrate’ the arrival of earth-inhabitant number

7 billion.

When I was born in 1928, the world had 2 billion people, basically all

environmentally friendly. My maternal grandfather farmed with a

horse, 20 cows, a few pigs and a flock of free- running chickens. My paternal

grandfather, a grocer, came calling once a week with his horse-drawn two-

wheeled cart to barter coffee, tea or sugar for eggs. Then self-sufficiency

was primary for most.  That’s no longer true.

Here’s the real reason. Tomorrow’s peak generation is basically oil-dependent, but faces a world where everything is past-peak: past oil-peak, past food-peak, past money-peak. That means people in school today will face a world with negative growth, in addition to horrific hurricanes, dire drought, terrible typhoons, horrendous heat and destructive downpours, according to Bill McKibben.

In his Eaarth he writes: “We have waited too long to stop the advance of global warming, and massive change is not only unavoidable but already on the way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways no human has ever seen. We have created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable, but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth.”

McKibben shows that we can no longer rely on the false promise of endless growth; our hope depends on building the kind of society and economy that can concentrate on essentials, and create communities that will be able to withstand the pains of a planet perilously out of balance.

More than ever, Christian teaching should be based on article 1 of the Belgic

Confession, which answers the question, ‘how we know God’, with:

“First by the creation, preservation and government of the universe, since that universe is like a most elegant 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: all these things are enough to convict men and leave them without excuse.”

Getting to know creation, things visible and invisible as outlined in Colossians 1:15-20, and perceiving the current forces endangering it, are the foremost tasks of Christian ministries. An institution is truly Christian when the result is a lifestyle that can seamlessly be continued in the New Creation, the arrival of a renewed and purified earth.

Christians confess that God created the earth ‘in his name.’ That makes the earth holy. God has given his holy creation to us not as caretakers, not as stewards, but as owners. Psalm 115:16 says: “The highest heaven belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to humankind.”

This gift is irrevocable. God will not renege on his generous donation: we are one with the earth: our world today is our world forever. Any ‘heaven’ teaching detracts from the real purpose of Christianity.

Here is something to ponder. In Genesis 2:15 the Lord put Adam and Eve- that is you and me – in the garden ‘to work it and take care of it.’ When Joshua, who succeeded Moses as Israel’s leader, gave his farewell address to his nation, he pledged that “he and his household will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).  I have been told by good authority that Joshua used the same verb of “serving the Lord” as God asked humanity “to take care of creation”, indicating that to work the garden (of the earth), to take care of it, and serving the Lord are one and the same thing.

Now, more than ever before in history, God wants to prepare us for “the new creation to come.” The word Education comes from the Latin verb e-ducere, which means to draw out and to bring up. To lead students toward an out-dated situation, a state belonging to a prior generation, is a waste of brain-power and money, and will only cause them to become disillusioned. One of the ten commandments is: “You shall not give false testimony,” which we daily do because our polluting oil-based way of life is a distortion of the Truth.

A teacher once told me that to confront students with such a radical picture will only make them depressed. However, the truth is never depressing: it will set us free. That is what Christianity-church-school-family-society- is all about: to set us free, and to face the future with an eye on Jesus, who will guide us no matter what.

Bert Hielema lives amidst trees and fields, in Eastern Ontario, and can be reached at bert@hielema.ca