Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 24

How then shall we live?

We often accuse the church that it is behind the times, old-fashioned, not in touch, too bound to outmoded traditions. Here is a paradox: in order to be with it, in order to actually be ahead of the curve, in order to be able to give real leadership to a society that craves for solutions, if the church really is concerned about its future – and, of course, it should be – then, in these last days, it has to go back 2000 years, to the church’s first days. That is the paradox the church faces.

In that glorious beginning when people responded to its call in droves, the first-time Christians, all over the Roman world, formed small groups of tiny active cells, anticipating and preparing for the imminent return of Christ.

Of course, the Roman Empire provided the necessary infrastructure for the gospel to spread world-wide: a world-government, universal travel, security guaranteed by the Pax Romana, also one language, spoken or understood by all aware people, all this aided the spread of the Good News.

Now, after 2000 years, after a long human history in which people organized themselves to a Tee, have become technically capable of previously un-heard-of feats, many now start to realize that all this progress has come at a price, that the bills are coming due, that the debt is so large, an amount larger than life, greater than anything the world can ever produce. Fortunately the account has been settled, the bill has a stamp on it: paid in full at Golgotha. Yet this rescue plan comes with a condition attached: only those who are ready to enter the new creation, those who have actively sought the Kingdom will, when the human-induced collapse occurs, when renewal is at hand, gain entrance there.  

So the crucial question today is: “How then shall we live?”

That is the issue all Christians face now more than ever. Preparation for the Lord’s coming cannot involve the aid of the gadgets which is causing the demise of human culture in the first place. Today, almost everything we do involves the burning of fossil fuel which is the greatest threat to God’s creation. The question ‘how then shall we live?’ forces us to explore the initial problem of ‘how can we live without these mechanical aids?’ The simple answer is that we cannot, and yet we must try, and when we fail to do that – and we will fail because we have painted ourselves in a corner – the least we can do is pray for forgiveness, while keep on experimenting to live holistically, always with the welfare of creation in mind. In other words, we now must strive for a life that will last for eternity. Now is the time to enter that new life, so that easing ourselves into that New Creation by actively being engaged in living that life now is not an impossible task. From now on it must dominate our very thinking all the time.

In the previous chapters we have seen that in our age Satan calls the shots. He has determined the sort of development humans must undertake, development that, in the end, proved to be creation destroying, leading to a total disintegration of civilization.

This means that we have to start from scratch, start very modestly, heeding Jesus’ words that “where two or three are together in my name, there I’ll be also.” This means that it cannot be done within the current ecclesiastical organizational structure, even though mostly church members would be involved. Only personal witness, not so much through the spoken words, but mostly be through acts of charity and expressed through showing constant love for all God’s creation. E. F. Schumacher, in his “Small is Beautiful”, has shown that small is better anyway. Massive gatherings always entail massive use of energy in transportation, in heating or air conditioning costs. Mega churches have no other goal than promoting personal adoration, results in becoming super organized and so becoming subject to the law of bureaucracy and de-personification.

The New Testament points to house-congregations. The church in Jerusalem which counted thousands of members, avoided the danger of being oversized by splitting into manageable small units that met in each others homes, as is evident from Act 2:46 where it says that ‘they broke bread in their homes and ate together with sincere and glad hearts.” The apostles too went, according to Acts 5:42, from house to house and never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ. Romans 16:5 relates that the Christians in the capital of the Empire worshipped in the home of Priscilla and Aquila, to which Paul sent his greetings. He also visited – see 1 Corinthians 16:19 – to the (house) churches in Asia, as well as to Nympha and the meeting at her house as is plain from Colossians 4:15. Philemon 2 confirms this structure as well.

So there is overwhelming evidence that this form of simple organization on the grass root level contributed immensely to the rapid spiritual maturing of the first generation Christians. This process has everything to do with them being on their own, with them personally discovering the depth of Christianity, its wide scope and its broad implication through self-discovery, through prayer and meditation and discussion on a communal level. This was possible because they believed that they were indeed all prophets, priests and kings.

It’s a great pity that the later church has not seen this as a proper way to grow. Soon thereafter the church appointed leaders who then, in turn, prescribed for them how to act in matters religious. This hierarchical structure also resulted in Old Testament ornate vestments and intricate pageantry so unlike the simplicity and freedom Jesus showed in his life.

Of course delegating authority is the easy way out, except that a faith function cannot be delegated: it is a personal matter. The church in becoming a sort of travel agency where guides did the planning, where the clerics became the travel consultants, in this way eliminated personal excursions, and stifled spiritual growth.

The Reformation was supposed to have changed this concept by giving power to the believers, but in reality nothing much different emerged: the same principle of tour guides, of specially trained persons, schooled in dogmatic and theological questions, robbing the laity of exercising personal growth and developing Kingdom expertise, so different from the early New Testament vision where not a professional power structure oversaw developments, but where every member of a local church group saw as his or her calling to exercise the office of believer in their mission to realize their Christian goal. Nowhere in the New Testament is there any hint that the world must be conquered for Christ by means of an organized power structure.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 12:9, quoting Jesus’ words, “My power is made perfect in weakness.” The apostles did not, as a body, address the Roman authorities protesting slavery, nor did they send a referendum to the Emperor in connection with the idolization of his office, neither did they design a political manifesto to guide the bureaucrats who had become Christians in their work. What the apostles did do was to point out to the new Christians from all walks of life to be a shining light, to do what was  just, to love justice and to walk humbly with God: in other words, to live the Covenant. Those who kept slaves were reminded that they would have to treat their slaves as fellow humans. Paul told Onesimus, a run-away slave, to return to his master and gave him a note for him wherein he urged his former owner to treat him well, for Christ’s sake and not punish him because he had escaped.

It is with that sort of maturity, with that aim for self-responsibility, in being a grown-up Christian engaged in their own environment and busy in their own surroundings where the future of the church lies. That’s what caused the phenomenal growth of Christianity in the first Century. The growth of the church was not due to operating a smoothly functioning organization, no, it was the influence of adult-in-the-faith believers, who used their daily contacts in life to influence their pagan neighbors and acquaintances and even employers. According to various sources it has been especially the women who played an important role there, something true even today. It was through them that, in the year 95 A.D., Christianity penetrated even into the imperial family.

Because men, women and children in their full-grown faith in Jesus Christ did not hide their beliefs but in their day-to-day activities showed their faith for all to see, without relying on official pronouncements and well-run organizations, that Christianity blossomed in the world of antiquity. This indicates that the more the church favors organization over personal witness the less it becomes the communion of saints.

So how do we recapture that original spirit? How then shall we live to be found acceptable to Christ and be welcomed into the New Creation? That the present structure is not working is also evident from the burn out rate among the current clergy. The (Canadian) Presbyterian Record reports that in a survey of more than 300 ministers from six Canadian denominations, they found that the number of those who had been diagnosed with clinical depression was double the national average. It also mentioned that these statistics likely underestimate the extent of clergy suffering, since studies show that only about half of those with major depression seek help. It’s therefore no surprise that sermons, by and large, do little or nothing to enhance spiritual growth for the flock, as, says this article, “although ministers read the Scriptures in preparation for sermons, it rarely nourished them personally.” Let alone others, I might add. One minister calls “ministry an endless job, often a bottomless pit.”

Although the article lists several ways to help ministers to avoid work overload and deal with the many problems associated with being a church pastor, it fails to come up with a new structure for the congregation where pastoral care and preaching is delegated to those members of the church who have the time and the talent to do that.

How then shall we live?

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 23

Where is the world coming to?

This is not a cheerful chapter. What we now are experiencing is the calm before the storm. There are so many ominous signs out there that if only one of them would materialize, the world economy – except for Africa – would collapse and billions of people with it. What’s going on? Why this quietness in spite of major threats?

It seems to me we are in the first stage of something pointed out by Elizabeth K?bler-Ross who has shown that tragedy comes in five stages: denial, followed by anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Denial typifies today’s situation. Politicians always must give a positive spin to circumstances. So must the news media. They depend on their corporate advertisers who do not want bad news to influence the media channels, so our papers, television, radio and magazines cannot print or picture or say what’s really going on.   

The threat of an Oil Peak is hardly mentioned, even though its logic is so elementary that is defies common sense not to make provisions for it, yet no government in the world is doing this in a sufficient manner. The chances that my house will burn are minute, but I pay thousands of dollars just in case for fire insurance. Where is the national insurance to safeguard our standard of living, utterly dependent on a continuous flow of oil? That it will stop someday soon is beyond dispute, but no nation has adequate alternatives.

The financial policies of the United States especially go against all common sense: their greatest liability is debt: federal, state, municipality and personal. Yet all they do is go deeper into the red through so-called stimulus packages. All authorities are in deep denial.

Booming China is no exception: by soaking up the debt from the USA it now has been sucked into a deep spiral, the sink hole of American dollars as they have advanced trillions of them to the USA: when the moment comes to unload them, both will suffer irreparably. They also, with total communist disregard for the environment, have allowed pollution to poison land, air and water, a bill that has to be paid sooner than later.

In  spite of numerous Climate Conferences sponsored by the United Nations, and despite of thousands of scientist warning that the perils of Global Warming are extreme and its onset imminent, the world at large is in deep denial about Climate Change. The reason is that nobody really wants to change their lifestyle to a more simple and self-sufficient one, because we are addicted to a carbon -based diet.  

Also the entire world faces a water shortage which will reduce crop yields and lead to a possible mass starvation aggravated by warmer temperatures. A pandemic equivalent of the Spanish Flu cannot be ruled out either. It by itself would paralyze modern life as people would be afraid the go out for fear of contracting the disease. Yes, we most certainly are in an extreme mode of denial.

We are approaching the second phase of tragedy: anger. We already see it in numerous instances where people who have lost their job go on a shooting rampage, always ending in suicide. Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute, is so worried that all branches of government and the media are on the wrong path that, in desperation, he has issued a warning that the American public is ready to revolt: “Taxed to death, angry at government bailouts, outraged by Wall Street greed, and bitterly resentful of a system that rewards the undeserving rich, the American public is ready to revolt.

He issued not only a warning, but also an appeal to do so: “The Tea Parties and Tax Protests sprouting across the nation, which we had predicted, are harbingers of revolution. But they are not enough.  Much stronger and directed action is required.  Our call for ‘Revolution’ will galvanize the people, destroy the corrupt ruling systems, and produce a prosperous and more just nation.” That’s hogwash, of course, as revolution often lead to worse circumstances, of which Russia in 1917 or France in 1789, are prime examples.

He writes that “Nothing short of total repudiation of our entrenched systems can rescue America. We are under the control of a two-headed, one party political system. Wall Street controls our financial lives; the media manipulates our minds.  These systems cannot be changed from within. There is no alternative.  Without a revolution, these institutions will bankrupt the country, keep fighting failed wars, start new ones, and hold us in perpetual intellectual subjugation.”

And here is where The Church in Flux comes in, as his words equally apply to the Church problem when he writes that “I am calling for an ‘Intellectual Revolution’.  I ask American citizens to free their minds from the tyranny of ‘Dumb Think.’  This is a revolution about thinking – not manning the barricades.  It’s about brain power – not brute force.” 

For society to survive and grow, it must wake up and grow up.  Americans must acknowledge what their opinions are based on, who they listen to … and why.

What are America’s prime information sources?  CNN, “The most trusted name in news”?  Fox, “Fair and balanced”?  CNBC, “First in Business Worldwide”? The New York Times, “All the news that’s fit to print”?

Who do the people listen to?  A closed circuit of familiar faces guaranteed to take predictable positions.  Authorities on nothing, yet pronouncing upon everything; a cadre of media aristocrats, pretending they’re the people’s voice.

Bill O’Reilly, Steven Colbert, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, Sean Hannity, Jon Stewart, Chris Matthews, Jim Cramer, Joe Scarborough, Anderson Cooper, Bill Maher.”

So far the warning from the director of the Trends Research Institute, issued to all subscribers, of which I am one.

The situation in the church is no different. Most ministers try to please the crowds, rather than please God. The sheep flock to Joel Osteen to hear that being prosperous is a blessing; the masses fill mega churches to hear preachers inciting them with a “Rapture” message which means a flight from the earth and its problems to rest forever in the arms of God, just at a time when only Biblical Christians can produce the proper answers.

But the revolution Gerald Celente would like to see will not happen, because, as he correctly diagnosed, it’s about brain-power and thinking. And that’s exactly why this will not happen, because the education system, the television, the church institutes, all have contributed to fashion a populace incapable of thinking and staging a revolution: most people are affected by the mind-disease called ‘Lethargy’, unable or unwilling to think, as the temporary availability of carbon-based energy has paralyzed the Western World, and, since the human body is a unity, the physical inability to exert themselves has equally prevented their minds from thinking lucidly. Their thinking process, their ability to correctly fathom the future, has been stifled by modern conveniences, wrongly assuming that the future is merely an extension of the past, something that is totally unrealistic.

Where is the world coming to?

It is speedily sliding toward a collapse of gigantic proportions, of which the monetary angle is but a small portion.  

The coming collapse will take numerous forms.

First, there is the financial collapse, which we are witnessing today. It will continue in spite of valiant efforts world-wide to cushion the impact. This is followed by commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.
The next phase is political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” proves an illusion. As official attempts to stem or temper widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival fail to make a difference, the political establishment will lose legitimacy and relevance. Once this has happened social collapse is soon to follow.  Faith that “your people will take care of you” disappears, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum run out of resources or fail through internal conflict. And the final stage is cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity.  Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources.  

I have a number of books that substantiate these scenarios.
In The Party’s Over, Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Richard Heinberg paints a realistic future when he wonders what we would do without oil, as the world is about to change dramatically and forever as the result of oil depletion. He correctly states that we are entering a new era as different from the industrial era as the latter was from medieval times. In The End of Oil; on the edge of a Perilous New World Paul Roberts outlines an identical picture: “disruption and violent dislocation are almost assured” he writes.

Thomas Homer-Dixon has written a number of books dealing with the enormous challenges humanity faces. In his The Ingenuity Gap he wonders whether the Western world can solve the environmental, social and technological problems of the future, as we are all caught dangerously between a soaring requirement for ingenuity and an increasingly uncertain supply. In his The Upside of Down, Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization, he outlines the troubles we face, especially Climate change, global oil depletion, explosive geopolitics which all threaten to overwhelm our ability to think clearly and act competently. Homer-Dixon shows that we are creating the conditions for catastrophe, but by understanding the underlying principles he, optimistically I believe, we can still limit the severity of collapse.

What does all this mean for the Church?

More about that in the next chapter.

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 22

The beginning of the End.

                             Wherever God erects a house of prayer

                             The Devil always builds a chapel there;

                             And ’twill be found upon examination,

                             The latter has the largest congregation.

                                          Daniel Defoe in The True-born Englishman

 I had a dream a while ago. I was on a wide boulevard and smack in the middle of the road was a huge church blocking the way. There was no way around it. If I had to go on, I’d have to go straight through the church. I wondered what this dream meant. Come to think of it, I have had that dream before. I think it means that, no matter how ineffective the church is in its proclamation, how non-committal the people in the pew, I have to stick to the church no matter what and keep on suffering when I hear the Word weakened, its message mangled and robbed of its power. I take comfort from the fact that Jesus, even though he condemned the Pharisees in no uncertain terms, still attended the synagogue. His disciples also stuck with the temple even after Jesus had gone to heaven. Paul always first went to the Jewish gathering places to bring the Gospel, even though later Christianity abandoned this way when the path of Christianity digressed too far from Jewish teaching.

So where are we now? Perhaps has the time come to leave the church anyway, because the way organized religion functions is no longer viable? But then what should take its place, because we cannot abandon ‘the communion of saints’?

That organized religion is on the wrong track became plain to me when I, after writing almost 20 years for a Christian weekly, was refused to write about the church. The editor suspected, I am sure, that I might not completely adhere to the party line. So I quit writing for them. At the time I was reading “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoevsky’s last book. In it is an episode involving the church: it’s called “The Grand Inquisitor”.

Here’s the story, more or less, as told by Ivan, the atheist Karamazow brother, 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 the essence of Jesus’ teaching, and that’s why the church of his day killed him.

Today we hear a watered-down sort of Christianity, combined with pomp and circumstance. When we today see the church on television, we see the Pope in beautiful attire, with a miter and staff, surrounded by red-hatted cardinals and purple-colored priests. The same applies to the church the Queen of England attends, perhaps a bit less elaborate, but quite fancy just the same, something totally alien to Jesus who ‘had no place to lay his head.”

The other picture we see of the church is the mega-type, thriving on male dominance and not being earth-directed but heaven-oriented, something alien to Jesus as well, who always called himself “the son of Man,’ meaning that he personified the human race.

Frankly church development has stalled precisely at the time when creation is in deep distress. Is that a sign? The crime of Iraq, the climate threat, Africa’s agony, reminds me of Hosea 4: 2-3:
“There is only cursing, lying and murder,
stealing and adultery;
they break all bounds,
and bloodshed follows bloodshed.
Because of this the land mourns,
and all who live in it waste away;
the beasts of the field and
the birds of the air and
the fish of the sea are dying.”
By and large for the churches it is “Business as usual.”   Some 50 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, and “The God Delusion,” by Richard Dawkins, are 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 forgiving 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.

Nevertheless, I think that Jesus would have approved of such an outburst. He once said that a person must be either outspokenly in favor of him, or dead-set against him: it’s the lukewarm, the fence-sitters, he despises. I think I can find a few of those within the hallowed halls.

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 a new type of church, where the world we live in, the cosmos, plays a large role. .  

When God created this world he called it good seven times after each phase, and very good when it was finished.  Does consistency not demand that we keep creation in that very good state and live simple and holy lives reflecting those commitments? I am sure that Jesus would be absolutely consistent in demanding not to tolerate a global and economic system that enables us, the world’s elite, to prosper at the expense of the majority, and defile the earth the way we do.

It seems to me that, if it comes to a choice between the depletion of the fish in the oceans, of the birds in the air, or of the lilies in the field, and a minister’s stipend or the mortgage, organized Christianity will opt for the latter. The irony is that paying into a church’s building fund is only a matter of money. The preservation of God’s creatures, however, goes to the heart of religion: the practice of a proper love and respect for them as creatures of God.

By now I am sure that we need a new approach to religion, a more all-inclusive approach. Looking back thousands of years, it is striking that every five – six hundred years a major religion came into being. Moses and the Hebrew brand belong to the Twelfth century before Christ; Zarathustra, Confucius, Buddha, all saw their births between 600-500 years B.C. In the first century the Christian Church conquered the world. Mohammed was born in the year 570. Shortly thereafter Celtic Christianity emerged.  There were stirrings in the Roman Catholic Church in the 13-15th century, culminating in the Reformation of 1517, about 500 years ago. So it looks that we are due for a major new religious upheaval, the Final push so to say, before Christ returns.

In short: all major religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, have defaulted on the environmental crisis.

The basis of our present polluted planet was laid long ago when cosmos-related systems of belief were replaced by formal religions, when the Christians decided that they needed organization with the result that creation-based spirituality gave way to human-centered theologies that de-sanctified the earth and taught people to see themselves as dominant over nature.

If we want to heal the destructive divide that exists between the human spirit and the natural world, we must retrieve ‘the lost gospel of the earth’ by which people live in kinship with a sacred natural world.

In general I can say that by and large it’s the non-church people who are involved in the environmental movement, in spite of one Church hymn that starts with the line “This is my Father’s world.” However, most of the church people expect to go to heaven and so their commitment to planet earth is at best divided. It is well-known  that the American  Religious Right vigorously condemns environmentalists as pagans and New Agers, while defending the rights of polluters who, in their opinion, are protected by the mandates of Genesis- ” to have dominion over the earth,” which is interpreted as subjection, like a slave to a master.

Although the religious communities have often defended the poor and victims of discrimination as God’s children, they have not spoken out about the actions of corporate and government polluters as a mortal sin against God’s creation, nor have they defended the earth as sacred and holy to the Lord.

Here are some specific instances.

Let me start with quoting two general sources: the 700 page Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity includes less than one page on environmental issues. In a chapter called “The Future of Christianity,” it notes that problems of resource decline lie ahead, but we are reassured that “it seems likely that new discoveries may provide the means for averting the threats of diminishing food or resources.” In other words, the Christian hope is for a technological fix. Another source, Huston Smith, “World’s Religions”, covering, among others, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, never explores whether these belief systems include any wisdom concerning the modern environmental dilemma.

Since I will concentrate on Christianity where did it go off track?

Quite early in its history did Christianity see life as a temporary passage, and saw the earth as a phase to pass through on the way to a separate sacred place. Augustine (396-430) is the great architect of the Church’s otherworldliness. With him the separation between grace and nature had its start. He pictured the church being in charge of the soul, while he considered the earth unholy, abandoned and left to the uses of science and technology. This led to three conditions:

1.     While humans are made in God’s image, nature is different, subject to the will of the people

2.     Nature is no more than the sum of its parts, and can be reduced to these parts for use or abuse.

3.     Human beings are the measure of all things; nature’s role is to be developed into a store house of value.

Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is the father of the scientific method. He wrote that “nature was to be placed on the rack, enslaved, bound into service, forced out of her natural state and molded.” Not long after that, Rene Descartes in 1637, made the famous pronouncement “Cogito ergo sum,” “I think therefore I am,” also divorcing the self from nature, and elevated the human destiny to be ‘masters and possessors of nature.” Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) called the universe a giant machine.

It is that sort of thinking that dominated the church. In our days during the Reagan administration, his interior secretary, the equivalent of Minister of the Environment, James Watt, a Pentecostal Christian, addressing a cattlemen’s convention, said, “if the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used.” Founders of the Wise Use movement, a coalition linking the timber and mining interests to the National Rifle Association, called environmentalists “the new paganism, in which trees are worshiped and humans are sacrificed at its altar. Environmentalism is evil and we intend to destroy it.” 

I know it would be unfair to imply that mainstream Christianity shares the view of these right-wing extremists, yet as a whole organized religion in both the USA and Canada has ignored the plight of the earth for many centuries. Its heaven-oriented theology, with its lack of express participation in the healing of the cosmos, has left the ever-dwindling church crowd direction-less and even bewildered.

And the Bible, where does it leave us? Both Judaism and Christianity base themselves on the Scriptures, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

The Hebrew Bible has a host of passages which indicate that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, as Psalm 24 says.

The prophet Isaiah had a vivid picture of the earth. Some 2700 years ago he wrote: “The earth languishes and withers… lies pollutes under its inhabitants, for they have transgresses the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant.”

Joel, another prophet, addressing the earth as if it were alive wrote: Fear not, o soil, rejoice and be glad, for the Lord has wrought great deeds. Fear not, o beast of the field, for the pastures in the wilderness are clothed with grass.” James Lovelock, developing his Gaia Concept, indeed considers the earth a living entity, which is a very biblical idea. 

For Isaiah, too, the earth is alive with pain and suffering. It’s polluted because of the deeds of its people. There are numerous psalms which have the mountains skip like rams, the hills like lambs.

The pre-enlightenment theologians, such as St. Francis of Assisi- 1186-1226 referred to the sun as Brother and to the moon as sister, and in connection with the earth “All praise be yours My Lord through Sister Earth, Our mother who feeds us in her sovereignty and produces fruits and colored flowers and herbs.”

The most striking text in the New Testament is John 3:16: God so loved the cosmos that he gave his only son to die for its renewal. If God so loved what he has made, then we, if we really want to follow him, must do likewise. Yet the church does little or nothing to honor that claim.

I maintain that the organized religion has failed there. It has seen the Bible as the only Word of God, paying no heed to the words of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who said that revelation comes in two volumes – the Bible and Creation. The 1561 Belgic confession most emphatically says that we know God: “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.” Meister Eckhart (1260-1327), both theologian and mystic said, “Every creature is a word of God and a book about God.”

Most of North American Christianity has a far too limited view of “The Word.” That’s why during the one hour per week the church meets, sermons concern themselves only with the Scriptures, the written word, while attention to the Created Word, is only in passing.

I can’t understand why the church has never caught on to Psalm 115:16, where it says explicitly that “The heavens belong to the Lord, but the Earth he has given to humanity.”  So, once it is given away, God no longer owns the earth: we do. The church got it wrong. Of course, I sincerely believe that God created it all. But just as a Rembrandt created his magnificent paintings, to which his name is tied forever, once he sold these, he no longer has possession of it. That’s how it is with the earth: God has given it to the human race. This error has misdirected the church.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man with 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, ‘the best room,’ that has nothing to do with work, everyday life and normality, a sugar-coated faith for Sunday mornings, that turns Jesus in to a moralizing figure head.” Wrote he: “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 and he totally contradicted the customary views of religion of his days. He concluded that therefore Jesus had no use for religion and wanted human beings to act like Jesus himself that is, being fully engaged in the act of being human. Paul calls Jesus the First-born of Creation, which makes Jesus the first human being. He was the first “Mensch” in the Jewish sense as well. God became human, that’s why we belong to the earth, and the desire to go to heaven, the main plank of the Christian religion, is un-biblical. Genesis 1:1, the very first text in the bible says “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” Heaven and Earth belong together. I repeat: The heavens belong to the Lord. The earth is given to the human race, as Psalm 115:16 unambiguously claims. God, in Jesus, became human, and in the mystery of God’s humanization becoming visible, it is this earth that is God’s ever-lasting dwelling place. It is through love for this earth that we can express our love for God. The church has totally ignored this aspect and as such it has lost its way. Bonhoeffer saw that only in a world that is no longer religious, just as Jesus abandoned the religion of his days, that we, the people of this planet can become aware of ourselves; and so Christ’s reality can have a greater impact on a world come of age than a world wearing disguises of religion.” 

Bonhoeffer perceived God and the world to be one: a suffering creation means a suffering God.

Yet, I had that dream, the dream of the church blocking my way. Even though we must remain connected to the visible church, what sort of form should this take?

How then shall we live and worship? More about that in the next chapter.

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 21

John, the Irishman, more than a millennium ago, told us that God is in all things. There’s a man who knew the bible. Colossians 1:15-20 says exactly that: “He is before all things and in him all things hold together.” The Irish John said it in poetry: “God has not created everything out of nothing, but out of his own essence, out of his very life: That is the light that is in all things,
the light which is the light of angels,
the light of the created universe,
the light indeed of all visible and invisible existence.”
Again this Irishman: “the way to learn about God is through the letters of the Scriptures and through the species of creation.” He urges us to listen to these expressions of God and to conceive of their meaning in our souls. So it is no wonder that the national color of the Irish is green. They were the Green Party as long as we have recorded history.
The attitude of The Irish John and Celtic spirituality in general is diametrically opposed to the materialism we have in our world, shaped by Roman Catholic dualism, and equally evident in Protestant Christianity. The bible is very clear on this. Again Colossians 1:15 -20  is a passage exemplifying the Celtic Spirit more than any other. This is what it says: Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

The Gnostics deny Christ’s humanity. But Paul affirms it repeatedly because Jesus always introduces himself as The Son of Man, which simply means Human through and through. Paul sees Jesus as the ‘firstborn of all creation.’ Bible translators like to modify this because it doesn’t fit in with their presuppositions. The Greek plainly says ‘proototekos pases ktiseoos’ which translates not as ‘the firstborn over all creation’ as the NIV has it, but ‘the firstborn of creation’
What does this mean? It means that, when God planned the creation, he started with duplicating himself in the form of Jesus Christ, in the form of the ultimate in creation, the human beings we are. God Himself, in the words of the Son, is a spirit and we must worship him in spirit and in truth. But Christ is not a spirit: he is a man of flesh and blood, just like we are. He also is the prototype, the original human, the very first human being, the firstborn of all creation. We look like him because we are made in God’s image. Yes, we look like Christ. We, as women and men, as boys and girls, are the highest order in God’s creation, but we come from the lowest material, the original stuff of creation: clay. We are made of that material, that’s why we belong to the earth and will always be part and parcel of it. After all the word ‘Adam’ means clay. God fashioned us, the human race, from the clay of the earth, a mixture of dry dust and water. He, as the Master Sculptor, created us, fashioned us, shaped us, molded us, in the image of that perfect, divine creature, God’s alter ego, Jesus Christ. That is what verse 15 says.
Verse 16 continues in that same vein: “For by Christ all things were created.” Remember Christ, the first human being, did this. Made in his image, part of his body, we can read this also: For by us, as human beings, as the body of Christ, all things were created.
That’s what accounts for the tremendous accomplishments we human beings have achieved: we are of divine origin. That’s why God is also so outspoken when he warns us not to kill other humans because they are God’s image (Genesis 9:6).
However, because we have strayed from the path of Christ, have not seen creation as the First Word of God, have gone in exactly the opposite direction, a direction to which the Celtic Christians objected, the world now is in such a dire situation that soon we will need a complete overhaul, a total cleansing, a drastic process of burning all the rubbish that now defile God’s cosmos.

By and large organized religion has neglected this approach. Even worse, by placing so much emphasis on God’s world, they were persecuted by the church as the Irish John was, with the result that reason, doctrine, church dogma, human wisdom, became the measure of faith.
We now see the result. We see a world plagued with pollution, plagued with poverty, plagued with a plurality of pains. We see a world where the idol of economic growth takes priority over any creation friendly act so that we now occupy a planet depleted with whatever is precious.

Until now many preachers still read Genesis 2:15 as a license to ‘dominate’ creation. Actually, just as Jesus came not to be served but to serve, so this text too has that same intent. Early in human history, in the glorious days of the Garden of Eden, God charged humanity to look after God’s creation. The word that previous translations showed as ‘dominate’ or ‘lord over’ in reality means ‘taking care’, because the identical Hebrew word is found in Joshua 24:15, where Joshua, the man who succeeded Moses as leader of Israel, vouches “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” Thus the same Hebrew word indicating ‘taking care of God’s creation’ and ‘serving the Lord’ means exactly the same.
This serving is reflected in the prayer of St. Patrick, the great Irish evangelist. His prayer is typical:
I bind myself today
The virtues of the star-lit heaven
The glorious sun’s life-giving ray.
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
the stable earth, the deep salt sea
Around the old eternal rocks.
Again the closeness to creation, but also the sense that Christ is in everything, including ourselves, based on this very bible passage in Col.1:19, where it says that God was pleased to have all God’s fullness dwell in Jesus.
Christ be with me, Christ within me
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
Celtic Christianity does not see a great gap between heaven and earth, no, the two are seen as inseparably intertwined.
The (Canadian) Presbyterian Record once had a review of a book called The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christians can reach the West.
The author, George G. Hunter III, outlined five proven Celtic Church practices he believes are needed today.
(1) We need to move from the ‘lone ranger’ approach in the church, where the minister is the all and in all, to partnership forms of ministry.
(2) We must create ‘neo-monastic church communities’ as places of formation for modern Christians.
I know that this is difficult in our subdivided world, where we all live in our own dwelling. Monastic means communal living, as in a convent or monastery, but then for families. It is something to which I will give more attention in a next chapter. Curiously in the October 9 2003 issue of the New York Review of Books which discusses The Human Web by Father and Son McNeil, the authors recommend the formation of primary communities:” Religious sects and congregations are the principal candidates for this role.”
(3) We must develop imaginative/ contemplative prayer patterns.
(4) Practice open and full hospitality as our prime response to those who are seeking.
We are all very private people and not prone to open our houses and hearts to others. In our busyness, we think we have no time for this.
(5) Rediscover that belonging comes before believing for those new to the faith.
These are new times. We see every day what the Roman Way of Christianity is bringing destruction and pollution to God’s world. In 1966 Dr Lynn White addressed the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. His topic: The historical roots of our Ecological Crisis. I quote: The church has taught that God planned this earth explicitly for man’s benefit and ruled no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asian religions not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.
We now know that this approach has been destructive for our planet. I sincerely believe that Celtic Christianity provides a better answer to today’s way of serving God than any church way yet confessed.
The Celtic cross plainly expresses this. The orb, the circle at the centre of the cross represents the sun and the light of the world, and expresses the desire to hold together the revelation of God in creation and the revelation of God in scriptures.
This is our Father’s world, which we will inherit as his children. Treat it as such, because it is ours to live in forever.

Here is a final Celtic poem:
DEEP PEACE OF THE RUNNING WAVE TO YOU
DEEP PEACE OF THE FLOWING AIR TO YOU
DEEP PEACE OF THE QUIET EARTH TO YOU
DEEP PEACE OF THE SHINING STARS TO YOU
DEEP PEACE OF THE GENTLE NIGHT TO YOU
MOON AND STARS POUR THEIR HEALING LIGHT ON YOU.
DEEP PEACE OF CHRIST THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD TO YOU.

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 20

How the Irish did it again.

 In 1995 Thomas Cahill wrote a book with the flattering title of How the Irish Saved Civilization: the untold story of Ireland’s heroic role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. In it Thomas Cahill outlined how the Irish practiced human sacrifice, because their gods were capricious, entrapped people and would only bless them in response to flattery, liturgical manipulation and sacrifice. That religious worldview produced a precarious sense of life; no Irishman was unfamiliar with the experience of cosmic terror.

When Patrick came – now the patron saint of Ireland evident in Saint Patrick Day – he preached the good news of a different God, a God not hostile, not capricious or self-seeking, but a God who loves people and all other creatures, and wants them free from sin and terror, a God who desires no human sacrifice, but whose sacrifice of his only Son for all of creation, makes human sacrifice forever unnecessary. Saint Patrick proclaimed a God who calls them not to die for him, but to live for him and each other.

That was the beginning of Celtic Christianity.Why do I single out Celtic Christianity? I single them out because the Irish are different. Their mindset was not influenced by Greek logic or by the Roman sense of organization and obedience to authority. The Irish were more like the people of Israel, if the Psalms are any indication. The Hebrew psalms show a wide range of religious experience, from exultation and doubt, from pain and persecution, from passion and aspiration, to fortitude, bitterness, despair and complaint, but also abundant gratitude and heartfelt praise. The Psalms reflect a deep humanity, that’s why they have remained a mainstay of the Christian life until this day.

And these very same traits are evident in the Irish. Perhaps they are the Ten Lost tribes of Israel, because there are many similarities between the Jewish mentality and the Irish character: both have given birth to great thinkers and outstanding scientists. Here’s how Thomas Cahill sees them: “They understood, as few have understood before or since, how fleeting life is and how pointless to try to hold on to things and people. They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting….drinking.. art – poetry for intense emotion, the music that accompanied the heroic drinking with which each day ended…All these are worth pursuit, and the first, especially will bring the honor great souls seek.”

Patrick, the apostle of the Irish, having spent many years there as a prisoner, understood their psyche and therefore was able to connect his message to their deepest concerns. Patrick knew their religious backgrounds, how their gods were an indifferent lot, and he could convince them that the Triune God of Christianity was receptive to their emotions. Patrick knew their love for artistic expression and he was able to give them the necessary outlets for venting their feelings through story telling, poetry, music, dance, drama and their indigenous gift for oratory. Celtic Christianity was so effective because it provided an avenue to release their deepest felt sentiments. 

Every branch of Christianity in the world is influenced by the prevailing opinions prior to it taking root there, even though Missionary work throughout the centuries has tried to impose a Western brand of Christianity on the native populations. We see the disastrous consequences of this especially among the indigenous population in Canada, where their native customs have, by force, been replaced with a Western brand of religion which has destroyed their own heritage and culture and left them empty and drifting.

That has been equally true in Asia, in China, in Africa, while Japan rejected this approach completely. Fortunately Ireland was spared this cultural holocaust because they have always believed that God uses all five senses to “speak” to people.

The Celtic cross is one example of Celtic expression. The orb, the circle at the centre of the cross, is said to represent the sun and the light of the world, and expresses the desire to hold together the revelation of God in creation and the revelation of God in the Scriptures. Together they reflect the practice of listening for the living Word in nature as well as in the Bible. A typical Celtic prayer is: “Almighty God, Sun behind all suns… in every friend we have the sunshine of your presence.”
That God is present in all creation was certainly the conviction of the ninth-century philosopher, John Scotus Eriugena, perhaps the greatest teacher of the Celtic branch of the church ever produced. His name simply means John, the Scotsman from Ireland.
He taught that Christ moves among us in two shoes, as it were, one shoe being that of creation, the other that of the Scriptures, and stressed the need to be as alert and attentive to Christ moving among us in creation as we are to the voice of Christ in the Scriptures. One of his prayer was, “Show to us in everything we touch, in every one we meet your presence.”
Like the Celtic Christian teachers before him, the thoughts of John the Irishman, were particularly shaped by the mysticism of the Apostle John, who tells us that “God is Love.” The realization that God is also a love affair is summed up in the doctrine of the Trinity. Celtic Christians, a 1000 years ago expressed this in this poem:
The Three who are over my head.
The Three who are under my tread,
The Three who are over me here
The Three who are over me there,
The Three who are in the earth near,
The Three who are up in the air,
The Three who in heaven do dwell,
The Three in the great ocean swell,
Pervading Three, O be with me!
When God created, he called it good after each phase, and very good when it was all completed. This basic goodness in creation is a special feature of Celtic Christianity. Says the Irish John: “God’s divine goodness is the essence of the whole universe and its substance. Evil is opposed to the existence of creation and where goodness is creative, evil is destructive.”
All this was written long before we experienced the evil of pollution, of global warming, of ozone depletion, which, we can now clearly see, is the devil at work.
As so often happens in the church, true reformers and true radicals are not tolerated by the ecclesiastical authorities. In 1225 the main writings of John the Irishman were condemned by the Pope and in 1685 they were placed on the Index, the papal list of forbidden writings. But the Celtic influence persisted. The people of the many islands off the Scottish coast, the Hebrides, living in isolation for centuries, retained much of the Celtic religion in their traditions.
There is a story of a woman from the island of Harris who suffered from a type of skin disease and was exiled from the community to live alone on the seashore. There she collected plants and shellfish, and having boiled them for eating, washed her sores with the remaining liquid. In time she was cured. She saw the grace of healing as having come to her through creation and so she prayed:
There is no plant in the ground
But it is full of His virtue,
There is no form in the strand
But it is full of his blessing.
Jesu, Jesu, Jesu!
Jesu, who ought to be praised.
There is no life in the sea,
there is no creature in the river,
there is naught in the firmament,
but proclaims his goodness.
Jesu, Jesu, Jesu!
Jesu, who ought to be praised.
There is no bird on the wing,
there is no star in the sky
there is nothing beneath he sun,
but proclaims his goodness.
Jesu, Jesu, Jesu!
Jesu, who ought to be praised.
John the apostle had a fine ear for God’s creation. Listen to the opening words of the gospel of John: “In the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the word was God. Through him all things were made.”

That word is still speaking to us. If God were to stop speaking the whole created universe would cease to exist. In the rising of the morning sun God speaks to us of grace and new beginnings and the fertility of the earth is a sign of how life wells up from within, from the dark unknown place of God. Celtic love for nature springs from three roots. First, love for God’s creation is Biblical. Genesis declares the goodness and preciousness of God’s creation, the Psalms are filled with a sense of creation’s wonder, and Jesus taught that the birds and animals, and even the plants, matter to God. Second, from the Druid mature mysticism that preceded Christianity’s introduction, the pagan Celts already respected and revered nature; the Christianity that Patrick brought affirmed and “Christianized” their closeness to nature. Third, Celtic Christians lived in natural settings, so their experience reinforced their love for nature. What Christianity did was converting them from Pantheism, seeing nature as gods, to Panentheism, seeing God in all things. Romans 1 :20 affirms this, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – has been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”

That text is one of the most telling passages in Scripture: simply looking around us in nature, up in the air, where the sun and moon and stars tell of God’s infinity, the miraculous interconnectedness of everything, has led to the Four laws of Ecology, as defined by Barry Commoner. They are:

(1) Everything Is Connected to Everything Else. The system is stabilized by its self-compensating properties, which, when overstressed, can lead to a dramatic collapse. Jared Diamond in his book Collapse uses the Easter Islands as a grim example of such an event.

(2) Everything Must Go Somewhere. Global warming is a current example of this law: when we burn fossil fuels the inescapable result carbon overload causing Climate Change.

(3) Nature Knows Best. We are sinning against that law when we introduce organic compounds that are foreign to nature. The result is harmful substances that lead to illnesses and air pollution. Smoking tobacco is a well-known example.

(4) There is no such thing as a Free Lunch. We are now discovering that we must pay the price for polluting: the longer we delay the true cost of our riotous living habits, the steeper will be the penalty. 

It would do well if preachers, rather than keep on telling Sunday School stories to an adult audience, bring home to them that God’s laws, including those of Ecology, are laws to live by, because they are valid for eternity.

More about this in the next chapter.   

The Church in Flux

Chapter 19

Another small step toward a possible solution

 The problem with the church is precisely that it is not “in flux”, is not evolving, is not changing with the times. The people in the church – average age of 60 years – also are simply too comfortable with the status quo. Of course that generation has benefited the most from the immense prosperity we have enjoyed, thanks to the Oil influx, which made everything possible. It generated unheard of wealth for even the poorest among us, as governments handed out, at least in Canada, ample support for those in need of help, especially the senior class.

Since it is the senior class that, by and large, is the mainstay of the church, and since they are well off, the members of the clergy see no need for change, because it is upsetting, so everything remains as it is, even while fewer and fewer people go to church.  That the sermons are mostly irrelevant, doesn’t matter either, because the after-the-service-coffee and pastries are good and the people friendly. So, the word ‘reformation’ is never heard, let alone pursued.  

Yet something drastic is going to happen, because, as I set out to say in the very first chapter, Panta Rhei, Oude Menei: Everything flows, nothing remains the same. The flow that goes on is like an underground river, and is undermining the very foundation of society and the church is no exception. 

In the past 18 chapters I have shown that we live in the Last Days. I have also pointed out that God has temporarily surrendered the cosmos to His great adversary, something which Jesus affirmed when he was tempted by the Devil as recorded in Matthew 4. This was also shown in Chapter 16 and 17 – dealing with Job – when Satan made a visit to heaven and God gave him permission to make life miserable for Job and, by extension, for the human race.

Actually for us life went to another extreme: because Job already lived a life of ease, he became an impoverished and detested outcast, and an AIDS sufferer as well. With us it went the other way: life in our time went from the hardships of the 1930’s depression to an existence of easy comfort, thanks to the temporary benefits of oil. C.S. Lewis once remarked that the road to hell is smooth, slightly sloping, no sudden turns. That’s the kind of life Satan has locked us into, courtesy our carbon-based society. It will be tremendously difficult for even the most sincere Christ-believers to extract themselves from this flick-of-the-finger luxurious living.

And where is the church in all this? Almost without exception, it has surrendered to a dangerous form of Gnosticism, which has caused the church to lose sight of its true mission, which Jesus outlined in the Sermon on the Mount, where he, in Matthew 6:33, said: “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

That kingdom is the New Creation, and the most magnificent life style a person can ever imagine. Its righteousness is to seek what is right for the creation that God loved so much that he offered his Son’s life to buy it back from the Satan who had temporarily taken possession of it. Failure to ‘seek the betterment of the kingdom/creation’ has resulted in a dangerous form of dualism, where we go to Church on Sunday and for the rest of the week we fail to observe the laws of creation, something Lynn White has correctly pointed out, when he outlined that the ecological crisis originated in Christianity.  

I have repeatedly shown that the real mission of Jesus was to establish the Kingdom, a task to be assumed by the church when Jesus left to be with his Father in heaven. I cannot remember ever hearing a sermon on “seeking the Kingdom.” Yet this was an explicit command from Jesus. The concept of ‘kingdom’ is simply assumed to be fulfilled in the church: the church is the kingdom which needs no further explanation, and therefore this is never openly discussed. That’s also the reason ‘Kingdom seeking’ is never listed in their ‘mission statement.’

Another, equally valid explanation for not pursuing the Kingdom goal is that every church member, as an individual, is bound for Heaven: the church is there to facilitate personal salvation: everybody on their own, even though the Apostles’ Creed defines the church as “the communion of saints,” never mentions heaven and expresses its destination as “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” Those too have become mere words.

If we really were to quiz people on heaven, and especially how they would visualize life there after death, we would hear a variety of answers, none of them definite, because the Bible gives no description of it: only 1 Timothy 6: 16 holds a clue, and it is not an encouraging one for the heaven-bound crowd. It says, “God alone is immortal, and who lives in inapproachable light, who no one has seen or can see.” But then the church people, who swear by the Bible, have often a totally wrong view on matters eternal. If they really were honest, they would admit that heaven holds no desire for them, because what does one do in heaven? Any full-blooded, active person delights in being human. Jesus always wanted to be known not as a heavenly being but as The Son of Humanity. Heaven-desire breeds passiveness, which is, indeed, the hallmark of the church. The kingdom is here. The kingdom is this earth which God called ‘good’ after each creation act and ‘very good’ when it was finished. God made no junk and will not junk what he has made.

But the church has a different goal: away from this beautiful earth for which we have been created, toward a heaven where life will be what?

No wonder the church is failing for want of defining its calling, as it now has little or no notion, what its real task is on earth. That heaven is so ingrained in people became clear to me when a good friend – a doctor in education – had her turn to read the Scriptures in our church. Her bible reading was Matthew 24, where, in verse 39, it says that “they – the people in Noah’s days – knew nothing about what would happen until the Flood came and took them all away.” When I asked her, after church, who were taken away to heaven and who were left behind, she said ‘The born again went to heaven’. When I pointed out that the ‘left behind’ were the ‘born again’, she admitted to having been brainwashed all her life.

The “Left Behind” crowd have read this passage totally wrong. In their videos the sinners are ‘left behind,’ while the ‘born again’ are taken away.

The church sees itself and calls itself: The Bride of Christ. There is another assumption which is not true. Isaiah 62:4 quite plainly says that: “the land will be married.” The church is not the Bride: the land is the Bride, and she will be married to the Groom, the human race, all believers, with Jesus as the ‘Primus inter Pares’, the First among equals.

That sort of language is not an allegory, is not a representation of a spiritual meaning through a concrete example. There are a few more incidents where creation is compared to a woman: Romans 8:22 points out that the whole creation – the land – is groaning as in the pains of child-birth. That too suggests that the land is female, and, actually is pregnant with the New Earth, whose birth is imminent. Jesus, as head of the New Covenant, as Head of the New Humanity, as the First Human Being, together with all those who have regarded creation as Holy, will be formally united in marriage with The Earth. Revelation 21:2 carried that imagery through when it says that “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” That statement is not an allegory but a concrete example of the New Creation being the Bride and the New Humanity the groom.

To the people of the church all this sounds totally foreign. For centuries the church has taught the wrong concept, has missed the boat as far as the Good News is concerned. The Good News is that we humans are humans, and will be humans into eternity. 

What is the ruling doctrine in the church is not The Kingdom proclamation but Gnosticism, as was shown, when discussing The American Religion. The ruling North American Religion, usually regarded as Christianity in North America, has, according to Dr Harold Bloom, ceased to be Christian, and instead has taken on the essence of Gnosticism, a false religion against which especially the Apostle John in his letters agitates strongly. The introduction to his letters, in the New International Version (NIV), has, under the heading of Gnosticism, the following explanation: “One of the most dangerous heresies of the first two centuries of the church was Gnosticism. Its central teaching was that spirit is entirely good and matter is entirely evil. From this unbiblical dualism flowed five important errors:

• (1) Man’s body, which is matter, is therefore evil. It is to be contrasted with God, who is wholly spirit, and therefore good.
• (2) Salvation is the escape of the body, achieved not by faith in Christ, but by special knowledge (the Greek word for ‘knowledge’ is gnosis, hence Gnosticism).
• (3) Christ’s true humanity was denied in two ways (a) some said that Christ only seemed to have a body, a view called Docetism, from the Greek dokeo (to seem) and (b) others said that the divine Christ joined the man Jesus at baptism and left him before he died, a view called Cerinthianism, after its most prominent spokesman, Cerinthius. This view is the background of much of 1 John (see 1:1; 2:22; 4:2-3)
• (4) Since the body was considered evil, it was to be treated harshly. This ascetic form of Gnosticism is the background of part of the letter to the Colossians (2:21-23)
• (5) Paradoxically, this dualism led to licentiousness. The reasoning was that, since matter – and not the breaking of God’s law (1John 3:4) – was considered evil, breaking of the law was of no moral consequence. The Gnosticism addressed in the New Testament was an early form of the heresy, not an intricately developed system of the second and third centuries. In addition to that seen in Colossians and in John Letters, acquaintance with early Gnosticism is reflected in 1,2 Timothy, Titus, and 2 Peter and perhaps 1 Corinthians.

By and large, almost without exception, the North American churches are influenced by Gnosticism. That is reflected in their ‘heaven’ goal which, as Dr Bloom pointed out, is a Greek heresy. Even though there are some churches which have modified their heaven orientation, almost all of their members still adhere to this teaching.

What then is a biblical approach to Christ’ teaching? More about that in the next chapters.