Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 12

Some radical thinking on religion

Let me start with some thoughts by America’s most distinguished literary critic, a man with more than 20 books to his credit, among them The Book of J, a thorough analysis of the books of Moses: Dr Harold Bloom, a Hebrew scholar, who knows the Hebrew bible and Christianity as few others.

In his analysis of Religion, I rely solely on his intriguing book The American religion, the emergence of the post-Christian nation.

Dr Bloom states that “I argue in this book that the American Religion, which is so prevalent among us, masks itself as Protestant Christianity yet has ceased to be Christian.”

There is a provocative statement that sounds true to me, because, as Dr Bloom writes “The American Religion, seems to me irretrievably Gnostic. It is a knowing – gnosis in Greek –  by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the-self, and the knowledge leads to freedom, a dangerous and doom-eager freedom: from nature, time, history, community, other selves….an obsessed society wholly in the grip of a dominant Gnosticism.”

A few pages later, Dr Bloom explains that, according to Gnostic belief “Adam and Eve, all begin as disasters in some versions of Gnostic myth, which has nothing good to say about nature, and which has no hope either for our bodies or our outward souls, no hope indeed for anything confined within the limits of space and time.”

No wonder the American churches, especially the Southern Baptist and many Pentecostal churches deny the human element in Global Warming and want President Obama to fail in his attempts to endorse Kyoto.

The success of the Left Behind series and The Great Late Planet Earth, two of the most widely read books in North America, with some 60 million copies sold, clearly affirms that almost all church-goers are believers in a flight from earth to heaven, which is pure Gnostic teaching. Many of the church hymns, across all denominations, contain references to heaven being humanity’s eternal home. No wonder that Dr Bloom toward the end of his book writes, “Christianity, like Judaism before it, is not a biblical religion, despite all its assertions, since it theologies are Greek, not Hebrew, even as normative Judaism, a second century of the Common Era formulation, was compelled to rely upon Greek thought-forms.”

Another of Bloom’s insightful and simultaneously devastating observations is: “Since I am persuaded that much of what this book describes can be found also in Americanized Catholicism and Judaism, as well as in most mainline Protestantism, much of American religiosity clearly lacks spiritual content. The societal consequences of debasing the Gnostic into selfishness, and the believer’s freedom from others into the bondage of others, are to be seen everywhere, in our inner cities and our agrarian wastelands.”

It is not surprising that he approvingly quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who once lamented that “God has granted American Christianity no Reformation.”

Shocking as it may sound to the sincere, believing and committed churchgoer when Dr Bloom states that ‘the American Religion is a form of idolatry’, I nevertheless fully endorse his opinion. Perhaps Karl Marx was correct when he wrote that “religion is the opium of the people.” At any rate, since much of the success of the American Religion has a prosperity angle, where riches are seen as a direct result of going to church, the current economic malaise – which will be quite prolonged and will only get worse – will severely test this branch of Christianity.

There is no doubt that Dr Bloom opinions are controversial. He also states that one of the hallmarks of The American Religion is its anti-intellectual stance, which ensures that very few if any of current churchgoers will ever read his books or ever question their own beliefs.

Dr Jacques Ellul is a man like Harold Bloom. He has equally controversial opinions, and, I must admit, I equally treasure his.

Dr Jacques Ellul is also an author of many books, all originally appearing in French, as he was a professor of law at the University of Bordeaux. Unlike Harold Bloom, who is a Jew, Ellul is a prominent Protestant opinion maker, who has some Jewish ancestors as well.

In his book Hope in Time of Abandonment he expresses his frustrations with organized religion and especially with the preaching, much of which is boring and irrelevant.

Here are some of his words: “Modern man is impervious to the preaching of the gospel…..We still persist in pushing the message of faith, which no longer belongs to our times.”

I see here similarity with Bloom’s thesis: the mark of Gnostics is that they have ‘gnosis’ which means ‘knowledge’. Since they ‘know’ the truth, they have ceased to look. Back to Ellul: “Where man is not looking for anything, he cannot hear the Gospel. Where he is quite content, he has no need of the Gospel.” In connection  with this he quotes Jesus who said that “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick”; “Woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation” (Luke 5:31; 6:24). “That”, Ellul says, “is the crucial message of the Beatitudes.” Sermons, in other words, are mostly a waste of time, as the ministers preach to the converted, who basically are beyond hearing.

In Hope in Time of Abandonment Ellul expresses his belief that God has left humanity to its own devices – something I have referred to in an earlier chapter – which means that the only matter left to humans is ‘The Hope for the Coming of the New Creation’. That’s why he writes that “Only the deep need of man today drives me to say that the center of the Christian message is hope….. I am led to opt for hope by quite another route. If it is true that the world in which we live is a world of abandonment, if it is true that God is silent and that we are alone, then, as I shall try to demonstrate later, it is under these circumstances and at this moment that the preaching, the declaration, and the living hope is urgent….What I mean quite simply, is that the central question for man ( and for the Christian) today is not whether we believe or not, but whether we to hope or not… To believe in the Lord Jesus implies hope for his return…… We are called upon to believe what we hope. We must awaken people to hope, for only there can faith take root…..It is true that if we are in the age of abandonment, then our preaching on all other aspects of the revelation is empty, obsolete, and outworn.”

Ellul does not have a high opinion of the church. “Christians as such are mostly honorable, devout, religious, warmhearted, committed and serious. No, it is not the fault of Christians, nor of a particular vice, that the archangel of mediocrity is the true master of the Church.” Later he states that “Thus we have only one choice: either be mediocre or renegade since we, the body of Christians constituting the Church system, are in an age of abandonment.”

Ellul sees the contemporary church as purely a sociological body, good for fellowship, good for socializing, good for praying and singing, but there its usefulness ends.

Just as Bloom, Ellul concludes that “Protestantism and Catholicism both have come to the end of the road as sociological realities. We cannot go back to the sixteenth century to make them alive again… Those who are out to kill or dissolve churches at all costs are wasting their time. All they have to do is let evolution and circumstance take care of it for them….Consequently, it calls for a revision of all our church life if hope is to be the center of our life and of our witness. It calls for a revision of all our activities, our administrations, our liturgies, our teaching procedures.”

Before Bloom, who wrote The American Religion in the 1990’s and before Ellul whose books date from the early 1970’s, Dr Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings and essays date from the 1930’s and 1940’s.

His books are so special because they were composed during the Hitler regime in Germany, written while he was on the run from the Gestapo – the Geheime Stat’s Polizei – as well as when he was in prison. He was hanged in April 1945, a month before Germany surrendered. The daily threats on his life give his writings an unusual poignancy.

So what does Dietrich Bonhoeffer have to say about the church and religion in general? That his opinions are well researched and biblically sound testifies to his great intellect which earned him a double doctorate in theology before the age of 25.

In 1939, while teaching in the USA, he returned to Germany to be with his church, the Lutheran church, where he was active as teacher, minister and youth leader, but later become disenchanted with their leaders because of the silent complicity of the church with the Nazi regime.

The disillusionment with the church actually started in America, where he, following a religious service he found intolerable, wrote in his diary “the whole affair was nothing but a well-mannered, opulent, self-satisfied celebration of religion”. He then already asked himself, “Are people really unaware that they can do quite well and be better off without religion?”

Two recurrent themes in Bonhoeffer’s thoughts are ‘religion-less Christianity’ and ‘a world come of age.’ Both can be traced to Revelation 21, where in verse 22 it says that ‘I did not see a temple in the City.’ The City referred to is the New Jerusalem, symbolizing the New Creation, where only those who have lived holy and godly lives while waiting for the Lord’s return, are present. In that New Creation people will not have ‘religion’. No churches, synagogues, mosques, or temples can be found there. All will adhere to ‘religion-less Christianity, as the Law of the Lord will be written in their hearts.

Bonhoeffer writes in that connection: “Christian existence does not mean being religious in any specific manner,….rather it means being a true human being.” That’s what God wants us to be: true human beings. That’s why Christ always calls himself ‘The Son of Man’ which simply means “a true human being.”

Bonhoeffer writes that “Jesus calls a person not to a new religion but to life. (That’s why) the pure teaching of the gospel is not a religious concern but a desire to execute the will of God for a new creation. Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from the world to other worlds beyond: rather, he gives us back the earth as its loyal children.”

Bonhoeffer, like Bloom and like Ellul, strongly condemns contemporary religion where he says that “We have fallen into secularism, and by secularism I mean pious Christian secularism. Not the godlessness of atheism or cultural bolshevism, but the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth.”

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 11

The church: the past, the present, the possible future.

 (1) The past.

 Under the influence of ancient Greek philosophy both the Protestant and the Roman Catholic churches have adopted a hands-off attitude toward creation, and have cast their eyes and desires on being in heaven.

In general Christianity saw the natural hierarchy as God being on the top, the human race, made in God’s image, a few steps below that, while all animals and plants were under human authority, with insects, a few rungs lower still, and at the bottom the micro-organisms.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote in Summa Theologica that “dumb plants and animals are naturally enslaved and accommodated to the uses of others … by a most just ordinance of the Creator.”

Thanks to the ancient Greek thinkers, such as Socrates and Plato, Life is seen as a temporary passage, and earth a temporary place. When Socrates was forced to drink poison, he did so gladly as he expected to go to a better realm after death. That sort of thinking has prevailed in the church until today. Especially Augustine (396-430) has been instrumental in separating nature from grace. Thanks to these religious doctrines the universe and the earth became de-sanctified, abandoned and left to the uses of science and technology, in essence saying that while the human race was made in God’s image, nature is different, is there to support the higher beings, and is no more than the sum of its parts, which can be used by human race.

Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was especially vocal here, with such claims as “Nature was to be placed on the rack”, and “enslaved”, and “Bound into service,” and “forced out of her natural state and molded.” Rene Descartes, a contemporary of Bacon, was of the same mind, writing that “The human destiny was to be masters and possessors of nature.”

 (2) The present

 That very attitude, although somewhat tempered by the current environmental dangers, is nevertheless still the dominant view. No wonder Lynn White in his famous paper on “The historical roots of our ecological crisis,” writes that “Modern Western science was cast in a matrix of Christian theology. If so, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt. Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward man’s relation to nature which are almost universally held not only by Christians and neo-Christians but also by those who fondly regard themselves as post-Christians. Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of the natural process. We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim. … To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West. For nearly 2 millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature.”

So far Lynn White. Of course his thesis has been strongly denied by contemporary theologians, who nevertheless insist that the ultimate destination of Christians is heaven. So, why bother about the earth when heaven is the goal? Basically there is no difference between the church’ past or its current beliefs. No wonder that the future of the church in its present form is not rosy.

 (3) The possible Future

 Here is what one commentator sees the church’s development in the near future, and I quote in full a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor, dated March 10 2009 and written by Michael Spencer.

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 10

The Covenant in more detail ( conclusion)

The concept of the Covenant first appeared in the life of Noah, a special man who didn’t give a hoot what others thought. He starts to build an oceangoing ship in the middle of the prairies. Noah, who did not know a rudder from an oar, who had never seen a ship or an ocean in his life, this fellow, a farmer, a wine grower who loved to imbibe of his own vintage, started to build a ship thousands of miles from any large water-body. Hilarious, really. Just something you expect from a wine-bibber. He became a tourist attraction and you should hear him thundering to the people: that if they did not turn to the Lord Creator and ask for forgiveness, and mend their ways, they would all drown. There’s where everybody burst out laughing: the punch line. Best show in town! And when it all happened, and it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, Noah knew he had been right.

Both Abraham and Noah were exceptional people, men full of faith in God’s promises. All people have faith, but usually in finite things, such as science or money or their own sense of superiority. Because Noah believed in the God Creator, his family was chosen to make a new start in the world. To seal this special relationship God made a Covenant with him.

Basically this Covenant, as related in Genesis 9, is a Covenant with Creation. Six times in this short passage God repeats that the Covenant made here with Noah, is with every living creature and with the earth. In essence God says here: “People of the earth, I am the Creator. Here I now pledge to form a triad, a Covenant between three parties (1) The Earth, (2) You as my image bearers, and (3) Me, as the Head of the Covenant.”

“Remember,” God said, “the line of the Covenant is not vertical: first Me, then you, then the earth, with the earth not really in touch with Me. No, the earth, the trees, the rocks, the bees and buffaloes, all are my creatures, the works of my hands.”

Draw a triangle: put God on the top, and on the other two corners we, representing the human race, on one corner and the earth on the other one, with arrows both extending to and coming from each corner as we all are inter-dependent, because the Earth gives life to humans, but also receives input from them, while we are dependent on the earth, but can also enhance it, and God gives life to us and the earth and we give praise to God in return.
In other words, if we look after the earth and after ourselves and our fellow creatures, caring for the crocodiles in the jungle and our neighbors next door, then God will look after us.

This Covenant, said God to Noah, will endure throughout eternity. God, People, the Land: an inseparable Triad. To seal it all, God sent his Son, as the New Head of the New Covenant, Jesus, God’s Son, the heart of our religion.

Covenant. Some people call it the Blood Covenant, because in the old days a Covenant between people was always sealed with blood. Here is a Davidic example. In 1 Samuel 18 we read that David and Jonathan made a covenant. As a sign of the Covenant Jonathan, the then crown prince, took off his clothes and gave them to David. He also handed over his sword and other weapons, even more personal and valuable than clothes. And David did the same. They completely exchanged their personal belongings, as a sign and symbol that they now were one. They also did something else, not related in the Bible, but part of the general rule of personal Covenant. This ritual required an incision in their wrists. Both parties would then raise their wrists to heaven and let the blood mingle. In the incision they would rub dirt to leave a scar as a permanent sign of their mutual allegiance. They then would sit down, make a list of their possessions exchange those lists with the promise that whatever the one part owned would become the rightful property of the other. In order to seal all this they would walk in the figure of an 8 around two altars as a sign of eternity. Then the two parties to the covenant would eat a special Covenant meal, a lamb and unleavened bread, with each party bringing its own bread and offering it to the other.

They would do the same with wine, pouring the wine of the one person into the goblet of the other. Jesus, as Head of he Covenant, followed that very procedure: His blood flowed for us, His wounds are still visible as an eternal sign of the Covenant, an everlasting scar on the God of the Trinity, that whatever is God’s, is also ours. The Lord of Creation gave it all to us. He is the God of the Universe. He signed over the ownership of this cosmos to the people of the Covenant, those who confess Jesus to be their Lord, and pursue the welfare of the Kingdom.

What a comedy! The comedy is that through Christ, God and God’s people – you and I – come together, become equals. The comedy is that God shares His Infinity with our finite being. There is an unfathomable, even greater contrast between God and our selves and between, say, the Queen of England and us.

Yet God and we have become one in Jesus Christ. Look at the Lord Supper. There Jesus says the familiar words: “This is my body, given for you, and this cup is the New Covenant in my blood poured for you”: now not God, but Jesus is the party of the Covenant. God has ceded his place to the Son, and Jesus is now at the centre. Paul tells us to clothe ourselves with the cloak of righteousness, with the Lord Jesus Christ, and so become a new creation, for God has reconciled the cosmos to himself in Christ’s full-bodied Covenant language.

This shows that the Covenant idea is woven throughout the entire Bible. In essence the Bible is the Covenant story, culminating in the coming of the Kingdom. The covenant/Kingdom idea between God- Jesus- humanity, all of us men and women, and the earth, is therefore the real foundation for the meaning and purpose of creation. Creation is the visible basis of the Covenant, its ultimate realization. Creation is there because God in Jesus desires to enter into a Covenant with humanity. We, as human beings, exist because God continuously calls us to the Covenant. God makes us discover how we have to live as we more and more experience each day to live in the Covenant, in his Kingdom/creation.

All this is based on us being “created in God’s image and likeness,” which offers us the opportunity to live closer to God, and so more and more resemble Him, as men and women, as conscious persons, as we experience participating in the Covenant. The beauty of the Covenant is that it allows us to begin to fathom how God has revealed himself in creation, making us the visible representatives of the invisible God.

I base this on Colossians 1:15-20. There it says that Christ is the first-born of creation, which really means that He is the first human being, and in that capacity, as that perfect creature, he created ta panta, all things. That explains why we are his image, why we look like him, and also explains why we can be such smart, intelligent and clever people.

Jesus is the original human, the prototype of all human existence. God, in his plan of salvation, revealed himself fully in Jesus, who represents humanity for us and in this way completed creation and attained the perfect life in God.

We are created after the pattern of Christ. Through the Covenant we experience that likeness to God in a personal response of love. As Children of God, as his heirs, through the Covenant with God, we share our humanity with the Son, who is the Lord of all that exists, and through whom the universe was made. The entire creation is there because it is permanently willed in Christ by the Father.

All this sounds hard to understand. More simply put: God’s first act of creation was to replicate Himself as Jesus, the Christ, and, as the first human being, in that capacity, created all reality. In order to make us share in that act, he made, after the human race had fallen into sin, a covenant, a treaty of sorts, between Him, us and creation, so that the ultimate destination of creation, his Kingdom, the New Creation, would still come about.

And what happens when the Covenant is broken? Genesis 15 gives a vivid illustration of this. There it is related how God and Abraham covenanted. Abraham is asked to cut animals in two and both God, in the form of fire, and Abraham in person, pass through these severed animals. The cutting of these beasts illustrates that if the covenant is not kept the bodies of the parties concerned would be cut in half as punishment. Later when the Israelites abandoned the agreement, the 10 tribes were banished from the earth never to be heard from again. In essence the people of Israel were broken up for ever.

So the Covenant is for all who abide by its terms. They will, when Christ returns, share in his glorious Kingdom and continue to be active participants in the ongoing labor of love of beautifying the Kingdom, an assignment that will never cease, because Creation is Infinite as God is Infinite.

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 9

We all are ‘Covenanters’.

Strong claim! You a covenanter? I a covenanter? Yes, everyone who is alive is bound by the covenant God made with the human race. Of course most of us don’t even know this, just as billions in the world have no clue that the sign of the rainbow means that God will never again be the cause of a global disaster that played havoc with all that was alive, as he did with the flood in Noah’s time. So what is that covenant claim all about?

Let’s retrace our steps a few thousand years, paraphrasing in many aspects Frederick Buechner’s book: Telling the Truth. The scene is the area of present-day Israel, or, as it was called in those days, Canaan. Picture a woman, pushing 91. She is laughing. She is laughing because she has just been told by an angel that she is going to have a baby, she who never had had a child before, was barren, could not get children ever according to the best medical information.

Today you may have heard about that woman in Romania who had a child at age 61 thanks to the products of modern technology. But here it’s the natural way: through husband- wife intercourse. That’s the miracle, and to her it sounds unbelievable.  Even though it was God’s angel who told her, she can’t control herself and her husband can’t control himself either. He keeps a straight face a few seconds longer, but he ends up cracking up, too. They are laughing at the idea that their baby will be born in a nursing home: yes, a really appropriate name this time, nursing a baby there. They are laughing because the angel not only seems to believe it but seems to expect them to believe it too. They are laughing because laughter is better than crying and may not be all that much different. They are laughing because if by some crazy chance it might just happen to be true, then they really would have something to laugh about.

Abraham, so goes one account, laughed until he fell on his face. And Sarah? She hid behind the door of the tent. Actually it was her laughter that got them all going.

According to Genesis, the Bible book which records this story, God then interrupted and asked about Sarah’s laughter. Sarah was scared stiff and denied the whole thing. But God insisted, “No, but you did laugh,” and, of course, he was right.

The most interesting part of it all was that God, far from getting angry at them for laughing, told them that when the baby was born, he wanted them to name him Isaac, which in Hebrew means ‘laughter.’ So you can say that God not only tolerated their laughter, but blessed it, and, in a sense, joined in, which makes it a very special laughter indeed: God and humanity laughing together, sharing a glorious joke in which we all are involved.

What is all this laughter about? The laughter is about the Covenant. Some 25 years earlier, when Abraham was 75 years old and Sarah, his wife, a mature 65, barren and thus childless, they were both living in Mesopotamia, the present Iraq.

God, out of the blue, called Abraham and said, “Abraham, I have something special in store for you. You see the world around you? People are doing well. They are growing rich and comfortable and somehow this causes them to forget me and go their own way. I want you to be different and treasure my way and I want you to leave your family and friends and cozy position and go to a country where I will make a great nation out of you, even though you have no son as yet. I will make your name great and will bless those who bless you and all people on earth will be blessed through you.” All people! That includes you and me!

God, in other words, made a contract with Abraham, a Covenant. Remember, he then was 75 years old, Sarah 65, and incapable of having children. Even for those days, when people did live long, this was a pretty advanced age for child bearing. And, I’m sure, Abraham figured that, once he had settled in Canaan, the present day Israel, matters would soon fall into place and his heir would come along.

But God’s time-scale is different to ours. As a matter of fact God has no time-scale: he is beyond time. So the years rolled by until finally, when Abraham was 100 years old and Sarah 90, 25 long years after God called them, the angel arrived with his amazing announcement. Then they laughed. They were going to have a baby after all. The stranger who appeared at the door turned out to be not a man who sold angel food-cake mixes, but a genuine angel. Who could have possibly expected such news from a man who talked and moved like a mere mortal, and yet they knew him to be a personal messenger from Him in heaven? It all happened so handily, even hilariously. What could they do but laugh at the craziness of it all. So they laughed until tears ran down their cheeks.

And thus the child born under the Covenant God made with Abraham is called laughter. And because we are all part of that covenant, we too are children of laughter. I think the joke is on us.

God chose us, the human race. He even made us in His image. Yes, that means we look like God. No wonder we often act like God too, but that’s another matter. I don’t know about you, but I do know that God made a pretty foolish choice to include me as a child of the Covenant, because more often than not I break that covenant.

What happens when one party breaks the covenant? Marriage, of course, is a covenant. Many know the heart sore resulting from divorce, and the suffering of children when parents separate. What happens when we split with God? The result is environmental chaos, seas depleted, forests devastated, mountain mined, prairies ploughed under, species disappearing. Yet through this all, through all this evil, God speeds up his coming, and the arrival of the Kingdom.

In Abraham God chose the Jewish people. Why them? Why not the sophisticated Greeks, or the clever Egyptians, or the dominating Romans? I think he chose the Israelites because, as somebody has said, they are just like everybody else, except more so – more religious than anybody religious, and when they are secular, being secular as if they invented the concept. What applies to the Israelites then, and the Jewish people now, certainly applies to contemporary church people as well, I am sure, and actually to the entire human race, where foolishness, so evident in the squandering of our resources, is the ultimate hallmark of humanity.

Actually, a closer look at the Christian Religion it self, reveals it also to be a ridiculous affair. The Bible tells is about a king who tramps around the country side with a bunch of uneducated fishermen as his bodyguards. The Prince of Peace, as he calls himself, looks more like a Prince of Fools, who, in spite of his miraculous powers, is not taken seriously at all, and ends up being hanged as a common criminal.

Today it’s no wonder that people find Christianity a laughing matter. I can well see their point. Just listen to these lines taken from Luke 6: “Blessed are you when you are poor.” Tell me, do you want to be poor? “Blessed are you when you weep.” Who wants to be unhappy for Pete’s sake? “Blessed are you when people hate you.” Well, don’t we all want to be liked and respected?

Yet, there is comedy in all this. Comedy is being different. We laugh not at the usual. What is common place is not funny. Says one text book for aspiring reporters: “If a dog bites a person, that’s not news: if a person bites a dog that must be reported because such an event provokes laughter.”

God makes those people part of the Covenant who are not afraid to stand for justice, justice in creation, justice in the nation, who place communal interests above personal desires, all for the coming of the Kingdom. There we have that Kingdom idea again, the dominating factor in history. God does not want people who, in the eyes of the establishment, do the commonly accepted thing. God wants atypical people, people like Abraham who went out on a limb, leaving friends and relatives, on a promise to become a father of a great nation. And He wants people like us, those who too often squander his creation, who too often act selfishly in too many ways, who too often live as if there is no God, but who yet struggle to do the right thing, even though too often it amounts to little.

So what really is the significance of this Covenant?

More about that in the next chapter.

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 8

How can we live holy and godly lives?

The Apostle Peter (2 Peter 3:11) urges us to “live holy and godly lives’. I connect this admonition to an old-fashioned concept: the Covenant, which my dictionary defines it as “An agreement, usually formal, between two or more persons, to do or not to do something specified.”

The most everyday form of covenant is a marriage, where two persons agree to do something specified, in this case, to keep troth, to remain faithful to each other, whatever the circumstances.

Believe it or not, but every living creature, both human and animal in the world are part of God’s covenant, something we hardly ever pay attention to. Since the concept is so seldom explored, yet fundamental to our relationships to all global creatures, I will explore this quite extensively, devoting the next three chapters to this special relationship.

The idea of Covenant has intrigued for a long time. As a youth I often heard the word. My parents called themselves ‘Covenant Children’. I grew up in the Netherlands when, during the war 1940-45, within the Reformed Churches a serious theological dispute erupted concerning the Covenant and Baptism. This ecclesiastical controversy was so severe that families split, congregations were torn apart, and brand new denominations emerged. I had a first-class seat in all this, as in the Christian College I attended, the sons and daughters of the ministers most intimately involved in this hair splitting, were my classmates. This experience gave me an early taste of religious intolerance when teenage boys refused to be exposed to the prayer of teachers who attended the church whose synod had not approved of the actions of the dissidents. I found that nothing is more vicious than Christian intolerance.

In my time Covenant applied only to baptism, and thus was a concern to church-goers only. I remember that in my church, whenever a child received that sacrament, we would automatically sing after the ceremony Psalm 105: “Jehovah’s truth will stand forever. His covenant bonds he will not sever… The Covenant made in days of old, with Abraham he does uphold.” That covenant had a meaning beyond generational significance never entered into the picture.

Yet, although the Covenant is the key to understand both God and His Kingdom, the concept itself is seldom explored. It reveals some of God’s characteristics that the church hardly ever points out. Since understanding the Covenant is vital to understanding the church, some elaboration is need, of which two of the most striking are the care God has for the entire creation, and the great sense of humor God has.

First it is significant how God expresses his utmost love for all his creatures. Immediately after the flood, when Noah and his family and all the animals had emerged from the Ark, God made a solemn declaration, (Genesis 9:9-11), “I will establish my covenant with you, and with your descendants after you – which means the entire human race – and with every living creature that was with you – every living creature on earth, the birds the livestock and all the animals.”  The prophet Hosea picks this up in Hosea 2:18-20, where the Bible says, “On that day I will make a covenant for them, with the beast of the field and the birds of the air, and the creatures that move along the ground.” These passages show that God’s covenant is all-encompassing, and will find its full expression in the Kingdom to come, because Covenant and Kingdom are two sides of the same coin.

That God has a real sense of humor is not a trait that the church has discovered. If ever it does, the church might become a more saleable commodity. Perhaps I should call this chapter “The Comedy of the Covenant.” Why? God made a covenant with Abraham and the first child born under the Covenant God made with Abraham, is called “Laughter.” Laughter sets the stage of the Covenant. It means that we, as children of the Covenant, are also children of Laughter.

And we have a lot to laugh about. Suppose that Queen Elizabeth, reputedly one of the richest women in the world, worth perhaps 20 billion dollars, would tell your extended family, all 20 of them, including spouses, children, and grandchildren: “I will have a contract made up, a Covenant. All my possessions, my castles, my land holdings, my stocks, shares, and crown jewels, everything I own, I will share with you. One condition I will make however, you must also share all that you own with me.”

Not a bad deal, we would say and we would be utterly foolish not to take her up on it; because suddenly each one of us would have a net worth of $1 billion. In addition, we all would be princesses and princes and wherever we went we would travel free and others would pay our hotel bills and meals.

This unlikely situation would certainly be a cause of great merriment and laughter.

Well, that is the Comedy of the Covenant. And it is no fiction but reality. God made such a contract with us, with all of us. He first made it with Noah, extended it through Abraham twice, then with Moses, David, and finally renewed and sealed it in Jesus Christ. In this contract with us God promised to share with us, as rightful heirs, as his daughters and sons, this whole universe, the entire creation, the gold it contains, the diamonds, the lakes and rivers and sea front, the
mountains and meadows, the houses and forests, the birds and the animals: all that the world contains, a gift much more valuable than the Royal $1 Billion. And in addition, things the Queen cannot give: perpetual peace of mind, eternal life amidst loving people, a life without disease or death, no dead lines, only life lines to pursue. The only condition on our part is that “We do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with the God Creator (Micah 6:8).” Those conditions also are comprehensive, they include doing justice to animals, treat them with respect. That today it becomes more and more dangerous to eat meat has everything to do with the way we handle animals. That we have Global Warming has everything to do with the way we do injustice to the air, the soil and the water on which our lives depend; showing mercy means to help those who need help, who are destitute and hungry; walking humbly with our God means living in awe of his greatness as revealed in creation. Doing all that – something Jesus calls an easy burden – means keeping our part of the Covenant and simultaneously preparing ourselves for the Kingdom to come.

In other words, keeping God’s Covenant is a sort of bonding, a welding together of lives to each other and to all living matter, a promise to be faithful no matter what comes, just as a marriage, which, ideally, is a life time arrangement between two persons to stay together, whatever comes, to share the good and not so good times, in riches and in poverty, till death part them.

Curiously, the word ‘Religion’ also means ‘binding together.’ Thus, in essence, Covenant and Religion, are one and the same thing, and both find their fulfillment in The Kingdom.

And is Religion like a comedy? You must be kidding! It’s more like a tragedy the way we witness it. The religion we usually experience is solemn and serious, a matter of death and sickness more than life and enjoyment.
Yet, both Covenant and Religion are like a comedy.

More about that in the next chapter.

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 7

Who’s in Charge?  (continued)

There is a curious, but nevertheless quite convincing passage in Matthew 4: 8 – 11 that shows conclusively that we, for now, live under the reign of Satan. Yes, that accounts for such things as our car culture, with a million deaths each year, and 20 million injured, yes that accounts for… the list is endless.

Here’s what the Bible tells us. I supply the comments.

Then the Devil took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their magnificence. Satan tells Jesus: “All this, all these kingdoms, all this splendor, I will give you if you bow down and worship me.”
Somehow Satan made to pass before the eyes of Jesus a gorgeous and impressive scene: not just the poor lands of Palestine, but the glorious highlights of Rome, the wonders of Greece, the treasures of Persia, the pyramids of Egypt, the Maya Empire in Mexico, the miracles of the Incas, the architectural treasures in China and Java, the Far East with its beautiful temples, St Peter’s dome yet to be built.
Then the Devil says: “All these things will I give to you, if you will fall down and worship me.”
The fact is that Satan’s claim is based upon certain unquestionable facts: the kingdoms of the entire world have become largely under Devilish control. They were then and are now submissive to his will, obedient to his laws, captive to his bidding.
Going back in history, we now know that the Inca and the Maya civilizations offered children to their gods. We know that the Roman crucified Christians and used them in the arenas as prey for the wild animals. We learned from the Bible that the Greeks scorned the approach of Paul and ridiculed his claim to resurrection. And today it is no different. Recent history points to a Stalin, a Hitler, the holocaust, the cruelties of the Khmer Rouge, each causing the death of millions.  General Romeo Dallaire aptly called his book: Shake hands with the Devil, the failure of humanity in Rwanda.
Satan’s influence is not confined to wars: Global Warming is part of that too, so are the millions felled by cancer. Satan, as Jesus acknowledged – later calling him ‘the Prince of this world’ – has, at this point, the upper hand. The fact of his sway is indeed undisputed. He was in charge in Jesus’ world and he is today, exercising authority over all who are in darkness.

Frankly it pays to be in league with the devil. He constantly is posting a rich reward to those who serve him. If Judas desires 30 pieces of silver, the devil will find them for him, on certain conditions, of course. Wealth, fame, power, position, all are in the gift of the devil.
And so, in effect, Satan declared to Jesus that whether the people knew it or not, they were at the Devil’s bidding, that he, undisputedly, was the Prince of this world. Just imagine, he offered Jesus the whole of the kingdoms, the glory of them. Under one condition, if only Jesus would but render homage to him, then he would receive the entire world as his gift. Satan said that most others had already submitted to his direction to gain some imagined advantage, and now he boldly suggested to Jesus that he should do the same.

Believe it or not: the temptation meant more to Jesus than even Satan in the deepest reaches of his subtlety could possibly understand. It was impossible for Satan to fathom the current and future nature of Jesus’ terrible suffering. Christ, of course, knew that his father had assured him these kingdoms, but he also knew the coming of unutterable agony and immeasurable darkness: the cross and the grave, his descent into hell. The fierceness of Satan proposal lay in the suggestion that all the grandeur of these possessions might yet belong to Jesus without going through the pathway of shame and suffering and death.
Not that Jesus entertained or meditated for a single moment the possibility of yielding to the foe, but the Christ understood the very core of its meaning and grasped even as the Great Tempter could not, the infinite cost at which he was yet to possess the world.
Of course, Jesus answer was short and to the point: “Get lost.” It was a command.

And that’s exactly what Satan did, after hearing that there is only way to go: worship the Lord Creator and serve him.
To worship is always to serve. The enemy did not ask for service, only worship. Christ knew that worship and service go hand in hand. Had he worshiped Satan, he also would have been in his service, as the first Adam found when he was deceived.
Satan promised kingdoms. Kingdoms have a degree of glory and grandiosity. Obama has Airforce 1 and the White House and Camp Davis.  But being a politician always means lying and deceit. Worldly affairs are always permeated with evil. We know that only too well.

What Christ promises is not kingdoms in the plural, but Kingdom in the singular. Says Revelation 11: “The kingdoms of the world have become the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.”
Jesus chose to move toward the establishment of one Kingdom and one throne. The devil showed the Master the kingdoms, tribes, divisions, containing the elements of conflicts and break-ups. Jesus refused them. He did not desire the kingdoms. He had come for the Kingdom with a capital K. He refused the tarnished glory of a wrecked ideal and chose the radiant splendor of the kingdom to come, the New Creation, even though the pathway to the goal was the pathway of the cross.

That’s all part of God’s master-plan. The Kingdom concept dominates all the world’s happenings. While we worry about job security, about money and the day-to-day business to keep body and soul together, the invisible kingdom of God is coming into its own, at first slowly but surely, and now with increasing tempo. It will find its true formation in the end-times, which are fast approaching, when all separate threads of the world’s happenings will unite to culminate in the Closing act when the Lord will assemble these separate strands to compose his Kingdom to come.

That Kingdom has always been present in the background of events straight through all the brokenness and schisms of history. Soon, in these Last of Days, the Kingdom will be revealed for all to see as the dominating reality. In the End Times, now imminent, on the Day of all days, when Jesus Christ will be revealed as the Lord of Lords and King of Kings, He will forever banish all powers that have had a destructive and negative impact on his creation. Paul speaks of that when he, in Ephesians 1:9-10 writes, “He made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure which he purposed in Christ to be put into effect when the times have reached their fulfillment – to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.”

The entire chain of human events, from its very beginning until now has only one purpose: the coming of the Kingdom. Our life’s goal is not that we personally may enjoy God forever and our soul be saved, but the real purpose of our existence lies only therein that we be part and parcel of the greater context of the Kingdom of God in which all things in heaven and on earth be under the aegis of Jesus, the Christ, who lives and reigns forever.

It is he who through his life and death has restored the Kingdom and has reunited all things under his rule, which is universal and cosmic.

We don’t hear too much in the church about the kingdom to come or of the New Creation, which Revelation describes as ‘the kingdom of the world’, meaning the entire cosmos.

I repeat: John 3:16 says: “God loved the cosmos so much that he gave his only Son to redeem it.” Redeem means ‘to buy back.’ Jesus bought back the entire cosmos, the land on which we live, the rivers and seas on which we sail, the air in which we fly, together with all that lives and moves and has its being. All the splendor of material things shall, under the perfect reign of Christ, be beautified and perfected. In the final victory, the whole creation, which to-day groans in agony under the rule of Satan – who is out to destroy God’s creation and we are often willing helpers there -will be redeemed, put aright, restored to its original beauty.

That’s what the Kingdom is all about. There’s where history is leading to. Jesus came to restore creation. As humans, we were created to help in that goal. God made us so that we might act in co-operation with Jesus for the fulfillment of God’s divine purposes.
As I have shown, at this time not God, but Satan is in charge of this world. This is the situation now more than ever, so evident in a world where troubles multiply and sin becomes more flagrant.
We know that Jesus is the ultimate owner. We know that he has redeemed the world, that is, has bought it back.
How should we view today’s situation? Compare it to a real estate transaction, where a property is bought by making an offer, and when all the conditions have been met, the deal is final with a possession date at a later time. That’s how I see the world at this point. Jesus, on Calvary, fulfilled all obligations, making the sale irrevocable. He bought it for us and paid for it, but we can not yet move in. That will come when Jesus returns. In the meantime Satan still occupies the house of creation and tries to afflict as much damage as possible, because he knows his time will soon be up soon.

How then shall we live in that interval? Peter gives the answer: “because the Day of the Lord will come like a thief, live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the Day of God and speed its coming.” (2 Peter 3:12)

Why can we live holy and godly lives? More about that in the next chapter.