Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

September 7 2022

WHY I DON’T CALL MYSELF A CHRISTIAN ANYMORE.

We have to revise the word “Christian”, or drop it altogether. Why this radical move? The concept has been coopted and become meaningless. Brazilian President, Bolsonaro, destroyer of the Amazon, calls himself a Christian. No Thanks. “Earth we are and to earth we shall return,” instructs Genesis 3: 19.  That’s why I now call myself an EARTHER. 

When I, for the last time, visited Groningen, the city I was born in, a relative, upon leaving, said, “See you again in heaven.” 

I had no reply. 

Most “Christians” believe they go to heaven, even though the Bible repeatedly says that “Nobody has gone to heaven, except the One who came from there” (John 3:13). To me ‘heaven’ is a pagan Greek concept! To me heaven is the place where God lives in ‘inapproachable Light, whom nobody has seen or can see’. (1 Timothy 6: 16). To me Jesus died to restore Creation, but the so ingrained ‘heaven heresy’ makes it easy to be a “Christian”: then we don’t have to give a hoot about the earth. And Climate Change? Of course, a myth, a capitalistic invention to allow more government control.

But God and Creation is one. “Oh no. That is devil worship”, these deniers say. But we cannot deny that God is what he does, that’s why Creation personifies God, and makes it holy, that’s why I call myself an “Earther”. That’s also why Bonhoeffer tentatively introduced a new term, “Religion-less Christianity”. 

Here’s why. 

In the 1930’s, with the rise of Hitler in Germany, the church was placed for a choice: approve of the Nazi doctrine or lose the state subsidy. Almost the entire church opted for Hitler. The same happened in much of American Christianity, when it endorsed Trump, and today in Russia where the Orthodox Church is in full agreement with Putin, because he financially supports the reigning religion. 

Bonhoeffer, initially, was very active in the German Lutheran Church, serving as pastor in London and Barcelona, and a leader in the ecumenical European scene in the early 1930’s. In that capacity he also visited the USA where he, in 1939, was offered a teaching position at Union Seminary, but when the war broke out in September 1939, he returned to Germany to be with his community there, well aware that it would lead to his death, which occurred on April 9 1945, just before the war ended.

His experiences with the religious scene in his home country made him rethink his attitude toward organized religion. He concluded that “specific to the Christian Faith is the perception of God and the world as one.” 

Co-suffering with God.

Co-suffering with God, means a radically new perception of Christianity. Bonhoeffer writes that, “When Jesus was in agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, he chided his disciples for not keeping watch with him for even one hour”. Yes, God expects us to suffer too, as Jesus did. When Jesus sees his creation go up in flames, with smoke and floods and drought, we, as eternal earthers, we too must mourn. Deeply. It’s purely our earth: we inherit it!

Yes, as Earthers, we are called to suffer together with God whose very creation – his very being – is being devastated by us.

Bonhoeffer also writes, “It is precisely here that the chance for our liberation from all religious preconceptions and distortions lie. By allowing ourselves to be taken up into God’s passion, a passion in the world and occasioned by it, we discover the world – and our own life – anew, becoming completely human, without religious schizophrenia.” 

Christian existence does not mean being religious in any specific manner…. It means being a true human being! Jesus did not bring a religion: he is the End of religion, he is above Christianity and non-Christianity, above religion and irreligion. 

I believe now that we must differentiate religion from faith. Jesus does not call us to a new religion, but to LIFE, and that to the FULL. (John 10: 10). Augustine, the early church father, coined it correctly, “Many whom God has,   the Church does not have; many whom the Church has, God does not have”.

Today the emphasis has shifted.

Today God is the target. Where there is no prophetic vision, the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law. (Proverbs 29:18).

All this makes John 3: 16 today the text to live by: “God loved the world, the cosmos, the earth and all it contains, SO much, that he gave his Son as payment to buy it back: believing this, He grants us eternal life.”

We have to drop the word “Christian”: the word has become meaningless. Live for the Earth. Become an EARTHER.

August 31 2022

CLOSE TO COLLAPSE?

“It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions.”

Those of the opening words of David Wallace-Wells’ book The Uninhabitable Earth. 

Global Heating is accelerating so fast that conditions, estimated even as late as last year to happen 30 years from now, are creating havoc today: now, 2022.
And next year? If the unusually long-lasting La Nina becomes the more likely El Nino, warming weather will become an even more of a burning burden. It’s no longer “Slouching Towards Gomorrah”, it’s “Galloping towards Armageddon”.

Take China.

The extreme heat there is snarling power supplies, threatening crops and setting off wildfires. Where will China secure the food supply to feed its 1.3 billion people? Crops have been reduced world-wide, and that dreaded Middle Age scourge of famine is making a sudden appearance. China, with 20% of the world’s people, has seen a straight 60 days of pure hell, pumping dry the Yangtze River, cutting off its hydro-electric capacity, while depriving it of adequate food supplies. 

 

Other global perils include: mounting geopolitical volatility; fragile supply chains; political dysfunction; digital disruption, with the result that the accelerating effects of climate change, suddenly causes the entire world to see the “end of abundance”. 

Should I mention Pakistan: 1,000+ dead and 33 million displaced by floods? 33 million: Canada’s entire population!

COLLAPSE, the book.

I have a book with the simple title, COLLAPSE, written by Jared Diamond, a professor at the UCLA.  He writes:

“Just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both, become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing. When people are desperate, undernourished and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.”

Pakistan is a good example of such a situation, but not the only one: Iraq too.

Close to Collapse?

Soaring temperatures (Iraq is enduring 120 degree heat that has fried the country’s electrical grid), the depletion of natural resources, flooding, droughts, the worst one in 500 years is devastating Western, Central and Southern Europe and is expected to see a decline in crop yields of 8 or 9 percent, power outages, wars, pandemics, a rise in zoonotic diseases and breakdowns in supply chains combine to shake the foundations of industrial society.  

And then there is “The Arctic”. It has been heating up four times faster than the global average, resulting in an accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and freakish weather patterns. The Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia is warming up to seven times faster. Climate scientists did not expect this extreme weather until 2050.

“It is worse, much worse, than you think.”

When I survey my small holdings in rural Eastern Ontario, then I must admit that, were the entire world like my immediate environment, collapse would be far from my mind. My garden has yielded a bountiful crop of green beans. My red beets needed two reseedings before the third one took root with plenty of produce to come, and my potatoes look glorious, assuring sufficient supply till the next crop comes due. My fresh tomatoes are unequalled in taste.

But there also is Revelation 18: 

         “All the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries, and the merchants grew rich, …and weep because in one hour your doom has come.”

I am sure that the situation today, the circumstances portrayed in the last Bible book, are being implemented now. Jesus told us to look at the world around us and read the signs. (Matthew 24: 33).

Today we live in a totally integrated world. Even in my little corner, the air is polluted: there is no escape. The earth is like a living body. It needs clean air, clean water, clean soil to function properly. All are lacking. 

Does that mean that we are “Close to collapse?” 

It seems to me that collapse is occurring in several sections of society. The Western world is quickly aging, burdening the health system, while environmental degradation comes with increasing physical hazards. The entire economic sector depends on natural resources, quickly vanishing. Climate Change already causes infrastructure deterioration. A realistic assessment indicates major adjustments are needed yesterday.

Are we close to Collapse?

Forewarned is forearmed. 

August 24 2022

ABOLISH THE CLERGY?

A few years ago, on a 10km run, I caught up with another runner and we talked, while enjoying the scenery in the Madoc area. He was a retired head of the Newfoundland Constabulary and in that capacity had to interview the archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church in that Province, in connection with sex crimes committed by his clergy. In his long career of interviewing people, he had never experienced such stonewalling as he had encountered there.

O, the church. For me a continuous cause of frustration and irritation. My difficulty has mostly been with sermons that fail to connect to today, with ministers denying the essence of the Christian faith, with hymns that celebrate heaven. 

Now, in the year of the Lord 2022, my church – my wife died almost 2 years ago – has no minister. I hope we never find a new one. 

Reason?

Educationally, a monologue is the least effective way of conveying a topic: also, after 8 minutes, attention wanes. In addition, the church’s basic message is usually old hat: God Created, we sinned, Christ redeemed, we go to heaven. Moreover, sermons are primarily geared to the intellect, which breeds dualism: the soul for God, the earth for us: there’s a word for that: Gnosticism. I increasingly believe that the failure to see Creation as holy, is a factor in Global Heating.

Time for a radical change.

We need a new orientation, primarily geared to our final destination: the New Creation, because eternity is for those who prepare for it.

“There is no temple there”,

“There is no temple there”, says Revelation in describing our future. “No temple” means no church, means no Bible, while God’s Created Word, the Holy Earth, remains. It’s about time that the church acknowledges that the Church as institute and the Bible as God’s indirect word, are going to be things of the past, while creation, God’s direct Word, is forever.

Basically, the church structure is based on Old Testament organization with the Pope as High-priest, and the clergy as priests, even though Paul’s outline in 1 Corinthians 14, emphasizes the laity. Paul, the eminent missionary, advocated gatherings centered on small group discussions, cautioning that “everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way.” 

Why has the church evolved differently?

The basic answer is: the clergy. We simply don’t trust the Spirit to direct us in an orderly way. The clergy is afraid that the laity will express opinions tainted with heresies, vainglory, and vanity, also suspecting that the same people will always carry the conversation. The ‘ordained’ simply do not believe that “The Spirit helps us in our weakness”, as Romans 8:26 tells us. 

But salvation is a personal matter: that’s why what people think and believe must be expressed and broadened, impossible in the current situation. 

Small is beautiful.

Schumacher, in his classic, Small is beautiful, celebrated the benefits of keeping organizations within reasonable limits. That’s especially true of church gatherings. Large churches tend to be impersonal, emphasizing not so much the needs of the parishioners, as the personal talents of its leaders. 

Leadership comes with certain dangers. The old Romans had an appropriate saying: “Quod Licet Iovi, non Licet Bovi”, basically stating that “What is allowed for Jupiter – the gods – is not allowed for the Cows, the common folk”. At times, the clergy were regarded as gods, allowing them to commit acts not allowed to less privileged people. The root of sexual misconduct is not primarily celibacy – the married Southern Baptist officials have the same problem – but the supposedly privileged position of the preachers. In the Netherlands and Scotland, the clergy used to be called, ‘Dominee’ or “Lord”, a designation reminding me of “Le droit du Seigneur”. 

I believe that the present preacher-dominated practices are contrary to New Testament prescriptions: they prevent spiritual growth, foster complacency and ignorance, and lead to lethargy, stagnation and collapse, all too visible today. 

The Bible is very explicit.

Abolish the clergy? Listen to Jesus! In Mathew 23, the “Woe to you, teachers”, is repeated seven times, each succeeding time in stronger terms, ending with “You snakes! You brood of vipers”. Jesus was dead-set against religion. He knew that religion would kill him. His very last miracle occurred when he was dying on the cross: the heavy curtain separating the common area from the Holy of Holies, ripped from Top to Bottom, signaling the death of formal religion. Jesus came to bring LIFE and that to the full: John 10: 10.

Jesus came to teach us how to live, how to prepare ourselves, not for heaven, as explicitly denied in John 3: 13, but for eternity in an environment cleaned of all pollution, by the blood of the Lamb. 

Abolish the clergy? Yes, prioritize personal participation.

August 17 2022

TRIPLE HOLY:

THE HOLY EARTH; LE MILIEU DIVIN; SACRED NATURE.

The Lord’s Prayer starts with “Hallowed be thy name”. In today’s language it translates as “Your name be holy”: using the subjunctive gives it more power. 

However, it has nothing to do with God’s name, as God is beyond a name, beyond comprehension. What it really means is that God is holy in all his actions; everything done by God ‘in his name’, represents God’s totality. With, “Hallowed be thy name”, we ask God to make us see that his name is engraved on every feature of creation, now in extreme pain, a pain we too experience, as expressed in the song below:

O holy earth, receive our tears
Console us, still our deepest fears.

We now are aliens in your land,
When will we see your healing hand?

The people here are drunk with wine

In blinded daze see no decline

The nations’ rulers spread the lie

Insist all’s fine, the truth deny.

What evil thought gave life to birth
That made us kill God’s Holy earth?

For one day soon God’s wrath will come,
With death for many, life for some.

(Tune: The Old Hundredth: O people that on earth do dwell)  

The tune is quite appropriate: this blog is directed to ‘all people that on earth do dwell’. Warnings galore! The ARCTIC NEWS last week had some disturbing news for us, earthlings: “sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic as high as 32.1°C or 89.78°F on August 8, 2022. Ten years ago, it was Zero Degrees Celsius in the same spot. 

Temperatures near the North Pole regulate the weather world-wide. Once the methane buried there, breaks lose, all hell will break loose, ending life in 2025. Have a look at its website.

Last week I was reading in Hebrew 10, “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” When we abuse creation – that’s how God presents himself to us – when we play dice with God’s work, we must expect his response: Global Heating is his revenge: it signifies falling into the hands of the living God.

Many sources.

Multiple books make that plain. Teilhard de Chardin, in his Le Milieu Divin, some 70 years ago, wrote that, “The day is not far distant when humanity will realize that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration.”  Now 2022, that day has arrived. This learned priest, devout Christian, great scientist with a doctor’s degree in Paleontology from The Sorbonne, echoes Bonhoeffer who, some decades before him, saw God and Creation as one. Teilhard’s biographer wrote, “If Teilhard loved God, it was through the world, and if he loved the world, it was as a function of God, the animator of all things.” A month before Teilhard died on April 10 1955, he wrote, “The joy and strength of my life will have lain in the realisation that when the two ingredient – God and the world – were brought together they set up an endless mutual reaction, producing a sudden blaze of such intense brilliance that all the depths of the world were lit up for me.”

Karen Armstrong, former nun, prolific writer, recently wrote SACRED NATURE. This past week I received her new book in the mail, all the way from London, England, where she lives. In it she described how “For most of human history, and in almost all the world’s cultures, nature was believed to be sacred, and our God or gods to be present everywhere in the natural world. When people in the West began to separate God and nature in modern times, it was not just a profound breach with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom: it also set in train the destruction of the natural world.”

Too late.

It is a sign of the last days, confirmed in the Bible’s very last book, that the final truth will be revealed, and confront humanity with the ultimate consequence of our current way of life. “The wages of sin is death”, says Romans 6: 23, “But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord.”

Not very popular, this explanation: it interferes with our idea of God, safely secured in heaven, where weare supposed to join him. It makes it easy for pastors to preach, and pew-sitters to live. Bonhoeffer calls this “Pious Secularism.” A holy creation calls for holy living. The Bible repeatedly says that – see John 3: 13, “nobody goes to heaven”. Jesus came to show us how to live LIFE: see John 10:10. 

Teilhard de Chardin, in conclusion, writes: 

One day, the Gospel tells us, the tension gradually accumulating between humanity and God will touch the limits prescribed by the possibilities of the world. And then will come the end.

August 10 2022

THE GREAT TABOO.

Why am I, why are you, why are we all here on this small ball floating in eternity, with no other life detected anywhere else? Is there a purpose for us in being born, live a few years, and then die, perhaps remembered by a few people? 

The title poses a situation we’d rather not discuss, because, basically, it is a religious, and thus unpopular, matter. There’s a catch: we can’t avoid it. We instinctively know that our world cannot continue on its present course. We also know that change is impossible, which really means that there will be an abrupt end. Then what? No consequences? We, just a puff of dust?

Back some decades.

Some 75-80 years ago, part of the church I attended, we had a youth group, some 20 high school teenagers, led by a university graduate, meeting after the second Sunday service. Believe it or not, there, we young men, discussed that sort of situation. Perhaps the then brutal German occupation from 1940-45, made that topic more acute, because ‘after the war”, the urgency evaporated and ‘religion’ faded away with the onset of the Carbon prosperity.

But how about today?  

Today we again have wartime conditions: our total war against Creation, against God. Against God? Yes. 

Dr. Sabine Dramm, in her book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an introduction to his thought, summarizes her findings concerning this German theologian with: 

“What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one”. 

I believe this to be true: we are what we do: abusing creation, means abusing God, Climate Change being the outcome. Believe me: In our fight against God, we are the undisputed underdog, fighting a losing battle, no matter what we attempt. I do everything to minimize energy use: it’s constantly on my mind, 24/7. But we – me too – have sold our souls to the false Carbon God, and must face the consequences.

Relevant questions.

I read the following items in a scientific journal, outlining our dilemma:

1) What is the potential assessment for climate change to drive mass extinction events? 

2) What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 

3) What are human societies’ vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk? 

4) How can these multiple strands of evidence—together with other global dangers—be usefully synthesized into an “integrated catastrophe?

The ‘world’ is asking the relevant questions. Are we? The signs are everywhere. It’s time that we face reality. We can see the End. We are on a track to total collapse. We are in the last days, which entails ‘Judgement’, that terrible word, the Great Taboo.

Bonhoeffer faced death continually, having been implicated in a plot to kill Hitler. This is reflected in his writings, calling himself an Anthropos Teleios, a human taking his cue from the End of Time. Today, 2022, endings are the topic du jour. 

How then shall we live?

Dr. Barry Commoner coined the four laws of ecology: memorize them: 

• Everything is connected to everything else. 
• Nothing disappears. 
• Nature knows best. 
• There is no free lunch.

Today we pay the price for disobeying these laws. As God is revealed in creation, serving creation as our dearest possession and honoring the Creator as the origin of life, is the only way out. Jesus did not start ‘the Christian religion’, he taught us ‘how to live’, in full symbiosis with creation. That’s why Jesus died: he died on the cross to restore creation, and make it possible for us to live there eternally. 

That’s why John 3: 16 is in the Bible: 

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

I know. I have said this before. Loving ‘the world’, the ‘cosmos’, means loving what God loved. Loving creation means loving God, the creator. Believing that Christ offered himself to buy back creation, implies that we must do the same. There is a simple song, not so easily implemented: “I want to follow Jesus”. To walk in his footsteps means doing everything possible to save creation.

Why am I, why are you, why are we all here on this small ball floating in eternity, with no other life detected anywhere else? Is there a purpose for us in being born, live a few years, and then die, perhaps remembered by a few people? 

Yes.
This passing life is a proving ground for eternity. We are being tested whether we are fit to live in the New Creation, of which the last Bible book gives us an inkling. LOVE JESUS: LOVE LIFE, EMBRACE ETERNITY.

August 3 2022

 SOMETHING NEW.

“What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
                           (Ecclesiastes 1:9,10)

Well: there IS something new under the sun, in spite of what Ecclesiastes, that blunt Bible book, says. We, in the year 2022, play poker with the planet without knowing the rules of the game, with our very existence at stake: that’s something new.

New warnings.

Every day there’s a new warning. Every day the warning is more explicit and more ominous than the previous one. Every day it comes from a different source. Every day it concerns a new threat, a new facet on the fate of the earth and a new phase emphasizing its finiteness. Last week an international team of experts argued the world needs to start preparing for the possibility of the climate endgame. “An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity”, is a new book, written by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen.

So, what do we do? 

Are we worried? Become environmental boosters?  No. We fire up the mothballed coal plants because cleaner burning natural gas is in short supply; we employ more drilling equipment for fracking, that energy-intensive procedure to obtain oil and gas; we expand the tar-sand operations because: “The price is right”, and the profits of the oil companies soar.

Yes, there is something new under the sun.

Half of humanity today is in the danger zone, from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune. So? Conserve? No. We continue to feed our fossil fuel frenzy. “We have a choice”, says Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, “Collective action or collective suicide.”

The age of humans has caused sea levels to rise three times faster than predicted. The arctic ice is vanishing at rates that were unforeseen. Even if we stop carbon emissions today – we have already reached 421 parts per million, up from 280 – carbon dioxide concentrations will continue to climb to as high as 550 ppm because of the heat trapped in the oceans. Global temperatures, even in the most optimistic of scenarios, will rise for at least another century, assuming we confront this crisis. The earth that God pronounced ‘good’ seven times, has become a source of misery and death. And we – we! – are the culprits: our ignorance, our inertia, our politics, our greed, our stupidity that has ensured that we sleepwalked to that dangerous 1.5C climate change guardrail, with higher temperatures on the way, and sure collapse.

The fulness of Time.

Last week I was reading a chapter in a book on “The fulness of time”, expanding on a quote from Ephesians 1: 10: ‘when the times reach their fulfillment.’ 

Today, now, Anno Domini 2022, the times have reached their end-points. The hourglass is full: drip by drip, grain by grain, chip by chip, we have polluted all the natural resources: air, water, soil, and now our era of extravagance at the expense of creation, is ending. 

For those who have eyes to see, the signs tell us that we are dealing with a world that is falling apart. Turmoil everywhere: airports in disarray; shipping of goods stagnating; prices of essentials soaring; the combination of Covid, Inflation, Climate Change, threatens to undo our so interconnected world economy; ignoring flagrant facts, in our arrogance and blindness, we have forgotten that ‘the living earth’ is finite, has an expiry date, now fast approaching.

Conclusion

We are dealing with a situation which our sharpest brains are no longer equipped to handle. We cannot cool the heat in the oceans. We cannot remove the CO2 in the air. We cannot replant the forests needed to regulate the weather. We cannot call back the lost species. We cannot refreeze the Arctic or restore the glaciers. We cannot refashion the prairies where once thousands of buffalos roamed. 

We, proud humans, have failed the test. God has allowed us to be in charge of his creation: we have tried; we have experimented; we have accomplished much. But……

James Lovelock, who died last week at the age of 103, coined the name ‘Gaia’ to designate the living earth. Psalm 148 is an ode to that living earth: there the entire universe sings, shouts, glorifies God: the hills, the mountains, wild animals and all cattle, small creatures and flying birds. 

Now the hills are aflame with the sounds of fury, the butterflies no longer fly, the wild animals to nowhere flee, the cattle, encased in poisonous pens, in despair die, the earth a pyre of self-sacrifice.

The earth needs renewal: “The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations”, promises Revelation 22: “No longer will there be any curse”.

Pray for renewal. Live for renewal. Live in renewal.