Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

RELIGION-LESS CHRISTIANITY

Is it curtains for the church?                                                

I don’t know where the expression “It’s curtains” originates, but it’s meaning is clear: it signals the end of something, such as, “if the plane crashes, it’s curtains for all”. 

Perhaps it originated in the theatre world; perhaps it has a biblical origin. There’s a curious item mentioned in all three synoptic gospels: The instant Jesus died on the cross, the curtain in the temple separating the Holies (the common aera where the priests gathered) from the Holy of Holies, (the place where only the High Priest was allowed to enter once a year, on the Day of Atonement), ripped from top to bottom. 

It must be remembered that the temple then was at the very centre of the Jewish Religion, with its annual calendar culminating in the feast of Atonement when the High Priest, once a year, entered the Holy of Holies to make the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the people. It’s now named Yom Kippur, the highest Holy Day of the Jewish calendar. By this act reconciliation between God and the people, is restored. Suddenly the heart of the Jewish religion was ripped out. A few decades later the temple was destroyed.

Why did this curtain rip?

 Curiously, this was Jesus’ very last act. I am a great believer in context, in making a decision based on previous sayings, such as found in Matthew 23. In that chapter Jesus shows his fury with the theologians of his day, the religious leaders. Seven times he condemns them for prescribing rules and regulations required for salvation. In that chapter, Jesus uses such strong language that it makes me think that the ripping of that curtain really means THE END of religion, all religion, because what applied to temple worship, is also relevant to Christianity. 

Christianity is not a religion.

I believe that the torn curtain signals ‘the end of religion, of all religions, including Christianity’. Why? Because Christianity is not a religion: It is a Way of LIFE.  On that Pentecost event, when the Holy Spirit descended on the crowd in Jerusalem, that divine act did not indicate the onset of the Christian Religion: it indicated a radical change in life:  these early Christ-followers had everything in common, following Christ’s edict: “I have come to bring life, and that to the full” (John 10: 10).

My Life Struggle. 

My religious battles have been with the church. I was an elder in a large church when the minister from the pulpit condemned a Christian organization of which I was a prominent supporter. I resigned and transferred my membership to a more open church, but when a new minister came, ultra conservative, I, rather than fight, moved away and became a member of a house church. 

After 5 years that too fell apart, and joined the local Presbyterian Church, where, after 45 years, I still am a member. There I again became an elder, representing the church in the regional meeting of churches, even chaired this so-called Presbytery for 2 years, and later became to convener of the National Board of Trustees for 5 years, for the simple reason that none of the accountants and lawyers, the financial pillars of the church, had never been accustomed to pray publicly.

A bit of history.

For some 300 years after Christ died, there were only house churches, where people had possessions in common, risking life and limb, job and security. It was only after Emperor Constantin favored the Christian movement, that Christianity became a status symbol, when buildings and structures appeared, evolving into The Christian Religion. That etiquette has now worn off. 

The end. Everything becomes what it is.

We now, as Climate Change, wars, epidemics intensify, must be prepared for THE END. Also, the end of religion: time to prepare ourselves for eternity to come: the New Creation. “The church is a product of the past, yet it is only out of the future that the present can be lived”, writes Bonhoeffer somewhere.

Don’t be shy to read the Bible. It still is the Book of Life. Yet, just as it is ‘curtains for the church’, so too the BIBLE will disappear. After all, it is a human book. In almost the very last Bible chapter (Revelation 21: 22), it says, I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.

No temple means no religion. No temple means no Bible. No temple means no church. 

These new conditions we must now, in these final days, strive to assume. Religion killed Jesus. That’s why we already see churches disappear, and replaced by ‘a way of life’, in tune with God’s creation, our eternal future. 

Prepare for ‘religion-less Christianity”, where God/Creation is all and in all. 

It’s simple:  ‘Love the Lord your God/Creation with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself. Luke 10: 27.

THAT GOD IS GONE.

In my early youth, he was there, God. That was more than 8 decades ago, in, what now in Canada is called, the Dirty Thirties. I saw God, symbolized in my grandparents who lived godly lives in godly surroundings, reflecting Genesis 3: 19: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” My parents’-parents saw themselves as part of nature, part of the animals they so lovingly tended, each bovine’s name posted in the cow barn. I remember the horse of my mother’s father, a placid dappled animal, named Bles. Working the land was done with compassion enriching the soil in the process.

Both grandfathers were elders in a large church in a tiny village. There, in the rural west quarter of the Netherlands’ most Northerly Province, Groningen, I saw God shining through my grandparents. 

I also remember the horse-drawn vessel, carrying their 2-3 milk cans each day, transporting the fresh milk to be processed in the farmers’ co-op, bringing the cans back with whey for the pigs. 

I, amazingly, also experienced God in their view on economics, how, my grocer/grandfather, came calling in his 2 wheeled box, pony-powered, and bartered the eggs from my Oma’s free-ranging chickens for coffee, tea, sugar. I even remember the smell of the stoke-hut, the freestanding cooking and eating shed, their simple meal, mostly potatoes; their standard dessert being buttermilk porridge: only I was allowed to sweeting it with corn syrup.

Their world was a unity.

My grandparents had never heard of the French philosopher René Descartes who set the tone for the modern separation of humans and nature, by putting forward the view that the mind is divine and God-like, and our bodies, and the bodies of other creatures, are just kind of lifeless matter, a false belief still dominating American Religion, and now the ruling faith in Pentecostal Africa as well. Also, the main direction in the world-wide Roman Catholic Church, however much I admire some of the leaders there. 

They also had never heard of Plato and Aristoteles whose dualism the church swallowed hook, line and sinker, separating body from soul, a rational soul from a material body, resulting in the ‘heaven heresy’. Look at the ‘Christian Republican Party in the USA: Once in power they will scrap all environmental regulations.

Religion kills.

It is worth noting, how the Old Testament religion, propagated by the Pharisees, killed Jesus, while our New Testament version is killing Creation/God. 

Dr. Lynn White, a Christian ecologist, was right. In his essay, The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, he maintained that, of all religions, Christianity is the most anthropocentric, the most human-directed one. I cannot help but conclude that today’s Climate Change is the direct result of the Church separating God from nature. 

All about OIL.

The War – 1939-45 – was waged for one reason: Domination of Carbon Resources: OIL. Hitler wanted the Russian resources. After the war, OIL totally replaced God, the deity whom the church banned to heaven, giving free reign to the Carbon God to rule supreme. That war, waged between God/Nature and ROW, the Rest of the World, is now in its final stages, ending in spectacular fashion: fire, smoke, heat, hurricanes: the wrath of God/Nature versus the puny proletariat we are, basically. 

So, where is the church in all this, today?

In the 13^th and 14^th centuries the church was almighty, but during the Black Plague it lost much of its prestige and when coordinated voices started to criticize its outreach, the edifice crumbled. 

Today, the church’s preoccupation with heaven, at the expense of the earth, has further eroded popular support so that now there only is a shell left, visible in empty churches. 

Now a universal holocaust looms and the church is left speechless, as it had bet on the wrong horse, and lost credibility.

What to do in this late hour?

It is too late to expect the instituted church to switch to an earth-minded gospel, even though Romans 1: 20 asserts that:  For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. We cannot plead ignorance. I know, OIL has fueled our amazing progress. We now experience its fateful consequence: fire and destruction.

Dr. Sabine Dramm’s book on Bonhoeffer, concludes with the amazing statement: “WhatBonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian Faith, is the perception of God and the world as one, and the perception of life that has its wellspring in this world in God, and in turn proceeds from this world back again to God. 

We used to believe that GOD IS ALL AND IN ALL: that God is gone in the Western world. Now, by our conduct, we confess that OIL IS ALL AND IN ALL.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Agreed, we live in interesting times. Yes, I know, it is a Chinese curse, but nevertheless, by delaying dealing with matters unsolved, by ignoring problems pending, by shutting our eyes while going full-speed ahead, will hasten ‘the demise of the earth!’. Sounds melodramatic, sounds over-the-top, but nevertheless, I, from my perch in rural Eastern Ontario, Canada, know it to be true.

A few relevant questions.

Who will be the next US president? Where will the next Atlantic Hurricane land? Will the persistent heat affect my health? How about the monetary deficits? Are churches still viable? Is marriage disappearing? What about the billions in Africa and Asia who lack security, food, shelter?  Will the bird flu attack humans? Will Covid ever disappear? What will the tens of thousands of forest fires do to our health and Climate Change? After all, trees are supposed to be the ultimate solution. Why are earthworms disappearing? Is God favoring Trump? Will the next IT (Information Technology) shut-out paralyze the entire world?

Questions galore. 

We truly live in a world of profound economic anxiety, routine violence and an opioid epidemic. And, yes, there also is flagrant denial. We all know we live in an era of unrelenting news of war and nature carnage. No, it is not true that the United States is overrun by millions of dangerous immigrants, but we do have mass displacement, which Hannah Arendt described as “homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.” Questions galore. Answers? Not so much. 

What’s next?

I am an old man, rapidly approaching 96. I had a dream a few nights ago, a strange dream, which I recall only vaguely. It had something to do with Judgement, the Last Judgement. I believe there is lots that calls for judgement. God gave us a well-ordered world, where everything perfectly fitted into everything else: no discord, no friction, no chaos, no mysterious decline in some facet of creation: on the contrary. Just last week, a computer snatch threw much of the air industry into chaos: one human error, and the lives of millions are affected; one infected bird in China, and the entire Western world suffers from Covid. We live in a very vulnerable world!

It looks to me that we have lost our bearings: we don’t know where we come from, anymore, and we don’t want to know where we are going, because it simply frightens us: humanity in general cannot bear much reality.

I notice this when I listen to my weekly dose of sermons. In my church sermons avoid reality, so the preacher finds a human-interest Bible story, gives it a moralistic twist, and pronto, sermon done. Fortunately, the ad in my local weekly paper, Tweed News, emphasizes St. Andrew’s ‘coffee hour’. That’s what the church is all about: fellowship. The good things about our church also are the Wednesday Morning open access coffee hour, and, with the Salvation Army, a free lunch for whoever, on Mondays 12-1.

The church is for others.

Bonhoeffer sees the church to be ‘for others’. There used to be grassy – weed infested – ‘lawn’ around our church building. Most of it is now converted to flower beds, or covered with a dozen large vegetable grow boxes, whose harvests go to the local foodbank, all signalling that “The Earth is the Lord’s”. Every church should have at least 2 committees: A worship and an environmental one: I sincerely believe that personal salvation and environmental salvation go hand in hand.

Who Cares?

“The whole land will be laid waste because there is no one who cares”, laments Jeremiah somewhere. We are ‘the land’, because ‘earth we are’, and to earth we shall return. 

Will technology ever triumph over nature/God? The short answer is NEVER. We can’t cure with technology when technology caused our predicament in the first place. AI – Artificial Intelligence – requires so much ‘power’ that its goal is self-defeating, apart from the dangers it poses to human intelligence.

Life is a totality. The natural disasters we experience are unnatural because they are rooted in the separation of us and the land, of us and our fellow citizens, of us, and the divine. After all, ‘everything is connected to everything else’, is one of the 4 laws of ecology. Life is a totality, where ‘nothing ever disappears’, where ‘there is no free lunch’, and the indigenous people knew that ‘father, mother, sibling’ nature knows best. The original sin is ignoring these laws.

Expect matters to get worse: we are approaching ‘limits’ everywhere. By delaying dealing with matters unsolved, by ignoring problems pending, by shutting our eyes to the ‘cries of creation’ we hasten ‘the demise of the earth!’. Sounds melodramatic, sounds over-the-top, but nevertheless, I, from my perch in rural Eastern Ontario, Canada, know it to be true.

What’s next? Worse.

“VENGEANCE IS MINE”. God.

Temperatures in large parts of the Earth are soaring, flames engulf large regions everywhere, tornadoes ravage the Gulf of Mexico states, severe drought starve populations in southern Africa and climate extremes continue to taking over large parts of the Earth. Much like oncologists advising patients and their families of a terminal illness, so are climate scientists agonizing while reporting the advent of dangerous warming as temperatures rise and tipping points are broken”. 

That’s how a recent ARCTIC NEWS bulletin starts. Bad news, so people ignore it. Carpe Diem is the attitude: enjoy life while you can.

A bit of background.

God loves his creation. In good faith he endowed it to humanity, trusting that our forefathers would honor God’s gift, and develop it according to God’s instructions. Instead, we, just like our ancestors, preferred a different way, and God let us. Deuteronomy 32: 20 explains: “I will hide my face from them,” he said, “and see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful.” 

Remember: God’s timetable is different from ours: this was written 3-4000 years ago, but with God: “A Thousand years is like one day”.

We know now what we have done and face the consequences. We ignored the 7th commandment:

⁷ “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

God’s name is written on each single created item, trees, animals, humans, soil, air, seas, just to mention a few. Every created entity is holy, but to de-sacralise them, rob them of their God-ordained sacred status, as we have done and still are doing, comes with a price: our actions are backfiring on us: the entire God-designed system has its own built-in revenge mechanism. 

Two books.

All this reminds me of two books: Barbara W. Tuchman’s unequaled A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14^th Century, and James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia, Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity.

In Tuchman’s book I found a curious parallel to today. She writes that, “At the start of the 14^thCentury the Baltic Sea froze over twice.”  That was after years of stable weather. It was the beginning of a little ice age, which meant disaster: crops failed, because incessant rains, resulted in famine and starvation. When the Black Plague arrived – 1344- it found a weakened human race. Then the church too, with its monopoly on religion (no salvation outside the church), was in turmoil, ending up with 2 popes, one in Rome, one in Southern France, Avignon. Both popes lived in luxury and opulence.  Division of rich and poor became increasingly sharp. Wars resulted, followed by the Black Death that killed close to half of Europe’s population.

A Repeat?

There is a lesson for us: when the next pandemic appears, it too will find a sick population existing on synthetic food, void of nutrition and healthy elements, an easy prey for virulent pathogens, viruses that can cause death and destruction.

Today we have not cold and rain, but heat and hurricanes, floods and drought. All of central and southern Africa: Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Lesotho, have severe drought conditions, while to the African north civic strife causes much the same. 

The irony is that drought and the resulting death toll, can fully be traced to us, the rich West, and our CO2 production. We, you and I, caused the famine there. God knows.

The revenge of Gaia.

The late James Lovelock in his book, The Revenge of Gaia, writes: “Despite their differences in doctrines, the existence of the Earth’s disease, the fever brought us by a plague of people, come from religious and humanist beliefs which regard the Earth to be exploited for the good of humankind.” 

He basically writes that the Christian religion – heaven oriented – is to blame.

All this brings me to Vengeance is mine.

In the Bible, there is Jesus’ reminder, Vengeance in mine. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.

Wise words, because without exception, the Western economy – that means us – is to blame for our heat predicament. Our opulent state of affairs, the wealth we have created, has been achieved, at the expense of God’s cosmos. Prompted by Bonhoeffer’s thinking, I am more and more inclined to see the unity of God and Creation. “It is a dreadful thing to become victims of Climate Change: forest fires, hurricane sufferers, tornado trauma, heat strokes, failed crops, flooding.” Earthquakes later?

That’s why we now are the direct target of God’s vengeance, making true: “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”. (Hebrew 10: 31).

IT IS LATER THAN YOU THINK.

‘In the beginning”.

That’s how the Bible starts. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Then, untold many millions of years ago, everything was there in principle, ready to be deployed at the correct minute or hour, year or millennium.

However, after a glorious start in Paradise, we became impatient, and made a deal with the devil to speed development. That development has now taken its full course, and has resulted in degradation and dissolution, because what has a beginning, has an end, unlike God who has neither. 

In a sense, we are on a voyage; every voyage has a starting point, and a destination. How this adventure began is the concern of many a scientist, who will forever remain puzzled about ‘the beginning’ while offering plausible suppositions. They do agree that there is a beginning. The how and what remains a mystery to them.

The law of logic.

The law of logic suggests that whatever has an origin, also has an ending. That applies to individuals like me and you, it applies to everything we observe, and consequently, it applies to the world we live in. “In the beginning” indicates that there also is ‘the end’. And, it is my guts, my feeling, my intuition, my conviction, that THE END is much nearer than statistics or news reports or TV or politicians – who still push ‘growth’ – suggest, if they mention it at all. 

Enter Arctic News,

There is one exception, however: ARCTIC NEWS. It concludes that the Arctic’s terrestrial permafrost now emits more greenhouse gases than it stores, and the trend is likely to accelerate as temperatures keep rising, especially, in the Arctic. 

The highest carbon dioxide emissions over the 2000-2020 period came from inland waters and wildfires. Then the non-permafrost wetlands exhaled the most methane, and the dry tundra released the most nitrous oxide.

A drastic change is coming.

The prospect of further toxic releases looks dire. It is estimated that the upper three meters of the permafrost-tundra region stores 1,000 Giga tons– a Giga ton equals a billion tons – of soil organic carbon, while deeper deposits could store an additional amount of 1,000 Giga tons. The analysis concludes that the permafrost region is the largest carbon and nitrogen pool on Earth. Self-amplifying feedbacks and crossing of tipping points, as well as the loss of the aerosol masking effect and sunspots reaching a peak, could contribute to cause a further temperature rise from, say AD 1800, of over 10°C, in the process causing the cloud tipping points to get crossed that can push up the temperature rise by a further 8°C. 

We all die when it rises by 5°C. 

A sudden melting in the Far North where heat has accelerated beyond anywhere else on earth, that alone could do the trick. Out of sight, out of mind, but remember the first law of Ecology: Everything is connected to everything else. It may happen silently and gradual, and, just as collapse, it may happen suddenly. Altogether, the temperature rise may exceed 18°C by as early as 2026: as early as 2026! I believe: it’s later than you think!

Already a world in turmoil.

Economic anxieties are adding to divisions between rural and urban dwellers, unskilled and college educated workers, religious traditionalists and secularists. In France, Italy, Germany and Sweden, far-right politicians have seized on this dissatisfaction to promote nationalist, anti-immigrant agendas, while growth is slowing worldwide, making it harder to find solutions.

THE DAY OF THE LORD.

Don’t be surprised: 2,000 years ago, the Bible told us so.

But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. (2 PETER 3: 10)

Enter Jesus and John.

That the end will come unexpected, is re-confirmed multiple times in the Bible. Jesus, in Matthew 24 – that terrible chapter – also points out its suddenness: verse 36: “No one knows the day or the hour, only the father.” A thought goes through my mind: if creation and the creator are identical, as Bonhoeffer suggests, then creation herself knows the tipping point, just as a person, about to die, feels it coming.

 And then there is John’s Revelation. It too reveals a detail about the ‘when and how’.  Here’s another quote: Terrified at her torment, they will stand far off and cry: “Woe! Woe to you, great city, you mighty city of Babylon! In one hour your doom has come!’ 

Revelation 18 describes the present moment, 2024, when a surplus of luxury goods, thanks to cheap slaves, finds no market any more, and the system collapses.

Believe me: IT IS LATER THAN YOU THINK.

BE A PEACE INITIATOR 

The title of Dr. Paas’ book, VREDE OP AARDE, I have tentatively translated as PEACE ON THE PLANET, rather than PEACE ON EARTH, which misses the rolling ‘r’s’ in the Dutch; I did this to maintain the poetic stance of the original title. Also, the ‘planet’ includes air, seas, and is thus more comprehensive.

Before I translate his conclusions, found on the last two pages of this 400-page book, a few words about God’s Kingdom. Jesus, on earth, embodied the Kingdom. When a storm threatened to imperil the lives of his disciples, he ‘rebuked’ the wind. The word ‘rebuke’ indicates sharp disapproval. He used the same word when curing Peter’s mother-in-law. Both destructive weather and diseases do not fit into the New Creation which Jesus represented.

Just as Jesus, we, his followers, represent the Kingdom. “Seek first ‘the kingdom’”, is Jesus’ direct suggestion to us. Without that aim, we miss the entire message. The Kingdom? Yes, the Kingdom, God’s Holy Creation.

With that in mind, I turn to Stefan Paas’ book, PEACE ON THE PLANET.

Here is what Dr. Paas writes, and I translate his last two pages:

“For what purpose is Christendom on earth? Why should people actually be a Christian? Why would I invite others to become Christian? These were questions I posed at the beginning of this book. Well, at the end of this enquiry my answer is: Christendom is here to establish peace. It does this to generate intimate connections, to search for righteousness in the service of reconciliation, in the hopeful expectation of God’s Shalom. In that mission the aim is not to make people Christians; the real purpose is for them to become priests in partnership with God’s creation, mediators of the covenant. To become priests involves a change: we must be saved from ourselves, and from the powers that oppose God’s Peace. This salvation is to be found ‘in Christ’, and this makes it materially possible for us to shape communities of love, justice and reconciliation – the very fields in which the good news finds fruition. It is the calling of these communities to devote themselves to reconciliation, and to teach people how they can learn to become priests for this mission of reconciliation. The Christian proclamation, the liturgies, its practises and disciplines, inherent in the Christian faith, their communities, the pioneer-projects, the experiments and innovations, the prayers, exorcisms, prophesies, healings, songs and expressions of praise – all these many-faceted expressions of devotions, attain integrity and unity when we observe that all this has as their aim to witness to God’s shalom, to shape people for this task of reconciliation, to bind them to each other and to their co-creatures, in order to combat the powers that hinder the attaining of peace, to make us sensitive for righteousness, and actively contribute to reconciliation and peace/shalom.”

“Just as Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom in the context of Roman occupation, violence, and apocalyptic tensions, in the same way every salvation-theology is a discussion with the world of the day. My proposal in this last chapter – and on last page I should add – is not meant to assert that this is the only possible narrative concerning the Christian ‘way of salvation’, the so-called ‘soteriology’. Yet, I do think that it is a viable option in a polarized society in the shadow of a universal ecological crisis. 

“What does it actually mean to talk about God in the current situation, to experience him redemptively, and to live in hope in the expectation of the arrival of his peaceable Kingdom? 

“Just as I mentioned in my introduction, I don’t expect that my interpretation will lead to a mass-conversion. My goal was to write something which would cause Christians to be inspired anew, and again feel embraced in God’s mission. I hope that this book be a tool for leaders in the church and other Christians to be able to explain why all of us need to change and provide them with the tools to do so, and what it means to be a community of peace, and how this book can provide direction for Christian societal activities and politics. Theology must be lived and the story of God’s “Shalom is a story by which we can arrange our lives. It is a story that relates how friendships, the search for righteousness, and feeling at home in creation are equally the fields of God’s grace, are avenues along we yearn for God and his future, dead places in which we are raised to life, spaces in which we experience ourselves immensely loved.

“Yes: happy are the peace-initiators.”

So far, my translation.

When we pray, Your Kingdom Come, we really pray for God’s New Creation, the ultimate time when there will be comprehensive Peace on Earth.