Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

JUNE 1 2019

ETERNAL LIFE.

In a book with the simple title of HEAVEN, I found a quote by the philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, “Can you imagine anything more idiotic than the Christian idea of heaven? What kind of deity is it that would be capable of creating angels and men to sing praises day and night into all eternity?”

It reminds me of a hymn with a beautiful melody, but questionable words, “By the sea of Crystal saints in glory stand…. Robed in white apparel washed in Jesus’ blood, They now reign in heaven…”

I once attended a conference in Hamilton, where Dr. Lewis Smedes of Fuller Seminary spoke. He commented, “suppose you hate singing, and dislike white attire, would that mean that you don’t fit in heaven?”

The HEAVEN book is actually quite interesting. In it the authors, Colleen McDannell, an American, and Bernard Lang a German professor, depicted the changing views on HEAVEN during the last 1,000 years, from early remote monasteries, where the monks pictured heaven as paradise, to modern-day fundamentalists, more in tune with Billy Graham.

So, what brought this Heaven Talk on?

I am trying to get rid of stuff, books, magazines that I deemed important at one time, and saved, and saved, and never re-read. I came across an old TIME magazine, dated March 31 1997, more than 22 years old, asking DOES HEAVEN EXIST? Its cover page had a man standing on a cloud, peering upward, the right hand above the eyes. It contained some interesting statistics, such as, “Do you believe in the existence of heaven, where people live forever with God after they die?” 81 % said yes, and only 13% disagreed.

It reminded me of Billy Graham, interviewed by Larry King on CNN years ago. Larry asked him, “What happens when you die?” Billy: “Jesus will take me by the hand, and bring me to God”.

Billy apparently does not know his Bible. Paul writes to Timothy, “God, who alone is immortal, lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see”. (1 Tim. 6:16).

Frankly the common ‘heaven’ view is so outdated and also so misleading that a totally new take on heaven and eternity is needed. Will it happen?

A long time ago the Presbyterian Record published an article I had written, questioning the entire HEAVEN concept, which evoked a letter writer to call me a heretic. When I answered this charge, the editor declined to publish it and, in turn, sent me a book by Boston College Philosophy Professor Peter J. Kreeft, with the telling title, Heaven the Heart’s Deepest Longing. Last week I re-read the book, and found much that I liked, but, you guessed it, I had basic disagreement with its main thesis which spiritualizes heaven, and has no place for eternity on earth.

The book has one illustration which clearly shows its main thesis. On page 7 of the introduction the author depicts 3 different situations. He had drawn three tubes representing humanity. One tube is open-ended on both sides, the bottom arrow pointing to the world, the tube itself featuring humanity, while the top points to God, with the subscript, Traditional Western Religion.

The second tube, also depicting humanity, is closed on the bottom and open-ended on the top, pointing to God, describing Eastern Mysticism.

The third tube again representing humanity is closed to the top, thus God is eliminated, while the bottom is open to the world, and the description there is Modern Western Secularism.

Dr. Kreeft describes this as follows: “Think of humanity as a tube with two openings. The openings can be either open or closed. Think of God, as superhuman reality, as above the tube, and nature, or subhuman reality, as below it. Traditional religious wisdom tells us to be open at both ends so God can flow in one end and out the other: in the receptive ends first by faith and then out of the active end by works. But if the top opening is closed, our business becomes exclusively human action in the world, without a plugin to divine power.”

No tube but a triangle

I see it differently. Picture a triangle, with God on top, the earth and us, humans, on the other corners. Arrows to and from each of the three parties, indicating both dependence and interactions: God depends on us – without humans there is no Christ and no world – and we and the earth depend on God. We and the earth are also interdependent. That’s a truer depiction.

Manipulations.

So why has the church, have all churches, promoted heaven at the expense of the earth? I detect several reasons.

1. Greek Philosophy. When Socrates died, he welcomed death. In The Trials of Socrates, Plato depicts Socrates’ last moments before his death. Plato quotes Socrates: “I’ll no longer stay put, but will take my leave of you and depart for certain happy conditions of the blessed”.
   Socrates is certain that he’s on the way to heaven, and even says a prayer to the gods after drinking the poison: “‘One is, I suppose, permitted to utter a prayer to the gods – and one should do so – that one’s journey from this world to the next will prove fortunate”. Socrates died to celebrate death.
2. The church has taken the easy way out. It is much easier to sell heaven than to treat God’s earth as holy. That involves a radical shift in how we have to live.
3. Preaching heaven is a sort of manipulation. It gives power to the clergy. A recent New York Times article state that, “You can unite millions of people by making them believe in completely fictional stories about God, about race or about economics….and most important, the truth is often painful and disturbing. Hence if you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you.”

Yes, it is much easier to believe in heaven. Believing in earth as God’s precious possession, and thus as holy and to be treated with the same love we reserved for ourselves and our neighbors, would mean a totally different life. When Jesus tells us ‘TO LOVE GOD ABOVE ANYTHING ELSE’ then this simply means that we have to love all that God has created.

OUR CALLING AND TASK IN LIFE

Now that we are approaching the end of human society, it is high time that we reflect on what we are supposed to do or should have done as the human race.

It goes beyond dispute that we are on earth for a certain purpose: we were called to do something specific. When we were created and so entered into history, God charged us with a specific mandate. That mandate was to cultivate creation, to look after the earth and the air around us. God specifically outlined this cultural task to us, to become one with the earth, to serve it in all its manifestations, not only what lived and moved and had its being around us, but also, and even more as our primary task, to discover who we are and what we are and why we are. After all, we grow emotionally in line with our task, and by accomplishing one step we mentally and spiritually prepare ourselves to tackle the next phase and the next, because it is a never-ending assignment the Lord entrusted to us.

However, the task is two-fold. Not only are we assigned to bring to fruition what in its essence, its kernel so to say was and is dormant in creation, both its human and non-human potential that is waiting to become into being, the other side of the coin is to preserve what is there, and to treasure and cherish what God already had entrusted to us as guardians and safe-keepers.  

This dual goal, this two-sided assignment, holds for eternity as well. As a matter of fact only when we today are busy with both the discovery what is latent in creation, and with the preservation of what is already there, that we are allowed to continue that into eternity, when both aspects will continue unabated and without the impediments we now experience in our sinful state.

Brother, Sister, are you saved?

We are called to fulfill that cultural duty while simultaneously striving for salvation. Salvation not only means eternal redemption but also the fulfillment of the creational mandate.

Enter Dr. Okke Jager.

The name means nothing to most of you. He was well known in the Netherlands for the many lighthearted books he wrote and his connection to Christian Radio. His doctoral thesis – a near 600 page tome – was on “Het Eeuwige Leven”, LIFE ETERNAL, Vita Aeterna.

I acquired a copy of his book on November 29 1986. It was published in 1962. I did not read the entire volume, but carefully studied the last chapter, entitled Het Eeuwige Leven, Life Eternal, some 30 pages.

He writes, “Life Eternal is true life. It is endless, free from death and decomposition and disintegration, a perpetual communion with the living God…….Death starts the moment we are born, and eternal life starts when we are ‘born again’…. We are able to be a new creation already now…..Those who have eternal life are a new people…. We are both 100% the old Adam and 100% the new person, if we belong to Christ”

He quotes his own professor, Dr. G.C. Berkouwer, “The reality of the Second Coming (of Christ) will not be unfamiliar in comparison with life on earth. In a great measure it will compare to this life in all its complexity and immense variety… Only then ordinary, daily life will be revealed and recognized, with its real character.”

Okke Jager again: “That’s why the Second Coming (the Parousia) does not mean a suspension of time, but rather a return to the original notion of time”.

Both Okke Jager and J.H. Bavinck reaffirm that the real meaning of history is the realization of the Kingdom of God where “life eternal is an earthy life, a bodily experience”. The Greek notion negating the body is totally contrary to the biblical view. The Socrates-Plato view severs eternal life from the new earth, a heresy largely adopted by much of Christianity.

No marriage in The New Earth, but……..

“In the approaching New Age there will not be marriage, in the form of a sex- and procreation union, but there will be special ties, that are the extension of the kind of existence in which we find ourselves today.”

Okke Jager seems to imply that sexual intercourse will not be excluded. “Even though the difference between Creator and creature will be maintained, the relationship between persons and sexes will not be different but will return to its original divine status, where the human will resort to its particular place, crowned with glory and splendor.”

Okke Jager continues, “God created the humans as men and women and not as neutral, sex-less beings. In the New Age Genesis 1 remains in force, as evident from Jesus’ pronouncement, “Haven’t you read that in the beginning the Creator made both male and female, for this reason a man will leave to get married”, (Matthew 19:4).

Enough. Time to recapitulate.

We are approaching the end of history. Jesus has told us that in the END everything will be revealed. That’s why the Bible ends with the book of REVELATION, which basically proclaims this message.

There is an enormous misconception of what is in store for humanity. Rapture and heaven are just two of the most glaring lies.

Once the END comes, God’s people will not go to heaven. As Bonhoeffer, Bavinck and now Jager have stated, we are from the earth, exist from the earth – now thoroughly poisoned – and will wake up in the earth, when it is totally purged of all evil, including pollution. Jesus came to restore creation to its original pristine state.

We will then be pure women and men, totally cleansed from the state of impurity where we have existed, to enter LIFE TO THE FULL. Women will glorify in their femininity, man in their masculinity, as the French say, “Vive La Difference”.

That’s what Jesus taught us. He also taught us, in John 3: 16, that we too must love the earth as Jesus loved it, for which he gave his life.

THE BLACK SWAN

May 25 2019

Unexpressed emotions will never die.
They are buried alive, and will come forth later,
in uglier ways.
                              – Sigmund Freud

So, what’s the connection between Sigmund Freud and THE BLACK SWAN? Let me first go to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of the Black Swan, who describes it as follows:

“The Black Swan is first of all an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its concurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”

It’s my contention that the next BLACK SWAN will be the result of plain stupid stubbornness, stemming from repressed feelings.

Human folly is all around us. Stop watching TV, the height of contaminating foolishness, and exercise extreme caution reading newspapers as well. This past week I read an article in the Guardian, where the author wrote that in 1900 life expectance was 45 years. Over the 9 decades she saw almost a doubling of lifespan, and predicted that her grandchildren, given medical progress, would live forever.

That’s the sort of nonsense we constantly read, just as economists talk about perpetual growth in a finite world, equally impossible. Yet we all eat that claptrap, forgetting that nothing is predictable, because we generally are oblivious to the randomness in history, especially now, when the world is beset with immense problems.

Of course, in its well over 400 pages, the BLACK SWAN author never mentions the Bible, which has a number of Black Swan events, such as Adam and Eve, the couple selected to start a new humanity, quite quickly encountering a Black Swan that forever changed the fate of humanity: the simple act of picking a fruit. The flood was another example. The coming of Jesus, the arrival of God in perfect human form, most certainly qualifies as a Black Swan, as will his return, which also will come totally unexpected. The rise of Christianity, the Black Plague, both qualify as Black Swans.

Unexpressed emotions will never die.
They are buried alive, and will come forth later
in uglier ways.

Unexpressed emotions mostly happen on the personal level, with disastrous results, but there also is a collective consciousness, mostly unexpressed as well, affecting us all, differing from continent to continent, from language to language. It takes its form in shared beliefs, ideas, attitudes and knowledge. They are mostly faith-based, faith in permanent progress, blindness to reality and denial of human frailty and sin.

We, the human race persistently cling to false hopes, convinced that in the end all will be well, believing that science will provide an answer, that human intelligence will find a solution, that human ingenuity will get us out of the hole.

These unexpressed emotions have a life of their own, hidden deep in the human psyche, where they are buried alive, but in the end will emerge in ugly ways. When Euripides, 2500 years ago, observed that, “Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate, incurable, in each, the wounds they make,” this also applies to thwarted desires in the wider context. Now that these unexpressed emotions are starting to surface as false and beginning to have detrimental effects on the human race at large, we see the “yellow jackets in France”, the “Trump tragedy” in the USA, and the “ultra-right movement” everywhere. Soon civic obedience may turn to mass disobedience, to hatred and violence, and in the collective may cause wars and revolutions as the future turns ugly.

Frequent Grey Swans.

In terms of Black Swans: today there are multiple predictable perils out there, which could be called “Grey Swans”.

Here are a few examples. A report from the U. N. states that air pollution may be damaging every organ and virtually every cell in the body. These pollutants cause inflammation that then floods through the body, with ultrafine particles being carried into the bloodstream, and result in all sorts of ailments, also affecting the brain cells, reducing intelligence. Air pollution now plays havoc with 90 percent of the world’s population. I call that a Grey Swan.

Then there is famine looming, as there’s a distinct possibility that the world`s food situation will worsen. Excessive rain and floods in the lower Mid-West in the USA, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, spell trouble for the farmers there, unable to work the land. In China there are invasive pests feeding mainly on corn devouring many millions of acres, mostly in the south and southwest and moving northward at an alarming pace.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reports that the fall armyworm native to tropical and subtropical areas of the Americas, was observed in central and western Africa in early 2016. In addition to corn, the worms feed on over 80 other crops, including rice and millet. “In the absence of natural controls or good management, it can cause significant damage to crops,” said the organization.

And then there is the African swine fever.

The spread of African swine fever (ASF) in Asia is taking a worrisome turn. First reported in northeastern China in August 2018, the highly contagious, often fatal pig disease quickly swept through the country, causing the death or culling of more than 1 million pigs. In recent weeks, it has jumped borders to Vietnam, Cambodia, Mongolia, Hong Kong, and possibly North Korea. Animal health experts agree that the disease will inevitably spread farther. And many of the newly hit countries are even less prepared to deal with ASF than China, they say, which has so far failed to end its outbreaks.

Vietnam and Cambodia “probably do not have the technical abilities to be able to control ASF,” says François Roger, an animal epidemiologist at the French Agricultural Research Center for International Development in Montpellier. He believes the virus will soon surface in Myanmar and Laos which both have an ever weaker infrastructure. 

Back to THE BLACK SWAN. Its subtitle is “The impact of the HIGHLY IMPROBABLE”.

Thanks to CLIMATE CHANGE there’s no more such a matter as the highly improbable. Ugi Bardi, an Italian Professor, in his blog, Cassandra`s Legacy, writes: “Human Extinction, an idea whose time had to come”. Hugh McPherson, and many others, all scientists closely following the developments in the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland, predict Short-term Human Extinction, see the greatest danger in the melting of the Permafrost and the consequent release of huge amounts of methane and other gases, causing a sudden spike in Global Heating, and the onset of sudden death of all that lives.

Mainstream news sources and its clients, the automakers and utilities, the politicians and the bureaucrats deny this, and people, more interested in sport scores and lottery outcomes, and struggling daily to keep their heads above water, do not give this the attention it deserves.

Yes, the collective consciousness is in denial, which means that The Black Swan on the horizon will come as a total surprise. Blame this on the media, the frivolity of entertainment, and the reassuring sounds of those in power, whose faith commitment is reaffirmed by the clergy of all faiths in that human cleverness will triumph.

Watching too much TV and reading too many newspapers, and not reading enough Bible passages, lead to mental blindness.

I know, I am a Vox clamantis in deserto, a voice crying in the wilderness, like John the Baptizer 2000 years ago. 85 years ago Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany. This country, the birthplace of Luther, Bach, Goethe, Bismarck, overnight became a nation of barbarians, of the SS, the SD, the Holocaust. I am afraid that a second term of Trump will see a similar development.

The Dirty Thirties are upon us again. The untold trillions of personal, corporate and national debt, so easily created on the computer screen, called into being out of nothing, has become real money in the form of mortgages, junk bonds, shares and stocks, and needs to be repaid. When that is not possible, and it is not possible, the BLACK SWAN of world-wide depression, worse than the 1930’s will be upon us. Taleb in his book writes, “History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.”

The universal access to computers has made us strong believers in information, with Google at our fingertips, and that combined with television has dimmed our minds to knowledge and made us wisdom deficient, so evident in how we treat creation. We set ourselves up like sheep for the slaughter, comparable to turkeys at Thanksgiving. Here’s a quote from THE BLACK SWAN.

“Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race ‘looking out for its best interest’, as a politician would say. On the afternoon before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief”.

That’s the only time Taleb in his book, the BLACK SWAN uses the word belief. It reminds me of Matthew 24 where Jesus, as recorded in verses 38 – 39 tells his followers (and us today), “For in the days before the flood people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them (the sinners) away. That’s how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.”    

Peter, in 2 Peter 3, reaffirms this. Verse 10, “For the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear like a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”

So, yes, the Black Swan, the ultimate Black Swan, is approaching. All the signs are out there, becoming more pronounced by the day.

Years ago, just before Hitler came to power, in 1932-33 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, then, at the age of 26-27, and already connected to the university as a theologian with a double doctorate, gave a series of lectures on CREATION AND FALL.

Here’s how he introduced them, “The Church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end. “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing” (Isaiah 43: 18-19). The new is the real end of the old; the new, however, is Christ. Christ is the end of the old.”

Taleb in his book, the BLACK SWAN, writes that we need a different mentality. So true. “As we cannot push the problem under the rug, we will have to dig deeper into it. We behave as if the Black swan does not exist: human nature is not programmed for Black swans.”

That is also true for the church. Bonhoeffer is not popular there: he is too blunt.

I believe that there is a collective consciousness, mostly unexpressed, affecting us all, differing from continent to continent, from language to language.

With the back to the wall, all of us inwardly know that what we are engaged in cannot last. We repress these feelings, and these unexpressed emotions will come forth later, in uglier ways.

Again Revelation.

In Chapter 16 the bowls of God’s wrath – all human induced – are described. “Next, the fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and it was given power to scorch the people with fire. And the people were scorched by intense HEAT and they cursed the name of God who had authority over these plagues; yet they did NOT REPENT and give him glory.”

Unexpressed emotions will never die.
They are buried alive, and will come forth later,
in uglier ways: THE ULTIMATE BLACK SWAN.

But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? (Malachi 3:2)

MAY 18 2019

FATE OR PREDESTINATION?

Last week I read an intriguing interview with Dr. Hannah Critchlow. She broached a topic that has fascinated me for a long time: the matter of METANOIA, the Greek word for MIND-CHANGE. Of course she did not mention metanoia, but the concept definitely was there. , funded by readers

In her new book, THE SCIENCE OF FATE, the Cambridge professor, a neuroscientist, examines the role of fate in our lives. She asserts that much of our life is predetermined at birth, which diminishes the extent how much we are in control of our destiny: “Once you build up a perception of the world, you will ignore any information to the contrary.”

She writes, “It threads through different cultures and is deeply rooted in the way that we speak today; for instance, we often say that babies are born destined for greatness…. The genes, the basic neural circuitry that acts as foundation for his life is already there.”

Dr. Critchlow writes that anxiety, obesity, depression and addictive behavior have all been revealed to have a quite high hereditary basis. But of course, all these behaviors may be amplified and reinforced by the decisions of our parents.

She also confirms something that I have learned in life: “opposites attract”.

Another angle.

My spouse became a Master Grapho-Analyst and in a course, taught by a priest who had a doctorate in psychology, also a grapho-analyst, he taught the same concept that ‘opposites attract’. This also was based on personality types, already discovered by the ancient Greeks: (1) the choleric; (2) the sanguine; (3) the melancholic; and (4) the phlegmatic.

This priestly doctor renamed the 4 classes as (1) elephant, (2) butterfly, (3) frog, and (4) turtle. We have 5 married children, all in long-time stable relationships, and none have married in the same category: all married opposites. And so did I.

My parents were a butterfly (my father) – turtle combination; my wife’s parents were a butterfly (he, a preacher), elephant pair. Often salesmen – my father – politicians and preachers are butterflies, whose characteristics are cheerful, extrovert, spontaneous, humorous, talkative, while elephants, people like me, are aggressive, competitive, strong, perseverant, arrogant, leaders. Frogs and turtles make an excellent fit. Frogs are serious, intense, loyal, friendly, and make good teachers. Turtles are calm, gentle, neat, stubborn, disciplined, make good lawyers.

Dr. Critchlow discovered the same: opposites attract.

The interviewer asked her, “What else does neuroscience tell us about a successful relationship?”

She answered, “If you image the brains of the couples who have been together for a long, long time and ask them to think about their partner, their brain will react in the same way as a drug addict’s. You can almost say this couple is addicted to each other.

And here comes the crucial question, “So what does neuroscience tell us about how you might go about changing someone’s mind or winning an argument?”

Dr. Critchlow answered, “It’s very difficult. Once you have built up a perception of the world, you will ignore any information to the contrary. Your brain is already taking up about 20% of your total energy, so changing the way that you think is going to be quite cognitively costly. And it might be quite socially costly too”. 

And coupled with that, came the next question, The subtitle of your book is “Why your future is more predictable than you think”; ultimately, you argue that there is no such thing as free will?

She said, “We are just processing information within the cartography of our mind that gives rise mechanistically to our behavior. So the decisions that we think we are consciously deciding on and making, actually it’s all just an illusion that can be reduced to what our brain is telling us to do.”

My question: “Does her thesis prove “Predestination”?

If I understand her correctly, then she proposes that much of what we do and think is already preconditioned by our genes and upbringing. This makes it very difficult to break away and become a new person, change one’s personality.

And that brings me to METANOIA, a change in our mindset. According to Dr. Critchlow, a change in one’s mindset is next to impossible.

This statement made me go to my library, where I pulled four books on HEALING AND THE MIND.

I first read a book by Dr. Bernie S. Siegel, a surgeon, entitled, “Peace, Love and Healing.” The book was published in 1989; I bought it in 1990, and have now read it again after almost 30 years.

Its subtitle is “Body-Mind communication and the Path to Self-healing: an Exploration.” Loving care, a cheerful attitude, faith, all aid recovery. Toward the end he quotes Henri Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest, a close associate with Jean Vanier; he lived for a while in one of the Arche communities. 

Here’s the quote, “In his book Out of Solitude Nouwen tells us what it is to care. He begins by explaining that caring is not the attitude of the strong toward the weak: caring takes place between equals. The word ‘care’ has its roots in the Gothic kara, meaning to grieve, experience sorrow, cry out with. The person who really cares must join with the person in pain. Sometimes it is all that can be done, which is hard for anyone to accept, especially hard for doctors, trained as we are to be fixers and mechanics, not healers or caregivers.”

Healers before penicillin were trained that way. As a 10 year old in 1938 I had a bladder infection. The doctor prescribed bed-rest and came every day. Doctors then had little in the way of drug treatments; instead they had to know their patients and the circumstances of their lives to heal them.  

My second book was by Dr. Herbert Benson, Professor of Medicine at Harvard, who wrote, “Timeless Healing: the Power and Biology of Prayer.”

He has devoted the last 35 years of his life to finding scientific evidence to provide an answer to the question, “Does prayer have a therapeutic effect?”

He sought to provide a “bridge” between Medicine and Religion, which would help find a treatment for many diseases. After so many experiments conducted over 35 years at the Benson–Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine, Herbert Benson believes that there is indeed a relationship between prayer and health. He writes, “We found that there is a link between the physical condition of a person and any repeated activity of concentration he does, which involves control over random thoughts. Most people make it through prayer. So, we believe that when a person repeats a prayer over and over again, it can help cure a disease, especially if it is caused by stress.”

“Yes, there is a link between prayer and healing!” writes Dr. Benson. “We studied people who prayed repeatedly and were very focused during the prayer. The magnetic resonance imaging showed that there was a decrease in metabolism, heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate and brain activity.

Thus, we gotscientific proof that prayer affects body functions and fights stress.

At the same time, the scientific team focused only on the possibility when a patient prays for himself, as the experiments were not directed towards the possibility of others to pray for a patient’s health. All major religions contain that power.

Bill Moyers, in his introduction to the third book I consulted, Healing and the Mind, wonders, “Why is it that about 60 percent of outpatient visits to primary care physicians are related to stress or mind/body interactions?” This is confirmed in ancient medical science, which told us that our minds and bodies are one.  The Latin phrase, Mens Sana in Corpore Sano comes to mind.

Under the aegis of PBS Bill Moyers wrote this beautifully illustrated book, dividing it into five major sections

• The Art of Healing
• Healing from within
• The Mind/Body Connection
• The Mystery of Chi
• Wounded Healers.

Bill Moyers interviewed numerous medical experts asking them how thoughts and feelings influence health and how healing is related to the mind. He even traveled to China to experience a culture whose model of human health is so different from the American one. In this 368 page book he convincingly shows that minding the ‘mind’ connection, patients heal faster, leave the hospital sooner and do better once they get home.

Dr. Deepak Chopra wrote Ageless Bodies, Timeless Mind, with as subtitle, “The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old”. In it he also pursues the mind/body approach, and shows that, by following his prescription for anti-aging, the effects of aging are largely preventable.

I can testify that, ever since I quit smoking in 1959, started running in 1960 and became a vegetarian a few years later this regime has paid off for me.

That the Mind/Body connection is important leaves no doubt. However the four books are more than 20 years old. Now, with organized religion rapidly losing ground, computerized medicine surging, information technology accelerating, and the personal touch lacking, the Mind/Body symbiosis is bound to suffer.

Will Dr. Critchlow’s discovery further stall that development?

Back to the beginning.

Dr. Hannah Critchlow, in her book, THE SCIENCE OF FATE, examines the role of fate in our lives. She asserts that much of our life is predetermined at birth, which diminishes the extent how much we are in control of our destiny: “Once you build up a perception of the world, you will ignore any information to the contrary.”

If she is correct in her assessment, this Cambridge professor and neuroscientist and an astute student of our nerve-system, further sets back the entire mind/body phenomenon.

Earlier I posed the question, “Does her thesis prove “Predestination”?

Predestination is the teaching that God foreordained all that will happen, including the salvation of some and not of others. She asserts that much of our life is predetermined at birth, which diminishes the extent how much we are in control of our destiny.

Romans 8:30 tells me that, “And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.” That to me points to predestination, that oh-so controversial doctrine.    

Yes, Dr. Hannah Critchlow asserts that much of our life is predetermined at birth. She believes that to a large extent our destiny is shaped at birth. She believes in FATE. I believe in PREDESTINATION. Are they the same?

Fate in Ancient Greece is a phenomenon that is inescapable; through interaction and close relationship with the gods, the fates of humans may be extended, but cannot be changed.

I am a religious person, and I believe that we are not mere random acts, creatures that are born, live and die, and then disappear into the eternal void, leaving little or no trace. I am fortunate that I have known my grandparents on both sides. I have lived with them and observed them in their daily lives. Both my paternal and my maternal grandparents were members of the same large rural church, and both were elders there. They too shaped me spiritually as much as my parents did physically.

I do admit that the Predestination concept is confusing. Dr. Critchlow claims that life is pre-determined, that we cannot change. Predestination says the same, but also implies that we remain responsible for our actions. Yet in many ways it resembles the Greek concept of FATE.

And how does all this relate to the Mind-Body phenomenon, to Prayer and Healing, to Peace and Love? Perhaps my reasoning here is somewhat farfetched, but I do believe that when we make Christ the center of our existence, see him as the ultimate human being and pursue the KINGDOM vision, where we consciously relate to the Earth and all that lives, then we will LIVE a Mind-Body-Spirit existence, the life God intended for us in the Beginning.

When all our actions – including seeing one’s body and all of creation as holy – are geared toward THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM, when we already now strive to live forever in perfection, then we are destined for eternity, where life-to-the-full will be experienced.

Christ did not come to bring religion. Christ came to teach us how to live.

MAY 11 2019

NEAR-TERM COLLAPSE

This year I actually welcomed the black flies. Fortunately I am immune to their bites. When I noticed them last week for the first time this spring, boldly buzzing around my head, I thanked the Lord: not yet a “Silent Spring”.

When Rachel Carson wrote “Silent Spring” – I received it as a member of a book club – I gave it away without ever reading it. That was in 1962: then I was totally oblivious to anything other than the generally acceptable opinions in all fields, including church matters, seeing my church as the only true one. 

Now, more than 55 years later, I have changed radically. Frankly I don’t trust public utterances anymore. I drive sparingly (so far 1,000 km in 2019) a VW diesel, buying the company line that diesel was the best car for the environment. It’s a 2002 model, and I will hang on to it, as, I am told, the carbon footprint of manufacturing a car is more than the fuel it will ever burn.

And then there is Boeing, which I also regarded as an honest company. That too is no longer true since their 737 Max deception. The plane is like the Chevy II which Ralph Nader labelled as ‘Unsafe at any speed.”

Bad news for the earth.

This was the week when one day was set aside to broadcast the bad news for the earth. Below are some quotes from 2 major newspapers, The New York Times, and The Guardian, commenting on the UN report that creation is in trouble.  

• The Guardian wrote that around the world, nature and the benefits it provides are in unprecedented decline – a trend that can be reversed, but only with a coordinated international effort and “transformative change” to the way humans draw food, water, energy and resources from the planet, a sweeping new report has found.
• The NYT said, “Human society is in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems, the world’s leading scientists have warned, as they announced the results of the most thorough planetary health check ever undertaken. From coral reefs flickering out beneath the oceans to rainforests desiccating into savannahs, nature is being destroyed at a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10m years, according to the UN global assessment report. The biomass of wild mammals has fallen by 82%, natural ecosystems have lost about half their area and a million species are at risk of extinction – all largely as a result of human actions, said the study, compiled over three years by more than 450 scientists and diplomats.”

There it is. Don’t for a minute believe that it will mean change in human conduct. On the contrary: with an ever growing world population, more people are vying for a higher standard of living. However, due to drought, soil erosion and floods, expect higher food prices. The same will be true for energy and natural resources, as easy access is gone, and with Energy Return on Energy Invested decreasing there too expect inflation.

Let’s face it. We are dealing here with 8 billion human beings, all bewitched by pictures of opulence of preposterous proportions, in spite of panoramas of unequaled inequality; all enamored by visions of unprecedented prosperity: they will never voluntary surrender their privileged position; all denying reality; all cloaked in utopian stupor and hiding behind fumes of ignorance until the boom is lowered, and, like anaesthetized alcoholics, stagger into the oncoming avalanches, overwhelmed by raw reality.

The Bills are due.

For the last 200 years we have used soil, water, air as a gift of nature. But, as one of the laws of Ecology states, “Nothing comes Free.” For TWO CENTURIES we’ve had a free ride. The UN has estimated that nature has provided the economies of the Americas with $24 trillion worth of non-monetized benefits each year: free water, free air, free soil. Now nature is calling for payment: restore or collapse. Nature is not a patsy: it is unforgiving.

 “The most important thing isn’t necessarily that we’re losing .?.?. 1 million species — although that’s important, don’t misunderstand me,” Robert Watson, chairman of the U.N. panel that authored the UN report, told the Washington Post. “The bigger issue is the way it will affect human well-being, as we’ve said many times — food, water, energy, human health.”

In other words: Humanity is inevitably on a globe-spanning murder-suicide track. Yes, Near-Term Collapse.

I read last week, “Things that can’t continue usually stop too late.” We fail to remember that all 8 billion of us owe our existence to a six-inch – a mere 15cm – layer of topsoil and the right amount of rain: not too much, not too little. Now 75 percent, a full three-quarter of that soil has been tampered with, saturated with pesticides, clogged with carbon-based fertilizer, basically poisoned beyond belief and beyond relief. Good luck.

The UN report did not mention what happens way Up North, around the Arctic, where the global heating is double or more than elsewhere, liberating, if that is the right word, the much more lethal methane and the even more deadly N20, Nitrous Oxide, the same poison that I generate with my diesel motor. The only matter that can be predicted with a great degree of certainty is NEAR-TERM COLLAPSE.

Volkswagen, Boeing and the US government with Trump – who last week passed a real milestone: his 10,000^th LIE – all attempted to hide the truth, for the sake of profit. They rightly deserve to forfeit my trust.

History has shown that a civilization collapses when there is a collapse of trust. The same applies to fiat money. An empire, a state, a family, any social structure, rich or poor, powerful or weak, new or old, happy or sad, if there is no trust it cannot exist for long. That’s what happened to the Roman Empire; that’s what’s happening to us. As Matthew 12: 25 says, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand”.

Ultimately, trust is based on truth. Without truth, there cannot be trust. “The Truth shall set you free”, Jesus said. In Roman times, the fight of Christianity against the Empire of Lies was more than everything else a fight to rebuild trust by establishing a new truth, the revealed one.

And now? We are rapidly entering a phase where the lies told to us by our governments and our elites are so huge, so pervasive, so blatant, that only the Devil can be the driving force behind all this, true to 1 John 5:19: “The whole world is under the power of The Evil One.”  

In the great confusion of our times even the good among us are confused, they can’t discern the truth anymore. And the time may have come when we need a new generation of Martyrs for truth is needed.

“Climate change modelers have not understood that one of the things that they should be concerned about is near-term collapse. The rising wealth disparity in recent years is a major indicator that the world economy may be headed toward collapse,” writes Gail Tverberg in her The Finite Earth blog.

Let’s face it.

The commitments made by countries in the Paris accord don’t get us to a 2 degree world unless of course the entirety of civilization does a 180 today, which won’t happen.

Insects are disappearing at 6 times the speed of larger animals and at a rate of about 2.5% of their biomass every year. These are our pollinators. These are links in our food chain. These represent the basic functioning of every terrestrial ecosystem.

58% of the biomass of vertebrate life on earth has been lost since 1970.

Drought – or too much rain – in nearly every food producing place in the world is expected to intensify rapidly and make them basically unusable.  

We can no longer save the society that we live in and many of us are going to be dead long before our life expectancy would suggest.

If your idea of hope is having some slightly modified Standard of living going forward and live to ripe old age… there is no hope. This civilization is over…

It all started in Paradise, the Garden of Eden.

Capitalism started in Paradise when the human pair saw the fruit tree there in a different light, re-arranging the priority from the aesthetic to the economic, from first seeing the Tree as an object of beauty – look at Genesis 2: 9-  and later – Genesis 3: 6 – “the tree was good for food”.

Once we abandoned the beauty principle and made the economic the measure of life, the chain of destruction was set into motion. We now gather the bitter harvest: cosmic disaster.

It reminds me of Revelation 18: 11-14,

“And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn over her, because no one buys their cargoes any more— cargoes of gold and silver and precious stones and pearls and fine linen and purple and silk and scarlet, and every kind of citron wood and every article of ivory and every article made from very costly wood and bronze and iron and marble,  and cinnamon and spice and incense and perfume and frankincense and wine and olive oil and fine flour and wheat and cattle and sheep, and cargoes of horses and chariots and slaves and human lives. “The fruit you long for has gone from you, and all things that were luxurious and splendid have passed away from you and men will no longer find them.”

That passage of the Bible outlines the END of Capitalism: economic collapse, societal collapse: lots of stuff on the market, but no buyers. The fruit in Paradise – see above – you longed for has gone.

Rather than pursuing beauty, as was the wish of the Creator, you, WE, have gone after things luxurious and splendid, and now we harvest the bitter results.

It is as plain as daylight: “The Bible tells you so”, as that simple children song has told us.

No, it is not too late. Yes, it is too late to avert NEAR-TERM COLLAPSE. That was evident already is Paradise: already then the first step to Collapse was taken. We now are at the end-game, almost at the finishing line. 

ENTER JOHN THE BAPTIZER

So…… What must we do? Good question.

Matthew 3 starts out with these words,

“In those days John the Baptizer came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, “Repent for the Kingdom of heaven is near.”

It strikes me that John chose the ‘wilderness’ to start his mission, just as today the WORD comes to us “in the wilderness” we have created. Why did John pick that location? Environmentalist he was, he did that for a purpose: all deserts were products of humans infringing on paradise. When God created ‘in the beginning’, the entire Middle East, the entire world, was tree-covered and productive. Deserts are the by-products of human exploitation and lead to war. Syria was the breadbasket of the Middle East until Climate Change and human stupidity made it food-deficient and caused the farmers to rise up in desperation. 

Today is the time for REPENTANCE. That’s the gospel we have to proclaim, “Repent for the Kingdom of heaven is near.” That Kingdom is the New Creation, the restored Paradise, the pristine Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve started out and failed: greenhorns as they were.

The Greek word for repentance is METANOIA, where the ‘meta’ indicates ‘change’ and the ‘noia’ points to ‘mindset’. We need a totally new way of thinking, from ‘profit’ to ‘beauty’, from exploitation to preservation, from destruction to enhancement of creation. With every step we take, with every thought we have, with every idea we conceive, the overriding concern must be the ultimate task we have: be servants to creation: honor God, the Creator, by word and deed, especially the latter.

It is too late to avoid near-term collapse. It is not too late to change, to undergo true METANOIA.

MAY 4 2019

THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS TRIO.

BUT FIRST….

Now that we are approaching the end of human society, it may be an opportune time to reflect on what we should have done as the human race or still are supposed to do at this late hour.

It goes beyond dispute that we are on earth for a certain purpose: we were called to do something specific. When we were created and so entered into history, God charged us with a particular mandate. That mandate was to cultivate creation, to look after the earth, the waters and the air around us. God specifically instructed us to become one with the earth – ‘earth you are and to earth you shall return’  – to serve creation in all its manifestations, not only to take care of all that lives and moves and has its being around us, but also, and especially to discover who we ourselves are and why we are what we are.

When we do this we will grow emotionally in line with our task,   and, by doing so, we also will increasingly mature mentally and spiritually so that we will be ready for the next phase and the next, because it is a never-ending assignment the Lord entrusted to us.

Therefore our task is two-fold: not only did God charge us to bring to fruition what in its essence was and is dormant in creation, both its human and non-human potential that is waiting to come into being, but also to preserve what is there, and to treasure and cherish what God already had entrusted to us as guardians and safe-keepers.

This dual purpose, this two-sided task of exploring and preserving holds for eternity as well: in the hereafter we simply continue what we started here, true to Revelation 14: 13, where it is promised that “our good deeds shall follow us”.

These ‘good deeds’ refer both to the positive actions and explorations we have done in creation and the intellectual and spiritual growth we have undergone. As a matter of fact only when we today are engaged with discovering what is latent in creation and in our own minds and with preserving of what is already there, then we are allowed to keep doing this into eternity, when both aspects will continue unabated but without the impediments we now experience in our sinful state.

We are called to fulfill this cultural duty while simultaneously striving for salvation, because salvation not only involves eternal redemption – honoring the Creator – but also fulfilling the creational laws. Or, as Dr. J.H. Bavinck formulated it, “personal salvation and creational redemption are two sides of the same coin: you can’t have one without the other.”

THE AMERICAN RELIGION

With that in mind I approach what in North America is labeled as Christianity, and why it has become exactly the opposite of what the Bible teaches.

Enter Dr. Harold Bloom, America’s foremost literary critic, who calls himself a gnostic Jew. In his THE AMERICAN RELIGION, subtitled, “The emergence of the Post-Christian Nation”, he identifies the American Religion as a variation of Gnosticism.

In my NIV Study Bible, in the introduction to the letters of the apostle John, there is a brief description of Gnosticism, which, it says, is “one of the most dangerous heresies”. Its central teaching is that spirit is entirely good and matter is entirely evil. Thus the body, anything substantial, such as creation, is evil. Salvation is escape from the body, such as going to heaven.

No wonder Dr. Bloom postulates that what commonly is called “Christianity” no longer deserves that label. He writes, “The American Religion masks itself as Protestant Christianity, yet has ceased to be Christian” Instead, “The flag and the fetus symbolize the American Religion”. He concludes his 1991 book, “The Twenty First Century will mark the full-scale return to the wars of religion.”

This prophecy is now being fulfilled: we have entered the most dangerous period in the history of the world, with two world-wars occurring simultaneously, both religious in nature: (1) The War against Creation; (2) The Middle East War.

Rapture and Zionism.

Almost all, 80% of white evangelicals – the adherents of the American Religion – voted for Trump in 2016, and his popularity amongst them remains high – in the 70s percent. Whilst other white voters may have become disheartened by Trump’s foreign policy white evangelicals have become his last, solid bastion. They are not insignificant either: they form some 25% of all Americans.

By now I hate the word ‘evangelicals’. Its root meaning is eu-angelos, which translates as “the good News”. In my opinion it now stands for the opposite. “Kak-angelist”, the bringers of Bad News, is a better designation. The Bad News consists of two teachings, which characterize these American believers: Rapture and Zionism. Both are totally unbiblical, by which I mean that there is no substantiation for these teachings in the Scriptures: on the contrary.

Based on some Old Testament passages proponents of the Zionism heresy argue that in Israel the temple will be rebuilt and then Christ will return. These beliefs clash with New Testament texts such as Hebrew 8: 13 where it says that, “By calling this covenant “new,” Christ has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.” The first covenant was based on temple worship. The second, new covenant is based on Christ who is the head of the New Covenant.                               

Christ is the end/fulfillment (telos) of the law (Romans 10: 4 and 2 Corinthians 1: 20), thus the Old Testament cannot be used as support for the modern secular state of Israel. As a matter of fact, the rending of the curtain between the Holy and the Holy of Holies, in the Temple when Jesus died, was definite proof that temple worship was a thing of the past.

Zionists have donated millions of dollars to this cause because they see it as a necessary precursor to the Tribulation – the Temple must be re-established for the End Times scenario to be played out. The Christian Zionist organizations believe that the Old Testament prophets, when they talk about returning to Israel, refer to the future today. The Rapture is another fabrication, completely refuted in Matthew 24: 39, which categorically states that the SINNERS will be taken out and THE BELIEVERS left behind on the holy earth.

These dangerous beliefs are professed and pursued by two of the most prominent US government officials: Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State, and Mike Pence, the US Vice-President.

Both men are obsessed with these heresies and actually happy about wars and fighting in the Middle East, because they are the key preconditions for ‘Rapture’ and Armageddon.

Mike Pompeo and Vice-President Pence are strongly of this ‘Evangelical’ orientation, while Trump worships himself, seeing himself as god. Their ‘religious’ views deeply influence  their foreign policy: During his tenure as CIA director, and before that as a member of the House of Representatives, Pompeo has consistently used language that casts the war on terrorism as a cosmic, DIVINE battle of good and evil. He has referred to Islamic terrorists as  “continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray, and stand and fight, and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior, and is truly the only solution for our world”.

In connection with IRAN, Pompeo used identical language, implying that Iran is the cosmic ‘evil’.

This style of Apocalyptic or Rapture language has been adopted wholesale by Trump, and his Administration. “To worship our Lord and celebrate our nation at the same place is not only our right,” Pompeo told attendees at a Kansas rally in 2015: “It is our duty.” He added, “We will continue to fight these battles,” the then Congressman said at a church in Wichita. “It is a never-ending struggle … until the Rapture. Be part of it. Be in the fight!”

Pompeo’s reference to Rapture is important: The Rapture is a distinctively American theology that says Christians will be taken up, or “raptured,” into heaven, at the onset of the End Times … and a number of GOP politicians allow their belief in Rapture theology to influence their political worldview. Because the Rapture is ultimately desirable — it marks the return of Jesus Christ — anything that hastens it such as war, is desirable too.

For many evangelicals, apocalyptic “good versus evil” battles, particularly centred on the “Holy Land” of the Middle East, are signs that the longed-for end may be at hand”.

And then there is the Other War, the WAR against creation, which will immensely speed up once a hot war emerges. Already up to a million species face extinction, many within decades, according to a recent UN report, and three-quarters of Earth’s land surface has been “severely altered”.

A third of ocean fish stocks are in decline, and the rest, barring a few, are harvested at the very edge of sustainability.

A dramatic die-off of pollinating insects, especially bees, threatens essential crops valued at half-a-trillion dollars annually. The Trump regime does everything in its power to hasten this extinction process, believing that it is bringing on Armageddon, the end of the world.

The American millenarian ‘myth’, then and now, was (and is), similarly rooted in a messianic belief in the Manifest Destiny of the United States: ‘the New Jerusalem’ that would represent humanity’s best hope for a utopian future. This belief in a special destiny (being ‘chosen’) is reflected in a conviction that the United States must lead – or more properly, has the duty to coerce – mankind towards its universalist destiny.

Although Trump, when he was campaigning promised to end US involved in wars, his actions today speak otherwise. Such as providing lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military, or nixing the short-range nuclear missile ban, or joining the Saudi’s genocidal war on Yemen, or threatening to topple the government of Venezuela, or stirring up trouble in the South China Sea. At every turn, Trump has backtracked on his promise to break with tradition and “stop toppling regimes and overthrowing governments.” …’ At every turn, Trump has joined the ranks of the war hawks he once criticized.

Trump is now marching in lockstep with the foreign policy establishment. In Libya, in Sudan, in Somalia, in Iran, in Lebanon, he is faithfully implementing the neocon agenda. Trump “the peacemaker” is nowhere to be found, while Trump the ‘madman with a knife’ is on the loose.

This whole is underpinned through the extensive Evangelical base that forms Trump’s key constituency.

And with the resurfacing of neoconservative policies, comes, inevitably, their ancient attitude towards Russia as an existential struggle that can have only one outcome – Russia’s collapse, leading to regime change – either via war or means short of war. All elements of western policy are geared to that one inalterable objective.

Trump’s instinct has been to cling ever closer to his loyal supporters. Almost alone among major demographic groups, white evangelicals are overwhelmingly in favour of Trump’s border wall, which some preachers equate with fortifications in the Bible.

But here is the point: There lurks a major danger in this ideologically ‘non-rational’ set-up. One that threatens us all – and may explain the Russian raising of their ‘threat status’. Trump’s instincts still remain that a channel with Mr. Putin is essential. But the demonization of Russia has not been stilled with the publication of the Mueller investigation. It will just swap to a new narrative.

The pressures on Trump from his Bolton-Evangelical team, to hasten End Time with an Apocalyptic good-versus-evil struggle, linked the Christian Zionists’ Greater Israel ambition, will increasingly mount, with Trump offering up Iran, and so advancing Rapture, and immensely pleasing Pompeo and Pence.

The major danger is that Trump is not fearful of nuclear war – at least not in the way earlier generations of US leaders were. Trump has manifested a strange and worrying fatalism about nuclear conflict.

I deeply believe that, “personal salvation and creational redemption are two sides of the same coin: you can’t have one without the other.” The American Religion is the complete opposite: destroy creation because it is evil, and flee this evil earth to become gods. Trump, Pompeo and Pence in their respective offices strive for these goals which make them THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS TRIO.

APRIL 27 2019

WHY THAT CHURCH FIRE?

To everything there is a season,
and a time for every purpose under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to break down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to count as lost,
a time to keep and a time to discard,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

Yes, this is a passage from the Bible. You’ll find it in Ecclesiastes 3.  There’s a time for everything, even to read the Bible once and a while.

That same Bible book, Ecclesiastes, its first chapter tells me, “There’s nothing new under the sun”. That, I think, is debatable. There IS something new under the sun: universal pollution, of which plastic is a symbol, and Climate Change another example. Well, perhaps I am wrong here: come to think, there really is nothing new, because pollution is a form of SIN, perhaps the ultimate sin, because it directly affects THE CREATOR. Sin, of course, has always been there: what is new is its universal nature. But Climate Change – the direct result of SIN – IS new!

Yes, there is “a time to be silent and a time to speak”. Today it’s time to speak, to speak loud and clear, to speak in unambiguous terms: POLLUTING IS SIN. To be silent today when the fate of creation is at play is sin, is to discard The Message, which is all about God’s world, which he created to his glory, because “God So Loved the World!!”

I also believe that we are in the home-stretch: now that everything goes global, it’s also now or never. By that I mean that it soon may be too late to change minds. I base that on the very last chapter of the very last Bible book, where a curious text appears. Revelation 22: 11:

“Let the one who does wrong continue to do wrong; let the vile person continue to be vile; let the one who does right continue to do right; and let the holy person continue to be holy.”

These words suggest to me that the lines are drawn, that the lots have been cast, that minds have been made up, that there’s no turning back once the End appears. Perhaps, by the grace of God, there even may be such a thing as a last minute conversion.

And that brings me to the Notre Dame de Paris.

Nothing happens by chance. I see the fire at Our Lady of Paris, as a significant event, as a symbol of a changing world. The church took 200 years to build: it made unfit for service, in mere hours. Creation took millions of years to develop: we destroyed it in 200 years, mere minutes on the world’s timescale.

Yes, it is tragic; A Human masterpiece gone up in flames; a symbol of old-fashioned, dated, Christianity vanishing forever; a relic of antiquity gone; a work of art, the result of 2 centuries of painful exertion and sacrifice by thousands of the faithful, vanquished before our eyes.

The believers 800 years ago had a long-time line, just as the painstaking artisans in Barcelona still struggle after many decades to finish the Sagrada Familia Basilica designed by Antonio Gaudi.

Why did this fire happen?

Nothing comes about just by chance. What lies behind this disaster? Is it a symbol of the state of Christianity today, which itself, is in total disarray? Is it a foretaste of what is in store for the world at large? Is the rending of the curtain in the Jerusalem Temple, when Jesus died, invalidating the Old Testament rituals, similar to the destruction of Notre Dame de Paris? I think so.

That sign 2000 years ago, in Jerusalem, the very centre of the World’s monotheistic religion, also had a mysterious origin. I imagine that the Priests, on duty in the Temple when Jesus died, noticed that ostentatious opening in that heavy curtain, exposing the out-of-bounds Holy of Holies. Of course the temple warden, the overseer of that sacred building, questioned the staff then present, but all pleaded both ignorance and astonishment that this tightly woven, soundproof, ultra-thick piece of tapestry could be so brutally ripped. (See Mark 15: 38).

That this sacrilegious act was truly ‘an act of God’ and really signaled the end of Temple Worship, and the very start of the world-wide “Christ”-ian faith, was not understood.

I see the fire at the Notre Dame as similar: the end of institutional religion.

Fact is that all of Christianity is at a crossroad. The heaven destination is more and more being questioned, and with it, ‘heaven-resembling’ monuments, such as most church buildings.

It’s no secret that today the Roman Catholic Church has never been so divided. The Protestant portion – its main body being in the USA – has become a political movement, where tolerance is no longer tolerated.

The Notre Dame fire suggests to me that worshiping in buildings made by human hands is a thing of the past. It suggests to me that ALL of life needs a new approach. I also believe that, just as God’s hand was involved in opening up the church’s roof to the sun and moon and stars, so this same hand made sure that the 180,000 bees in three hives on the roof, were spared, protected from the intense heat.

A different era.

When the Notre Dame de Paris was built, all of life was focused on the church: everybody was automatically a member. The clergy saw itself as the “sole servants of salvation”. Latin was the church language and Nulla Salus Extra Ecclesiam – no salvation outside the church- was generally accepted as the real truth.

Also the original designers of the building had a different idea of life than we do, witness the Gargoyles on the periphery of the church roof. These half-human, half-beast demons carved out of stone, were a good indications of the general belief of the populace then: evil was always at the doorsteps.

Then the choice was brutal: either be faithful to the church and obey its dictates, or face the Inquisition and go to hell. That’s why the church was built as a portal to heaven: that’s why the ceiling in the church was so elevated, prominently featuring God’s angels.

Then there always was the stark choice, heaven or hell, and the church’s message was equally unambiguous: come to church, daily is better, confess sins to the priest, who’s there instead of God, and be saved.

Now, if you were allowed to enter that burned out hull today, the tableau is totally different: Open Sky. The walls are scarred, but access to the open air, to the sun and moon and stars, has been given free reign. After 800 years, God’s sunshine, God’s moonlight, God’s starry twinkling sky directly beams unto the debris now littering the floor where the footprints of some 20 generations of worshipers are embedded. The Holy Ground has been contaminated, just as the earth everywhere has been poisoned by us, screaming for deliverance.

Another church, another fire.

Years ago my wife and I visited Berlin and, in the city’s very centre, there were the ruins of an old church: no roof, open windows like hollowed-out eyes, charred, bullet-pocketed walls: the former Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, left in its war-damaged state: a silent, eloquent memento to what happened during World War II.   

It is my considerate opinion that Notre Dame de Paris also should not be rebuilt. It should be left a skeleton, a reminder to the world of our universal WAR against creation, just as that church in Berlin, also located in the very heart of Germany’s Capital City, still is a silent witness to the evil forces of warfare.

Yes, the church should never be rebuilt, in spite of solemn pledges by the suddenly pious plutocrats, who probably believe that this is a cheap way to heaven: after all what is 100 Million Euros when you have billions of that stuff. If there were a call to help the poor – would that same money be forthcoming?

Also, the rebuilding is now in the clutches of the bureaucrats, in spite of billions pledged, these pledges may never be cashed, because the entire process will be subject to all sorts of circumstances, such as safety concerns, design delays, economic turmoil, weather disasters, and clerical infighting.     

WHY THE FIRE?

Why the fire in what is known as Holy Week? Nothing happens by chance. The fire was pre-ordained. It was a warning that what happened on Monday April 15 was a prelude to what is coming on a day in the near future when, as 2 Peter 3: 10 has predicted,

“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up.”

Today that mysterious fire signals to me the symbolic end of the ‘building-centered’ Christian religion. It is typical that Billions are pledged to rebuild this temple, while the real task of the church is to seek the lost and to help the destitute, and, above all, to treat God’s creation as holy.

The last thing we need is another building. There are more than 5000 church buildings in France alone that are in a poor state of repair and most of them totally under-utilized: empty all week, except for a few hardy souls, mostly old.

Thirteen Thousand Oak Trees were sacrificed to construct the roof alone of this building: tall, mature, straight trunks of pure wood. Are there still enough of those around in our age of forest’s massacres? Should we even try to find them, at a time when every single tree is needed to combat Climate Change?

From bad to worse.

The environmental news becomes more ominous by the day. Yet the Climate Change deniers are a powerful force. The nation of France is deeply divided, and this has spawned the Yellow Vest movement, objecting to a fuel tax that penalizes especially the less wealthy class. The same is true in Canada where in recent elections those who favor carbon tax have been defeated.

Yes, the news is bad. In ecological terms, things are getting worse faster than anticipated, leaving humanity with increasingly limited options or no option at all. Everyone agrees that there are no quick and easy fixes, so do not expect any truly sustainable fixes to emerge from the political or the industrial mind.

Yes, there is “a time to be silent and a time to speak”.

Today it’s time to speak, to speak loud and clear, to speak in unambiguous terms: POLLUTING IS SIN. It’s time to act, to escape the carbon trap. To not act when the fate of creation is at play is sin, is to discard The Message, which is all about God’s world, which he created to his glory, because God So Loved the World!!

News has a short lifespan these days: two weeks ago Paris. Last week, hundreds killed in Sri Lanka, both involving churches. Is the Lord telling us that Church buildings are becoming a trap?  

On Pentecost in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, the church too was on fire: people actually were sporting flames on their heads, signs of the presence of the Spirit.

Then the church had no buildings. From there on, for 400 years, the church grew and grew without any buildings, simply house gatherings.

Why that church fire? Is that a sign that the time for church buildings is over? Back to basics? Back to house churches? Back to neighbors inviting neighbors?

Why that church fire? Lots of questions.