Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

SEPTEMBER 22 2018

ARE WE COMMITTING INFANTICIDE?

All economists talk debt nowadays, meaning money owed in loans to financial institutions, or in bonds issued by governments on all levels and by corporations. Monetary debt is always repaid somehow either by being discharged in full, by getting a discount or by writing off the loan which will be the case for much of the money owed world-wide, now more than $250 trillion.
Consider this simple calculation: Twenty years ago there was $40 trillion of debt in the world; today there is $250 trillion. The leverage of the world has gone from 1.3 times the world’s GDP, which is stable, to 3.3 times, which basically means the world has created huge temporary prosperity by burying itself in debt: the world’s economy, the so fabulous rate of growth, has entirely been artificially created by debt.

No wonder there is trouble on the horizon.
1. Interest rates are rising, because inflation is shooting up as droughts and floods play havoc with harvests. Blame Climate Change.
2. Entitlements. I like that word: it suggests that we are entitled, are worthy, have a right, to receive life-long pensions and free medical care. With people living longer, a lot longer, pension funds are not really able to fulfill their obligations. Also the rates of return on money are too low, causing a double whammy. Combine that with (1) older people increasingly having physical problems such as dementia, cancer, fragile bones, all calling for care, so medical bills balloon, (2) while fewer enter the workforce, signaling double trouble.
3. And then there is the world at large: it is dying, and that too requires remedial measures. Just take last week’s hurricane: it will take untold billions to heal the damage caused by Hurricane Florence, perhaps as much as 50 billion, while the USA budget is already in the red to the tune of more than $800 billion for this fiscal year, with $1 Trillion deficit expected next year.
4. The ultimate result will be that quite soon all lenders will go broke: governments, pension funds, mortgage companies, and with them the people, billions of them, now depending on the generosity of these sources. Yes, even the so celebrated Ontario Teachers Retirement Fund which pays teachers a pension equal to 70% of their highest earnings will be affected. And then what?

What is meant by DEBT?

The German/Dutch word for Debt is SCHULD, which has two meanings:
(1) debt/trespass, as in Dutch “Vergeef ons onze schulden” = Forgive us our trespasses, and
(2) blame/guilt/fault/sin.
We simply are sinful people. In the very beginning Adam faulted Eve for taking the fruit: “she was to blame” (het was haar schuld), he told God. Debt is a form of SIN, especially where it concerns environmental debt, taking more from the earth than we are entitled to. So, yes, the wages of DEBT is DEATH. Not for nothing is a loan against a property called a MORT-gage. The word MORT means death.

New Times.

Today creation is calling in the debt owed to it by revolting against humanity. Tomorrow the financial world will do the same. It will be foreclosing on the money debt, and that means the collapse of the Capitalistic world, the system that has been a Capital Offence against everything and everybody that exists.

The most dangerous debt.

Indeed, greater than the monetary gap is the creational debt, simply impossible to express in dollars and cents. This much greater deficit is the environmental emptiness we have pushed on our children and grandchildren. How in the world do we remedy that situation? To the extent that we are today eroding the carrying capacity on which future generations would otherwise depend, our way of life could be characterized as intergenerational “predation”, or to put it bluntly, we, the old, are “eating” our young, we are committing infanticide.

Deterioration.

It definitely looks that the climate situation is getting worse, of which the Florence fiasco is just one of the many. Take far away Asia. There six great river valleys have supported most of human civilization for the past 5,000 years. During that time, the snow melt from the region’s high plateaus has always arrived at precisely the right moment, and in precisely the right volume, to support the crops upon which the region’s teeming billions rely, while another billion people plus depend on the monsoon arriving at the right time, and in the right place, each year. And yet, as the planet heats up and sea levels rise, the pattern of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal and elsewhere will change. If they grow stronger and start roaring north toward the 250 million people living at or near sea level in the greater Ganges Delta, the world will face a long train of catastrophes.

The international community is in no way prepared for such a scenario. Just look at the US, the wealthiest country in the world: it wasn’t ready for Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, or for Hurricane Sandy in New York, or for Hurricane Harvey in Houston, or for Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, which is now estimated to have taken 2,975 lives.
And the latest? Florence is hitting perhaps the most vulnerable of all states, the Carolinas, with close to 10 million pigs, lots of buried chemicals and the filthy slurry of pig effluence. On every TV screen we see a disaster of epic proportions unfolding.

Remember: these last five hurricanes have been among the most damaging in US history, and they have all occurred in just the past 15 years. The severity of their impact was not merely a product of administrative incompetence or the increased density of coastal residential and commercial development. Precisely it was the predictable result of a changing climate. Even worse, as natural disasters go, these were small pinpricks compared to what the future holds in store if current trends continue.

There’s one more.

So I have mentioned two kinds of debts or deficits: monetary and environmental. There is one more.

There also is what I could call “the GOD deficit”, ”the religious” debt, the moral inheritance our ancestors have left us, and we scorn.

By this I mean such matters as ‘faith of our fathers’, and the ingrained work ethic, the thrift and human frugality that were typical of those grown up during the depression of the 1930’s and before, when 90 percent of the population in the Western world had to live by their wits, depending on family, neighbors and friends, when there was little governments could do or wanted to do to help those in need.

These three different debts mean that everything is different: money owed that will never be repaid; environmental deficits that will never be remedied; a Religious heritage that is in the process of disappearing, so it’s no wonder the ECONOMIST doesn’t get it.

The Economist, that venerable British weekly magazine, last week published a special 175 year MANIFESTO, lamenting that the world is failing to rekindle the spirit of Radicalism. By Radicalism it means unfettered liberalism. It correctly states that during its 175 years of being the world’s leading periodical, life expectancy has increased from 30 to 70 years globally and literacy from less than 10% to more than 80. So, by rights, people should be extremely happy, but the contrary is true: the world is at odds with itself: discontent is universal.

The Economist blames the current moral malaise on the upper 1 percent, and calls on them for a return to compassion and genuine sharing.

It is true that global literacy has increased, but this has given people a false sense of accomplishment. Years ago Dr. Johan Huizinga wrote, “Onderwijs maakt onder-wijs”, indicating that “A little learning is a dangerous thing”.

A little knowledge makes people over-confident and unwilling to be led, while leaders are at loss as well, causing people such as Trump to exploit ignorance, by claiming scientific observations such as Climate Change, diet guidelines, exercise benefits and religious givens to be seen as fake news.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle summed it up neatly when he noted “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” This was confirmed a couple of centuries earlier by the Chinese philosopher Confucius who observed, “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing”, said Socrates.

The trouble is that, with the God Deficit, true wisdom too has gone, with living in a polluted, plastic filled climate minds too are affected, while pressing money problems cloud people’s judgement.

The Economist does not understand that we live in a different world where ignorance reigns, where people no longer can be influenced by so-called ‘rational’ policies. We are hooked on CARBON and will do so till the bitter end.

Of course people like Kate Raworth, an Oxford professor, struggle with this and have come up with good solutions. She has devised the “The Doughnut” symbol, focusing on the need for a deep renewal of economic theory and policymaking so that the continued widespread political prioritization of gross domestic product growth is replaced by an economic vision that seeks to transform economies.

Years ago E. F. Schumacher in SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL too found a wide following, but the opposite happened: bigger became better. Goudzwaard et al. in several publications such as AID FOR THE OVERDEVELOPED WEST, and BEYOND POVERTY AND AFFLUENCE, just to name two, also offered reasonable solutions.

The deciding factor in all cases is human nature. Attempts at wholesale redistribution haven’t worked out very well in the real world. Virtually all gains for the developing poor these days come in the context of economic growth that disproportionately benefits the wealthy and drives ecological overshoot.

Sorry, Economist, Sorry, Raworth, Sorry, Goudzwaard, there is no solution as human nature – conceived and born in sin – will never change. On the contrary, as the world turns uglier, so will humanity. As Gandhi said, the Earth provides enough to satisfy everyone’s need but not everyone’s greed.

That does not mean that we should give up. Revelation 14: 13 clearly states that “our deeds will follow us into eternity”, so praise to Schumacher and Goudzwaard and Raworth and the many others who struggle to make this world a better place to live.

What all these learned academics forget is that human nature is stuck in a paradigm that is promoted by the politicians, who talk one way- sometimes- and act a different way, because they want to be reelected, and nobody remains in power by preaching restraint and implying, let alone openly advocating, hardship now to ensure a future for the next generation.

The TRUMP phenomenon depends entirely on denial, and exploitation of the earth’s scarce resources. The increasing ferocity of forest fires and the increasing incidence of ever more destructive hurricanes simply do not translate in a greater awareness of Climate Change.

ARE WE REALLY COMMITTING INFANTICIDE?

By and large organized Christianity preaches only one aspect of sin, by concentrating on personal misbehavior. However, the original sin in the Garden of Eden was two-fold: disobeying an explicit divine command, and an environmental sin. That’s why J.H. Bavinck, in his book “Between the Beginning and the End, a Radical Kingdom Vision,” categorically states that (page 34-35):
“It is God’s intent to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one overarching harmony. There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved in him. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all wise will of him who lives and rules for ever.”

Does that mean that debt, especially environmental debt, killing our children with our extravagant lifestyle, is a sin against the Kingdom, and as such against the Holy Spirit?
That is a question I will not answer. Suffice it to say that there is such a thing as JUDGEMENT day, where each one of us will be called on the carpet before the Ultimate Judge who is the only ONE who really knows what goes on in our hearts.

SEPTEMBER 15 2018

ENDS AND ODDS

The End of Oil, Paul Robert;
The End of Science, John Horgan;
The End of Nature, Bill McKibben;
The End of History, Francis Fukuyama;
The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin;
The End of the World, A history, by Otto Friedrich;
The Beginning and the End: the Bible

Except for Fukuyama’s, all the other books I have.

THE ENDS.

THE END OF OIL I bought in 2004 in Kingston,Ont. Then Peak Oil was much in the news. I even attended a Peak Oil conference in Boston where at Boston University many learned people predicted that very event. Today, thanks to fracking, oil flows liberally, even though the environmental effects are disastrous, especially the abundant release of methane, that ultra-dangerous gas.
Still, for the time being, No End of Oil, but rapid increases in carbon-based Climate Change.

THE END OF SCIENCE I bought in 1996 in Raleigh, NC, when our youngest daughter lived there. John Horgan, then staff writer for the Scientific American gave his book the subtitle of `Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age.”
I think he was unto something. Today we see some refinement here and there, such as the Apple gadgets, but not really anything new. Sticking my neck out, I believe that we have reached the limit of scientific knowledge, while stupidity has no bounds as we see a drastic decline in wisdom, due to the disappearing ‘fear of the Lord’, which is the beginning of wisdom.

Bill McKibben wrote THE END OF NATURE, not fully realizing then, 30 years ago, how accurate he was: a real plus for this man. His book appeared years before the onset of rapid Climate Change.

THE END OF HISTORY: Francis Fukuyama, an American political philosopher, entered the global imagination at the end of the Cold War when he prophesied the “end of history” — a belief that, after the fall of communism, free-market liberal democracy had won out and would become the world’s “final form of human government.
How wrong he was. Today we see the opposite happening: right-wing movements, dictatorships are popping up everywhere: more like the end of democracy, of which Trump in the USA and Doug Ford, in my home province of Ontario, are the symptoms.

THE END OF WORK: Jeremy Rifkin in 1995 wrote that the decline of the Global Labor Force will be caused by the increasing influence of computers, robots and telecommunication devices. Indeed, he was quite prophetic in his prediction.

THE END OF THE WORLD, a History, was written by Otto Friedrich. I bought it in 1986, more than 30 years ago.
He divides it in three books:
Book I: Barbarians at the Gates:
The Sack of Rome, A.D. 410; the Birth of the Inquisition: 1209-44.
Book II: The Eye of God:
The Black Death 1347-50; the New Jerusalem 1525-33; the Lisbon Earthquake, 1755.
Book III: In Our Time:
The Coming Revolution, 1905; The Kingdom of Auschwitz, 1940-45; Epilogue, The Great War.

Of course, the End of the World did not come but many people centuries ago were deeply religious and saw these events as The Hand of God. Today, when the real End of the World is at hand, this religious notion is strikingly absent.

THE BIBLE: The Beginning and the End.

Well, the world still turns, and The End has not yet come, but multiple endings occur continuously, such as species vanishing, forever, democracies disappearing, dictatorships emerging, rampant anger and civility ceasing, the End of stable weather, the End of Capitalism, and, at the very end, THE END, when the Lord returns, pretty soon, I think.
We should not forget that the Bible is completely written with THE END in mind. Jesus came to prepare us for THE END. In the Sermon on the Mount, that very Christian Manifesto, he sums it all up with the words, “Be Tele-ios, as I am Tele-ios”, (Matthew 5: 48), which is translated as “Be perfect”. However, it really means “Always keep The End is mind”, the End as in Tele-phone, Tele-gram, Tele-pathy, Tele-vision, Tele-scope, all referring to the TELOS, the word for END or FAR AWAY in Greek.

THE ODDS

The ODDS refers to something unusual, something out of the ordinary, such as the unusual hurricane striking at North Carolina.
August had no significant storms in the Atlantic and people on the East coast felt better, North Carolina especially because the government there, when a scientific report came in that North Carolina with many low lying areas, was a sitting duck for rising seas, the government passed a law banning policies on such forecasts. So it allowed further expansion, also in pig farms, which now have 9 million hogs. The odds are that this poses more than a mere threat. There also are a dozen or so nuclear reactors there. The odds there are frightening in the extreme, as the plants generally reside near a body of water—a river, lake, estuary or ocean—because they require a constant source of water for cooling purposes. Without cooling water, a nuclear reactor will overheat, leading to core damage, containment failure, and release of harmful radiation into the environment.

Global Warming and Hurricane frequency go hand in hand: this past week I counted 9 of them churning their ways across the earth’s major waterbodies, four in the Atlantic and five in the Pacific.

Odds are that this is just the beginning: the dangers from the seas are just the start. And they are not the only threats that face us. New technology and climate change might make the world more different than we can possibly imagine.

The odds are that the job market will change the way we work. It could quite well mean the End of Work, as AI, Artificial Intelligence, outwits the ever shrinking brain capacity of the average human.
Neil Postman wrote “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”. That Death refers mostly to the death of thinking and the ability to reason critically. All our gadgets are making us less human and more like robots. Fight it tooth and nail: your spiritual wellbeing depends on it!

Some people believe that machine learning and robotics will make humans economically redundant. I believe that more rapidly than we can imagine, the way we work will change, but, somehow we will not, and that will cause untold misery. In many ways we are what we do: our work defines us.

There are certain dangers lurking out there, dangers totally new to our generation: computer! We are as much products of what we feel as what we think. And computers now know that. Already algorithms control much of our daily lives. Odds are that Google and Facebook will exercise undue influence.

The Bible is right: un-equality is becoming the norm. In Matthew 25 Jesus is quoted, “For everyone who has will be given more and he will have an abundance.” (Verse 29). In the past few decades, people all over the world have been told that humanity is on the path to equality. Yet the world has never felt more unequal with vast wealth and power concentrated in the hands of the few while others have nothing. This is very bad and may well get worse unless we do something about it.

Beware of online communities such as Facebook. Odds are that they are being spied upon. But the greatest dangers lurk in ecological disasters.

The ODDS on Climate Change.

Arctic sea ice isn’t just threatened by the melting of ice around its edges, a new study has found: Warmer water that originated hundreds of miles away has penetrated deep into the interior of the Arctic.
That “archived” heat, currently trapped below the surface, has the potential to melt the region’s entire sea-ice pack if it reaches the surface, researchers say.
The study appears online Aug. 29 in the journal Science Advances.
“We document a striking ocean warming in one of the main basins of the interior Arctic Ocean, the Canadian Basin,” said lead author Mary-Louise Timmermans, a professor of geology and geophysics at Yale University. She is Canadian-born, and has a perfect Dutch name.
She writes, “The upper ocean in the Canadian Basin has seen a two-fold increase in heat content over the past 30 years, the researchers said. They traced the source to waters hundreds of miles to the south, where reduced sea ice has left the surface ocean more exposed to summer solar warming. In turn, Arctic winds are driving the warmer water north, but below the surface waters.
“This means the effects of sea-ice loss are not limited to the ice-free regions themselves, but also lead to increased heat accumulation in the interior of the Arctic Ocean that can have climate effects well beyond the summer season,” Timmermans said. “Presently this heat is trapped below the surface layer. Should it be mixed up to the surface, there is enough heat to entirely melt the sea-ice pack that covers this region for most of the year.”
All this perfectly confirms what Dr. Guy McPherson has preached for the last decade. See his ARCTIC NEWS blog.

We live in an Age of Transition, from the normal, steady state, to the abnormal, unsteady state. Nothing is certain anymore. The past no longer holds lessons for us. Does that mean THE END OF HISTORY?

The ODDS on religion.

The odds are that faith in the return to earth of Jesus to restore creation, as he promised when he ascended to heaven, will wane, while false faiths will proliferate. Religion once provided meaning and identity, which it still does in my life, but, by and large churches have lost their bearings, and movements have taken on sectarian and bigoted views.
As natural disasters multiply, despair and hopelessness will abound.

Odds are there will be a backlash against immigrants at a time when the economy is faltering and traditional jobs are under threat. But immigration can be a force for good, both economically and socially in helping different cultures to understand one another better. The key is to find the balance between bad immigration and good immigration before everyone is either controlled by Google or wiped out by a natural disaster.

Terrorism

Billions are spent to prevent bad people to harm good people. I am writing this on September 11 that notorious date when the twin towers in the World Trade Center in New York City were attacked and some 3000 people died. Yet world-wide more than One Million people die in automobile accidents each year, 3000 every day! It’s about time we abolish cars and make the world Bike-Friendly, but the odds are that this will never happen.
True, if terrorists get their hands on nuclear weapons that would be scary.

Love.

With us being on the brink of a climate change catastrophe combined with economic collapse, will I really continue to love my neighbor as myself? What are the odds there?
I really do not dare to speculate on such a situation. The Bible – Matthew 24: 12 – tells us that, “Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold”. Already there’s something like donor fatigue: the problems everywhere are giving rise to far-right movements, truly scary.

So what is the answer?

Try Meditation: I meditate for two hours or longer every day while preparing for my blog. Turn off television, listen to good music, walk, run, bike, do physical exercises to clear your mind. Read good books. Discuss matters of importance with others.

We need to worry, because modern life does present plenty of reasons for concern: terrorism, climate change, the rise of A.I., encroachments on our privacy, even the apparent decline of international cooperation.

No, I am not a pessimist. I am a cheerful guy, always upbeat, take pleasure in life, love my wife and extended family, but when I run, (3 times per week) my running mantra is MARANATHA, LORD COME QUICKLY, because time is short.

Fortunately the Lord will cut short the age of trial for the sake of the saints, but, for the time being it will get a lot worse: the tribulations are about to start, and there won’t be a pre-tribulation Rapture.

SEPTEMBER 8 2018

MY STRUGGLE

I grew up in a time in the Netherlands when all facets of my family life were ruled by RELIGION: I attended Christian schools on all levels. My father was a member of a Christian Political Party, then in power. My mother attended meetings of the Christian Women Association. My older brother played on a Christian Soccer Team. We read a Christian Daily Newspaper. Everything was Christian, Christian Radio, Christian …. You name it.

That same mentality was still alive and well among the thousands of Dutch immigrants, I among them, who arrived on Canada’s shores in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.

In 1955 we moved from Hamilton to St. Catharines, then a hotbed of that sort of thinking thanks to some leading figures there, such as Marinus Koole and Dr. Paul Schrotenboer, our minister, American by birth. Every week I met with a group to study the philosophy of Dooyeweerdt, a Free University (Amsterdam) professor, whose book was incomprehensible. Never mind. Also I was among the scores of young adults attending the Unionville conferences, where enthusiasm for a new approach to Christian thinking was invigorating.

I soon got involved in the Christian School Movement, functioning for 6 years as the secretary of both the board of Ontario Alliance of Christian Schools, and the local Christian School (1959-65). When in 1965 2,500 Christian Reformed young people from all over the USA and Canada came to a Young Peoples’ Convention in Niagara Falls, I chaired the committee organizing this huge 4 day event.

Always the activist, I was an elder in the Christian Reformed Church and, when we moved to Tweed, also in the Presbyterian Church, at one time chairing the regional assembly of their churches, the so-called Presbytery, for 2 years, and becoming the convener of the National Board of Trustees for 4 years, overseeing the denominational finances and pension funds.

Disillusioned?

Today I am not so sure any more about the merits of all these bodies. My outlook has changed, and I sense that stagnation has affected most Christian enterprises. So what’s lacking?

I believe it is the overall religious outlook that is missing. The late Dr. Evan Runner, Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Mich., some decades ago, coined the phrase LIFE IS RELIGION, a state that has been the norm from time immemorial.

Recently I started to read THE ILIAD by Homer, a 2500 year old 600 page Greek story, all about Helen and Troy, about Agamemnon and Achilles and, of course, Odysseus and the gods, oh my, all sorts of them: the book is saturated with religion.

I love the books by Tony Hillerman as he describes the goings on in Navajo country in New Mexico and Arizona, everything ensconced in religious symbols, so typical of most aboriginal life.

The Middle Ages were that too. Dr. Johan Huizinga starts his classic THE WANING OF THE MIDDLE AGES as follows: (As I only have the 1972, 50th anniversary edition in Dutch, HERFTTIJ DER MIDDELEEUWEN, here is my translation),
“When the world was 500 years younger (now 600 years), life’s happenings were much more sharply delineated than today. Between suffering and elation, between natural disasters and happiness, the distance seemed much greater than is the case now. Whatever people then experienced, it still had that quality of immediacy and finality, comparable to the joy and sadness so typical of children. Every expression of life’s happenings, every action was accompanied by highly expressive religious rituals, had the value and symbols of a strict and enduring lifestyle. Big events such as birth, marriage, death, because they were seen as fundamental, were anchored and shrouded in divine mystery. But also the less momentous occasions, a voyage, a certain undertaking, or simply a visit, were accompanied by an untold number of blessings, ceremonies, proverbs, and traditional formulations.”

The Middle Ages were so unlike today. Then “Religion” included every action, every movement. Today the connotation “Religious” suffers from negative overtones, such as anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-earth, anti-almost everything, but pro-heaven, pro-Trump, pro-gun and pro- economic growth.

We no longer are awed by anything, and with that lack of reverence, God too is gone, banned from his very own earth. Where not too long ago moving to a new continent meant parting for life, today we routinely travel to the ends of the earth as easily as visiting a neighbor – if we still do that.
God – religion – is reserved for an hour on Sunday, with only a minute portion of the population in attendance, usually old traditionalists and often fervent heaven-believers.

Will the church survive?

It’s difficult for the church today. The sex scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, and the division there between progressives- the Pope- and conservatives – the Curia – is out in the open. Also the entire religious spectrum has to compete with 24/7 TV ads, offering a much more attractive picture, while daily life is so busy that there is no time for reflection. Today conformity reigns.

Pope Francis again.

His visit to Ireland kindled all these reflections. There, once a bastion of Roman Catholic thinking, the Pope received a cold reception, greeted with jeers. How have times changed! Not so long ago Ireland was the most Catholic of all catholic nations. Not so long ago I was the most active of all active Christians. And how have I changed!

All inclusive.

In my church, St. Andrew’s Tweed, hangs a large Celtic cross crafted by one of our parishioners. The orb, the circle at the centre of the cross, is said to represent the globe, expressing the desire to hold together the revelation of God in creation and the revelation of God in the Scriptures. The cross, of course, represents Jesus’ sacrificial death to regain creation. Together they reflect the practice of listening for the living Word in nature as well as in the Bible.

That God is present in all creation was certainly the conviction of the ninth-century philosopher, John Scotus Eriugena, perhaps the greatest teacher of the Celtic branch of the church ever produced. His name simply means John, the Scotsman from Ireland.

He taught that Christ moves among us in two shoes, as it were, one shoe being that of Creation, the other that of the Scriptures, and stressed the need to be as alert and attentive to Christ moving among us in creation as we are to the voice of Christ in the Scriptures. One of his prayers was, “Show to us that in everything we touch, in every one we meet we see your presence.”

The basic goodness in creation is a special feature of Celtic Christianity. Says the Irish John: “God’s divine goodness is the essence of the whole universe and its substance. Evil is opposed to the existence of creation and where goodness is creative, evil is destructive.”

As so often happens in the church, true reformers and true radicals are not tolerated by the ecclesiastical authorities. I know that feeling. In 1225 the main writings of John the Irishman, were condemned by the Pope and in 1685 they were placed on the Index, the papal list of forbidden writings. But the Celtic influence persisted. The people of the many islands off the Scottish coast, the Hebrides, living in isolation for centuries, retained much of the Celtic religion in their traditions.

My struggle.

My struggle is with my growing conviction that today God has ceased to speak, has ceased to be heard in the church, has ceased to have any influence in society on a general level, even though he still works in people’s hearts.

My struggle concerns my growing unease, perhaps sadness that the message of an all-inclusive faith is not getting through. With Elijah I too take comfort from 1 Kings 19: 18, “Yet I reserve seven thousand in Israel–all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and whose mouths have not kissed him.”

The attitude of The Irish John and Celtic spirituality in general is diametrically opposed to the materialism we have in our world, shaped by gnostic Roman Catholic and Protestant dualism. The bible is very clear on this.

Take Colossians 1:15 -20, that beautiful passage exemplifies the Celtic Spirit more than any other. This is what verse 15 says: Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. Jordan Peterson in his book “The Twelve Steps, an antidote to Chaos”, points to this passage. I believe that when God planned the creation, he started with duplicating himself in the form of Jesus Christ, in the form of a human being, the firstborn of all creation. We are his image: we look like Christ, created from the lowest material, the ‘Ur’ stuff of creation: clay. That’s why we must love The Earth.

Verse 16 continues in that vein: “For by Christ all things were created.” That makes “all things” HOLY! Celtic Religion saw it that way, but the church objected, even till today: hence my struggle. Doctrine, church dogma, human wisdom, became the measure of faith at the expense of creation. We now see the result. We see a world plagued with pollution, plagued with poverty, plagued with a plurality of pains.

Again the closeness to creation, but also the sense that Christ is in everything, including ourselves, based on this very bible passage in Col.1:19, where it says that God was pleased to have all God’s fullness dwell in Jesus. Celtic confession states that,
Christ be with me, Christ within me
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

Celtic Christianity does not see a gap between heaven and earth, no, the two are seen as inseparably intertwined.

A long time ago the now defunct Presbyterian Record had a review on a book called: “The Celtic Way of Evangelism: How Christians can reach the West.”

The author outlines five proven Celtic Church practices he believes are needed today.

(1) We need to move from the ‘lone ranger’ approach in the church, where the minister is the all and in all, to partnership forms of ministry.

(2) We must create ‘neo-monastic church communities’ as places of formation for modern Christians.

I know that this is difficult in our subdivided world, where each is on his/her own in our own dwelling. Monastic means communal living, as in a convent or monastery, but then for families. It is something that need to be explored and, who knows, the future may impose this sort of living on us. Curiously in the October 9 2003 issue of the New York Review of Books, discussing Father and Son McNeil’s book, The Human Web, the authors recommend the formation of primary communities, ”Religious sects and congregations are the principal candidates for this role.”

(3) We must develop imaginative/ contemplative prayer patterns.
I have been a member of our prayer group for years and recommend this.

(4) Practice open and full hospitality as our prime response to those who are seeking.

We are all very private people and not prone to open our houses and hearts to others. In our busyness, we think we have no time for this.

(5) Rediscover that belonging comes before believing for those new to the faith.

These are new times.

We see every day what the current way of Christianity is bringing to the world: destruction and pollution.
The Celtic cross expresses this plainly. The orb, the circle at the centre of the cross represents the world, and expresses the desire to hold together the revelation of God in creation and the revelation of God in scriptures.

The Good News is that this evil world, now dominated by, yes, The Evil One, (see 1 John 5: 19), is about to undergo a metamorphosis – a total radical change. Only those who equally undergo a METANOIA – a total change of mind – a mentality that recognizes AND implements a life that, in principle, resembles life in eternity, will inherit the new earth: the meek, those who live simple lives, will inherit the earth. (Psalm 37: 11)

Sadly, I see little or no signs that this is happening on a communal level, which makes me echo Jesus’ words: Luke 18: 8, “However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

SEPTEMBER 1 2018

Globe and Mail HEADLINE.

“Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”.

“The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.”
Balzac
We all are criminals. We all have great wealth, even the poorest among us are rich by historical standards. We all have cars, all have late model TVs, all live, on an average, more than 80 years, something unheard off 100 years ago.

How is that possible?

The horrible truth is that we all thrive on the proceeds of a crime, a crime that nobody mentions, a crime that remained unacknowledged for some 200 years, and is now coming to haunt us to death.

“Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”. That was the headline in the Globe and Mail of Saturday August 25 2018. How true!

Laws are supposed to rule our lives. There still is a glimmer in us of the Divine Law, “Love God above everything else, and our neighbors as ourselves”, but that facet is fading fast, also because we give it a pious twist, as if we can love an unseen God. We can’t. We can’t love someone who is invisible: only Moses, God’s friend, was allowed to see a glimpse of God’s back.

‘God is invisible’, Paul wrote to his protégé Timothy, “God lives in inapproachable light, whom nobody can see or has seen” (1 Tim. 6:16). It is impossible to love something unseen. That’s why God can only really be honored, can only really be praised properly, can only really be loved, when we embrace and value his creation above everything else. That’s how we adore great artists: by their legacy.

From the rising of the sun, to the hour of its setting, our constant pre-occupation ought to be: loving God’s creation in all its manifestations. Not doing this, results in sin and sin results in DEATH. Romans 6: 23 says it unequivocally, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”.

When the headline in Canada’s leading newspaper says, “Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”, then that’s only true for a few seconds in geological time, because it is impossible for humanity to thrive, to be happy, to be at ease and content when the entire planet is in agony.

Dr. Barry Commoner coined the Four Laws of Ecology. Here are the two most applicable:

1. Everything Is Connected To Everything Else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all. Humans and other species are connected/dependent on other species. With this in mind it becomes hard to practice anything other than compassion and harmlessness.
2. There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms. In nature, both sides of the equation must balance, for every gain there is a cost, and all debts are eventually paid.

We live in unparalleled luxury while everything around us is on fire, is being poisoned, is drowning, is endangered, then, as Law # 1 of Ecology, EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE tells us, this will equally affect us. All this creational abuse will catch up on us and death is the outcome.

We feel instinctively that a day of reckoning comes, because, ”There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms. In nature, both sides of the equation must balance, for every gain there is a cost, and all debts are eventually paid.”

Some of the following I owe to a 2004 Harper article: THE OIL WE EAT, written by Richard Manning.

Here’s how we Westerners, became rich at the expense of creation.

Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from nature’s rules. Take food. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain: it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet’s “PRIMARY PRODUCTIVITY.”

When Adam and Eve appeared in The Garden of Eden, Primary Productivity was One Hundred Percent: everything and everybody thrived, had sufficient food, has pure oxygen to breathe, had perfect water to drink, had unadulterated food to eat. Today everything is up in the air.

The brutal truth is that we humans, a single species among millions, consume perhaps as much as 50 percent of Earth’s Primary Productivity, 50 percent of all there is, air, soil, water, leaving little for the remainder of creation: hence we never had it so good, and the rest never had it so bad.

The Book of Revelation mentions 42 months, 3.5 years, exactly half of the PERFECT number 7. Specifically Revelation 13: 5 reveals that, “Then the beast was allowed to speak great blasphemies against God. And he was given authority to do whatever he wanted for forty-two months.”

I believe that today we live in that “forty-two months” timeframe, busily blaspheming against God by harming creation, effectively sinning against one of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. (Exodus 20:7). Misusing God’s name means harming creation.

The outcome is that, “Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”. Fifty percent is midway, just as 42 months -3.5 years – is midway SEVEN. Using 50 percent of all there is, gives us untold riches, and also signals THE END.

We, the greedy 7.6 billion of us, have simply stolen the food (the rich among us, our Western World, a lot more than others) from all other living matter, and caused animals and plants to become extinct at alarming rates.

How did this crime become generally accepted?

More than two thirds of humanity’s cut of Primary Productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained undiminished. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world.

From land to mouth

Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. That’s how Adam and Eve lived in Paradise: God’s advice to this human pair was to eat the fruit available there and then.

Why humans might have traded the hunter-gatherer approach for the labor-intensive-back-breaking work of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts – the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries.

Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.

‘When Adam delved and Eve span who was then the gentleman?’ In 1381, a radical priest called John Ball travelled the length of the country –England – stirring up the peasant class in a revolt against their feudal landowners. Nothing changed.

Farming is the process of ripping our precious earth open again and again. Take Iowa. Our oldest son lived there for a decade. We visited his family quite often. It used to be prairie, but is all fields now.
Here’s a true folly: we grow grains that we feed to livestock, but livestock is perfectly content to eat native grass. There likely were more bison roaming the Great Plains before farming than all of beef farming raises in the same area today: and the stink! When the wind in that college town was from the East the entire town smelled like a sewer.

Oil is not well.

Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years. On average, it takes some 20 liters of fossil energy to restore a year’s worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land. Each year we burn through more than 400 years’ worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else.

Plato, a writer whom I had to read in Latin – oh how I hated him! – already lamented, “What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton”. Plato’s lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country’s soil and subsequently caused the decline of Rome.

The Green Revolution.

Then science came to the rescue, a blessing until it became a curse: the Green Revolution. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of three grains, rice, wheat, corn, so that they could be hyper-charged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. In my opinion this Green Revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet, because commercial agriculture disrupted long-standing patterns of rural
life worldwide, moving a lot of no-longer-needed people off the land and into the world’s most severe poverty.

In the sixty-year period beginning about 1960, the world’s population has more than doubled, adding virtually the entire increase of 3.5 billion to the world’s poorest classes, the most fecund classes. The Green Revolution with plenty of water for irrigation, with loads of oil-based fertilizer and tinkered seeds, increased yields, and so contributed hugely to the population boom. In other words it’s OIL that caused that “Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”.

About two thirds of U.S. and Canada’s grain and corn is labelled “processed,” meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the key ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America’s poor and working classes, and the suspected culprit in the American pandemic of obesity.

Ever considered the energy content of your breakfast?

A kilo of breakfast cereal, the grinding, milling, wetting, drying and baking, bums the energy of two liters of gasoline. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces before it leaves the factory floor. Add to this the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to a store near you, and the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores, and the calorie total doubles.
So you wonder, perhaps why, “Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet”.

It’s the OIL we eat, a perfectly pervasive poison, killing not only our bodies, but also our minds and spirits.

Revelation 13: 5 reveals that, “Then the beast was allowed to speak great blasphemies against God. And he was given authority to do whatever he wanted for forty-two months.”

These forty-two months are now over: we’ve been eager participants in causing creational agony. Now it is our turn to suffer because EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE.

AUGUST 25 2018

THE TWO WITNESSES,
CATASTROPHIC CLIMATE CHANGE, and
NEAR TERM EXTINCTION

Revelation 11 has this strange story about two witnesses who appear out of nowhere, get a pretty good reception at first, then are killed, their bodies publicly displayed to the great delight of the crowd, then miraculously resurrected, and fetched up to heaven, followed by an enormous earthquake. Curiously during the past week there were 144 earthquakes in The Ring Of Fire, magnitude 4.3 or more. Is the Big One on the West Coast next?

J.H. Bavinck, in his EN VOORTWENTELEN DE EEUWEN, dealing with REVELATION, the last Bible book – which I have translated, 85,000 words, and gave the provisional title of AND ON AND ON THE AGES ROLL – describes this ‘witness’ episode in detail.

Here are some excerpts.

“At the same time these two witnesses will raise their voices in the world. The time for missionary work has past. Come and gone. The good news has done its job in the world. We now live in a time of apostasy, of chaos, and dissolution. Amidst this witless and disoriented generation these two persons, operating separately, will arise in the name of God.

“Their words will be seen and heard and read throughout the world thanks to the Internet. These two witnesses will appear in the midst of the utmost insanity of a world swiftly speeding to complete collapse. Millions will monitor their message. Are they the ones who can give new hope to a generation that is so tired and has lost its foothold? Do they have a new message for a world that is dying from uncertainty and insecurity?

“Again they will hold high the age-old message that only Jesus Christ is Lord, and that only in returning to him there is salvation. And when they proclaim this, the word will sound as something new, as something fresh, as something that deals with all the problems of the then living generation. Nothing stale, nothing withered, nothing that sound like platitudes or lack fire in their delivery, no, every word will sparkle with spirit and expressed with extraordinary eloquence. Even the most unrepentant unbeliever will realize that this pair knows what they are talking about and what they say is not some old-wife tale, but is the bruising reality.

“Will that mean that a general conversion will come about? Will these two really generate a following? There will be moments when it will look that this would actually happen, especially when, in their blind hate, some of them will try to kill them, and find out that this is impossible because they are authorized by God. That especially will force many to openly consider to follow these two witnesses and to accept their words.

“But still, their performance will not lead to universal conversion. The people of those days cannot really accept them as sent by God. Their message is too old-fashioned, too opposed to their deepest and most secret thoughts. After all they say things that has been heard from time immemorial and already then rejected as useless. They bring something to the fore that has, for centuries, been repeated ad nauseam and already then seen as something impossible for the modernity to embrace.

“These two witnesses, the carriers of the very last exhortation on behalf of God, will perish in the end, as so many other prophets and apostles before them. But that will still have to wait because of the then current universal confusion and disintegration. But eventually censure will halt the spread of the news and the film in the TV cameras will be destroyed. Forcefully the authorities will suppress all gossip related to it. These two witnesses are now old news. They were clever operators, but their time is up. We now must look ahead. Forget about the nonsense of these old fashioned preachers.”
So far Bavinck’s prophetic words.

My comments.

All this sounds pretty up-to-date. It is so true that the church is beyond repair. The current news about the Roman Catholic Church confirms that: only when Pope Francis issues an edict that from now on priests are allowed to marry or openly live with homosexual partners, and simultaneously give nuns the priestly status, will that church be saved.
Hans Küng, a now retired Catholic theologian, once said that it is within the power of the pontiff to abolish celibacy, and he informed Pope Francis of this, but, I believe, this will cause the CURIA to ask the Mafia to place a contract on the Pope.

More on the church as institute: it has too much baggage, too many buildings, far too much hierarchy, Pope, Cardinals, Archbishops, Bishops, Priests, all eager for more power.
Once the church abandoned house-churches and went into the building business, it sealed its doom.

Back to Bavinck:

“But apart from blaming the church there is another factor that acts as a delaying agent, something which now slowly is becoming visible. The very end can come only when the world has first degenerated into a condition where, in the most radical sense, the entire earth has become rebellious, godless, chaotic and lawless. Sin must become public, sin must be revealed what it in the most explicit sense really is and always has been.”

I believe that moment has now come, personified in the devilish appearance of Donald Trump. His ascent fits in precisely with the basic meaning of the Book of Revelation, which Bavinck describes as:
“Everything must become what they are. That is one of the dominating motifs of this remarkable book of the Bible, a motif that only at the very end of time comes to us in its naked reality: “Let they who do wrong let them continue to do wrong; let they who are vile, continue to do vile; let they who are right, continue to do right; let they who are holy, continue to be holy”. (Rev. 22:11).

“Right now his world is covered by a haze of untruthfulness: all things seem different than they are. The devil disguises himself as an angel of light, while the children of God often poorly reflect God’s image in their daily walk of life. Everything is unclear, unreal and non-transparent.
“Under the force of constant hammer blows, still raining upon this pseudo world, humanity finally becomes the humanity it was meant to be in the most detestable sense of the word, the real human, that is the rebel, the prisoner, the doubting, and the unconverted. World history, stripped bare from all pretenses, is not simply a record of events: it is nothing else than that through all these happenings, through prosperity and adversity, through wars and peace, through increase in knowledge and culture, through all this and more, in the end everything becomes what it always has been. That’s why the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, the reign of him who calls himself the Son of man, can only come when the Kingdom of the Beast has the entire world in his grasping hands.”

That is my introduction.

Here comes my speculation.

The church, as Bavinck points out, no longer can generate enough credibility to speak to the world in convincing terms. I already mentioned the Roman Catholic Church, with her priest problem. Look at the Pentecostals and the Southern Baptists with their heaven and rapture fakery. Look at the church that is following Trump. Today the entire word “Christian” has become a no/no word.

So my approach is totally different.

In my opinion two witnesses HAVE arisen. They unabashedly speak their mind and we better listen to them. Both can be found on YouTube.

Dr. Guy McPherson was a professor of Ecology and Nature Studies at the University of Arizona, for 20 years, when he resigned voluntarily before being pushed out by his department because of his views.

So what are his views? Based on his observations – which can be found in the ARCTIC NEWS website – he shows, conclusively in my opinion, that abrupt Climate Change is about to happen leading to extinction of all that lives, including us humans, hence the new acronym : NTE or Near Term Extinction.

He basically says that, “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic. By upsetting the energy balance of the planet we are changing the temperature gradient between the equator and the pole. This in turn sets in motion major re-organizations of the flow patterns of the atmosphere and ocean.” This is confirmed by Chris Rapley, professor of climate science at University College London. “The consequences are emerging and they are disruptive, and likely to become even more profoundly so”.

When you view his many videos on YouTube, you will see that Dr. McPherson is afraid that next season, 2019-20, will be decisive as by then the entire Arctic will be ice-free, which, according to him, confirmed by Sauli Niinistö, the Finnish Prime Minister, will mean the End of the World.
Here’s why.
Once the Arctic heats up, the Giga-tons of METHANE, a gas 100 times more lethal that CO2 Carbon Dioxide, will be released in the atmosphere, and cause a temperature rise of TEN DEGREES CELSIUS, high enough to burn us all. It reminds me of 2 Peter 3: 12, “That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat.”

McPherson often says that a doctor, asked by a patient how long he or she will live, never gives an exact time-frame. McPherson does the same. It reminds me of Jesus’ words in Matthew 24: 36, “”But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father”. This to me suggests that we can perhaps pinpoint the year but that’s it.

I see this man as one of the witnesses, telling us to be ready, and emotionally and spiritually prepare ourselves to meet our Maker.

Then there is Dr. Jordan Peterson, witness Number Two.

He now is quite famous. He wrote “THE 12 RULES FOR LIFE, an antidote to Chaos”, which sold more than 2 million copies.

In this book he ashamedly professes that life is suffering, that human nature is sinful, that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Repeatedly he quotes the Bible and sees it as foundational for life. God ‘spoke’ and he sees the LOGOS as the ultimate wisdom, referring to Christ as the perfect human, and resurrection as a given.
To quote Bavinck again, “And when they proclaim this, the Word will sound as something new, as something fresh, as something that deals with all the problems of the then living generation. Nothing stale, nothing withered, nothing that sounds like platitudes or lack fire in their delivery, no, every word will sparkle with spirit and expressed with extraordinary eloquence.”
Dr. Peterson is like that, witness his many presentations on YouTube, especially when interviewed by Paul VanderKlay, a Christian Reformed minister.

I see both these men as the Two Witnesses as described in Revelation 11, the 21st Century version.
Fact is that the church no longer can play its original role, constrained as it is by historical development. It usefulness is gone even though it will remain till the end, functioning in its historical capacity as the public face of religion. Bonhoeffer’s statement that “the church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things, it lives from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end,” is almost always ignored.

All this is fully in line with Jesus’ statement that THE END will come like a thief in the night. (Revelation 3: 3).

My topic this week is indeed very controversial. Many will disagree. Jesus, in Matthew 24:33, said: “Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door.”
In today’s parlor, this means, “As soon as you read about the Sixth Extinction, and the ice disappearing in the Arctic, and people like Guy McPherson warning about the positive feedback of Methane, and Jordan Peterson making the Bible relevant again to young and old, you better take the words of Matthew 24 to heart: time is rushing to the END.

August 18 2018

HATE AND HERESY

“Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.”
Euripides, Greek poet 480 BC –406 BC

“Heresy is a form of intellectual stubbornness, the refusal to abandon a mistaken idea.”
Dante, Italy, 1265-1321

I found these quotes in Donna Leon’s book THE WATERS OF ETERNAL YOUTH.

The “Lover’s Hate” maxim reminded me of my book, DAY WITHOUT END, in which our guardian angel, Cornelius, shows us the pre-historic world.

Here is that section:

We see the planet earth from a satellite vantage point, a large ball in an ocean of blue with a wisp of cloud here and there where green colours glimmer through, pure stark colours. As we edge in, we notice more detail: rainy jungles and sand-coloured desert. We continue our sweep, moving ever closer. The screen shows everything in three dimensions which gives the sensation that the earth is right there for the touching. I can sense the rich air, suggesting a high oxygen content. I ask Cornelius about this and he says, “Yes, the make-up of the air is different from what you were used to. Look at the large animals there–and we zoom in on a tree eating creature, resembling somewhat a gigantic ostrich– they could not live in less pure air.” He now zeroes in on an even more fierce-looking quadruped, equally ugly and ungainly in my opinion. A couple of these uglies are engaged in a fierce fight and we can hear their shrieks and loud bangs as their arms and legs pound on each other.
“Did God create these terrible looking beasts?” wonders Fidelia, “they are awful.”
“No,” replies Cornelius. “He had delegated this to Lucifer, his chief angel who wanted to experiment by creating animals of large size and huge proportion. However they proved quite destructive. I think they ate their own weight in foliage each week. Look, there is a pair at work. See how they rip through the trees, uproot them and leave gaping holes in the earth. Also they were fast breeders and their presence created a severe imbalance.”
“What happened? Did God allow Lucifer to get away with this?” inquires Phronimos.
“Well, you know God Creator,” continues Cornelius. “He called Lucifer to account and when he pleaded with God, He gave him another chance. Lucifer had argued that the climate on earth was too favourable for these creatures and wondered whether a greater variety in temperatures would keep them in check. God agreed, and he changed the atmospheric conditions. Look, here comes the next phase.”
We see enormous volcanic eruptions, spouting ashes, darkening the skies and polluting the atmosphere. Everywhere we see nothing but thick smoke and dark, bulging flames. I close my nose and cover my mouth against the penetrating smell of sulfur. It is a good thing that Cornelius now is at a safe distance from the rapidly changing atmosphere because the picture is so real that I can feel the earth shake violently and see enormous clouds of mists hiss and steam.
We now speed through time, passing through millions of years in a few seconds, and we see that the earth has taken on a different appearance: same round ball, but a more defined land mass, with a distinct white on both ends. The continents have drifted apart, forced by the enormous pressures of the subterranean forces, and I recognize them: there is Asia, topped by the gigantic Siberian vastness; the immense Pacific Ocean, a solid blue, with little dots here and there. As the earth circles, I point out the American land mass, stretching from pole to pole, and then a few moments later, Europe and Africa, almost all entirely emerald green, and in an expanse of almost perpetual purple, the Indonesian archipelago and Australia. When we move closer we see lots of experimental animals, both plant-eating and also large meat-eating monsters, all very impressive and gigantic, some of them having mouths like enormous horses. Phronimos suggests that no humans could dwell in such an environment and Cornelius nods in affirmation.
“Nothing really changed!” I exclaim, as I see the long necks and the large claw-like feet of these monsters, which also function as hands when they sit on their tail and so are able to reach even the highest tree tops. I also notice other animals with gigantic heads who tear other creatures apart as if they are made of paper.
“True,” says Cornelius. “So God called Lucifer again to his throne. When He pointed out to Lucifer that these animals and others just as ferocious in the seas meant that more benign developments would be impossible, they got into quite an argument. I was there and I have never seen anything like it since. Heaven usually is a quiet, peaceful place, but this was something else. I think Lucifer had plans from the start to challenge God and shape the cosmos according to his ideas.”
“What sort of character is Lucifer?” Phronimos wonders.
“He is a real charmer and by his smooth talk he convinced many more angels to join forces with him.”
“So, what happened?” asks Initia. We all are quite intrigued by this and eagerly await Cornelius’ answer.
“Well, first the Lord Creator banned Lucifer and his vassals from heaven and gave the Light-bearer the darkest place in creation, the deepest black hole in the universe, as his base of operation. Then God destroyed the earth completely. Watch.”
We now have moved quite a distance from the earth. We see the globe in the far, far distance, and for a good reason: a large asteroid is speeding to the earth. When it hits, black soot fills the sky and blocks out the sun. The entire earth is covered with a thick layer of rock and debris and volcanic lava. The rich, lush vegetation is buried deep in the earth. All living matter disappears and the earth goes into a deep, long sleep out of which it awakens in the form we know it. A large section of the globe is shrouded in white: the ice age has come and with it some human habitation and upon closer examination also different animals such as giant elephant-like creatures. The icy-period now fades quickly and with more moderate temperatures now prevailing, life, as we have experienced it, develops.
“And the rest you know,” says Cornelius.

Here is an episode where love turns sour, and degenerated into hate. Lucifer, also known as the Devil, the Satan, and The Evil One, switched from a love relationship – only LOVE can exist in God’s presence, as God IS Love – to total hatred, and consequently is banned from Heaven.

The Satan landed feet first on Earth, causing incurable wounds to God’s creation, grieving the Creator deeply, even more because it took the life of God’s only Son to remedy the situation.

Today we still are in that suffering stage, and the wounds are all too clearly visible, although we, in rural Tweed, notice little of it, as the heat has been moderate and the rains came in time. True, there is no real awareness of God and religion in our area, but that is par for the course. Relationships are another matter: divorce and poverty are rampant.

In my appraisal career I often had to evaluate the real estate assets of a couple splitting up: a tricky job, because one party wanted a low value while the other a high estimate. The bitterness and the anger, the animosity and hostility proved to me that when love turns to hatred, every action, even well-intended, is seen as an act of revenge.

That’s also the reason why angry spouses, mostly men, far too often kill their female partners, and often take their own lives also, indicating that, “Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.”

HERESIES in theology

I like Dante’s definition of HERESY, “Being a form of intellectual stubbornness, the refusal to abandon a mistaken idea.”

Today heresies abound, especially theological. Need I mention HEAVEN again, a truly pagan concept? Or Rapture?

We live in different times where the old is losing its validity. Take the church. If nothing else, look who go there: old folks like me. That alone tells m that the model no longer works.

The Roman Catholic Church, the largest Christian denomination in the world, is a good example with its supposedly celibate clergy. An utterly outdated and totally unbiblical teaching, where, in fact the church is robbing the clergy of their humanity, a sin all too obvious today. With no women clergy there, the church pursues an utterly outdated and totally unbiblical practice.

In general the church clings to the Bible as God’s SOLE revelation, forgetting that there also is God’s permanent, direct Word, his creation.

By ignoring God’s creation, the church forfeits any chance to speak to the world. Today pastors need not only be theo-logians, knowing the Logos, the Word about Theos- God, through a thorough grasp of the Scriptures, but also be Ecologists connecting the Eco – the OIKOS, – the Earth to its maker.

HERESIES in economics

Heresies are equally evident in economics. Capitalism is based on the assumption that the earth’ resources are infinite. Their leaders believe that they can keep us supplied with what we want in perpetuity by exploiting the earth.

The result is all too obvious. We are suffering from a form of intellectual stubbornness, the refusal to abandon a mistaken idea, which is leading to total societal collapse.

The global economy is so intimately integrated that the absence of one vital ingredient, such as rare earth minerals of which China is the major source, can stall production of the now so needed tools for Information Technology.

Still the major obstacle facing the world is the dependence on fossil fuels, an idea that will seal the doom of society.

Heresies in Politics.

Political heresies abound, especially today. In the USA, with the Congress members up for re-election every two years, raising money is their main concern, which often means securing funds from corporate donors, who dictate their wishes, usually not a voter’s priority. Also the lack of proportional representation in North America’s politics means that always a minority rules.

How then shall we live?

Time and again it boils down to the religious question, “How then shall we live in a world that is finite, a world that is indeed holy, because it is God’s very creation?”

Today, as no other time, this means sacrifices, for instance letting go of television, while reflecting and praying without ceasing. My constant prayer is “MARANATHA, Lord come quickly”. Writing, which I do every day, is a matter of reflection, a mind-opening exercise, which can lead to greater self-knowledge.

Growing food, digging into the soil, is my passion: I feel a kinship with the soil. When this spring a BLACK groundhog ate all my carefully cultivated cabbages, kale and green beans, fencing in my garden was no remedy. Fortunately my prayer for a predator to kill this nuisance was heard, and, thanks to warm days, warm nights, and lots of irrigation, I was able to restart these plants again.

Somehow, it seems, animals are more aggressive this year: chipmunks are eating my ripe tomatoes, crows and squirrels were after my apples, so I had the pick them before they were ripe – I have an early apple tree – and made apple sauce from them.

“How then shall we live?”

Ban HATE and HERESY and embrace LOVE for the earth and for all that lives and treasure the TRUTH of the Scriptures instead. John 3:16 embodies them both: “Love the cosmos, and the TRUTH of eternal life will be ours.”

I see the church’s task to prepare its members for the cosmos to come. For this the most appropriate text is Revelation 21: 1, “Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.”

There’s where our citizenship belongs. 1 John 5: 19 beyond dispute, claims that, “We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”

We don’t belong to the first heaven and earth, a planet totally dominated by evil.

Reborn in Christ, we belong to the New Creation.