Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

CELTIC CHRISTIANITY

Belgic Confession.

You probably have never heard of that confession. Actually it is one of the mainstays of the Reformed Faith. Here’s what it says about us knowing God: “We know God first by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book…. As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20: “all these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse.”
Wow!! Looking at creation and seeing God at work there is more important than the Bible.
So how does the church go about ‘knowing God’? Does it encourage creational knowledge? Does it tell the world that dishonoring creation – driving a car, for instance – is enough to damn people? Does the church encourage field trips in to nature? Does it give seminars on specific aspects of creation, all to encourage “knowing God”?

We know the truth. The church has fully implemented Descartes’ dictum COGITO ERGO SUM, I think that’s why I am: logic before observation. It has promoted intellectual reasoning – sermons – over direct creational engagement.

It was not always so. Enter CELTIC CHRISTIANITY.

In my church, St. Andrew’s Tweed, hangs a large Celtic Cross, crafted by one of our parishioners. As Presbyterians we are acquainted with this religious symbol, but do we know its significance?

The orb, the circle at the centre of the cross, is said to represent the sun and the light of the world, and expresses the desire to hold together the revelation of God in creation and the revelation of God in the Scriptures. Together they reflect the practice of listening for the living Word in nature as well as in the Bible. A typical Celtic prayer is: Almighty God, Sun behind all suns… in every friend we have the sunshine of your presence…

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 prayer was, “Show to us in everything we touch, in every one we meet your presence.”

Like the Celtic Christian teachers before him, the thoughts of John the Irishman, were particularly shaped by the mysticism of the Apostle John, who tells us that “God is Love.” The realization that God is also a love affair is summed up in the doctrine of the Trinity. Celtic Christians, a 1000 years ago expressed this in this poem:
The Three who are over my head.
The Three who are under my tread.
The Three who are over me here
The Three who are over me there.
The Three who are in the earth near.
The Three who are up in the air.
The Three who in heaven do dwell.
The Three in the great ocean swell,
Pervading Three, O be with me!

When God created, he called it good after each phase, and very good when it was all completed. This 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.”

All this was written long before we experienced the evil of pollution, of global warming, of Climate Change and a melting Arctic, which, we can now clearly see, is the devil at work.

As so often happens in the church, true reformers and true radicals are not tolerated by the ecclesiastical authorities. 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.
There is a story of a woman from the island of Harris who suffered from a type of skin disease and was exiled from the community to live alone on the seashore. There she collected plants and shellfish, and having boiled them for eating, washed her sores with the remaining liquid. In time she was cured. She saw the grace of healing as having come to her through creation and so she prayed:
There is no plant in the ground
But it is full of His virtue,
There is no form in the strand
But it is full of his blessing.
Jesu, Jesu, Jesu!

Jesu who ought to be praised.
There is no life in the sea,
there is no creature in the river,
there is naught in the firmament,
but proclaims his goodness.
Jesu, Jesu, Jesu!

Jesu who ought to be praised.
There is no bird on the wing,
there is no star in the sky
there is nothing beneath he sun,
but proclaims his goodness.
Jesu, Jesu, Jesu!
Jesu who ought to be praised.

John, the apostle, had a fine ear for God’s creation. Listen to the opening words of the gospel of John: “In the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the word was God. Through him all things were made.”

If God were to stop speaking the whole created universe would cease to exist. In the rising of the morning sun God speaks to us of grace and new beginnings and the fertility of the earth is a sign of how life wells up from within, from the dark unknown place of God.

John, the Irishman, a millennium ago, also tells us that God is in all things. God has not created everything out of nothing, but out of his own essence, out of his very life. That is the light that is in all things,
“the light which is the light of angels,
the light of the created universe,
the light indeed of all visible and invisible existence.”

Says this Irishman: “the way to learn about God is through the letters of the Scriptures and through the species of creation.” He urges us to listen to these expressions of God and to conceive of their meaning in our souls. So it is no wonder that the national color of the Irish is green. They were the Green Party as long as we have recorded history.

The attitude of The Irish John and Celtic spirituality in general is diametrically opposed to the materialism we have in our world, shaped by Roman Catholic and Protestant dualism. The bible is very clear on this. Take Col.1:15 -20, a passage exemplifying the Celtic Spirit more than any other. This is what it says: Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

What does this mean? It means that, when God planned the creation, he started with duplicating himself in the form of Jesus Christ, in the form of the ultimate in creation, the human beings we are. Christ is the first human being, the firstborn of all creation. We are his image. In other words, we look like Christ. We, as women and men, as boys and girls, are the highest order in of God’s creation, but we come from the lowest material, the ‘Ur’ stuff of creation: clay. We are made of that material. The word ‘Adam’ means clay. God fashioned us, the human race, from the clay of the earth, a mixture of dry dust and water. He, as the Master Sculptor, created us, fashioned us, shaped us, molded us, in the image of that perfect, divine creature, God’s alter ego, Jesus Christ. That is what verse 15 says.
Verse 16 continues in that vein: “For by Christ all things were created.” Remember Christ, the first human being, did this. Made in his image, part of his body, we can read this also: For by us, as human beings, as the body of Christ, all things were created.

However, because we have strayed from the path of Christ, have not seen creation as the Real Word of God, we have gone in exactly the opposite direction, a direction to which the Celtic Christians objected. For this reason, by placing so much emphasis on God’s world, they were persecuted by the church, with the result that reason, doctrine, church dogma, human wisdom, became the measure of faith.

We now see the result. We see a world plagued with pollution, plagued with poverty, plagued with a plurality of pains. We see a world where the idol of economic growth takes priority over any creation friendly act, so that now many people see a world depleted with whatever is precious. All this rests upon the wrong interpretation of Genesis 2:15, where God gave humanity the charge to look after God’s creation. Curiously the word here for ‘taking care’ is the same as in Joshua 24: 15, where Joshua, the man who succeeded Moses as leader of Israel, vouches “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” The same Hebrew word that of taking care of God’s creation and serving the Lord is used in both instances.

This serving is reflected in the prayer of St. Patrick, the great Irish evangelist. His prayer is typical:
I bind myself today
The virtues of the star-lit heaven
The glorious sun’s life-giving ray.
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
the stable earth, the deep salt sea
Around the old eternal rocks.

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.
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 great gap between heaven and earth, no, the two are seen as inseparably intertwined.

A long time ago 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. In 1966 Dr. Lynn White addressed the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. His topic: The historical roots of our Ecological Crisis. I quote: “The church has taught that God planned this earth explicitly for man’s benefit and ruled no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asian religions not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.”

We now know that this approach has been destructive for our planet. I sincerely believe that Celtic Christianity provides a better answer to today’s way of serving God than any church way yet confessed.

The Celtic cross expresses this to plainly. The orb, the circle at the centre of the cross represents the sun and the light of the world, and expresses the desire to hold together the revelation of God in creation and the revelation of God in scriptures.

This is our Father’s world, which we will inherit as his children. Treat it as such, because it is ours to live in forever.

That, perhaps, means that we must go where we can live close to the soil, that God-given substance out of which we were formed, rather than the city. The nurture of the soil brings us closer to God. Have the entire family engage in growing food, rather than factory-stuff. Engage in low tech and localism.
The closer we are to green spaces the healthier our life and more open we are to the voice of God in our lives.

DEEP PEACE OF THE RUNNING WAVE TO YOU
DEEP PEACE OF THE FLOWING AIR TO YOU
DEEP PEACE OF THE QUIET EARTH TO YOU
DEEP PEACE OF THE SHINING STARS TO YOU
DEEP PEACE OF THE GENTLE NIGHT TO YOU
MOON AND STARS POUR THEIR HEALING LIGHT ON YOU.
DEEP PEACE OF CHRIST THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD TO YOU.

JANUARY 7 2017

THE CHURCH AND CREATION

It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.” – Mark Twain
That church development is often derailed is not surprising, given that it is a human institution, yet discovering that all churches today, in 2017, are basically off track, took me a long time to fathom.

Actually, this is not surprising, considering history.

Some 2500 years ago the elite of Israel, its nobility and the church officials were deported to Babylon, led as hostages away from the Promised Land because the people of God had forgotten about God, even though ‘religion’ was thriving. Fortunately, some of them, such as Daniel and his friends managed to take the religious treasures with them, the old scrolls and the ancient papers that related their history.

There, far away from Jerusalem, they saw it as their holy duty to record what had happened to the Chosen People in the past, tracing their version of history all the way back to the days of Creation. Oral transmission too was used.

To these farsighted people we owe much of the Hebrew bible, because there, in the solitude of their exile, they had the time, the means and the opportunity to think and reflect, guided by the Holy Spirit. During that 70 year sojourn, somehow the true gospel became clear to them. There they recorded it and prepared the people of Israel for the coming of the Messiah.

Back from the Babylonian exile, again in the trusted environment of their own country, they really tried to live by the Law of Moses, restoring the Year of Jubilee, as the Lord had commanded, but soon formalism and church law prevailed and they again fell into the old trap of relying on outward adherence to the Laws of Moses.

Is there a lesson for us today?

In some way the same happened with the Dutch emigrating from the Netherlands to Canada in the early 1950’s. They too in their relative isolation, through their church communities blew new life in the religious heritage of the pre-war days in the Netherlands.

Now, it seems to me that in Canada among the Reformed community forward thinking has stalled, just as what happened soon after the exiles returned to the Promised Land after 70 years exile in Babylon.

The rise of Christianity.

Looking back 2000 years, we know that the Old Testament Church had grown stale. It took Jesus three years to convince a few people that the time was ripe for a change. That certainly indicates to me that it’s not easy to steer people in a different spiritual direction.

Fortunately, after Pentecost, and with Paul’s conversion, Christianity was preached world-wide. However, it soon became affected by Platonic thinking, while the church, thanks to its success, organized itself along the lines of the Roman Empire: Pope, Cardinals, Archbishops, bishops, and priests resembling the political structure of that day.

This year it is exactly 500 years that Martin Luther challenged the then Universal Christian church. We call it THE REFORMATION. By and large Luther brought the Bible back to the masses. Just as Paul could bring THE WORD, thanks to the PAX ROMANA and the koine dialectos – the universal language then – Luther too was blessed with the onset of the printing press and the subsequent rise of mass reading, which greatly accommodated the spread of the Reformed gospel.

Today: where are we?

We now are in situation similar to the time Jesus came, and Luther nailed his 95 theses on the Wittenberg church. Pietism has triumphed: the banner of heaven has been hoisted high. People are so sure that they’ll end up high up there, that no argument, no ‘proof text’, no concrete evidence will convince them. BUT…………It’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.”
Last week I sat across from a lady – a devout Christian – to whom I tried to explain that ‘cosmos’ – the word mentioned in John 3: 16 – means all things created. Her reply was: it applies only to people. It has nothing to do with animals, with trees, with flowers.

So: WHAT IS THE GOOD NEWS TODAY? Is it THE OLD TIME RELIGION, GOOD ENOUGH FOR ALL?

The old time religion is purely heaven-oriented, and/or so institutionalized that it amounts to the same thing.

A new approach is needed, made possible by Jesus, who called for combining the created word with the written word, in preparation for our future, the new creation.

A book by Dr. J. H. Diemer “NATUUR EN WONDER” or “Nature and Miracle”, points that way.
Diemer joins the ranks of Bavinck and Bonhoeffer by equating THE KINGDOM to the original Garden of Eden, and to the NEW EARTH which Jesus will bring with him when he returns, establishing a ‘religion-less Christianity where all dogmas, all confessions, all statements of faith are discarded, including church buildings, all ranks and offices, as the true sanctuary is the universe, God’s Holy creation.

Diemer was a biologist who died young, at age 40, in June 1945, just after the war, from malnutrition and punishment suffered in a German prison camp.
He wrote in Dutch and I paraphrase to avoid his academic language: “Faith in God motivates us to assume leadership in the created order of all things.
“Adam, at his new birth, powered by God’s word written in his heart, had the mandate and the desire to look at the exact nature of everything created. Infused by God’s Spirit, he was enabled to see the possibilities inherent in all created beings and structures. The cultural task of the first human pair filled with the Holy Spirit was to see the place of everything created, animals, trees, weather, and assign what fitted where.
“That was the cultural task God gave Adam in the beginning. That task is still ours today. God gave creation to us as the human race to serve, to maintain and to develop as God’s Kingdom on earth.
“In Paradise the human race was perfectly fit for this task. Their faith simply made that possible. They obeyed God’s Word to the letter, and, empowered by God’s Spirit, all of nature responded to Adam’s leadership. In this way all happenings in nature were directed toward service of God’s Kingdom.”
So far, so good. Then….

“Through the fall into sin, all of nature from the low amoeba to the highest form fell away from God and the fallen creatures became sinful trespassers, offending God’s basic law.
“From now on the law of sin became nature’s dominating force. The functions of all created matters were separated from the divine directions based on the laws that God had given through faith in Him. Sin redirected human ambitions to operate as independent forces which resulted in fights among themselves to gain the upper hand. Instead of serving and building and maintaining God’s Kingdom we served the kingdom of darkness and were engaged in destructive, estranging and dissolving activities, threatening to destroy God’s Kingdom.

“That is the curse that now hangs over the earth because of sin, all too evident today.

“In Christ all of nature has been radically redirected to God’s service. Christ has again placed God’s Kingdom in the hearts of the believers. That belief must be re-activated in our time of environmental distress, because through the fall into sin we no longer want to obey the directions prescribed by God, and so become willing servants of the Satan. We withdrew from our original mandate and convinced ourselves that we could function independently from God.
“Now we have disorder instead of order, exploitation instead of normal development, destruction instead of construction, decay instead of unity, chaos instead of cosmos.”
So far the Christian biologist, Dr. J. H. Diemer.

This struggle is out in the open but the outcome is assured, thanks to Christ’s life, death and resurrection. Bonhoeffer and Bavinck also affirm this, stating that “Christ did not bring a religion: he brought us LIFE.”

Our life must be fully lived in the context of THE KINGDOM. In spite of what Rome tells us, the church is not the Kingdom. In spite of what Reformed thinking tells us, the church, school, family, do not comprise the Kingdom.
Christ’s kingdom is on the way, already faintly present in our life. God’s kingdom, perfect in the Garden of Eden, will again be perfect in the New Earth to come.

The word ‘church’ comes from the Greek ‘kurios domo’, the house of the Lord: a misnomer because the universe, the cosmos, is the house of the Lord.

Today one of the most thriving businesses is to decommission church buildings. The Actinolite United Church – just north of where we live – is now ‘the Marble Art Centre’. The word ‘marble’ points to its marble stone structure, at one time mined in that hamlet. The former Tweed Anglican Church is for sale. The church we attend can seat 300 people, more than double the total gathered in the 4 other churches on a typical Sunday. The only time young people are possibly exposed to prayer and Bible reading is when their grandparents are buried.

Today, in our post-modern world, church buildings, by and large, have become an anachronism, no longer in tune with the times. Their high ceilings – reminiscent of heaven – make them energy hogs; their hymns are often in praise of heaven; their sermon approach is outmoded, dating to the pre-TV era; these monologues promote sheep-like attitudes, devoid of incentives to foster maturity; their parking lots are an ode to GMC and Ford and Japan; their organizational setup smacks of authoritarian tendencies; their Sunday worship an incentive to sever nature from grace, promoting an unhealthy and thus unchristian dualism.”

We have to go back to our original mandate which is that we were charged to develop God’s creation in such a way that it honors God, the creator, who, in the Bible is often described as the creator of heaven and earth.
Our task is the same as Adam’s: to beautify Paradise and enhance her possibilities. It is not a one-dimensional matter of singing and praying: it’s task is all-embracing, getting dirt under our nails; lovingly tending God’s soil, out of which we were shaped.
In these days where one calorie of commercial food takes 10 calories of carbon, growing one’s own food is not only creation-God- friendly but an act of worship. By inserting a seed into the earth we commit a holy act because the earth is holy. The entire Lord’s Prayer is a fervent prayer for ‘the kingdom to come’. In that prayer our plea to ‘forgive our trespasses’ refers to our constant sins against creation, while the line “as we forgive those who trespasses against us” is a recognition that we all are caught in the-trespass-against-creation trap.

Our worship should never pause. Reducing our carbon footprint should be a continuous concern. Sunday gatherings should be much more community minded, where singing, praying, sharing wholesome living tips, bringing produce and exchanging news a regular feature. The old – Acts 2 – is new again, which today means that, with churches often far away, we should meet in each other’s homes, and, where congregations are large, split it in units of 20 or so, with emphasis on walking to certain central points.
Today, using the Internet for spreading the Good News of the Kingdom has two original advantages combined: borderless like the Roman Empire and English as the universal language.

Again we all should be continually carbon footprint conscious, and always try to picture ourselves in circumstances visualizing our eternal life in THE NEW CREATION. There is that old saying: the future belongs to those who prepare for it.
Mark Twain coined “It’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.”, but
Hebrew 11: 1 tells us: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”
Today we see a creation in its last phase, because of sin. Christ has promised us a new earth where harmony and shalom is guaranteed forever.

P.S.
You do well to look at ARCTIC NEWS and listen to the 20 minutes interview with Dr. Peter Wadhams who is an ‘expeditionary’ scientist and Emeritus Professor of Ocean Physics from Cambridge. Peter Wadhams’ observations of the Arctic ice for over 4 decades makes him one of the worlds authorities on the subject.

DECEMBER 31 2017

LESS THAN TEN YEARS?

2016 was a real ‘news’ year, with Brexit and Trump and lots of hot weather. How about 2017? To me it looks like the same, even more so. While ‘no news’ signals good news, signals the old and trusted way of life, ‘news’ usually means uncertainty, insecurity, unpredictability.
In store is Change, Change with a Capital C: in 2016, the engine of change got cranked up. In 2017 change will speed up: change and more change will shift in high gear, which means that the future will be much, much more different.

Much of that acceleration is due from what we have wrought on both Poles where the real WEATHER makers are. The ARCTIC NEWS website shows that the ice in the Far North is disappearing beyond the wildest prediction. Last week it was 30 degrees Celsius – 50 Fahrenheit –there above normal, and that happening in December when there is perpetual darkness at the North Pole, 24/7.
The website states that: “The situation is dire. If no action is taken on climate change, the earth faces a potential temperature rise of more than 10°C or 18°F by 2026.”

Ten years, a blink of the eye. Is that all we’ve got? One more decade? Of course, of course no action will be taken: so it’s almost sure that we will experience a sudden, unexpected, as lightning in a blue sky, a beyond extraordinary event, totally fatal for all of us: a jump in the world-wide temperature of some 10 degrees Celsius, 18 Fahrenheit.

What’s behind all this?

ARCTIC NEWS last week featured a closer look at LAKE BAIKAL, in Siberia, within the Arctic Circle, the depository of 20 percent of the world’s accessible drinking water. It’s deep, some 1600 meters, with a bottom temperature of 3.5°C. Underneath that huge lake lies 425 Giga tons of methane. Compare that to the 5 Giga tons currently in the atmosphere. Methane can be up to 100 times more devastating than CO2, our car exhausts.
Now remember that our entire world is screaming for water – used mostly for irrigation of agriculture, fracking and obtaining synthetic oil from tar sands.

Take a look at the Aral Sea, a similar water body, further to the west in Asia: it disappeared almost overnight because of climate change and irrigation. If this were to happen to Lake Baikal it could release 85 times the methane now in the atmosphere, which would increase the world temperature by 10 C, spelling the end of the world: we all would burn to crisps.
That is only one place. The Arctic Ocean is shallow: 50-100 meters deep. There many more Giga tons of methane are buried. The same is true in the Arctic Tundra, both in Canada and Siberia, where melting permafrost is already unlocking much more deadly methane.

If 30°C above normal in the Arctic is shrugged off as a blip, what if this blip turns out to be a harbinger of what is in store for all of us: sudden death.

I find it difficult to fathom my true feelings, but the extraordinary weather events lately, the deviation from the norm, the irrationality of political events, the extremely vulnerable state of the economy, the callousness and shallowness of the religious situation, the total lack of vision of politicians whose quest for economic growth is absurd, the exponential rate of drug overdose deaths by mostly young people, all serve to increase my sense of foreboding.

Suppose, suppose that the Lord comes back and nobody really expects him?

The BIG ONE?

Revelation 16: 18 is just one of the many Bible books that predict an earthquake. There it says: “Then there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder and a severe earthquake. No earthquake like it has ever occurred … “

Now almost every day a new earthquake causes upsets somewhere in the world. Does this passage point to the US-Canadian Pacific Rim where some 100 million people live?

I try to do my little thing to prepare me for eternity. Frankly it is always on my mind while I venture – not very successfully – to emulate a lifestyle of eternity, difficult to do in a carbon-saturated environment.

I know, this is not the most encouraging start of a new year, but when I look ahead to 2017, I see elections in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands all having the potential to destroy the European Union.

And then there is TRUMP.

Does he account for the inexplicable restlessness in me, the afore-mentioned feeling of foreboding, fostered mainly by his irrational utterances and his creation-destroying appointments? I see the USA as a disaster in waiting in the Trump presidency. Society has become so complex that a simpleton like he may have no clue how to deal with the different political and bureaucratic entities which may resist him all the way. Enough to drive him even more crazy.

So where are the hopeful signs? Are there any?

I sometimes feel like that old man Simeon, who suddenly pops up in Luke 2. He was told by the Holy Spirit that he, in his lifetime, would meet Jesus Christ. And he did: he held the baby Jesus in his arms. What a feeling would that have been! It made him exclaim “My eyes have seen your salvation”.

True, the Holy Spirit has not talked to me directly, yet I must trust my gut feelings. Then Simeon was the very exception, something I feel as well. Israel then had only one wish: to be freed from Roman tyranny. That desire dominated Jesus’ disciples even until his Ascension.

Today is no different: we want Economic Growth at all cost: job security, prosperity. There is hardly any real desire for the Lord to return because, unlike Simeon who saw salvation and eternal life on the earth, we have utopian ideas of human-induced peace. Forget it. It’s impossible. Always has been. Frankly I see the Lord’s return as the only hopeful sign.

Are we due for tremendous change?

Every 500 years or so the world undergoes a mega-metamorphosis. In the year 1,000 before Christ, the Davidic kingdom saw its start. Five hundred years later Buddhism emerged and the Jewish exile to Babylon took place. The Christian era had its beginning 2000 years ago while Islam’s inception was between the years 500-600. One thousand years ago, starting in 1096, there were the Crusades, a Europe-wide event to wrest Jerusalem from the forces of the prophet Mohammed. This year, 2017, it is exactly 500 years ago -1517 – that Martin Luther started the Reformation, causing immense friction in Europe.

We now are at a crucial point in history where everything has an expiry date: globalization, nature, religion, potable water, the use of paper money, democracy, stable weather, ice on the North Pole, and the list goes on. Yes, the very fate of the human race is at stake. It looks more and more that the Earth too has an expiry date.

Is that the reason why I am so uneasy?

All this reminds me of Jesus.

Jesus was convicted by the religious rulers of his day for saying that he would break down the Temple, the very symbol of THE GARDEN OF EDEN, representing the unspoiled creation. Jesus, the first-born of creation, the maker of heaven and earth, was accused of ‘the sin against creation’, the very sin that is the most offensive of all sins because it’s directly aimed at God’s majesty.

Jesus was accused for ridiculing God’s Paradise on earth, accused of saying that he himself would create a new temple, a new Paradise. That was his sin. The church then convicted Jesus for committing the original sin.

Actually, that’s what we have been doing right from the start! We always have been busy, right until now and into the Day of Christ, breaking down the Holy Temple, God’s so beloved creation, replacing it with our own culture, our arts and sciences, our music and literature, our films and television, all in an effort to build a new paradise. We have not respected The Tree of Life, and so assured our death.

The great irony of all ages is that the church of Jesus’ day killed him because he was accused of the very crime we are daily engaged in: he, the sinless one, took our sin, our very own creation-defiling sin, upon his shoulders.

And the church today?

Don’t get me going. The US church elected a person who is the exponent of all that offends creation. Watch 2017 take revenge in unprecedented ways, or should I spell that as UNPRESIDENTED ways?

This brings me to Nietzsche.

Friedrich Nietzsche always told us ‘to remain true to the earth.’ He, the offspring of generations of clergymen from both parents, a brilliant man, a sharp observer, a devout Christian, lost his mind when he saw one of God’s creatures, a poor horse, whipped to death.
We, insensitive as we are, find it normal to be active participants in the death of 60 percent of all mammals. Nietzsche revolted against a Christianity that sought escape in heaven, an idea now so entrenched that many of the hymns we sing have lines slandering and depreciating this world, together with the praise and exaltation of a heaven to come, drawing odious comparisons between the things of this earth and the blessings of heaven. Current church practice gushes in a very unsportsmanlike manner over an imaginary beyond, to the detriment and disadvantage of a “here,” of this earth, of this life. That turned Nietzsche off so much that he lost his mind.

Another year lies ahead, another year mostly lived without God and disregard of his creation. We simply cannot expect God to be with us when we intensify our efforts to despoil creation.
Jesus was killed because he bore the sin against creation, which he did not commit but which we do every day of the entire year. We cannot escape it. We have it built into our way of life.

So, the age-old question pops up again. How then shall we live in the coming year, which, who knows, may be among our last?

The perennial question.

It seems to me that we must slowly retreat from the system that perpetuates the sin of Adam, the sin against creation. How that is to be done is a question that confronts each of us in a different way. What it boils down to is that, as Bonhoeffer has observed, we must look at the `telos`, the end and work back from there.

Again the opening lines of Bonhoeffer’s CREATION AND FALL come to mind:
“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.” He then quotes Jesus: “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing,” as recorded in Isaiah 43: 18-19.

Don’t expect the church to do this. The church only lives for the church. So, it’s up to us, as church members.

That’s our mandate for 2017, as it has been for every year, but now more urgent and necessary than ever. The old things have brought us where we are: at the edge of destruction. The world’s answers are failing and, as true fanatics, their leaders are redoubling their efforts.
Expect more of the same, even more so: more destruction, more war, more empty rhetoric, more irrelevant political and religious banter.

We must quietly feel our way to eternity, perhaps alone, perhaps in a small group. We must pray a lot, try to walk or bike the road to life everlasting. Take on the burden of Christ, for (Matthew 11: 30) “his yoke is easy and his burden is light.”
Perhaps that also means that we must travel light: the less we own and the less we are engaged in worldly matters, the easier it is to travel on the path of Christ.

DECEMBER 25 2016

WHY WAS JESUS BORN?

So, it is Christmas, the day in which we hear about Jesus the Christ, who, in popular understanding, forever remains a baby, because as an adult he became too outspoken and controversial. That he died (see John 3: 16, the most important text in the Bible today) to forever restore creation and the human race to a pristine and sinless state, is almost never mentioned: not one preacher in 10,000 will tell you that. Amor Mundi, love for our fragile world, is needed now more than ever. That’s why Christ came: he personified that love by his death.
Yes, Amor Mundi, love for the world was the exact reason why Jesus came to earth! He came to give us eternal life on an earth that sorely needed total renewal.
No wonder Bonhoeffer and Bavinck are unpopular when they express the perfect Biblical truth that the redemption of you and me and the redemption of the cosmos – the world we occupy – go hand in hand: you can’t have one without the other!!

Yes, you read that correctly. If you say you love Jesus but have no qualms about polluting the atmosphere, then something indispensable is missing. The saving of sinners and the restoration of creation are two sides of the same coin. That’s why we daily must ask ‘to forgive us our trespasses’ involving God’s Holy Cosmos. That also means that a renewed earth is our eternal destination and not heaven where God lives in inapproachable light, whom nobody can see or ever has seen. (1 Tim: 6: 16).

THAT HEAVEN THING AGAIN

Somehow the HEAVEN HERESY reminds me of my very early youth when my parents read me stories from “De kinder Bijbel”, our beautifully illustrated Children’s Bible. I can recall how I was told of Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, who suddenly fell ill and died.
John 11 relates the story. Just as we, when sickness strikes, rush to the hospital, so his two sisters right away sent a messenger to the great healer, Jesus, their best friend. The chapter relates how Jesus ‘loved’ (‘agape’ in Greek) that family, yet when the news reached him he waited a couple of days before meeting with his grieving friends, but by that time Lazarus had been buried. When Jesus arrived, he said that Lazarus was asleep which made Martha say the remarkable words (verse 24) “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day”.

It is exactly these words that the church seems to have forgotten, extolling instead the supposed benefits of heaven of which John 3: 13 says that nobody has ever gone there, except Jesus who came from there.

As a kid I was so brainwashed about heaven that, when the story was read to me I remember wondering “why would Jesus call Lazarus back from that so beautiful heaven?” My parents ignored my query.

The root of our Environmental COLLAPSE.

I call it ‘COLLAPSE’ when we have killed 58% of all vertebrate wildlife just between 1970 and 2012, and at a rate of 2% per year we will have massacred close to 70% of it by 2020, barely 4 years from now.
It is my considerate opinion that belief in heaven is at the root of our environmental crisis, which has culminated in the paganist heresy of RAPTURE, that great untruth that has poisoned modern Christianity as thoroughly as the snake in the Garden of Eden.
Blame Hal Lindsey and his unbiblical book THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH which led to the LEFT BEHIND SERIES.
His tale spinning purely relies on his imagination, and not on biblical givens. I have no idea why Hal Lindsey had such an intense interest in Israel, evident from page 32 of The Late Great Planet Earth. There he asserts, without presenting any evidence: “Sometime in the future there will be a seven-year period climaxed by the visible return of Jesus Christ in Israel.”

What we face here is the old dispensationalist notion of the seven-year kingdom. Lindsey arrived at the figure of seven years by adding up the 42 months and 1260 days of Revelation 11:2-3. Lindsey claims that the age of the church will end when the believers are taken up to Christ. That event will mark the beginning of the seven-year period, a period in which the state of Israel will play a major role and World War III will begin.
He claims – again without proof – that during that period, more people will turn to Christ in faith. Through the work of 144,000 Jewish evangelists, there will be a great revival among the Jews. That must be the reason why Lindsey is so interested in the development of the modern state of Israel: still all pure speculation.

He also asserts that when the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem is near it will be time for the “Rapture.” The believers will be taken up to Christ in the air, but the world will go right on turning and life will continue. Everywhere people will disappear suddenly—from athletic fields, from lecture halls, from offices, from churches. That’s why we read on bumper stickers: “If the driver disappears, grab the wheel!”

Let’s test all this on Scripture.

The word RAPTURE does not appear in the bible at all but it has a curious pedigree: both RAPTURE and RAPE come from the Latin verb RAPIO of which the passive form is RAPTUS, meaning “seized”. In essence they mean the same thing: RAPE is the violent seizing of sex, and RAPTURE the violent raping of creation.
Matthew 24: 39 explicitly says that “the sinners are taken away” and not the believers, but many gullible Christians haven’t got a clue what the Bible really teaches, and are easy victims for anything, including the TRUMP tragedy, the most perfect Devil’s ploy since the Garden of Eden.

Back to the Lindsey lies.

According to Lindsey’s book – which for a while outsold the Bible – after the Rapture, the seven-year period will begin. For 3 1/2 years, the two witnesses, whom Lindsey calls “Jesus freaks,” will go about their work. After that the Antichrist will bare his fangs and the persecution (the Great Tribulation) will begin. At about that time, the inferno of World War III will break out, with Jerusalem at the center of events. Once those seven frightening years are over, Jesus will return and the millennial kingdom will begin. That kingdom, in turn, will be followed by judgment and, finally, ultimate glory.

THE HEAVEN MYTH

The title of the book THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH says it all. It implies that the world we live in will disappear, will be gone, will somehow evaporate or melt away.
That, in itself, is an admission that God has failed, that God was imperfect, because the world which he created and called `good` after each phase of creation and `very good` when God surveyed the ultimate result, has been a mistake: why else would it have to fade away?

It is an admission that the old GNOSTIC heresy that creation is a work of the DEVIL is alive and well. In Lindsey`s notion, we can abuse and pollute and exploit the earth at our heart`s content, because it is evil to start with.

According to this false statement the birth of Christ, which we celebrate today, is only significant because he has come to save human souls of which some will be raptured up to heaven. His birth, life, death, and resurrection has nothing to do with the rest of creation, which makes the teaching of RAPTURE a LIE.

I have said it before and will say it again: John 3: 16 portrays the heart of the gospel: GOD SO LOVED THE COSMOS. It does not say, as most churchgoers believe: God so loved the human race. Of course he loves us, but the Greek is quite explicit here. The word COSMOS indicates all created matter. True, humans occupy an important place in creation, but God equally cares for lions and elephants and whales and dolphins and polar bears, not to forget trees and the flowers in the field.

The earth and we humans, belong together.

A long time ago, the Bible tells us, God fashioned the first human pair from the earth. The Hebrew word for soil is Adamah, from which Adam was formed. The word adam reminded the Israelite immediately of the first Adam who was taken from the soil of the earth, hence the well-known saying: soil we are and to soil we shall return. Just as we have red clay and black soil, we too have people of different colors. The word ‘adam’ typifies the human race in its unbreakable unity. We all come from the earth and we all go back to the earth. Earth-bound we are, forever. We, the human beings, are adam, and belong to adamah, the life bearing earth. With every sinew of our exis¬tence we are tied to the earth, which bears us and feeds us.

Where does the HEAVEN NOTION originate?

It all goes back to Plato and Socrates.
Socrates was condemned to die because he had been a bad influence on the Greek youth. Jesus died because he was a bad influence on the church of his day. Socrates gladly drank the chalice filled with deadly poison, seeing death as better than life. Jesus saw death as the ultimate enemy.
Both did not leave any personal writings: Socrates’ teachings were meticulously recorded by Plato, while we know about Jesus from the four Gospels.
Since Christianity became a global phenomenon, who has been more influential: Jesus or Socrates?

Sad to say: The Greek –pagan -philosophy of heaven as the Christian’s eternal habitat has triumphed, thanks to Socrates. That’s the reason why most of Christianity – almost every expression whether that is Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, or every other denominational wing – has suffered from a form of dualism, splitting body from soul, sacred from secular.
Originating in Socrates, as recorded by Plato, many ideas which were long regarded and accepted as the pure unadulterated essence of Christianity, such as the doctrine of an immortal soul, a self-denying attitude towards matters involving our body, and the view of sexuality as in itself ‘the sinful lust of the flesh’, are deeply rooted in Platonic thought.
It is evident everywhere. Look no further than the hymns we sing in church: in most of them there is a ‘heaven’ reference, and salvation only applies to men and women, never to ‘nature’, the whole creation, as plainly outlined in Romans 8: 22.
I like the current Pope, but when I see him in his white robe, escorted by all male companions also immaculately dressed in identical pure habits, I see dualism at work: the church separate from society, as the priestly class represents God and his angels. Just as Jesus is supposed to be sexless so these men are supposed to be that too. We know that reality is different. We cannot separate sex from life: denying the presence of sex is akin to denying creation.

Why does this lie linger on?

The HEAVEN lie lingers on because it is much more convenient. We can live our leisurely lives – at least we Westerners – and not pay any attention to ‘the suffering of Creation’, forgetting that Christ came to earth, lived there depending on charity, and died as a criminal, to redeem Creation, the Cosmos, us as her inhabitants, but also every single species, which, at one time formed a total harmonious totality.

The TRUMP tragedy is resting on the false notion that creation is there to be exploited, to be stripped of everything possible to enrich the One Percent.

That everything exists for SERVICE of which Jesus was the prime example, witness his very own words as expressed in Matthew 20: 28: “The Son of man did not come to be served but to serve”, is not understood.

That ‘service’ was and today still is primarily aimed at restoring his now totally despoiled creation to its original state. John 3: 16 explicitly states that those – and only those – who love creation as Christ did, will have eternal life. That is the radical emphasis in today’s Good News.

So do away with that pious Christmas mentality and focus on the real task the Church is charged with: love the cosmos as Jesus did.

DECEMBER 18 2016

OUR DISASTROUS DATE WITH THE DEVIL.

“And there was war in heaven……The devil, Satan, who leads the whole world astray, was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.
Revelation 12: 7, 9

After the mighty Michael and his army of fighting angels had defeated the Satan cohort, the Devil and those loyal to him, all rebels who had challenged God’s authority were kicked out of heaven.

Who says that heaven is a peaceful place?

That’s how we, right here, ended up with the world’s newest and most dangerous refugees, thrown out of God’s presence and landing, feet first, on Planet Earth. The unexpected does happen: the world, our world, got new rulers who, fueled by ferocious revenge, are now frantically intending to hit God where it hurts the most: destroying God’s most precious planet.

Yes, the location has changed. Heaven is cleared of the rebels, but the victory of Michael and his angels over the demonic army way up there has made matters worse exactly where you and I live. Now the struggle continues and is being fought directly on our doorsteps. So expect the totally unexpected, because Satan, the Father of Lies, has personally arranged for a true believer, his avowed ally, to be installed in the White House, the very seat of power in the world.

History is repeating itself. Just as the High Priest and his cabinet, the Sanhedrin, condemned God’s Son to death because he agitated against the seat of organized religion, so Trump and his mainly ‘Christian’ cabinet are condemning God’s creation to death, refusing to respond to her anguished cries: Romans 8: 22 “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”

The Good News: it will hasten Christ’s coming!

You say “of course that’s that gloomy blogger again.” Well, the signs are all there: unrestricted evil, disappearing species, political turmoil, out of control debt, wacky weather, lies, lies, lies, all indicating THE LAST OF DAYS.

The issue of the Last Days is a recurring theme in the Bible. The entire New Testament has been written in the expectation of Christ’s speedy return. In Acts 2, when the church had its modern beginning, we read that people sold all their possessions and shared what they had, anticipating Jesus’ Second Coming.

Of course all Bible readers know that the day and the hour are unknown. That restriction means very little. I compare it to the birth of a child. There we know the approximate date, but not the ‘day or the hour.’ We know that after a 9 months period more or less, new life will come, but even when labor pains start the actual time of birth cannot be accurately predicted.
Therefore we simply cannot say that on October 31 2017 at 8.22 p.m. we will see Christ’s glorious re-entry. The Bible is quite emphatic on this point: the Lord repeats it twice in Matthew 24 stating that not even the angels or the Son of Man know the exact date and time.

Yet the Lord tells us to keep watch, because there will be definite indications. Jesus points to the fig tree and how it, at a certain time, will change in appearance, signaling summer. That Christ’s return will be preceded by disasters is certain: Matthew 24 signals that and so does much of Revelation.

So then, are signs of the ‘fig tree’ apparent today? Most definitely.

Primary Productivity, for instance, indicates that almost half of the world’s basic energy, vested in plants, trees, animals, has been used for the benefit of the human race, but in such a way that once it is used, it cannot be restored. It now stands close to 50, witness depleted and acidifying oceans, soil degradation, tree loss, death of species, debased human nature and Climate Change, none of them can be re-created by human technology.

Revelation 11: 2 says that “they will trample on the holy city for 42 months.” The Holy City is God’s creation. Revelation 13: 5 repeats that: “The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise authority for 42 months.”

There is significance in the number of 42 months, which is 3.5 years, exactly half of that perfect number ‘7’. Matthew 24: 21-22 says that “For there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now – and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect, those days will be shortened.”

Allow me a brief detour by means of a riddle illustrating the nature of exponential growth. A lily pond contains a single leaf. Each day the number of leaves doubles – two leaves the second day, four the third, eight the four, and so on. “If the pond is full on the thirtieth day,” the question goes, “at what point is it half full?” Answer: “On the twenty-ninth day.”

It is my contention that we are quite close to both the 3.5 year mark and the number of Primary Productivity, which also stands close to the half: both fit into the Day 29 mark! I believe that the Lord will not return on Day 30, but on Day 29 for the sake of the elect, when, seemingly, the glass is still half full. Then the trumpet will sound and, all will be changed, in a flash, in the twinkling of the eye.
Of course I realize that this is purely my imagination at work…..yet…

The words of Peter come to mind: “Since everything here today might well be gone tomorrow, do you see how essential it is to live a holy life? Daily expect the Day of God, eager for its arrival. The galaxies will burn up and the elements melt down that day – but we’ll hardly notice. We’ll be looking the other way, ready for the promised new heavens and the promised new earth, all landscaped with righteousness.” (The Message, 2 Peter 3.)

So, what constitutes a Holy Life?

That this has to do with creation is beyond question, which makes me think of Matthew 5:48: “Be perfect.” The Greek word there is ‘teleioos,’ best translated as ‘holistic’ (Al Wolters) derived from ‘telos’, (as in ‘tele-phone, tele-pathy’) which suggests that we always have to keep the faraway goal – telos- in mind, which is our final destination, the New Earth.

But before this event, trouble, big trouble, which is contrary to what we would expect. We all figured that Christ’s great triumph – his death on the cross – would result in increasing peace and prosperity here on earth as well. That’s why we sing, a bit prematurely, I believe:
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!
The strife is o’er, the battle done,
the victory of life is won;
the song of triumph has begun.
Alleluia!

The battle is done? Forget it. We now discover that the opposite is true: the world is becoming demonic in the fullest sense of the word. Verse 12 of Revelation 12 says: “But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! Filled with fury, because he knows that the time is short.”

That’s what the angels sing. This means that the demonic armies have thrown themselves onto our world with such unbridled ferocity and furious hate for God, that it can only have the most terrible results for creation and us.
With Satan being kicked out of heaven, a combination of evil powers emerges, a frightening mass of such a highly disturbing magnitude that it will seem that the bells have tolled for humanity, banning all peace and quietness forever.

Yes, I sincerely believe that the Demonic Era has arrived.

Satan descending to earth means that from now on world events will be grimmer, more frightening, accelerating with breathtaking speed, continuously assuming more ghastly proportions, dragging millions along in a maddening ‘danse macabre’, undermining all old established morals, speeding relentlessly to chaos and social upheaval.

This world, indeed, has now truly become possessed. All factors that somehow acted as brakes to stall this development are pushed aside; once this process is in motion it will speed up disastrously, and nothing can stop it. With Satan’s descent history has become madness. Woe to those who are sucked into this whirlpool of evil.

John, the author of REVELATION, sees it all happening in a prophetic dream. He also realizes that something is the matter here that is beyond human grasp, because in principle, Satan’s influential position should naturally come to an end as well, as, it seems, his defeat is final and can only mean his total destruction.

But God has a reason for this delay, has a reason why the demonic powers are allowed space to pursue their relentless opposition; there is a reason why God has allowed a certain period for this, a time-frame in which life on earth goes on as if not Satan but Michael and his angels have suffered defeat.

It is here where we are confronted with the history of the world. It is in this extremely remarkable phenomenon that matters are not yet what they are, that everything still looks different than it is in reality. The haze of untruthfulness hovers like a curse over the world and in that fog of uncertainty history marches on.

Look at the last 500 years. Since the 1500’s the entire world has seen a very traumatic transformation, rapidly accelerating in the last century. That period saw deeply penetrating social changes, urbanization, and bloody revolutions. It also witnessed the birth of a global mechanical, physical science- dominated world with all its consequences. All too evident also are the erosion of old moral principles. All too well-known are the World Wars, affecting and upsetting all that lives.

Never before in the history of the world has so much in such a short time been demolished and radically changed, as in the last five centuries. These immense changes were not confined to Europe and the USA, but now involve all people everywhere, imperiling the existence of all these countries and regions and increasingly cause unrest and confusion.

It almost seems as if God for centuries has blindfolded humanity to prevent them from seeing all the planetary powers and possibilities and then suddenly he ripped away the blindfold in our days so that the one perspective after the other opens up.

This wild, unrestrained progress of human thought and discovery comes not only with both a good dose of triumph but also with visions of frightening nightmares. Nerves are constantly at an edge, the pace of life is ever more hectic, undefined feelings of anxiety dominate the millions. We are confronted with situations, internally, spiritually, and morally which make it impossible to cope, which make us feel helpless, and which give us the unnerving notion that we are racing toward indescribable confusion and degeneration.

Is that what is meant when John laments in these harrowing words:
“Woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short”. (verse 12).

Have we humans, more than ever before in these last centuries, embraced these demonic powers which sweep us along in its breathtaking course? Are these the demons whose terrible presence we more and more sense in our day and age?

All our dismay and bewilderment cannot erase the overriding fact that the demonic forces in reality have suffered defeat and that’s why their fury is merely a symptom of their defeat. They are fully aware that they have ‘little time’: they have already been banned from heaven and their influence on earth is approaching its inevitable finish.

The Demonic Age will end.

That “woe on earth and sea” may be accompanied with feelings of untold anguish, yet they fully rest on the unbelievable sounds of jubilation coming from on high: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ.” “He has come!” Above the screaming hurricanes, emerges the over-riding call to joy beyond measure. It resounds like a loud trumpet blast penetrating to the utmost parts of the universe. It also echoes in our hearts, filled with anxiety and fear.

December 11 2016

ANARCHY

Curiously the SEPTUAGINT, the Greek translation of the (Hebrew) Old Testament by 70 (Septuagint in Greek) Jewish rabbis starts with almost identical words “EN ARCHE”, which means: In the beginning, the first words of the Bible in Genesis 1.

That ‘beginning’ was marked by ANARCHY, in Biblical language called CHAOS, which, like ANARCHY, means: leaderless, without a specific goal, empty, undefined, having no real substance.

That is how I see the next four years in the Western world shaping up, exactly the opposite of what is needed, because these years will determine the fate of the world.

Yes, ANARCHY is in the cards: authoritarianism is on the march as well, violence is in the air, awaiting a spark. Most people are ‘against’, without being able to define their opposition. Everything is up for grabs: military alliances, trade pacts, political integration and legal framework. Dictators everywhere exult in the sudden surge of the unpredictable Donald who has 666 written all over him, who wants to make America great again, and will accomplish the exact opposite.

No wonder I feel depressed, for me an entirely new sensation. Gone will be any climatic moderation. Gone will be any fiscal frugality. Gone will be Christian charity, welcoming the down-and-out of this world.

This new cruel harshness, this pitiless approach to the international refugees will create tremendous hardships and severe suffering: brace yourself for strict laws to forbid TV crews to broadcast these heartrending scenes.

Jobs? Forget it. Robots, Artificial Intelligence, technological relentless advance will doom many more millions of angry young men to become surplus, and, with no meaningful work to fill their time, violence will increase as “idleness is the root of all evil.”

So Trump promised economic growth. He also boasted to provide health care ‘at a fraction of the current cost!’ Those gullible American voters! They are in for a rude awakening. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. More old people, the fastest growing segment of the population, will require more of all that makes healthcare so necessary and so expensive.

So Trump promised economic growth. This too shows his ignorance. There is an ocean of difference between a promise and a fact. Facts are Trump’s stumbling block, and will be his direct downfall. Too bad that his speedy demise will increase anarchy, something he will advocate, blaming everybody but himself.

Why is economic growth no longer possible?

Well, history is a good guide. It has been said that the further forward you want to forecast, the further back you have to look.

So let me go back a while. According to the historian Angus Maddison the annual rate of growth in the western world from AD 1 to AD 1820 was a mere 0.06 per cent per year, or 6 per cent per century. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level.

Then—just a couple of hundred years ago—people started getting richer, and richer and richer still from, say 1820, first thanks to coal.

Growth accelerated even more after the US Civil War in 1860, when other countries too made stupendous progress. Western Europe and Japan largely caught up to the US in the second half of the 20th century, and China and other emerging nations are well on their way, but that single 100-year period, the “special century,” from 1870-1970 was more important to economic progress than any other so far.

Then, some 50 years ago, growth slowed.
And now growth is stalling altogether.

Back to history.

A child born in 1820 entered a world that was almost medieval: lit by candlelight, in which folk remedies treated health problems and travel was no faster than hoof or sail. Three great inventions of that next half century—the railroad, steamship, and telegraph—set the stage for more rapid progress. The Civil War showcased these advances when northern trains sped Yankee troops to the front and steamships blockaded supplies to the South. Compare that to the War of 1812, when news still travelled so slowly that the Battle of New Orleans was fought three weeks after a treaty had been signed to end that war. But by the time of the Civil War, daily newspapers published the outcomes of battles mere hours after they occurred.

Let me point out why it is now impossible to repeat the aspects of the post-1870 economic revolution.

In 1870, rural and urban working-class North Americans bathed in a large tub in the kitchen after pumping water from outside in pails and warming it over an open hearth. All this was such a nuisance that some people bathed once a month. Similarly, heating in every room was once a distant dream—yet it became a daily reality in the decades between 1890 and 1940.

The flood of inventions that followed the Civil War transformed life. When electricity made illumination possible with the flick of a switch, the process of creating light was changed forever. When lifts allowed buildings to extend vertically instead of horizontally, the nature of land use was changed, and urban density was created. When small electric machines replaced huge, heavy steam boilers, the scope for replacing human labor with machines broadened beyond recognition.

So it was with transport. When cars and other ‘auto-mobile’ vehicles replaced horses, the quarter of agricultural land devoted to feeding those animals was freed up. Progress in transport has been stunning; it took little more than a century from the first primitive railroads which began replacing the stagecoach in the 1830s to the Boeing 707 flying near the speed of sound in 1958.

The transition of the food supply from medieval to modern also occurred during this century. The Mason jar, invented in 1859, made it possible to preserve food at home. The first canned meats were fed to Northern troops in the Civil War, and during the late 19th century a vast array of processed foods, from Kellogg’s cornflakes and Borden’s condensed milk to Jell-O, entered American homes. Clarence Birdseye invented a method for freezing food in 1916, although it took until the 1950s before people had domestic freezers. In 1870, shoes and men’s clothing were bought from shops but women’s clothing was made at home, and the sewing machine had only recently reached the mass market.

By the 1920s, most women’s clothing was bought from retail outlets that did not exist in 1870—namely, the great urban department stores and, for rural customers, mail-order catalogues.

Many – I among them – now worry that there will no longer be work for an increasing share of able-bodied adults.

Yes, the remarkable period between 1900 and 1970 was indeed exceptional. My mother was born at the turn of the 20th century at a farm with no electricity, and died in the late-1970s in the city. Over her adult lifetime she saw the flush toilet, electricity for lighting and central heating go from being luxuries enjoyed by a quarter or less of the population to becoming universal. She saw radio come into being and then be supplanted by black-and-white and ultimately color television. She saw air-conditioning, washing machines, dryers and refrigerators go from non-existent to universal. Over her lifetime, transportation went from meaning walking, riding a horse or taking some kind of train to being primarily based on cars and planes. When she had my oldest brother in 1924, infant mortality was 75 per 1000 and large families could expect to suffer an infant or childhood death. When her youngest grandchild was born in the 1970s, infant mortality was below 20 per 1000 and life expectancy had risen by more than a decades.

It is striking to contrast the changes during my mother’s lifetime with those during mine. Microwaves have become universal in kitchens. Automotive air-conditioning has gone from common to universal. A much wider range of TV programs are now available and with a much sharper picture. There is a wider array of healthy foods. And even though I refuse to carry a smartphone, most others keep connected all the times.
But….all these changes in my lifetime are purely cosmetic. Still I can easily claim that my generation, those born between 1920 and 1970, are also the most fortunate generation.

Certain kinds of progress can happen only once. Living in a controlled climate, having access to indoor plumbing, largely eliminating child mortality, controlling infectious disease, and being able to communicate immediately in the absence of physical presence are all examples of transformations that can be built on and improved but are impossible to replicate.

We should not forget that all this happened thanks to CARBON FUELS, or should I say CARBON CARNAGE.

Our profligate production of perfidious petroleum products has prompted the all-pervasive poisoning of our precious planet.

Yes, our legacy is largely illegitimate; it is the direct opposite of creational justice. This total act of exploitation of the earth’s treasures, such as air, soil, water, just to name the three elements all of life depends on, will serve as a tremendous drag on economic growth, may probably cause negative growth, making the potential for total chaos and complete anarchy universal. We have squandered our inheritance and no political party in the world can restore the damage done.

We are now experiencing the Age of Aging, not only of the population, cancelling the continuation of universal healthcare because of lack of economic growth, but we also are witnessing ”The Aging of the Planet”. We live in a world where problems are piling up and so-called solutions – fracking, more coal, pipelines, and Trump’s tirades – are making matters worse.

ANARCHY and EN ARCHE, CHAOS and COSMOS.

“In the beginning (en arche) God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty.” God spoke and it came to be. Genesis 1: 1-2.

Yes, the world started in chaos. Out of that chaos God created cosmos, the well-ordered world, where each species had a specific place, forming a perfectly harmonious totality. John, the fourth gospel after Matthew, Mark, and Luke, starts on an identical note: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That suggests to me that the world, cosmos, and God, are one. To sin against creation is to sin against God. No wonder there is increasing chaos and anarchy.

We now are un-doing God, un-creating Creation: Anarchy everywhere is the result.

Trump and his followers may assert that they will restore that greatness that was evident during that golden age of 1870-1970, but that glorious growth century was an anomaly, powered by poisonous particles, now emerging everywhere and choking off all that lives and moves and has a being. Trump will speed up the process of disintegration and so bring on more chaos.

So what are we to do? What am I to do?

I believe that I must start by acknowledging the true situation, by confessing that we live in a world where matters have run stuck. There no longer are solutions to the world-wide chaos we have created. Our helplessness is causing and accelerating anarchy.

We must realize that, as Jesus prayed in John 17, “we are in this world, but want no part of a world that now is dominated by ”The Evil One”, as is evident from various Scripture passages, such as 1 John 5: 19.

Jesus’ followers belong to the New World to come, of which the Bible speaks in glorious terms. Isaiah 65: 25 pictures such a scene, where current enemies such as the wolf and the lamb will feed together, and where nobody will do or cause harm on God’s Holy Mountain, something we now do continually.

Jesus, God’s precious Son, died to wrest back God’s beloved cosmos out of the clutches of The Evil One. That’s what John 3: 16 is all about.

When Jesus returns, and we in these coming weeks celebrate this, he will do away with all religion. Bonhoeffer writes: ”Jesus takes possession of the world come of age”, initiating a Religion-less Christianity (See Revelation 21:22). Jesus does not call us to a new religion but to LIFE.

That LIFE will be lived to the fullest extent in the New Creation.
To get away from Anarchy we have to start a New Beginning, from CHAOS TO COSMOS.

As always: our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.