Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

OCTOBER 23 2016

“CHRISTIANITY TODAY” AND THE HEAVEN HANG-UP.

Below is shown an editorial which appeared in CHRISTIANITY TODAY last week. I quote it in full, because it gives a clear picture of what constitutes orthodox Christianity in the USA.
Here it is:

As a non-profit journalistic organization, CHRISTIANITY TODAY is doubly committed to staying neutral regarding political campaigns—the law requires it, and we serve our readers best when we give them the information and analysis they need to make their own judgments.
We can never collude when idolatry becomes manifest, especially when it demands our public allegiance.
Just because we are neutral, however, does not mean we are indifferent. We are especially not indifferent when the gospel is at stake. The gospel is of infinitely greater importance than any campaign, and one good summary of the gospel is, “Jesus is Lord.”

The true Lord of the world reigns even now, far above any earthly ruler. His kingdom is not of this world, but glimpses of its power and grace can be found all over the world. One day his kingdom, and his only, will be the standard by which all earthly kingdoms are judged, and following that judgment day, every knee will bow, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, as his reign is fully realized in the renewal of all things.
The lordship of Christ places constraints on the way his followers involve themselves, or entangle themselves, with earthly rulers.

On the one hand, we pray for all rulers—and judging from the example of Old Testament exiles like Daniel and New Testament prisoners like Paul, we can even wholeheartedly pray for rulers who directly oppose our welfare. On the other hand, we recognize that all earthly governments partake, to a greater or lesser extent, in what the Bible calls idolatry: substituting the creation for the Creator and the earthly ruler for the true God.

No human being, including even the best rulers, is free of this temptation. But some rulers and regimes are especially outrageous in their God-substitution. After Augustus Caesar, the emperors of Rome became more and more elaborate in their claims of divinity with each generation—and more and more ineffective in their governance. Communism aimed not just to replace faith in anything that transcended the state, but to crush it. Such systems do not just dishonor God, they dishonor his image in persons, and in doing so they set themselves up for dramatic destruction. We can never collude when such idolatry becomes manifest, especially when it demands our public allegiance. Christians in every place and time must pray for the courage to stay standing when the alleged “voice of a god, not a man” commands us to kneel.

This year’s presidential election in the United States presents Christian voters with an especially difficult choice.
The Democratic nominee has pursued unaccountable power through secrecy—most evidently in the form of an email server designed to shield her communications while in public service, but also in lavishly compensated speeches, whose transcripts she refuses to release, to some of the most powerful representatives of the world system. She exemplifies the path to power preferred by the global technocratic elite—rooted in a rigorous control of one’s image and calculated disregard for norms that restrain less powerful actors. Such concentration of power, which is meant to shield the powerful from the vulnerability of accountability, actually creates far greater vulnerabilities, putting both the leader and the community in greater danger.

But because several of the Democratic candidate’s policy positions are so manifestly incompatible with Christian reverence for the lives of the most vulnerable, and because her party is so demonstrably hostile to expressions of traditional Christian faith, there is plenty of critique and criticism of the Democratic candidate from Christians, including evangelical Christians.
But not all evangelical Christians—in fact, alas, most evangelical Christians, judging by the polls—have shown the same critical judgment when it comes to the Republican nominee. True, when given a choice, primary voters who claimed evangelical faith largely chose other candidates. But since his nomination, Donald Trump has been able to count on “the evangelicals” (in his words) for a great deal of support.

The revelations of the past week of his vile and crude boasting about sexual conquest—indeed, sexual assault—might have been shocking, but they should have surprised no one.
This past week, the latest (though surely not last) revelations from Trump’s past have caused many evangelical leaders to reconsider. This is heartening, but it comes awfully late. What Trump is, everyone has known and has been able to see for decades, let alone the last few months. The revelations of the past week of his vile and crude boasting about sexual conquest—indeed, sexual assault—might have been shocking, but they should have surprised no one.
Indeed, there is hardly any public person in America today who has more exemplified the “earthly nature” (“flesh” in the King James and the literal Greek) that Paul urges the Colossians to shed: “sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry” (3:5). This is an incredibly apt summary of Trump’s life to date. Idolatry, greed, and sexual immorality are intertwined in individual lives and whole societies. Sexuality is designed to be properly ordered within marriage, a relationship marked by covenant faithfulness and profound self-giving and sacrifice. To indulge in sexual immorality is to make oneself and one’s desires an idol. That Trump has been, his whole adult life, an idolater of this sort, and a singularly unrepentant one, should have been clear to everyone.

And therefore it is completely consistent that Trump is an idolater in many other ways. He has given no evidence of humility or dependence on others, let alone on God his Maker and Judge. He wantonly celebrates strongmen and takes every opportunity to humiliate and demean the vulnerable. He shows no curiosity or capacity to learn. He is, in short, the very embodiment of what the Bible calls a fool.

Some have compared Trump to King David, who himself committed adultery and murder. But David’s story began with a profound reliance on God who called him from the sheepfold to the kingship, and by the grace of God it did not end with his exploitation of Bathsheba and Uriah. There is no parallel in Trump’s much more protracted career of exploitation. The Lord sent his word by the prophet Nathan to denounce David’s actions—alas, many Christian leaders who could have spoken such prophetic confrontation to him personally have failed to do so. David quickly and deeply repented, leaving behind the astonishing and universally applicable lament of his own sin in Psalm 51—we have no sign that Trump ever in his life has expressed such humility. And the biblical narrative leaves no doubt that David’s sin had vast and terrible consequences for his own family dynasty and for his nation. The equivalent legacy of a Trump presidency is grievous to imagine.

There is a point at which strategy becomes its own form of idolatry—an attempt to manipulate the levers of history in favor of the causes we support.
Most Christians who support Trump have done so with reluctant strategic calculation, largely based on the president’s power to appoint members of the Supreme Court. Important issues are indeed at stake, including the right of Christians and adherents of other religions to uphold their vision of sexual integrity and marriage even if they are in the cultural minority.
But there is a point at which strategy becomes its own form of idolatry—an attempt to manipulate the levers of history in favor of the causes we support. Strategy becomes idolatry, for ancient Israel and for us today, when we make alliances with those who seem to offer strength—the chariots of Egypt, the vassal kings of Rome—at the expense of our dependence on God who judges all nations, and in defiance of God’s manifest concern for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed. Strategy becomes idolatry when we betray our deepest values in pursuit of earthly influence. And because such strategy requires capitulating to idols and princes and denying the true God, it ultimately always fails.
Enthusiasm for a candidate like Trump gives our neighbors ample reason to doubt that we believe Jesus is Lord. They see that some of us are so self-interested, and so self-protective, that we will ally ourselves with someone who violates all that is sacred to us—in hope, almost certainly a vain hope given his mendacity and record of betrayal, that his rule will save us.
The US political system has never been free of idolatry, and politics always requires compromise. Our country is flawed, but it is also resilient. And God is not only just, but also merciful, as he judges the nations. In these closing weeks before the election, all American Christians should repent, fast, and pray—no matter how we vote. And we should hold on to hope—not in a candidate, but in our Lord Jesus. We do not serve idols. We serve the living God. Even now he is ready to have mercy, on us and on all who are afraid. May his name be hallowed, his kingdom come, and his will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.

End of the CHRISTIANITY TODAY editorial.

My comments.

There is much in that editorial that I like, because it is good conventional Christian teaching. However (and here I fundamentally differ) I believe that this sort of orthodoxy can no longer be the criterion for the Christian today.

For instance: I have difficulty with the following sentence. Here it is:
“The true Lord of the world reigns even now……..”

In 1 John 5: 19 the apostle contradicts this when he writes: “The whole world is under control of the evil one,” affirming what Jesus himself prayed in John 17. That this is the case is all too evident in our unlimited use of creation-destroying fossil fuels.

Further in the editorial “substituting the creation for the Creator” is called idolatry. Of course we may not make an idol of anything created, whether that is a tree or a man or woman or economic growth. But, since God made the totality of creation, this does indicate that the creation as an entity is holy. After all we call the Bible holy.

Compare Creation to the Bible: the Bible’s composition, what to include and what to leave out, its order of content, the arranging in chapters and verses, all this is of human origin. Creation, however, is a direct act of God, has no human input at all. This makes Creation more holy than the Bible. Psalm 33: 9 says: “God spoke and it came to be; he commanded and it stood firm”. That statement is confirmed in John 1: “In the beginning was the WORD”, resulting in God’s Created Word, his PRIMARY REVELATION, his DIRECT WORD, compared to the Scriptures, which are his Secondary Revelation, his Indirect Word. The church has never recognized this distinction, even though the ancient (1560’s) Belgic Confession plainly teaches this.

And that brings me to what is lacking in that editorial: it lacks any mention of our sins against creation, and any referral to Climate Change (CC).

Yes, American ‘Christian’ voters have a difficult choice, but not as difficult the church leaders had when Hitler occupied the Netherlands from 1940-45.

Then too churches were faced with a difficult choice: was the Hitler regime legitimate or not? Those preachers who disagreed were imprisoned – my own brother-in-law was one of them – and they often faced death. Now the choice is even more pronounced: can a Christian participate in a society that is bent on self-destruction due to the use of fossil fuel? Trump’s party openly ridicules Climate Change, openly mocks the preservation of God’s creation. At least the Democrats dare to mention that CC word.

The editorial does not want to touch this, or, more likely, sees it as not important. I suspect that a good percentage of the readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY not only condone but are eager participants in The American Way of Life, which is non-negotiable, even though it destroys the cosmos which God loved so much that he sacrificed his only Son to buy it back out of the clutches of ‘the evil one.’ If the entire world would live as us North Americans we’d need 5 planets to accommodate this.

Jesus and the Cosmos.

I dare say that if we don’t love creation, the COSMOS for which Jesus gave his life to buy it back from THE EVIL ONE, we simply cannot love Jesus. Yes, you read this correctly! Loving creation and loving Jesus are two sides of the same coin!! When I say that I love Shakespeare, this has nothing to do with him as a person because what he created is regarded a treasure. How much more does this apply to creation and to the Creator, Jesus, whom we intimately know from Scriptures. Yes, loving creation and loving Jesus go hand in hand, something the church is failing to proclaim.

I tie it in with what I now call THE HEAVEN HANG-UP, which hangs over the church and the world as THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES. Pointing to Damocles means that the church, through its heaven stance, imperils the existence of the entire world. It’s the HEAVEN HANG-UP that prevents CHRISTIANITY TODAY as well as Christianity at large from proclaiming that Climate Change poses the greatest danger for God’s earth. Nowhere does the Bible point out that we go to heaven when we die. John 3: 13 explicitly states that nobody has gone to heaven except the One who came from there: Jesus.

It is also my considerate opinion that the HEAVEN HANG-UP is preventing the church from attracting new people to its constantly depleting ranks, while promoting pious secularism, as Bonhoeffer put it.

Here is a sentence from a David Brooks column in the New York Times, discussing a book from a distinguished academic who searched for the Truth. He rejected Christianity because “he thinks their emphasis on the next world disparages this world”.

Enter Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s father and both grandfathers were ordained ministers in the Lutheran Church in Germany. He knew doctrine and the Bible as few others. His church affiliation faltered when he saw how the church slandered and depreciated this world, while praising and exulting in a hypothetical world to come. To his mind the church drew odious comparisons between the things of this earth and the blessings of heaven. Nietzsche revolted seeing how the church (then and now) gushed in a very unsportsmanlike manner over an imaginary beyond, to the detriment and disadvantage of a “here,” of this earth, of this life, and posits another region—a nether region—for the accommodation of its enemies.

In his THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA Nietzsche wrote: “I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners whether they know it or not.
They are despisers of life, atrophying and self-poisoned men, of whom the church is weary: so let them be gone!”

He continued: “Once blaspheming against God was the greatest blasphemy……to blaspheme against the earth is now the most dreadful offence…”

The CHRISTIANITY TODAY editorial does not speak for the earth, God’s greatest work of art for which he sacrificed his only Son. CHRISTIANITY TODAY here is a perfect example of the state of Christianity Today by committing the SIN OF OMISSION when it does not mention what President OBAMA calls THE GREATEST DANGER HUMANITY faces: CLIMATE CHANGE, the immense peril facing God’s Holy Creation, a disaster much greater than an improbable Trump presidency.

All this is due to the HEAVEN HANG-UP which the church in general has with God’s precious planet. Most preachers are afraid to proclaim this, afraid to upset their parishioners. No wonder James 3: 1 is in the Bible.

OCTOBER 16 2016

ANTHROPOCENE

You may have heard the word “Anthropocene.” It’s a relatively new word, coined by a Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering the effects of ozone-depleting compounds.

Look at that word again. A bit of knowing Greek will tell you that it
comes from the Greek ‘anthropos’ which means ‘human being’, also found in ‘anthropology’, the science dealing with human behavior. The last 4 letters ‘cene’ is also of Greek origin, stemming from ‘kainos’ which means ‘new’. Thus the word stands for ‘the new human’ and we then have to extend it to ‘age’ or ‘period’. Thus freely transposed into ordinary parlor the sort of strange word ANTHROPOCENE really means: “the period or timeframe where we humans call the tune and are fully in charge.”

I associate the term ANTHROPOCENE with Psalm 115: 16. There it says that ‘THE HIGHEST HEAVENS belong to the Lord, but THE EARTH he has given to us humans.’

Oh, that Bible(!): confusing at times, because Psalm 24 says the opposite: “The Lord’s is the earth and its fullness, the world and all its peoples.” So what’s going on?

My guess is that the heavenly timetable is different from yours and mine. Often the Bible counts events which have not yet happened as something of the past. In heaven the past is the future and the future is the past. It is as if ‘time’ there is not a straight line, such as from year zero to infinity, or from creation to Christ and the cross to the New Creation. In heaven, time is more like a circle where the beginning is the End and the End is the beginning.

Yes, it is true, as related in Psalm 24 “the earth is the Lord’s”, just as Vincent van Gogh’s paintings always belong to him even though his descendants have long sold them to museums everywhere.

So, what then is true and what is false about the earth’s ownership? My bet is that both are true. God made the earth just as the St. Matthew Passion is forever associated with J. S. Bach but now is a world-treasure, or as the NIGHTWATCH is Rembrandt’s most famous painting but now belongs to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. So it is with the earth: forever the Lord’s but, with possession constituting 99 percent of ownership, we are the current owners.

And that is confirmed by the word ANTHROPOCENE.

Why that word?

Dr. Crutzen justified the term Anthropocene citing the following reasons:
1. Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet.
2. Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted.
3. Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems.
4. Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary productivity of the oceans’ coastal waters.
5. Humans use more than half of the world’s readily accessible fresh water runoff.

Let me take a closer look at item 1: Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. That is called Primary Productivity which Dr. Crutzen estimated at some 40 percent, and he is not alone.

PRIMARY PRODUCTIVITY

Our efforts to change the make-up of the earth is connected to “Primary Productivity,” a concept indicating the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the sum of earth’s plant energy that makes our lives possible. It is in essence “the total budget of life.” All humans and all animals eat either plants or eat animals that eat plants, and solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. It is this very activity that is now in danger because we appropriating too much of what is.
When Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden, Primary Productivity was at its peak: 100 percent. People lived long, long lives.

After the Garden of Eden, the number of people rose quickly, starting agriculture and making cities possible of which Cain was the prime mover. As a result Primary Productivity started to decrease.

In our age of rapid population growth this phenomenon has accelerated with earth-breaking speed. Consider the following, as quoted from “The Ingenuity Gap” by Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon.

“We are moving so much rock and dirt, blocking and diverting so many rivers, converting so many forests to cropland, releasing such huge quantities of heavy metals and organic chemicals into air and water, and generating so much energy, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen compounds that we are perturbing the deepest dynamics of our global ecosystems. Between one-third and one-half of the planet’s land area has been fundamentally transformed by our actions: row-crop agriculture, cities, and industrial areas occupy 10 to 15 percent of Earth’s land surface; 6 to 8 percent has been converted to pasture; and an area the size of France is now submerged under artificial reservoirs. We have driven to extinction a quarter of all bird species. We have used more than half of all accessible fresh water. In regions of major human activity, large rivers carry three times as much sediment as they did in pre-human times, while small rivers carry as much as eight times the sediment. Along the world’s tropical and subtropical coastlines, our activities – especially the construction of cities, industries and aquaculture pens – have changed or destroyed 50 percent of mangrove ecosystems, which are vital to the health of coastal fisheries. And about two-thirds of the world’s marine fisheries are either overexploited, depleted, or at their limit of exploitation.”

There have been two efforts to figure out how Primary Productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other by biologist Stuart L. Pimm, Professor of biology at Duke University in Durham N.C. They both concluded that we humans consume about 40 percent of Earth Primary Productivity, 40 percent of all there is. That percentage may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet.

An update.

These estimates were made some 10 years ago. Since then we have had China’s and India’s growth rapidly accelerating, FRACKING also has been on a fast track, coral reefs have deteriorated big time, while the earth’s temperature has risen by more than One Degree Celsius.

Primary Productivity, now approaching 50 percent simply means that we, the 7 billion plus, have simply stolen the food of all other creatures, the birds, the whales, the tunas, the frogs, the elephants. The list goes on and on. Anthropocene really means that, with humanity in charge, there is no place for all other creatures. Trump and his followers embody that phenomenon, horrible as it is. The very fact that this is the case actually means that in reality there also is no longer place for us, either, mainly thanks to the dehumanizing of technology.

Can we still function as people?

Last week the New York Times reported a conversation with a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who said with a kind of deadpan resignation: “You know we are designing a world that is not fit for people.” George Monbiot in an article in the GUARDIAN dealing with the loneliness caused by modern technology, concluded:

“It’s unsurprising that social isolation is strongly associated with depression, suicide, anxiety, insomnia, fear and the perception of threat. It’s more surprising to discover the range of physical illnesses it causes or exacerbates. Dementia, high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, lowered resistance to viruses, even accidents are more common among chronically lonely people. Loneliness has a comparable impact on physical health to smoking 15 cigarettes a day: it appears to raise the risk of early death by 26%. This is partly because it enhances production of the stress hormone cortisol, which suppresses the immune system.”

That’s why being an active member of a church group- any group actually- is so important, not so much the service, that too, but the coffee hour, the choir, the bible study, the prayer groups: the more activities, the better for health.

I also believe that loneliness comes from lack of genuine relationship with the rest of creation. We fail to see the trees as our neighbors; we no longer hear the birds sing or are able to see the twinkling stars while constantly exposed to pesticide-laden food and drink causing ill health.
Planetary stress too affects us. Last week The Arctic News reported that the ICE BUFFER around the North Pole is gone.

Why is that important?

This ice buffer used to bounce back massive amounts of ocean heat carried along sea currents into the Arctic Ocean. Now the sea ice is disappearing and this same heat, earlier absorbed by the massive ice buffer, now warms the Arctic Ocean, which in many places is less than 50 m deep.
What is so terribly frightening is that on that so shallow Arctic floor there are momentous methane masses, called Hydrates, billions of tons. It so happens that methane is some 20 times more lethal than our CO2 which we produce in billions of tons each year and is mainly responsible for Climate Change: ice out, heat in, weather haywire. Once these hydrates explode, we are done-for.

According to a Waterloo professor, Thomas Homer-Dixon, the future looks bleak, when what “ we have experienced , (are) so far only the earliest stages, just the leading edge, of the planet’s environmental crisis. Far, far greater environmental challenges are still to come.”

True, we have made great strides in alternative energy sources, both wind and solar. But the harsh truth is that for the foreseeable future there is no true substitute for oil. The sun shines only a certain numbers of hours in a year and we can’t command the wind to blow when power is needed. I know. I have both power sources and still need the ‘grid.’

A brief ‘energy’ history.

When wood ran out, some 400 years ago, coal came on line. When coal proved to be too polluting, oil and natural gas were available. Now, what do we do? Rely mainly on Natural gas of which the world still has plenty, but all in very remote locations, such as Siberia or Australia? It will take trillions of dollars to feed the North American market with adequate supply, assuming there is plenty of it left. Remember: natural gas too is polluting.

Thanks to oil, in my lifetime, the world’s population more than tripled from 2 billion to 7.2 billion. As late as 1945 my maternal grandfather had no electricity on his small farm. He managed with one horse and one help. Then people were mentally and physically equipped in coping with little or no carbon energy. These skills we have lost. Also much of the earth has been spoiled, unfit for intensive, organic, agriculture. We still have a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure powered almost exclusively by fossil-fuels. Cars, trucks, roads, boats, docks, airplanes, airports, hospitals, schools, farms, manufacturing plants, food processing centers, water-treatment plants – all run on fossil fuels. At home we have heat at the touch of a switch, and cooling is just as easy. All plastics, pesticides, and fertilizers are derived from that oil or gas as well. It is simply impossible for friendly energy to take over much of our modern systems. Do you drive a Prius? Are you off the grid? Talk is easy.
Primary Productivity now stands between 45 and 50, meaning 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. Depleted oceans, soil degradation, disappeared species, cannot be re-created by human technology.

Yes, ANTHROPOCENE is upon us. God has given us, humans, ownership of the earth with God’s sole purpose – quoting Deuteronomy 32: 20 – ‘to see how we manage on our own without God’. So far the results have not been encouraging. Will we manage to right the wrongs? Will we manage to reverse Climate Change? Will we manage to re-stock the oceans? Will we manage to build a sustainable future?

No wonder people are uptight and cling to some false prophets such as Donald Trump. Believe me, there are no simple solutions anymore. I sincerely believe that we have gone too far to remedy the situation.

October 9 2017

FAST FALLS THE EVENTIDE.

You may recognize this as a line from ABIDE WITH ME, the song made famous by the TITANIC disaster more than 100 years ago.
The greatest danger in most of our Western world is that all seems so normal, just like the Titanic when it was merrily making waves on the North Atlantic, until…..
True, the summer was hot, and rainfall in our area well below average, but still where we live life looked as if the ‘not a cloud in the sky’ saying would also apply to everything else.
Of course I am known as a doomsayer so what sort of Jeremiad is in store this week?
If you have an ear to the ground, you hear the rumbling. Voices echoing severe dissatisfaction are becoming louder and louder. The very fact that there is the Trump phenomenon, the Brexit vote, the rise of le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands points to a general unease in the Western world, still the dominant trendsetter today.
It is quite clear that there especially is a lot of anxiety among the young people, where the Over Dose deaths are rapidly increasing. Yes, in our heart of hearts we too know that the future looks ominous.
There is a good chance that TRUMP of all people will come out on top, and if not triumphant, he will at least be favored by more than 40 percent of the US electorate. Unbelievable. Why? What’s going on?

It’s over!

The entire model on which our societies have been based on for as long as we ourselves have lived is over! Economic growth has stopped. The only growth we have is in cancer treatments and heart bypasses and pollution controls and repairing storm and water damage caused by severe weather. It’s positive growth that’s really negative because it’s financed by tax dollars and insurance money. That sort of growth makes us poorer in the long run.
Basically there is no economic growth. There hasn’t been any for years. Our entire economic system is based on 2-4 percent growth so that our governments can keep their promises of old-age security and unlimited health-care for all: but that is impossible when tax revenue is flat or even declines.

What have we done? Lack of interest income has been replaced by borrowing money, made possible through ultra-cheap debt. The Washington bureaucrats have doctored employment figures, making untold millions disappear from the labor force, showing low unemployment. Both in Canada and in the USA smart government operatives have changed the method of calculating inflation, telling us that there hardly is any increase in prices. And most of all there’s debt, public – 50 trillion – and private – 100 trillion – that has served to keep an illusion of growth alive and now increasingly no longer can. That works out to $22,000 per person DEBT for every human being on the earth! Correct me if I am wrong: $150 Trillion divided by 7+billion on the earth. The IMF supplied the debt figure!
Those eliminated statistically from government screens are suddenly appearing on Trump rallies, and clamoring to be heard. Dulled by stupidly watching Fox News and mal-informed by right-wing radio commentators, and piously led astray by the religious leaders, they now are flocking to false prophets who equally deceive them with phony fairy tales.
You know what this means? It means that THE DEVIL HAS GONE FULL-TIME in the absence of the proclaimers of THE REAL WORD. The masses are awakening and reason has been abandoned. The old system is being found wanting, and the new has not yet appeared, and never will because we have burned all our bridges. We are smack in the middle of the most important global development in decades, even in centuries, a true revolution, which will shape the world forever.
We now face the consequences of no growth, of globalization and the rapid advent of THE ROBOT SOCIETY. It spells the doom for such goodies as Old Age pensions, Universal Health Care and other social benefits. The American plebs already experiences this doom and sees irrational Trump as a solution. God help us, but He is hiding his face – seeing what our end will be (look up Deuteronomy 31: 17), so the Great Adversary, here personified by Donald Trump, is seen as the savior. Indeed God help us, but since as a society we have destroyed the world God loves, we also have burned all bridges to him, unless we repent.
Soon we will be back to conditions of 100 to 200 years ago, except that then, by and large, people and nations were self-sufficient. This is no longer possible. Already the political scene is fundamentally changing. The Republican Party in the USA is disintegrating before our eyes. It has been hijacked by a lunatic. The Democratic Party there is deeply divided and will also disappear in its present form. Blame it all on forces that are beyond our control, that are bigger and more far-reaching than our mere opinions, even though they all are the results of our own actions.
It’s has been brewing a long time. The Republican Party, by their own actions of non-cooperation, by their crazy religious notions, by their stupid ideas of simple solutions to complex problems, by denying that all people have needs, not just the rich, has generated its own demise.
Oh, yes, history tells us that revolution always devours its own people.

Our Finite World.

The cause is simple: we live in a Finite World, and we have reached the End: we have used up our allotted inheritance, and now we face extinction. It’s the Prodigal Son Parable all over again. That, in blunt terms, is what we are experiencing. That takes some adjusting. But, as true fanatics, we are redoubling our efforts, even though we have no idea where we are going. Trump is a clear example of this irrationality.
Thanks to the temporary presence of Fossil Fuels, we’ve had a ball. Now the ball is deflated and impossible to kick down the road, because it has become filled with lead. Super hurricanes, super typhoons, rain bombs, super droughts, you name it, will soon be regular features, and the weather channel the most watched of all programs. Don’t expect the insurance companies to pay the damage, don’t expect the governments to bail you out: they all are or soon will be broke.
Donald Trump will still lose the election, but it doesn’t truly matter. He will entice people to revolt and, since the low-ranks of the army and the police are with him, expect chaos in November. Better get ready. Don’t ask me how.
So Hillary will win. It will be a pyrrhic victory, because she too will be in the same boat as you and I. Louis XXIV comes to mind or rather his wife Marie Antoinette with her “let them eat cake”, both killed by the revolutionary crowd in 1789 when THE PEOPLE were in charge.
If she wins, her program too, like all the others, will be targeted towards more growth, and there’s no such thing available. And while in a no-growth scenario it’ll be a good thing for America to bring jobs back home, as is Trump’s message, they won’t spell anything that even comes close to growth, because ROBOTS are the looming danger, and they don’t pay taxes and don’t need health insurance either. Prepare for the Fall of the Roman Empire and the French Revolution wrapped up together. How about that for a Jeremiad!

FORTY PERCENT!

Just imagine: 40 (FORTY!) percent of the American population wants change and they precisely are the ones who favor guns. They are angry and won’t take it anymore: they have lost their factory jobs, have no savings, have high deductible health insurance, if any at all, and are ready to go all the way because they have nothing to lose. They also are in debt to their eyeballs. And Janet Yellen is all set to increase the interest rate as soon as Hillary is elected.
And if all fails, there always is war. Syria today is becoming like Spain in the 1930’s where Russia and Germany were waging a proxy war. Now it is Russia versus the USA.
Where are we now?

Today there is a huge divide, typified by the two Presidential candidates. On the one hand there is Hillary and the status quo, building on past glory and the Affluent Society, largely generated by the Carbon-Age. And then there are the angry white Trumpians in the USA and the reactionaries in Europe, such as the “Alternative für Deutschland” and le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. They too are becoming more popular. It’s only these people – so their leaders proclaim – who have the wisdom to MAKE AMERICA, GERMANY, THE NETHERLANDS, GREAT AGAIN.
None of the USA two warring factions has a real clue what’s going on and what is in store. The real truth is that THE WORLD IS TIRED, is exhausted, is running on empty, is depleted of what really counts: fresh air, potable water, healthy soil, plenty of biodiversity but is now full of our toys. We have mined the seas, leveled the mountains and paved the planet, leaving no room for animals and nature-loving humans. But there are McMansions and airplanes and cars, oh yes!

Still Trump has a point. For many groups, especially the less educated working class, life genuinely is worse than it was in the mid-60s. It’s no wonder that such people buy Donald’s paradise-lost narrative. But the real problem is that people have lost faith in the God Creator, who, when creation came into being, saw that it was good, and who, when all systems were go and humanity was infused with God’s Spirit, called creation very good. It is that goodness that we have abused. Once that was lost, humanity became hell-bent on destruction. That’s what we see now: a sure path to self-annihilation.
Already the signs are everywhere. A Trump victory will simply speed up the process, denying the very present evidence of Climate Change, as MATTHEW, not the author of the GOSPEL by that name, but a horrendous hurricane so aptly named, is lingering over ocean waters that are 30 Degrees Celsius!!
As matters speed to its destined end, as humanism and religion wither, despair and doubt have become pervasive. Of course.

FAST FALLS THE EVENTIDE.

We can`t turn back the clock. We are in a phase of history as no other. Ancient China, medieval Germany, the Dutch Golden Age — they all contained some piece of wisdom and had their own strengths and weaknesses. But it was the Industrial Revolution that set the stage for our current predicament. It started simply with the steam engine, powered by coal and led to today`s carbon-saturated state from which there is no escape.
We have chosen that route and will stay there even as it ends up in total disaster. Yes, our way of life has an expiry date, approaching with neck-break speed.

So what now? Permaculture?

Permaculture defies simple definition and understanding. The term began as a fusion of “permanent” and “agriculture”. Even back in the 1970s, two men, Mollison and Holmgren, saw how destructive industrial agriculture was to natural habitats and top soils, and how dependent it was on finite fossil fuels. To them it was clear that these systems were unsustainable, a position ratified by scientific reports today which expose the alarming effects industrial agriculture has on biodiversity and climate stability. These two pioneering ecologists began to wonder what a “permanent agriculture” would look like. Thus permaculture was born.
In the broadest terms, permaculture is a design system that seeks to work with the laws of nature rather than against them. It aims to efficiently meet human needs without degrading the ecosystems we all rely on to flourish.
Put otherwise, permaculture is an attempt to design human systems and practices in ways that mimic the cycles of nature to eliminate waste, increase resilience and allow for the just and harmonious co-existence of human beings with other species. It is predicated on two cosmic truths:
LOVE GOD AND HIS CREATION ABOVE ALL, AND LOVE OUR FELLOW HUMANS OF EVERY STRIPE AND COLOR AS OURSELVES.
Jesus said: “On these two simple rules depend everything and everybody”.

Yes, if you ABIDE by these rules the Lord will ABIDE with you and me.

October 1 2016

EXPECT TREE-MENDOUS TRAGEDIES

Poems are made by fools like me
But only God can make a tree.
Joyce Kilmer.

I too can be a fool and make a little tree poem such as:
While only God can make a tree
It’s up to me for it to be.

The Bible starts with a tree, it ends with a tree, and in its center stands the Calvary Tree on which Jesus died. Before the divine blood reached the earth, affirming its holiness forever, his flesh and blood were pounded into the tree, forever making trees holy.
Trees play a dominant role in the Bible. There is the Tree of Life which featured prominently in the Garden of Eden, so prominent that it can truly be said that the Tree of Life stands for the eternal truth that the Tree signifies Life. Without trees we lose an important source of oxygen, something we need every minute of our lives. We all know that trees can live without us but we can’t live without trees.

So, since we are so concerned about our own life and our own wellbeing, how come we have not done everything in our power to make trees a central part in our lives, and preserving them a priority?

Good question.

Then there is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, also having an important place in paradise, the tree whose fruit Adam and Eve ate, doing exactly what it promised: exposing them to evil.
I wonder what that tree means for us today. Could it be that by our random cutting down of trees for the sake of profit, we commit the ultimate evil act because we deprive all humans of the ever-needed oxygen? Already there are reports that there is less oxygen in the air. We know that trees inhale CO2, the very stuff we produce in abundance, and exhale the pure oxygen we need. The burning of carbon fuel in our beloved automobiles needs oxygen to work, and with billions of engines firing on all cylinders all the time all over the world, pollution continues unabated. That’s why we always need more trees, and also need unpolluted and chilly oceans to absorb all that Carbon Dioxide which we pump into the air every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

Yes, we need more trees, millions more, but the opposite is happening.

The trouble is that trees are disappearing at an unprecedented pace. They are cut down to grow soybeans to feed cows for meat consumption, cows that cause more methane emission than any other animal, cows whose meat cause cancer and heart disease. Trees are in trouble, everywhere. In Hawaii there are signs of a mysterious disease that has ravaged the US’s only rainforests – and is just one of the plagues that also are devastating American forests across the west.

On the eastern tip of Hawaii’s big island the seemingly ubiquitous ohi’a trees were dying at an astonishing rate. The leaves would turn yellow, then brown, over just a few weeks – a startling change for an evergreen tree. “It was like popcorn – pop, pop, pop, pop, one tree after another,” one observer said. “At first people were shocked, now they are resigned.
“It’s heartbreaking. This is the biggest threat to our native forests that any of us have seen. If this spreads across the whole island, it could collapse the whole native ecosystem,” somebody else remarked. Nearly 50,000 acres of native forest on the big island are infected with rapid ohi’a death disease. Rumors abound as to its origin: did it emerge from Hawaii’s steaming volcanoes? A strange new insect? Scientists still aren’t sure of where it came from or how to treat it.

A researcher in plant pathology at the US Department of Agriculture said that when she analyzed the disease “right away Dutch elm disease popped into my head. I’m not sure if there’s been anything else like this in the world,” she said. “The potential is there for major devastation.” The disease hadn’t yet spread to crops, like coffee, but it threatens a whole family of metrosideros trees and shrubs found mainly in the Pacific.”
But the plight of the ohi’a is not unique – it’s part of a quiet crisis playing out in forests across America. Drought, disease, insects and wildfire are chewing up tens of millions of trees at an incredible pace, much of it driven by climate change.

Oh that dreaded word again: Climate Change!

Our oceans provide us with most of our oxygen. But they are in trouble too. While I am writing this a blob of superhot water is moving north in the Pacific Ocean toward Alaska and, you guessed it, to the Arctic, the last place where hot water is needed. Yes, there is a saying: “we are in hot water”, meaning that trouble is brewing. For oceans to release oxygen they need to stay cool.

No wonder both forestry officials and oceanic scientists are increasingly alarmed, and say the essential role of trees – providing clean water, locking up carbon and sheltering whole ecosystems – is being undermined on a grand scale. California and mountain states have suffered particularly big die-offs in recent years, with 66 million trees killed in the Sierra Nevada alone since 2010, according to the Forestry Service.

In northern California, an invasive pathogen called Sudden Oak Death is infecting hundreds of different plants, from redwoods and ferns to backyard oaks and bay laurels. The disease is distantly related to the cause of the 19th-century Irish potato famine, and appears to have arrived with two “Typhoid Marys”, rhododendrons and bay laurels, said Dr David Rizzo, of the University of California, Davis. “We’re talking millions of trees killed, whole mountain sides dying.”

Drought kills.

“Five years of drought in the west have not only starved trees of water but weakened their defenses and created conditions for “insect eruptions” across the US”, said Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana. “Bark beetles and mountain pine beetles, usually held in check by wet winters, now have more time to breed and roam. The latter have already expanded their range from British Columbia across the Rockies, to the Yukon border and eastward, into jack pine forests that have never seen the bug.
“The outbreak is “something like 10 times bigger than normal,” Six said. “Basically a native insect is acting outside of the norm, because of climate change.”

Boosted by Climate Change, various beetles and the fungi they carry have already wiped out millions of acres of trees, and Six and Rizzo both warned of cascading effects. In the redwoods, Rizzo said, the loss of tanoaks and their relatives would strip away nut-producing species, leaving birds and mammals that rely on them without food. “The loss of mountain pines”, Six said, “threatens grizzly bears and the critical snowpack that supplies water to life below. There’s virtually nothing we can do to stop the beetles, either, unless they’ve killed everything and run out of food. Or unless the climate cools, and I don’t think anyone’s expecting that anytime soon.”

In Hawaii, warming temperatures have helped spread four types of beetles that bore into ohi’a bark to feed. The beetles carry disease spore on their wings, in their guts and in the sawdust of burrows, spreading it from tree to tree. The beetles are part of scolylinae, a “very destructive family” that is also decimating trees in California, according to Curtis Ewing, an entomologist at the University of Hawaii. “They are exploding around the world due to global warming,” he said. They appear unstoppable: spraying each tree with insecticide would be time-consuming and made futile by rain, and pheromone-laced traps also appear ineffective.
The university’s arboretum has started collecting ohi’a seeds in the face of a doomsday scenario that was recently unimaginable for such a common tree.

Is this really a DOOMSDAY Scenario?

To be or not to be.

While only God can make a tree
It’s up to me for it to be.

God gave us the earth to manage. For us to live long and healthy he gave us the trees and the power to have them be or not to be. The tree joins heaven and earth together. It connects time and eternity. Its sap, its life-enhancing fluid is sucked out of the earth, from wherever its roots travel and invigorates the leaves and all the tiny branches. Also its capillaries deep in the ground intertwine with other root structures and warn its neighbors of impending dangers. Trees, like we, are communal creatures.

The tree appears on the first page of the Bible, and again on the last page. The Tree of Life is the symbol of the mysterious connection between life and death, of eternity and fertility, of the relationship between God and us, of the unity of us and the earth, and especially of the cosmic totality of all that lives. The tree carries the world in which we live: it is the axle of the universe. By killing trees, we kill ourselves. That is the DOOMSDAY scenerio we facing.

In the cross of Calvary the tree joins the Alpha and the Omega together, the past and the future, the beginning and the end. As such the tree of the Cross in the Bible stands between the Tree of Life in Paradise and the Tree of Life of the New Creation, where in the very last chapter of the Bible we find these beautiful and comforting words: “The leaves of the Tree are for the healing of the nations”. Yes, miraculously, the tree that was instrumental in the fall of humanity also is the very source of our restoration. That’s one reason why Jesus died on the

Tree, the tree that, as first of all creatures, was impregnated with the flesh and blood of the Savior. For Jesus the cross was extra painful because hanging above the earth separated him from the earth he loved so much. (John 3: 16)
Yes, the tree is a symbol of the earth: just like our planet has a thin layer of soil, miniscule as it is, on which we depend for our food supply, the tree too has a tiny veneer below the bark where all its life elixir moves. Make a circular cut around its trunk and the tree dies.

Oh we stupid and short-sighted humans. We have chosen trees not to be. Not honoring the life of trees spells doom, signals tree-mendous tragedies.
Already in Indonesia, on the forefront of tree-destruction, thousands of people die due to poisonous smoke inhalation. Worse: nine out of ten people globally are breathing poor quality air, the World Health Organization said last week, calling for dramatic action against pollution that is blamed for more than six million deaths a year.
The problem is most acute in cities, with poorer countries having much dirtier air than the developed world. But pollution affects practically all countries in the world and all parts of society. Already the death of rainforests means changes rainfall patterns, soon playing havoc with agriculture and threatening our precious cup of coffee, the world’s main addictive bean. Water supplies in crucial sections of the world – California comes to mind – will in the coming years make large sections of the world inhabitable, while uneven distributions of rain in ever more violent forms will drown cities here and starve other elsewhere.
We, as a human race have been blinded by greed, by, yes, SIN, to pursue the accumulation of money at the expense of the TREE.

Where will it end?

We know, without acknowledging it. That’s why thousands of people, especially the young who see no future, revert to deadly drugs: for them a brief respite into delirious delight before sinking into oblivion, a sure escape from a future that has no future for the human race anymore.

EXPECT TREE-MENDOUS TRAGEDIES.

The suffering and death of trees is a sure prelude to the suffering and death of humans. Already we see multiple signs. No matter who wins the presidential election, the momentum of global decline and the resulting hardship cannot be avoided. Trump will merely accelerate the process a bit more.

Luther said: “If I knew that the Lord would return tomorrow, I’d still plant a tree today.” Would you?

September 25 2016

What makes me tick?

I am not referring to my ticker, my heart. When I am writing this my pulse rate is a shade below 60, and my blood pressure – recently checked at the Tweed Clinic- is in an acceptable range, good enough for a man who within weeks will enter his 89th year.
No, it’s not my physical health I am hinting at. Who knows, some sort of virus will hit me. Who knows my almost daily 11 km bike ride on the edge of a busy highway will prove fatal one day, when it is the Lord’s time to call me home. Of course I am very careful in my living habits and try everything in my power to eat well, to sleep well, and exercise regularly, because I am a fervent believer in Mens Sana in Corpore Sano, a sound mind in a sound body.

What does make me tick I owe to my parents and grandparents. I can clearly picture my grandparents, all four born in the 1860’s in the North of the Netherlands near the borderline between the Groningen and Frisian provinces. Just last week my younger brother living in Alberta, more engaged in family matters than I, sent me the death announcement of my maternal grandfather, Egbert de Haan, telling me that he died on August 23 1940 at the age of 71. He was born in 1868 in the same area where he died.
The ‘rouwkaart’ the notice of death, said: “Today suddenly the Lord took from our midst our dear husband, father, and grandfather Egbert de Haan. His life was Christ and his dying gain.”

I remember him clearly. I was almost 12 when he was buried on a glorious August day. I can still picture him lying in his plain pine coffin under a glass plate, a big fly trying to get out. The cemetery was perhaps 500 meters from the church hall where he was laid up and slowly, solemnly and silently hundreds of people walked behind the horse-drawn hearse to his last resting place.

Both my two sets of grandparents attended the same church in Kornhorn. Both were elders there. My paternal grandfather was a grocer and my maternal one a farmer. My grocer OPA – grandfather – came once a week to my maternal grandmother in his 2 wheeled horse cart, bartering eggs for sugar and coffee and tea. Then people were very diligent in dealing with members of ‘the household of faith.’ People never shopped around for the best price: everybody assumed that whatever was offered was done so at a fair price.
Mind you people then had a great deal of self-sufficiency. My farmer grandparents left no carbon foot print. They had no electricity, walked and biked, grew most of their own food, had lots of milk – a dozen cows -, eggs, made their own butter, raised pigs and the only items they bought or bartered were sugar, coffee, tea and some cleaning supplies.

I was born in the city of Groningen. My mother was the oldest of 5 children and the only one leaving farm life and the countryside. My father was fortunate in wooing my mother. When they were married in 1923 her father, Egbert de Haan, after whom I was named, gave her 2300 guilders as a dowry, a princely sum in those days, the equivalent today of some $100,000. With that money our parents furnished a complete household for some 1100 guilders while with the remainder my father started his business, a venture which, for many decades, until the 1960’s was quite successful and allowed us to grow up in relative luxury.

My mother really loved her father, Egbert de Haan, and since I was named after him, I think I became her favorite child. She once told me that she had hoped that I would grow up to become a preacher, a minister of the gospel, then in Christian circles the summit of what a child could achieve. I did disappoint her that way, yet, perhaps my desire in my retirement to write my blog, and to translate three books written by an evangelical missionary, must have been influenced by my mother’s wish.

We all change, somehow.

My convictions have developed from what my grandparents and parents believed. I owe this to Bonhoeffer, a German, and Bavinck, a Dutchman, two theologians who lived at the same time, came to maturity between WWI and WWII and independently arrived at identical Kingdom visions. It is thanks to them that I have adopted a new way of thinking. I believe I also have been influenced by moving from the city – St. Catharines, Ontario – to the country, East Ontario, an equal distance from GTA – the Greater Toronto Area – and Ottawa, Ontario’s second largest city.
Living on 50 acres amidst a multitude of trees and having thousands of acres of crownland around us, has given me a new perspective on life, a more integrated one, something I believe the city does not offer.

I remember reading a commentary on John 3: 16 – God so loved the cosmos (everything that exists). This made me realize that we have to read the Bible and see God’s love much more comprehensively than we in church are led to believe: God’s love equally applies to all facets of creation, also including us. That is not fully understood by Christianity.
Today a new perspective of what the Gospel proclaims is, in my opinion, needed more than ever because, in many ways, Christianity has ceased to be Christian. To illustrate this, a reference to an article in the New York Times is in order. There, a Randall Balmer, professor of religion at Dartmouth, wrote:
“The religious right was never about the advancement of biblical values. The modern, politically conservative evangelical movement we know is a movement rooted in the perpetuation of racial segregation, and its affiliation with the hard-right fringes of the conservative movement in the late 1970s produced a mutant form of evangelicalism inconsistent with the best traditions of evangelicalism itself. Since then, evangelicals have embraced increasingly secular positions divorced from any biblical grounding, and supporting Donald Trump represents the logical conclusion of that tragic aberration.”

Of course Harold Bloom has long argued that the American Religion has ceased to be Christian, citing the general acceptance of Gnosticism, still very much alive in Reformed Churches as well, evident in the common belief that, upon death, we go to heaven, limiting God’s love only to humans, hardly ever including the earth and what it contains into the orbit of God’s love.

A new Reformation needed.

What we need is a Third Reformation, just as drastic as the previous two. Jesus was the prime mover of the first and the second one was initiated by Martin Luther. So what about that third? That calls for a bit of church history.

Jesus appears on the scene in a remote corner of the then known world. Yet where he was born and raised had a special place in the story of salvation because Israel, the country of God’s chosen people, was the nation entrusted with the secret of the covenant, God’s pact with the cosmos.
We may know the story, the saga of promise and deliverance, of fall and redemption. Fed up with Israel’s unbelief God finally said: enough and its elite were taken away into exile, which actually proved to be a time for reflection and a return to the roots.
In spite of courageous attempts by those returning from Babylon, legalism in the post-exile period triumphed over child-like surrender and when Jesus started his mission his message battling institutional orthodoxy resulted in him being crucified. When he died the curtain in the Jerusalem temple was torn from top to bottom, signifying the end of Post-Exilic Judaism and the start of Christianity: the FIRST REFORMATION.

In 2017 it will be exactly 500 years after Luther started the SECOND REFORMATION, a religious revival that, according to Dietrich Bonhoeffer by-passed the USA. He was lecturing in the USA in 1939 when the war broke out and decided to return to Germany, even though he knew that it would cost him his life. Upon his departure here’s what he said about Christianity in the USA:
“God has granted American Christianity no Reformation. He has given it strong revivalist preachers, churchmen and theologians, but no Reformation of the church of Jesus Christ by the Word of God….American theology and the American church as a whole have never been able to understand the meaning of ‘criticism’ by the Word of God and all that signifies. Right to the last they do not understand that God’s ‘criticism’ touches even religion, the Christianity of the church and the sanctification of Christians, and that God has founded his church beyond religion and beyond ethics….In American theology, Christianity is still essentially religion and ethics….Because of this the person and work of Christ must, for theology, sink into the background and in the long run remain misunderstood, because it is not recognized as the sole ground of radical judgment and radical forgiveness.”

In other words the essence of Christianity, Christ and him crucified, the most significant event in history, has not resonated with the American church.
Harold Bloom was right. Randall Balmer, quoted above, is right, Bonhoeffer is right, and J. H. Bavinck too strongly condemned the American religion and Pentecostalism in particular. I believe we all have been affected by the one-sidedness, the anthropocentric character of Christianity.
Both Bavinck and Bonhoeffer repeatedly stressed that salvation of the person and salvation of the cosmos go hand in hand. “Brother are you born again”, as I have been asked by my Pentecostal friends, is the wrong question. The right question, especially now where the entire earth is being threatened with destruction is “Brother what are you doing to attain a lifestyle that reflects God’s goodness in creation?”

It is exactly there where the church must redirect its focus. When we say we love Jesus but have no conscience-nagging-feelings when we pollute God’s earth, then our confession, however pious it may sound, is inconsistent.

A THIRD REFORMATION is needed, one where personal faith and creational welfare go hand in hand. In the FIRST REFORMATION Jesus and Paul proclaimed that obedience to the Mosaic Law was to be changed to “believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved”. After 1500 years, due to the corruption of the church, Luther, in the SECOND REFORMATION, called the people back to that original message. Now, with Climate Change threatening our very survival, this message must be augmented to include both personal salvation and factual love for creation. The HEAVEN HERESY has led to a gross distortion of the Christian Religion in general.

A third Reformation is overdue.

Yes, we now are overdue for this THIRD AND FINAL REFORMATION. The time is short and the odds almost impossible as, in spite of immediate world-wide communication, opinions have hardened and minds have closed.

Very few people believe “IN THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY AND THE LIFE EVERLASTING. Fewer still look forward to the coming of THE NEW HEAVEN AND THE NEW EARTH where everything is just perfect, an earthly earth, where wine is real, a perfect planet where sickness and death no longer exist. That means to change instituted religion away from worship expressed in church only, to a ‘doctrine-devoid’ Christianity: simply falling back on Jesus’ words: ‘love God expressed as love for creation and our neighbors as our selves’. That way we see God in everything – yes a form of Panentheism – where religion is not part of life but is LIFE. Of course that is an intra-denominational affair.

That requires an outlook where everything is focused on the Kingdom to come where Christ is all and in everything. Bonhoeffer begins his book CREATION AND FALL with these farsighted words: “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.”
What makes me tick is the description of my grandfather: “His life was Christ and his dying gain”. I too try to do that, even though today it is impossible to emulate his ‘carbon-free’ life.

In a voyage it is not the beginning that is important: it’s the end that counts, its completion. If we want to be part of the NEW CREATION to come then our life today must reflect that wholeheartedly.

September 18 2016

THE DARKNESS DEEPENS

Last week I felt down, ready to throw up my hands and say: “the heck with it all: what’s the use. Why not turn on the television, read a trashy novel and give up on writing every day and translating more of J. H. Bavinck”.

But then, on second thought, it’s difficult for me to go against my nature. I am the perfect specimen of a neo-Calvinist to the core, a workaholic, a goal-driven guy, a fanatic in a sense, and consumed – in the good way – to share my religious insights with others via this medium of the Internet. Quite presumptuous, actually! Who am I but an auto-didactic oldster with time on his hands, a person addicted to reading, running, biking, organic home-grown produce, vegetarian to boot.

What set this off was reading how a powerful minority in our world, strongest in the United States and Australia, holds on to the idea that Climate Change is a hoax. The Republican governor of Florida, a state that almost certainly will lose population centers and land area to rising seas, has banned the use of the words CLIMATE CHANGE by state employees. Meanwhile they are, due to a strong El Nino and Climate Change combined, experiencing record temperatures and are seeing signs that they may be approaching climate tipping points already as Florida was hit by flooding rains for the second time in a week, with a third threat on the way. Oh no, nothing to do with Climate Change, of course.
Oh yes, there’s something else I am deeply worried about: it now looks as if the other person trying to become POTUS –President Of The United States – might even make it. His party, the GOP, is composed of “hard-core” climate denialists. “Hard-core” climate denialists stubbornly and publicly proclaim a belief that anthropogenic – human-induced- Climate Change is either unsupported by scientific evidence or, more frequently, an elaborate hoax. “Hard-core” climate denialists demonstrate a very soft relationship to physical and scientific reality, and will clutch at any piece of information that seems to discredit climate science and climate action. Just as they connect all sorts of ailments with Hillary so too they continually invent various fables to support their beliefs that humans have nothing to do with climate catastrophes. They totally ignore that last month was the hottest August ever recorded, marking the 11th straight month that global heat records have been shattered, according to NASA data. Usually July is the hottest month of the year, but this time August equals it. “No, no,” say the hard-core deniers, “this is all nonsense”. Actually, when incorporating the seasonal cycle, it was more than 2°C or 3.6°F warmer in July and August 2016 than it used to be.

I guess I am writing to the converted, but just the same last week Anchorage, the most populous city in Alaska saw a record high temperature of 25C or 78 degrees F, which beat the previous record by a whopping seven degrees. You may remember that Alaska lies in the Arctic Circle.

Yet, we all are Climate Change Deniers.

Forget about the ‘hard-core’ deniers. We’ve all met them and nothing will convince them. They are like the RAPTURE adherents, presumably taken away – raptured – before the real trouble start. What’s the word again? Pre-tribulation!
No, I don’t worry about them: nothing will sway them. I do worry about a much more troubling web of climate denial that is far more widespread. I refer to the “soft-hearted” climate denial crowd which can be found everywhere in society. They acknowledge that in some ways Climate Change is real, is disastrous and is happening now. But they refuse to see that in their own life and action they ignore global warming. They also refuse to admit that we are in a real catastrophic situation: they see the danger far away in the future.

Band aid solutions.

Oh yes, changes are contemplated: politicians and businessmen advocate the embrace of various carbon pricing systems claiming them to be the single “silver bullet” to avoid climate catastrophe. Also charitable trusts and church pension funds are divesting funds away from fossil fuel companies and pleading for the removal of their subsidies. This sort of band aid action allows most of us to live split lives: we theoretically and politically are fully in favor of Climate Change and ardently defend it, but still we cling to a lifestyle most typical of the high-consuming middle and upper classes.

I am not the exception.

Am I an exception there? No. I too want my cake and eat it too. Of course we were not among those who this past week traveled in ultra-comfort on that giant cruise ship which encountered no obstructions while sailing on the North Pole with people paying as much as $120,000 for the 32 day cruise. I am also sure that almost all of them too believe in Climate Change.
Is Climate Change really that bad and the danger that immediate?
Consider the following, taken from the ARCTIC NEWS website.

1. A rapid temperature rise is held off by the temporary masking effect of aerosols emitted when burning fuel (especially sulfur dioxide from coal-fired power plants). Once this masking effect ends, a huge sudden rise in temperature can be expected.
2. A rapid temperature rise is also held off by the fact that some impact and feedbacks take time to kick in. There is a huge (but decreasing) capacity of oceans, ice sheets and glaciers to act as a buffer for heat. Demise of the ice and snow cover in the Arctic and methane releases from the seabed of the Arctic Ocean also take time to eventuate and much sunlight is still reflected back into space by the snow and ice cover in the Arctic. However, even though their impact may now look only minimal, one or more feedbacks can cause a dramatic non-linear rise, speeding up the way one or more feedbacks kick in, not only in terms of progression of a non-linear rise, but also due to interaction between feedbacks.
3. There are three kinds of warming in the Arctic: emissions from our industrial and personal living practices, which, in turn, produce soot. This then changes the albedo effect as dark absorbs more heat than white – snow or ice. This leads to see ice loss, weakens and releases the Arctic methane, the real kicker.

The scenario of a rapid 10°C temperature rise thus becomes a distinct possibility when considering the size and vulnerability of some of the terrestrial and marine carbon pools and the combined warming impact of:
1. Carbon dioxide emitted over the past decade reaching their peak impact soon
2. Ending of the masking effect that aerosols currently exercise over global warming; and
3. Feedbacks causing even higher levels of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, ozone, etc.), less sunlight being reflected back into space and less heat being radiated from Earth.

The Potential For Huge Methane Release

A recent source gives a figure of 63,400 Gt C (Giga tons) for the Klauda & Sandler (2005) estimate of marine hydrates. A warming Gulf Stream is causing methane eruptions off the North American coast. Further eruptions of methane from marine sediments have been reported off the coast of New Zealand.

Methane hydrates in marine sediments aren’t the only type of hydrates that should be considered. Methane also appears to be erupting from hydrates on land almost everywhere in the Arctic and Antarctica. There lies the greatest danger and the immediate threat.
End of quote from ARCTIC NEWS.

The Bible again.

I know that the Bible does not mention Climate Change in these words. It does indicate that an all-compassing fire will clean up the mess we have created (2 Peter 3: 10) and a 10 degree Celsius warming will easily do that. What the Bible does say is that God will not condone half-hearted measure where it concerns his holiness because the world we live in is holy: it is God’s work of Art, which calls for the highest degree of reverence.

To fail to see the earth as holy, as God’s created Word, as his Primary Revelation, is the church’s most glaring omission. It has created a schizophrenic Christianity, hot for the Written Word, cold for the Created Word. A mixture of hot and cold generates a lukewarm attitude.

I think I am in order to relate this condition to a letter Jesus wrote to an Asia Minor Church, Laodicea, as recorded in Revelation 3: “Because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I am about to spit you out of my mouth”.

Is it too farfetched to apply this to us?

Why Laodicea? Why those damning words? Why? Because Laodicea was like our Western world.

The city was rich, prosperous, had lots of industry, and a medical university. Science, art, technical know-how were flourishing in this well-established Asian-Minor center. In this atmosphere the church in Laodicea was born and grew up. Apparently she acquired a touch of the mood of the city, one of self-satisfaction, just not so much that it became a terrible nuisance. This city featured an aura of contentment, an aroma of having arrived, and the church there too was that way.
We sometimes speak of conforming to the world and mean with that such matters as gambling or lotteries perhaps, or abandoning church altogether. But essentially conforming to the world goes much deeper, is much harder to measure and more difficult to weigh. It more resembles a mist that, unnoticed, waves through the open windows, infiltrates the clothes, the furniture and penetrates all the pores of one’s personality without perceiving it. Something of that kind of conformity had affected that church. The entire mood of the city, of the surrounding area where they lived had acquired this prevailing, light-hearted, up-beat, satisfied disposition which had permeated all thinking like an all-pervasive poison.
It seems to me that present day Christianity is like that City, some 2000 years ago, neither hot nor cold, perfectly conforming with a way of life that, except for Sundays for an hour, totally conforms to secular life.

I believe that Christians, confessing that THIS WORLD BELONGS TO GOD ought to be at the forefront of Climate Change action. Churches and preachers ought to warn against this soft and hard climate denial, work in concert, mobilize social movements, invent new and revitalize existing political and government institutions, use all relevant social resources, to cut emissions to zero to stabilize climate processes. Each church member should become an example to his/her neighbors as leaders in Climate Change, car-pooling, retrofit their dwellings, live in communities, anything that approaches zero emissions.

By simply acknowledging that Climate Change is a problem and voicing general support for some form of climate policy vs. the evil or willfully-ignorant hard climate denialists, do we soft climate denialists feel that we have discharged our duty towards posterity and maintain the integrity of the biosphere for human life?

Fact is that current climate policy has been next to useless and an obstruction to decisive action. Do we find that troubling?
Will we wait until we are confronted by extreme weather, flooding, droughts, rising seas, the effects of disturbed ocean chemistry and high temperatures?

Do we really care that we are producing famines, deaths by drowning and hyperthermia?
Will some money to such organizations as WORLD RENEW or PRESBYTERIAN WORLD SERVICE or WORLD VISION be our sole effort?

IS AN INCREASE OF TEN DEGREE CELSIUS NOW A CERTAINTY?

It seems to me that high levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have already locked us in for a future temperature rise of 10°C. Carbon dioxide emissions reach their greatest warming impact then years after release. In other words, the full wrath of the carbon dioxide emitted over the past decade is yet to come.
Back to my original heading: THE DARKNESS DEEPENS, a line borrowed from ABIDE WITH ME. This begs the question HOW THEN SHALL WE LIVE?

I only have one answer, found in 2 Peter 3 as well, verse 14:”So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.”

That also implies that we love the earth: John 3: 16.