Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

February 28 2016

OUR EARTH IS IN THE DEVIL’S DEADLY GRIP.

Never mind the song “This is my Father’s world.” Never mind contemporary testimonies that state that “Our world belongs to God”. Never mind us singing “Beautiful Savior, King of Creation.” All this sounds very pious, and, yes, ultimately all this is true, but today these lines are simply incorrect, deceiving us, giving us a false sense of security and sending the wrong message to the masses.
Fact is that ‘our earth is in the devil’s deadly grip’. Never mind what the churches proclaim. The church’s message has, by and large, become so ineffective that people are quitting them en masse, and part of the reason is that the church no longer calls a spade a spade. All evidence shows that things here, down under where you and I live, are getting worse by the day. You want an explanation for the Holocaust and Climate Change, for Cancer and continuous conflicts? Look no further than the devil. All signs indicate that what used to be God’s world is now under a curse, a curse so bad that even Bill Gates, the richest man on earth, admits that it needs a miracle, something beyond the power of humans, to rectify the situation.

The trouble is that the church reads the Bible wrong. It has been blinded by Greek philosophy, which has proved more enduring and more incisive than the Scriptures. The one cardinal text in the Bible that I think has been constantly misinterpreted is John 3: 16: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son (as a ransom to buy the world back) that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” Yes, our everlasting life depends on the correct interpretation of this text.

So what does this text really mean for me? To me it indicates that ownership of the world, the cosmos, had been transferred to the Devil, who now is in full possession, but that, in principle, Jesus’ death on the cross bought it back, the transfer to be implemented when his Kingdom comes in the New Creation.
Compare this situation to a real estate deal. For some 10 years in my 40+ years of business life I have been a Real Estate Broker. Here’s what I did: I listed a property, put up a sign, advertised it, had an offer with some conditions such as financing, and when these conditions were met within a stated time limit, the deal was final. Only then would I stick up a SOLD sign on the property. I would receive my commission upon closing when the new owners would move in.

Back to John 3: 16, which also involved a Real Estate deal, this time the entire earth, the cosmos, as the Greek word has it. In the Garden of Eden God gave the earth to the human race. Psalm 115: 16 simply says: ’The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to humanity.’ Period. Then something strange happened: Adam and Eve gave it away. That clever fellow, the Devil, tricked them to transfer ownership, with the result that everything changed: thorns and thistles instead of edibles. There’s where Jesus entered the picture. He didn’t come to rescue you and me from eternal death – that too – but his PRIMARY MISSION was to wrest creation out of the hands of the Devil.

Back to that Real Estate deal. On Calvary Jesus paid the price: His life. That made the sale final. We now live in that limbo stage between the point in time when the deal became final, and the closing of the sale when the new owners move in. It is in this particular interval that we now live: between Calvary when Jesus suffered the most horrible death and his return which is now imminent. The closer we get to the Second Coming, the worse things will get for the planet, and for us.
Of course with the old owner still in possession of the property – the cosmos in this case, the world and those who dwell therein – the Devil is not the most cooperative of owners. On the contrary: he hates Jesus. He is the ultimate enemy. He knows that he is on the losing end. He knows that once Jesus returns, he’s had it. So, as the most vindictive of all creatures, he is busy inflicting the most possible damage to the house, and, even though he cannot totally destroy it, he is busy gutting the inside so that very little good remains.

There’s where we are at. Jesus really wants us to refrain from being implicated in this ‘wrecking’ business, but the sad truth is, believe it or not, we all are the Devil’s willing allies. The church, in some ways, is the leader in this by teaching the crowd that our ultimate destination is HEAVEN. So who cares! Thrash the joint. “Get in line, get in line, follow the ‘to heaven’ sign!” was a song I was taught in grade- and Sunday school. There’s hardly a hymn in my (Presbyterian) church’s songbook that does not somehow allude to the glories and beauty of heaven, all pure Gnostic nonsense, distancing us from the earth.
Yes, the Bible is full of texts that indicate the Devil’s present hold on creation. Take Matthew 4: 8-9, where it says: “Again the devil took him (Jesus) to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor: the great pyramid of Giza, the Colosseum in Rome, the great wall of China, the Taj Mahal, just to name a few, and said: “All this I will give you if you will bow down and worship me.”

Jesus did not dispute that claim. He didn’t say “This is my Father’s world.” He did not quote “Our world belongs to God.” Nothing of that sort. Actually, in John 17, when Jesus intimately talked with his father just before his final trial and death, he confessed (verse 15): “My prayer is not that you take them (my followers) out of this world but that you protect them from the evil one.” The evil one is what Jesus calls The Prince of this world, the real ruler here. Verse 16 also is often misinterpreted as well. “They are not of this world (the world belonging to the devil) as I am not of it.” The heaven-heretics interpret this to mean that neither Jesus nor we belong to this world but have heaven as our future. Jesus actually says the opposite: neither he nor we belong to a world dominated by the Devil. The apostle John is very emphatic on this score: in 1 John 5: 19 he explicitly states that “We know we are children of God and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”

Need I say more?

Walter Brueggemann in his book, “INTERPRETATION AND OBEDIENCE” makes the point that new times need new approaches.
Here’s what Brueggemann writes – and I fully agree with him -:”The case for theological education cannot be made once and for all. It needs to be made again and again because what theology and theological education are called to do varies in each social setting and cultural circumstance……….We live in a culture that in its dominant modes is committed to a reading of reality that is false and will finally dehumanize and destroy……I suggest that the church in our cultural setting is largely contained in and seduced by that false reading of reality so that it has little energy or imagination, not to say courage for its mission.”

Looking at the church in my more than eight decades of faithful attendance I have not noticed an iota of change in the way the church operates. The only difference from the 1930’s is that today the sermon is 15-20 minutes long while in my youth I often endured 45 minutes of preaching, and that twice on a Sunday.
It is my contention that today we live in a unique time, a time never before experienced by the human race. Everything today has an expiry date in it, yet we live as if the earth is infinite. Just last week I saw an article that outlined how close to 90 million acres of forests in North America are under threat due to Climate Change and the beetles. As the forests go so do we. And that is just one example.

That brings me to the point I really want to make: churches are failing to do their task; churches are telling us that this world belong to God. That is true in the sense that God created it, just like the Nacht Wacht belongs to Rembrandt who painted it in 1650 or so, but is now the possession of the Dutch Government. God created but now this world belongs to us, and we made a mess of it by transferring it to God’s enemy.

Yet, we are in this world to stay. Dietrich Bonhoeffer has something to say about soil and the earth.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a theology professor in Berlin and totally opposed to the Hitler regime. He was hanged in April 1945, a few weeks before Germany collapsed. He was then 39 years old and the author of many books. I have his A TESTAMENT TO FREEDOM a 530 page volume containing his essential writings. In it he takes the church to task as it has moved away from the earth and has embraced the pagan-idea of heaven, increasingly seeing the earth as evil. Here are his words: “Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from the earth in other worlds beyond: he gives us back to the earth as its loyal children.”
Bonhoeffer calls this ‘heaven message’ pious secularism. His words: “The Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth is pious secularism which also makes it possible to preach and to say nice things.”

In his CREATION AND FALL he is again very outspoken. There he writes: “The soil and animals over which I have dominion, are the world in which I live, without which I cease to be. It is my world, my earth, over which I rule…. I belong completely to this world. It bears me, nurtures me and holds me…. God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.” So far Bonhoeffer, my kind of theologian.

Then there is J. H. Bavinck

Bavinck too has written about this. In BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END: A RADICAL KINGDOM VISION Bavinck, talking about Jesus, the Son of Man, humanity personified, wrote: “Numer¬ous nations still maintain the ceremony of treating a small child with special rituals when it first gets into touch with the fertile earth. This contact with the earth is an essential element of life. We are taken from the earth, we belong to the earth, and we live through the earth. Our bond with the earth is so strong that we cannot for a moment imagine existing apart from the earth, and hanging – as Jesus did on the cross – breaks the contact with the earth. Hanging places a person outside the great cosmic unity and puts him all by himself as an exile, outside the wider context of God’s glorious creation. That is why hanging is an eloquent expression of being expelled from God’s kingdom. When suspended above the earth, humans are placed outside the contact with the earth. Exiles, lonely and lost souls, humans are carried outside the powerful context of God’s life-energizing grace. Such is the signi¬fi¬cance of that dreadful death, death on the cross. The Scriptures, rather than emphasizing that death on the cross is pain¬ful, point out that it foreshadows the cruel reality of carrying God’s curse.”

Walter Brueggemann concludes his book THE LAND with these words: “The gospel is about the coming of the new age, the new kingdom, the new land.”

Jesus died not to save our souls on the way to heaven. No, no, no. He died to force the devil to let go of the earth and to restore it to its original perfection. That’s why loving God is expressed in loving the earth, his precious possession. It’s here where we will enjoy eternal life. It’s the church’s task to prepare people for this.

FEBRUARY 21 2016

THE TOWER OF BABEL AND THE DISSOLUTION OF TODAY’S INSTITUTIONS

THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The Second Coming is a poem composed by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919 just after the War ended. One hundred years later, the Second Coming is that much closer.

Let me first say a bit about the Tower of Babel. Genesis 11 relates that even then, some 6000 years ago, people were technically quite advanced. They had the expertise to mine big blocks of granite, to transport them to a central place, and to hoist them high up into place using bitumen for cement (this was in the Middle East where there was then and is now loads of that tarry stuff).

To build a tower of that magnitude called for a strictly regulated organization, required a structure of command, and lots of ‘slave’ labour, as well as an intricate monetary system to finance this all. The unified language the Bible mentioned also implied a singleness of purpose, a pyramid of power, with dictatorial tendencies, where human freedom was made subordinate to the overall goal of building a world empire.
It is exactly that sort of governance that the Lord wanted to prevent from existing. Therefore God, by personal intervention, confused their language so that they could no longer communicate. I also imagine that among those dispersed were true believers who saw God’s plan and took with them some of the truths still evident in many an indigenous folk tale.

Back to today.

We now live in a situation described in Deuteronomy 31: 17: “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.” Yes, today we live a life without God’s universal guidance, all too evident everywhere, leading to certain cultural death.

We again have a universal language: English. We now have built not one but twin Towers of Babel, coming to you in the dual forms of the Carbon Age and the Internet, both amazing structures that allow us to communicate instantly with people all over the world and reach any point on the globe in a few hours. That actually is a boon for the Gospel and its world-wide proclamation, fulfilling one of the requirements before the Lord’s return: Matthew 24:14 tells us that “the gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in the entire world, and then the End will come.” Brace yourself.
Yes, we have built our own towers of Babel in the forms of our Carbon fueled life and the WWW, the World-Wide-Web for good and ill. The Lord used the old Tower of Babel to create a multi-lingual and pluralist society, expressed in Jesus’ words: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.”
Now the new Towers of Babel are crumbling, testing the faith of all believers. Climate Change is causing the weather to go weird and World-Wide communication has generated world-wide confusion and dissatisfaction and universal surveillance.

Look at American politics. Bizarre. Bernie Sanders, a 72 year old Senator of independence status, from Vermont, is challenging Hillary Clinton, who, more or less, represents the status quo. Sanders’ success shows that much of America is tired of rising inequality and sick of seeing the rich become richer and the poor poorer. He intends to revive both a progressive agenda and the American tradition of egalitarianism. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, who fought to the left of Barack Obama in 2008 on topics such as health insurance, appears today as if she is defending the establishment, just another heiress of the Reagan-Clinton-Obama political regime.
Sanders makes clear he wants to restore progressive taxation and a higher minimum wage ($15 an hour). He advocates free healthcare and free higher education in a country where inequality in access to education has reached unprecedented heights. That’s the situation on the left.

The ‘religious’ right reminds me of Adam and Eve. Just as the first human pair easily fell for the ‘ great deceiver’, so too the Christian segment of the USA are flocking to Trump and Cruz, succumbing to a hyper-nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-Islam and anti-Christian discourse and a limitless glorification of the fortune amassed by rich white people.

Today we see the revolt of the masses and the threatened dissolution of age-old political institutions. This is also evident in Europe where similar movements are at work and nihilism is also gaining ground.
It is true: for many in the USA the current conditions are not working. Especially the Republican Party has made it its main message that government is not the solution but the problem. Don Trump’s success is extra scary as he appeals to the worst in human nature. In spite of his atheistic language, ridiculing his opponents, blaming minorities for taking jobs away, the so-called Evangelical section flocks to him, exposing their basic ignorance of Christian values. Of course it was no different in Canada where the fundamentalists too voted for Harper who had no regard for God’s creation whatsoever, preferring the profit-seeking, technology-can-fix-it ideology of fossil-fueled capitalism: the modern equivalent of the Tower of Babel.

Are Christian Institutions also vulnerable?

Christian institutions have benefited from the modern Tower of Babel to build churches and Christian education on all levels. Their continuance depends on maintaining these cosmos-killing conditions: in other words, they are relying on the Tower of Babel syndrome, in spite of paying lip service to more ecologically sound measures. Yet it is our Christian duty to promote the death of our secular civilization, by abandoning the Tower of Babel’s destructive practices because they imperil God’s Primary word, Creation. John 3: 16 makes it abundantly clear that loving creation is the Christian’s primary duty. Strange as it may seem, the building of all these Christian institutions, seen as necessary at the time, has now become a hindrance to adapting to the new reality: the coming collapse of the world economy will force them to abandon the entire network of educational institutions. The trouble with physically building churches and schools is that we are making an absolute statement that this is how it always will be. Already the youth is shying away from these human enterprises in record numbers, imperiling the institutions from within because the current Tower of Babel built on fossil fuel is crumbling, while the WWW is as fragile as the electricity supply.
God, in his goodness and omniscience, is now forcing us to seek out a new course as financial and environmental constraints will compel us to do so.

“In our Father’s House there are many mansions”.

Our truth, our perspective, our Judeo-Christian-Western values need a thorough re-examination, seeing our world not just with Western eyes but with Indian and Chinese eyes and Inuit eyes, not just only with human eyes but with golden-cheeked warbler eyes, coho-salmon eyes, and polar bear eyes, and not even just with eyes at all but with the wild, barely articulate being of clouds and seas and rocks and trees and stars.
Today we are on the cusp of experiencing the dissolution of all institutions, finding ourselves on the eve of what may be the human world’s greatest catastrophe. None of us chose this, not deliberately. None of us can choose to avoid it either. It’s all in God’s plan to prepare us for the New Age to come, where Christ will be all and in all, where he will be the Primus inter Pares, the First among equals, all children of God and sisters and brothers of Jesus.
That means that THE SECOND COMING is not far away, evident in the disintegration of all that has made our life so different from our forebears.
For most of human history life has been solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The fortunate coincidence of factors that drove the unprecedented improvement in living standards following the Industrial Revolution, and especially in the period after World War II, has been unique, an historical aberration. Now, different influences threaten to halt further increases, and even reverse the gains. Yet, we have experienced how materially benevolent life can be, a foreshadowing of Eternity, the New Age to come in God’s Kingdom.

Now all signs point to looming shortages of critical resources, such as water, food and energy due to manmade climate change and extreme weather conditions. Europe is currently struggling to deal with a few million refugees fleeing conflicts in the Middle East. How will the world deal with hundreds of millions of people at risk of displacement as a resulting of rising sea levels?

Today we live in an age of ‘extend and pretend’, whereby authorities choose to ignore the underlying problem, cover it up, or devise deferral strategies to ‘kick the can down the road’. The assumption has been that government spending, lower interest rates, and the supply of liquidity or cash to money markets would create growth. It would also increase inflation to help reduce the level of debt, by decreasing its value. Human wisdom hasn’t worked: global debt has increased, not decreased, in response to low rates and government spending. Banks, considered dangerously large after the events of 2008, have increased in size and market power since then.
The policies have also set the stage for a new financial crisis. Easy money has artificially boosted prices of financial assets beyond their real value. A significant amount of this capital has flowed into and destabilized emerging markets. Addicted to government and central bank support, the world economy may not be able to survive without low rates and excessive liquidity.

Authorities increasingly find themselves trapped, with little room to take a different tack and unable to discontinue support for the economy. Central bankers know, even if they are unwilling to publicly acknowledge it, that their tools are inadequate or exhausted, now possessing the potency of shamanic rain dances.
Politicians know all this, but are unwilling to openly discuss the real issues. They argue that the problems are too far into the future to require immediate action, fearing electoral oblivion, but in so doing they are merely pile up the problems.
It is not in the interest of bankers and financial advisers to tell their clients about the real outlook because bad news is bad for business. The media for the most part, accentuate the positive. Facts, they argue, are too depressing. The priority is to maintain the appearance of normality, to engender confidence.
So the Twin Towers on which our economy depends are slowly disintegrating, until they reach a sudden point of collapse. For the moment, the world hopes for the best of times but is afraid of the worst. The world has postponed, indefinitely, dealing decisively with the challenges, choosing instead to risk stagnation or collapse. But reality cannot be deferred forever. Kicking the can down the road only shifts the responsibility for dealing with it onto others, especially future generations.
The lesson here is that we should not grow too attached to institutions or confessions or even contemporary statements of faith: the all will disappear.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!

February 14 2016

IS THERE STILL A CHRISTIAN CHURCH?

That question reminds me of a little ditty:
“Whenever God erects a house of prayer
The Devil builds a chapel there;
And ‘twill be found upon examination,
The latter has the largest congregation.”
Daniel Defoe in The True-born Englishman
Isn’t my title terrible? Questioning whether there still is a Christian Church? Yet, it reminds me of Jesus’ words in Luke 18: 8: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” So, perhaps, my question has some validity. The word ‘faith’ is well defined in Hebrew 11: 1: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” Of course this statement pertains to The New Earth to come, because the entire Bible and Jesus’ entire mission had an eschatological emphasis, always pointing to “The Kingdom to come,” the new creation that humanity rejected in Paradise. However, ask the average church-goer what they unconditionally hope for and most certainly believe and I expect they will quote Billy Graham. In an interview on CNN I heard him say that when he dies, Jesus will take him by the hand and bring him to God. Sheer nonsense, of course: pure Gnostic gibberish. 1 Timothy 6:16 says that “God lives in inapproachable light, whom nobody can see or has seen.” Not even Billy G.
Yes, that’s that heaven-heresy again, the falsehood that killed the “New Earth” expectation and totally misdirected the church. To rectify that error the church itself must now become a mission field, because Jesus’ real message is: “God so loved the world”. The Greek word there is cosmos, which includes everything created and implies perfection, the opposite of chaos now everywhere, thanks to the Ruler of this world, the Satan now in charge.
A new approach is needed. THE J. H. BAVINCK READER points the way. You may know that I hold this man very high. I have translated three of his books, one already published by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, one to be published in May – THE RIDDLE OF LIFE – and another, on Revelation, this Fall, with the possible title of AT THE THRESHOLD OF ETERNITY.
J. H. Bavinck was primarily a missionary. As such all his writings emphasize the aim to bring the Good News to those who have never heard it. That now includes the church, by and large. He studied the world’s religions and discovered that many of them have something that points to Christian influence from thousands of years ago. Take Hinduism which describes a primeval age where poison appears over the ocean world. In order to save the world from destruction the great god Shiva gathered the poison into his hand and drank it. This indicates that only a God can save the world. Japanese Buddhism contains a theology of redemption comparable to reformed teachings. So missionaries, familiar with indigenous teachings, could build on this knowledge to bring the Gospel of Christ.
However, today the challenge is immensely more difficult. What is so different today is that, as T. S. Eliot has reflected: “Men have left God not for other gods, they say, but for no God: and this has never happened before.”
Another thing has happened, and that too has never happened before. In general the church has ceased to be Christian. This is especially true in the USA situation, where the expert on these matters, Prof. Dr. Harold Bloom, has outlined this in his book THE AMERICAN RELIGION. The Falwell crowd personified in the LIBERTY University is a bulwark of this nationalistic-gun-toting-anti-Muslim-Climate-Change denying mentality: also pure pagan Gnosticism, still falsely carrying the label of Evangelical Christianity.
It’s true, many churches struggle, including the one we attend, and that is good. So, perhaps, I overstate the case. Still the emphasis in the church has to shift, from what theologians call “Special Revelation” to include “General Revelation”. The ‘special’ refers to the Bible and the ‘general’ to creation. To call creation ‘general’ is, in my opinion, a terrible misnomer, because it lacks any specificity. It’s so, yes, ‘general’, so neutral, so devoid of any hint of the divine. A much better designation is GOD’S MAJESTIC REVELATION, pursuing Psalm 8: “O Lord how majestic is your name in all the earth!” That, at least, says something that is true. Could it be that theologians gave creation that silly label to downplay creation at the expense of their expertise: the Scriptures?
Let me quote J. H. Bavinck, where he refers to his fellow missionary Paul, as recorded in Acts 17:
The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth. In his missionary preaching, Paul very definitely does not take his point of departure from human religion, but from the objective work of God and from God’s self-manifestation. (Bavinck continues) My own inner conviction is that this is the only truly relevant and effective point of contact. Acts 17: 30 says: “In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.” We are the hearers of the ‘now’ in this text. We stand in that momentous ‘now’ of the new chapter of God’s involvement with his world.
When bringing the gospel Bavinck, the missionary, starts with pointing to creation. That is today more relevant than ever, witnessing the ‘groaning of creation’. Today in ‘the now’, the words of Proverbs and many other Scripture passages are coming true. Take Proverbs 1: 31: “They will eat the fruit of their ways.” Or Proverbs 5: 22: “The evil deeds of the wicked ensnare them; the cords of their sins hold them fast.” Or take Jeremiah 2: 19: “Your wickedness will punish you; your backsliding will rebuke you.” That’s what we experience today: our sins against creation are starting to hurt us.
Therefore a new approach is needed, used by the apostle Paul when he met with the sophisticated Greeks on the Areopagus, where he right away focused on creation, rather than hitting them over the head with the Bible.
For too long the church has denied that the world we live in is ‘holy’. I once was in a discussion group of some 8 people, among which the executive director of a denomination which shall go unnamed. My wife and I were the only non- Americans. In that exclusive circle I wondered aloud why we call the Bible holy but not creation. This was met with stony silence. It reminds me of a passage by Paul in Romans 1: 18: “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness”, and verse 25, “they exchanged the truth of God for a lie.” J. H. Bavinck comments on these texts with these words: “What is that “suppressing”? We have described it as a repressing and we have registered the suspicion that this can also happen unconsciously.”
Bavinck goes on to say that at the precise moment that people see, they already no longer see. We all fully affirm that God made creation and called it good 7 times. Bavinck who also studied and taught psychology writes that “our awareness is tied to all kinds of inner emotional and volitional dimensions of our lives…..We see what we want to see……God definitely reveals himself, but people immediately push it away, repress it, suppress it. They are knowers who do not know, seers who do not see.”
That’s exactly what happening with ‘general revelation’. It is pushed back out of people’s consciousness. We all sing “This is our Father’s world”, and then pollute it without any qualms. We all do that. We see the Bible as Holy. We don’t see God’s world as holy.
THERE’S WHERE THE CHURCH HAS TO CHANGE.
So when I ask IS THERE STILL A CHRISTIAN CHURCH? then I am inclined to answer that with a definite “perhaps not.” And that is not all that strange. One of the Psalms (14) tells us that there is no one who does good, not even one. That also applies to churches. Yet we are still Christian when we follow Christ’s teaching. The church is still Christian when it follows Christ’s teaching, even though we and our churches are imperfect and see all things ‘through a glass darkly’.
So what does Christ teach?
Here is one thought: when Paul brought the gospel, all people had a ‘god’ concept, a symbol or image they adored. Now this is only present in the church. Now majority of people are god-less, are un-godly, can’t be bothered. They are not especially bad perhaps, often good citizens, law-obeying creatures, but they have not a bone of piety, not an ounce of religion. Those people cannot be reached anymore with the gospel: they are totally turned off on religion of any sort. That means that only the church people are likely candidates for the GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM.
So what did Christ tell us?
Jesus tells us, not once but repeatedly, that the ultimate meaning of human life is the kingdom of God. Many of his parables deal with that theme. To acquire the kingdom we often have to offer everything we have; it is the pearl of great value, for which we have to sacrifice all that we have.
In the Bible four items stand out:
(1) Thy Kingdom Come. Give us this day our daily bread. Both lines appear in the Lord’s Prayer.
(2) Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and all things will be given to you as well. (Matthew 6: 33).
(3) For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. John 3: 16.
(4) Be you perfect as I am perfect. Matthew 5:48

(1) Let me start with the lines so familiar because we pray them when we recite the Lord’s Prayer. In “Thy Kingdom Come” we ask the Lord to return soon and bring The New Creation. The word ‘daily’ in “Give is this day our daily bread”, the Greek word epiousios does not actually mean daily, but something like ‘of extra substance’. (I am quoting here Diarmaid MacCullogh an Oxford professor in his book CHRISTIANITY THE FIRST 3000 YEARS). He writes: “(The word epiousios) may point to the new time of the coming Kingdom.” That fits because Jesus made the Kingdom the central point of his teaching.
(2) In “Seek first the Kingdom”, Jesus’ words in the Sermon of the Mount, Jesus lays out his mission. Our aim in life is the New Creation to come. That means that here and now we must promote the welfare of creation. Just imagine! Seeking the best for creation is the primary aim of Christians! “General revelation” is at least as important as “Special revelation!”
(3) In my book John 3: 16 is the most significant text in the Bible. If God loved the cosmos so much that he sacrificed his one and only son to wrench the cosmos out of the clutches of Satan, should we too not make loving creation our top priority? Doing that comes with a promise attached: eternal life in God’s new earth!
(4) “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5: 48). The word for ‘perfect’ in Greek is ‘teleios’, which really means ‘all inclusive’. I think ‘holistic’ is the better word, always keeping the ‘telos’ in mind, the ‘end’ of all things, avoiding the law of unintended consequences so evident in our use of carbon fuel. Bonhoeffer called himself ‘anthropos teleios’, which means a person who always considers the consequences of his actions. Again the emphasis is on ‘general’ revelation, seen as at least as important as the church’s stock in trade, ‘special’ revelation, the Holy Scriptures.
Conclusion.
IS THERE STILL A CHRISTIAN CHURCH?
I leave it up to you to draw the conclusion. Of course the church is important. Of course the Bible is indispensable. How else could I come to document this ‘exposure’. The two, the Scriptures and the Cosmos, both are Holy. We can’t have one without the other, but the New Creation, coming soon to your doorsteps, will last forever, while ‘the law of God’ will be vested in our hearts, which means that God’s indirect word, the Scriptures, will vanish. Eternal life, as promised in John 3: 16, will be lived in God’s direct revelation, that MAJESTIC ONE, remember. Eternity will not be long enough to explore and detect God’s greatness that has no end. Also a prerequisite: a great deal of curiosity.

February 7 2016

A WORLD IN DISARRAY: another of my jeremiads, of course.

Disarray? Not here in Tweed so much.
This week I went to two evening meetings, something I not often do, except for choir – which really does not qualify as a meeting, and a bible study group, which also is not a place where you meet strangers. Yes, that is what I call meetings, a place where I meet new people and greet old friends.
The first was on Tuesday in the (new) library building where the talk was Climate Change and its effect on Gardening. Well attended. It also offered multiple tips how to grow stuff organically. Since I rely on our garden for much of the produce we eat – potatoes, cabbages, kale, onions, beets, green beans, carrots as well as apples and raspberries – I still have a lot to learn. Even after more than four decades of veggie gardening, I still see myself as a novice. So am eager to become more informed, especially at a time when so many drastic changes are taking place everywhere, and, as one speaker said: “in a few years’ time in a world of disarray, growing your own maybe the only way to secure a reliable food source.” Yes, with too much drought and/or too much rain, better prepare for the worst. I increasingly believe that the churches’ failure to actively incorporate God’s direct word – creation – in its day-to-day prescription for eternal life, is the real cause why so many have left the church and why among those who are still attend church, aspects of amnesia are approaching.
Here is a different take on this meeting: I see the meetings of the Tweed Horticultural Society as a divine manifestation at par with the regular Sunday worship. I did count 9 members of our church there.

More about that next week.

That was one meeting. The other was a few days later, on Thursday, where a totally new concept for Tweed was introduced: sponsoring a Syrian refugee family. Again religious overtones: an expression of ‘loving one’s neighbor’.
Here too there was a good crowd, some 60 people, basically open to sponsoring a Syrian family of four, mother, father, 2 children. In this venture I chair the finance/ fundraising committee which must collect $30,000 of which $26,000 already has been raised. I presume I will have to do a bit of door-knocking for this excellent cause.

Both meetings emphasized to me that our world is in disarray because we all live in One World, where Climate Change is universal and Global Disorder affects us all.
Somehow I am developing a totally new view on religion, and it scares me, because it makes we feel too different. If you have been a regular reader of my blog, and there are a few, then you may have noticed that I see the earth as God’s primary Word, his direct Word, while the Scriptures, the Old and New Testaments, I see as God’s secondary Word, his indirect one, as it has come to us through human hands, inspired as it is by the Holy Spirit. Yes, God’s primary word is more important: we are to inherit it!

I am always reading something. This week it is an interesting book, one of my own, entitled THE CIVILIZATION OF THE MIDDLE AGES by Norman F. Cantor, almost 600 pages. Reading it made me wonder whether history is repeating itself, because I see a remarkable similarity between the 14th and 15th centuries and today.
These two centuries too were periods of crisis and dissolution. Plagues and wars were severe and frequent. The people themselves were acutely aware that theirs was a troubled world. Even the weather was different then: the onset of a little Ice Age played havoc with the crops, just as Global Warming is doing today.
The book relates how the gap between rich and poor widened everywhere as trade declined, again exactly what is happening now. The church was all mixed up too, just as today. Then the selling of indulgences for the remission of sin was a popular way to raise money for the church; now in the fastest growing churches are the Prosperity kind: its main message is that when you become a “ true Christian’ God will bless you materially. The leading Republican candidates, Cruz and Rubio preach that gospel, are supposedly fervent Evangelicals, but they despise the poor, favor guns, and want to do away with Obamacare and benevolent government.
The big difference between then and now has been that the late Middle Ages saw that terrible Black Plague that killed 20-30 percent of the European population, especially the urban dwellers. Frankly today also the world is ripe for another pandemic. Already 90 percent of people suffer from one or more ailments. We also have:
? Global warming and resultant climate instability;
? The contamination of all ecosystems and food chains—and all humans—with persistent organic pollutants and other novel entities such as nano-particles;
? The depletion of key resources and damage to ecosystems that provide life-supporting “goods and services”; and
? The loss of species and biodiversity, a human-induced “sixth great extinction” that threatens the overall web of life.

All this sets the stage for another type of universal disease, probably something totally new, against which there is no effective antidote.
Take Africa and Asia at this point: both tremendously susceptible to a virus of some sort. Perhaps the current ZIKA variety may mutate into something affecting adults as well. Today anything is possible. I read last week how typhus has hit Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, where a water crisis has fueled fears of new epidemics. All over Africa the taps and wells are running dry, setting the stage for wide-spread hunger and disease.

Then there is the USA.

One look at the USA, and we see political chaos. We also see debt at an all-time high, with stagnant wages, with jobs mostly of the ‘service’ kind paying less than a living wage and even these are disappearing because the public has out-shopped itself and is trying to pay-off debts, with the result that even Wal-Mart is closing stores and entire shopping centres stand empty. There is a billion square feet of vacant commercial retail space, more than Canada has in total. When people have ‘nothing’ to lose, they ‘lose’ it, so they do the craziest things, like voting for Donald Trump, a Hitler-like person, or the right wing Cruz or Rubio, and prefer the old Senator, Ernie Sanders, over the establishment Hillary Clinton.

Chaos everywhere.

China in particular. There peasants by the millions flocked to the cities and found jobs in steel mills and other factories. Now they are being fired by the hundreds of thousands and returning to their rural roots, where they will sow dissension and cause exactly the riots the Communist rulers so fear. Just imagine: steel production in 1990 was a mere 70 million tons. This year the mill capacity is 825 million tons. Automobile production in 1994 was only 1.4 million. Now the factories there can produce 33 million of cars per year. Cement production went completely astronomical. In the three years of 2011-12-13 China produced more cement than the entire 100 years of the 20th Century in the USA.

All this infrastructure outlay and increase in industrial capacity was done on borrowed money. The trouble with borrowing is that when the ability to pay the debt goes down and markets disappear, the outstanding debts increase because of added interest. Wait for China’s economy to implode and, as it comprises close to 20 percent of the world’s Gross Domestic Product, expect a global recession if not a depression.
Believe me: all signs of collapse are present. Add the weather factor, the overpopulation, Europe on the edge of a break-up, the USA scene more confused than ever, all of which makes me thankful that, for the time being Canada, where I live, looks like an oasis of stability.
Of course, my age group is of the privileged sector. I remember that, as a self-employed person, I enrolled into the CPP, the Canada Pension Plan, where my first annual payment was $75.00 plus my employer’s portion, another $75.00. My last payment, before I retired in 1993 was exactly 10 times as much: $750.00 + $750.00. In total, adding 8 percent compound interest, my total CPP pension pot came to about $35,000.00. I drew that out in 4 years, from age 65-68. In the meantime the CPP payments have increased, thanks to a bit of inflation, to more than $12,000 annually so that now, almost 20 years later, the Canadian government and its tax payers, have paid me more than $240,000 beyond my contributions. How long can that last?

The entire world is in disarray, with, at best, a stagnant economy. Yet all levels of governments have based the payments of all pensions and medical benefits on infinite growth. Someday in the not too distant future, the expense ratio will exceed the revenue projection by such a large margin that matters will run stuck.
Just as one’s own garden produce may soon be the only source of food left, so too the government money stream, now originating in Ottawa or Washington may cease, and people would have to rely on their own resources or simply starve. That’s happening already in Greece and many regions in Africa, as well as in parts of the Middle East, that’s why the Middle East is coming to Tweed, one of the few sane areas left in the world.
Here, in Eastern Ontario, 100 years ago, people mostly lived on small farms, with a few cows, a few apple trees, a large garden, chickens, a pig, a horse or two, a cheese factory or creamery every few miles, all close to a ‘walk-to’ one-room schools where the basics of reading and writing and arithmetic were taught.
However, the past will never be repeated. The past is gone. The rural landscape is now dotted with fancy homes and 2-3 car garages, needed to transport the owners to far away employment places. Our society is built entirely on an abundance of cheap fuel, a sort of energy that we now know is also the source of the greatest threat humanity has ever faced.

The stage is set for a totally new world. We suddenly hear of dangerous mosquitoes. Of course they always were there, but now they have turned vicious. It seems that, in a world of disarray, all things turn against us. Of course, rather than embracing the world, rather than recognizing that we are part of the earth, rather than admitting that the Lord has fashioned us out of the clay of the earth and blew his own breath into our nostrils to make us human, we wanted to be gods ourselves. Pride, hubris, self-aggrandizing, has now brought us to the state where we are at the very edge of the abyss. No wonder it feels that the whole world is going through a long, nervous breakdown.

To repeat: the entire financial world is faced with new conditions, such as negative yields on money and gigantic debt levels. Then there are the growing geopolitical risks, including those stemming from the Middle East, Europe’s identity crisis, rising tensions in Asia, and the lingering risks of a more aggressive Russia. Something has to give.

Welcome to the New Abnormal for growth, inflation, monetary policies, and asset prices, and make yourself at home. It looks like we’ll be here for a while.
What is really happening is that the Lord is testing us as never before. In a world in total disarray wherever we look, there’s no way we can escape God’s judgement. The earth is taking her revenge. For us the only way left is to bow humbly before God’s majesty, kneeling before his judgement throne, and confess, as the prodigal son did in that familiar parable that Jesus taught us (Luke 15): Father I have sinned against heaven and against you”.
Of course, that’s not easy. It means that we must acknowledge that we have gone wrong, that society is at odds with the gospel, the Good News of the Kingdom – the new earth- to come.

That calls for a new mindset because, by and large what is commonly called Christianity has ceased to be Christian because it still sees the earth as a planet to escape from, regards the earth as evil. That has to change.

January 31 2016
WHO THEN CAN BE SAVED?

“If people are in Christ, they are a new creation. The old has passed away, now there is something new! (2 Cor. 5: 17).”

This is a revolutionary passage. In Paul’s days being in Christ meant swearing off false gods, severing all family ties, risking financial ruin and becoming a pariah, an outcast from society. Today it means something equally drastic: it means being totally new people, people with a different mindset, different living habits, totally in tune with creation. Yes, today also, when we are in Christ, it entails a total change, reflecting what is to come, portraying the new humanity.
It really makes me wonder whether I am in Christ, because there’s so little in me and by me and through me that shows that I am a new creature.

Of course, this passage makes me think of Revelation. Of course. That book, like no other, points to the New Age to come, a time totally different from what is happening today, now at this precise moment in your and my life.
Today we all eerily resemble the proverbial frog situation, that creature that sat in a comfortable pot of water, slowly brought to a boil and blithely burns to death. That, literally, reflects our ever warming globe, a product, a situation caused by us driving cars everywhere, turning up the heat when it is cold, the air conditioning when it is warm, traveling anywhere in the world.

We live in abnormal times. This flick-of-the-finger feast is something totally new in the world. Only the previous 100 years or so have seen such incredible luxuries. According to Angus Maddison, an historian of economic growth, 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. Or, as summed up by the economic commentator Steven Landsburg: “Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture—but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people’s lives. 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.”

Why did we become so wealthy? Simple: we discovered carbon fuel.
And there is where we are now. What did we do? We robbed Peter – creation – to pay Paul – us, mostly Western White people. Now Peter – creation – is exhausted: we have robbed it blind: goodbye to riches; goodbye to the good life; goodbye to everything that has made material life so marvelous. Also goodbye to the skills of yesteryear, the skills of basic survival, the skills of living on $400 to $600 per year thanks to multi- century-long generational know-how. The real rich will survive a little longer, but their lives will be miserable and dangerous and lonely, because they will be beset with dangers wherever they venture.
We now are in the stage referred to in Romans 8: 22: “The entire creation is groaning as in the pains of child-birth.”
If we are with it, if we really feel the pain of creation, if we really suffer with the birds and the bees, the fish and the elephants, the trees and the oceans, then – says that same text – we now, at this time, at this moment in history, should eagerly look forward to this stage of development, for it signifies the coming of what we hope for: the redemption of our bodies and our being adopted into the new creation. Wow. Rejoice. Don’t panic: embrace the suffering: it signals the end of the beginning, the sinful Adam stage.
But……. There always is a ‘but’.
The bible book “James” pulls no punches: “What good is it if we claim to have faith but have no deeds?” Or Jesus’ words: Where do we benefit if we gain the whole world, but lose our soul?” (Matt.16:26).
Yes, talk is cheap. Bonhoeffer calls that ‘pious secularism’ when we try to please God and Mammon, because living the energy-rich life without thinking about it, without having a grain of regret, is wanting to have the cake and eat it too.
This calls for wisdom. Ecclesiastes 7: 12 points the way: “Wisdom is a shelter as money is a shelter, but the advantage of knowledge is this: that wisdom preserves the life of its possessor.”
Preserving life does not mean the life in the here and now, but the life for eternity. Of course that makes sense: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” That too needs an explanation. Fear of the Lord simply means that we are in awe of God’s wisdom in creation and act accordingly. When we abuse creation, we abuse God, a daily occurrence for all of us.
It is not easy to be a “New Creation,” particularly in these last days, when everything is speeding up, except a God consciousness. I have said it before and will say it again: If God so loved the world that he offered his most precious to gain it back, isn’t our first obligation to love it as well with whatever we possess, even with our very life?

So here is step 1 of preparing for the AGE TO COME.

Commit yourself to the preservation and enhancement of God’s creation. Today everything we do has a stamp of destruction. If there ever were a generation that sins, it is ours. No wonder Revelation 18: 4 says: “Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues; (verse 5) for her sins are piled up heaven, and God has remembered her crimes.” How appropriate that the ‘sins are piled up to heaven’. Indeed Climate Change has everything to do with the CO2 we pump into the heavens.
That coming out is different for each. Leaving this current world behind is not the same for each person, that’s why I cannot dictate what you must do. I know what I must do, and try it consciously, even though I know it is impossible to live a totally creation-friendly life. We have our social, business and family life to preserve. Also it is different for city folk than for country dwellers, but for each of us the biblical given is: “to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.”
That “working out” has an immense global dimension for the simple reason that we are to inherit this world. Therefore I see this life as proving grounds for eternity: our eternal life starts here and thus life today must somehow, however faintly, resemble our life to come. It is not perfection that counts: it is the struggle that’s important. We must fight the good fight to do whatever we can to somehow reflect eternity.
To think that we have arrived, and can coast from now on, doesn’t work. We never arrive, and even though we see “through a glass darkly”, and have only a faint notion how we have to live, we do know our destination: a world where peace and shalom and perfection have an uninterrupted present and is good for eternity.
That takes constant effort and conscious attention. Nothing has damaged ‘Christian’ life more than the Heaven Heresy; nothing is more significant than the proper idea of “the Kingdom”, the perfect, pristine, Paradise-like life that is to come. Without the correct idea of the Kingdom, for which we pray each time we recite the Lord’s Prayer, we cannot proceed. Jesus’ foremost message is and always has been “Seek first the Kingdom, the welfare of Creation, and the rules that guide it, and everything else will fall into place.”
Step Number 2.
Involve your spouse and your family. If not married, find a like-minded person to pursue this goal. Try to promote this Kingdom idea in your church, if you still attend one. After all, the church should be the primary promoter of this idea, but, sorry to say, the church has, by and large, lost this Kingdom ideal. Still the church ought to have the only real solution, so it fervently should promote the “New Earth” option, the only real one out there. The fields are ripe for harvests because the world is desperate for answers.
There are many concerned people today, very worried about the deterioration in almost every field. Never has the political and economic and natural climate in been more worrying.
Step 3
Live as if the New World has already come. Fact is that our current creation-destroying life cannot be sustained: everything today points in that direction. The year 2015 was the warmest on record by a long shot. Also the spread of diseases are really worrying, combine that with the deteriorating state of Global health, where more than 90 percent of people suffer from one or more diseases, and the stage is set for a major pandemic. Again Revelation, the last Bible book, points in that direction as well. I am not sure what to recommend here. Does the plea “Come out of her lest you will be burdened by her ills”, apply here as well? The spread of Christianity in the first centuries was aided by the unstinted and unselfish aid to victims of pandemics in spite of direct exposure to crippling diseases.
Step 4
Gather knowledge. Stay informed. Research the ways of old; find out how people before the Carbon Revolution lived and thrived. In a sense these times were much more community minded, with small country, one-room schools being a focus for a certain small area.
Today, with computers, these schools should be resurrected, displacing the stinking diesel buses which cart young people over great distances to a regional education factory where there is little or no parental oversight. The result of mass schooling is certainly not a success. There the students are trained for a life that has no future. Small schools, reflecting the values of the parents, (do they still have values?) are more student-friendly, are more flexible, and flexibility is the key to the future, because it will resemble more what worked in the past. And the past is the future!
Step 5.
Turn off television.
Neil Postman has written an enlightening book on the subject of television, subtitling it “Amusing ourselves to Death”. By death he basically means ‘spiritual death’ because television deadens our minds. Of course it also speeds up physical death, making us ‘couch potatoes’. TV basically is an entertainment tool, at the expense of quality information. Politics and religion become a commodity and ‘the news of the day’ a show, with lurid pictures and distorted snapshots.
Of course commercials pay for the content, and so we receive a package that promotes the capitalistic point of view. TV has done much to give such continents as Africa an unreal picture of the Western world, and is a factor in economic refugees.
Postman argues that, owing to this change in public discourse, politics has ceased to be about candidates’ ideas and solutions, but whether they come across favorably on television: image is everything.
Personally I hate television. I confess that I subscribe to a basic package, mainly for the news. We watch it so little that I wonder why I pay for it.
We did without TV when our family grew up. TV is very detrimental for family life and development.
Enough.

My main thesis here is that “If anybody is in Christ, they are a new creation. The old has passed away, now there is something new! (2 Cor. 5: 17).”
The last 100 years or so have been a complete abnormality. History has speeded up at a breath-taking – literally – and ultimately life-taking speed. All this is part of the Lord’s plan to accelerate the coming of the Kingdom. Our (old) way of life has to disappear. Our life out of tune with creation has to become totally in harmony with creation. Don’t think too lightly about this.
It was an enormous change for the early Christians. May be it has become even more difficult to day.
Who then can be saved?

JANUARY 24 2016

DARK AGE AHEAD

I bought the book on May 18 2004, paid $29.95 plus tax, and never read it until this past week. The book? DARK AGE AHEAD, written by Jane Jacobs, an expatriate American then living in Toronto and famous for writing THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES.
So why did I suddenly pay attention to DARK AGE AHEAD which has lingered among my many volumes for a dozen years?
It now looks that we have a DARK AGE AHEAD. This was confirmed by a remark of Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the WEF, the World Economic Forum, meeting this past week in Davos, Switzerland. There some 2000 people, able to pay the $40,000 – thus quite rich, mostly the billionaires of this world, and people on expense accounts such as Justin Trudeau – gather to listen, talk and network.
Mr. Schwab said that, “As the crash in commodities prices spreads economic woe across the developing world, Europe could face a wave of migration that will eclipse today’s refugee crisis. Look how many countries in Africa, for example, depend on the income from oil exports. Now imagine 1 billion inhabitants, imagine they all move north.”
North, of course, means Europe, already overcrowded and itself in a deep financial fall and experiencing immense political turmoil, its union ready to fall apart, according to financier George Soros.

Last week these rich folk in DAVOS, probably controlling more than 50 percent of the world’s wealth, were asked what they thought were the five elements they feared the most. Not surprisingly INVOLUNTARY MIGRATION, as outlined above, was number 1. Also quite understandable was the fear for EXTREME WEATHER, now happening along the Atlantic Seaboard in the USA, indicating the direct effects of CLIMATE CHANGE. The third most feared possibility was a FAILED CLIMATIC MITIGATION. In other words, people in charge of the money tap fear that COP 21 and the climate decisions taken in Paris have no real bite. Number 4 on the most dreaded list was INTERSTATE CONFLICT. With the Sunnis battling the Shiites, or Iran versus Saudi Arabia, that is a real possibility. The fifth choice was A MAJOR NATURAL CATASTROPHE. Yes, a major earthquake is overdue on the west coast of the North America.

Basically all five dangers are climate related. The refugee crisis has been speeded up by desertification of Africa, exacerbated by lack of rain and too many people. The same is true for Interstate conflict, while weather and natural catastrophes too are caused by humans. Yes, brace yourself: there is a DARK AGE AHEAD.

There is a deep connection between THE DARK AGE and mass migration. Jane Jacobs writes, “The collapse of Rome and the onset of its famous Dark Age coincided with a great migration of peoples.”
This reminded me of my grade school days at the J. C. Wirtz Christian School in Groningen in the mid 1930’s.

In my youth learning was different. History, for instance, was partly taught by rote, memorizing important dates. These most memorable happenings were drilled into us by the entire class reciting such dates as, “In the year 400 A. D. massive people movements took place when the Romans retreated and the Franks and Sachs replaced them.” That was in a world where the entire European population could be counted in the low tens of millions.

Now imagine 1 billion moving north, that is into Europe. Fact is that oil comprises the major income for African nations, of which the price is down by 60 percent. Combine that with extensive drought in many African regions causing real famine and there is a recipe for disaster, and a clear incentive to move to seemingly greener pasture: a true sign of THE DARK AGE TO COME.

Jane Jacobs’ book does not mention such causes as Climate Change, political turmoil, or overpopulation. Instead she focuses on the disappearance of cultural facets, of which today there are plenty indications. Take, for instance, the onslaught on the family structure, evident today in the Trump tragedy, which is fueled by disorientation and plain revolt against authority. Or look at education. It should prepare for the future, and how to cope with a changed economic, cultural and atmospheric climate. Christian Education should especially prepare the youth foremost for the New Creation to come. Is that happening?

The Dark Ages that followed the Fall of Rome caused mass amnesia: all too evident today as well. Then people simply forgot the accomplishments of the past. They lost the vitality of the Roman culture and ‘dwelt in darkness’, a well-known biblical term too: the Bible says that people who no longer care for God and his commands ‘live in darkness’. She writes how in the Dark Age, the years from 500 to 1000 A.D., everything disappeared: education for the children; religions and rituals; the composition of households and societies; crafts, skills, – everything was gone

Jacobs feels that our headlong rushing into the Internet Age gives a false sense of security about the permanence of our culture. Suppose, by some act of terrorism, the entire Internet collapses, or a solar storm eliminates all electricity – as happened in September 1859 when flares from the sun melted all transformers – we suddenly are sunk: there is no back-up system. In 1859 society did not depend on electricity: now it cannot do without it.

Back to what’s going on in the USA on the electoral front. There, politically THE DARK AGE has arrived. The 2 political parties are on a self-destructive path. With the primary season now upon them, so far none of the self-appointed candidates for the Presidency have given an inkling of what is to be done in an age of desperation for many, with the middle class disappearing, the money-market in free fall, and the climate in disarray. And now, to top all the nonsense Sarah Palin is blabbing her baloney. Yes, we certainly already live in THE DARK AGE.

Writes Jim Kunstler in his recent column: “The Republican Party may be closer to outright blowup since the rank and file will never accept Donald Trump as their legitimate candidate, and Trump has nothing but contempt for the rank and file. If Trump manages to win enough primaries and collect a big mass of delegate votes, the July convention in Cleveland will be the site of a mass political suicide. The party brass, including governors, congressmen, senators and their donor cronies will find some device to deprive Trump of his prize, and the Trump groundlings will revolt against that move, and the whole nomination process will be turned over to the courts, and the result will be a broken organization. The Federal Election Commission may then have to appeal to Capitol Hill to postpone the general election. The obvious further result will be a constitutional crisis. Political legitimacy is shattered. Enter, some Pentagon general on a white horse.”

Matters are no better on the Democrat ticket. It seems that at the very time when bi-partisan cooperation is urgently needed and a united front established, chaos reigns.

It no longer looks like Hillary is a shoo-in for the presidency. Bernie Sanders runs on the Socialist ticket which works in Canada but is a dirty word in the USA, as bad as being a communist. That Europe and Canada have done well under Socialism means nothing in the USA where ignorance reigns. Jane Jacobs calls that Social Amnesia, an affliction that affects a good portion of its population.

So what does the USA population want? The TRUMP phenomenon is proof that a good portion of the American population wants a revolution, wants to kick out the current administration, the current political system, and wants to do away with whoever is calling the shots, forgetting that a true revolution always devours its own children first. This political disarray is a direct result of the collapse of the nuclear family, as divorce, single parenthood, creates disoriented people, shorn of all stability and portraying all the symptoms of the Coming Dark Age. Jane Jacobs sees the disappearance of the stable family as one reason for the Dark Age to come.

It is generally agreed that America, the world’s leading economy, is beset by complex, intractable problems that don’t have a clear villain: technological change displaces workers; globalization and the rapid movement of people destabilize communities; family structures have dissolved. Add that the political order in the Middle East is teetering, that the Chinese economy is cratering and inequality rising, and the entire global order is fraying. None of the candidates addresses these factors: lots of accusations, but no solutions, lots of pretending, but no positive proposals.
Fact is that the problems we now face are systemic: they cannot be solved anymore: in a word we are approaching A DARK AGE.
In the meantime Trump and his Republican cohorts feed on cultural xenophobia. Where Canada welcomes Syrian refugees, the ignorant South sees a terrorist behind each non-white face. A trip to Toronto, where non-whites dominate and live in perfect harmony, might be a good lesson is civics for them, but then their FAITH is closed to any change.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Prov. 29: 18).

That is exactly the reason for darkness. Without a guiding light we wander aimlessly. American religious fundamentalism only creates more darkness. The coming DARK AGE is being fueled by a false religion. It is the Religious Right that propels the success of both Trump and Cruz, the two leading Republican candidates: it consists of the living dead: theirs is not the politics of hope grounded in a vision of a common good for all people and the betterment of creation, but a nihilistic cynicism driven by resentment and anxiety.
Of course money too is a cause, or the lack thereof. Jane Jacobs writes that one of the causes of the Roman Collapse as described in Gibbon’s DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE was the constant shortage of money in the treasury, insufficient to pay Rome’s legions. Ultimately chronic deficits and the debasement of money contributed to Rome’s downfall and the coming of the Dark Age. The reason for the current financial problems is DEBT. Basically debt will do us in, aided by global environmental degradation which will speed up the process exponentially.

Back to Davos, today’s center of the world’s interest.
The Bible talks about sharing pain: if one member of the human race suffers, then all members suffer. When progress and wellbeing is not shared then all wellbeing is under pressure. Politicians and business leaders gathered in the Swiss Alps this past week face an increasingly divided world, with the poor falling further behind the super-rich and political fissures in the United States, Europe and the Middle East running deeper than at any time in decades. Just 62 people, 53 of them men, own as much wealth as the poorest half of the entire world population and the richest 1 percent own more than the other 99 percent put together. That bodes ill for all.
Thomas L. Friedman last week Wednesday wrote a highly disturbing column in the New York Times. He wondered whether seismic shifts are occurring in the global system with immense unpredictable consequences. He asks “What if a bunch of eras are ending all at once? What if China’s growth is ending, which accounts for 50 percent of global growth when multiplier effect is taken into account? “What if…” and he lists a number of factors on which our world depends. “What if the $100-a-barrel era is over, devastating the many economies, including Canada, which need this range to survive? What if the robots, the software and the automation eliminate jobs and cause mass unemployment? What if Climate Change will advance unabated because cutting down the use of carbon fuels means higher unemployment?

So when I connect the dots between the question marks and the raw reality, the result is A NEW DARK AGE.

Is this just another one of my pessimistic pieces? Perhaps. I don’t say that this is going to be revealed this week, this month, even this year, but all trends point that way. Be forewarned, because this gives us time to prepare.

So what must we do? Is there a way out? Must we throw in the towel, become disheartened and slowly get sucked into the abyss? That a DARK AGE is upon us in the foreseeable future is beyond doubt. All signs point to severe financial and environmental degradation.

Next week I will attempt to present some positive thoughts on how to survive the coming cataclysm that might suddenly be upon us.