‘THAT’ GOD IS GONE.

THAT GOD IS GONE.

In my early youth, he was there, God. That was more than 8 decades ago, in, what now in Canada is called, the Dirty Thirties. I saw God, symbolized in my grandparents who lived godly lives in godly surroundings, reflecting Genesis 3: 19: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” My parents’-parents saw themselves as part of nature, part of the animals they so lovingly tended, each bovine’s name posted in the cow barn. I remember the horse of my mother’s father, a placid dappled animal, named Bles. Working the land was done with compassion enriching the soil in the process.

Both grandfathers were elders in a large church in a tiny village. There, in the rural west quarter of the Netherlands’ most Northerly Province, Groningen, I saw God shining through my grandparents. 

I also remember the horse-drawn vessel, carrying their 2-3 milk cans each day, transporting the fresh milk to be processed in the farmers’ co-op, bringing the cans back with whey for the pigs. 

I, amazingly, also experienced God in their view on economics, how, my grocer/grandfather, came calling in his 2 wheeled box, pony-powered, and bartered the eggs from my Oma’s free-ranging chickens for coffee, tea, sugar. I even remember the smell of the stoke-hut, the freestanding cooking and eating shed, their simple meal, mostly potatoes; their standard dessert being buttermilk porridge: only I was allowed to sweeting it with corn syrup.

Their world was a unity.

My grandparents had never heard of the French philosopher René Descartes who set the tone for the modern separation of humans and nature, by putting forward the view that the mind is divine and God-like, and our bodies, and the bodies of other creatures, are just kind of lifeless matter, a false belief still dominating American Religion, and now the ruling faith in Pentecostal Africa as well. Also, the main direction in the world-wide Roman Catholic Church, however much I admire some of the leaders there. 

They also had never heard of Plato and Aristoteles whose dualism the church swallowed hook, line and sinker, separating body from soul, a rational soul from a material body, resulting in the ‘heaven heresy’. Look at the ‘Christian Republican Party in the USA: Once in power they will scrap all environmental regulations.

Religion kills.

It is worth noting, how the Old Testament religion, propagated by the Pharisees, killed Jesus, while our New Testament version is killing Creation/God. 

Dr. Lynn White, a Christian ecologist, was right. In his essay, The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, he maintained that, of all religions, Christianity is the most anthropocentric, the most human-directed one. I cannot help but conclude that today’s Climate Change is the direct result of the Church separating God from nature. 

All about OIL.

The War – 1939-45 – was waged for one reason: Domination of Carbon Resources: OIL. Hitler wanted the Russian resources. After the war, OIL totally replaced God, the deity whom the church banned to heaven, giving free reign to the Carbon God to rule supreme. That war, waged between God/Nature and ROW, the Rest of the World, is now in its final stages, ending in spectacular fashion: fire, smoke, heat, hurricanes: the wrath of God/Nature versus the puny proletariat we are, basically. 

So, where is the church in all this, today?

In the 13^th and 14^th centuries the church was almighty, but during the Black Plague it lost much of its prestige and when coordinated voices started to criticize its outreach, the edifice crumbled. 

Today, the church’s preoccupation with heaven, at the expense of the earth, has further eroded popular support so that now there only is a shell left, visible in empty churches. 

Now a universal holocaust looms and the church is left speechless, as it had bet on the wrong horse, and lost credibility.

What to do in this late hour?

It is too late to expect the instituted church to switch to an earth-minded gospel, even though Romans 1: 20 asserts that:  For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. We cannot plead ignorance. I know, OIL has fueled our amazing progress. We now experience its fateful consequence: fire and destruction.

Dr. Sabine Dramm’s book on Bonhoeffer, concludes with the amazing statement: “WhatBonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian Faith, is the perception of God and the world as one, and the perception of life that has its wellspring in this world in God, and in turn proceeds from this world back again to God. 

We used to believe that GOD IS ALL AND IN ALL: that God is gone in the Western world. Now, by our conduct, we confess that OIL IS ALL AND IN ALL.