November 24 2021
WHAT IS “CHRISTIAN?”
A few weeks ago, I received a mailing from the Christian School Foundation, a Canadian body with the aim to help Canada’s Christian School movement. To me it generated a somewhat adverse effect, a feeling of negativity, a strange reluctance to even read the booklet. I know it was the wrong emotion, Why? Today the word “Christian” is now often associated with ‘anti-vaccine’, ‘anti-homosexual’, ‘anti-science’, even ‘anti-creation!’
It was not always so.
In 1955 my wife and I and one little son, moved from Hamilton, Ontario to St. Catharines, where in 1957, with a daughter added, I became quite involved in establishing a Christian School there, convinced that public education would lead my children astray from the true faith.
I myself am a multi-generational product of Christian education in the Netherlands. My parents had gone to their village Christian school, while the parents of my grandparents paid for their Christian schooling, just as we now had to do.
I must admit, my Christian elementary education has had a lasting influence on me because of my weekly memorizing the rhymed Psalms: my wife and I sang them together when she suffered from dementia: the songs learned in our youth remained with her and me till the very end.
I was for years the secretary of the local Christian School board, and a member of the Education Committee. Being self-employed, I spent at least one day a week working for this cause. From 1959-1965, as recording and corresponding secretary of the board of the Ontario Alliance of Christian Schools, a province-wide organization I traveled one day each month to Toronto, for an all-day meeting there. That often entailed another day of work, writing the minutes and doing the extensive correspondence.
Then a change.
When my term was up more conservative men took over and I lost touch with the Christian School movement. But not quite.
In 1972 I gave a chapel talk at the Beacon Christian Highschool in St.Catharines. That year had been a turning point in my life: two books changed my entire outlook: Donella Meadows: “The Limits to Growth”, and Telder’s (Dutch) “After Death, what…?” The first book awoke what must have been lingering in my mind concerning the future of our profligate lifestyle, predicting a sure end. The second confirmed my suspicion about going to heaven, and suggesting eternal life on earth.
In that chapel talk, with my minister present, I expounded on my doubts about what I now call “The Heaven Heresy”, prompting the minister to send a letter to the school parents, contradicting my views. That, combined with my disenchantment with the growing inflexibility of the church I attended, coupled with the 1973 Oil Crisis and the outlook predicted by “The Limits to Growth”, my wife and I decided to make a radical move: sell business and house and move to Tweed where friends had come to the same conclusion. That happened in 1975.
From City to Country.
We moved. I built an energy efficient house on 50 acres, two storey with large windows facing south, a central masonry chimney, all set to heat the dwelling with wood and a back-up system. We became part of a house church, the type of worship when Christianity began. I took extra university courses – economics, urban studies – wrote three master-appraisals, to qualify for commercial real estate appraiser, which I did in 1978.
Always a ferocious reader, I fell in love with Bonhoeffer. Translated three books by an enlightened Dutch theologian, J.H. Bavinck. Both men convinced me that personal redemption and redemption of creation go hand in hand: a radical new insight for me.
Years ago, I wrote a book, DAY WITHOUT END, in which I imagined myself living in the New Creation. That prospect still governs my life. I see everything from the perspective of eternity, and am also governed by Revelation 22 where is says, “And there is no altar there”: no church, no Bible in the New Age to come! The real “Christian” Life is totally centered on and in ‘creation’.
That made me see how ‘original sin’ is the result of picking fruit from the Paradise tree without asking the tree for permission.
The ‘heaven heresy’ has distorted the “Message”: my growing trouble with church and Christian Education finds its source there, I believe.
A new perspective needed.
Christian churches and schools, need a new perspective, one that focuses on the End, so that we can prepare ourselves for living in the New Creation: A total Way of Life, listening to Creation, and effectively loving it: That is the NEW Way. It seems to me that the written Word, God’s indirect revelation, has become a talisman, because our way of life constitutes a curse on God’s direct, created word, to our mortal peril.
I pray and hope that these institutions follow that path. My reluctance to embrace the word “Christian” stems from my emphasis on God’s Created Word.
What is “Christian”? We have to find another word.