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.