Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

DEATH: THE LAST ENEMY.

There is a new book out: The survival of the Riches. I read a review of it in Civis Mundi, a highbrow Dutch monthly magazine, a free electronic periodical of Social Philosophy and Culture, which my brother Drewes in the Hague faithfully sends me.

Before the author, Dr. Douglas Rushkoff, a professor in New York City, dealt with “The Rich”, he, 10 years ago, wrote the Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, a non-fiction work. 

That book caught the attention of a certain segment of society, and earned him an invitation to speak at a conference, which came with special privileges: first-class airfare, a chauffeured limousine, a remuneration that equaled one-third of his professorial pay, staying in a super deluxe resort somewhere in the desert. 

In Present Shock, Rushkoff describes our Western predicament, a state of anxiety in which we try to keep up with the ever-increasing speed and immediacy of time, because our temporal pressures are so great and our confidence in our own ability to solve the world’s problems so weak that apocalyptic finality has an unshakable appeal. 

This ‘end-time’ state of mind, makes Rushkoff write that, rather than focusing on building a better future, society is primarily concerned with building a worthwhile present, and failing on that score. 

Actually, he says that there no longer is a future: the future is here!

An unusual request.

Rushkoff’s extravagant trip, accommodation and renumeration were not the only surprises: when he was ushered in to the auditorium there was not the customary overflowing audience but only five (5) persons, all super rich, none of them interested in his prepared speech.

They had invited him because they feared for their future: their wealth had given them everything they could wish for, yachts, private planes, trophy wives, except life without death.So, these 5 multi-billionaires had a few questions:  how to escape the consequences of what they themselves had caused to happen: the coming collapse of society. These unnamed men also wanted to discuss such pressing questions as how to maintain authority over their private security, after that dreaded “event”. 

By the way: Don’t ever think that the ultra-rich are a balanced lot. The richer people are, the more insecure they feel: Can they really depend on their ‘hired men’? Maybe the guards could wear some sort of disciplinary collars? Better yet, what about using robots as guards? Are friends, real friends? Do their wives really love them? 

But especially they wonder about their own mortality. They all knew about Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, also a billionaire, who died at the age of 65. He also had all the toys, including a luxury yacht, but he died anyway. Is death really inevitable?

These were the questions Dr. Rushkoff faced. Would there be a cure for death? They saw ‘death’ as the greatest evil, the scourge of humanity, a moral scandal. These superrich were outraged over their own mortality, regarded it as a personal affront. Yes, they saw DEATH as the ultimate enemy, now that death lurks everywhere.

Take the Arctic. 

The danger there will sooner than later affects us all. Arctic News reports that the ICE is disappearing! Without the buffer constituted by thicker sea ice, an influx of ocean heat threatens to destabilize hydrates contained in sediments at the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean, resulting in eruptions of huge amounts of methane, a gas 100 times more deadly than our very own tail-pipe variety. 

Then, too, there is the growing nuclear threat. There too we are beset with universal elimination. Is there a cure? Can we escape death? Can we bypass both global and personal death?

The rich are different.

More terrifying than a Hollywood-derived nightmare is their naive and profoundly antisocial response: They’d rather build their bunkers than work to avert the apocalypse. Rushkoff describes their attitude as a “faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.”

No wonder: Many people now seem fixated on stockpiling enough resources to protect themselves from the rest of the world.

Conclusion.

The world is scared. It sees dangers everywhere. GOLD is soaring, as if possession of it will assure survival. I remember from the war 1940-45 golden wedding rings were offered in payment for a loaf of bread, and refused. Only Christ can offer eternal life: as Paul writes in 1Corinthians 15: 26, The last enemy to be destroyed is death. Christ came to bring us LIFE, and that to the full, (John 10:10), life without super-yachts and private aircrafts and trophy wives, but having all of God’s Holy Creation as our inheritance, the Tree of Life, bearing twelve crops of fruit every month! 

HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?

“How Should We Then Live” is the title of a book written by theologian Francis A. Schaeffer, published in 1976. At that time, I found the book’s title attractive. Then as now for me ‘how to live’  was a daily struggle, quite convinced that, because of ‘habituation’, we had grown accustomed to a thoroughly unchristian lifestyle, for the simple reason that our cosmos-destroying existence was killing the very world which God loves so much. 

So, yes, ‘how should we then live?’ was always uppermost in my thoughts, so much that, in 1975 I built an energy-efficient home, passive solar, 2 storey and large windows on the south, one storey and a small window on the north, mostly heated by wood, super insulated, of course. And a large vegetable garden.

So, what did Francis Schaeffer recommend?

Francis Schaeffer and his wife opened in Switzerland a retreat called l’Abri. There, devotion to Christ and the reality of prayer formed the nucleus of daily life. In essence life was seen as a spiritual journey with heaven as its goal. In 1975, when the book appeared, I was in full accord with these goals, until……..

Until I no longer was. In 1991 I bought a thin book – only 150 pages – with the intriguing title TENDING THE GARDEN, essays on the Gospel and the Earth. In it I found an essay by Paulos Mar Gregorios, head of the Indian Orthodox Church, in which he outlined the three principles that ruled his life. For the first time in my life my pious existence got a jolt. His first principle shook me, serious believer, to the core: Human redemption can be understood only as an integral part of the redemption of the whole creation. 

Yes, read that statement again. Human redemption can be understood only as an integral part of the redemption of the whole creation. 

I greatly admire Bonhoeffer. To me he was, what today Aleksei Navalny is: a martyr for Freedom. Just as Bonhoeffer returned to Germany in 1939, abandoning a promising position at Union Theologian Seminary, to a certain death by Hitler – he was hanged a few weeks before War’s end – so too Navalny went back to Russia, knowing full well his predicament. Bonhoeffer, in his book, A Testament to Freedom, writes – and his words, written in 1932 (90 years ago!) were truly are prophetic – “We have fallen into secularism, and by secularism, I mean pious, Christian secularism. Not the godliness of atheism or cultural bolshevism, but the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth…This pious secularism also makes it possible to preach and to say nice things…(However) The function of the church is to witness to the power of God in the new creation”. When did you hear that message?

How do non-Christians see Christianity?

Carl Safina is one of them, a non-Christian who has closely studied Christianity.

In his fascinating book, Alfie & Me, this author/ecologist, convincingly demonstrates that the outcome of Christianity is actually based on Greek philosophy more than on the Bible, which, in John 3: 16 expressly states God’s ultimate love for creation, yet almost unanimously Christians believe that eternal life will take place in heaven, while the earth is disposable. He clearly demonstrates that Plato, this revered Greek philosopher, moved the sacred away from the body, from Earth, from LIFE! And, tragically, the church did the same!

What is ‘Christian’? You decide. Is Safina Christian? His book is all about caring for an injured owl, Alfie.

In his epilogue, Safina writes, “What will we do with our one wild and precious life? Perhaps the answer can be easy: to care fiercely without apology (for the earth). If there is a final exam at the end of life, and its sole question is “Did you care”, I hope I might at least pass the course.” Yes, Dr. Safina, yes there is a final exam. Yes, the question is: “Have you cared for creation and her creatures?”

When Dr. Safina asks that question in his epilogue, we know that he ardently cares for planet and people, for birds and biosphere. He does not like the Christian Religion, of which he has a good grasp. On various occasions he quotes the Older Testament, which does have an anti-creation bias, emphasizing exploitation and dominion. On page 198 he writes, “The man who has been called the most influential evangelical, anti-environmentalist in the United States, Calvin Beisner, told an interviewer in 2016, that people should be concerned of the state of their eternal souls – not about the state of the merely temporary planet.”

This is exactly what Francis Schaeffer saw as being ‘Christian’. That’s what Plato recommends, “we must get rid of the body’. The majority of church people still echo this sentiment, under the enduring influence of  the Late Great Planet Earth, written by Hal Lindsey.

Barry Commoner, another non-Christian, has formulated the laws of Ecology. In my opinion, they reflect pure Christian theology, as important as the 10 commandments. They should be read in church every Sunday! Why? Because they tell us how to live the Christian life.

These simple rules are:

1.   Everything is connected to everything else.

2.   Nature – creation- knows best.

3.   There is no free lunch

4.   Nothing ever disappears. (including our good and bad deeds)

 

Reflect on these rules and fill in the details when deciding “How to live Christianly.”

ENVISIONING THE END.

I know: Doomsday Tidings are unpopular. But then… Let’s face it: The news nowadays is relentless and has a new element: it focuses on finality, whether it is through AI – Artificial Intelligence-, or through the increased Nuclear Threats, whether it is through the alarming development on the climate scene, or through the rapid decline of the ecclesiastical enterprise: (“Will I find faith when I return?”, Jesus lamented). No doubt: Finality has found a fertile focus.

Bad as it is, I worry most about the sorry state of the human psyche, reflected in the loyalty to certain psychopaths, such as Donald Trump, whose utterances are becoming increasingly unhinged and irrational. But then: he and others merely mirror the idiocy that our technological society has unleashed on us through our unquenchable thirst for carbon fuels.

Where there is no vision…..

All this, to me, points to a humanity that has lost her bearings: confused, irritable, vulnerable, unsure, lacking vision. “Where there is no vision, the people perish”, says Proverb 29:18. We are at that stage!

Warnings galore.

Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, said the uncertainty about the interaction of the different factors was a reminder that we do not fully understand every aspect of how the complex Earth system is responding to unprecedented radiative forcing. “This is happening at a much faster rate than ever documented in the past,” she said. “If anything, we are much more likely to underestimate the impact of those changes on human society than to overestimate them.”

Here’s how ARCTIC NEWS views the world:
“Global empires east and west have become increasingly brutal. Fascism ? the ideology of death ? and its neo-conservative (so-called) followers are not concerned with global warming and its consequences, except where it hurts the profit motive. References to “climate change” by politicians constitute hollow words they hardly mean.”  

Yes, I admit it: I am an alarmist.

Blame me for seeing “Darkness at noon”, the title of a book written when Communist rule in Eastern Europe was frighteningly real, now this darkness is universal. 

Blame me when today, Spring 2024, events remind me of the very last Bible book, Revelation, its name a translation of the Greek Apocalypse. The word ‘Revelation’ points to the disclosure of secrets by uncovering what hereinto has been obscured and hidden. The real point of the last Bible book is that “In the end of time, all that is secret will be unveiled, and everything becomes what it is”. That opening up, that ripping away of any obscuring elements, is now revealing the naked reality of human nature, a state that even the saintly apostle Paul admits to: Romans 7: 19: For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing. That sounds over the top for a man who brought the Good News to the world. But is applies to me and to us all today.

We are helpless.

It has come to a stage where we all, I too, have been forced to conform to a mode of living that destroys God’s Holy Creation. We cannot possibly live without harming the earth. Take me as an example: I eat mostly food grown in my garden, but still the plastic I generate in food wrappings and packaging is sickening, and, while living 5 km from store and church, I need a car. And heating? I used to heat almost completely with recycled wood, but the wood particles play havoc with my lungs, and my 95 years play havoc with my endurance, so I too, and we all, have painted ourselves in a corner, have burned our bridges: there is no escape anymore. 

Onto Dr. J. H. Bavinck, who foresaw this all 60 years ago.

Here are some excerpts of his book on Revelation, and my translation: The catastrophes mentioned extend to the entire cosmos. They affect people everywhere. Earlier we have seen how in the disastrous happenings preceding the last things, two types of distress can be detected. There are calamities that originate from above, that find their source in nature and there are those that are the result of human action. Here only the first type is mentioned. It is as if the tamed earth, given by God as a gift to humanity as her own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against her tormentor. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become recalcitrant, and full of revenge has thrown itself upon humanity. And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her nuclear energy, her mighty medical system, her military prowess, and her entertainment establishment, all of which made her feel so immense mighty and strong, these same men and women are now in a total humiliating fashion confronted with the fact that in the final analysis they amount to nothing, that they are a mere rag that is thrown out as useless. 

We now daily experience The REVENGE OF CREATION. This is the beginning: The worst is yet to come. 

Yes, we now can envision the end.

         WE HAVE TO REDEFINE “CHRISTIAN”.

         All new truths are born as heresies

The idea that I would like to see the name ‘Christian’ replaced, came to me while reading a book by Carl Safina, an ecologist, who wrote a biography of an owl, which he found, almost dead, and nursed back to life, and saw it mature, naming his manuscript after her: Alfie & Me. 

My good friend George, with a master’s degree in biology, gave me the book which he had read twice before he handed it to me.

In Safina’s book he, on numerous occasions, mentions how contemporary Christians have succumbed to dualism, echoing Dr. Harold Bloom, a biblical Scholar, who wrote “The American Religion, the emergence of the Post Christian Nation”. There he says that “The American Religion masks itself as Protestant Christianity, yet has ceased to be Christian.

Just this past week Trump, speaking to his “Christian” audience, promised, when elected, to scrap any and all environmental regulations, knowing that Christians believe that heaven is their home, not the earth. That’s how non-Christians see ‘Christians’: earth-haters! Of course, this is not accurate all the time, but, by and large, this holds true.

Safina quotes a fellow ecologist, Dr. Lynn White Jr., who wrote, “Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia’s religions, not only established a dualism of nature and man, but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for its proper ends.” Safina continued: “As a Christian himself White put the blame on Christianity. But Christianity got its dualism from Plato”.

Plato and Descartes.

That brings me to that ancient Philosopher Plato, because I believe that Christianity, in its present form, owes more to Greek philosophy – Plato especially – than we dare to admit. The entire ‘HEAVEN’ idea is a direct throwback to the pagan notion that spirit is superior to matter. 

Prof. Dr. C. A. van Peursen, in his book, BODY, SOUL, SPIRIT, a survey of the Body-Mind problem, wrote that, “A couple of thousand years before Descartes, the Greek philosopher had already drawn a sharp dividing line in his philosophical system between soul and body… how superior the soul is to the body”. Descartes and, in general Christians, echo that sentiment, which basically is a pagan belief.

A new approach and a new name for ‘Christian’ are needed.

We need a new approach to Christianity, which now is almost exclusively geared to the soul going heavenward, while the body is refiled, evident especially in the USA, which calls itself a “city on the hill”, a nation others ought to see as a beacon of light.

What does the Bible say?

The Bible starts with Paradise, and ends with Paradise. In its centre stands the Tree of Golgotha, where Jesus, God’s Son was crucified to redeem Creation, plainly stated in John 3: 16. 

In that chapter Jesus told Nicodemus, representing the church then and now, that God’s primary love is for creation. In that passage Jesus uses the Greek word ‘Agape’, signaling God’s unconditional devotion to all of reality, to the entire COSMOS, to the total universe. This clearly indicates that those who try to love what God loves, must follow God’s example and go beyond the now degraded name of Christian, and assume a new designation, something like Cosmo-phile or Earth-Friendly. 

Jesus and religion.

When Jesus was 12 years old, he already had an encounter with the religious elite and, even at that young age, took its measure. His very last act, just before he died on the cross, was to rip the curtain enclosing the Holy of Holies in the Temple, from top to bottom. That very happening forever demonstrated that Christ’ message had nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with LIFE, by opening the Holy to everyday doings: All of life is HOLY, including creation.

Jesus brought LIFE, not religion, which killed him.

The very centre of life today is Jesus’ love for LIFE, captured in the words he spoke to the Old Testament church representative, Nicodemus, in that private audience. Here the church and Jesus spoke heart to heart and mind to mind. Here Jesus revealed clearly and concisely without a shred of ambiguity that his love for creation, the COSMOS, was so all-encompassing and all-inclusive and all-comprehensive that he, as God’s only Son, was willing to give his own life, his flesh and blood, as the ultimate sacrifice to buy back God’s Precious world, now in the total grasp of God’s Opponent. Only believing that, by word and deed, would bring eternal LIFE.

That requires a re-birth, a rebirth for all of Christianity, now basically denying that “The Earth is the Lord’s”.

In order to emphasize that belief, the word “Christian” no longer conveys this commitment.

I am a Bibliophile: I Love Books. Others call themselves Anglophiles or Francophiles, expressing their love for the culture of these countries. 

My approach is to look forward and try to live the perfect life for which Jesus gave his totality: I am, in other words, a COSMOPHILE, an EARTH LOVER. That term should replace the term Christian, now no longer conveying God’s love for all that lives. Become Earth-Friendly. Follow Jesus’ example, and live forever.

February 6 2024                                                                      

Enduring Enchantment and Endless Consciousness.

The décor in my living room where I read and write, has been fashioned not by me, but by my late wife, who died on October 23 2020, in her 93d year. Her artistic and inspiring arrangement of original artwork, of paintings and embroidery, of wood carvings and colorful plants, and, of course, family pictures, assures her enduring presence, inspiring me every moment of the day, captivated by her enduring enchantment.

After her slow death, due to dementia and physical ailments, my spouse of 67 years appeared to me in a dream a while ago. I wanted to kiss her, but she told me that I had to wait at least three years. 

I believe that conversation to be true. I know that her body is dead; I also know that her spirit is still alive. Death is not the end: we humans are more than just body: we also are soul and spirit, and so retain consciousness.

Some biography.

Both my wife and I were born in 1928. She was the 8^th of 12; I the 4^th of 9. Her father, the only minister of a church with 1300 members, died a month before her 9^th birthday. Her mother, in the midst of the world-wide economic depression, was faced in 1937 with greatly reduced income, but was able to raise her 12 children – 5 female and 7 male – with almost all of her brothers attaining professional status. 

My wife’s parents were very gifted, and so was my wife who, because she and her sisters were female, and would surely marry, did not have the educational opportunities their brothers had, which she resented greatly, yet, due to her talents she became a Master Graphologist, an expert in hand-writing analysis.

My daily routine.

Each morning I settle myself in my Lazy Boy, looking south to the large window there, with red and green plants on its sill, while the West wall in my living/dining room is adorned with colorful art objects, including a large decorative glass painting, suspended in the fixed window there. On the east wall of my living room, I have a large bookcase well-proportioned, beautifully crafted, overflowing with books, of course, flanked also by original paintings from recognized artists. 

In a word, my writing and living space is inspiring, enchanting and restful: a constant reminder of my wife’s artistic arrangements. Thank you, Lord, for the privilege of having been married to her for nearly seven decades.

Endless Consciousness.

We all are part of this world, forever: Enchantment and Eternity and Earth belong together.

My brother Drewes in den Haag, the Netherlands, gave me a Dutch book, (it went through 9 printings in the first year) the title translated as Endless Consciousness, in which the writer, Dr. Pim van Lommel, a heart specialist, who in that medical capacity often witnessed death, relates how the Almost Dead Experience is a proven fact. I myself experienced it, when my father died, who, just before the end, said, “Is the radio on? I hear music.” That music continued, I believe, after his body expired.

In his introduction the author writes, and I translate: “I have concluded that endless consciousness always has existed independent of our body and will continue to do so. There never is a beginning nor an end to our consciousness. That’s why we seriously must consider that death, just as birth, is a transition to a different state of consciousness, while during life the body functions as an interphase.”

If that is true – and I am inclined to believe it – then this has enormous implications for life and the hereafter. And for theology as well. Jesus, on the cross, told his co-sufferer, that he would that day be with Jesus in paradise: he would join Jesus in his full consciousness, to be fully restored to life on the Day of the New Creation.

Where did we go wrong? 

We have allowed ourselves to live apart from nature, and often apart from our fellow humans as well. We are the poorer because of this loss of integration. We have been too anthropocentric and now we reap the harvest of our lopsided existence, scorning the holiness of all that exist, acting and believing that we are ‘superman’, above the mere irrational elements in creation which lack our rational powers. We are starting to realize that we now, more than ever, are dependent on a well-functioning earth, which provides us with our daily needs.

In the Lord’s Prayer there is a line: “Hallowed be thy name”. It is my considerate opinion that this phrase has nothing to do with God’s name – God is beyond a name – and refers to everything that carries God’s name, his signature, enchanted by his touch that is beyond AI comprehension.

Eternity is now: Life never ends. 

Endless Consciousness confirms that ‘nobody ever disappears’, that the good deeds of some will always be part of them (Revelation 14:13) while, that in others, pride will haunt them forever.

GOD, BILLY GRAHAM AND SHAKESPEARE.

January 31, 2024

In 1991 Larry King interviewed Billy Graham on CNN, and asked him, “What will happen when you die?” Billy did not miss a beat, supposedly quite ready to give a quick answer. So, what did he say? How did the great evangelist, the pastor to presidents, phrase his reply? How did this preacher, always seen with an open Bible in his hand, ready to explain the intricacies of the Christian religion, answer this secular interviewer, who was married eight (8) times, and feared neither God nor his laws? 

You’ll never guess. Billy Graham did not quote the Bible. Billy Graham did not look for a Bible passage such as Daniel 12: 13: “As for you, go your way till the end. You will rest, and then at the end of the days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.”  None of that. No, Billy, the bold Bible pusher said, “When I die, Jesus will take me by the hand and bring me to God.” Wow. Wouldn’t that be something! A private audience with the God Creator, much grander than a visit with the Pope! 

Billy, his voice like thunder, “Thus says the Lord!”, could not have been more wrong. “Jesus,” says Colossians 1: 15, “is the image of the invisible God.” Even more striking is Paul’s description of God – see 1 Timothy 6: 16: “(God) alone is immortal, who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see”. “Billy Graham, the great deceiver?”

God and Shakespeare: profound parallels.

Shakespeare: we know nothing of his age, his place of birth, where he died, how he looks like. His life-details are a mostly a mystery: we do know that he died in 1618; we do know that this most talented, and most celebrated playwright in the history of the literary world wrote 38 plays; we do know that his literary talents have mesmerized the theatrical world for centuries. 

But, why do I compare him to God?

Well…. Just like Shakespeare, the greatest bard in the last 500 years, we know God only by what he did: The saying goes, ‘by your actions we shall know you’. Of William Shakespeare nothing physical is known. Maggie O’Farrell, in her HAMNET, a book one of my granddaughters gave me, beautifully surmised the life of the great poet, but, brilliant as it is, it is fiction at its best.

So, I repeat, how do we know God? 

“How to know God”, asks the Belgic confession. “How to know Shakespeare”, ask the professors of English, where a play of the hero of Stratford and the Globe Theatre is required study in any university syllabus. “How to know God”, is also our perennial question, asked and explained in a million synagogues or church buildings or mosques in the world every Saturday or Sunday Morning. 

With Shakespeare the answer is simple: thousands of teachers and millions of students study the multiple plays written by this inspired man, and every year new dissertations are written, exploring a minute aspect of some play to gain a greater understanding of this literary giant, of which no photograph, no picture, no accurate biography can be found, but whose plays are better known than the Bible, which has become a forgotten book.

The simple explanation for Shakespeare’s life is through his works, his legacy, his handiwork, his oeuvre, his portfolio. 

So, back to the perennial question: How do we know God? You have guessed the answer: By and through his works. That’s why the Belgic Confession categorically states:

We know God by two means:

First, by the creation, preservation, and government
of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book in which all creatures,         
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God: God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20, ^“Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. 
So, they are without excuse. All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.

Second, God makes himself known to us more clearly
by his holy and divine Word. 

Simply stated: We know only about Shakespeare through his literary output. We also know only about God through his works in creation, which is his Direct and Primary Revelation, through his Son, Jesus Christ. The church basically has diluted THE MESSAGE, by intellectualizing God, through solely concentrating on the Bible, God’s Indirect and Secondary Revelation. 

No wonder the church and the world are in rapid and in inevitable decline.