OCTOBER 7 2017
THE LOST GOSPEL OF THE EARTH. (1)
Last week I went to a memorial service, where a celebrated preacher did the meditation. He lived up to my expectation: a good speaker, well versed in the Scriptures, giving a solid orthodox message.
Of course I had expected it. When he mentioned THE WORD, the Bible, he sounded totally convinced and was completely confident that there was no other Word, that only Sola Scriptura (Latin: by Scripture alone) contains the infallible rule of faith and practice.
I no longer believe that.
That Scripture is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path, as per Psalm 119:105, is no longer understood: we stare so much at the light that it blinds us from seeing the path.
I am becoming more and more convinced that Sola Scriptura is killing the church. It fosters complacency and lethargy and self-satisfaction and apathy, plaguing the church more than anything else. The Sola Scriptura dogma simply endorses the status-quo. The trouble is that we are quite content with the sort of Christianity even though it attracts fewer and fewer people.
Yet I still believe that the Reformed church of which I have been a life-long member has the capability and the potential to truly be a reforming element in the world, but it must retrieve the Lost Gospel of the Earth.
When I arrived in Canada in 1951 as a 23 year old, I was still completely a child of the neo-Calvinist movement, fed with it since birth. As a self-employed person since 1952 I had the opportunity and the desire to serve on boards of local and provincial Christian movements – serving from 1959-65 as the recording and corresponding secretary of the (Province of) Ontario Alliance of Christian Schools. That plus being secretary of the local Christian School society and member of its education committee took then perhaps 20 percent of my time, while simultaneously building a business and providing for a growing family. Amazingly in that 6 year period I was able to save $5,000 as a down payment, enough to build an 1800 square feet house, costing then $20,000, including the site- 80 x 180’ – situated on a major street in St. Catharines, On. Built-in was my home office from where I operated my real estate and general insurance business.
These where exciting years in which, as a friend put it, we threw a few bricks together and, miraculously, full-fledged Christian elementary and high schools emerged, fully in line with our neo-Calvinistic principles. We were truly convinced that we were helping God building his kingdom.
Since then, thanks to reading and translating Johan Herman Bavinck’s book, now entitled BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END, A RADICAL KINGDOM VISION, I have come to see that God’s Kingdom is not of human origin but is the New Creation to come. That’s why I believe with Bavinck that personal salvation and the salvation of the earth are two sides of the same coin: we can’t have one without the other. All the Christian schools and all the Christian churches and the people who make these possible, are useless and a waste of natural resources and good intentions if these institutions come at the expense of environmental cohesion, while fostering an implied Heaven belief.
This was again confirmed in that Memorial Service, where the preacher emphasized the resurrection and life eternal, but where the requested song “Guide me, O my great Redeemer pilgrim through this barren land”, reaffirmed the opposite.
This song was composed in 1745, when the earth had less than 1 billion people and was basically in pristine condition. The ‘pilgrim’ reference and the ‘barrenness’ mentioned, were philosophically inspired by Greek pagan thinking, seeing earth as a passing–through stage, with nature not seen as touched by God’s grace and heaven the ultimate goal. The Greek influence was again quite evident in the next verse, “When I tread the verge of Jordan”, which, just like the disdain for the earth, is directly taken from Greek Pagan Mythology, where the STYX is the river that forms the boundary between EARTH and the UNDERWORLD, while a piously renamed JORDAN gave it a biblical semblance.
We should not forget that hymns are usually the only way the people in the pew participate in a worship service, and, judging by the Presbyterian song book, at least half of them point to heaven. That’s what the average Christian holds true and is highly upset when this is contested.
We are being tested.
We only dwell on our earth for a very short while compared to eternity. Yet it is a tremendously important period because it determines our forever-future: our brief span of life here, some 80-90 years at most, is a bagatelle compared to eternity, yet it serves as the proving grounds for the Hereafter.
The belief that Sola Scriptura, that the Scriptures alone point us to the road to salvation, holds no longer true. It may sound pious, but it is a false piety, correctly labeled so by Bonhoeffer as Pious Secularism.
Christian endeavor of any kind has the tendency and the danger of seeing the church where we worship, the Christian schools where some send their kids, as the road to heaven. We forget that history marches on and current global developments warn us that we are racing toward creational demise, which urgently requires new thinking.
This is the month of Re-Reformation, 500 years after Luther.
This ought to be the year of rediscovering THE LOST GOSPEL OF THE EARTH, without which all what goes under the name of Christianity will become futile.
The only hope to revive the church is by totally changing the approach to the Good News.
Paul sets the tone.
Paul, in his letter to Romans, the very first chapter, makes an amazing statement.
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse: for even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools.”
Let me rephrase this passage from Romans 1 into everyday language. Here Paul writes that by simply looking at creation, living in it, seeing how the bee serves the fruit tree, how each segment complements another, discovering that everything is connected to everything else: this immense intricacy should convince us to detect the divine design, which leaves us no excuse. That’s why the Belgic Confession plainly states that:
We know God first, by the creation, preservation and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book to which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God, his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1: 20.
All these things are enough to convict humanity and to leave them without excuse.
This is our Father’s World, which makes it God’s PRIMARY OR DIRECT WORD, in contrast with the Bible which is God’s SECONDARY OR INDIRECT WORD finalized by human vote at the Nicea concilium in 350 AD.
With gusto we sing ’in the rustling grass I hear him pass – he speaks to me everywhere’. We mouth it, but we do not live it. We really don’t want to see. Intellectually we see, but in reality, in our day-to-day affairs we push this knowledge away, we repress it, we are knowers who do not know, seers who do not see, because this knowledge that the world we live in is “Our Father’s World”, and therefore HOLY, is too dangerous to fully live, is too difficult to make it true in our lives. So we invented heaven, taking the clue from pagan Greek philosophy.
The pagan Greek Heaven idea has gained a seemingly insurmountable foothold in the Christian church: people in the pew seem powerless to grasp that that ‘going to heaven’ is an impossibility because “God lives in inapproachable: nobody has seen God and nobody can see God”, Paul writes to his friend Timothy (1Tim.6:16), while John 3: 13 plainly states that nobody has ever gone to heaven. I once heard Billy Graham tell Larry King that when he dies, Jesus will take him by the hand and bring him to God. Pure nonsense and total contrary to the Scriptures.
In our heart of hearts we believe that somehow science will find a cure for Climate Change, that electric cars will do the trick and solar panels. At the deepest level this denial is rooted in a faith that there must be a technological fix for everything.
In religious terms we must be ‘born again’ in creation. Jesus wept because we claim to be ‘born again’ Christians, but we live like born again pagans, while the Religious Right call environmentalists ‘pagans’.
By and large the church has failed to call the actions of corporate and government polluters as a mortal sin against God’s creation nor have the clerics defended the earth in the same way they have defended the poor and victims of discrimination as God’s children.
Sad to say, but generally speaking we are only willing to accept those environmental reforms that can fit comfortably with our cultural, political, religious and economic assumptions.
It is high time that we formulate and implement a NEW GOSPEL OF THE EARTH CREED, so that we can make our religious traditions relevant to the environmental crisis that is upon us as it becomes more and more severe as Global Heating accelerates.
That New CREED must start with the statement that THE EARTH IS HOLY because God made it, and must continue with that most dreaded sentence that harming the earth is SIN.
We sing “Breathe on me breath of God”. ‘Breath’ in Hebrew is RUAH, which also means spirit and wind, the same forces that in Greek are meant in PNEUMA. Our lives have been activated by the breath of God.
We are breathing the same air that Jesus did. We breathe through CREATION. The air we breathe is generated and maintained by trillions of active organisms, from bacteria and termites, to flowers and pine trees. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide: we totally live in symbiosis with the trees which breathe out oxygen and breathe in carbon dioxide.
When we pollute the air which is all around us, we poison and sadden the breath (pneuma= spirit) that is really inside us and ourselves. “Thou shalt not kill” applies to all created matter.
THE NEW GOSPEL OF THE EARTH must not only contain that it sees Creation as holy, and harming it as SIN, but also that our eternal salvation depends on living holy lives, totally in awe on account of God’s marvelous handiwork, where everything – like an intricate mechanical clock – fits together in complete harmony.
Paul’s amazing statement, fully expressed under the aegis of the Holy Spirit, that we stand condemned for failing to acknowledge God’s voice in the cosmos makes me wonder whether we are saved when we do see creation to be of divine design, not knowing the Scriptures.
When we do see the Cosmos as God’s particular object of love, and love it in turn with every fiber of our body, mind and spirit, will God, on Judgement Day count that of sufficient merit for admission to THE NEW CREATION? I especially have indigenous people in mind.
I believe that in this month, exactly 500 years ago that Martin Luther, on October 31 1517, had the courage and the holy zeal to challenge the church of his day and start the REFORMATION, we, the church of 2017 can do no greater service to the humanity than reinstate THE LOST GOSPEL OF THE EARTH.
John 3: 16, GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD, the cosmos, must become the ultimate reality also for us.
More about that next week.