Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

THE OLD TIME RELIGION: still good enough?

I just reread an interview with Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 2012-22, thus the former head of the Anglican Church. An erudite man, writer, poet: in short: a very polished person.

Why did I do this? I tried to detect a new approach to the traditional way – Jesus saves, as explained in the Scriptures – which, to me is no longer effective.

Take this text:

“Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”, the opening words of Psalm 8. I was curious: would he mention Creation?After all, God is a total unity. Our words – my words – what I say or do, do not always complement each other. Not so with God. The Belgic confession says it better than I can phrase it:

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.

All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.

Of course. Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Romans 1: 20 explains that also: by us observing creation, God shows his full authority, and so reveals his majesty, affirming the lines in Psalm 8, but Dr. Williams, biblical scholar, great theologian, never mentioned this essential path to salvation.

Just look what is happening in God’s Garden, the world He gave to us to improve.

This year has just begun!

This year is exceeding 2023 – Canada’s worst wildfire season. In addition to the loss of plants and animals and poor air quality for a huge area, this illustrates a dangerous feedback loop. Estimates in the journal Nature calculate that the C02 emissions from the 2023 Canadian wildfires equals the total annual emissions of India. The CO2 released by wildfires heats the planet, which creates more drought and more wildfires, which creates more global heat, and so on.

As the Earth warms, harmful algal blooms are on the rise – even invading the polar regions. These unusual intrusions are driven by a mixture of pollution from agriculture, runoff from human waste and, increasingly, global heating – sometimes with dramatic consequences for wildlife and humans. As they spread, they are changing the colour of the world’s lakes, rivers and oceans. Remember: Creation is God’s gift to us!

I now live in suburban St. Catharines, Ontario. Daily I walk along carefully maintained lawns: beautifully manicured: not one weed, but also no bees and butterflies, and very few birds. I read this week that ”Insects are now plummeting in protected regions round the world, leading to crashing bird populations. Climate change is one of many factors, with an increasing effect. There are regions with virtually no insects left.”

I also read this week: The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. (Acts 2: 20). That is happening now, 2025! Forest Fires confirm the Finale.

To me the question arises: For what purpose is Christendom on earth?

My simple answer is: Christendom is here to establish peace: Peace on Earth!  

We are here to become one with the Earth. We are here to establish intimate connections with all that lives. We are here to search for the right way, the Christ-like Way, so that we live in full harmony with God’s beloved cosmos. We are here to live in the hopeful expectation of God’s New Creation. We are here not to make people Christians, Bible believers, as Dr. Williams said in his lengthy interview. Our real purpose is to become priests in partnership with God’s creation, mediators of the God’s Covenant as outlined in Genesis 9. Yes, the Bible is essential!

John 3: 16 is at the heart of the Gospel. “God so loved the WORLD!” When God sacrificed His Son to ‘buy back’ Creation from The Evil One, should we not follow that ‘cosmos-loving’ path as well? The reward is eternal life in the New Creation!

Look at TODAY!

This weekend the heads of our ruling countries meet in Canada, in a region clouded in smog and smoke from forest fires, a sign of ‘WAR AGAINST CREATION’.

The ‘old-time religion’, still good enough?

Psalm 24 still rules:  The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. That was true 2,500 years ago: that is true today in 2025, and will be true forever on the renewed earth.

That is not a ‘religious act”: that means a ‘way of LIFE!’ That’s what I missed in Dr. Rowan William’s interview.

THE OMINOUS THIRTY MINUTES OF SILENCE.

On November 11 1918 history was made: the end of a murderous war, in which millions of young lives were callously killed in a dispute that had no other cause than stupidity and vainglory. The world – Europe actually – had not seen a war for 100 years, and the generals had become restless, while the wisdom to prevent a conflict, was absent. The German Kaiser was a stupid person, not inclined to listen to reason, so in August 1914 the guns started roaring, not to be silenced for 4 years.

To commemorate this tragic event – and tragic it was – since then, now for 106 years, on every November 11, 2 minutes of silence is maintained, a pause to reflect on human bellicosity.

However, there is a silence-precedent. The last Bible book, Revelation 8: 1, records a similar event: When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.

J. H. Bavinck, in his book on Revelation, entitled And On and On the Ages Roll, comments on this text: “We don’t have the slightest idea of what this means. Who can state this with any certainty?”

Well, I am fool enough to venture an explanation.

I believe that our ‘2 minutes of silence’ may indicate a possible explanation. Just as we now, for more than a century, have reflected on the folly of war, and, annually, have recalled the uselessness of the millions of deaths in Flanders Fields, wars and rumors of war have intensified, especially our relentless rebellion against God/Creation.

That brings me to the angels, who for thousands of years, have fought the vain attempts by humans to outwit God. However, today, for ‘thirty minutes’, these very same angels have stopped their efforts to influence human behavior, and have given humanity a free hand to challenge God for the last time. Trump is leading the way by abolishing all efforts to stop Climate Change: a daring bid to be like the Almighty! And, so far, God is letting him get away with it:  just as ‘Old Testament religion’ was successful in crucifying the Christ, so God is allowing the human race to destroy creation.

Everything becomes what it is.

Bavinck sees the purpose of the Bible’s last book, as ‘everything becomes what it is’. He bases this on Revelation 22: 10-11: “Let they who do wrong, continue with their sinful conduct; let they who do right, pursue their good works”. So, for ‘30 minutes’ the angels will not intervene: We are on our own for good or ill!

That really means that God is retreating and giving us the liberty to follow our own way. We see how, in 2025, the result of the widespread use of pesticide and fertilisers, of light and chemical pollution, leads to loss of habitat and the growth of industrial agriculture; we see how this has reduced the number of insects, has imperiled the existence of wild life, has aided the disappearance of birds; we see it in Climate Change, drought and floods, forest fires and ever stronger and more frequent hurricanes; we see it in the fading of ‘faith’, the advent of rulers like Trump and Putin, dictators and right-wing thinking, wars and rumors of war; we see it as the heavenly silence endures.

So, how long is the heavenly 30 minutes of silence?

Everybody knows that in the Bible a minute is not 60 seconds, nor does ‘soon’ mean in a day or two.

So, how long is ‘the heavenly 30 Minutes’? The Bible gives no hint, so God allows me to speculate, because the divine timetable is different: “One day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”, says 2 Peter 3.

That is no help, so, here is my – possible – explanation. A day has 24 full hours, and thus 48 thirty minutes periods. Historians have determined that ‘history’ runs back some 4800 years to Mesopotamia and Egypt, or 48 x 100 years. By connecting the two, my tentative answer is that ’30 minutes’ heaven-time indicates roughly 100 years: perhaps 1914-2025.

Why 1914-2025?

The Lord gave me a hint: last week, I, at random, picked up a book “Sinners and the Sea”, the untold story of Noah’s wife, written by a Jewish author, Rebecca Kanner. We know the story, how, after the God-induced Flood, wiping out all human life, the Noah clan makes a new start.

The same will happen after ‘the 30 minutes’ have expired, but this time the ‘destructors are us’. And we are well on the way: since 1914 we have seen TWO World Wars, are preparing for a THIRD, while the War against Creation/God is intensifying, and AI, the ultimate Tower of Babel, looms.

When Noah’s Fludde came, the people then ridiculed the effort of building the Ark. Noah’s explanation was ignored, just as today the signs are not heeded. I believe that “the 30 minutes’ are now in force and will soon expire.

Will there be a repeat of global demise, now human-generated?

Yes.

HOW THEN SHALL WE LIVE?                       

The perennial question.

In detective stories, the principal character, the celebrated investigator who always, in the end, nails the culprit, often lets the reader know that there is no such thing as coincidence: every occurrence, all circumstances have significance.

I can affirm this in my weekly writing: I scan a lot of perhaps useless stuff. I daily read three newspapers: The Globe and Mail, the British the Guardian, and the New York Times. Much of the writing in these three sources often seems irrelevant, yet, sometimes an article finds a place in staging my next episode of self-discovery: that’s really what my blogs are.

In these confusing times, especially for Christians, the question of “Christian Living” is a burning one. The late Harold Bloom, the famous literary critic, in his book The American Religion, states that the churches in which Americans worship, have, by and large, ceased to be Christian, now plainly evident in its leader, Donald Trump.

So, what is ‘religion?’

It reminds me of a book I have with the intriguing title, What Christianity is NOT”, written by Dr. Douglas John Hall, a McGill professor, a man I met at an environmental conference in Madison Wisconsin some 35 years ago, organized by Dr. Calvin de Witt. I discovered, having attended a few of these gatherings, that is typical for  ‘Christian’ environmental meetings, that the presenters often outnumber the attendees. This certainly was the case at this Wisconsin meeting, in a Roman Catholic Convent. By and large church people are not at all interested in matters dealing with God’s Creation because the overwhelming percentage of church-going people expect to go to heaven, away from this wicked earth.   

Dr. Hall starts his book with a short Latin sentence: Si comprehendis, non est Deus, a line attributed to St. Augustine, meaning, “If you understand it, you are not talking about God”.

 He also mentions Karl Barth, who wrote, “The message of the Bible is that God hates religion”. In that same vein Bonhoeffer writes, “Jesus does not call people to a new religion but to life”. He bases this on John 10: 10, where Jesus says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

I believe that the thief in this text is especially us, 21th century humans: if there ever was a rapacious and destructive being in history is us, my generation. I am writing these lines on Ascension Day. There the angels appearing at the event of Jesus leaving the earth, declared: This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” (Acts 1: 11).  Jesus is earth-bound! Praise the Lord.

“Seek first the Kingdom”: that’s how Jesus defines his mission. That simply means, “seeking the welfare of creation, God’s work of art, for whose restoration Christ died! Not just for us sinners? The common belief?

Dr. Sabine Dramm, quoting Bonhoeffer, wrote: “Christ died for the world, and Christ is Christ only in the midst of the world. God cannot be understood without the world nor the world without the God who has entered it in Jesus Christ: Only they who love the earth and God as one, has faith in God’s Kingdom”. When did you hear that in church?

Yet he echoes what J. H. Bavinck writes in his Between the Beginning and the End: “The Central point of the gospel is not us poor humans and our pain and suffering; rather, its entire focus is aimed at the unique and powerful reality that God wants to reinstate his Kingdom.”

Bavinck’s – not surprising – conclusion is that ‘there is no such thing as individual salvation: all salvation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all-wise of Him who lives and rules forever.”

Bonhoeffer concluded that “Only they who love the earth and God as one, have faith in God’s Kingdom”. He also wrote: “They who love God love Him as Lord of the earth as it is; they who loves the earth, love Him as Lord of the earth.

Based on this, a new look at Christianity is far overdue. Not heaven-oriented, but earth-driven. That’s why present-day Christianity is not a religion: it is ‘a way of life’, a total commitment to the welfare of creation: God’s Kingdom!

How then shall we live?

Therefore: “Seek first the Kingdom”, that means, The welfare of God’s Creation.

CHRISTIANITY: SOME OBSERVATIONS

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People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it. Amos 8: 12.

There is a Latin saying, “Si vis pacem, para bellum”, which means, “If you want peace, prepare for war”. That may have been true 2,000 years ago, when there was no force equal to the Roman Legions, trained to perfection, irresistible through their discipline and leadership. Also, life then was cheap, with an average lifespan not exceeding 30 years, and natural resources – trees, wild animals – aplenty. Now the world is so crowded, with 8 billion ever more greedy people, that trees and animals are endangered: no more room!

And where is God in all this? Good question.

God brings peace: “Peace on earth!” But now wars are everywhere, and I especially refer to the spiritual and ecological wars, both intimately connected: they really are the wars that end all wars. These ‘world-wide’ conflicts have as their most ardent combatants those who are ‘religious’, the most dangerous of mindsets. Hitler, Mao, Trump, Putin, are all great believers in a specific faith, be that ‘purity of race’ – Hitler – or superiority of the mind – Mao – or the power of money – Trump – or the idol of Patriotism – Putin: they all have their ‘religion’, and, as Jesus found out: Religion Kills.

And Christianity?

And where does Christianity come in? We have seen it in the past weeks: Religion had a front seat in ceremony and pageantry: a new pope, a new name: but where is ‘the Word of the Lord’?

Jesus was asked this question. Here’s what he answered:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.”

That sounds so familiar, that we tend to skip this Jesus’ answer, which included the total personality.

He really said: “Love the Lord with every bodily and every intellectual and every mindful part of the human entity”. He really said: “Loving the Lord is totally comprehensive”. He really said: “Loving the Lord goes far beyond the comfortably personal”. He really said: “That love encompasses especially and primarily, without exceptions, ALL of creation, all human action.

He really said: “That love concerns the chicken we eat; that love includes the water we sip from a plastic bottle; that love refers to the shows we watch on television, the ways we move our bodies, the air we inhale every few seconds, the dreams we have while asleep”.

Psalm 139 comes to mind:

You have searched me, Lord,

and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise;

you perceive my thoughts from afar.

You discern my going out and my lying down;

you are familiar with all my ways.

And it concludes:

See if there is any offensive way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting.

Lead me in the way everlasting? What is it?

A little detour: When I tell people that I love Bach, or Shakespeare or Rembrandt, then my love has no personal connection, is totally different from the way I love my spouse, my kids, my close relatives or friends. My love for these great artists has everything to do with the way I love them through their works, through their artistic expressions, such as the St. Matthew Passion, King Lear, the Night Watch: as persons these famous artists may have been cantankerous, quarrelsome, and unfaithful, but through their works of art, their name and fame live on forever.

That’s too, I think, how we should love the Lord our God: through his works, the total expressions of God’s greatness. Through some quirk of pagan priority, we have distorted the totality of divine greatness, and have grabbed what is not ours by rights, and have distorted God’s Masterpiece beyond recognition. I believe that a sin against Creation is a sin against its Creator.

So…. no wonder people look for God, and fail to find him: Creation/God is seen as disposable. Romans 1: 20 tells it plainly:

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.

Living in and with and through Creation, I have no excuse. Loving God means unconditionally loving Creation, just as Jesus did, offering his life for her redemption.

People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it. Amos 8: 12.

The only constant is what God has made: the world we live in, even when we have debased it to the point of planetary perdition.

THE LAST THINGS.

A recent poll found that 40% of Britons have not read a book in the last year. “The literary era has come to an end,” Philip Roth prophesied in 2000. “The evidence is the culture, the evidence is the society, the evidence is the screen.” Roth believed that the habit of mind that literature required was bound to disappear. People would no longer have the concentration or the isolation needed to read novels.

What is true for reading, is also true for ‘religion’. To use the above line: “People no longer have the concentration or the isolation needed to reflect on matters eternal.” The great apostle Paul, the author of many letters, still utterly relevant after 2,000 years, owed his learning through reading and memorizing large sections of the Hebrew Bible, and also knowing and appreciating the then contemporary authors, including the great Greek authors Homer and Plato – See Acts 19, describing his appearance in Athens, Greece. That’s why he urged in his letter to believers in Thessalonica – 1 Thessalonians 5: 21 – to “Test all things. Hold fast to what is good.”

That truth, ‘to test all things’, applies to us even more now, than to the communicants in that city in Asia Minor. It applies especially to today, in times of change, spiritual turmoil, and immense advances, both technical and philosophical. Scripture constantly urges us to be openminded, to see developments always in the light of the coming new world, the place Christ-followers see as their final destination. Yes: The Last Things!

To ‘test the last things’ means being a reader, means being tolerant and wise, means being able to discern, means being well-rounded and versed in contemporary thinking. It especially implies having a thorough understanding of Scriptural thinking, and Christ-centred knowledge, now both lacking.

When Paul addressed the recent converts to Christianity, he urged them to not just swallow his Christ-centered words, but to probe their veracity in the light of what is happening all around them, especially in a time when the aim of the Roman authorities was to proclaim the Roman Emperor as God.

Nothing new.

Today we are faced with the same aim: we see ‘economic growth’ as the overriding goal of our civilization, in spite of ecological agony and meteorological disasters. Affirming the assessments of experts in the fields of ‘nature’ studies is the required ‘Christian’ duty also for theologians as it concerns God’s Holy Creation, even though the Trump administration has forbidden the mention and publication of these studies. It is essential for all of us to read and to absorb the study of THE LAST THINGS, the significance of which appears more and more in today’s scenarios.

My outlook.

I see my life from the perspective of the future. By this I mean that I am ruled not by the past, but by what the Bible projects as “The New Earth to Come”, a state where ‘righteousness’ rules, righteousness also in regards to ecological conditions, defined by their laws.

Today we experience the backlash of our past actions: the bill for our riotous living is due, and the amount we owe is beyond our ability to repay. We can deny this condition – and we do – but that only aggravates the problem. The Western World is facing its final Reckoning, which the late James Lovelock defined as “The Revenge of Gaia”, a Christian concept.

Christians confess that God fashioned the earth and then donated it to us to develop it, reflecting his intentions. However, we followed a different path and today face the consequences of the LAST THINGS.  According to Kübler-Ross, we now in the stage of denial, even though the signs of our demise are crystal clear.

Two Immediate Threats.

Climate Change, now out of control, is well known, while AI, Artificial Intelligence, is increasingly being recognized as having the immediate potential to destroy all that lives and moves and has a being. It is developing so fast that those in the know fear that it threatens to be ‘better’ than humans at everything, at which point it is basically going to run the whole show, making us humans superfluous.

I see these developments as the full implementation of the “Tower of Babel” concept: The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. (Genesis 11:7). God will not tolerate this.

Today we again speak the same language, and, indeed, everything has become possible, including the destruction of the entire world. We, right now, are experiencing THE LAST THINGS: we better prepare ourselves. Because our generation has lost ‘religion’, has lost the God/Creator concept, the surprise will be total. That’s why– see Revelation 11: 15 – the future guarantees that:

   “The kingdom of the world has become
    the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah,
    and he will reign for ever and ever.”

 REJOICE!

ANY CHANCE FOR CHANGE?

New Pope, old church.

New President, old hat.

New economy, old problems.

New climate, old approaches.

There is this song:

Abide with me, fast falls the eventide
The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide
When other helpers fail and comforts flee
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away
Change and decay in all around I see
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

If there is a song, if there are lines that apply to today more than any other, they are the above cited lyrics, composed decades ago, supposedly played by its orchestra when the Titanic sank in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic in 1913.

Today, this year, this decade, the world is in its last stage of dissolution. Pessimistic? No. Optimistic, because I wholeheartedly believe, and do one hundred percent endorse, that after this terminally ongoing phase, there will be, for the sake of Christ-believers, an unexpected, all-comprehensive ending, telos, reckoning, judgement – whatever you call it – heralding the onset of the new Creation, of which numerous Bible passages speak, none more eloquently than Romans 8:

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.  For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

Please note: This passage is all about creation, and her increasing suffering, evident in rapidly vanishing species, and ever shrinking natural habitat.

Back to Today.

Back to Today, where we have experienced an interesting week. A week in which 133 old men, never married, reared in purely protective portals, within the ecclesiastic exterior of basically masculine mannerisms, chose a new leader for an institution that is quickly fading in importance. After all, its entire organisational structure is totally outdated, being based on an Old Testament model that died 2,000 years ago on Calvary’s Cross, when Jesus exclaimed: It is finished. Believe me: the priestly order is finished, even though it is taking 2,000 years to achieve a degree of reality.

Why?

At that precise moment Jesus died, he did his last miracle: “The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.” (Mark 15: 38) That curtain separated, in the Old Testament Temple, the room where only the High Priest, once a year, was allowed to enter to make atonement. Suddenly, with Jesus’ death, atoning for all the world’s sins, this High-Priestly symbolic act was declared null and void, and with Jesus’ very final act, RELIGION received its final farewell: away with all manifest measures of ecclesiastical expressions, evident in church spires pointing to heaven, in clerical robes and collars of any kind, in ‘reverend’ designations of various grades: all gone when that curtain ripped.

Typical Conduct.

The rituals evident especially in choosing a new pope, and in church proceedings in general, where change is seen as sacrilegious, these factors are also in plain sight in other fields of human enterprise. New Pope, old church: Change has no chance.

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New President, old hat.

The new president is a comical figure, who is trying to rule his world based on flimsy notions. Impossible! The societal structures solidified into staleness over centuries, are, just as the ecclesiastical entities, ready to implode. His ‘reign’ will simply accelerate this process.

New economy, old problems.

Is there really a new economy? No. Jesus lamented that ‘The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.’ (Matthew 26: 11). The rich control the economy, and, as Paul wrote to Timothy: For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. That was true then, and is true today. Yet, we are facing a new economy, as we are entering “The Limits of Growth”, for the simple reason that we live in a Finite World. That ‘finite’ condition will dominate our financial situation, resulting in shortages and inflation. The new economy requires ‘economy’, implying wartime conditions, not seen in 80 years, since the End of World War II.

New climate, old approaches.

We are facing impossible challenges, the most glaring being Climate Change. If there ever is a threat to LIFE, it is Global Heating, which has no solution anymore: it is baked into our human fate.

ANY CHANCE FOR CHANGE?

No. Sorry.