OCTOBER 5 2019
THE GATES OF HELL…..
Virgil said, “The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way.”
C. S. Lewis echoed this, “The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without sign posts.”
How did I come to that topic? The October 21 election in Canada is the indirect reason. The Globe and Mail, Canada’s answer to The New York Times featured an in-depth analysis of Andrew Scheer, the banner carrier for the Conservative Party, and a devout Roman Catholic. According to this article Scheer is an admirer of its most conservative wing, Opus Dei, which yearns for the re-introduction of the Latin Mass, and condemns any approach to same-sex unions or a role for females in the R.C. church, and a firm believer in HEAVEN.
I have long agitated against the teaching of HEAVEN. Yet I was shocked to read the Official Opus Dei doctrine on this topic. Here it is:
“Since Christ came into the world to redeem us from sin and lead us to perfect communion with God, his Ascension inaugurates humanity’s entrance into heaven. Jesus is the supernatural Head of mankind, as Adam was in the order of nature. Since our Head is in heaven, we who are his members have the real possibility of reaching heaven too. Moreover, he has gone to prepare a place for us in the Father’s house.” (cf. John 14:3).
Oh, there is so much in that statement that I disagree with, that I can only highlight a few objections.
First there is the split between Supernatural and Natural: that cursed dichotomy separating nature from grace, and praising heaven at the expense of the earth. That’s why Scheer did not participate in the Climate Change walk, and is against a Carbon Tax. Should I mention his denial of any Same-Sex connection?
This statement totally ignores Acts 1:11, where the angels say that Jesus will return to earth in the same way he left. John 3: 16 (God so loved the WORLD) also gives a different picture. Jesus did not die for our sins: he died for the restoration of creation, which God, upon completion, called ‘good’ seven times: going to heaven means abandoning his precious creation and so making God imperfect: leaving the earth amounts to failure.
Can we blame ‘Religion’ for Climate Change?
The late Dr. Lynn White, professor at Duke University thinks so. In 1965 he wrote an essay in which he explains this position. Here are some excerpts, “The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture. It has become fashionable today to say that, for better or worse, we live in the “post-Christian age.” Certainly the forms of our thinking and language have largely ceased to be Christian, but to my eye the substance often remains amazingly akin to that of the past. Our daily habits of action, for example, are dominated by an implicit faith in perpetual progress which was unknown either to Greco- Roman antiquity or to the Orient. It is rooted in, and is indefensible apart from, Judeo- Christian theology. The fact that Communists share it merely helps to show what can be demonstrated on many other grounds: that Marxism, like Islam, is a Judeo-Christian heresy.
“We continue today to live, as we have lived for about 1700 years, very largely in a context of Christian axioms. What did Christianity tell people about their relations with the environment? While many of the world’s mythologies provide stories of creation, Greco-Roman mythology was singularly incoherent in this respect. Like Aristotle, the intellectuals of the ancient West denied that the visible world had a beginning. Indeed, the idea of a beginning was impossible in the framework of their cyclical notion of time. In sharp contrast, Christianity inherited from Judaism not only a concept of time as non-repetitive and linear but also a striking story of creation. By gradual stages a loving and all- powerful God had created light and darkness, the heavenly bodies, the earth and all its plants, animals, birds, and fishes. Finally, God had created Adam and, as an afterthought, Eve to keep man from being lonely. Man named all the animals, thus establishing his dominance over them. God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes. And, although man’s body is made of clay, he is not simply part of nature: he is made in God’s image. Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.”
Later he continued, “Man shares, in great measure, God’s transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia’s religions (except, perhaps, Zorastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends. At the level of the common people this worked out in an interesting way. In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects. It is often said that for animism the Church substituted the cult of saints. True; but the cult of saints is functionally quite different from animism. The saint is not in natural objects; he may have special shrines, but his citizenship is in heaven. Moreover, a saint is entirely a man; he can be approached in human terms………….. But since God had made nature, nature also must reveal the divine mentality. The religious study of nature for the better understanding of God was known as natural theology.
“In the early Church, and always in the Greek East, nature was conceived primarily as a symbolic system through which God speaks to men: the ant is a sermon to sluggards; rising flames are the symbol of the soul’s aspiration. The view of nature was essentially artistic rather than scientific. While Byzantium preserved and copied great numbers of ancient Greek scientific texts, science as we conceive it could scarcely flourish in such an ambience.
“However, in the Latin West by the early 13th century natural theology was following a very different bent. It was ceasing to be the decoding of the physical symbols of God’s communication with man and was becoming the effort to understand God’s mind by discovering how his creation operates.”
Let me stop there. If you want to read his entire essay, go for it: it is well reasoned. Even though the church has vehemently denied that it is responsible for our environmental problems, just look at the US “Evangelical” wing, fiercely supporting Trump and fully endorsing his anti-Creation policies.
What Dr. White writes about ‘nature’ is an angle I have so often pursued that I am loath to mention it again. God is so holy that whatever he created is holy as well. That makes creation HOLY, and by harming creation, we offend God.
It seems to me that “The Gates of Hell” differs little from “The Gates of Heaven”. Just as “the way to hell is smooth and easy” thanks to carbon fuels, our entire life and supposed ascent to heaven is smooth and easy as well. That it now starts to cause hell on earth is conveniently ignored: is there where “pre-tribulation Rapture” comes in?
On more quote from Dr. White: ”For nearly 2 millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature. What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.”
I emphasize: “Until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.”
Prof. White is right. “Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and re-feel our nature and destiny.”
WE MUST RETHINK OUR RELIGION.
Throw out the Heaven Heresy. It’s a cop-out. Belief in Heaven prevents us from loving the earth. We must adopt the Bonhoeffer-Bavinck line: “God, We and the Earth belong together”. The current “Christian” approach is Un-Christian. Christ died to regain the earth, now in the clutches of The Evil One. If you have a Bible, just look up 1John 5: 19.
Virgil said, “The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way;” C. S. Lewis echoed that, “The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
The Lord’s Prayer has a line that Pope Francis wants to change, and I agree. The line is, “Lead us not into temptation”. He correctly has stated that God does not lead us into temptation. In the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving in the Presbyterian Book of Praise (Canada) it is translated as “Save us from the time of trial”.
In these last days God, in his wisdom, has decided to confront us with the ultimate trial to make us ready for eternity. Remember, not God, but The EVIL ONE today rules the world. It is The EVIL ONE, Christ’s perennial opponent, who now is calling the shots, and we, all of us, have chosen his smooth, easy, creation-destroying road, which is leading us to HELL.
Sorry to be so blunt. We need a new approach to life and to worship, in a way where the unity of God with us and the earth is lived and expressed. We must admit that the way we live today leads to the demise of God’s earth: that is SIN with three Capital Letters.
TOTAL CONVERSION
The bible uses two different words for CONVERSION: metanoia and epistroph?. The first, metanoia, means a change in our mindset, the second, epistroph?, means a complete change in life style. Metanoia implies a radical change in devotional behavior. Church services now consist of a monologue, prayer, reading the bible, some songs, a collection to support a minister, all within an hour, leaving LIFE unchanged. Bonhoeffer calls this ‘pious secularism’. Epistroph? is a 24/7affair. We need a combination of the two, a total approach to life, a creation-loving life and relationships and new comprehensive, prayerful piety.
| Jesus is the controversial and radical version of God, who drove the moneymen from the temple, who called the clerics poisonous snakes, who said, “I have not come to bring peace but the sword.” (Matthew 10: 34). |
No wonder the clergy avoids preaching about him. Why? Because this same Jesus does not bring us religion but teaches us how to live.
His opponents hated him, calling him a glutton and a winebibber, whose first miracle was making top-grade vino, because he wanted us to be truly human, joyful when the occasion merits it, moved to tears when bad things happen – which is the case today.
If we believe we go to heaven, then we allow creation to be smothered in its carbon-filth. If we believe that “the meek shall inherit the earth”, because it is HOLY, then this should be evident in how we live. “Meek” in this instance means living in obedience to the divine laws of creation.
Remember: personal salvation and the salvation of the WORLD go hand in hand: you can’t have one without the other.