Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

April 28 2013

THE GREAT CRASH.

John Kenneth Galbraith, a Canadian by birth, Harvard professor of economics and an author of many books wrote The Great Crash 1929 in 1954, now almost 60 years ago. That Crash started The Great Depression.

In it Galbraith remarked that, “compared to earlier market downturns, those in 1893, 1907 and 1920, having happened they were over. Not so the one in 1929: it lasted well over a decade and actually circumstances became worse: what looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning.”

After weighing all the evidence, Galbraith concluded: “Had the economy been fundamentally sound in 1929 the effect of the great stock market crash might have been small”. He stated that the crash was caused by five weaknesses, of which the first was “The bad distribution of income: the rich had a disproportionate part of the available wealth”, something also true today. Other factors were the bad banking and corporate structure, the dubious state of the foreign balance and the poor state of economic intelligence. Most of this is applies to today with Climate Change doubling the risk.

The real message of the book is a warning- a warning that 1929 might very easily happen again. We are still waiting, but I am sure that someday somebody will write a book with the same title but a different date. That date could well be 2013 or 2014.

History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes, somebody once said, so it’s advisable to look at the past to understand what’s going on now. G. K. Chesterton wrote in 1933 that “The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.” Today that past – 1929 – tells us that economic crashes do happen, can last a long time, but would probably have a different outcome.

Robin Hood in reverse: robbing the poor to pay the rich

Ben Bernanke, the current Captain of The Money Ship in Washington, was a professor of economics at Princeton University. He made the study of the Depression his life-long task, concluding that during that lost decade the Federal Bank had been too tight in its money policy. So immediately after the 2008 Crash he pumped trillions of dollars into the banking system to replace the losses the banks had suffered with the millions of ‘underwater’ mortgages. He is still at it, expanding the money supply each month with $85 billion. All the large banks greatly benefited from this over-generous debt forgiveness because, in the fall of 2008, every major US bank was on the verge of insolvency caused by their reckless assumption of enormous debts to finance speculative investments often using derivatives such as credit default swaps (CDC) that had been created by the same group of large banks. When their debts overwhelmed their assets, the government bailed them out at the expense of taxpayers’ money. The Big Boys with their enormous annual bonuses were compensated for their outrageous behaviour with the poor man’s money.

The immense amounts of money made available every month have resulted in interest rates hovering near zero, penalizing those who have savings and depend for their pensions on interest income: again a strike against you and me. Now Bernanke is trying to punish us even more: his real aim is to generate some inflation, and so repay the trillions of debt he created with cheaper dollars, again hurting the average citizen, because his greatest fear is ‘deflation’ where prices drop and money becomes worth more, something that happened during the Depression of the 1930’s and in Japan since 1990.

Back to the future

I believe that another cause of the Depression was the sudden availability of cheap energy. In 1929 the USA was simply drowning in oil. GM bought up and closed bus companies and transit systems, advertising that cars – not trains or buses- were the future of the world. John Deere, Allis Chalmers, International, Massie Harris, all touted tractors and other mechanical tools as the wave of the farming future. True, the 1929 Crash was at least partly caused by the sudden surplus of manpower created by cheap fuel capable of generating hundreds of carbon-based horsepower replacing real horses and real men. They made hundreds of thousands of human lives redundant, and forcing them to flock to the cities where there were no jobs. Jobs only appeared when World War II came along and everything and everybody was mobilized to win that war.

After the war, with millions discharged from the armies, the pent-up demand for cars, housing and furniture, the generous allowances to study and liberal grants to buy properties all served to ring in an unprecedented period of prosperity, a Golden Age that lasted for about 50 years. Cheap energy played a dominant role here too with gasoline at rock-bottom prices.

There is something new under the sun

Ecclesiastes tells us that ‘there is nothing new under the sun,’ but these words are now out of date. John 13:34 urges us to love one another. That is no longer a mere moral given. The new approach also requires that we express this love by making sure that life’s essentials, such as water and air, are pure.

Everything has changed: the place of us humans within the natural world is not what it was: in my lifetime nothing has remained the same. Based on the optimistic view that cheap energy would be with us forever, we built an entirely new society. Everything we see around us is founded on the premise that cheap power is forever, evident in transportation, social relationships, finances, farming, manufacturing, globalization, outsourcing, and religion. They all have one wallop of weakness in common: one day fuel will cease to be plentiful or become too expensive: then there is no going back to simpler ways. We have religiously, with the fervor of divine conviction, surrendered ourselves to three fallacies: (1) infinite resources, such as energy and clean water, (2) infinite economic growth on which our banking system and government largesse such as old age security and medical care depend, and (3) an infinite capacity of the atmosphere to absorb our waste.

Another, much greater Crash, to come.

All this ensures that a Great Crash or even a Greater Crash will happen again, and this time we will exactly know what will be its cause: we have sold our souls to material progress in an all-or-nothing bet. We are playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded. In other words: in a finite earth, with an ever growing population that, thanks to television and advertising and the simple construct of contemporary enterprise, wants ever more of everything, we are betting on infinite growth to survive, a mathematical impossibility.

Greenspan, the predecessor of Bernanke, in testimony before the US Senate was quite open: “To exist you need an ideology. Everyone has one.” How true. Faith in infinite growth motivates governments, judging by the song books coming from the finance ministers from Brussels to Washington, with Ottawa being one of the chorus leaders.

Spend or Cut: the false choice

Now the words of the song are stuck in a groove, and come out totally garbled. Its vibrations sound like- spend-yes-cut-no – spend- no- cut- yes. Actually there is no real difference: spend means now; cut means get rid of some fat so that, a bit leaner, growth can pick up faster. Both ‘cutters’ and ‘spenders’ are true believers in economic growth. Wrote the Financial Times last week: “The world’s leading economies acknowledged on Friday that ‘further actions are required’ to put the global economy on track for strong, stable and balanced growth, but the opinions are divided between balancing the budgets, trying to curtail debts, or flooding the market with more cash.”

The Idol of Growth is just that: an idol

The only good thing about all this is that if and when it becomes clear that there is no growth left in the system, all its one-dimensional advocates, from both the Spend! and the Cut! parties, will disappear into a great void. They have no idea what to do without growth. There is no economics class that teaches them. The simple truth is that too much debt makes future growth impossible, because debts have to be paid before people start buying again. Even if economic debt is paid, there remains the ever accelerating environmental debt. The 1929 Depression was solved by World War II. It was caused in part by tractors and combines eliminating warm bodies. We now are at the verge of another depression, this time caused by too much debt, by clever robots, ever smarter software and the declining state of nature. Sorry young people! For most of you in the Western world, your own living standards are going to be below those of your parents. Given your levels of unemployment, the duration of it, and the fast rising levels of debt, it’s not a very big gamble to say that this will be true for the majority among you. Nor is it that much of a gamble to suggest that this will constitute a – major – turning point in our societies.

You’re caught up by the direct result of idol worship, because economics is a religion, complete with priests and churches and rituals and deities serving the divine dogmas of Economic Growth. The trouble with a false religion is that it needs sacrifices. You are the sacrificial lambs.

What sort of Crash is coming?

I believe there is a distinct possibility that this time the Crash will be much more all-encompassing. Some people claim to have discovered a frightening pattern that points to a massive economic catastrophe unlike anything ever seen before. “What this pattern represents is a dangerous countdown clock that’s quickly approaching zero,” said Keith Fitz-Gerald, the Chief Investment Strategist for the Money Map Press, who predicted the 2008 oil shock, the credit default swap crisis that helped bring about the recession, and the Greek and European fiscal catastrophe that is still wreaking havoc until this day. These people found an identical pattern in the USA debt, total credit market, and money supply that guarantees they’re going to fail. This pattern is nearly the same as in any pyramid scheme, one that escalates exponentially fast before it collapses. Governments around the globe are chiefly responsible. And what’s really disturbing about these findings is that the pattern isn’t limited to our economy. They found the same catastrophic pattern in our energy, food, and water systems as well: all these systems could all implode at the same time: Food, water, energy, money: Everything.

Dr. Kent Moors of Duquesne University, one of the world’s leading energy analysts, who advices 16 world governments on energy matters and who currently serves on two State Department task forces on energy, also voiced concerns over what he and his colleagues uncovered. “Most frightening of all is how this exact same pattern keeps appearing in virtually every system critical to our society and way of life,” Dr. Moors stated.

The pattern that’s hard to see unless you understand the way a catastrophe like this gains traction,” Dr. Moors says. “At first, it’s almost impossible to perceive. Everything looks fine, just like in every pyramid scheme. Yet the insidious growth of the virus keeps doubling in size, over and over again – in shorter and shorter periods of time – until it hits unsustainable levels. And it collapses the system.”

It all has to do with debt. For 30 years – from the 1940s through the 1970s – the US total credit market debt was moderate and entirely reasonable. But then in seven years, from 1970 to 1977, it quickly doubled. And then it doubled again in seven more years. Then five years to double a third time. And then it doubled two more times after that. Where we were sitting at a total credit market debt that was 158% larger than our GDP in the early 1940s… By 2011 that figure was 357%.

Dr. Moors warns this type of unsustainable road to collapse can be seen today in our energy, food and water production. All are tightly connected and contributing to the economic disaster that lies directly ahead.

According to polls, the average American is sensing danger. A recent survey found that 61% of Americans believe a catastrophe is looming – yet only 15% feel prepared for such a deeply troubling event.

The 1929 Great Crash came out of the blue. Will the next, much greater Crash, also come totally unannounced?

Next week: How to prepare for a possible collapse.

To view previous columns click on ‘home’.

THE EARTH: OUR ULTIMATE TESTING GROUND

Our entire life is one long test. From birth to death we are being examined. The subject of this life-long probing is precisely where we are: our physical earth.

The experiment started with Adam. I believe that God took Adam and Eve from the then existing population, just as later Abraham was singled out and called to leave his ancestral home to travel in faith to the land his descendants would inherit. David is another example of this. He was chosen to become the ancestor of Jesus.

Back to Adam who failed the test, something we do all the time. It is by grace that we are saved. Perhaps Adam’s former life proved too powerful. In Genesis, the first Bible book, we read that there were other people on the earth for whom Cain expressed fear. There were also those mysterious sons of God (Gen.6:2) who were attracted to the beautiful women on earth. The Bible authors, by the way, have a real appreciation for female beauty. Job 42: 15 tells us of Job’s daughters “Nowhere in the land were there found women as beautiful as Job’s daughters.” Perhaps Adam was also influenced by Eve’s beauty. At any rate if Adam and Eve were selected from the then existing people, God did this because our world had come to a stage where the human beings could damage the state of the earth, so God elected Adam and Eve to prevent that. He infused them with his Spirit to enable them to make a new start for the human race, instructing them how to keep the laws of creation and be a beacon of light to a world on the cusp of being irreparably harmed.

That it all started with a tree is significant. The tree is a symbol of the earth. The tree, in a sense, carries the earth, is the axle on which the universe depends. The cross of Calvary is often equated with the tree. The blood of Christ first penetrated the tree: his flesh was first pounded into its wood. The Tree of the Cross fuses the Alpha and the Omega, unites earth with heaven, the past with the future, the beginning with the end. The cross in the Bible stands between the Tree of Life in Paradise and the Tree of Life in the world to come, as described in Revelation, the last Bible book. We as the human race stand and fall with the trees. Regard them with awe. It could well be that Adam’s sin was to take the fruit without asking the tree’s permission. In Paradise everything was connected to everything else. Trees and animals and humans formed an unbreakable whole. All species were intimately connected and treated each other with reverence and deference. I can well imagine that, when Adam and Eve forgot this and took the fruit without first asking permission from the tree, the holy spell, that special symbiosis in nature was broken. That’s when suddenly insects became a nuisance, animals a danger and humans strangers to each other.

Before Adam and Eve named the species I think God infused them with special capabilities to understand the language of the animals and the plants. That’s how they were able to gauge their nature and see their function in the scheme of totality. I believe they could speak with these creatures and in close cooperation with them determined the name for each individual species. All of them, animals and plants, received instructions how and where to live. Jeremiah 8:7 tells us that “the stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons… but my people do not know the requirements of the Lord.” Just as we have a spirit which ascends to God when we die, animals too have such a mysterious ingredient. Ecclesiastes 3: 21 relates that “the spirit of man rises upward and the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth.” Adam and Eve also knew the special features of all plants: they owed their long and healthy lives to the miraculous ingredients plants had, knowledge they retained when the gates of paradise were shut, still assuring them many centuries of life.

I found a very interesting article in the Lapham Quarterly dealing with animals, their spirit and their minds. Here’s its start:

These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness. On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of activity that led the distinguished zoologist Donald R. Griffin to found the field of cognitive ethology (animal thinking) in 1978: octopuses piling stones in front of their hideyholes, to name one recent example; or dolphins fitting marine sponges to their beaks in order to dig for food on the seabed; or wasps using small stones to smooth the sand around their egg chambers, concealing them from predators. At the same time neurobiologists have been finding that the physical structures in our own brains most commonly held responsible for consciousness are not as rare in the animal kingdom as had been assumed. Indeed they are common. All of this work and discovery appeared to reach a kind of crescendo last summer, when an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,” a document stating that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” It goes further to conclude that numerous documented animal behaviors must be considered “consistent with experienced feeling states.”

That same article goes on saying:

“And yet, if you put aside church dogma, and lean in to look at the Bible itself, or at the Christian tradition, the picture is more complicated. In the Book of Isaiah, God says that the day will come when the beasts of the field will “honor” Him (Isaiah 43:20). If there’s a characteristic of personal identity more defining than the capacity to honor, it’s hard to come up with. We remember St. Francis, going aside to preach to the little birds, his “sisters.” Needless to say he represented a radical extreme, conclusions of which regarding the right way of being in the world would not seem reasonable to most of the people who have his statue in their gardens. In one of his salutations, that of virtues, he goes as far as to say that human beings desiring true holiness should make themselves “subject” to the animals, “and not to men alone, but also to all beasts.” If God grants that wild animals eat you, lie down, let them do “whatsoever they will,” it’s what He wanted.

Deeper than that, though, in the New Testament, in the Gospel According to Luke, there’s that exquisite verse, one of the most beautiful in the Bible, the one that says if God cares deeply about sparrows, don’t you think He cares about you? One is so accustomed to dwelling on the second, human, half of the equation, the comforting part, but when you put your hand over that and consider only the first, it’s a little startling: God cares deeply about the sparrows. Not just that, He cares about them individually. “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?” Jesus says. “Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight.” (Luke 12:6). Sparrows are an important animal for Jesus. In the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a boy Jesus, playing in mud by the river, fashions twelve sparrows out of clay—again the number is mentioned—until a fellow Jew, happening to pass, rebukes him for breaking the Sabbath laws (against “smoothing,” perhaps), at which point Jesus claps and says, “Go!”, and the sparrows fly away chirping. They are not, He says, forgotten. So God remembers them, bears them in mind. Stranger still, He cares about their deaths. In the Gospel According to Matthew we’re told, “Not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” Think about that. If the bird dies on the branch, and the bird has no soul, and is from that moment only inanimate matter, already basically dust, how can it be “with” God as it’s falling?

We must embrace the totality of creation. I believe there’s where our testing comes in. Creation is God’s primary word. John 3:16 is the most underestimated and misinterpreted text in the Bible. If God loves this world so much that he lays down his life to buy it back- the literal meaning of ‘redeem’ – should we not do the same? Animals are much closer to us – witness their DNA – than we like to admit.  And what applies to animals is equally true for plants: we have to surround ourselves with them and care for them, because not only are animals special, plants too are much more sensitive than we often realize.

There is a well-known study from the early 1970s where classical music (Debussy), jazz (Louis Armstrong was used, among others), and Indian (Ravi Shankar) were played. The plants grew large and healthy, with the plants actually growing towards the radio for each of these three forms of music, just like they bend towards sunlight. In a book I have, Secrets from the lives of Trees, I read that “At a recent symposium in Montpellier, France, entitled the International Colloquium on the Tree, a South African zoologist spoke of his research with an acacia tree. When munched on by insects, it issued a warning to other trees of the attack. The scientist, Wouter van Hoven, noted that trees within fifty yards responded to the message. In less than fifteen minutes neighboring trees increased the level of tannin in their leaves, making them poisonous to the insect predators.” The current issue of the National Geographic reports that, “When drought hits, trees can suffer—a process that makes sounds. Now, scientists may have found the key to understanding these cries for help.”

I believe that the church is far too narrow in its approach to life. Basically its entire message still has that ‘heaven’ orientation, as it concentrates on God’s Secondary Word, the Scriptures, which actually are a lamp for our feet while we study God’s Primary Word. Our test does not concern Scriptures alone: our test primarily deals with our treatment of the cosmos.

I love the Scriptures and such gems as Colossians 1:15-20. Look it up. Memorize it. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Christ, and through him reconcile to himself all things (Ta Panta).”  Sphere sovereignty has its place, but not in the preaching of the good news. To confine the preaching to the Bible is separating nature from grace, fostering a dualism that is foreign to the Bible. Seminaries should educate students for all of life: the good news is that everything will be made new: seminarians need to learn both ecology and theology.

Johan Herman Bavinck has something to say about this. In Chapter Four of his The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming, (soon to be published by Eerdmans) with the telling title: Christ, the Central Focus of the Scriptures, he laments that:

It is extremely unfortunate that the con­cept of the Kingdom of heaven or the Kingdom of God has escaped our dogmatic reflection and is paid scant attention in our Christian life. That is the reason why we find it very difficult to read the Good News with that wonderful suspense that comes from seeing it against the backdrop of the overwhelming reality of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God has come “near” in Christ; the great Day of the Lord is about to come. The Kingdom claims the entire cosmos in all its manifestations. Wherever Jesus comes the demons flee, the fever subsides, the sea becomes calm, the storm obeys. The King­dom of God has come near. Leprosy retreats, the blind open their eyes in utter amazement, the lame start to leap in spontaneous enthusiasm, the dead rise from their graves. Indeed, the Kingdom of God is near. All those shattering, destructive, depressing and disruptive forces now dom­i­nating the universe flee away in despair and anguish as soon as the King appears. All those miracle stories recorded in the Gospels, which we in our thoughts and our daily lives find difficult to explain and which we can only deal with if we somehow spiritualize them, are clearly meant in the Gos­pels to manifest the awesome powers of the Messiah in his kingdom. As such they serve as proof that God will not surrender this terrible world to the powers of decay at work in it, but that the Great Day has started in which he himself will gather up his world into a harmonious symphony of adoration. Christ’s miracles gather the Kingdom under a cosmic um­brel­la: the Kingdom is the restoration of the Urzeit; it is the introduc­tion of the eventual “renewal” (Matt. 19:28).

I believe Dr. Bavinck is correct. The church must have a much more integrated approach to ‘life’, because the way we go about our daily affairs is a dry-run, is the ‘testing ground for eternity’ and determines whether we will be part of the glorious kingdom to come, a kingdom where also all animals and all plants find their perfect place.

Click on ‘home’ to read the entire blog.
Next week an examination of the present economic situation.

LESS FOR MORE COULD LEAD TO NOTHING FOR ALL

When last week I announced my topic for the ensuing week, I had only a vague idea where I would go. I remember I was angry. Or perhaps that was not the correct word. Upset was a better description. Sad came even closer. Perhaps it was all three. My emotions are always close to the surface.

So why all this inner turmoil? I just had read that China had exceeded its fish quota by 12 times the agreed limit. We all know that the oceans are being depleted. Chinese fishing boats are more like fish-processing factories, and operate close to the Africa coast and scoop up, suck away, literally scrape the bottom of the ocean and so make it impossible for the poor African fishermen in their frail boats to catch the fish their lives depend on.

The real danger of this deathly method is a sudden fish stock collapse, similar to what happened on the Newfoundland coast where the cod disappeared in short order: for Africans less and less catch means more and more work, and when the catch collapses nothing for everybody.

Another reason for my down-mood was bees. Bees have earned a by-word: busy as bees. There now are fewer bees and many more trees that need pollination. There also is far less wisdom and far more problems. There also is far less money for much more work.

We need bees. You like apples? Almonds? Onions? How about blueberries or cherries or actually all flowering fruit out there: they all need plenty of pollination, and for pollination nothing beats the honeybee. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that a quarter of our diet depends on honeybees powering pollination.

We need bees, and bees are dying en masse, have been since about 2005, when a phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) was first given a name. We named the result without knowing its cause. Curing CCD has proven impossibly complex, as tantalizingly difficult as preventing cancer: what’s the good of a cancer cure when the cancer rate is constantly increasing?

Bees or the lack of them is not the only stress on trees. Remember last year’s weather in Ontario? Thanks to a far too early spring followed by frost, all blossoms were killed which gave us no apples or cherries, and, of course, the price went up. Where I used to pays $22 for a bushel, last fall I paid $37. But if there are no bees, there we won’t have any fruit at all. Ever. I once did an appraisal on a GM dealership. The lady who helped me told me that she was engaged to a doctor. I told her not to eat any apples. She asked Why not? I said: an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Without apples and other healthy fruits, diseases will multiply. Add a bit of drug-resistant diseases, and you better take out some extra life insurance.

So what is killing the bees? You could as well ask: what’s causing cancer. So what makes bees to die? Who knows? It could have all possible causes — bad nutrition, pesticides, an itinerant lifestyle that’s full of unnatural stresses, because bees are trucked by the millions from one pollination place to the next, from California to Georgia. I believe Monsanto is partly to blame. Its seed are impregnated with long-lasting pesticides. Also bee hives are such complex, tightly organized systems that if a few bees fall ill the whole structure might fall apart.

Fish, bees, incurable diseases are not the only new dangers. Years ago I wrote in a column that China would be the bellwether for our world to come. If China can make a go of it, the world will also do so.

So, what is happening in China? Decades of industrialization is taking its toll on the soil. All pollutants ultimately end up there. A few years ago I developed a curious head condition. My skull would feel numb and subject to heat flashes. Finally a wise doctor suggested allergies. I had been having strawberries in my porridge. I checked the label: Imported from China. I immediately stopped using them and never had these symptoms again. A soil survey showed that most of China’s growing soil is heavily polluted, containing even metal pollution from a hundred years ago, as well as the ‘666’ pesticide banned in the 1980s.

Then there is China’s air. A few weeks ago, air quality at the U.S. embassy in Beijing registered 755 on a scale to 500. A thick, choking haze enveloped the entire city. You couldn’t see from one high-rise office tower to the next; flights were cancelled, some highways were closed, schoolchildren were kept indoors, hospital admissions soared. China’s air quality problems aren’t limited to Beijing — a 2010 study found that air pollution led to 1.2 million premature deaths nationwide — and killer air is just one of the country’s ecological nightmares. I might add that China has the highest smoking rate in the world: 70 percent of men smoke but only a fraction of women, who are greatly in the minority. One-half of its surface water is so polluted it can’t be treated to make it drinkable, and half of that is so bad it can’t even be used for industrial purposes. Seventy percent of the country’s rivers and lakes receive raw sewage or untreated industrial toxins. Cancer rates are up, and the country has been losing an area the size of Prince Edward Island every year to desertification, brought on by unsustainable farming practices in grassland ecosystems. It doesn’t look that China will make it.

Is it any better here in North America? Fracking is all the craze there, some claiming that it will make the USA an energy exporter nation. Hogwash.

Why should we care? Because the shale oil and gas frenzy will be one of the most environmentally destructive initiatives in our history. Millions of acres will be cleared for well pads, drilling roads, and a mind-boggling web of pipelines, much of it on federal lands. Much of this acreage will include those carbon sinks known as trees: the same what’s happening with the tar sands in Alberta, where also millions of trees are rudely discarded to get to that tar stuff that will later spout out of our exhausts as GHG= Green House Gases. In the Dakotas this industrial wasteland will likely never be reclaimed, certainly not by the oil industry. When a well becomes unprofitable to produce – and their depletion rate is very high – the industry will close it in and move on to greener pastures to destroy. Let’s also not forget the enormous consumption of water, often in arid regions, toxic emissions from drilling equipment and rolling stock, methane released or flared, and the uncertain effect of hundreds of thousands of wells and fractured shale formations on groundwater supplies. Again less (oil) for more (pollution), and long term pain for short term gain.

I believe that all this will result in collapse, which maybe as sudden as the cod collapse and the weather change. Let those who have an open eye for the fool’s gold that our financial scenario reflects, and an open heart and mind what the Lord is trying to tell us.

What it really amounts to is that we no longer live in normal times. The past is no longer a trusted guide for the future. The assumption that “it can’t happen here” is no longer valid. Now anything is possible anywhere: the weather is haywire; financial fiascos more frequent; pandemic pandemonium increasingly possible; crop failures a constant likelihood; wars and rumors of war more worrisome.

The abnormal is the new normal. Take the economic situation. Every month Ben Bernanke, the man who is at the money till in Washington, generates by a touch on the computer $85 billion of new money, 12 month a year till Doomsday. Those trillions are posted against the debit balance of our children and grandchildren. It’s all about idol worship. By paying homage to the god of Progress we sin against God’s command not to worship other gods, leading to the “punishing of the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation, of those who hate me.” (Ex. 20:5). That phony money only benefits the already rich while burdening the overburdened innocent even more. It is bound to end badly. We have lived too long beyond our means, both economically and environmentally.

The past 100 years has been the age of extremes: the millions senselessly slaughtered on Flanders fields; the senseless Depression of the Thirties; the senseless holocaust of the Jews; the senseless Hitler mania; the senseless Republican Party today. To crown it all the senseless sacrificing of the natural state of the environment for the sake of producing more junk that nobody needs, that nobody can afford, in the process creating a society totally dependent on automobiles for survival. There is no going back. The abnormal is the new normal. All seems well until the unexpected happens because we are in the final stage of history, a highly unpopular statement, because we don’t want bad news to disrupt our comfort. We genuinely believe that if we cling to our normal routine and habitual methods of doing things, despite overwhelming proof that something dangerous is looming, everything will be OK, that bad things simply cannot happen here. But as Ayn Rand put it, “You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”

Underneath our feet there is some ominous rumbling. What has happened to the fish stock, what continues to happen to the bee situation, can easily happen to the financial world.

Have you followed the situation in Europe: the crises in Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus and now France? Or the budget battles in the USA? It’s all about money and debt. Frankly the debt overhang is simply scary. Why does it happen now? Why is everything coming to a head? Because we are dealing with ultimate matters. We are approaching the End.

Here’s what Johan Herman Bavinck writes in his The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming: “The church always falls back on her great longing for the end?time. Again and again, as if driven by unseen forces, the church remembers that she is not of this world, that she belongs to the coming age, and that she must aim all her efforts in that direction. This keen awareness of the end-time—this eschatological con­sciousness—is today undergoing a strong revival throughout the church of Christ. The terrible blows of two world wars that lie behind us, the ruins of countless irreplaceable cultural treasures^[1]—they all remind us that we live in a world that is headed for destruction. The early church understood this, as is evident from the writings of that period. In the Didachè, one of the oldest writings of the early church, the prayer for the Lord’s Supper went as follows: “Let grace abound, and let this world pass away. Maranatha!” It is true: the church can witness the destruction of world cities, and at the shattering of all these treasures she senses that these horrendous happenings will cause this terrible world to go under and perish on account of the forces at work within it. The church experi­ences something of the jubilations of the redeemed in heaven when Babylon falls, when all the merchants of the world are in mourning over the big city and the saints in heaven call out to each other: “Rejoice over her, O heaven! Rejoice, saints and apostles and prophets! God has judged her for the way she treated you” (Rev. 18:20). That is not a per­verse longing for death; it is a genuine con­vic­tion that this world is has­tening toward destruction and that through that destruction the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ will come.”

Because we don’t want to think about this and close our minds to the possibility of collapse, the Bible tells us that the Lord will come like a thief in the night. Perhaps some old people like Simeon in the temple (Luke 2:25) and Anna (Luke 2:36) will be ready, but the vast majority of the people, both in Jesus’ days and also today, rather not entertain what the Bible tells us.

Next week: We and our connection to animals and plants.

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[1] Translator’s note: Today we would add: the environmental happenings, the economic turmoil, the destruction of habitats like the rainforests.

April 7 2013

The final Reformation?

A case can be made that some history runs in cycles. Major religions, for instance, seem to be born every six hundred years. Moses and the emergence of the Yahweh worship took place some 1200 years before Christ. About 600 years later the world saw the birth of three separate religious streams: Zoroaster in Persia, Confucius in China and Buddha in South East Asia. Then the Christian Religion took off with the death of Christ, while Islam saw its rise with Mohammed who lived from 570-632. Due to the Crusades – 1096-1291-  the 100 year war between France and England -1337-1453-, and especially the 14^th Century Black Plague pandemic which killed at least one-third of the European population, the next religious event, the Protestant Reformation,  had a long time in coming with Martin Luther acting as catalyst in 1517. Now, with the speeding up of history thanks to our carboholic addiction, 500 years later we are due for what I call the Final Reformation.

If the Church were a business it would have been redundant or bankrupt a long time ago, loosing ‘customers’ continuously. In spite of the growth of some churches in North America, the overall ecclesiastical scene is negative: somehow organized religion no longer appeals to the masses.

We – my wife and I – attend the local Presbyterian Church. A couple of disastrous ministers caused a lot of people to leave. The average attendance dropped from 50-60 to 25-30, with the old guard staying put and the young people leaving. Perhaps our church is not a good example and I may be out of touch, attending a so-called mainline church. But I am not wrong when I know that the more popular churches are not in the creation-saving business and have no Kingdom perspective whatsoever. Instead they concentrate on saving ‘souls’. Years ago, doing an appraisal on a business, the owner asked whether I was born again. I found the question somewhat embarrassing because what I thought was meant by being born again and what I presumed his notion would be were probably two entirely different things. So I guess I mumbled something and went on with inspecting the premises.

Of course in the Presbyterian Church you never ask a person whether he or she is born again. Perhaps we should, and explain what it means. So what does it mean? Jesus told Nicodemus that a person should be born again. Old Nick too found it troubling: he had never heard of such a thing. In that sense he would have made a good main-line Christian. However, whatever was meant before by being born again has, I believe, now taken on a new form.

Johan Herman Bavinck, in his The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming – soon available through Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Mich. – has no use for individual salvation, the still common explanation of re-birth. He wrote: “It is God’s intent to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one over­arching harmony. There is no such thing as individual salvation. All sal­vation is of necessity universal. (emphasis mine). The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved in him. 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 (including animals from Ants to Zebras, I might add) are again unified under the one and only all?wise will of him who lives and rules for ever.”

“There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal”. If this is true, and I believe it to be, then the church needs to undertake a drastic revision of its modus operandi, an entirely new approach to the Good News. Since the current model of “Brother (sister) are you born again?” doesn’t seem to work anyway why not try a different Way?  What should take its place?

Let me take a little detour while you mull this over. The Heidelberg Catechism asks us what our only comfort is in life and death. For practically all people in the West it means embracing a certain religion, one that is not the biblical kind. We all somehow are part of that religion, pressed upon us by the sheer force of events. The surrogate God that western civilization adores, hesitantly in the 19th century and with increasing conviction and passion now is ‘Progress’. Today, when we hear the politicians speak and the national budget makers compile their calculations, they religiously claim that ‘Progress’, that economic growth will deliver us from all evil. We speak of ‘Progress’ with the fervor of converts, religiously believe in its omnipotence and infinite benevolence, and have adopted it as the core doctrines of our civil religion, and made it central to our contemporary notions of meaning and value, as Christianity was before the Age of Reason.

Just as all idols, Progress is failing us. The gods of our age are abandoning us as more growth inevitably results in faster Climate Change and higher pollution. Just look at China! Actually it certainly looks that we have entered the age of no-or even negative growth, which means that we have to look for a different god.

Here the church has a golden opportunity.

In the last chapter of The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming entitled “The Road to Life”, J. H. Bavinck writes: “With a degree of nostalgia we recall how in the ancient church bap­tism was experienced as real renewal. Coming out of a pagan culture and the enchantments that life there offered, people would hesitantly draw near to the cross of Jesus Christ, where they would gradually be taken in by his word which displayed a new life in which only Christ was Lord and King. When then, at last, such persons, drawn from darkness, experi­enced baptism, a new world would open up for them. That meant that they would often be shunned by their old friends, perhaps even their own parents, but they would be received in a new circle, the church of Christ, and they would stand with that church in the life?connection of the risen Saviour. In the most perfect sense that was real renewal as the old was indeed a matter of the past, and look, all had become new! In its ulti­mate sense the fact of baptism can only be compared with the Flood that once had consumed the ancient world, of which baptism was the con­trast, the antitype (1 Pet. 3:21). As then, so now, through baptism, an old world, destined for destruction, drowned forever, and a new world arose, a world filled with God’s precious promises. Baptism meant for­saking the world and becoming a new person for the sake of Christ. It was submerging in Christ and again rising in him. Baptism was the entrance to a new world, a new heaven and a new earth. It was custom­ary at one time to assume a new name to show once and for all that the old person was dead and a new one was born in Christ. That is how radically people experienced the transition from the old to the new, from Adam to Christ. “The old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Cor. 5:17).”

Back to today and “there is no such thing as individual salvation. All sal­vation is of necessity universal. If that is true, then we have some work to do. The Final Reformation is all about conscious caring for the holy creation: not only believing it but also living it. “I am not my own but belong to my Saviour Jesus Christ,” says the Heidelberg Catechism. It is about time to fill that in. In Colossians 1: 15-20 Jesus is “All and in All”. The Greek words there are ta panta, which includes everything under the sun. Not just us and our soul: all salvation is of necessity universal, because Jesus brings the Kingdom, the New Earth and if we want to be part of that then we must see the cosmos as holy, which means that with whatever we do we must contemplate their consequences. The unintended consequences of Progress are Climate Change and Pollution. The consequence of confessing Christ is a metanoia as intense and as thorough, a switch in our mode of life as drastic as converting from paganism to Christianity, something the early Christians did. Metanoia – being re-born -means as fundamental a shift as an Islam believer experiences when leaving the teachings of Mohammed and confessing Christ as the only Saviour and seeing all of creation as part of God’s holiness. Why? Since there is no such thing as individual salvation, since all sal­vation is of necessity universal, our lifestyle must reflect that. That is the major and perhaps most difficult change Christianity has to make in these final days in order to gain admission to the new creation. As a born and raised Calvinist I realize that the grace of God plays the ultimate role here.

Last week I promised to again consult with Bonhoeffer, who saw God, Creation and Humanity united in an unbreakable bond. When he was in the Tegel prison in Berlin and an accommodating guard smuggled his letters out to his fiancé, family and friends, he wrote on July 16 1944:”Etsi Deus Non Daretur. Living as if God does not exist….. Before God and with God we live without God.” That hints at “and there was no temple there” (Rev. 21:22), and leaves just us and creation. Religion interferes with us being human, since we are created to be one with the earth from which we originate, that feeds us and which, when we die, serves as our resting place, where we sleep until Jesus wakes us up.

J. H. Bavinck says something similar:

“The Kingdom is in shatters. That is the profound tragedy con­fronting the life of the world. This goes far beyond the fact that we have torn up its cohesion: it actually means that God has surrendered his own creation to Satan and his followers, whose only purpose is to abuse it and destroy it. The Kingdom, after all, com­prises all things, all plants, all animals, all people, all angels. The King­dom includes the sea and the land, the moun­tains and the valleys, all that was and is and is to come; and all of it is incorporated in a great and mighty whole. The Kingdom is the place where all things are in their rightful place and where everything can fulfill its function and deploy its potential in complete harmony with all that surrounds it. The Kingdom is synonymous with light, peace, joy, service to God, in harmonious vene­ra­tion. Where the Kingdom is being destroyed, where this structure comes apart at the seams, there is decomposition, brokenness, frag­men­tation, enmity, contra­diction, meaninglessness, darkness, death. The Kingdom is the smile of God’s good pleasure: “See, it was very good.” With the breaking of the Kingdom God hides his face. Psalm 104:29 reads: “When you hide your face, they are terrified.” The glow fades away; something akin to the pall of death covers the world.”

We are living in the days where God is absent. Among God’s last words to Moses were, as recorded in Deut. 31: 17, 18, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.”

We are in that final stage of history. We are on our own. It could quite well be that it is too late for the churches to experience the Final Reformation. Churches, religious bodies, seem to be too anchored in the world and too cumbersome to change course, also because they depend too much on the existing economic structure to survive.

Of course the Church will prevail. It is as in the days of Elisha when there were 8000 who had not bowed their knee to Baal, many of them unknown to each other because it was too dangerous to seek affiliation with others. At the same time the church cannot go back to the situation of the first Pentecost congregation in Jerusalem. Then society was much more interdependent, living physically close. Today we live in our subdivided and exurban diaspora. The only way to really prepare somewhat for the dangerous times to come- and they will come – is to sell out and form a sort of a monastery for families, living as new-creation-friendly as possible, with a great degree of self-sufficiency, perhaps clustering around a certain profession or trade or institution as is done in rural Africa.

Just as people converting from paganism to the Christian Way in the early days faced alienation from their families and friends, such a switch too would be derided as fanatic and unduly pessimistic: “Progress will come again!” will always be the secular mantra. The Final Reformation entails becoming more and more earth-minded, feeling the kinship with all that is created.

Am I correct? Is my analysis acceptable? Think about it. I may be wrong. My voice is just one of many. In the meantime I am busy getting ready for spring: my seedlings are doing well. The Maple Syrup season was better than last year. A later spring is much more creation-friendly than last year’s far too early one, which resulted in us not having any apples. Today we live much more in a ‘trusting God’ situation because of our self-inflicted climatic dangers. What worries me especially is the ‘bee’ situation. Apparently it is in particular the Monsanto type of seed, impregnated with long-lasting pesticides, that causes bees to die. We are playing with fire when we change the creation order.

Next week: LESS FOR MORE

Toward a religion-less religion?

There’s an interesting text in the Bible, one that especially intrigues me: it’s Romans 1:20. It is an important text because one of the Reformed Confessions explicitly refers to it as a proof text. It is article 2 of the Belgic Confession, the second oldest of the doctrinal standards of the Christian Reformed Church. It dates from 1567, thus almost 450 years old, and exactly 50 years after Martin Luther started what is known as the Reformation, the event when a body of people left the Roman Church to go their own way. This particular article explains The Means by which we know God. The first part of the answer is: 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: his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.”

So what did the apostle Paul write in Romans 1: 20? He said that “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 men are without excuse.” In other words: anyone who has eyes to see, a brain to interpret and a mind open enough not to be blinded by science, must realize that behind the riddle of creation is God, the creator who speaks to us primarily through the world we inhabit.

Why does the church rely on such ancient documents? The Heidelberg Catechism dates from 1563. The Canons of Dordt are a bit newer: 1618-19,  while the Westminster Confession, the standard of the Presbyterian Church is the most recent, dating from 1646. Why are there no recent confessions? I am pretty sure that the world- and the church – has changed in those four hundred years. I suspect the trouble is that even if a denomination would try, it could never agree on a new creed. Why is that? French law professor Jacques Ellul – his wife Yvette was Dutch – gives an answer. He writes in Hope in Time of Abandonment that “For centuries the Church has focused on the preaching of faith. That is no longer possible, both because man on the outside is no longer listening, and also because within the Church we are experiencing what I think is an insoluble confusion over what precisely is the content of faith…..The creeds can no longer be the core of preaching today.”

He goes on to say that the church must switch from preaching Faith –the word ‘creed’ comes from ‘credo’ which means “I have faith” – to Hope, hope in the coming of the new creation, hope that is accompanied with prayer. “When we engage in prayer” he says “then hope is born”. That’s why I think, Jesus included “Thy Kingdom Come” in the Lord’s Prayer.

Bonhoeffer says something similar. He starts his book Creation and Fall with these remarkable 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.”

J. H. Bavinck, in his The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming – soon to be published by Eerdmans – also sings this tune. In Chapter Three, simply named “The Kingdom”, he makes a point that the church may well take to heart: “It is God’s intent to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one over­arching harmony. There is no such thing as individual salvation. All sal­vation is of necessity universal. (my emphasis). The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved in him. 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 (from Ants to Zebras) are again unified under the one and only all?wise will of him who lives and rules for ever.”

Church take note: “There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal”. If this is true, and I believe it to be, then the church needs to undertake a drastic revision of its modus operandi, a complete re-orientation: from religion being a private matter to seeing God in everything. I know this is a form of Panentheism, which says that God and the universe are coextensive, while claiming that God is greater than the universe and that the universe is contained within God. Not to be confused with Pantheism, which literally means that everything is god. This falls in line with Romans 1:20 which says that people are condemned by not seeing God behind creation. To me this also means that the corollary is true:  anyone who looks at the miracle of creation and no longer sees it as a riddle, but a great work of Art devised by The Master Mind or Whatever is excused from judgement and declared righteous in God’s eyes.

If this is true then a person like Albert Einstein is saved. Though he called himself an atheist, he saw himself as a deeply religious man. Here’s what he said:

“To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.”

Einstein in essence affirms the words of a hymn:  “O Lord my God! When I in awesome wonder consider all the works thy hands have made, I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, thy power throughout the universe displayed.”

This leads me to believe that there is salvation outside the church – outside formal religion. I sometimes wonder whether there is salvation within the church. Don’t get me wrong. By and large the people there are the converted: they don’t come to be converted. I know that church services are great instruments of affirming faith, of experiencing fellowship, of sharing the good and the bad and so enhance community, but I doubt whether they do make people see the light and suddenly cause a metanoia, a complete change from being outside the kingdom to being part of it.

We should not forget that the church of his day killed Jesus. It seems to me that the church of today this time is killing God – by killing his creation in the name of religion. Mega-churches seem to do that. They draw their clientele from a wide area, meaning that they can only be reached by the highly polluting car. They offer what I perceive as ‘biblio-tainment’. By that I mean that the Bible is introduced as entertainment, with loud music, overhead pictures and film scenes, an avalanche of words and bible texts, spoken mostly out of context: they are the Wal-Mart of the ecclesiastical scene, killing off the small churches within walking or biking distance of peoples’ homes. Jesus’ saying that ‘where two or three are together in my name there I will be also’ is totally contrary to this trend that “Big is Beautiful”. This mass “religious” entertainment could well result in more atheism, as it advocates that God’s creation is irrelevant. It is also completely the opposite of what Bavinck, Bonhoeffer and Ellul advocate. No wonder the church is in turmoil. What to do? Where to go?  How to preach?

Some 60 years ago Bertrand Russell published his Why I Am Not a Christian. At that time his book caused quite a stir. Russell could not accept Christianity because he wondered how a benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient Deity would allow the emergence of Hitler and Stalin, the H bomb, and I may add, the more recent phenomena, such as Global Warming and World-Wide-Pollution. In his time Dr. Bertrand was so controversial that he was declared unfit to teach philosophy in a New York College.

Today questioning religion is all the rage: books, such as God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens are popular publishing success stories. Hitchens was outraged by the dogmatism of religion, yet he himself had moved from Marxism (he was a Trotskyist) to Greek Orthodox Christianity, then to American Neo-Conservatism, followed by an “antitheist” stance that blamed all of the world’s troubles on religion. Hitchens thus swung from the left to the right, from anti–Vietnam War to cheerleader of the Iraq War, and from pro to contra God. He ended up favoring Dick Cheney over Mother Teresa. Or take The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, also on the best-sellers list for weeks on end. If you want to make money today in publishing, become a religion – or God –basher. Richard Dawkins, for example, writes that “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty unjust control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniac”, and I could go on and on. I guess, from this quote, you can deduce that Dawkins doesn’t like God.

Egbert Ribberink and Dick Houtman, two Dutch sociologists, who classify themselves, respectively, as “too much of a believer to be an atheist” and “too much of a nonbeliever to be an atheist,” distinguish two kinds of atheists. Those in one group are uninterested in exploring their outlook and even less in defending it. These atheists think that both faith and its absence are private matters. They respect everyone’s choice, and feel no need to bother others with theirs. Those in the other group are vehemently opposed to religion and resent its privileges in society. These atheists don’t think that disbelief should be kept locked up in the closet. They speak of “coming out,” a terminology borrowed from the gay movement, as if their non-religiousness was a forbidden secret that they now want to share with the world. It seems that the stricter one’s religious background, the greater the need to go against it and to replace old securities with new ones.

Nevertheless, I think that Jesus would have approved of outspoken atheists. He once said that a person must be either totally in favor of him, or dead-set against him: it’s the lukewarm, the fence-sitters, he despises.

Non-church going people and perhaps a few within the churches themselves are looking for answers and are not finding them within the current ecclesiastical set-up. For many the church is no longer relevant. What is needed is new Reformation where the world we live in, the cosmos, plays a prominent role. More about that next week.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer again. He had a double doctorate in theology, professor in Berlin at the age of 25, hanged by Hitler because he opposed his godless actions, seeing the state of the church, paints an ironic picture of religion. My grandparents on a farm in the Netherlands, had one room, the most beautifully adorned room in the house, where nobody ever came. Bonhoeffer compares religion to such a room. He wrote: “Religion is often like ‘the best room,’ that has nothing to do with work, everyday life and normality. Then it becomes a sugar-coated faith for Sunday mornings that turns Jesus in to a moralizing figure head. The religion of Jesus Christ is not the dessert that comes after the meal, but is the entire meal, applies to all of life.”

He then describes how Jesus actually lived quite un-religiously, how he totally contradicted the customary views of religion of his days. He concluded that Jesus had no use for religion and wanted human beings to do what Jesus himself did, that is being fully engaged in the act of being human.

Bonhoeffer could be quite controversial. He said that just as Jesus abandoned the religion of his days – which cost him his life – Bonhoeffer wondered whether only in a world that is no longer religious, we, the people of this planet, can become aware of ourselves; that the reality of Christ can have a greater impact on a world come of age when we let go of the disguises of religion.

It is possible that I misunderstand Bonhoeffer. Let me think about that for a week so that I can re-read him and find some direct quotes from him regarding this. Bonhoeffer was really an eschatological thinker, no doubt also because he knew that he would die soon: he was executed by hanging on April 9 1945, less than a month before the war was over. He was 39 years old. After five years of enemy occupation, April 9 1945 was the exact day my hometown, Groningen, the Netherlands, was liberated from the Germans, after a fierce 4 day fight with the Canadian Army. Thank you Canada.

Next week some thinking on church reform and re-focus of worship.