Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

February 10 2013

The Lord’s Prayer and the Church’s blind spot.

2000 years ago a mysterious star- indicating the birth of a king- guided three kings to Jerusalem. There they went to see the real source of power, Herod the King, to ask what he knew about this baby King. Clueless but concerned, Herod summoned the Bible experts, the teachers of the law and the Pharisees. The church leaders, knowing the Scriptures, directed the three magi to Bethlehem, but they themselves ignored the extraordinary event how three important foreign dignitaries, traveling for weeks, had followed a celestial sign that indicated the birth of a royal child. The official church had a distinct blind spot regarding the coming Messiah. The biblical scholars in Jesus’ time wanted the Messiah to be a secular power figure: failure to recognize Jesus as the Son of God spelled the end of the Old Testament temple worship.

History is repeating itself. Again the church has a blind spot: this time she fails to recognize “the Gospel of the Kingdom.”  Will this have the same consequences for the New Testament church?

Most church goers are very familiar with the Lord’s Prayer. Often the communal prayer in a church service is concluded with the well-known words of the prayer Jesus taught us.

I have been influenced to write about the Lord’s Prayer while translating De Mensch en zijn Wereld, We and Our World written by Dr. J.H.Bavinck. Its third chapter deals with “The Kingdom” (available upon request). Here this well-known Dutch professor writes that: “The concept of the Kingdom of God resounds like a majestic chorale through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation….. God’s Kingdom has a cosmic character, which means that it comprises the entire world as we have come to know it. Not only are we humans part of that Kingdom, but it also includes the world of animals and all plants.”

Dr. Herman Ridderbos, another Dutch theologian, in his classic book The Coming of the Kingdom affirms this: “The central theme of Jesus’ message is the coming of the Kingdom of God”. In its introduction he writes: “The kingdom of God is a purely future and eschatological event, presupposing the end of this world; and therefore, cannot possibly reveal itself already in this world…. It is nothing but the commencement of the new world, after the catastrophic upheaval of the present era.” In connection with the Lord’s Prayer he writes that “The Lord’s Prayer has been entirely inspired by the coming of the kingdom.”

I don’t know why the church is so reluctant to deal with the kingdom, but I have a feeling that the church wants her members to be comfortable and at ease. It frightens people that the “coming of the kingdom” is preceded by catastrophic upheaval, of which today there are plenty of signs. I also believe that ignoring to pursue “the coming of the Kingdom” is the real reason why today’s church is in rapid decline: when the church misses her true calling then people sense that and leave. Jesus himself told the church (Matt.24:14): “To preach the Gospel of the Kingdom.” It is my wish that having a new look at the Lord’s Prayer may help to remedy this situation to some extent.

So let me start with these first words: “Our Father”.

There is an intimacy expressed there that is typically New Testament. I see that as the result of Jesus, as the Son of God, being human. He is like us in everything except for sin. By addressing God as “Our Father”, we move away from individualism and stress the idea of community that will be perfectly realized in the New Creation, the Kingdom to Come. There God’s people will enjoy the unsurpassed bliss of a renewed Earth. When we address God as Father this implies that we will share in the sheer happiness of the Kingdom that is to come and signifies that a brand new relationship between God and his people has begun.

“Hallowed be Thy name.”

That is old-fashioned language. It simply expresses the wish, or command, that God’s name be made holy. God is synonymous with his name. God created the earth by naming the parts, sun, moon, seas, animals, humans. All of these are holy because they carry God’s signature. The prayer simply asks us not to profane God’s name, not to defile his creation, but treat it as God’s holy property. When we pollute, we take God’s name in vain; we then molest his majesty; we do not hallow God’s name.

“Your Kingdom Come.”

If there were ever a prayer that indicates the ultimate desire of the church, then it is these three simple words: “Your Kingdom Come”, closely followed by “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Both petitions are similar in aim. Here we pray not for us, not for this world, not to make life better for us, but we simply ask God to speed up the return of Christ so that ‘real’ life can begin. The Psalms often mention how the rich have their reward ‘in this life’. We hear and read about the “One Percent” who have their yachts, are accompanied by beautiful women and jet all over the world: “They have their reward” in this short life, 70-80- perhaps 90 years. The Lord’s Prayer has a different emphasis: eternal life on God’s totally renewed earth, restored to its “Eden” like beauty. That is what we express when we pray “Your Kingdom Come.” When we ask that God’s will be done, then our request is equally radical. In essence, we say: “Lord, I will do my level best to follow your commands by living so that when you return I have no trouble fitting into life in the New Creation, an adjustment that must begin here and now.

And here comes a difficult one. “Give us this day our daily bread”.

Translators have had great difficulty with this text because of the one word ‘daily’, the Greek ‘epiousios’. Among my many books is one by Dr. Diarmaid MacCullogh, who wrote Christianity, the first 3000 years. Dr. MacCullogh is a professor of church history at Oxford University. On page 89 of this 800 page book he writes: “Epiousios does not mean ‘daily.’ In other words: the line has nothing to do with making us comfortable by giving us our ‘daily’ bread. The Greek word means something like ‘of extra substance,’ and if we can assign any meaning to epiousios it may point to the new time of the coming kingdom”

Other authors, such as Robert Guelich in his The Foundation for understanding the SERMON ON THE MOUNT also deals extensively with this word. Commenting on this petition he writes: “The eschatological element remains inherent in the request, since Jesus’ ministry introduces the new age.”

Based on these sources and the general direction of the prayer, the request “Give us today our daily bread” could mean something like this: “Grant us the wherewithal to prepare ourselves for the Kingdom to come.” This is also in full agreement with the following verses in Matthew 6, where it says in verse 25: “do not worry about what you eat and drink. Is not life more important than food?” So really our request for daily bread does not fit into the spirit of the chapter at all, which looks ahead to life in the New Creation. That is, perhaps the most difficult part of the prayer: it asks us to be in the world but not of the world.

And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.

I believe that our greatest sins are of an environmental nature. We constantly sin against God’s creation, especially we people of the 21^st Century, where each time we drive a car, switch on a light, eat manufactured food, we increase the environmental debt. (It takes at least 10 fuel calories to produce one food calorie.)  At this stage of history we cannot ‘not’ sin in whatever we do. No holier than thou attitude is ever warranted. We can only expect to be forgiven when we at the same time forgive others of their sins.

Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one.

1 John 5: 19 tells us that “the whole world is under the control of the evil one.” It’s up to each one of us to determine where temptation lies. We all are touched by the power of the evil one.

I believe that Jesus gives us this prayer with the Kingdom in mind. When we recite it reflect on its real meaning while patiently waiting for Christ to bring his Kingdom: WHICH IS AT HAND! Hallelujah.

Next week a comparison between the 14^th and the 21^st century.

February 3 2012

HOW THEN SHALL WE LIVE?

One of the most e-mailed articles in the New York Times issue of January 28 had this opening paragraph:

“A couple of weeks ago, on a leisurely Sunday afternoon, 40 people gathered at a church in Washington Heights for a show-and-tell session sponsored by the New York City Preppers Network. One by one, they stood in front of the room and exhibited their “bug-out bags,” meticulously packed receptacles filled with equipment meant to see them through the collapse of civilization.”

I emphasize the last line: “To see them through the collapse of civilization. I guess I am not the only one who thinks that we live in the most perilous period of history.

The Bible, both in the Old- and the New Testament tells us to: “Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues, for her sins are piled up to heaven…”  (Revelation 18: 4-5).

It is my opinion that we no longer physically can opt out: it is too late for that. Still the question “How then shall we live?” must be asked.

My tentative answer comes in two parts.

(1) We should live so that we are mentally/spiritually prepared for the collapse of civilization, which is a prelude to the return of Christ, described in the three last chapters of Revelation, the very last Bible book. That, I think, is the easy part.

Christians always have looked forward to Christ’s return, reason why the entire New Testament is written with Jesus’s immediate return in mind. Acts 2 relates how the first Christians shared their possessions: they expected His return in a matter of weeks or months, not years.

There is a reason why Christ has taken his time: we had to discover the boundaries of creation: the boundaries of science – splitting the atom; the boundaries of nature – Climate Change; the boundaries of commerce and trading- how the lust for money is the root of all evil; the boundaries of space – satellites – and other boundaries, such as what to eat – vegetarian I believe, perhaps also the boundaries of organized religion and formal marriage. This knowledge and much more, is needed to avoid mistakes in the new creation where everything has to be perfect.

The Bible is not a history book: it is the book of salvation, but it gives hints of the future, such as in Matthew 24 and Revelation 16 and 17. These passages don’t paint a pretty picture. Already there are abundant signs of looming disasters, and judging by history and human nature, little or nothing will be done to prevent matters from getting out of hand. No wonder ‘collapsitarianism’ is all the rage.

When will Christ come back? A distant relative of mine – Harold Egbert Camping (My first name is Egbert) tried to fix the date, but we know that is impossible, yet Jesus gives numerous pointers:  Matthew 24 Verse 14 says that before Christ comes back, the ‘Gospel of the Kingdom’ has to go world-wide. Not just the Gospel. Jesus is very specific: The KINGDOM Gospel, which means the good news that the New Creation is about to come: here the World Wide Web is the most likely medium. Matthew 24: 15 gives another indication: the planetary plague of pollution: “So when you see standing in the holy place (that is God’s holy creation!), the abomination that causes desolation – yes, that refers to Climate Change and world-wide pollution- let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.”  The annotation ‘let the reader understand’, indicates that the warning applies to both the destruction of Jerusalem, which happened in A.D. 70, and the end-of-time, when Christ returns, preceded by enormous disasters, both natural and man-made.

That same recent New York Time article also said this:

To the unprepared, the very word “prepper” is likely to summon images of armed zealots hunkered down in bunkers awaiting the End of Days, but the reality, at least here in New York, is less dramatic. Local Preppers are doctors, doormen, charter school executives, subway conductors, advertising writers and happily married couples from the Bronx.”

There is indeed a wide-spread fear that there’s something seriously amiss in society. The “prepper” meeting took place in a church, but Christians are not mentioned among the “preppers”. Satan’s most successful deception has been that believers go to heaven even though the Bible never mentions this. It actually says the opposite: nobody can see or approach God. (1 Tim 6: 16.) It does state that God, the earth and the human race belong together forever. One of my friends once said: “God made no junk and will not junk what he has made.” That’s why the question: “How then shall we live?” is so important because the earth is our habitat for ever.

(2) My second part of “How then shall we live?” involves love. 1 Corinthians 13 is all about love. It says that if we don’t have love, even if we have faith to move mountains, it amounts to nothing. Traditionally we have applied this love to humans only, but that is not enough: our love has to be total, and must include everything God created. John 3: 16 very explicitly states that God’s love is in the first place aimed at his creation: “God so loved the cosmos.” We have to move away from ‘man’ centred loving, so-called anthropocentric love and embrace everything that lives. We need to practise the sort of reverence for all life found in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, as well as in the teachings of Saint Francis of Assisi and Albert Schweitzer. We need to learn to value other species for their own sakes, and not because we expect to use them for our own economic goals. That may be a lot more difficult, because for the last 500 years we have acted as if the earth’s resources were infinite, and have mercilessly exploited nature and animals, indeed ‘dominated’ the earth, rather than lovingly ‘serve’ her, as Genesis tells us.

Especially the tribal traditions of the native populations emphasize the importance of harmony with nature. Before we can enter the New Creation we must learn how to be one with creation. Here is a quote from “Land of the Spotted Eagle” by the Lakota (Western Sioux) chief, Standing Bear (ca. 1834-1908):

“The Lakota was a true lover of Nature. He loved the earth and all things of the earth… From Waken Tanka (the Great Spirit) there came a great unifying life force that flowered in and through all things, the flowers of the plains, blowing winds, rocks, trees, birds, animals, and was the same force that had been breathed into the first man. Thus all things were kindred and were brought together by the same Great Mystery….Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. For the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them. And so close did some of the Lakota come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue.”

I know this sounds difficult to achieve in today’s urbanized world, where everything is geared for profit, including all of nature. Yet, if I read my Bible correctly, then that sort of virgin world is our future, a place where everything is in harmony. Call it ‘paradise.’

How then shall we live?

My grandparents – born in the 1870’s – had no trouble with that question. Their lives were totally in tune with God’s earth. We now live in a time where we are harvesting what James Lovelock calls “The Revenge of Gaia.” A good example is the current practice of “fracking” and ‘oil at any cost’ which will only make nature’s problems worse.

Matthew 5: 48 combines the two parts of the answer. It says: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Greek word for ‘perfect’ is ‘teleios’, of which a better translation is ‘holistic’, embracing matters from beginning to end. Teleios comes from the Greek word ‘telos’ which we find back in ‘tele-phone’, tele-vision’, something we hear or see from ‘telos’, from ‘afar’. Telos means ‘end’. So when we are ‘teleios’ we keep the ‘end’ in mind, the New Creation, where everything will be perfect, Jesus message of The Gospel of the Kingdom. Only holistic living does that. It takes a lot of prayer and community support to even begin such a life style. Our aim is to become anthropoi teleioi people who live for the coming of the Kingdom.

My constant prayer is: Lord, have mercy on me, because I fall so short of these goals.

Next week: an exploration on “The Lord’s Prayer”. In January 4649 people visited www.hielema.ca/blog

Our World Today

January 14 2013

Young people pound Ponzi to pieces

In 1920, an Italian immigrant to the U.S. by the name of Charles Ponzi started a business that would buy postal reply coupons in Italy and exchange them for stamps in the U.S., taking advantage of significant price differences due to high postwar inflation. He attracted investors by promising extraordinarily high returns—50 percent within 45 days. He simply used the money of later investors to pay high returns to earlier investors, extracting huge profits along the way. By the time the fraud collapsed, investors had lost nearly $20 million, the equivalent of about $225 million in today’s dollars. Such frauds have been known as Ponzi schemes ever since.

The second-biggest Ponzi scheme is more recent. It was concocted by the New York hedge-fund manager Bernard Madoff, and collapsed in 2008 with losses of approximately $20 billion. But the biggest Ponzi scheme is still happily fooling all of us in the developed economies. We in the Western World, and Japan, have borrowed enormous funds from the future, basing it on a global growth and lots of young bodies. There are strong indications that future growth to fund today’s pensions and medical costs will never come. The young people are saying by their attitude: go and fly a kite; we will not cooperate; we refuse to produce enough children to fund your folly. In other words, young people are pounding Ponzi to pieces.

The result is that, financially all Western governments are in deep trouble. Debt has been accumulated at a frightful pace, and the Ponzi scheme that so well worked for Bismarck, is backfiring: there are not enough young people to pay for the old people’s benefits.

And these obligations are huge: income for life and free medical care, increasing exponentially for older people who become sick more often. The young people are in no position to pay for this: many good jobs have gone to low wage countries and robot technology is threatening to eliminate a lot of other jobs. Good bye Ponzi.

What is happening to these young people? There are two changes in their attitudes. One is religion. By and large young people are abandoning it, and with it they are also letting go of marriage. Joel Kotkin notes in a recent report titled “The Rise of Post-Familialism,” that one of the factors all major world religions have in common is that they make family and kinship central in their lives. Indeed, the more devout young people are, the higher their rates of marriage and the more children they have. Lack of religious values leads to secularism and agnosticism and forestalls family formation.

Then there is contraception which has abolished the old trinity of sex, marriage, and childbearing, and decoupled sex from baby making. And with that link broken, the connections between sex and marriage — and finally between marriage and childrearing — are severed, too.

And this trend line is heading higher. Divorce rates are stable, but cohabitation is now so common that it is crowding out matrimony as the formal form of family formation. Also increasing levels of education push the average age at first marriage higher.

The conclusion is simple. Times have changed. Two trends are irreversible: people live longer, which means immense outlay for medical purposes and pension benefits, while birth rates decline and so what happened in the past no longer works.

Add lower growth – or no growth at all – another leg on which society depended, and the haggling about money and taxes and benefits will only lead to utter stagnation. What cannot continue, will not continue. Young people sense this. They sense a future with little prospect and so intuitively refrain from commitments, such as marriage and childbearing.

Next week’s column will be based on Revelation 22: 2: “The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

JANUARY 7 2013

Deus ex machina; pecunia ex machina.

A peculiar title: all Latin. If you look a little closer you’ll recognize a few words, such as deus – god – and ex- from or out of- and machina, our word for machine. Pecunia may not be so familiar.  It simply means money. Pecunia ex machina, means something like an ATM Automatic Teller Machine, but for banks only: free money, but not really. More about that later.

First about the Deus ex machina.

It literally means God out of the machine. It comes from ancient drama where sometimes a god was needed, so the actors had a god figure suspended above their heads and some stage hand would lower it whenever a god was called for. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian, put to death by Hitler weeks before World War II ended, used Deus ex Machina, as an example of the sort of god that is needed only when special circumstances require his presence, which actually is the way Christianity in general uses God. When all goes well, we can do without him, but when sickness strikes or death or unemployment, we want God there to heal our cancers or avoid death or get us a job.  For the rest, we don’t need him.

Bonhoeffer, while in prison in 1944, waiting to be hanged, writes that usually ‘ religion’ offers only an escapist flight from the real world, and has pushed God to the boundaries of faith, available on call to answer prayers of deliverance and of favour. That sort of act is always partial, while ‘faith’ is something whole, involving all of human life. Jesus calls a person not to a bit of religion, but to life and that to the full.

The famous Dr. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare expert bar none, writes in his “the American Religion” that America is very religious, but of a sort that has ceased to be Christian. His central point is that Gnosticism rules the church, evident in the belief that upon death we go to heaven, discarding the earth is useless and even evil. That’s why the ‘religious right’ doesn’t care for the environment, including Stephen Harper, Canada’s benevolent dictator- Prime Minister. I remember Billy Graham being interviewed on CNN – when I still had television – and a man by the name of King asked him: “where will you go when you die?” Billy’s answer was “Jesus will take me by the hand and bring me to God,” in spite of Paul writing that God lives in inapproachable light, that nobody can see him and nobody has seen him. Apparently the most celebrated “Christian” in the world, is so caught up in the gnostic heresy, separating earth from heaven, that he reads the bible totally with unchristian eyes. Bonhoeffer calls such a belief ‘pious Christian secularism.’ Bonhoeffer also writes; “This is not the godlessness of atheism or cultural bolshevism, but Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth.”  He says that God, the human race and the earth are one. If we renounce the earth – by living recklessly with God’s beloved earth- then we cease to be Christian. After all the most famous text in the bible is John 3: 16, “God so loved the cosmos, our earth, that he allowed his son to be put to death as ransom for  gaining the earth back from the Satan who had acquired it through our sinful action.” Don’t fall for Deus ex Machina.

Pecunia ex machina.

A similar thing is happening with money. It used to be that money had an intrinsic value, was backed up by gold or some other value, such as barter, by which articles of identical value are exchanged. I remember my paternal grandfather, a grocer, making the rounds with his horse and buggy to my maternal grandparents, farmers, and bartering eggs for sugar and coffee and tea. Believe me: that will happen again. In Greece where there is a shortage of Euros, barter is now normal.

Just as God is created ‘ex machina’, so money today too is created out of nothing. This is called ‘quantitative easing’ or simply “QE”. The Washington-based Federal Reserve Bank headed by Ben Bernanke creates money “ex nihilo” out of nothing, as if he were God, $85 billion each month, until unemployment is down to 6.5%. And where do these trillions of dollars go? They go to the bankers who were responsible for the shortfall.

In the Matthew 18 Jesus tells a parable about a man who owed the king 10,000 talents – something like $500 billion. After much pleading the king forgives him this debt, but – here I quote the Bible –“But when the servant went out, he met a man who owed him 100 denarii – perhaps a small mortgage – and refused to hear his pleading and threw him in prison.” When the king heard how ungrateful this banker had been, he reneged on wiping out his $500 billion, and he got prison too.

This biblical parable is coming true today: the government gives the banks Trillions of dollars and the banks refuse to forgive the millions of ‘under water’ mortgages. There nobody goes to prison, reason why this is going to backfire on the financial institutions. Believe me. This ‘pecunia ex machina’ will end badly as it did in the Jesus’ parable.

Our debt levels, especially in the US, Europe and Japan, are higher than they’ve been at any point in human history. All we’ve done now for the last decade is trust a band of bankers and shady officials to fix the problems they themselves caused in the first place: appointing foxes to guard the chicken coop.

Trusting a ‘deus ex machina’ leads to a false religion. Putting our trust in pecunia ex machina’ reflects the false foundation of our economic life.

A true God requires total devotion, all the time. True money must be backed by genuine collateral. Both deus ex machina and pecunia ex machina are based on false assumptions and signal the end of much of what we call organized religion and capitalistic society.

New columns published every Monday morning.