Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

January 2012.

OUR WORLD TODAY

It’s now well into 2012. Some people associate the year 2012 with disaster, thanks to the movie by that name, which in 2009, predicted that this year the earth would be struck by calamities so immense that only a few would survive.  However, just as George Orwell’s prophesies for the book 1984 – written in 1949 – did not come to pass in that year, so 2012 will not see the world turn upside down, even though there are signs that not all is well in the Western world.

Perhaps a phenomenon called “collective consciousness” might play a role: if enough people believe that something disastrous will happen, it just might, no doubt influenced by the bad news out there. Just look at the monetary system: it’s not too far-fetched to believe that the entire banking business might collapse someday. John Kenneth Galbraith, in his The Great Crash 1929, called the chapter preceding THE CRASH “The Twilight of Illusion.”  To me it seems that today we live not in the twilight, but in the dark night of illusion, brought on by our pious faith in perpetual progress, the ‘unknown known’ which simply ignores the everyday realities of diminishing returns and limits to growth, and by our stubborn belief that the future will always be better than the past. That’s why we allowed trillion dollar deficits, and also convinced ourselves that our pollution problems would be solved with improved technology, another illusion, that false belief which we intuitively accept as true. Curing debt with more debt and treating pollution – caused by technology – with more of the same, reminds me of Matthew 12 where Jesus was accused of driving out demons in the name of the prince of demons.

As we go deeper into the teenage years of this century, one thing is sure: it will be a decade of deleveraging: we’re in for at least 10 years of paying off over-due bills, pushed aside, waiting for economic growth that refuses to come.  Debts are always paid, either through inflation, with money of less value – the more likely scenario – or deflation, lower prices and wages, both signaling hardship. Paying for our climate overshoot will result in more floods, more ice storms, more tree-breaking winds, more drought and failed crops, increasing living costs everywhere.

Sorry, young people, just as the Roman Catholic Church keeps on apologizing for sexual crimes, we, older people, must keep on saying sorry for leaving you with an immense mess: a world changed beyond recognition, in which species disappear at a rate 1000 times faster than before, and in which everything we’ve taught you – based on our life style – is vanishing right before your eyes. We still piously sing “This is our Father’s World”, but we, at best, have treated his world with callous indifference. Don’t repeat our mistakes. Don’t make money your goal. Instead handle our living planet with the reverence it deserves.

Keep healthy habits: run, walk, bike, ski. Not for nothing the bible emphasizes that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. I know you young can take a lot of abuse, but there always is a price to pay. Poor diets, watching too much TV, sitting too long in front of a computer screen, may not kill you, but will lead to decades of chronic disease: prevention is better than curing, especially as future health-care dollars will become far less plentiful. Choose a mate with extreme care and seek to be part of a viable community.

Don’t rush into anything. Christians have eternal life, and, as Revelation 14:13 says “Your deeds will follow you in the New Creation.” So investigate everything, and discover what has lasting value. Remember Creation is God’s primary word. The best way to love God is to love creation. Treat her with all the care you can muster, for our health depends on her health. Oil-based enterprise is no longer the answer because of its toxicity. Renewal is the key, which is also the key ingredient of the New Creation.

Happiness is to be “in the Lord.” It means to be consciously busy to seek the best for people and the earth. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in Creation and Fall “Without God, without our brother and sister, we lose the earth (because)… God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.”

We are in the earth, of the earth. The sum total of being a creature is that we completely belong to this world, because it bears us, it nurtures us and embraces us. Any heaven-oriented teaching is from the devil, because it denies God’s very Word of creation.

Bert Hielema lives in rural Tweed, Ontario where he tries to practise what he preaches of which he does too much.

DECEMBER 2011

OUR WORLD TODAY

Am I a heretic?

I am always thinking. Often I muse on bible passages that puzzle me, which has given me the incentive to slowly change my focus from Scriptures alone to combining it with the Created word, a fusing of Spirit–inspired writings with God’s direct revelation in creation. Not surprisingly this has led to different ideas.

It all started with that famous text “God loves the world, the cosmos, so much that he offers his only begotten son as a ransom to wrest it out of the grip of the Great Deceiver”. In the concept of cosmos I include everything we can see, probe, think, paint, compose in music or prose or poetry, build theories upon and write philosophical treatises about.

For me that definition of cosmos and the coming of the cosmic Kingdom are at the core of my quest for salvation. For that end God has given the Scriptures to provide us with “a lamp for our feet and a light for our path” (Psalm 119:105) in our pilgrimage from where we are to the coming Kingdom. Actually Romans 1:20 suggests to me that even without Christ and the Bible, a person on Judgement Day, just by seeing creation as a miracle and honouring its maker, might plead that as sufficient ground for salvation, because billions never have heard true gospel preaching, and a gracious God will make allowances for that.

Colossians 1:15-20 is for me one of the most poignant passages of Scripture, because it described that Jesus sees Himself as the first-born of the entire creation. First-born means that He was indeed the first human being and existed before anything else. He almost always calls Himself “the Son of Man”, Humanity Personified. In His very humanness, in His ultimate loving kinship with all his fellow creatures, Jesus is, simultaneously, the image of the invisible God. He makes God’s love visible so that we can fully experience this love. We, women and men, are made “in his image”: we physically look like Jesus, who, as God, has entered into His creation, and so affirms that God, we and the earth belong together. Forever.

As the first human creature ever He created the entire cosmos, all that lives, moves and has its being. He created this by Him and for Him. That to me explains why we, his brothers and sisters, his look-alikes, are also so immensely creative, evident in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Hildegard van Bingen, Rembrandt, Bach, van Gogh,  as well as such eminent scholars as Luther, Calvin, Bonhoeffer, Bavinck, Louise Pasteur, Barbara W. Tuchman, Einstein, and such technical giants as Steve Jobs.

Jesus has gone for me and for his creation through death, where He too has been the first, because nothing in my life happens which He Himself has not first experienced: pain, loneliness, sickness, deep sorrow, and even my death. God, for my salvation, has deemed it necessary that in the life of the man Jesus his total fullness is present, so that we too and everything else, have been reconciled, have been set aright. In his glorified human existence he is our Mediator with the Father. That’s how I read Colossians 1:15-20.

I believe that we are under-selling ourselves, a typical Calvinistic trait. After all Psalm 8 calls us “little less than a god,” and Psalm 82:6 suggest that “You are gods, and all of you children of the Most High.”

Since Jesus created it all, any act to harm creation is an assault on the holiness of Jesus. I see The Lord’s Prayer as an eschatological instrument, centering on The Kingdom – the New Creation – to Come. Therefore to “Forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors,” must be seen in that light as well, asking Jesus to be merciful when we sin against God’s beloved creation, harm its holiness, and asking us not to point fingers to others who do the same.

I also see Revelation 22:2 that way. The statement that “The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations”, has long been a puzzle to me. Global Warming is a direct result of our machinery spewing Carbon Dioxide. The leaves of the tree are the healing agents there. Creation has her own mechanism for restoration, now overwhelmed by the immense amounts of man-made Green House Gases. Once the carbon-based poisons are eliminated – which will be in the New Creation – the leaves of the trees will do the rest.

At Christmas we celebrate Christ’ second birth: His first-birth took place ‘in the beginning.’

Is this comprehensive approach to the gospel really a heresy?

Bert’s new books, The Shortest Day, and Day without End, are available by contacting Bert@hielema.ca

NOVEMBER 2010

Our World today

This is a good news column. World-wide surveys indicate that Canada is the best country to live in, and that people in the Netherlands are the happiest. Assuming that this wellbeing also applies to the Dutch now living in Canada, they and their offspring enjoy the best of all worlds. The news cannot be better.

We all know that we live on perilous planet, in a very worried world. In response people across the globe demonstrate, fed up with governments bailing out the bankers at their expense: that too is good news.

Paul Gilding, the Australian environmentalist and author of The Great Disruption argues that these public protests are signs that the current growth-obsessed capitalist system is reaching its financial and ecological limits. Says he: “I look at the world as an integrated system, so I don’t see these protests, or the debt crisis, or inequality, or the economy, or the climate going weird, in isolation — I see our system in the painful process of breaking down,” which is what he means by The Great Disruption.

In essence he believes that our blind faith in economic growth, our ineffective democracy, our overloading of planet earth is really a form of global suicide.

Recent events in the world of money – the debt crises in Greece, Italy and Spain come to mind – remind me of the kid in the fairy story who cries out what everyone knows but is afraid to say: “the emperor has no clothes”. In other words: capitalism is counterfeit.

Here’s why. For decades we’ve been told that global market capitalism benefits all. The reasoning is something like this: “in spite of the rich getting richer, in spite of corporations focusing solely on profit, in spite of pollution going un-priced and unchecked, we all would be better off. Wealth might not be equally distributed, but the poor would become less poor, those who work hard would get jobs, those who study diligently would get better positions and we’ll have enough wealth to fix the environment.” That capitalistic promise is now being exposed as fraud. That is good news.

Signs are that we could be facing a new depression. If it does, it could well be worse than the dirty Thirties. David Leonhardt in The New York Times explains that underneath the misery of the Great Depression, the United States economy was quietly making enormous strides during the 1930s. Television and nylon stockings were invented. Refrigerators and washing machines turned into mass-market products. Railroads became faster and roads smoother and wider. As the economic historian Alexander J. Field has said, the 1930s constituted ‘the most technologically progressive decade of the century.’

True, the 1930s was a tough time to make a living, with no unemployment insurance, no pensions, but, since society then still was mostly rural-based, nobody went hungry. Technology invented then would later spread world-wide and would power the post-WWII consumer boom.

We now are mostly city-dwellers, always just three days away from starvation, burdened by mega debt, saddled with political stagnation, aging populations, climate problems, continuous financial crises, just to name the most obvious. All this suggests that if our world today – North America and Europe- suffers a severe economic downturn, depression-like destitution will be far more devastating.

Frankly I see us facing a wall, the end of the future, the end of progress and growth, in essence the end of history, because today, apart from the ultra-vulnerable computer structure, there’s really nothing new on the horizon, climate change being the exception.  Examples: Steve Jobs is dead. Space travel has stopped. The Concorde, the ultimate in air transport – 3 hours from Paris or London to New York or Washington – has been scrapped. Nixon, 40 years ago, promised that the war on Cancer would be won. Today not only cancer, but also obesity, Alzheimer’s and diabetes are rampant. Nuclear energy was touted as too cheap to measure: today electricity rates in Ontario have skyrocketed. Average income, in constant dollars, is less now than decades ago. Nothing has really improved in the last thirty years, not health care, not education, not air travel, not work opportunity. Efforts to combat Climate Change have virtually been abandoned. The fate of the Euro is still an enigma and the US Dollar is still in the doldrums, amplifying monetary mayhem. Since our entire system depends on progress, stagnation signals collapse.

To me these are the signs of the fig-tree (Matt 24:32), all pointing to end-times, which means that we have nothing but joy to look forward to: the return of the Lord, and the coming of his glorious kingdom. That is the real Good News!

Bert Hielema daily prays for that Kingdom to come, a topic of his two new books, The Shortest Day and Day without End, available by e-mailing bert@hielema.ca.

October 2011

What makes education Christian?

Tomorrow will not be like yesterday. Today is already different, but

tomorrow, the second decade of the year 2000, will be like no other. Here’s

one reason. This week we ‘celebrate’ the arrival of earth-inhabitant number

7 billion.

When I was born in 1928, the world had 2 billion people, basically all

environmentally friendly. My maternal grandfather farmed with a

horse, 20 cows, a few pigs and a flock of free- running chickens. My paternal

grandfather, a grocer, came calling once a week with his horse-drawn two-

wheeled cart to barter coffee, tea or sugar for eggs. Then self-sufficiency

was primary for most.  That’s no longer true.

Here’s the real reason. Tomorrow’s peak generation is basically oil-dependent, but faces a world where everything is past-peak: past oil-peak, past food-peak, past money-peak. That means people in school today will face a world with negative growth, in addition to horrific hurricanes, dire drought, terrible typhoons, horrendous heat and destructive downpours, according to Bill McKibben.

In his Eaarth he writes: “We have waited too long to stop the advance of global warming, and massive change is not only unavoidable but already on the way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways no human has ever seen. We have created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable, but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth.”

McKibben shows that we can no longer rely on the false promise of endless growth; our hope depends on building the kind of society and economy that can concentrate on essentials, and create communities that will be able to withstand the pains of a planet perilously out of balance.

More than ever, Christian teaching should be based on article 1 of the Belgic

Confession, which answers the question, ‘how we know God’, with:

“First by the creation, preservation and government of the universe, since that universe is like a most elegant 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: all these things are enough to convict men and leave them without excuse.”

Getting to know creation, things visible and invisible as outlined in Colossians 1:15-20, and perceiving the current forces endangering it, are the foremost tasks of Christian ministries. An institution is truly Christian when the result is a lifestyle that can seamlessly be continued in the New Creation, the arrival of a renewed and purified earth.

Christians confess that God created the earth ‘in his name.’ That makes the earth holy. God has given his holy creation to us not as caretakers, not as stewards, but as owners. Psalm 115:16 says: “The highest heaven belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to humankind.”

This gift is irrevocable. God will not renege on his generous donation: we are one with the earth: our world today is our world forever. Any ‘heaven’ teaching detracts from the real purpose of Christianity.

Here is something to ponder. In Genesis 2:15 the Lord put Adam and Eve- that is you and me – in the garden ‘to work it and take care of it.’ When Joshua, who succeeded Moses as Israel’s leader, gave his farewell address to his nation, he pledged that “he and his household will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).  I have been told by good authority that Joshua used the same verb of “serving the Lord” as God asked humanity “to take care of creation”, indicating that to work the garden (of the earth), to take care of it, and serving the Lord are one and the same thing.

Now, more than ever before in history, God wants to prepare us for “the new creation to come.” The word Education comes from the Latin verb e-ducere, which means to draw out and to bring up. To lead students toward an out-dated situation, a state belonging to a prior generation, is a waste of brain-power and money, and will only cause them to become disillusioned. One of the ten commandments is: “You shall not give false testimony,” which we daily do because our polluting oil-based way of life is a distortion of the Truth.

A teacher once told me that to confront students with such a radical picture will only make them depressed. However, the truth is never depressing: it will set us free. That is what Christianity-church-school-family-society- is all about: to set us free, and to face the future with an eye on Jesus, who will guide us no matter what.

Bert Hielema lives amidst trees and fields, in Eastern Ontario, and can be reached at bert@hielema.ca

SEPTEMBER 2011

NOT A RE-CESSION, BUT A RE-SETTING?

It’s been a crazy summer in our world today, the exception being right here where I live. Our garden had its rains in time, our three apple trees were loaded with fruit: an early one with a delicious species, good for eating and processing, a later one to provide us with “An (organic) apple per day to keep the doctor away”, and even my Northern Spy variety has a few dozen. A friend gave me a different kind of raspberries, which bore abundantly, so we ate hundreds of them, and froze even more; also carrots galore, and red beets, tomatoes, potatoes, cabbages and kale, of course. Each day we thank the Lord for his bounties.

However, these ideal conditions did not extend to the economy. Last month The Wall Street Journal reported that “Forty years ago today, US President Richard Nixon closed the gold window and ushered in, for the first time in human history, a global system of unconstrained paper money under full control of the state.”

Now four decades later this is no longer true. Yes, there still is an unconstrained supply of money, but the states, Germany, France, the USA, have lost control over the Euro and the dollar, and trying, in vain, to regain that authority. Gold has gone hyperbolic.

It’s a crazy world out there. I wonder how many of the devout Christians who back the Republican Party, for example, realize that its current approach to social welfare issues is identical to the one presented by Anton Szandor LaVey in The Satanic Bible. It may seem odd that believers in a faith where Christ told one of his followers to give all he had to the poor, now by and large support a party that’s telling America to give all it has to the rich. That’s what you get when most people who claim they believe in the Bible have never actually read more than a verse here and there.

When you read this column, Obama has given an important speech on the economy. Just as the Canadian Finance Minister talked about rekindling economic growth, so, I am sure, the US president will sing that same tune: that’s the only song politicians know. The false note in all this is that perpetual growth is impossible. Yet this faith persists because people in general are deaf to any truth that will harm their political or financial fortune or religious comfort.

Here’s an example: all signs point to the dawning of a new era, one of ‘no growth’ which also might spell the end of The Age of Money, but nobody is admitting this. Already perilous instability is the norm, with the market up and down like a yoyo, and gold soaring.

Reality is that money has become to us as the potato was to Ireland in the 1840s. Then blight caused starvation. Now lack of jobs, deflation, the weather, does the same. Greed is the cause. It has always been the great destroyer. Columbus sucked a thousand years of gold from the Caribbean in two or three years, and then extinguished all its human life. Jesus was a victim of greed. Now all the large land and sea animals of the earth, and most of its birds, are under the sentence of extinction. They are being killed not by the rifle, but by a more lethal invention, money and its insatiable quest for more.
The Bible tells us that greed is the root of all evil. In my youth there was a song Money is the root of all evil, take it away. That’s exactly what’s happening. Money is melting away like the Arctic. Each time a home owner goes bankrupt, (there are millions of households with mortgages larger than their value) money evaporates, vanishes like a puff of smoke. Bank shares in the US and Europe have dropped by more than 80% in the last few years. This plummeting represents the dwindling into nothingness of the so-called fiat money created when Nixon went off the gold standard. Now all those virtual money entries, fashioned by a flick of the finger on a computer screen, are being deleted. The current financial system needs growth, and without economic growth it will collapse from debt defaults.

I believe what we are facing is not another economic recession, but a re-setting of the economy. Just as in a few weeks we will re-set the clock to Daylight Saving Time, in the next few  years the economy will re-set itself. Too long we have been in an overdraft position, both environmentally and economically. It’s pay-back time, both principal and interest. This means that we will subjected to the most drastic adjustment humanity has ever faced. Brace yourself for bad times.

Bert Hielema, as a commercial real estate appraiser, wrote long narrative valuation reports which always included a section on future economic conditions. His territory covered an area from Picton to the Algonquin, from Peterborough to Perth.

August 2011

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

I have some bad habits – of which I will name one later – and some good one, such as biking or running an average of 10 km every week day, and also, for the last 26 years, writing a daily meditation of some 400 words from Monday through Saturday and 800 on Sundays, based on texts from the lectionary, the list of pre-selected bible readings. Each fall I buy 2 copies – my wife does it too – of Journeying Through the Days for the next year, published by the Upper Room Books in Nashville. These volumes are beautifully illustrated, each page divided into two open sections, headed by a bible text, while Sundays occupy a full empty page except for the text and the lectionary readings for the ensuing week. That custom, more than anything else in my life, has influenced my thinking.

A few weeks ago my meditation was centred on Psalm 139, our wedding psalm 58 years ago, and specifically its very last words: “Lead me in the way everlasting.” I can’t remember what these words meant to me in 1953, but now I see it as a prayer to direct me on the road to the new creation, asking for insight how I, in our world today, must proceed from here to eternity. A few days prior to that, the Journal had called my attention to Romans 8, asking me to share in God’s suffering if I want to share in his glory.

I see a definite connection between suffering and the road to the new creation. We all know John 3:16 “God so loved the world,” which is the very basis of Christianity. By loving living nature we express our love for all our neighbours, be they human, plants, air, water, for the simple reason that when we pollute we harm these all.

Suppose that Rembrandt, after having sold his most famous creation, the Nachtwacht, depicting the elite of Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age, discovered that the new owner not only changed the faces but also deleted some, and deformed others, grossly mutilating the entire picture. That would have been a source of great aggravation for Rembrandt van Rijn.

Actually we daily do this to creation, causing immense suffering to Jesus. Because I love Jesus, I, on my journey to eternity – which I believe to be the New Creation – suffer with Jesus because I live in a society where I am forced to harm creation. I suffer additional pain because of the failure of the church, at least the one I attend, to recognize the pain of creation. Yet we all know that the cosmos Jesus so loves so much, is now groaning, as in pains of childbirth (Romans 8:22).

In that regard Christianity is not different from Islam. A friend sent me an article from the Jakarta Post, dealing with (Islam) preachers and the environment. Here is a quote: “However, not only do most preachers undermine life in this world — which is indeed temporary — compared to the eternal world after life, they also ridiculed science, logic and reason. On the pulpits, many preachers challenged scientific discoveries, which, according to their belief, were untenable. They then called upon the audience to return to “piety” and religious dogma. They stressed that human reasoning can never surpass religion.”

And this brings me to American politics, a nation where the word ‘God’ is (ab)used more than anywhere else in the world. I find it utterly depressing when, to name one example, Sarah Palin, riding on a motorcycle, exclaimed triumphantly that ‘she loved the emissions,” and advocates ‘drill baby, drill’. Michelle Bachmann, another presidential hopeful, is a Rushdoony disciple, and expressed agreement with him when he said that God in His law requires the death penalty for homosexuals. R.J. Rushdoony, a so-called Reconstructionist theologian, believes that the Mosaic laws must be implemented today, a statement resonating in the US Tea-party movement. This man also said that “Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed to spiritual aristocracy.” That’s why we hear that “The state is a bankrupt institution. The only alternative to this bankrupt ‘humanistic’ system is a God-centered government.” Blame the debt crisis on this as well.

In our world today Jesus is the forgotten item. The New Testament and freedom that is in Christ is pushed away, leaving a vengeful God rather than an understanding Jesus. Whenever I see the Pope or the High Anglican clergy in their full regalia I see Aaron and the Temple, and the Old Testament rules and regulations, and I cringe.

We all, without exception, are on the way from Here to Eternity. Only when we suffer because of Climate stress, misguided politicians, people-pleasing preachers and reality denying consumers, can we be fully assured that the crown of glory awaits us (Romans 8:17).

One of Bert Hielema’s bad habits is that he preaches too much in his columns. Complaints to bert@hielema.ca