Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

INTRODUCTION

 In this book I am quite critical of the instituted church. I believe I can do this because I love the Church. Frankly, if I did not love it, if I were indifferent to its fate, then I would not have gone to the trouble to devote so much time and energy to write an entire book about the church, analyzing its current state, pointing out where it has gone wrong, and suggesting a possible new way to bring the gospel to the world so desperately in need of Good News.

I always try to follow the Scriptures, of which one text tells me that, when I speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15) we will in all things (ta panta) grow up. One of my main points is that the church has failed to consider the “all things” angle. In my book ‘all things’ means exactly that: not only us, the human race, but everything the Lord has created.

 I realize that some people will say that I am too blunt, that my treatment has been too harsh, my words too judging, my suggestions too utopian, and there is some truth to that. However, I believe that it is too late in history to beat around the bush, to pull my punches, to talk in veiled language, and hint at matters rather than call a spade a spade.

I take my cue from Jesus who was very outspoken when it came to his mission, calling the then church leaders all sorts of names. I have been much more gracious there, because I realize that they are simply repeating what they have been taught in their seminaries.

I very much emphasize that we live in the Last Days and that now Satan, God’s great adversary calls the tune, by and large.

I do hope that where I have gone wrong in my reasoning, people will correct me, also speaking the truth, as they see it, in love.

 I am not a theologian. By the grace of God I started 24 years ago writing a daily meditation based on the lectionary, in a journal published by The Upper Room in Nashville, Tenn. In all these years I have never missed one day, writing about 400 words on weekdays and 800 on Sundays. There I learned about Scripture and about myself in a way not possible by any other means.

Dated May 2009,                                         Tweed, Ontario.

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 25

How then shall we live? (Continued)

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)

The above text is not an isolated passage of Scripture. The same plea can be found in Isaiah 52:11, where this prophet makes an identical entreaty when he tells the people of Israel to “Depart, depart, go out from there!” That ‘there’ is idol worship, is the defiling of God’s name, which, in current language means to stop any further polluting of the earth, the creation which carries God’s name. Polluting is like defacing the Mona Lisa, but then on a universal scale. That text is preceded by the beautiful words depicting the proclamation of the New Creation, “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!” That captures the new mission of the church, the Church in Flux.

Jeremiah too tells us to get out, but in starker terms. In Jeremiah 51:45 he foresees the present time, when (verse 44) “The nations will no longer stream to him. And the walls of Babylon will fall. (45) Come out of her my people! Run for your lives! Run from the fierce anger of the Lord.” He had made that call before in the same chapter (verse 6) and justifies this sudden departure in verse 9: “We would have healed Babylon (would have liked to convert the entire world, impossible now, as related in the parable of the ten bridesmaids) but she cannot be healed; let us leave her and each go to his own land, for her judgment reaches to the skies, it rises as high as the clouds.”

What does all this mean for us today? Does this mean that I have to go back to the land where I was born? No. it means that “in the House of the Lord are many mansions” which means that we, each in our own way, must prepare for the Kingdom, God’s new creation, to come, which goes back to the original question “How then shall we live?”

In earlier chapters I have outlined the Covenant, and have repeatedly referred back to that concept.

In that covenant that God made with his people he, in unambiguous terms, made him self equal to us, by offering a partnership, where God would share all he had with us if we were to share all we had with him. What God expects us to do, as our part of the Covenant is quite concisely captured by Micah (6:8) where it says, “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

It’s as simple as that, except that we have forgotten that to act justly applies to all God’s work, trees, soil, air, fish, animals, people. And to love mercy means to treat animals as our neighbors, while to walk humbly means to continually praise God for the gift of Creation.

Now, as the prophets have written, God’s judgment reaches to the skies, her sins are piled up to the heavens, an eerie prophecy of air pollution and Global Warming.

Of course we can’t get out of this world. As the laws of ecology state: nothing disappears, as everything is connected to everything else, as everything must go somewhere. We too are finding out that nature knows best and that there is a price to pay for everything as there is no free lunch.  In simple terms this indicates that we cannot disassociate ourselves from this world and its problems. But we must somehow cut the ties with the system that is in charge, a system that is ruining God’s world. Perhaps we can call it Capitalism, which pursues ‘creative destruction’ even though Communism has been equally destructive and Socialism too has been a willing partner in pursuing Economic Growth: all have stolen from creation to pursue happiness, which was seen as gathering as many toys as possible without regard for the environmental consequences. As Herman Daly in his book Beyond Growth has argued “We should strive for sufficient capital wealth, efficiently maintained and allocated and equitably distributed, for the maximum number of people that can be sustained over time under these conditions.”(p. 220).

There is an economist speaking in his special jargon. I should note that the goal is not maximum per capita wealth but ‘sufficient’ for a good life, over time’, always taking in consideration not only the well-being of the human race- which until now has been the only concern of the vote-buying officials-  but acting so that our actions benefit all of cosmos. As I have argued, we, as the human race and the land are engaged to be married. As soon as Christ returns, the marriage ceremony will take place.

I earlier have shown, referring to Job, who was converted from an ego-centered fellow to a eco-centered man, and in the parable of the 10 bridesmaids, that there is more to being a Christ-follower than going through a prescribed routine. We have to think outside the box and that means to think outside the contours of organized religion. “Come out of it” doesn’t mean to leave the church just as it doesn’t mean that we must leave the world – which is impossible anyway – but it does mean that we free ourselves from the constraints the organized systems place on us.

All along I have hinted, perhaps even more than that, have suggested that we must go back to house churches. That is not good enough in this day and age. Life is more than church. Life is religion. This means that our next step is much more radical than meeting at a certain place, where a limited number of people pray, sing, read scripture and share insights.

We must go beyond that, and do so in various ways. E.F.Schumacher, in his Small is Beautiful wrote already in 1973 that “the modern industrial system consumes the very basis on which it has been erected…. lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.”  He already then recommended that a new life-style is needed with new methods of production and new patterns of consumption. He approvingly quotes Thomas Aquinas who defined a human being as a person with brains and hands, enjoying nothing more than to be creatively, usefully, productively engaged with both his hands and his brains, and recommends exactly a full-orbed life. He points out that “rather less than one-sixth of the total population is engaged in actual production. With a fully employed person, allowing for holidays, sickness and other absence, spending about one fifth of his total time on his job, it follows that the proportion of “total social time” spent on actual production is roughly, one-fifth of one-third of one-half = 3.5 %. The other 96.5 % of total social time is used in other ways, including sleeping, eating, doing jobs that are not directly productive.” He suggests to give ourselves a goal to increase productive time six-fold to 20 % in which to actually produce things, employing hands and brains. He writes,” Think of the therapy of real work; think of its educational value.”

That sort of successful, creative, life-enhancing activity took place in the Celtic Christian Communities which Ian Bradley describes in the book by that name. Under the heading of “Colonies of Heaven – the Monastic Model”, the title Ian Bradley gave to these communities, he calls them “perhaps the most striking feature of Celtic Christianity.” Writes he: “For Christians in the British Isles between the fifth and the eleventh centuries, the monastery rather than the parish church was the primary focus for worship.”(p. 2)  This sort of monastery was not a monkish affair, but involves entire families, married, single, men, women, married priests and single clergy as well.

In the preceding chapters I have argued against heaven in no uncertain terms. Thus to name such communities today ‘Colonies of Heaven’ is inappropriate. Our emphasis should be on preserving the earth: calling them New Creation Colonies would be a better designation, even though the name sounds somewhat pretentious.

As always, matters are open to experimentation. To quote Ian Bradley again: “To establish places on earth which speak of Heaven [- or, in our context, of a Renewed Earth -] is certainly fundamental to the Christian faith and practice in the British Isles in the so-called Dark Ages [the 6-11^th Century] …. It is most definitely a vision that we need to recapture if Christianity is to shine again in our own perhaps even darker age.” (pp. x, xi)

In short, I have related what the Bible says about the Christian life in particular, how it has to re-focus on living the New Life on a New Earth, in a world now increasingly threatened by irreversible destruction. I also have stated that today our world is basically ruled by God’s great Adversary, the Satan, whose only aim is to destroy God’s world, a peril not at all recognized by ecclesiastical institutions which have closed their eyes to present-day dangers and only see an escape to heaven as the way out. Seeing the situation in this light, I have argued that it is imperative in these last days to witness of Christ’s impending return in ways that try to simulate the New Future.

How this should be implemented cannot be prescribed in any detail, as “there are many mansions in God’s house” which suggests that there are multiple ways to play with this concept. It is well-known that the Lord delights in variety: not one of the untold billions of people who ever lived was ever precisely identical, not even identical twins. Not one leaf is exactly the same as another, not even one snow flake, so variety is the spice of life, provided that the basic principles of glorifying God in all our works remain its foundation.

As usual the world is already busy with this concept. “Transition” is the new name of the game, where the buzz word is resilience, with its implications of being skilled, being ready, being confident, and therefore being optimistic about The Day After Tomorrow. We know that The Day after Tomorrow is when the Lord returns. The world sees Transition as the new concept of green and sustainable and eco-once hot, now almost clichés, and subject to corruption by the market. A resilient person is one who can adapt to new circumstances.

Transition was founded by Rob Hopkins, an English academic, who wrote in his Transition Handbook that he has “found a way for people worried about an environmental collapse to invest their efforts in ongoing collective action that ends up looking more like a party than a protest march.”

He hits the right note there, as I have described in my book From Eternity to Here, a Bible-Fiction Tale. Hopkins showed his students The End of Suburbia and they all got supremely depressed, before resiliently bouncing back to found Transition! In short, the film is about how in 1956, a geologist named M. King Hubbert, using a bell curve to chart the world’s petroleum reserves, predicted that global oil production would peak sometime around the year 2000 and then decline rapidly. Energy companies, government officials, academics, and environmentalists disagree on whether the peak has happened, or whether it’s five, 10, or 20 years down the pike. It’s impossible to know a precise date, because between half and two thirds of the world’s oil is in the Middle East, and those nations treat information about their reserves as if they were state secrets. However, since 2005, world oil production has not increased, even though global demand continued to rise until the recent recession.

The descending slope of Hubbert’s bell curve is very steep, so if oil sources are depleting, the stuff will stop flowing faster than we can kick our addiction. Given that our electricity, our transportation, and most of our goods depend on oil, we’re pretty screwed.

This is where Transition taps in. The movement offers a framework for planning an orderly and even a “prosperous way down” the curve, to quote a book well known among Peak Oilers, to a world with less oil. Transition is about communities-in particular “re-localizing” them, and this you probably know something about: eating local and buying local, but also manufacturing local. It’s also about “re-skilling”-learning to do the things our great-grandparents knew how to do, such as growing food and building things. Most importantly, Transition is about resiliency, or, as Hopkins says in his book, “a culture based on its ability to function indefinitely and to live within its limits, and to be able to thrive for having done so.”

So it seems the time is right and the circumstances ripe to prepare for the real Great Transition, from the Old World to the New World.

The Church with a Capital C is in a state of Flux. The church with a lower case should be resting in peace, should be pursuing shalom, but instead it is rusting to pieces, slowly descending to nothingness, because nothing ever remains the same. Its present form does not reflect the reality of tomorrow, a life to be lived to the full in a renewed creation. The course we are following today is the way of death. The course we must follow is the way of Life, eternal life in a creation deeded to us as heirs of the Kingdom.

When the Lord returns he must find us busy in preparing for that heritage. “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city (Revelation 22:14).”

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 24

How then shall we live?

We often accuse the church that it is behind the times, old-fashioned, not in touch, too bound to outmoded traditions. Here is a paradox: in order to be with it, in order to actually be ahead of the curve, in order to be able to give real leadership to a society that craves for solutions, if the church really is concerned about its future – and, of course, it should be – then, in these last days, it has to go back 2000 years, to the church’s first days. That is the paradox the church faces.

In that glorious beginning when people responded to its call in droves, the first-time Christians, all over the Roman world, formed small groups of tiny active cells, anticipating and preparing for the imminent return of Christ.

Of course, the Roman Empire provided the necessary infrastructure for the gospel to spread world-wide: a world-government, universal travel, security guaranteed by the Pax Romana, also one language, spoken or understood by all aware people, all this aided the spread of the Good News.

Now, after 2000 years, after a long human history in which people organized themselves to a Tee, have become technically capable of previously un-heard-of feats, many now start to realize that all this progress has come at a price, that the bills are coming due, that the debt is so large, an amount larger than life, greater than anything the world can ever produce. Fortunately the account has been settled, the bill has a stamp on it: paid in full at Golgotha. Yet this rescue plan comes with a condition attached: only those who are ready to enter the new creation, those who have actively sought the Kingdom will, when the human-induced collapse occurs, when renewal is at hand, gain entrance there.  

So the crucial question today is: “How then shall we live?”

That is the issue all Christians face now more than ever. Preparation for the Lord’s coming cannot involve the aid of the gadgets which is causing the demise of human culture in the first place. Today, almost everything we do involves the burning of fossil fuel which is the greatest threat to God’s creation. The question ‘how then shall we live?’ forces us to explore the initial problem of ‘how can we live without these mechanical aids?’ The simple answer is that we cannot, and yet we must try, and when we fail to do that – and we will fail because we have painted ourselves in a corner – the least we can do is pray for forgiveness, while keep on experimenting to live holistically, always with the welfare of creation in mind. In other words, we now must strive for a life that will last for eternity. Now is the time to enter that new life, so that easing ourselves into that New Creation by actively being engaged in living that life now is not an impossible task. From now on it must dominate our very thinking all the time.

In the previous chapters we have seen that in our age Satan calls the shots. He has determined the sort of development humans must undertake, development that, in the end, proved to be creation destroying, leading to a total disintegration of civilization.

This means that we have to start from scratch, start very modestly, heeding Jesus’ words that “where two or three are together in my name, there I’ll be also.” This means that it cannot be done within the current ecclesiastical organizational structure, even though mostly church members would be involved. Only personal witness, not so much through the spoken words, but mostly be through acts of charity and expressed through showing constant love for all God’s creation. E. F. Schumacher, in his “Small is Beautiful”, has shown that small is better anyway. Massive gatherings always entail massive use of energy in transportation, in heating or air conditioning costs. Mega churches have no other goal than promoting personal adoration, results in becoming super organized and so becoming subject to the law of bureaucracy and de-personification.

The New Testament points to house-congregations. The church in Jerusalem which counted thousands of members, avoided the danger of being oversized by splitting into manageable small units that met in each others homes, as is evident from Act 2:46 where it says that ‘they broke bread in their homes and ate together with sincere and glad hearts.” The apostles too went, according to Acts 5:42, from house to house and never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ. Romans 16:5 relates that the Christians in the capital of the Empire worshipped in the home of Priscilla and Aquila, to which Paul sent his greetings. He also visited – see 1 Corinthians 16:19 – to the (house) churches in Asia, as well as to Nympha and the meeting at her house as is plain from Colossians 4:15. Philemon 2 confirms this structure as well.

So there is overwhelming evidence that this form of simple organization on the grass root level contributed immensely to the rapid spiritual maturing of the first generation Christians. This process has everything to do with them being on their own, with them personally discovering the depth of Christianity, its wide scope and its broad implication through self-discovery, through prayer and meditation and discussion on a communal level. This was possible because they believed that they were indeed all prophets, priests and kings.

It’s a great pity that the later church has not seen this as a proper way to grow. Soon thereafter the church appointed leaders who then, in turn, prescribed for them how to act in matters religious. This hierarchical structure also resulted in Old Testament ornate vestments and intricate pageantry so unlike the simplicity and freedom Jesus showed in his life.

Of course delegating authority is the easy way out, except that a faith function cannot be delegated: it is a personal matter. The church in becoming a sort of travel agency where guides did the planning, where the clerics became the travel consultants, in this way eliminated personal excursions, and stifled spiritual growth.

The Reformation was supposed to have changed this concept by giving power to the believers, but in reality nothing much different emerged: the same principle of tour guides, of specially trained persons, schooled in dogmatic and theological questions, robbing the laity of exercising personal growth and developing Kingdom expertise, so different from the early New Testament vision where not a professional power structure oversaw developments, but where every member of a local church group saw as his or her calling to exercise the office of believer in their mission to realize their Christian goal. Nowhere in the New Testament is there any hint that the world must be conquered for Christ by means of an organized power structure.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 12:9, quoting Jesus’ words, “My power is made perfect in weakness.” The apostles did not, as a body, address the Roman authorities protesting slavery, nor did they send a referendum to the Emperor in connection with the idolization of his office, neither did they design a political manifesto to guide the bureaucrats who had become Christians in their work. What the apostles did do was to point out to the new Christians from all walks of life to be a shining light, to do what was  just, to love justice and to walk humbly with God: in other words, to live the Covenant. Those who kept slaves were reminded that they would have to treat their slaves as fellow humans. Paul told Onesimus, a run-away slave, to return to his master and gave him a note for him wherein he urged his former owner to treat him well, for Christ’s sake and not punish him because he had escaped.

It is with that sort of maturity, with that aim for self-responsibility, in being a grown-up Christian engaged in their own environment and busy in their own surroundings where the future of the church lies. That’s what caused the phenomenal growth of Christianity in the first Century. The growth of the church was not due to operating a smoothly functioning organization, no, it was the influence of adult-in-the-faith believers, who used their daily contacts in life to influence their pagan neighbors and acquaintances and even employers. According to various sources it has been especially the women who played an important role there, something true even today. It was through them that, in the year 95 A.D., Christianity penetrated even into the imperial family.

Because men, women and children in their full-grown faith in Jesus Christ did not hide their beliefs but in their day-to-day activities showed their faith for all to see, without relying on official pronouncements and well-run organizations, that Christianity blossomed in the world of antiquity. This indicates that the more the church favors organization over personal witness the less it becomes the communion of saints.

So how do we recapture that original spirit? How then shall we live to be found acceptable to Christ and be welcomed into the New Creation? That the present structure is not working is also evident from the burn out rate among the current clergy. The (Canadian) Presbyterian Record reports that in a survey of more than 300 ministers from six Canadian denominations, they found that the number of those who had been diagnosed with clinical depression was double the national average. It also mentioned that these statistics likely underestimate the extent of clergy suffering, since studies show that only about half of those with major depression seek help. It’s therefore no surprise that sermons, by and large, do little or nothing to enhance spiritual growth for the flock, as, says this article, “although ministers read the Scriptures in preparation for sermons, it rarely nourished them personally.” Let alone others, I might add. One minister calls “ministry an endless job, often a bottomless pit.”

Although the article lists several ways to help ministers to avoid work overload and deal with the many problems associated with being a church pastor, it fails to come up with a new structure for the congregation where pastoral care and preaching is delegated to those members of the church who have the time and the talent to do that.

How then shall we live?

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 23

Where is the world coming to?

This is not a cheerful chapter. What we now are experiencing is the calm before the storm. There are so many ominous signs out there that if only one of them would materialize, the world economy – except for Africa – would collapse and billions of people with it. What’s going on? Why this quietness in spite of major threats?

It seems to me we are in the first stage of something pointed out by Elizabeth K?bler-Ross who has shown that tragedy comes in five stages: denial, followed by anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Denial typifies today’s situation. Politicians always must give a positive spin to circumstances. So must the news media. They depend on their corporate advertisers who do not want bad news to influence the media channels, so our papers, television, radio and magazines cannot print or picture or say what’s really going on.   

The threat of an Oil Peak is hardly mentioned, even though its logic is so elementary that is defies common sense not to make provisions for it, yet no government in the world is doing this in a sufficient manner. The chances that my house will burn are minute, but I pay thousands of dollars just in case for fire insurance. Where is the national insurance to safeguard our standard of living, utterly dependent on a continuous flow of oil? That it will stop someday soon is beyond dispute, but no nation has adequate alternatives.

The financial policies of the United States especially go against all common sense: their greatest liability is debt: federal, state, municipality and personal. Yet all they do is go deeper into the red through so-called stimulus packages. All authorities are in deep denial.

Booming China is no exception: by soaking up the debt from the USA it now has been sucked into a deep spiral, the sink hole of American dollars as they have advanced trillions of them to the USA: when the moment comes to unload them, both will suffer irreparably. They also, with total communist disregard for the environment, have allowed pollution to poison land, air and water, a bill that has to be paid sooner than later.

In  spite of numerous Climate Conferences sponsored by the United Nations, and despite of thousands of scientist warning that the perils of Global Warming are extreme and its onset imminent, the world at large is in deep denial about Climate Change. The reason is that nobody really wants to change their lifestyle to a more simple and self-sufficient one, because we are addicted to a carbon -based diet.  

Also the entire world faces a water shortage which will reduce crop yields and lead to a possible mass starvation aggravated by warmer temperatures. A pandemic equivalent of the Spanish Flu cannot be ruled out either. It by itself would paralyze modern life as people would be afraid the go out for fear of contracting the disease. Yes, we most certainly are in an extreme mode of denial.

We are approaching the second phase of tragedy: anger. We already see it in numerous instances where people who have lost their job go on a shooting rampage, always ending in suicide. Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute, is so worried that all branches of government and the media are on the wrong path that, in desperation, he has issued a warning that the American public is ready to revolt: “Taxed to death, angry at government bailouts, outraged by Wall Street greed, and bitterly resentful of a system that rewards the undeserving rich, the American public is ready to revolt.

He issued not only a warning, but also an appeal to do so: “The Tea Parties and Tax Protests sprouting across the nation, which we had predicted, are harbingers of revolution. But they are not enough.  Much stronger and directed action is required.  Our call for ‘Revolution’ will galvanize the people, destroy the corrupt ruling systems, and produce a prosperous and more just nation.” That’s hogwash, of course, as revolution often lead to worse circumstances, of which Russia in 1917 or France in 1789, are prime examples.

He writes that “Nothing short of total repudiation of our entrenched systems can rescue America. We are under the control of a two-headed, one party political system. Wall Street controls our financial lives; the media manipulates our minds.  These systems cannot be changed from within. There is no alternative.  Without a revolution, these institutions will bankrupt the country, keep fighting failed wars, start new ones, and hold us in perpetual intellectual subjugation.”

And here is where The Church in Flux comes in, as his words equally apply to the Church problem when he writes that “I am calling for an ‘Intellectual Revolution’.  I ask American citizens to free their minds from the tyranny of ‘Dumb Think.’  This is a revolution about thinking – not manning the barricades.  It’s about brain power – not brute force.” 

For society to survive and grow, it must wake up and grow up.  Americans must acknowledge what their opinions are based on, who they listen to … and why.

What are America’s prime information sources?  CNN, “The most trusted name in news”?  Fox, “Fair and balanced”?  CNBC, “First in Business Worldwide”? The New York Times, “All the news that’s fit to print”?

Who do the people listen to?  A closed circuit of familiar faces guaranteed to take predictable positions.  Authorities on nothing, yet pronouncing upon everything; a cadre of media aristocrats, pretending they’re the people’s voice.

Bill O’Reilly, Steven Colbert, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, Sean Hannity, Jon Stewart, Chris Matthews, Jim Cramer, Joe Scarborough, Anderson Cooper, Bill Maher.”

So far the warning from the director of the Trends Research Institute, issued to all subscribers, of which I am one.

The situation in the church is no different. Most ministers try to please the crowds, rather than please God. The sheep flock to Joel Osteen to hear that being prosperous is a blessing; the masses fill mega churches to hear preachers inciting them with a “Rapture” message which means a flight from the earth and its problems to rest forever in the arms of God, just at a time when only Biblical Christians can produce the proper answers.

But the revolution Gerald Celente would like to see will not happen, because, as he correctly diagnosed, it’s about brain-power and thinking. And that’s exactly why this will not happen, because the education system, the television, the church institutes, all have contributed to fashion a populace incapable of thinking and staging a revolution: most people are affected by the mind-disease called ‘Lethargy’, unable or unwilling to think, as the temporary availability of carbon-based energy has paralyzed the Western World, and, since the human body is a unity, the physical inability to exert themselves has equally prevented their minds from thinking lucidly. Their thinking process, their ability to correctly fathom the future, has been stifled by modern conveniences, wrongly assuming that the future is merely an extension of the past, something that is totally unrealistic.

Where is the world coming to?

It is speedily sliding toward a collapse of gigantic proportions, of which the monetary angle is but a small portion.  

The coming collapse will take numerous forms.

First, there is the financial collapse, which we are witnessing today. It will continue in spite of valiant efforts world-wide to cushion the impact. This is followed by commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.
The next phase is political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” proves an illusion. As official attempts to stem or temper widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival fail to make a difference, the political establishment will lose legitimacy and relevance. Once this has happened social collapse is soon to follow.  Faith that “your people will take care of you” disappears, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum run out of resources or fail through internal conflict. And the final stage is cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity.  Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources.  

I have a number of books that substantiate these scenarios.
In The Party’s Over, Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Richard Heinberg paints a realistic future when he wonders what we would do without oil, as the world is about to change dramatically and forever as the result of oil depletion. He correctly states that we are entering a new era as different from the industrial era as the latter was from medieval times. In The End of Oil; on the edge of a Perilous New World Paul Roberts outlines an identical picture: “disruption and violent dislocation are almost assured” he writes.

Thomas Homer-Dixon has written a number of books dealing with the enormous challenges humanity faces. In his The Ingenuity Gap he wonders whether the Western world can solve the environmental, social and technological problems of the future, as we are all caught dangerously between a soaring requirement for ingenuity and an increasingly uncertain supply. In his The Upside of Down, Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization, he outlines the troubles we face, especially Climate change, global oil depletion, explosive geopolitics which all threaten to overwhelm our ability to think clearly and act competently. Homer-Dixon shows that we are creating the conditions for catastrophe, but by understanding the underlying principles he, optimistically I believe, we can still limit the severity of collapse.

What does all this mean for the Church?

More about that in the next chapter.

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 22

The beginning of the End.

                             Wherever God erects a house of prayer

                             The Devil always builds a chapel there;

                             And ’twill be found upon examination,

                             The latter has the largest congregation.

                                          Daniel Defoe in The True-born Englishman

 I had a dream a while ago. I was on a wide boulevard and smack in the middle of the road was a huge church blocking the way. There was no way around it. If I had to go on, I’d have to go straight through the church. I wondered what this dream meant. Come to think of it, I have had that dream before. I think it means that, no matter how ineffective the church is in its proclamation, how non-committal the people in the pew, I have to stick to the church no matter what and keep on suffering when I hear the Word weakened, its message mangled and robbed of its power. I take comfort from the fact that Jesus, even though he condemned the Pharisees in no uncertain terms, still attended the synagogue. His disciples also stuck with the temple even after Jesus had gone to heaven. Paul always first went to the Jewish gathering places to bring the Gospel, even though later Christianity abandoned this way when the path of Christianity digressed too far from Jewish teaching.

So where are we now? Perhaps has the time come to leave the church anyway, because the way organized religion functions is no longer viable? But then what should take its place, because we cannot abandon ‘the communion of saints’?

That organized religion is on the wrong track became plain to me when I, after writing almost 20 years for a Christian weekly, was refused to write about the church. The editor suspected, I am sure, that I might not completely adhere to the party line. So I quit writing for them. At the time I was reading “The Brothers Karamazov,” Dostoevsky’s last book. In it is an episode involving the church: it’s called “The Grand Inquisitor”.

Here’s the story, more or less, as told by Ivan, the atheist Karamazow brother, to his younger brother Alyosha, the aspiring priest. In it Jesus returns to the earth during the Spanish Inquisition. Ivan says: “It is fifteen centuries since signs from heaven were seen. And now the deity appears once more among the people.” Everyone recognizes him, because a blind man sees and a dead child rises. But the old cardinal, in charge of the Inquisition, takes Jesus to prison and tells him that: “You have no right to add anything to what you have said…. Why have you come to hinder us?” Ivan explains that this is a fundamental feature of the Church that God cannot ‘meddle’ now because “all has been given by you to the Pope. The Church is the authority now.”
The Grand Inquisitor then tells Jesus that he erred when he resisted the devil’s three temptations in the wilderness, where the devil offered him miracle, mystery and might, which the Church has accepted. Jesus, however, wanted them to have freedom of choice. But, says the clergyman, freedom is too difficult and frightful for the masses and so the Church has taken the three awesome gifts for them. The Inquisitor concludes: “We are not working with you, but with the devil– that is our mystery.” Jesus, still not speaking, kisses him on the lips. “That was all his answer.” The Grand Inquisitor opens the cell door and says, “Go, and come no more, never, never.” And the divine visitor leaves.

“Freedom is too difficult for the masses” says the cardinal, but that is the essence of Jesus’ teaching, and that’s why the church of his day killed him.

Today we hear a watered-down sort of Christianity, combined with pomp and circumstance. When we today see the church on television, we see the Pope in beautiful attire, with a miter and staff, surrounded by red-hatted cardinals and purple-colored priests. The same applies to the church the Queen of England attends, perhaps a bit less elaborate, but quite fancy just the same, something totally alien to Jesus who ‘had no place to lay his head.”

The other picture we see of the church is the mega-type, thriving on male dominance and not being earth-directed but heaven-oriented, something alien to Jesus as well, who always called himself “the son of Man,’ meaning that he personified the human race.

Frankly church development has stalled precisely at the time when creation is in deep distress. Is that a sign? The crime of Iraq, the climate threat, Africa’s agony, reminds me of Hosea 4: 2-3:
“There is only cursing, lying and murder,
stealing and adultery;
they break all bounds,
and bloodshed follows bloodshed.
Because of this the land mourns,
and all who live in it waste away;
the beasts of the field and
the birds of the air and
the fish of the sea are dying.”
By and large for the churches it is “Business as usual.”   Some 50 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, and “The God Delusion,” by Richard Dawkins, are 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 forgiving 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.

Nevertheless, I think that Jesus would have approved of such an outburst. He once said that a person must be either outspokenly in favor of him, or dead-set against him: it’s the lukewarm, the fence-sitters, he despises. I think I can find a few of those within the hallowed halls.

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 a new type of church, where the world we live in, the cosmos, plays a large role. .  

When God created this world he called it good seven times after each phase, and very good when it was finished.  Does consistency not demand that we keep creation in that very good state and live simple and holy lives reflecting those commitments? I am sure that Jesus would be absolutely consistent in demanding not to tolerate a global and economic system that enables us, the world’s elite, to prosper at the expense of the majority, and defile the earth the way we do.

It seems to me that, if it comes to a choice between the depletion of the fish in the oceans, of the birds in the air, or of the lilies in the field, and a minister’s stipend or the mortgage, organized Christianity will opt for the latter. The irony is that paying into a church’s building fund is only a matter of money. The preservation of God’s creatures, however, goes to the heart of religion: the practice of a proper love and respect for them as creatures of God.

By now I am sure that we need a new approach to religion, a more all-inclusive approach. Looking back thousands of years, it is striking that every five – six hundred years a major religion came into being. Moses and the Hebrew brand belong to the Twelfth century before Christ; Zarathustra, Confucius, Buddha, all saw their births between 600-500 years B.C. In the first century the Christian Church conquered the world. Mohammed was born in the year 570. Shortly thereafter Celtic Christianity emerged.  There were stirrings in the Roman Catholic Church in the 13-15th century, culminating in the Reformation of 1517, about 500 years ago. So it looks that we are due for a major new religious upheaval, the Final push so to say, before Christ returns.

In short: all major religions: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, have defaulted on the environmental crisis.

The basis of our present polluted planet was laid long ago when cosmos-related systems of belief were replaced by formal religions, when the Christians decided that they needed organization with the result that creation-based spirituality gave way to human-centered theologies that de-sanctified the earth and taught people to see themselves as dominant over nature.

If we want to heal the destructive divide that exists between the human spirit and the natural world, we must retrieve ‘the lost gospel of the earth’ by which people live in kinship with a sacred natural world.

In general I can say that by and large it’s the non-church people who are involved in the environmental movement, in spite of one Church hymn that starts with the line “This is my Father’s world.” However, most of the church people expect to go to heaven and so their commitment to planet earth is at best divided. It is well-known  that the American  Religious Right vigorously condemns environmentalists as pagans and New Agers, while defending the rights of polluters who, in their opinion, are protected by the mandates of Genesis- ” to have dominion over the earth,” which is interpreted as subjection, like a slave to a master.

Although the religious communities have often defended the poor and victims of discrimination as God’s children, they have not spoken out about the actions of corporate and government polluters as a mortal sin against God’s creation, nor have they defended the earth as sacred and holy to the Lord.

Here are some specific instances.

Let me start with quoting two general sources: the 700 page Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity includes less than one page on environmental issues. In a chapter called “The Future of Christianity,” it notes that problems of resource decline lie ahead, but we are reassured that “it seems likely that new discoveries may provide the means for averting the threats of diminishing food or resources.” In other words, the Christian hope is for a technological fix. Another source, Huston Smith, “World’s Religions”, covering, among others, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, never explores whether these belief systems include any wisdom concerning the modern environmental dilemma.

Since I will concentrate on Christianity where did it go off track?

Quite early in its history did Christianity see life as a temporary passage, and saw the earth as a phase to pass through on the way to a separate sacred place. Augustine (396-430) is the great architect of the Church’s otherworldliness. With him the separation between grace and nature had its start. He pictured the church being in charge of the soul, while he considered the earth unholy, abandoned and left to the uses of science and technology. This led to three conditions:

1.     While humans are made in God’s image, nature is different, subject to the will of the people

2.     Nature is no more than the sum of its parts, and can be reduced to these parts for use or abuse.

3.     Human beings are the measure of all things; nature’s role is to be developed into a store house of value.

Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is the father of the scientific method. He wrote that “nature was to be placed on the rack, enslaved, bound into service, forced out of her natural state and molded.” Not long after that, Rene Descartes in 1637, made the famous pronouncement “Cogito ergo sum,” “I think therefore I am,” also divorcing the self from nature, and elevated the human destiny to be ‘masters and possessors of nature.” Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) called the universe a giant machine.

It is that sort of thinking that dominated the church. In our days during the Reagan administration, his interior secretary, the equivalent of Minister of the Environment, James Watt, a Pentecostal Christian, addressing a cattlemen’s convention, said, “if the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used.” Founders of the Wise Use movement, a coalition linking the timber and mining interests to the National Rifle Association, called environmentalists “the new paganism, in which trees are worshiped and humans are sacrificed at its altar. Environmentalism is evil and we intend to destroy it.” 

I know it would be unfair to imply that mainstream Christianity shares the view of these right-wing extremists, yet as a whole organized religion in both the USA and Canada has ignored the plight of the earth for many centuries. Its heaven-oriented theology, with its lack of express participation in the healing of the cosmos, has left the ever-dwindling church crowd direction-less and even bewildered.

And the Bible, where does it leave us? Both Judaism and Christianity base themselves on the Scriptures, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

The Hebrew Bible has a host of passages which indicate that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, as Psalm 24 says.

The prophet Isaiah had a vivid picture of the earth. Some 2700 years ago he wrote: “The earth languishes and withers… lies pollutes under its inhabitants, for they have transgresses the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant.”

Joel, another prophet, addressing the earth as if it were alive wrote: Fear not, o soil, rejoice and be glad, for the Lord has wrought great deeds. Fear not, o beast of the field, for the pastures in the wilderness are clothed with grass.” James Lovelock, developing his Gaia Concept, indeed considers the earth a living entity, which is a very biblical idea. 

For Isaiah, too, the earth is alive with pain and suffering. It’s polluted because of the deeds of its people. There are numerous psalms which have the mountains skip like rams, the hills like lambs.

The pre-enlightenment theologians, such as St. Francis of Assisi- 1186-1226 referred to the sun as Brother and to the moon as sister, and in connection with the earth “All praise be yours My Lord through Sister Earth, Our mother who feeds us in her sovereignty and produces fruits and colored flowers and herbs.”

The most striking text in the New Testament is John 3:16: God so loved the cosmos that he gave his only son to die for its renewal. If God so loved what he has made, then we, if we really want to follow him, must do likewise. Yet the church does little or nothing to honor that claim.

I maintain that the organized religion has failed there. It has seen the Bible as the only Word of God, paying no heed to the words of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who said that revelation comes in two volumes – the Bible and Creation. The 1561 Belgic confession most emphatically says that we know God: “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.” Meister Eckhart (1260-1327), both theologian and mystic said, “Every creature is a word of God and a book about God.”

Most of North American Christianity has a far too limited view of “The Word.” That’s why during the one hour per week the church meets, sermons concern themselves only with the Scriptures, the written word, while attention to the Created Word, is only in passing.

I can’t understand why the church has never caught on to Psalm 115:16, where it says explicitly that “The heavens belong to the Lord, but the Earth he has given to humanity.”  So, once it is given away, God no longer owns the earth: we do. The church got it wrong. Of course, I sincerely believe that God created it all. But just as a Rembrandt created his magnificent paintings, to which his name is tied forever, once he sold these, he no longer has possession of it. That’s how it is with the earth: God has given it to the human race. This error has misdirected the church.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man with 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, ‘the best room,’ that has nothing to do with work, everyday life and normality, a sugar-coated faith for Sunday mornings, that turns Jesus in to a moralizing figure head.” Wrote he: “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 and he totally contradicted the customary views of religion of his days. He concluded that therefore Jesus had no use for religion and wanted human beings to act like Jesus himself that is, being fully engaged in the act of being human. Paul calls Jesus the First-born of Creation, which makes Jesus the first human being. He was the first “Mensch” in the Jewish sense as well. God became human, that’s why we belong to the earth, and the desire to go to heaven, the main plank of the Christian religion, is un-biblical. Genesis 1:1, the very first text in the bible says “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” Heaven and Earth belong together. I repeat: The heavens belong to the Lord. The earth is given to the human race, as Psalm 115:16 unambiguously claims. God, in Jesus, became human, and in the mystery of God’s humanization becoming visible, it is this earth that is God’s ever-lasting dwelling place. It is through love for this earth that we can express our love for God. The church has totally ignored this aspect and as such it has lost its way. Bonhoeffer saw that only in a world that is no longer religious, just as Jesus abandoned the religion of his days, that we, the people of this planet can become aware of ourselves; and so Christ’s reality can have a greater impact on a world come of age than a world wearing disguises of religion.” 

Bonhoeffer perceived God and the world to be one: a suffering creation means a suffering God.

Yet, I had that dream, the dream of the church blocking my way. Even though we must remain connected to the visible church, what sort of form should this take?

How then shall we live and worship? More about that in the next chapter.