Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 3

Can we predict when Christ returns?

Nobody knows the exact day of the Lord’s return. Jesus in Matthew 24 admits that not even he has the actual information: “No one knows about that day or the hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son but only the Father.”

 That to me is a significant statement. It suggests a difference in knowledge between Jesus and God. What’s going on here? Here’s what I think, lies at the bottom of this problem, and I’ll have to take a little detour to get there.

 The Great Commandment is – Mark 12:30 – “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” That’s easier said than done, because how can we love something or someone we cannot see, and will never see? So, how do we love God, who lives in inapproachable light, who nobody can see or ever has seen (1 Timothy 6:16)? How do we love Handel or Bach? We love them by perfecting their music. That’s how we love God. We love him by loving what He loves. John 3:16 says unequivocally that “God so loved the world – the cosmos – that He gave his one and only Son as an offering, a payment, to redeem his creation” Buy it back, in other words.”  More about that in a next chapter.

 This statement which Jesus quoted to Nicodemus in the book of John is the most abused piece of Scripture. Even Helmut Thielicke in his The Trouble with the Church falls into the trap of equating the word ‘cosmos’ in that verse with ‘humanity’. That error is one of the causes why the church is in so much trouble. Another one, equally serious, is to equate the church with the Kingdom of God, while the real Kingdom is God’s beloved world, His cosmos.

 Of course God loves the human race, but He does so as a part, perhaps the most important part, of his cosmos, his well-ordered creation, indeed His Kingdom. This means that the most simple and straightforward way to love God is to love his creation, something the church has sorely neglected to do.

 This earth, his beloved cosmos, is the expression of God’s existence and God’s love. This earth, all of us, is there for only one reason: God wanted us to be there. We are God’s projection on the screen of this earth: we are made in his image. That also means that God can never be separated from his creation, can never be known without the earth and those who dwell therein. How would anybody know about God if we were not there, or if the world wasn’t there? God needs the earth to make heaven, where God dwells and his angels abide, real for us. He needs the earth to show who He is and what He sees as the purpose of his creation.

Simply put: by loving creation we express our love for God in the most direct and effective way. That also implies that by studying creation we are getting to know more about God, which actually means that we, by investigating the world and they who dwell therein, we are practicing theology. However we should not fall into the trap to make creation god: that is Pantheism. What is correct is to see God in everything: Panentheism.

 After this interlude back to Jesus’ admission that he had no clue when he would return. Yet, I think I can figure something out on that score. The key to knowing when Jesus will come back can be traced to the state of God’s cosmos: the riddle of Jesus’ return lies in the earth itself and what we have done and still are doing to it, a concept which involves “Primary Productivity.”

 What is meant by “Primary Productivity?” Any changes in the make-up of the earth is connected to “Primary Productivity,” a concept that  indicates the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the sum of earth’s plant energy that makes our lives possible. It is in essence “the total budget of life.”  Once that budget is spent, when all our cosmic credit has been exhausted, life is no longer possible.

 All humans and all animals eat either plants or eat animals that eat plants. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. It is this very activity that is now in danger.

When Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden, Primary Productivity was at its peak: 100 percent. After the Garden of Eden, the number of people rose quickly, starting agriculture and making cities possible of which Cain was the prime mover. As a result Primary Productivity started to decrease.

In our age of rapid population growth and an even faster increase in the use of natural resources, this phenomenon has accelerated with earth-breaking speed. Consider the following quote from The Ingenuity Gap by Dr Thomas Homer-Dixon: “We are moving so much rock and dirt, blocking and diverting so many rivers, converting so many forests to cropland, releasing such huge quantities of heavy metals and organic chemicals into air and water, and generating so much energy, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen compounds that we are perturbing the deepest dynamics of our global ecosystems. Between one-third and one-half of the planet’s land area has been fundamentally transformed by our actions: row-crop agriculture, cities, and industrial areas occupy 10 to 15 percent of Earth’s land surface; 6 to 8 percent has been converted to pasture; and an area the size of France is now submerged under artificial reservoirs. We have driven to extinction a quarter of all bird species. We have used more than half of all accessible fresh water. In regions of major human activity, large rivers carry three times as much sediment as they did in pre-human times, while small rivers carry as much as eight times the sediment. Along the world’s tropical and subtropical coastlines, our activities – especially the construction of cities, industries and aquaculture pens – have changed or destroyed 50 percent of mangrove ecosystems, which are vital to the health of coastal fisheries. And about two-thirds of the world’s marine fisheries are either overexploited, depleted, or at their limit of exploitation.”

 Dr Homer-Dixon is talking about the decrease in “Primary Productivity” here.

There have been at least two efforts made to figure out how Primary Productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other by a Christian biologist Stuart L. Pimm, professor of biology at Duke University in Durham N.C. They both have concluded that we humans consume about 40 percent of Earth Primary Productivity, 40 percent of all there is. That percentage may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet: we, the 6 billion plus, have simply stolen the food, we, the rich, a lot more than others.

 So, what has all this to do with Jesus’ return? I will explain that in the next chapter.

The CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 2

“THE LAST DAYS”

Before I continue with “The Church In Flux”, I have to come up with definite substantiation that “We live in the Last Days,” and for that I don’t have to go any further than the major harbors in the world, where ships are at anchor full of the stuff that people used to buy but no longer can afford.

There is a striking passage in Revelation pointing to that exact situation. I refer to chapter 18 of the last bible book, for which the heading is “The Fall of Babylon,” or “the demise of an economic system.” That could be ours.  If you have a bible, look it up, especially verses 9 -13. Here’s a quote, “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her (Babylon, the modern world) because no one buys their cargoes anymore…”

How striking! Yes, today we are in The Last Days, and the sorry thing is that when I go to church – which I do – nobody seems concerned about it, nobody pays any attention to it, even though this issue is a recurring theme in the Bible. The entire New Testament has been written in the expectation of Christ’s speedy return. In Acts 2, when the church had its modern beginning, we read that people sold all their possessions and shared what they had, in anticipation of Jesus’ Second Coming. Since then there have been a lot of false alarms.
Of course all Bible readers know that the day and the hour are unknown. That restriction means very little. I compare it to the birth of a child. There we know the approximate date, but not the ‘day or the hour.’ We know that after a 9 months period more or less, new life will come, but even when labor pains start the actual time of birth cannot be accurately predicted. In the same vein we cannot say that on December 23 2012 at 8.22 p.m. we will see Christ’s glorious re-entry. The Bible is quite emphatic on this point: the Lord repeats it twice in Matthew 24 that not even the angels or the Son of Man know the exact date and time. That makes eminent sense to me.
Yet the Lord tells us to keep watch, because there will be definite signs. Jesus points to the fig tree and how it, at a certain time, will change in appearance, signaling summer. In the same way there will be tell-tale symptoms of the Lord’s return. So what other indications are there? Are there more signs of the ‘fig tree’ out there?
Most definitely. Ships full of stuff nobody wants or needs are not the only pointers. There’s something deeply fundamental going on: the entire growth model we have created ever since World War II is simply unsustainable both ecologically and economically. We have this song in church where the line ‘Nature sings” appears. Well, believe me, nature doesn’t sing anymore: she screams: “No more.” The edifice of economic growth is crumbling. It depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change, earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese …

 We can’t do this anymore. All that money was borrowed against real estate, which now is rapidly reducing in value. Ships full of that merchandize are now sitting everywhere, because, suddenly, we don’t have any money left to buy their cargo. But politicians, in order to get reelected, depend on this treadmill exercise of more and more, so they are pushing not only the economy but everything else over the cliff, even though our so-called high standard of living has been obtained by depleting all our natural stocks – water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land.

Frankly, we are at a historic moment: the collapse of wealth, both personally and globally. 

A few economists risked the scorn of their colleagues by predicting this disaster and a few scientists warned us that we are living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets, but our elected officials, by and large, have downplayed the dangers.

Here’s what a European think-tank wrote recently: “It is high time for the general population and socio-political players to get ready to face very hard times during which whole segments of our societies will be modified, temporarily disappear or even permanently vanish. For instance, the breakdown of the global monetary system we anticipated for summer 2009 will indeed entail the collapse of the US dollar (and all USD-denominated assets), but it will also induce, out of psychological contagion, a general loss of confidence in paper money altogether.” 

Does this mean that people will change their living habits? No of course not.  There are still billions out there who have observed our Western Wealth, and want a piece of that same pie. This process is going to continue till it is no longer possible: that moment is at hand.  

 James Lovelock in his The Revenge of Gaia, Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity, writes in his Preface to the U.S. Edition that “We have driven the Earth to a crisis state from which it may never, on a human scale, return to the lush and comfortable world we love and in which we grew up…billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the arctic region where the climate remains tolerable.”

 In a recent discussion on Alanna Mitchell’s latest book Sea Sick, the reviewer writes: “While Mitchell is walking on the Australian beach with Tim Flannery, the author of the influential book The Weather Makers, and an impassioned advocate for a rational approach to global warming, he tells her that she is ‘documenting the last days of a system. Humans are now interfering with the most basic elements of that system'”.
We do have a serious problem. According the Harriet Friedman, a University of Toronto professor specializing in analysis of food systems, “more than half the world’s agricultural land suffers moderate to extreme soil degradation. Climate change will certainly make yields unpredictable in the future, if not already.”

 So when will all this take place? More about that next week.

INTRODUCTION TO A WORK IN PROGRESS

The title of this multi-part series on the church reminds me of a Greek saying “Panta Rhei, Oude Menei” which translates as “Everything flows, Nothing Remains the Same.”

My interest in the church goes back many decades. Whenever I buy a book, I always write the date of purchase and the city where I bought it on the inside cover. For instance, Helmut Thielicke’s “The trouble with the Church, a Call for Renewal” was bought in 1965, the year I became an elder in the Christian Reformed Church in St. Catharines, Ontario. Since then I have acquired dozens more dealing with the church.

Now, without warning, something in me has urged me to clarify my own thinking on this topic, so my first action was to pull from my library some 25 books related to church and religion.

Why do I feel compelled to write now? People of the Reformation are apt to quote a Latin phrase “Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda – The Reformed Church, Always in the process of Reforming.  I believe this to be true. However, when I look around me and cast a glance back into history, then it seems to me that in reality the slogan is “Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Eadem – The Reformed Church, Always the Same. In essence nothing major has occurred for more than 1500 years in the Roman Catholic Church and almost 500 years in the Protestant part. The organized church is now 2000 years old. From all indications not much has changed in those two millennia, yet we have seen enormous evolutions in living habits, business practices, education, science, medicine, statecraft, but somehow the structure of the church has seen little development. Do New Times call for a different sort of church? That’s what I want to explore in these musings about the church.

I believe that we have come to a crucial moment in history: we have entered ‘The Last Days”. Of course that is nothing new for those who know the Bible: the entire New Testament has been written with The Last Days in mind. If that is true – and I believe it is – should the church not be in the forefront to prepare people? A real call to repentance, such as John the Baptizer did when he shouted: “Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand?”

Yes, I sense it’s for real. I will elaborate on this more extensively in the following segment.

To be able to concentrate on this I have suspended my weekly newspaper column on World Affairs, so this range of bites, of some 1000 words, will not appear in print but be strictly for web consumption. How these whispered words will wing their way into the whole wide world, only the Lord knows. I will simply float them on my blog and pray that somehow they will reach those who wait expectantly for His return.

I know that everything still looks quite normal. That too is a sign of The Last Days: after all the Lord Himself has said that His return will be ‘Like a Thief in the Night’. Who knows we have become so immune to what’s going on around us that we may not have noticed the magic manifestations of the “number of the Beast: 666.” Climate Change, a topic of mostly verbal inaction, has not yet reached our doorsteps; Peak Oil, as sure to come as night follows day, has not yet affected us; a possible Pandemic is still gestating somewhere. But we are already vulnerable where it hurts: in our wallets. The gods of finance have already fallen on their faces.

Yet life goes on as if nothing is different out there: people marry or start living together; children are born; couples split; more men and women grow old; in other words: life rolls on in the regular rhythm of birth, life and death, and, when I observe the church, it too behaves as if nothing has changed or even will ever change.

That too makes sense, because we seldom question our most reliable and well-established entities. The church has always been there. Why submit it to a thorough analysis? But we have to because we live in New Times. Fact is that the rulers of this world are desperately trying the right the economic ship, which is heeling unhealthily and chances are more than even that it will keel over, imperiling our way of life built on fictitious money. This situation is so critical that many start to question the role of Capitalism and Globalization, the two major engines of the current economy.

Since we already are breathing in the air of doubt about the very foundations of our financial state, the time is opportune also to ponder the current make-up of the church, where it has come from, where it now is, and whether the current model still is effective in the New Times.

So why me?  Am I really qualified to do this? Of course nobody has asked me to engage in this. Here’s why I undertake this enterprise. I have always been intimately involved in the church. When we moved to Tweed in 1975, I soon became an elder again, this time in the local Presbyterian Church, served twice as moderator of the Kingston Presbytery (the first lay person to occupy that office) – the equivalent of Classis in the Christian Reformed Church – obtaining a picture of the spiritual part of the church, and later was the chair of the Board of Trustees of the National Church, observing how the church deals with money matters.

I am an active person by nature: want to be involved, so I chaired (Christian) school boards, coordinated the start of Quinte Christian High School,  the first president of the Tweed Area Community Care Incorporated, and wrote weekly columns for decades. But now I believe the time has come to look critically at the only other institution to which I have pledged my troth.

I aim to develop my theme of ‘The Church in Flux” by looking critically at the church, that human institution, among which, I know, most members of the Church with a capital C can be found, that mysterious body, the true Church, not recognized by its spires or a published membership list.