Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

July 15 2023.

 WIR KONNTEN NICHTS TUN. (We could do nothing)

On May 13 I wrote that “The next six months will decide the fate of the world”. Now, on July 15, it is perfectly clear that the future looks dark, very dark, ominous, downright perilous. The naked truth is that the physical earth, as we have fashioned it in our likeness, is beyond salvation, while AI is about to destroy ‘the humanity’ in us.

The recent past.

Eight years ago, when the UN Paris Accord was signed, there was a glimmer of hope that a structural change was still possible, but the world ignored the worsening weather-related events, and soldiered on as if nothing was amiss. Then we still had the false hope that the clock was stuck at Five Minutes to Twelve, seduced by the misdirected goal that ‘now is the moment when, if we act, we can avoid the consequences’, but we sat on our fat fannies, and failed to act. In consequence the atmospheric warming is accelerating; the polar icecaps are melting, the glaciers are disappearing, the forest fires are fiercer than ever, and the extinction of all species of animals continue to sadden us, while ecosystems face universal destruction. Today we live in the Apocalypse. António Guterres, the UN secretary, coined it correctly: ‘we are on a highway to hell with our foot still on the accelerator”, while all scientific reports, from whatever source, are being ignored. 

O yes, a lot of good things happen! We now have solar and wind energy; we now have electric cars and bikes; we now have better insulation and recycling, have perma-culture and carbon credits.

But the problems accelerate even faster: plastic micro-pieces poisons sea-life everywhere, even detected in the deepest ocean crevices and the highest Himalaya summits. 

My great-grandchildren.

My 13 grandchildren have grown up, still having been aware of the croaking of frogs, the humming of insects, of life before Covid. My eight great-grandchildren now live in a world where heat hovers, where unpredictable storms threaten, where gentle rains turn to floods and threaten once secure construction, where winds harbor hurricanes, where lack of rain cause crops to fail, where our human societal life more and more mean disasters, diseases, dried-out regions, inhabitable places expanding.

We now live in an era which James Lovelock labeled, “The Revenge of Gaia.”

Gaia?

James Lovelock who died last year on his 101^st birthday, was not a Christian, but he did coin a Christian concept: the earth as a living entity. Dr. Douglas John Hall, in his What Christianity is NOT, praises Dr. Lovelock for recognising that ‘the earth is a living reality, not merely a collection of inanimate substances and processes. To see the world as alive leads us to a better way of understanding both the world and ourselves in it.’ 

I have often quoted Bonhoeffer who saw creation as God’s revelation -His WORD – to us, in perfect accord with the Belgic Confession. Just as “Religion’ killed Jesus, so our actions toward the Living Creation, constituting killing Creation is a form of killing God.

A different life is needed. 

We must re-examine our life, from beginning to end. No more automatic partaking in the way of Western life, geared to consumption, geared to waste, geared to immediate satisfaction. Everything we do must be evaluated in light of eternity, where our future lies, eternal life on a new earth which is waiting in the wings. Life must be lived in total awareness of the future that awaits us: the new world, where righteousness dwells, the transition to a society where the lamb lives with the lion. 

Are we helpless? 

When the German people after the war, learned about the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered, without a public outcry, they said, “Wir konnten nichts tun”, we could do nothing. Of course, they could do something: they could have prayed, remembering that Jesus was a Jew. Praying for Jews was praying for Jesus, just as praying for Creation is praying for God.

It’s too late to change what happened. Past-history now determines post-history. Post-history means that we must live the New Life that is to come. The excuse that we can’t do anything about the ‘fate of the earth’, was not valid about Jews in 1940-45, and is not valid about the earth today. The first thing we can do is ‘pray’, pray for Christ’ return, and then, the more difficult matter, try, TRY, to live the New Creation Way, live, think, probe, assume, dream, yes, ‘dream!’, how to live sustainably, how to live the full life Jesus wanted us to live. 

Christ did not start a new ‘religion’. Religion, as we have seen, kills. Christ wants us to live, LIVE! And that to the full. (John 10:10)

July 8 2023

OUR DEAL WITH THE DEVIL.

The God thou servest is thine own appetite. (Doctor Faustus)

A deal with the Devil (also called a pact with the Devil, Faustian bargain, or Mephistophelian bargain) is a cultural motif exemplified by the legend of Faust and the figure of Mephistopheles, as well as being elemental to many Christian traditions. According to traditional Christian belief about witchcraft, the pact is between a person and the Devil or another demon, trading a soul for diabolical favours, which vary by the tale, but tend to include youth, knowledge, wealth, fame and power. (Source Wikipedia).

George Monbiot, in his book, HEAT, (My good friend George T. gave it to me) subtitled, “How to stop the PLANET from burning”, knows that the only solution is a new mentality: wishful thinking.

In it, George Monbiot, a columnist with the British the Guardian cites a play, written in 1590, by Christopher Marlowe, “The tragical history of Doctor Faustus”. Marlowe describes how Doctor Faustus draws a circle and summons the Devil’s servant, Mephistopheles, and offers him a deal: if the Devil will grant him twenty-five years in which to live ‘in all voluptuousness’, Faustus will, at the end of that period surrender his soul to hell.

So, the bargain is struck, signed in blood, and Faustus acquires his magical powers.

My immigration to Canada, in1951, my betrothed’s arrival in 1952, our marriage in 1953, and the birth of the first of our five children in 1954, coincided with the world’s most extreme era of our deal with the Devil, now, in 2023, revealing its lethal finale. I have been a willing participant.

Long, long ago….

Of course, our deal with the Devil goes back many millennia, but then, what is time?  Historic time is that short period between the Urzeit and the End-Time. Our lives as humans in the world are but a brief moment: behind us we have the horizon of primeval time and before us the now visible dawn of the end-time, and these two are identical. 

Dominated by the Devil.

The deal with the Devil is an historic event: it happened in history; it took place a few millennia ago, yet it is a supra-historical event because it had consequences for all subsequent centuries, finding its culmination in my life-time, the years we now experience. All of history can only be understood in terms of this one event when we made the deal with the Devil.

Where we are heading?

We can now see where it is heading. George Monbiot, in his book, HEAT, written some 20 years ago, may have outlined some preventive measures to avoid the final HEAT, but we know now that ‘the deal we made with the Devil’, is final, proving again the old adage: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, or as C.S. Lewis coined it: “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” That’s us today, a world ending in God’s judgement.

This reminds me, again, of Bonhoeffer’s acute observation that it is unique to the Christian Faith to see God, the Creator and his creation as unified, just as we identify our great human artists, Bach, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, by their compositions, plays and paintings. 

The Flood then, and today’s final stretch.

God, after the Flood, promised not to repeat that event, knowing full well that this time around we, ourselves, would do the job. Deuteronomy 32: 20 is a striking example of God’s irony: “I will hide my face from them, he said, to see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful.”

‘Unfaithful’ indicates our deal with the Devil, abolishing, seemingly, God’s indictment, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.” (Genesis 3: 19). We, for a while, could bypass that burden, using those buried carbon treasures to make travel easy, to make housework simple, to engage in agriculture in airconditioned luxury, to live in comfort year-round, no matter cold or heat. 

Our life, apart from God, abusing God’s creation, our deal with the Devil, is now turning deadly, is now literally making hell a human invention, a self-inflicted curse.

George Monbiot ends his book on a negative note. “Our campaign against climate change….is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity….. not for freedom, but for less….Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but also against ourselves.” 

Contrast this with Jesus’ words, “I have come that we have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:10). 

The Bible ends with seas of abundance, “On each side of the river stood the Tree of Life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month” 

July 1 2023

I am worried.

‘Sinning against creation is sinning against God’. 

An Iowa meteorologist is resigning from his television station because he developed post-traumatic stress disorder after threats over his climate change coverage.  

Jeremiah 26 has a similar story. This great prophet experienced an identical treatment as the weatherman: Jeremiah told the religious elite that their actions carried consequences: Both told the truth, and both received death threats. Here’s the biblical version: But as soon as Jeremiah finished telling all the people everything the Lord had commanded him to say, the priests, the prophets and all the people seized him and said, “You must die! 

I too, tell an unpopular truth. Look at Matthews 24:29 and Acts 2:20: “The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.” That is happening now, July 2023, as the ash and smoke of forest fires lethally fills our lungs: with 4 months of burning to go! 

Or is it too late?

In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, humans everywhere believe there is solution to the mess we are in, and, perhaps there is, if we set the clock back 150 years, dismantle the automobile structure, return to local food production, mow the grass with a scythe, milk cows by hand, get light from candles, cook with wood, and heat with woodstoves, all theoretically possible, but practically impossible.

Believe me: We have gone too far. Blame ‘Religion’.

Blame ‘religion’. Too simplistic? No. Today the reigning religion is Gnosticism, evident in our disdain for the earth and everything material, a lifestyle to which we are so devoted that we are blind to the truth, the unpopular truth, so well described throughout the Scriptures: Jesus died to renew creation! The saving of souls only is the old-time religion of Gnosticism. 

The new time religion is captured in John 3: 16: “God so loved the cosmos”, a truth the church has never fully endorsed and implemented. The ‘cosmos’ indicates ‘all of creation’, everything fashioned by God’s hand. Yes, blame the American Religion, Gnostic to the core.

Gnostic? 

My NIV Study Bible, introducing John’s letters, describes Gnosticism as the most dangerous heresy. It lists these points: 

Body, any matter, is evil; Creation is evil; God is spirit, and thus good.

Salvation is escape from the body to heaven, achieved through special knowledge-gnosis.

Christ’s true humanity is denied.

Yes, Creation is seen as evil.

Since creation is evil, Climate Change is welcomed and encouraged: the sooner the earth vanishes, the better says Hal Lindsey’s in The Late Great Planet Earth: heaven is our destination!

All churches have been affected by this heresy. All churches have spires, pointing to heaven. 

Matthew 24, depicting today, mentions the concept of Abomination: “When you see standing in ‘the holy place’ (pointing to God’s creation/cosmos), the ‘abomination’ that causes desolation – let the reader understand”. It simply points to climatic pollution. The phrase, ‘let the reader understand’ means that only when it happens, can we grasp the tenor of the text.

That brings me back to that weatherman in Iowa, a very religious state: a very Republican state: They go to church. In the USA church is synonymous with ‘religion’. Harold Bloom, that great American professor of humanities at Yale, and English at New York University, and translator of the Hebrew Bible, wrote The American Religion, with as subtitle, The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. His analysis is that American Christianity has ceased to be ‘Christian’, has succumbed to ‘Gnosticism’, affirmed by Bonhoeffer decades earlier. 

Bonhoeffer visited the USA twice. After his second visit he noted that “American Christianity was pragmatic, morally courageous, oriented toward social activism, and individualistic but was also entirely theologically unmoored”. Bonhoeffer found that American theologians placed little emphasis on the fundamental theological questions: the Crucifixion, the resurrection, salvation, grace, and redemption. “There is no theology here,” he wrote in a letter to a friend.

In his essay “Protestantism without Reformation,” Bonhoeffer offered an explanation for this situation. “American and continental Protestantism developed differently. While European Protestantism emerged from a revolt against the established religion, Catholicism, American religious communities were the product of the pre-Reformational English tradition of dissent launched by John Wycliffe, a 14th-century priest who challenged certain church teachings. That was at the time when the Roman Catholic Church reigned supreme. 

What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one, which makes me to conclude that ‘Sinning against creation is sinning against God’. 

This means that: “Human salvation and planetary salvation go hand in hand”, and, as we are now experiencing: “Crimes against creation carry their own punishment.”

I am worried. Does this mean the end? Are we ready?

June 24 2023

THE RUSH IS ON.

From my student days a Greek saying pops up after 75 years: panta rhei, oude menei, which translates as ‘everything (panta), flows (rhei), nothing (oude), menei (remains the same). (The rivers Rhine and Rhone have their root in ‘rhei’.)

The ‘flowing’ in that slogan is not an orderly process: it gnaws at the existing system so carefully coordinated to regularity and order. That ‘gnawing’ is dangerous, because our societal structure is fragile and built on a monoculture: our poisonous petrol dependency. 

Our very present peril lies North, at the Pole. There the loss of Arctic Sea ice albedo, (that white snow-covered top layer, reflecting the sunrays), signals the disappearance of an important heat buffer, exposing the shallow seafloor consisting of methane, trillions of tons. That stuff is 80 x more lethal than our very own CO2. The bubbling up of this gas constitutes a dangerous tipping point, and could abruptly accelerate the temperature rise in the Arctic: yes, the rush is on: and the El Nino has yet to arrive!

Also, the Jet Stream is strongly deformed, threatening to result in heatwaves that extend over the Arctic Ocean and cause hot water from rivers to enter the Arctic Ocean, while storms accelerate the flow of ocean heat there, with forest fires ash and choppy waters contributing to disintegrate the sea ice, speeding up its demise. 

I repeat: The rush is on that threatens to release the methane on the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean. Once that process starts, it will shoot up the world’s temperature: then the rush becomes a crush!

Nature is stronger than any man-made machinery.

One thing is becoming certain beyond a doubt: There is nothing that can withstand the force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power. Already an endless series of ever more frightening events roll over the world and over people everywhere, preceding the last things.

Preceding the last things. 

The tamed earth, given by God as our own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against us, its tormentors. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become our enemy, and full of fury has thrown itself upon humanity. And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her nuclear energy, her Artificial Intelligence, her mighty medical system, her military prowess, and her entertainment establishment all of which made her feel so immense mighty and strong, these same men and women are now in a total humiliating fashion confronted with the fact that in the final analysis they amount to nothing, that they are a mere rag that is thrown out as useless.

Yes, the signs of ‘change and decay’ are all around us. It even has affected the church in all its manifestations: its pronouncements of certainty themselves are signs of doubt and uncertainty.

The Southern Baptist Church, America’s largest, has reaffirmed that women are not fit for the ministry. The church I grew up in, the Christian Reformed Church, has pronounced that practicing homosexuals are living in sin: Their ruling ‘males’ know exactly what God has commanded, in itself an aberration and sin against God’s majesty.

Ora et Labora, Pray and Work.

This is not a hopeless situation: on the contrary: the current situation contains valuable information: We are being prepared for eternity, where the lessons learned NOW will be applied THEN. 

In that regard I want to pay tribute to Dr. Barry Commoner, who has formulated the four laws of ecology: 

1. nothing disappears, 
2. everything is connected to everything else, 
3. nature is our best guide,
4. nothing comes free.

These bills are now due, and they are more than humanity can afford: we must pay with our lives: nobody is excepted, not you, not me.

Long ago, the church sent out missionaries with a message containing only a partial truth. 

I made a song reflecting that:

Tune: all creatures that on earth do dwell

Five Hundred Thirty years ago

Columbus left the Spanish shore

He praised the Lord, lauda Deum

He did this ad infinitum.

He and his crew sailed duly west

To India was their unknown quest

When the outlook cried, ‘land ahoy’,

They praised the Lord and danced with joy. 

They took along the perfect crutch

“Nobody’s saved outside the church”.

Set out to tell the natives there,

Their pagan ways lead them nowhere.

(Their pagan ways redeem them!)

They kill the prey only for food

They see in forests only good,

Regard the earth a holy gift

For them it is a spiritual lift.  

We have ignored their keen insight

molested their indigenous right

We should pay homage to their way

Before we totally go astray.

June 17 2023

SOCIETAL SUICIDE?

The date, June 17, brings back many memories. On that day, 70 years ago, in Hamilton, Ontario, my fiancée, Diny Hilbers, and I were married. My wife died on October 23 2020. On our gravestone is inscribed, under our birth names, “Till we meet again”. I wholeheartedly believe in, what the Apostles’ Creed says, “the resurrection of the dead, and life everlasting.”

I sense there is a growing obsession with death in today’s society, a desire to let go of responsibility -witness climate change -, a desire to shed the burden of individuality, choice, freedom, a desire to just give up and sink back into the ‘dust we are’.

In the January/February issue of The Atlantic, under the theme of Notes from the Apocalypse,was an article by Adam Kirsch: The People cheering for Humanity’s End. The author wonders, “Is the reign of human beings on Earth nearing its end?” He states that there is a disparate group of thinkers who say ‘yes’ to that notion, and would welcome such finality. 

I agree: a cold and basic analysis of the human state would, indeed, come to such a conclusion.

Look at the young people today. They are grappling with challenges that no generation ever, has been forced to deal with. They just have come out of the Covid experience, and now face disastrous Climate Change, which has become a visible threat, evident in universal forest fires, forcing us again to wearing face masks. 

Indeed, there are immense changes taking place everywhere, even in places where few people make a living: the frigid North. There, for many millennia, the color of the landscape was pure, eye-blinding white, where ‘white’ bears were among the world’s largest creatures. That significant part of God’s creation, is now totally out of balance. 

El Niño.

The next El Niño is on the way. They are forming when the water at the surface of the central and eastern Pacific around the Equator is warmer than usual. This occasional pattern influences weather dynamics worldwide and indicates warmer years globally. This year humans have pumped three additional years’ worth of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the last El Niño. That means the current one emerges amid planetary conditions that will accelerate its warming effects.

There you have it

There you have it: the oceans are already running record warmest, without the El Niño properly developed yet. Once it has fully come into force, it could well destroy habitat for all living creatures. Be prepared!

Morphic Resonance.

There is something like Morphic Resonance, remembrance of matters past. The entire world remembers when trees, animals, seas, earth, sky, formed a unity with us humans: the suffering of one involves the suffering of all: killing one, kills all. These vibrations still penetrate our minds and spirits and, yes, our bodies too: “All one body, we”, says the Bible.

This phenomenon is especially evident in the polar regions, where warming is three times faster than the global average, where the loss of ice is producing a vicious spiral of heating world-wide: ‘morphic resonance’ at work, that penetrates every core of all universal beings. It seems that the smarter we become technically, the dumber we become mentally and spiritually.

The Natural smarts we lack.

Those four kids in Colombia survived because they know more about ‘how to live’, than we do, wealthy Westerners. They know what is important in life; they know the essentials of existence. Thirteen-year-old Lesly Mukutuy was able to identify edible fruits, find suitable water and avoid dangerous plants and animals, thanks in part to knowledge handed down by her environmental schooling: the ancestral knowledge of the eldest child kept her younger siblings, including a ‘one year old’ baby, alive after 40 days. Of such is the Kingdom:  Imagine: forty days in the wilderness, just like Jesus!

For once I partially agree with former President Donald J. Trump, when he cast his indictments as a “final battle” with “corrupt” forces that are destroying the country, except that he is the instigator of this evil. It certainly relates to Revelation 12: 7: “Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back”. Whatever happens in heaven, resonates on earth.

Let me conclude with an apocalyptic passage from the Mayan period, around 

250 AD. It succumbed soon after.

Eat, eat, while there is bread

Drink, drink, while there is water;

A day comes when dust shall darken the air,

When a blight shall wither the land,

When a cloud shall arise,

When a mountain shall be lifted up,

When a strong man shall seize the city,

When ruin shall fall upon all things,

When the tender leaf shall be destroyed.

June 10 2023

THREE SOCIETAL FAILURES

My Latin dictionary defines the verb deficio, as: to fail, or, to do less than one might. Our word ‘deficit’ finds its root there, a ‘failure’ to live up to expectations.

Societal failure affects us all. The most common one is monetary: “the excess of expenditure or liabilities over income or assets in a given period”.  The Economist, that 150+ years old British weekly, in its mid-May edition, sported on its cover, FISCAL FANTASY LAND, referring in its editorial to the deficits all major governments run, manageable when debt only costs 1-1.5 percent, but now courting ‘failure’, having soared to quadruple that amount. 

With life expectancy increasing and a rapidly soaring population of older people, clamoring for good pensions, a bubbling increase in ‘old age’ ailments is guaranteed. Add crumbling infrastructure and looming climate change, requiring repair and costly upkeep, while wars and military hardware call for immense investments, the need for money goes sky-high, financed through debt. How high can debt go, before societal failure looms?

Other ‘failures’, environmental and religious, are even more dangerous.

ARCTIC NEWS June 3 2023 opens with:

• Earth’s energy imbalance is at record high 
• emissions are at record high 
• greenhouse gas concentrations are at record high 
• temperatures are very high, especially in the Arctic

• North Atlantic Sea surface temperature is at record high

• sea ice is very vulnerable 
• the Jet Stream is strongly deformed.

It continues:

El Niño is on the way, sunspots are higher than predicted and the Tonga submarine volcano did add large amounts of water vapor high into the atmosphere.

Both loss of Arctic Sea ice and eruption of seafloor methane constitute tipping points that threaten to abruptly accelerate the temperature rise in the Arctic, thus also accelerating loss of permafrost in Siberia and North America that threatens to trigger further releases of greenhouse gases.

Well?

Where the monetary deficit/failure can cause financial hardship, the environmental shortfall, the lack of arable land, the poisoning of water and soil, the heating of the atmosphere, can end all life on earth. 

The Future.

Today’s ‘weather’ situation, has direct consequences for us. The world economy has been based on temperate atmospheric conditions: moderate heat, regular rains, fertile soils. All these are now in jeopardy, on the verge of radical change. 

That’s just the weather.

The faith failure.

Jesus, at one time, lamented, “However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8). 

Reading and re-reading Karen Armstrong’s book, Sacred Nature, it is quite clear that humans are religious beings, have been throughout history. I come from a string of deeply believing God-fearing Christians. My children have followed in that line, but not my grandchildren. For them there is nothing that attracts them to ‘religion’. I believe the church, by neglecting to preach and practise the ‘Earth-Word’, as indicated in John 3: 16, is squarely to blame.

It is not ‘faith’ that has declined. There still is faith in progress, faith in democracy, faith in technology, dubious faith in AI, but the trouble is that ‘The Great Adversary, Satan, the Devil, whatever you call this entity’, rules the world – 1John 5: 19 – and – assuming he is male – his aim is to destroy it.

We now have reached the condition where this secular faith is backfiring, witness the universal conflagration. That faith deficit already started in The Garden of Eden, when the human pair, call them Adam and Eve, didn’t quite trust God’s instructions to be a ‘servant and enhancer of creation’. So, when their previous regard of the earth’s bounty ‘beautiful to look at and good for food’, as in Genesis 2:9, was, prompted by the great seducer, reversed to ‘good for food and of nice appearance, (Genesis 3:6), this also caused a faith deficit, now evident ‘in extremis’. 

Summary.

We are stuck in a pattern from which there is no escape. As I write this I am ‘house-bound’, not because I am ill, but because ‘the outside’ is ill: it is dangerous to inhale the air because of our environmental endeavors. 

The word deficit means: ‘failure’. Our money policies ‘lack’ wisdom. Our environmental practices ‘lack’ wisdom. Our faith life ‘lacks’ wisdom. The Bible, that forgotten book, has a line about wisdom: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning – the beginning! – of wisdom”. That really means that LIFE starts with “being in awe of God’s Creation”. Once we start ‘serving’ God’s earth, we no longer ‘lack’ but have life in abundance.

By the way.

A couple of nights ago, I was looking at the sky. Here’s what I saw:

 Forests Fires: The sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. (Acts 2:20)