Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

 October 5 2022

 BOMBS.

Some commentators, Tocqueville and Fukuyama among them, tell us that society needs religion, because, they say, its absence advances anarchy and despotism. Religion, supposedly, teaches us direction and purpose and pursues aims beyond personal gain.

There is truth in this, but also danger. The Russian Orthodox Church wholeheartedly supports Putin. Bolsonaro’s and Trump’s most ardent supporters are Church members. Nothing is more insidious than distorted religion, seeing Creation, God’s precious handiwork, as an enemy to be exploited to enrich oneself. It now is clear that Putin’s religion has brought this world, God’s world, to the edge of nuclear annihilation. 

The Fall of Babylon: OUR WORLD!

Dr. J. H. Bavinck, professor of Missions, in his book on Revelation, written 60 years ago, claims, in Chapter 18, that Babylon – our world TODAY – will be destroyed by a nuclear bomb. 

He writes: “Babel – our current civilization – bombs itself into oblivion, destroys what it has built, commits suicide. World history is a self-killing enterprise; world history is a leap into the abyss. That is what humanity does without prompting: God does not have a hand in all this.” 

It reminds me of Deuteronomy 32: 20, “I will hide my face to see what their end will be.” Well….

Bavinck continues, “John – the author of the last Bible Book – sees this quite clearly. This verdict erupts from the bottom up. It is pure self- decomposition, pure self-destruction. Humanity causes its own downfall. We really have no idea that, behind all this, behind our foolish thinking, stands God. That same God whom humanity has scorned, has forgotten; yes, this same God allows humanity to destroy itself.”

The apostle Peter, in his letter, expecting Jesus’ return, tells us to live holy lives, lives that tell us to be in tune with creation, so that our transition is smooth.

What does holy living entail?

I am not a psychologist, a word which contains two Greek words, Psyche = soul, and Logos = word/science/God. Neither am I a biologist – bios=life – a person concerned about ‘all that lives’, mostly plants and animals. I am also not a humanist. Humanists are defined as persons who use their intellect to explain their lives, rather than relying on religious belief. I am not a humanist, because my ‘Christian faith’ dominates my life.

What does my faith tell me?

I believe that at a certain point in history, some 12,000 years ago perhaps, God selected out of the existing humanoid race, 2 persons who had great promise, and infused them with God’s Spirit. 

Psalm 82: 6 affirms that we all are ‘gods’, children of the “Most High”. God wants us to investigate the Earth’s potential and grow in wisdom and knowledge by studying the Infinite that resides in God’s Creation. 

Being ‘human’ means searching, probing, trying, crying, investigating, learning, failing, marveling, praying, lamenting, singing, and the list goes on. Oh, yes, I should include ‘laughing’. I ‘laugh’ a lot at myself: my thoughts can be so foolish and absurd: laughing at my ineptness and stupidity is part of me being human. 

In final analysis, being human really means getting ready for the New Creation.

So, what IS happening TODAY?

Let me take a look at our times. If there ever was a society under stress, it is ours. In our stupidity we have passed all the limits of survival: destroyed the old-growth forests, killed off large numbers of species, poisoned the atmosphere, depleted our mineral resources, eroded the fertile soil, polluted water and the atmosphere, set the planet on a path to irreversible warming, and a few more little things, including having deployed a sufficient number of nuclear warheads to wreck the ecosystem and kill everybody. And we haven’t renounced our beloved habit of making war against each other. Repair has become impossible: a New Earth is needed, and is coming! 

I just finished reading David Wallace-Wells book, “The Uninhabitable Earth, Life after warming”. Somewhere toward the end, he writes, Pleasure districts like Miami Beach, built just decades ago, will disappear.

This prophecy has already become reality. In an eyewink, billions of Real Estate in that region, have been destroyed by a man-made bomb: the weather, now an unending story, identical to the nuclear danger, where one bomb brings another, brings another. MAD we are: Mutual Assured Destruction guaranteed. Our bombs obliterate us.

John 3: 16 – God so loved the world – clearly indicates that the express purpose of Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection, is to restore the Garden of Eden. He taught us how to live! He came to bring us a new earth and a new humanity: all our efforts to remedy the present plight, will fail. 

Sorry to say: as humanity, we have really bombed.

September 28 2022

VENGEANCE

The oceans are angry; the earth is boiling with rage.

When sailors first approached the American shores, the fish were so plentiful that lowering a bucket into the salt waters would yield a teeming catch. Today that same haul would see millions of plastic fragments: no wonder the oceans react violently against our sacrilegious acts. And the earth, where our footprints lie? That same surface also is shifting from friend to foe. It reminds me of Hebrew 10: 30-31, “Vengeance is mine: It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Yes, creation represents the living God!

Vengeance is exactly what we are experiencing today, because God is what he does. Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lords, and all it contains.” That includes the 70 percent of seas and oceans, and the solid ground which we call our home, now increasingly under extreme stress, either burning or desiccated. 

Of course, we have inflation, never to let up. Of course, prices will accelerate, as the very base on which we live, dries up, becomes desert, and unyielding. Of course, food will become hard to grow, and the already hungry masses, will starve. Upping interest rates will only aggravate the economic situation: it will not restore depleted soil nor fill up the empty seas. What worked yesterday is ineffective today: the entire world has changed.

The weather used to be an independent force, not subject to human intervention, a phenomenon that was largely predictable, stable, with summer heat and winter cold, both with moderate temperature differences, and with spring and fall that eased us into the higher or lower fluctuations. 

Ice ages.

We know for sure that the earth experienced both a Big and a Little Ice Age. The Big one ended about 10,000 years ago when much of the northerly part of the globe was ice-covered, while the oceans were 120 meters lower than today. There also was a Little Ice Age from about 1450 to 1850, when the average temperature was about 1 (0ne) degree Celsius lower. Why these century-long cold snaps happened, is still a question. They had nothing to do with human interference. 

Just recently scientists have suggested that the human mind emerging from the Big Ice Age, was fundamentally different from earlier anthropological versions, now having, what I call, a spiritual dimension. What these findings do not mention – and what my biblically-influenced mind whispers to me – is that the human pair mentioned in Genesis 1-2, was of that unique, fully formed species infused with God’s Spirit, a man and woman emerging from the then existing humanity, yet with a particular trait not existing before, call it spiritually inclined, aware of God as Father and Creator.

The Little Ice age too saw a different humanity, evident in its artistic expressions, never since experienced in such a pronounced manner. For example, during these 4 centuries we saw Michelangelo, 1475-1564, Luther, 1483-1546, Shakespeare, 1564-1616, the great painters, the van Eyck Brothers, Rembrandt, and the still unsurpassed composers, Bach-Handel, 1685-1750, just to name a few. Today’s great names are technicians, such as Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs, the inventor of the Mac Computer. The machines they made were mere extensions of the abacus, an ancient tool used for thousands of years.

Where has that inventive spirit gone? The unequaled greatness of a Mozart, the daring of a Martin Luther, the vision of a Nietzsche?

How will it all end?

I have long wondered how the apostle Peter’s prophecy will play out. In 2 Peter 3 he writes, “The Day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear like a roar; the elements will be destroyed like fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.” 

That, for me, is a mystery no more. The answer lies in the Arctic Ocean, a shallow sea resting on a foundation of methane, that hundred-fold more dangerous greenhouse gas. For many millennia it was safely secured in the cosmic freezer where it lay undisturbed, and largely forgotten. Now the freezer is gone, replaced by a furnace: Global Heating is nowhere more pronounced than exactly there where all these destructive gases are buried. 

There are also more aggravating elements at work: this past week two hurricanes, one between Alaska and Siberia, and another between Baffin Island and Greenland, have pushed hot ocean water into the very polar regions where these explosive gases are situated.

Arctic News has warned us, and predicts that the methane release there, will cause an EIGHT (8) Degree Celsius rise in global temperature, obliterating everything alive.

Vengeance?

The oceans are angry; the earth is boiling with rage.

“Vengeance is mine. It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” 

September 21 2022

THE END?

The past week was an emotional one, dominated by the late Queen Elizabeth II. It reminded me of another queen, Victoria, who on January 22 1901, died at the age of 81. She passed away at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, including the future King, Edward VII and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

Then teletyped telegrams whirled throughout the world announcing the death of the British Empress, a heyday for the multiple newspapers throughout the globe. Then, as now, wars, royal weddings and the funerals of royalty were, and still are, the most spectacular sources of news. 

Queen Victoria had lost her husband, Prince Albert, at a young age, and for years she had withdrawn from the public scene in an endlessly extended period of mourning. Then too, a war raged: the Boers in South Africa, fought for independence.

Its funeral procession featured the German Kaiser on his proud horse, as well as the Russian Czar, also a relative of the deceased. That same Kaiser would die in exile in 1941, in Doorn, the Netherlands, banned there after Germany’s defeat in 1918. In that same year the Czar and his immediate family were brutally murdered.

That year 1901, also was the start of the CARBON era.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his book, The Age of Extremes, noted that TEN percent of humans, alive on January 1 1900, died an unnatural death in the next 50 years, due to TWO World Wars and ONE horrendous epidemic.

Today, 121 years later, it’s Queen Elizabeth’s turn to end an era. She too mourned the death of her husband. Her grieving too, hastened her death, but, unlike her Great-grandmother, Victoria, she remained engaged almost till the very day she died.      

The late queen represented continuity, security, certainty. But Britain today, and the world at large, faces a cost-of-living crisis, faces soaring national debts, faces a looming recession and a chronic productivity problem, faces Global Heating, and untold other problems. We are at the threshold of a new era, unprecedented, with a population, pampered and unprepared.

A look back.

For 2,000 years we have counted ‘progress’, by the number of people living. It had taken the world at large till the year 1,800 to reach the One Billion Count. When Queen Elizabeth was born in 1926, thanks to our Carbon-based life, that number had doubled in 125 years, but during her 70 years reign it grew to Eight Billion, an impossible number. 

A new book, An Inconvenient Apocalypse, by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen, tells us that in today’s depleted state, the earth can support no more than TWO Billion. They write, “No existing ideology or culture is going to provide us with a template for dealing with what lies ahead, a world of fewer people consuming less energy.” 

That means that the Carbon Age has ended: a New Era dawns.

I believe that the death of this queen, who reigned from 1952 to 2022, 70 years, signals the end of an era. 

It was the age of carbon; it was the age of material welfare; it was the age of spiritual decline; it was the age of untold increase in human numbers; it was the age of Big Government: it is no longer sustainable. 

At the Queen’s two church services, viewed by 4 billion people, something miraculous happened. The prophecy of Matthew 24: 14 came true: “The Gospel of the Kingdom was preached to the whole world”, signaling the end of an era!

Already each day brings on new disasters. Each day another ‘earth’ event makes headlines. Each day another food item rises in price, some of them going to absolutely ridiculous levels, as floods and droughts foster famines in multiple places. 

Our world is changing, without warnings, in wild and un-wielding ways.

The thousands who lined the paths in London to see the Queen’s coffin, and the billions who followed the proceedings on TV, sensed that they lived in a time period that will never return. The slow-motion, many-hours-queue to bid farewell to their queen, suggested to me that people were reluctant to accept that the Age of Abundance had died with her. Gone now is this short, oh so short, era of erotica, as it were, of effortless extravagance, of luxury at the switch of a finger.

And yet…..

How beautifully timely was the final reading at her funeral service, from Revelation 21, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.”

Not only the end of an era: the old world as we know it, has passed away.

September 14 2022

EARTH AND CHURCH: EARTHER AND CHURCHER.

One of my readers – and a good friend – sent me this question:

“My question to you is how do you see Earthers moving forward. How do you see Earthers learning from each other, gathering, where, when, and what do you see as the purpose of being together – if you see one at all. I am asking that you go further in your explanation, beyond the statements of how bad things are, what happened and get on to what we do next, how do we establish ourselves and how do we demonstrate our values and beliefs.”

 Here is my view on LIFE, my world-view if you like.

1. I see my life as a prelude to eternity. Yes, a trial period, after which I am judged – oh, that terrible word! – whether I am fit to enter the perfect world to come.
2. That condition colors my life. It has made me an ‘earther’. I deeply believe that I will spend eternity right here, on Terra Firma, the earth God created and called good seven times.
3. I also believe that at some point God deeded this earth to humanity, giving us full authority to act according to our wisdom. Our cultural mandate is found in Genesis 2:9, where the TREE was described as “Pleasing to the eye, and good for food.” This indicates that we are charged to retain and enhance creation’s beauty, its purity, its pristine state, its perfection, its immense richness, simply so astounding with its abundance of various creatures. A closer look shows how everything on earth is somehow harmoniously connected to everything else, how one species influences the other and the one creature depends on the other. Plants cannot exist without the earth that feeds them. Animals, on the other hand, cannot function without plants. And so on…
4. However, in Genesis 3: 6 there is a sudden change, something very different, a complete reversal: “The Tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye.” Food before beauty, economics before aesthetics: greed emerged, and wealth acquisition gained priority. Beautification was pushed back, and personal gain achieved dominance. 

That first attempt to commercialize the world, ended in the Flood, with only Noah’s family and the fauna surviving.

• But God did not give up: he made a new beginning with Noah, and sealed that in a new Covenant. Genesis 9 relates how God specifically singled out Creation, with the totality of living species. Miraculously, God made a covenant with the very cosmos he had created, and acknowledged that from now on Creation would be equal to his divinity and operate as such independently from the deity. Yes, God made Creation equal to himself: that’s what Covenant means, like in marriage! Now venerating creation, the cosmos, loving it, takes the place next to worshipping God, who is invisible: yes, loving Creation has become the entrance to God’s favor.
• However, humanity did not want this sort of thing. Even though another Covenant was made, this time with God choosing a particular tribe as his own, that too was to no avail, and God resigned to the human lot. Among God’s last words to Moses were: “I shall hide my face from them to see what their end will be. (Deuteronomy 31: 17, 18). We are experiencing this today.
• Still God did not give up. Again, God relented, and sent the Son, Jesus Christ, God become human, and affirmed in John 3: 16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son as payment to buy back Creation. Believing the Son’s sacrifice gives us eternal life.”
• Jesus taught us how to live, but religion killed him.

EARTH AND CHURCH: EARTHER AND CHURCHER.

This confronts us with a choice in this late hour of human history. Both the earth and the church are on life-support. Both are destined to die, and only the Earth, will be revived. 

The church, as all ‘man’-made organisms will totally fade away. Revelation 21: 22 specifically mentions that in the New Earth there will be no temple, for God’s law will be embedded in the hearts of his people: that means ‘no bible, no church’.

Jesus was killed by religion, by the church of his day, therefore we must be very conscious of the dangers of religion. The earth is God’s primary, direct and ever-lasting Word; the Bible, pointing us to Christ and his sacrifice, is, nevertheless, God’s secondary, indirect, and disappearing Word, necessary, as Psalm 119: 105 tells us, to be: A lamp for our feet and a light for our path (in creation). We have to be careful that staring in that light does not blind us to experiencing the real Word.

Kathryn, does that answer your question?

September 7 2022

WHY I DON’T CALL MYSELF A CHRISTIAN ANYMORE.

We have to revise the word “Christian”, or drop it altogether. Why this radical move? The concept has been coopted and become meaningless. Brazilian President, Bolsonaro, destroyer of the Amazon, calls himself a Christian. No Thanks. “Earth we are and to earth we shall return,” instructs Genesis 3: 19.  That’s why I now call myself an EARTHER. 

When I, for the last time, visited Groningen, the city I was born in, a relative, upon leaving, said, “See you again in heaven.” 

I had no reply. 

Most “Christians” believe they go to heaven, even though the Bible repeatedly says that “Nobody has gone to heaven, except the One who came from there” (John 3:13). To me ‘heaven’ is a pagan Greek concept! To me heaven is the place where God lives in ‘inapproachable Light, whom nobody has seen or can see’. (1 Timothy 6: 16). To me Jesus died to restore Creation, but the so ingrained ‘heaven heresy’ makes it easy to be a “Christian”: then we don’t have to give a hoot about the earth. And Climate Change? Of course, a myth, a capitalistic invention to allow more government control.

But God and Creation is one. “Oh no. That is devil worship”, these deniers say. But we cannot deny that God is what he does, that’s why Creation personifies God, and makes it holy, that’s why I call myself an “Earther”. That’s also why Bonhoeffer tentatively introduced a new term, “Religion-less Christianity”. 

Here’s why. 

In the 1930’s, with the rise of Hitler in Germany, the church was placed for a choice: approve of the Nazi doctrine or lose the state subsidy. Almost the entire church opted for Hitler. The same happened in much of American Christianity, when it endorsed Trump, and today in Russia where the Orthodox Church is in full agreement with Putin, because he financially supports the reigning religion. 

Bonhoeffer, initially, was very active in the German Lutheran Church, serving as pastor in London and Barcelona, and a leader in the ecumenical European scene in the early 1930’s. In that capacity he also visited the USA where he, in 1939, was offered a teaching position at Union Seminary, but when the war broke out in September 1939, he returned to Germany to be with his community there, well aware that it would lead to his death, which occurred on April 9 1945, just before the war ended.

His experiences with the religious scene in his home country made him rethink his attitude toward organized religion. He concluded that “specific to the Christian Faith is the perception of God and the world as one.” 

Co-suffering with God.

Co-suffering with God, means a radically new perception of Christianity. Bonhoeffer writes that, “When Jesus was in agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, he chided his disciples for not keeping watch with him for even one hour”. Yes, God expects us to suffer too, as Jesus did. When Jesus sees his creation go up in flames, with smoke and floods and drought, we, as eternal earthers, we too must mourn. Deeply. It’s purely our earth: we inherit it!

Yes, as Earthers, we are called to suffer together with God whose very creation – his very being – is being devastated by us.

Bonhoeffer also writes, “It is precisely here that the chance for our liberation from all religious preconceptions and distortions lie. By allowing ourselves to be taken up into God’s passion, a passion in the world and occasioned by it, we discover the world – and our own life – anew, becoming completely human, without religious schizophrenia.” 

Christian existence does not mean being religious in any specific manner…. It means being a true human being! Jesus did not bring a religion: he is the End of religion, he is above Christianity and non-Christianity, above religion and irreligion. 

I believe now that we must differentiate religion from faith. Jesus does not call us to a new religion, but to LIFE, and that to the FULL. (John 10: 10). Augustine, the early church father, coined it correctly, “Many whom God has,   the Church does not have; many whom the Church has, God does not have”.

Today the emphasis has shifted.

Today God is the target. Where there is no prophetic vision, the people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law. (Proverbs 29:18).

All this makes John 3: 16 today the text to live by: “God loved the world, the cosmos, the earth and all it contains, SO much, that he gave his Son as payment to buy it back: believing this, He grants us eternal life.”

We have to drop the word “Christian”: the word has become meaningless. Live for the Earth. Become an EARTHER.

August 31 2022

CLOSE TO COLLAPSE?

“It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions.”

Those of the opening words of David Wallace-Wells’ book The Uninhabitable Earth. 

Global Heating is accelerating so fast that conditions, estimated even as late as last year to happen 30 years from now, are creating havoc today: now, 2022.
And next year? If the unusually long-lasting La Nina becomes the more likely El Nino, warming weather will become an even more of a burning burden. It’s no longer “Slouching Towards Gomorrah”, it’s “Galloping towards Armageddon”.

Take China.

The extreme heat there is snarling power supplies, threatening crops and setting off wildfires. Where will China secure the food supply to feed its 1.3 billion people? Crops have been reduced world-wide, and that dreaded Middle Age scourge of famine is making a sudden appearance. China, with 20% of the world’s people, has seen a straight 60 days of pure hell, pumping dry the Yangtze River, cutting off its hydro-electric capacity, while depriving it of adequate food supplies. 

 

Other global perils include: mounting geopolitical volatility; fragile supply chains; political dysfunction; digital disruption, with the result that the accelerating effects of climate change, suddenly causes the entire world to see the “end of abundance”. 

Should I mention Pakistan: 1,000+ dead and 33 million displaced by floods? 33 million: Canada’s entire population!

COLLAPSE, the book.

I have a book with the simple title, COLLAPSE, written by Jared Diamond, a professor at the UCLA.  He writes:

“Just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both, become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing. When people are desperate, undernourished and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.”

Pakistan is a good example of such a situation, but not the only one: Iraq too.

Close to Collapse?

Soaring temperatures (Iraq is enduring 120 degree heat that has fried the country’s electrical grid), the depletion of natural resources, flooding, droughts, the worst one in 500 years is devastating Western, Central and Southern Europe and is expected to see a decline in crop yields of 8 or 9 percent, power outages, wars, pandemics, a rise in zoonotic diseases and breakdowns in supply chains combine to shake the foundations of industrial society.  

And then there is “The Arctic”. It has been heating up four times faster than the global average, resulting in an accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and freakish weather patterns. The Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia is warming up to seven times faster. Climate scientists did not expect this extreme weather until 2050.

“It is worse, much worse, than you think.”

When I survey my small holdings in rural Eastern Ontario, then I must admit that, were the entire world like my immediate environment, collapse would be far from my mind. My garden has yielded a bountiful crop of green beans. My red beets needed two reseedings before the third one took root with plenty of produce to come, and my potatoes look glorious, assuring sufficient supply till the next crop comes due. My fresh tomatoes are unequalled in taste.

But there also is Revelation 18: 

         “All the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries, and the merchants grew rich, …and weep because in one hour your doom has come.”

I am sure that the situation today, the circumstances portrayed in the last Bible book, are being implemented now. Jesus told us to look at the world around us and read the signs. (Matthew 24: 33).

Today we live in a totally integrated world. Even in my little corner, the air is polluted: there is no escape. The earth is like a living body. It needs clean air, clean water, clean soil to function properly. All are lacking. 

Does that mean that we are “Close to collapse?” 

It seems to me that collapse is occurring in several sections of society. The Western world is quickly aging, burdening the health system, while environmental degradation comes with increasing physical hazards. The entire economic sector depends on natural resources, quickly vanishing. Climate Change already causes infrastructure deterioration. A realistic assessment indicates major adjustments are needed yesterday.

Are we close to Collapse?

Forewarned is forearmed.