Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

NOVEMBER 18 2017

CAN WE STILL DO IT?

It is beyond any doubt that we live in a world totally at war against Creation, the ultimate work of art which God called good after each phase, and very good once it was completed.

It is now deteriorating at a clip unique in the millions of years of its gradual evolution. Its pace of degeneration has culminated in a state where today in Bonn, Germany the nations of the world are meeting to assess the damage and devise ways to stop our earth from choking on its own excrement and are unable to do so. After 23 meetings solely concerned with Climate issues, the poisons are still rising.

Of course, the church knew the outcome all along even though it now ignores it. In my youth every Sunday one sermon of the two was on the Heidelberg Catechism. In it the preacher drilled into my sub-consciousness that I was a ‘born sinner, corrupt from conception on’. Oh my….

So, following that logic, this stern command made sense: “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.”

CAN WE STILL DO IT?

That’s the question I struggle with.

The rich see the writing on the wall, and have bought their retreats. Some, like the Amish, never became part of modernity, while the poor in Asia and Africa never did have the chance to indulge in Western culture because, thanks to us they have droughts and floods, degraded soils and overpopulation which will prevent the basically innocent African and Asian population from becoming self-sufficient again.

CAN WE STILL DO IT?

The poet T.S. Eliot predicted that, after the disintegration of Western society, civilization would be conserved and restored by a new monastic movement. He wrote this almost 100 years ago when the world was still underpopulated by today’s standards, and basically pristine.

Eliot knew his history and being acquainted with the events at the end of the fifth century, knew how in Benedict’s day, the once-great Roman Empire had collapsed into chaos. He knew how, through economic disaster, famine, plague, moral decadence and political corruption, the society was on edge and vulnerable, as Barbarians invaded Rome from the north and east, sensing lucrative spoils to be had. So Benedict of Nursia, experiencing the decay of the Empire, established small communities of men and women dedicated to prayer, work and study.

Fine, that was 1500 years ago, when the Western World still could retreat into fortified settlements, exist on local produce, and people had high regard for the Clergy who had sold themselves as The People of God with answers people believed to be true. The GADFAEL series written by Ellis Peters, set in the 12th Century in England, portrayed a society that was sustainable where the religious retreats were an integral part of society and all people adhered to one faith.

Today a BENEDICT movement is becoming popular fueled by a book on that topic. My question is whether something similar can be undertaken today, a time somewhat resembling the Fall of Rome.

Actually the situation is far worse because today the natural elements also are in uproar, with hurricanes inflicting major damage, with droughts and floods and earthquakes increasingly molesting minds and mortar. Can the nations – now gathering in Bonn, Germany, COP 23 – prevent an increase in CO2 emissions, as the Gods of our Age demand more and more goods and greater and greater luxuries?

Will there be popular movements to halt ‘progress’? Will people, the many millions who know the score, band together and vouch to cut consumption, live within the means of nature and so preserve creation?

Well, I’ll tell you right now: it ain’t gonna to happen. We will continue our destructive ways till the very end.

We have advanced 1500 years beyond the collapse of Rome, which brought on what the history books call THE DARK AGES. Then, indeed, monasteries and convents were instrumental in preserving civilizations and slowly prepared the populace for the MIDDLE AGES.

The designation “Middle Ages” tells a story: it resembles the normal life cycle: Birth, Youth, Middle Age, Old Age, Death. Our civilization has seen birth, experienced Middle Age and now is dying and in the throngs of Death.

Not too long ago Pope Benedict XVI – who retired to make place for the present Pope Francis – predicted:
“From today’s crisis will emerge a Church that has lost a great deal. … It will become small and will have to start pretty much all over again. It will no longer have use of the structures it built in its years of prosperity. The reduction in the number of faithful will lead to it losing an important part of its social privileges. It will start off with small groups and movements and a minority that will make faith central to experience again. It will be a more spiritual Church and will not claim a political mandate flirting with the right one minute and the left the next. It will be poor and will become the Church of the destitute.”

Surely a somber message from the man who was Pope just a few years ago.

Another Roman Catholic priest predicted that,
“A “Benedict Option” would undermine clericalism in a positive and creative way. There would be natural renewal of worship, religious education and service based on the needs of the local community rather than top-down “good ideas” by diocesan bureaucrats.”

That’s realistic talk in our days of growing estrangement from religion, at the very time when, paradoxically, the only hope is religion, of the all-encompassing kind. Fact is that the Church of Rome, and all denominations, sees the future strictly in religious terms. There’s no creational aspect to what the clergy sees as the future, that biblical notion so beautifully expressed in Psalm 24, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness there of”, has not become a truth for the church in general.

That something is astir, however, was strikingly featured in the NEW YORK TIMES a few weeks ago. The headline said:

Are Christians Supposed to Be Communists?

I know that Communists have a bad name. A long time ago, in my schooldays I was told that the difference between a Christian and a Communist is that a Christian believes that All That is Mine is Yours while a Communist says All that is Yours is Mine.

David Bentley Hart in his NYT article maintained that the early Christians lived a common life and voluntarily enjoyed a community of possessions.

There`s no doubt that Acts 2 tells us that in Jerusalem the first converts to the proclamation of the risen Christ affirmed their new faith by living in a single dwelling, selling their fixed holdings, redistributing their wealth “as each needed” and owning all possessions communally. This was, after all, a pattern Jesus himself had established: “Each of you who does not give up all he possesses is incapable of being my disciple” (Luke 14:33).

Jesus lived that ideal. When Jesus came to earth, forever to retain the status of both God and Human, he could have been a human being of any description, stature, degree and condition; and yet he chose to be poor. The English poet Christopher Harvey said of him in the seventeenth century:
It was Thy Choice, whilst Thou on Earth didst stay, And hadst not whereupon Thy Head to lay.

David Bentley Hart wrote: “Down the centuries, Christian culture has largely ignored the more provocative features of the early church or siphoned off their lingering residues in small special communities (such as monasteries and convents). Even when those features have been acknowledged, they have typically been treated as somehow incidental to the Gospel’s message — a prudent marshaling of resources against a hostile world for a brief season, but nothing essential to the faith, and certainly nothing amounting to a political philosophy.”

Hart struggled with the Greek words that contained the word “koinon,” or “common,” and most especially the texts’ distinctive emphasis on “koinonia,” a word usually rendered blandly as “fellowship” or “sharing” or (slightly better) “communion.” “But, he wondered,” is that all it implies? After all, the New Testament’s condemnations of personal wealth are fairly unremitting and remarkably stark: Matthew 6:19-20, for instance (“Do not store up treasures for yourself on the earth”), or Luke 6:24-25 (“But alas for you who are rich, for you have your comfort”) or James 5:1-6 (“Come now, you who are rich, weep, howling out at the miseries that are coming for you”). While there are always clergy members and theologians swift to assure us that the New Testament condemns not wealth but its abuse, not a single verse (unless subjected to absurdly forced readings) confirms the claim.

Hart came to the conclusion that koinonia often refers to a precise set of practices within the early Christian communities, a special social arrangement — the very one described in Acts — that was integral to the new life in Christ.

Hart also wrote, “When, for instance, the Letter to the Hebrews instructs believers not to neglect koinonia, or the First Letter to Timothy exhorts them to become koinonikoi, this is no mere recommendation of personal generosity, but an invocation of a very specific form of communal life. As best we can tell, local churches in the Roman world of the apostolic age were essentially small communes, self-sustaining but also able to share resources with one another when need dictated. This delicate web of communes constituted a kind of counter-empire within the empire, one founded upon charity rather than force — or, better, a kingdom not of this world but present within the world nonetheless, encompassing a radically different understanding of society and property.”

The early Christians were different, totally different. All around them Paganism prevailed. Then Christians expected Christ to return any minute, so their notion of possessions was different: they saw themselves as transient tenants of a rapidly vanishing world, refugees passing lightly through a history not their own.
Hart writes, “Well into the second century, the pagan satirist Lucian of Samosata reported that Christians viewed possessions with contempt and owned all property communally. And the Christian writers of Lucian’s day largely confirm that picture: Justin Martyr, Tertullian and the anonymous treatise known as the Didache all claim that Christians must own everything in common, renounce private property and give their wealth to the poor. Even Clement of Alexandria, the first significant theologian to argue that the wealthy could be saved if they cultivated “spiritual poverty,” still insisted that ideally all goods should be held in common.”
He continues,
“As late as the fourth and fifth centuries, bishops and theologians as eminent as Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria felt free to denounce private wealth as a form of theft and stored riches as plunder seized from the poor. The great John Chrysostom frequently issued pronouncements on wealth and poverty that make Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin sound like timid conservatives. According to him, there is but one human estate, belonging to all, and those who keep any more of it for themselves than barest necessity dictates are brigands and apostates from the true Christian enterprise of charity. And he said much of this while installed as Archbishop of Constantinople.”

That was then: a sharp difference between Christianity and paganism.

Today whatever is left of Christianity is basically indistinguishable from society at large. Actually the majority of church people have no earthly expectations anymore as heaven is the goal. Care for the earth is seen as New Age, a sort of modern paganism. Christ’s return to earth as THE ESSENCE OF HUMANITY, has been replaced with RAPTURE, a miraculous fetching up to heaven to leave the sinful earth to its deserved destruction.

CAN WE STILL DO IT?

What is the tiny remnant to do in these last days? Those who look forward to Christ’s coming and his New Creation, the Kingdom to come for which he gave his life?

Can we still choose the BENEDICT option? Can we still form religious communities, holding all things in common, at a time when we are so individualistic, so rich, so spoiled, so enraptured and en-captured by technology?

NOVEMBER 11 2017

TIME AND ETERNITY.

Jeremy Rifkin gave his book TIME WARS the subtitle of “The Primary Conflict in Human History”. I bought it in Los Angeles on December 5 1987 at a book fair on the grounds of the UCLA, the University of California. Yes, thirty years later I still love books and book stores.

Rifkin portrays the right perspective. He writes that a battle is brewing over our conception of time, the outcome determining the future of society. How true! The conflict is between those who advocate speed and efficiency and those who look for values more consistent with human needs and the dictates of nature. The real struggle – so said Rifkin – is between those who favor an artificial world where past, present and future blur together without benefit of real time or memory – a fully simulated ‘paradise’ – and those time rebels who question society’s capitulation to computer-related models and nanosecond-culture.

Rifkin, without mentioning it, touches here on the age-old division between Nature and Grace, in which Organized Religion has been an eager enemy of Nature, in essence battling God.

Eternity starts now.

My premise is that our life today determines our life in eternity. Eternity is not a matter of the future, it starts in the present. Already now and here, in this temporal life, we embrace eternity. If Christians are true to their status then they experience their religion as an existence before the face of God, the Creator.

We, as the human race, wander between the first and the second Paradise. We know the past and we all face eternity. That gives us a notion of time that determines our very humanity. It belies the belief that at death our life ceases to exist, that then all traces of our beings disappear forever.

Look at Creation: it breathes ETERNITY.

Scientists, acute nature observers, people who have far advanced in their fields, more and more realize that in their research and probing they have merely scratched the surface, have hardly made a dint into their field of enquiry. The reason is that the world, the cosmos, has been so created that scrutinizing created matter is an infinite enterprise, proceeds forever, so that we never will be able to describe and label at all.

E. O. Wilson, not a Christian, let me correct that, not a church adherent, in his book HALF-EARTH makes that very observation. Only a never-ending eternity is long enough to complete and fathom all that is inherent in creation.

Revelation 14: 13 encourages us in this regard because “our good works will follow us”. These good works apply especially to the acquisition of knowledge regarding creation, God’s ultimate work of art, just as our bad works – causing creational stress and distress in persons and nature – will forever come to haunt those who unrepentantly cause them.

The Apostles’ Creed confirms this where it says, “I believe in LIFE eternal.” That life refers to all living matter. That life also refers to all scientific enterprise, where we need ETERNITY to come to the bottom of all that is contained in creation. That means that this sort of searching starts in mortal life and continues in eternal life: so curious minds, don’t despair: there’s lots of time to come. All we need is unbounded curiosity: to live is to question; to live is to wonder; to live is to relax: we have all the time in the world.

This implies that dying does not mean that time stops: death is simply sleep, as Jesus always maintained. Death is nothing but an interval, a time to reflect, “the pause that refreshes”, as COCA COLA used to say. That also indicates that eternal life starts in the here and now.

So forget about dividing life into two sections where temporal time is seen as less valuable, while eternal life is regarded as of higher quality.

It is true, of course, that life today where the Christian can show only a small start of being obedient to God’s laws, is less perfect than life later in eternity, where all sin is banned forever. It is quite understandable that we call life after the Resurrection as ‘eternity’ while life from cradle to grave is seen as transitory: however the Scriptures tell us that we must include this period of transience as belonging to life eternal.

What is the situation today?

Back to Jeremy Rifkin, who sees a sharp division in his 30 year old book, a chasm that since has become so wide that it is almost impossible to distinguish church-going Christians from non-Christian. It is beyond question that society as a whole has chosen to live the planet-destructive way.

What Rifkin calls The Primary Conflict in Human History has largely disappeared: the MACHINE has won: we all are wedded to technology, the most trusted of all human enterprises. The old-age revolt of the godless versus the people of God has gone to the Satan crowd.

The Bible tells us that this has always been the case.

The prophets of old spoke with deep sadness about revolt, about how the human race had broken the COVENANT, had strayed away from the harmonious unity of the universe and chosen to go its own way. “Even the stork in the skies knows her appointed seasons, and the dove, the swift and the thrush observe the time of their migration. But my people do not know the requirements of the Lord”, lamented the prophet. (Jer. 8:7).

We all have ruptured the Kingdom; we all have brought dissonance into the world order.

At one time everything in heaven and on earth was united in one over arching purpose, in devout submission to him who created it all. We now have excluded ourselves from this goal. “The heavens declare God’s glory and the expanse tells us the work of his hands” sang the poet in Psalm 19, but we, the human race, we alone have refused to be included in that act of worship. We have torn ourselves away from this all embracing body and have declared ourselves to be sovereign. We have become a law to ourselves and by that act clothed ourselves with the mantle of loneliness, no longer able to hear and understand the song of creation, and, sadly, in turn no longer seen by creation as part and parcel of it.

The Book of Revelation calls this state BABYLON. We all are in Babylon.

The frightening part is that Babylon, that glorious Babylon, with its infinite charm, basically presents a pathetic picture. With it insistent advertising, with its tinkering and peddling, with its visual effects, it may entice the naïve, the easily fooled, who fail to see that Babylon is an empty shell, “who was and is not”, the way John described this world-tyrant. It simply cannot endure because it is not vested in God. Outside God nothing is safe, outside God everything, however beautiful it may seem and however great it may appear, in essence is nothing other than vanity.

That we live in THE LAST DAYS becomes plainer by the day because today is being fulfilled the basic message of the book of Revelation: everything will become what it is. Today we experience that.

Everyday there are new revelations of long hidden sex crimes, of money secretly stashed away to escape legitimate tax, of the true nature of the electorate, wanting independence, revealing their base, nihilistic nature.

What we call world history is one tremendous masquerade where each single item carries a disguise, where everything is different than it seems. But soon, very soon, this entire tomfoolery will end and every mask will be removed. That is the meaning of everything that has happened and will happen, and that is what the last things are all about.

Today we see Revelation in spades, everywhere, fulfilling in its last chapter: “Let those who do wrong, let them do wrong even more, let those who do vile, let them continue to do more so; let those who do right continue to do right; and let those who are holy continue to be holy.” (Rev. 22: 11).

That hits the nail on the head. The masks have to go, the secrets must be unveiled: everything in the end must become what it always has been already.

Nature already is falling upon the human race as a provoked lion: nature will breach all constrains humanity has placed upon it, and will explode into extraordinary catastrophes, earthquakes, floods, failed harvests, pandemics. All these will be more severe than ever.

Humanity has not turned to God, has only become more outspoken in his resistance, more spiteful in its hatred, more determined in its powerless hate, more relentless in its rage against God’s children. Indeed, who is unjust, more injustice will ensue, who is vile, more vileness will follow. The masks fall off.

We already are seeing how human vilest intentions rise to the surface. All veneer is vanishing, melting away in the heat of the last days

Where is the church?

In these last chapters of Revelation we notice little of the church. We often do hear heavenly songs of praise but the hidden ways of the church on earth are no longer shown. History no longer concerns her.

Fortunately, in the melting pot of the final time the church too becomes more and more what she is; in spite of all pressure and persecution, the church slowly assumes the features of her true character: love for God expressed as love for the Cosmos. Then, in the end, the new Kingdom, the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, the New Jerusalem will dawn.

In the end everything in the world becomes what it should have been all along when Christ returns.

Nature has no independent existence but is an instrument in God’s hand and is part of God’s plan and does what God wants. She does not become that: she is that. And we humans, we who revolted against God, we who in the depth of our striving are the great fugitive from God, and always rebel against him, we grimly keep on embracing this world because this is our last and only refuge.

What happens in the end is not something new, is not something miraculous. No, all this amounts to is that when humanity has spoken its last and most important word, then God starts to speak his mighty word. That is the most radical revolution of all times, but in essence it is nothing else than that everything becomes what it is. The secret is dug up from every reality and exposed for everybody to see. The ultimate meaning of every creature becomes exposed and held up to public view in the hands of the True God.
That is the Judgment Day,
the most horrible what can be imagined
but also that is redemption,
the eternal liberation of all who have loved Jesus’ appearance on earth.

At one time he exclaimed on Calvary the triumphal call: “It is accomplished”. Already then the great plea was settled, and already then everything was changed. On the last day it again will be exclaimed: “It is done!” (Rev. 21: 6). That second exclamation is exactly the same as the first. It is the same word, but now it is in the acute, present tense, is now the full reality.
Now, indeed, it is for ever and ever ‘done’.

Thirty year ago Jeremy Rifkin reminded us that the battle between wisdom and foolishness, between TIME and ETERNITY was raging and quickly intensifying.

The real question is not that there is the conflict. That’s becoming more evident by the day. The real question is at which camp are we. There’s no such a thing as the right church or the wrong church: all of them have gone astray.

It boils down to John 3: 16: God so loved the world that, in order to free it from Satan’s clutches, he offered his Son as payment.

What is required of us? Love God and his creation, above all, and all human creatures as ourselves.

That transforms TIME into ETERNITY.

(Part of this has been translated from J.H. Bavinck’s book on Revelation.)

NOVEMBER 4 2017

TURMOIL

I like that word TURMOIL. It sounds like what it portrays.
I sometimes write lines of the rhyming kind. TURMOIL for instance, rhymes with toil, spoil, oil, soil, with boil, foil, roil, foil, with despoil, embroil, recoil — oodles of possibilities to make up something that ends in …oil. Rhyming lines make for easier remembering and can be made into singing versions.
I once wrote six verses on a minister who was retiring and I had the congregation sing them on a familiar tune: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow” (8888LM). Here are 3 of them.

A man acquainted with each trend,
in dogma steeped, in creed not bend,
unerring knowledge quick to lend:
our dear beloved Reverend.

The sick to see, the rifts to mend,
And always justice to defend,
The Gospel preach, Goodnews extend,
Our dear beloved Reverend.

On the Lord’s will he does depend,
he must, he can’t on his stipend,
another reason to commend,
our dear beloved Reverend.

For some I could have added, but never did:

His sermons are, I must contend
Quite often boring, without end,
That’s why I simply do pretend
To listen to the Reverend.

On TURMOIL here’s what my muse tells me:

Our world today, by using oil,
Has done away with human toil,
But poisoned our so precious soil,
So will it end in great turmoil?

Yes, soon there’s nothing left to spoil
Then all of nature will recoil
Who do we think we can still foil
Before it ends in great turmoil?

The ocean waves already boil
The forests burn and tempers roil
Our rulers lie and truth destroy
Yes, it will end in great turmoil.
(Can be sung on the tune: By Babel’s streams we sat and wept)

Turmoil is the trend: wherever I look matters are in motion, often violently.

Jonathan Wiener, in 1990, wrote, “THE NEXT ONE HUNDRED YEARS, Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth”. He relates how already in 1896, a Swedish chemist, Svante Arrhenius, wrote, “We are evaporating our coal mines into the air. …Eventually this change might very well heat the planet to heights outside all human experience.”

Wiener relates how Charles David Keeling, 60 years later, in 1956, when 26 and with a fresh Ph.D. in chemistry made it his life’s goal to measure CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon Dioxide is the gas that our cars exhale through their tail pipes, causing Green House Gases.

Now, another 60 years later, these gases are fueling WEATHER TURMOIL. As of October 31 this year the count had accelerated to 404.16 parts per million, the largest annual increase ever. Historically 280 was the norm. Globally trees – thanks to forest fires and clear-cutting – now emit more CO2 than they absorb.

A recent report points out that concentrations of CO2 are now 145%, methane 257% and nitrous oxide 122% above pre-industrial times.

The beginning of the End.

This year is signaling the beginning of the end. From now on the most watched website will be ARCTIC NEWS which also gives details on what happens in the air above us, where NORMAL is no longer a current word.

As I have written before: everything is connected to everything else. That ‘everything else’ reminds me of Colossians 1: 15-16. It says that: “Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him.”

Now, with Satan in charge, ALL THINGS are about to change, in the air, in the soil and in the seas, including all that is not visible such as the airwaves, the rays that are bounced to and from the satellites, the TV streams that are received via the dishes sporting on our roofs, the thoughts that penetrate our minds: all these invisible things shape our minds more than the few sermons on Sundays: everything is about to change; nothing is stable anymore: TURMOIL is the new state.

A Chinese curse is with us: may you live in interesting times.

This past week Washington was awash in turmoil. It’s just one example of what’s going on over the entire globe. The election of Donald Trump is not exceptional: he is the exact outcome of the mentality of the American Psyche: brash and loud and abrasive and entirely focused on money, given to exaggeration, stretching the truth, seeking to appear bigger and richer than they really are: the proverbial American. Trump so resonates with the American psyche because he embodies it.

What is so dangerous is that America claims to be religious, except that its religion is no longer Christian. As Harold Bloom so acutely observed: America claims to be Christian, but has ceased to be so: Gnosticism rules the church, and not any church but all the churches: it’s built into their very structures.

The USA is not the only country is disarray. Great Britain, when it chose by a tiny majority to leave the European Union, has also been at odds with itself as its economy is facing declining growth prospects. The ruling Conservatives have no clue how to quit the E.U. without doing even more damage to their country’s future. That’s what happens when you vote for “disrupters” who never spent a second thinking through how all of their disruptions connect the morning after the morning after.

Everywhere in the Western world the rulers have an impossible task: how to pay for the generous social benefits – pensions and healthcare – when faced with old and older people and a declining younger work force. So far mountains of debt have done the trick, impossible to sustain.

RELIGION AGAIN.

Last week the Guardian had a long article on the state of the Roman Catholic Church, in particular on Pope Francis. It started with the ominous words: s
“Pope Francis is one of the most hated men in the world today. Those who hate him most are not atheists, or Protestants, or Muslims, but some of his own followers. Outside the church he is hugely popular as a figure of almost ostentatious modesty and humility. From the moment that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio became pope in 2013, his gestures caught the world’s imagination: the new pope drove a Fiat, carried his own bags and settled his own bills in hotels; he asked, of gay people, “Who am I to judge?” and washed the feet of Muslim women refugees.
But within the church, Francis has provoked a ferocious backlash from conservatives who fear that this spirit will divide the church, and could even shatter it. This summer, one prominent English priest said: “We can’t wait for him to die. It’s unprintable what we say in private. Whenever two priests meet, they talk about how awful Bergoglio is … he’s like Caligula: if he had a horse, he’d make him cardinal.” Of course, after 10 minutes of fluent complaint, he added: “You mustn’t print any of this, or I’ll be sacked.”

To judge by the voting figures at the last worldwide meeting of bishops, almost a quarter of the College of Cardinals – the most senior clergy in the church – believe that the pope is flirting with heresy.
His most violent opponent is Cardinal Burke who represents a long tradition of heavyweight American power brokers of white ethnic Catholicism. The hieratic, patriarchal and embattled church of the Latin Mass is his ideal, to which it seemed that the church under John Paul II and Benedict was slowly returning – until Francis started work.
Cardinal Burke’s combination of anti-communism, ethnic pride and hatred of feminism has nurtured a succession of prominent rightwing lay figures in the US, from Pat Buchanan through Bill O’Reilly and Steve Bannon, alongside lesser-known Catholic intellectuals such as Michael Novak, who have shilled untiringly for US wars in the Middle East and the Republican understanding of free markets.

It was Cardinal Burke who invited Bannon, then already the animating spirit of Breitbart News, to address a conference in the Vatican, via video link from California, in 2014. Bannon’s speech was apocalyptic, incoherent and historically eccentric. But there was no mistaking the urgency of his summons to a holy war: the second world war, he said, had really been “the Judeo-Christian west versus atheists”, and now civilisation was “at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism … a very brutal and bloody conflict … that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years … if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not … fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting.”
To guarantee Francis’ changes will last, the church has to accept them. That is a question that will not be answered in his lifetime. He is 80 now, and only has one lung. His opponents may be praying for his death, but no one can know whether his successor will attempt to contradict him – and on that question, the future of the Catholic Church now hangs.” End of quote.

I welcome the TURMOIL in the Roman Christian Church, a situation brutally necessary for arriving at the TRUE state of the Gospel: away from heaven – still 100 percent Roman Catholic teaching – and honoring God’s creation, and its eternal existence, which many Catholics do.

BACK TO MUNDANE MATTERS

As we well know, all is not well.

Climate Change is the catalyst here, already causing Pandemics, deadly droughts, flooding rains, and hellish heat that devastate the crops.
As a prelude to THE END, the Bible Book REVELATION mentions EARTH QUAKES, especially in Chapter 16: 18: “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth.”
You can imagine how the seismographs in the capitals shake wildly in record numbers beyond any ever registered. You can visualize how the houses tumble, the palaces are flattened. No human technological expertise is any help. Nothing can withstand this force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power. Now an endless series of ever more frightening events roll over the world.

The catastrophes mentioned here extend to the entire cosmos. They affect people everywhere. In the disastrous happenings preceding the last things, two types of distress can be detected. There are calamities that originate in nature and there are those that are the result of human action. Here only the first type is mentioned. It is as if the tamed earth, given by God as a gift to humanity as his own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against her tormentor. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become recalcitrant, and full of revenge has thrown itself upon humanity.

And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her nuclear energy, 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.

Today the signs of looming earthquakes are everywhere.

One newspaper reports:
Europe Fears ‘The Big One’ After 140 Earthquakes Strike The French Alps In 40 Days.
The same is happening in Yellowstone Park where also hundreds of small earthquakes have been detected. The danger there is so immense that a volcanic explosion there could spell the end of the world. Other regions too report volcanic unrest: in Bali, Indonesia, in Alaska, in Iceland, wherever volcanoes are found.

To make sure that this message penetrates the dull minds of humans the Bible mentions earthquakes in various places, such as in Matthew 24: 7, in Luke 21: 11, in Ezekiel 38: 19, in Joel 2: 10, all as preludes to THE END.

We, as the modern Humanity, are unleashing powers and disasters which today are the harbingers of world-wide calamities. All the signs are there.

TURMOIL visible and invisible will only accelerate. Be prepared. John the Baptizer comes to mind: the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

OCTOBER 28 2017

THE FINAL REFORMATION.

On October 31 2017 it is exactly 500 years ago that Martin Luther started a true revolution: challenging the all-powerful ecclesiastical empire, with Rome as its capital. The final outcome: thousands of new denominations, a cacophony of different opinions, the birth of Colonialism and Capitalism. Now, 500 years later do we experience the end of organized religion?
Fact is that from 100 percent participation in matters divine then, today, in our Western World, only a few go to church, mainly the old.

The traditional churches, Anglican, United, Presbyterian, are dying, at least in the village where I live. In Quebec the same is true for the R. C. Church. Our local Anglican Church expired a few years ago, as they could no longer pay the overhead. I was at its last service where many lapsed members came for their final farewell. What were they thinking?
I liked their minister, a very-open-minded, sincere Christian. When, in our Presbyterian Church we had a series of terrible preachers, we often would go there. At the time there also was an excellent Roman Catholic priest in town, who had been a missionary in Mexico. He was truly ecumenical and had no respect for the RC hierarchy.
Not so much the Pentecostal Church. I once went to a concert there, but walked out, couldn’t hack the music, the lyrics and the male-chauvinistic atmosphere.
Then there is our Salvation Army station. It sponsors the food bank, and has a second-hand clothing store. When I needed a black blazer I went there and found a brand-new virgin wool coat for $4.00 and a leather belt for $1.00: can’t beat that. Our village has a limited commercial section, no stores that sell such items, but it does have a large segment of unemployable and disabled people, people that somehow may not feel at home in our church which is thoroughly middleclass, almost half of them retired teachers. Sally Ann fills a definite need in our municipality. The commercial options maybe limited but for the 6500 people that live here there’s lots of religious choice.
Oh yes, I almost forgot the most important part: half of the arae confess to be of the Roman faith. We have two large R. C. churches no more than 4 km apart. Together they seat more than twice the other churches combined. It certainly is not lack of capacity that plagues the churches: the United Church seats some 300 people, the Presbyterian about 250, and the two R.C. churches more than one thousand. Yet on any given Sunday no more than 250 people attend church representing less than 4 percent of the total population. I’m pretty sure that’s an optimistic figure.

Tweed had a large influx of unilingual French people some 150 years ago. When they were registered by the English officers their names were phonetically recorded, so Thibeault turned into Tebo, Robichaud resulted in Rabbishaw, Faubert formed Fobear or Fobert and Villeneuve was transcribed as Villneff, just to cite a few name distortions. Of course, then they all were staunch Catholic.

The church we go to, St Andrew’s Presbyterian, was built in 1890 and inaugurated in 1892. This past Sunday we celebrated our 125th anniversary.
We joined it in 1980 when there was a thriving Sunday School and a regular attendance of some 70 people. The choir then had close to 20 members and competed in music festivals. On our 100th Anniversary we even performed the Messiah.

Since then people have died and moved away. Of the current members only 5 were born into the church. Thanks to an influx of new people we still have a core of some 40 people. The choir, now reduced to 9 people (I am the only tenor), has only one original member: the rest, including the choir leader, are new. Gone is the Sunday school.

Does that indicate that the days for organized religion are numbered and the need for God has disappeared?

Religion will never disappear.

When people stop believing in God they will start believing anything, such as Infinite Economic Growth. “Anyone who thinks that exponential growth can go on forever on a Finite Planet is either a madman, an economist or a politician,” remarked one astute observer.
There must be a lot of mad people in the world, because Exponential Growth is still the reigning mantra in the land. It is pure RELIGION, replacing the Creator God with the god Mammon.

Basically I am an Collapsitarian, a state of mind that finds ample reinforcement today, witness the frightening disappearance of 75 percent of insects, imperilling crops and fruits: another definite sign that we are approaching THE DAY OF THE LORD.

I am a firm believer in the laws of Ecology, one of which is: “everything is connected to everything else”. Our entire societal system consisting of economic, environmental, ecclesiastical segments is one gigantic whole with all parts so intimately intertwined that when one part fails the entire structure collapses: no insects, no humanity. Just last week the WHO – World Health Organization – reported that today one in six deaths world-wide are the result of pollution, the direct result of today’s pseudo religion which allows us to live as kings, with One Hundred Energy slaves at our disposal 24/7 for a very brief time.

One example.

There is a nihilistic strain coursing through the veins of a significant number of people on the American right, composed mostly of Rapture believing, cosmos despising, church people. They delight in Mr. Trump’s effort to annihilate truth and draw energy and purpose from the unsettling effect he has on the nation as a whole. For them, Mr. Trump is a “fighter,” and politics needs to be weaponized in order to be enjoyed. They see politics as World Wrestling entertainment and Mr. Trump as the best wrestler in the ring.

Nihilism and fatalism go together.

Take the farmers across six US states in the wheat belt. They all live – and die – by the OGALLALA aquifer system.
They know what the problems are, and they can clearly see that it has a multi-hundred-year recharge rate, and that they’re drawing it down far too fast. The farmers full well know that if they continue to do this then the very farms that they consider their chief assets are going to be ruined. Now they basically grow corn in a desert. It simply doesn’t make sense. Everybody knows it doesn’t make sense, and yet they persist and continue to do this.

World-wide we do the same thing everywhere: we saturate the soil, water and air with plastic particles and pesticides, which have murderous effects on all life, including insects and humans.

We need an APP for thinking.

When I was running last week, outside, in shorts, at the end of October!, I thought up a perfect APP for making people think. It’s a program that, when activated will suddenly destroy access to the Internet in all of North America forever. That will restore people to think for themselves again. It would also bring people back to church, for fellowship, a necessary ingredient for sanity, wellbeing and longer life, because people who go to church live longer and healthier, for the simple reasons that we are created to be part of a community. In the Apostles’ Creed, the only line that gets an elaboration is: I believe in One Holy Catholic Church, THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS.

What is the role of the church in these FINAL REFORMATION DAYS?

By and large the church no longer can bring the truth, because it will only alienate the people in the pew, most of them being Heaven Adherents.

The truth is found in 2 Peter 3: 13, where it says that
“In keeping with Christ’s promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.”

It is now all too clear that there is no righteousness in our state of affairs – and I don’t have to repeat the multitude of environmental sins we constantly commit. N.T Wright, in his study outline on Revelation notes that one pastor, after reading Wright’s book SURPRISED BY HOPE, started to preach the NEW EARTH gospel, upsetting his major contributors who had grown up with the Heaven doctrine.

That means that the church is caught between two opposing forces. The inevitable result is an ineffective gospel. It is high time that the church develop a NEW EARTH GOSPEL and prepare THE WORLD FOR AN EARTHLY FUTURE, because without a NEW EARTH emphasis the church has little to say.

I believe that, if the church plods on, torn between heaven and earth, and unwilling or unable to implement 2 Peter 3: 13, then both NULLA SALUS EXTRA ECCLESIAM and NULLA SALUS INTRA ECCLESIAM hold true.
This means that even though “there is no salvation outside the church” there also is “no longer salvation inside the church”, because all it does is prolonging PIOUS SECULARISM as Bonhoeffer put it.

In that case what happens to the NEW EARTH BELIEVERS?

For them the church is there to teach them humility, to learn patience. For them the church is there to love our fellow neighbors in spite of unbelief, in spite of ignorance, in spite of misunderstanding, in spite of traditional faith, in spite of hypocrisy.

Jesus knew that the Jewish religion of his time was godless. Yet he went to the synagogue and temple. That’s why I too still go to church where the minister has the unenviable job to balance between heaven and earth.

THE FINAL REFORMATION.

History teaches us that every 500-600 years a new start is made in religion. Major religions seem to be born every five- six hundred years. Moses and the emergence of the Yahweh worship took place some 1200 years before Christ. About 600 years later the world saw the birth of three separate religious streams: Zoroaster in Persia, Confucius in China and Buddha in South East Asia, while the Solomon Temple in Jerusalem was also inaugurated.
The Christian Religion took off with the death of Christ, while Islam saw its rise with Mohammed who lived from 570-632.
The Crusades – 1096-1291- could be seen as a major change, as the church became militant. This was followed by the 100 YEAR WAR between France and England -1337-1453-, and especially the 14th Century Black Plague pandemic which killed at least one-third of the European population.
All this prepared the world for the next religious event, the Protestant Reformation, led by Martin Luther on October 31 1517.

Now, with the speeding up of history thanks to our carboholic addiction, 500 years later we are due for what I call the FINAL REFORMATION.

As I see it, this FINAL STAGE will take the form of John 3: 16 where all churches, all denominations, all religions will embrace LOVE FOR THE COSMOS, or perish, most likely the latter. That is what Jesus prayed for as recorded in John 17: 21: “That all may be one,” uniting on the theme of LOVING THE COSMOS. He was about to give his life for this goal.

That’s why today churches everywhere must ignore all denominational directives, most shelve all confessional documents and contemporary statements and unite under the banner of 2 Peter 3: 10-13:
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.
Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live HOLY and GODLY lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.

Living HOLY and GODLY lives means that we must be totally aware of Christ’s sacrifice, be in tune with God’s Creation, and ban, as much as possible, all polluting elements in our life and so effectively prepare ourselves for the arrival of THE NEW CREATION.
THAT CONSTITUTES THE FINAL REFORMATION.

OCTOBER 28 2017

THE FINAL REFORMATION.

On October 31 2017 it is exactly 500 years ago that Martin Luther started a true revolution: challenging the all-powerful ecclesiastical empire, with Rome as its capital. The final outcome: thousands of new denominations, a cacophony of different opinions, the birth of Colonialism and Capitalism. Now, 500 years later do we experience the end of organized religion?
Fact is that from 100 percent participation in matters divine then, today, in our Western World, only a few go to church, mainly the old.

The traditional churches, Anglican, United, Presbyterian, are dying, at least in the village where I live. In Quebec the same is true for the R. C. Church. Our local Anglican Church expired a few years ago, as they could no longer pay the overhead. I was at its last service where many lapsed members came for their final farewell. What were they thinking?
I liked their minister, a very-open-minded, sincere Christian. When, in our Presbyterian Church we had a series of terrible preachers, we often would go there. At the time there also was an excellent Roman Catholic priest in town, who had been a missionary in Mexico. He was truly ecumenical and had no respect for the RC hierarchy.
Not so much the Pentecostal Church. I once went to a concert there, but walked out, couldn’t hack the music, the lyrics and the male-chauvinistic atmosphere.
Then there is our Salvation Army station. It sponsors the food bank, and has a second-hand clothing store. When I needed a black blazer I went there and found a brand-new virgin wool coat for $4.00 and a leather belt for $1.00: can’t beat that. Our village has a limited commercial section, no stores that sell such items, but it does have a large segment of unemployable and disabled people, people that somehow may not feel at home in our church which is thoroughly middleclass, almost half of them retired teachers. Sally Ann fills a definite need in our municipality. The commercial options maybe limited but for the 6500 people that live here there’s lots of religious choice.
Oh yes, I almost forgot the most important part: half of the arae confess to be of the Roman faith. We have two large R. C. churches no more than 4 km apart. Together they seat more than twice the other churches combined. It certainly is not lack of capacity that plagues the churches: the United Church seats some 300 people, the Presbyterian about 250, and the two R.C. churches more than one thousand. Yet on any given Sunday no more than 250 people attend church representing less than 4 percent of the total population. I’m pretty sure that’s an optimistic figure.

Tweed had a large influx of unilingual French people some 150 years ago. When they were registered by the English officers their names were phonetically recorded, so Thibeault turned into Tebo, Robichaud resulted in Rabbishaw, Faubert formed Fobear or Fobert and Villeneuve was transcribed as Villneff, just to cite a few name distortions. Of course, then they all were staunch Catholic.

The church we go to, St Andrew’s Presbyterian, was built in 1890 and inaugurated in 1892. This past Sunday we celebrated our 125th anniversary.
We joined it in 1980 when there was a thriving Sunday School and a regular attendance of some 70 people. The choir then had close to 20 members and competed in music festivals. On our 100th Anniversary we even performed the Messiah.

Since then people have died and moved away. Of the current members only 5 were born into the church. Thanks to an influx of new people we still have a core of some 40 people. The choir, now reduced to 9 people (I am the only tenor), has only one original member: the rest, including the choir leader, are new. Gone is the Sunday school.

Does that indicate that the days for organized religion are numbered and the need for God has disappeared?

Religion will never disappear.

When people stop believing in God they will start believing anything, such as Infinite Economic Growth. “Anyone who thinks that exponential growth can go on forever on a Finite Planet is either a madman, an economist or a politician,” remarked one astute observer.
There must be a lot of mad people in the world, because Exponential Growth is still the reigning mantra in the land. It is pure RELIGION, replacing the Creator God with the god Mammon.

Basically I am an Collapsitarian, a state of mind that finds ample reinforcement today, witness the frightening disappearance of 75 percent of insects, imperiling crops and fruits: another definite sign that we are approaching THE DAY OF THE LORD.

I am a firm believer in the laws of Ecology, one of which is: “everything is connected to everything else”. Our entire societal system consisting of economic, environmental, ecclesiastical segments is one gigantic whole with all parts so intimately intertwined that when one part fails the entire structure collapses: no insects, no humanity. Just last week the WHO – World Health Organization – reported that today one in six deaths world-wide are the result of pollution, the direct result of today’s pseudo religion which allows us to live as kings, with One Hundred Energy slaves at our disposal 24/7 for a very brief time.

One example.

There is a nihilistic strain coursing through the veins of a significant number of people on the American right, composed mostly of Rapture believing, cosmos despising, church people. They delight in Mr. Trump’s effort to annihilate truth and draw energy and purpose from the unsettling effect he has on the nation as a whole. For them, Mr. Trump is a “fighter,” and politics needs to be weaponized in order to be enjoyed. They see politics as World Wrestling entertainment and Mr. Trump as the best wrestler in the ring.

Nihilism and fatalism go together.

Take the farmers across six US states in the wheat belt. They all live – and die – by the OGALLALA aquifer system.
They know what the problems are, and they can clearly see that it has a multi-hundred-year recharge rate, and that they’re drawing it down far too fast. The farmers full well know that if they continue to do this then the very farms that they consider their chief assets are going to be ruined. Now they basically grow corn in a desert. It simply doesn’t make sense. Everybody knows it doesn’t make sense, and yet they persist and continue to do this.

World-wide we do the same thing everywhere: we saturate the soil, water and air with plastic particles and pesticides, which have murderous effects on all life, including insects and humans.

We need an APP for thinking.

When I was running last week, outside, in shorts, at the end of October!, I thought up a perfect APP for making people think. It’s a program that, when activated will suddenly destroy access to the Internet in all of North America forever. That will restore people to think for themselves again. It would also bring people back to church, for fellowship, a necessary ingredient for sanity, wellbeing and longer life, because people who go to church live longer and healthier, for the simple reasons that we are created to be part of a community. In the Apostles’ Creed, the only line that gets an elaboration is: I believe in One Holy Catholic Church, THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS.

What is the role of the church in these FINAL REFORMATION DAYS?

By and large the church no longer can bring the truth, because it will only alienate the people in the pew, most of them being Heaven Adherents.

The truth is found in 2 Peter 3: 13, where it says that
“In keeping with Christ’s promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.”

It is now all too clear that there is no righteousness in our state of affairs – and I don’t have to repeat the multitude of environmental sins we constantly commit. N.T Wright, in his study outline on Revelation notes that one pastor, after reading Wright’s book SURPRISED BY HOPE, started to preach the NEW EARTH gospel, upsetting his major contributors who had grown up with the Heaven doctrine.

That means that the church is caught between two opposing forces. The inevitable result is an ineffective gospel. It is high time that the church develop a NEW EARTH GOSPEL and prepare THE WORLD FOR AN EARTHLY FUTURE, because without a NEW EARTH emphasis the church has little to say.

I believe that, if the church plods on, torn between heaven and earth, and unwilling or unable to implement 2 Peter 3: 13, then both NULLA SALUS EXTRA ECCLESIAM and NULLA SALUS INTRA ECCLESIAM hold true.
This means that even though “there is no salvation outside the church” there also is “no longer salvation inside the church”, because all it does is prolonging PIOUS SECULARISM as Bonhoeffer put it.

In that case what happens to the NEW EARTH BELIEVERS?

For them the church is there to teach them humility, to learn patience. For them the church is there to love our fellow neighbors in spite of unbelief, in spite of ignorance, in spite of misunderstanding, in spite of traditional faith, in spite of hypocrisy.

Jesus knew that the Jewish religion of his time was godless. Yet he went to the synagogue and temple. That’s why I too still go to church where the minister has the unenviable job to balance between heaven and earth.

THE FINAL REFORMATION.

History teaches us that every 500-600 years a new start is made in religion. Major religions seem to be born every five- six hundred years. Moses and the emergence of the Yahweh worship took place some 1200 years before Christ. About 600 years later the world saw the birth of three separate religious streams: Zoroaster in Persia, Confucius in China and Buddha in South East Asia, while the Solomon Temple in Jerusalem was also inaugurated.
The Christian Religion took off with the death of Christ, while Islam saw its rise with Mohammed who lived from 570-632.
The Crusades – 1096-1291- could be seen as a major change, as the church became militant. This was followed by the 100 YEAR WAR between France and England -1337-1453-, and especially the 14th Century Black Plague pandemic which killed at least one-third of the European population.
All this prepared the world for the next religious event, the Protestant Reformation, led by Martin Luther on October 31 1517.

Now, with the speeding up of history thanks to our carboholic addiction, 500 years later we are due for what I call the FINAL REFORMATION.

As I see it, this FINAL STAGE will take the form of John 3: 16 where all churches, all denominations, all religions will embrace LOVE FOR THE COSMOS, or perish, most likely the latter. That is what Jesus prayed for as recorded in John 17: 21: “That all may be one,” uniting on the theme of LOVING THE COSMOS. He was about to give his life for this goal.

That’s why today churches everywhere must ignore all denominational directives, most shelve all confessional documents and contemporary statements and unite under the banner of 2 Peter 3: 10-13:
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.
Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live HOLY and GODLY lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.

Living HOLY and GODLY lives means that we must be totally aware of Christ’s sacrifice, be in tune with God’s Creation, and ban, as much as possible, all polluting elements in our life and so effectively prepare ourselves for the arrival of THE NEW CREATION.
THAT CONSTITUTES THE FINAL REFORMATION.

October 21 2017

WHY ARE WE HERE?

We, you and I, are here for one purpose only: to look after creation. Nothing else comes even close. It’s also a rewarding affair: when we look after creation, creation looks after us.

This ‘cultural mandate’ was given to the first human pair: there, in the beginning, before time started (because it was supposed to be FOREVER) the original human calling was service in its fullest scope and doing this gladly with all it possessed. That was clearly evident when God entrusted Adam and Eve with the occupancy and care for the cosmos. Entrusting implied full ownership: total possession.

Caring for creation was then and still is now our primary cultural mandate.

Faint notions of this original assignment are still visible to us. Actually it’s becoming more evident now that creation is in such a state of imbalance because our creational sins are catching up on us. You see the opposite is true as well: neglecting, abusing creation makes it our enemy.

Still………

Scientific observations confirm that living along greenery, close to trees, in the midst of vegetation, soaking in nature makes us happier, and lengthens our lifespan.

It is really striking how great our powers were at the time of creation when God allotted us full ownership of creation.
Basically the Creator said: “I give you complete freedom to develop the earth as you see fit. I will first allow you a learning period, in which you can begin to see the intricacy of all created matter, so that you can respect and understand how all things fit together. After that you can start to develop created matter, to deploy the means of creation, use your brains and so serve God.”

When we start to learn about ourselves, which is perhaps the highest goal of every human, we realize that all of us have many diverse abilities and talents, but we all need three specific traits: (1) We have to acquire special knowledge, (2) Must aim for total peace with the Highest, and (3) See the holiness of all creation.

Life, from the very beginning was a classroom; life from the very outset was a harmonious relationship with the Creator; life was always to be a constant, never ceasing learning and worship experience.

Those three features give us humans our unique stamp, lending us a character that distinguishes us from every other creature, making us rational, spiritual, and moral beings.

Last week I was reading “TENDING THE GARDEN: essays on the Gospel and the earth.” The introduction cited a survey done by Yale University, tracing human attitudes toward nature and wildlife. The outcome was rather startling: “the more frequently an individual attended religious services, the higher the probability that his or her attitudes toward animals would tend toward those of domination or even outright negativity. Similarly, those who reported that they rarely (if ever) attended religious services were far more likely to display an ecological or naturalistic stance toward the animal world.”

One key rule.

Of course we must respect creation as an extension of God, the Creator: it is the earthly, natural reality of God’s creativity.
When we look around us into the whole wide world out there, we immediately are overwhelmed by the rich diversity we see everywhere. The immense richness is simply astounding. The abundance of varieties of beings and the many kinds of creatures is beyond belief.

A closer survey discovers ever-newer shapes and forms and ever more encounters with different, previously unknown species.
When we more closely examine what goes on around us, then instead of mere admiration for the amazing newness of it all, we are struck even more by the unity and order that are evident everywhere, because everything on earth is somehow harmoniously connected to everything else. The 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, as these are often the sole source for their food.

The phenomena of day and night, of summer and winter, of rain and drought, of heat and cold, all are part of the grand chain
of happenings, depending on where the sun happens to be and from where the wind blows. The one event influences another and yet the one cannot exist without the presence of the other.

We continuously discover that the order is one full of purpose. The great connectedness of all these entities is at the same time the reason why the totality is served by it as well. We don’t even need to explore everything too deeply to discover the amazing fact that behind everything there is an invisible set of laws: that the one as it were serves to complete the other. The butterflies serve the flowers just as much as the flowers serve the butterflies. The sun, that big, beneficial celestial body, which from an immeasurable distance bathes the earth in multicolored splendor, is itself not conscious that from a distance of millions of miles it brings light and warmth. It is the sun that maintains life on earth. It is the sun that causes plants to sprout out of the moist earth. It is the sun that removes mourning and remakes it into merriment. If the sun had a mind of its own, then perhaps it would muse: I shine because that’s my nature: I delight in it; it’s the joy of my life. But it knows not that a Hand mightier than the sun has included it in the beautiful law of serving. Because, unknowingly, that so superior sun serves the tiny, tiny plant that full of life expectancy courageously stretches its stem to absorb its rays.

When we look around us with open eyes and minds, then there
is one thing that time and again touches us to the core: it’s all about serving. The law of serving is at the heart of every creature: it is the overarching purpose for every being. That law makes it possible for the entire world to exist.

Every creature may think that it is there only for itself, but in the final analysis it is nothing else but a servant for others. To be alive, to exist at all, finds it destination simply in serving others. Without that law nothing else can be. Yet that law of serving is remarkable in more than one way.

What is so truly amazing is that, as a rule, no creature is there for the sole reason of serving, as they all think that self-help
is their sole goal, but all that serving goes automatically, and thus is simply an unconscious act. It is as if a mighty hand brings all this into motion and, in spite of itself, stimulates this self-less serving. This serving, therefore, is not a sacrifice, is not a duty, but an in-born act, without compulsion, without intent. Each single being is there according to its nature, but everything together is so oriented that the existence of the one supports the other and maintains it.

It also soon becomes clear that the act of serving changes in direct proportion to the higher status of the species.
There are three categories of beings in creation, three large classes, which differ among themselves.

The first category consists of the ordinary, lifeless material. That
too involves service, but it is one that is ostensibly accidental. The fertile soil serves the tiny seeds that germinate there but they are unaware of this, and that’s alright with them. A blanket of snow, with its dense cover, serves to protect the field against the bitter cold. The high mountains also serve when they gather the snow in the winter and preserve it throughout the spring only to release it in the summer and so replenish the rivers with their pure and cool water. But all this proceeds unknowingly.

Then there is the rotating of the earth around its axis. Is this not also a serving of immense meaning because this daily motion makes the transition from day to night possible, something that, in the final analysis, enables us to live?

All these elements are unaware of their serving. Sometimes, circumstances may cause severe damage. This happens, for instance, when unusual rainfall results in widespread flooding, or when a merciless sun burns the promising harvest to a crisp. In the seemingly nonliving world the great order of natural law still rules, generally attuned to the great law of service; but under the prodding of the great Adversary it is now more and more inclined toward destruction.

In the second place another broad range of species can be found in the smaller of the animals and plants. In that segment service takes on a more defined role, has more purpose, more unity, and looks to be more intentional. The plant offers itself with all its tender organs, and, when circumstances become unfavorable, it even changes its approach to other methods to serve better.
Upon closer examination it appears that the typical plant is less concerned about its own welfare and more about the well-being of its progeny.

The mother offers her life to advance that of her child. The full ear shrivels to dust when the seeds have been released into the earth. To propagate the line the single specimen brings the ultimate sacrifice.
The mother protects the young against all danger and would rather perish than neglect her newborn. There also is evidence of a peculiar “specimen-egoism.”

We are on top, but…..

At the very top of these three compartments is the final stage, that of the conscious possessors of free will, the human species.

With humans service is simply different, is infinitely richer, but because of that also more difficult. It is self-evident that the aforementioned natural instincts are also present in the human race.
There too they care for children; there too a touch of “specimen-egoism.” But these powerful instinctive forces are here recognized as such. Humans know exactly what they do and why they do it.
Consequently humans have much greater opportunity to serve.

Service becomes specialized as each assumes a small part of the great societal task. The trouble with us humans is that the inclination to only serve our specific needs is both stronger and more dangerous, promoting our welfare at the expense of our fellow citizens and creation. Even though we are more conscious of what we do and are able to gauge our needs we also can easily ignore the plight of our neighbors and creation.

That happens all too easily when we center life around our own interests, while often pushing away the needs of others. In short: serving is for most of us something we are loath to do, driven by egoism, the “I come first” instinct. That “I come first” inclination
often overwhelms all other feelings, stifles them, and comes out on top. With us humans the urge of “me first” usually takes priority over conflict, the struggle, the concept of serving.

Given this weakness, we have been given a command: serve one another! This serving, something all other species of the world accomplish automatically and by instinct, we have to implement in full awareness of what we do. In this third category we are given the command, the moral code: Love your neighbor as yourself, and God and his creation above everything else.

There has been one, the human Jesus Christ, who has expressed
his life’s calling: The Son of Man, Humanity personified, has not come to be served, but to serve.

Not serving creation comes at a price.

Already we see the contours of the end times. This past week it was discovered that 75 percent of all insects world-wide have disappeared: jeopardizing pollination and starving birds. That is just one sign.

The end manifests itself in an increasing and senseless chaos among the human race in ways far greater than ever before experienced. In the very end, thoroughly evil elements will use the powerful instruments of modern technology to make life totally machine-dominated.

Still, we, you and I, are here for one purpose only: to look after creation. Nothing else comes even close. It’s also a rewarding affair: when we look after creation, creation looks after us.

That was and still is our ‘cultural mandate’.

P.S. Some of these thoughts I owe to J.H. Bavinck in his book “The Riddle of Life”.