Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

OCTOBER 14 2017

THE LOST GOSPEL OF THE EARTH. (2)

My Dutch nature compels me to be entirely truthful, which forces me to see politeness as a form of hypocrisy, consider bluntness to be an asset while insincerity and ambiguity are a no-no.

For this week’s critique I have singled out the contemporary Statements of Faith of two denominations: the Christian Reformed Church’s OUR WORLD BELONGS TO GOD, and for the Presbyterian Church in Canada its LIVING FAITH, a statement of Christian belief.

Synopsis.

I believe that the current ecclesiastical set-up is becoming unglued because of an anthropocentric reading of the Scriptures and neglect of and even disdain for The Gospel of the Earth.
This has brought us to a religious state where churches have become ineffective as their basic assumptions are wrong, those assumptions being that the church is there to proclaim personal salvation, that creation is of little or no consequence and that heaven is the ultimate destination of believers.

Let me state in advance that I am not a theologian and have not studied theology in any shape or form. I now believe that all church doctrines and denominations have become irrelevant: only one thing matters: LOVING CREATION.

I do admit to being a life-long student of the Bible and have become a great admirer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings.
The same is true for J. H. Bavinck whose (1) HET RAADSEL VAN ONS LEVEN, (2) AND VOORT WENTELEN DE EEUWEN and (3) DE MENSCH EN ZIJN WERELD I have translated and now are available as (1) THE RIDDLE OF LIFE, (2) BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END, A Radical Kingdom Vision, and the yet to be published (3) ON AND ON THE AGES ROLL, an exposition of REVELATION.

My Love for creation is based on John 3: 16.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls John 3: 16 the most important text in the New Testament. Here it is: “For God so loved the world (COSMOS) that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

Why is this text seen so important?

At a bible study session I asked what the word ‘world’ in this context meant. The general response was that it meant ‘the people’, and for a long time that too was my opinion, until I looked closer at the word ‘world’, which, in the original is ‘cosmos’.
My dictionary defines the word ‘cosmos’ as “the world or universe regarded as an orderly, harmonious system.” It cites chaos as the opposite.
In essence this means that, since God loves the cosmos so much, it is our Christian duty to do the same: it is not enough to love one’s neighbors: love for creation is even more essential because it includes everything and everybody.

Based on this premise I believe that HUMAN REDEMPTION CAN BE UNDERSTOOD ONLY AS AN INTEGRAL PART OF REDEMPTION OF THE WHOLE CREATION.

That is a statement not found in either of the religious outlines.

The Christian Reformed statement was first written in 1986 and a much improved version appeared in 2008 in which the ‘stewardship’ designation was dropped, and Climate Change was noted.

In businesslike terms John 3:16 states that God bartered his Son in exchange for the return of the COSMOS. It’s as simple as that.

Somehow the Devil, by means of the most devious act ever committed, had secured ownership of the COSMOS, a deal that took place in the Garden of Eden. There this wily evil angel hoodwinked an immature and inexperienced couple, to whom God had entrusted his creation, in transferring ownership from them to the Great Deceiver, an act which has detrimentally affected everything and everybody, until Christ returns.
Psalm 115: 16 is quite explicit about ownership: “The highest heavens belong to the LORD, but the earth he has given to humanity”.

We all agree that the world has God’s signature on it, just as the famous painting by Rembrandt THE NIGHT WATCH carries his imprint. Yes, creation is God’s work of art, but just as Rembrandt’s painting is now owned by the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, so too, to our increasing sorrow, Creation too is no longer under divine guidance. That means that, just as THE NIGHTWATCH has undergone change of ownership, so too has the earth.

All that is confirmed in John 3: 16, where God, the Father, paid the ultimate price – the life of his one and only son – to buy the COSMOS back from The Evil One.

John 3: 16 is so important because properly understanding this text – unconditionally LOVING the COSMOS – guarantees us ETERNAL LIFE.

Here’s what I believe!! This is my conclusion:

Christ did not come into the world to save sinners: no, Christ came into the world with the SOLE purpose to wrest ownership of the cosmos away from Satan and restore it to the people of God.
The Creator-God was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice – the life of his Son – to buy back the COSMOS from the Satan. That’s what happened on Calvary. Jesus died by offering his divine body for the sole purpose of regaining ownership of the COSMOS.

As a rule churches in general give this text a pious twist and say that he died for our sins. He did that too, but that was and is an incidental matter: God’s main goal was the re-acquisition of the Cosmos which WE had sold to the Evil One and which Christ bought back with his blood.

THAT IS THE LOST GOSPEL OF THE EARTH, a message which the church must regain.

Let me repeat: somehow the cosmos, the world that God created had fallen into the wrong hands: it no longer was God’s cosmos, it no longer belonged to the creator. Ownership had changed to the great dismay of God, the creator. His beloved work of art, of which Psalm 33: 9 says that “For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm”, that wonderful world, created by and through God’s Command, had fallen into the wrong hands.

This means that today, the world in which we live, is not in God’s care, but subject to the evil influences of the Great Deceiver. This is becoming more evident by the day.
And the Bible backs that up.

Three examples point that out.

1. Matthew 4:8: Again the devil took him (Jesus) to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.

2. 1 John 5: 19: We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.

3. John 17: 15-16: My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.

These three texts indicate that not God, but the Devil, which Jesus often calls, The Evil One, is in charge of this world. It explains the Holocaust, Nuclear weapons, Climate Change and today the emergence of Trump.

In other words: The world which God created and which, at one time, “belonged to God” as the creator, no longer is his, but has fallen into the wrong hands.

When the Devil took Jesus on a high mountain and showed him all the wonders of the world, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the wild-life abundance of Africa, the indigenous culture of the Americas and implied that all this –the entire world – was now the grand possession of the Devil, Jesus did not dispute that claim. He did not say, “This world belongs to God.” No, Jesus knew that the Devil spoke the truth.

He affirmed that when he prayed to his father – as recorded in John 17 – where he asked, “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.”

That text has often been used by the Heaven adherents to prove that we don’t belong to this world. But that is incorrect: Jesus knows that the world we live in, is in the power of the evil one, and that we should have no part of such ownership. Jesus wanted nothing to do with such a world, and neither should we. We are in the world, but don’t belong to a world fully in the possession of the enemy, the evil one. We simply cannot participate in a world, totally owned by the Devil.

That situation is plainly explained by John in his letter: “We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”

The LIVING FAITH, the 1984 “Statement of Christian Belief” of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, takes as point of departure that God is still fully in charge of creation and while the Devil plays a role in the world, creation ownership remains fully vested in the God creator.

OUR WORLD BELONGS TO GOD, a Contemporary Testimony of the Christian Reformed Church has as its Preamble:
As followers of Jesus Christ,
living in this world—
which some seek to control,
and others view with despair—
we declare with joy and trust:
Our world belongs to God!

Not a very auspicious beginning, but that is beside the point. The statement should not have said that ‘some seek to control’, but that today it is fully controlled by the evil one. That would have been the truth and would have altered the entire document.

Also neither of the Reformed testimonies even hints that there is a Created Word, which, quoting the Belgic Confession is “like a beautiful book, in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: his eternal power and his divinity.”
Also nowhere in these two statements is found that creation is holy and that, when we cause pollution, we sin. Also nowhere in the statements is creation seen as alive, as suffering, as burdened under the sins of the people, yet Isaiah 24 eloquently outlines how:
The world languishes and withers,
The heavens languish together with the earth,
The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants,
For they have transgressed the laws,
Violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant.

That points to the all-important covenant God made with humanity and Creation, as outlined in Genesis 9.

Churches are ANTHROPOCENTRIC.

Our sin, so vividly illustrated in the Book of Job, is ANTHROPOCENTRIC, the arrogant and deluded belief that the earth and the universe were designed for human benefit and control. Churches today, almost without exception, foster some sort of mindless obedience, void as it is of any creational connection, tacitly if not openly advocating that cursed heaven connection.
The Book of Job outlines more than any other book in the Bible that we ought to give ourselves whole-heartedly over to the universe, arising from humility that leads to wisdom instead of anthropocentric pride.

Just as Job is born again, converted from an EGO-centered life to an ECO-centered consciousness based on awe, we too must see that our own conversion and the redemption of creation go hand in hand.

What both statements should have emphasized is the Coming of God’s Kingdom, the New Creation, following Jesus’ plea, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matthew 6: 33)
That means that when we pursue the welfare of creation as our goal in life, everything else will fall into place, including our personal salvation.

Bavinck categorically states that “It is God’s intention to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one overarching harmony. There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved in him. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God where all things are again unified under the one and only all-wise will of him who lives and rules forever.”

That’s what I really miss in both statements of faith.

P. S.
Praise the Lord: today – October 14 – I am entering my 90th year!!

OCTOBER 7 2017

THE LOST GOSPEL OF THE EARTH. (1)

Last week I went to a memorial service, where a celebrated preacher did the meditation. He lived up to my expectation: a good speaker, well versed in the Scriptures, giving a solid orthodox message.
Of course I had expected it. When he mentioned THE WORD, the Bible, he sounded totally convinced and was completely confident that there was no other Word, that only Sola Scriptura (Latin: by Scripture alone) contains the infallible rule of faith and practice.

I no longer believe that.

That Scripture is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path, as per Psalm 119:105, is no longer understood: we stare so much at the light that it blinds us from seeing the path.

I am becoming more and more convinced that Sola Scriptura is killing the church. It fosters complacency and lethargy and self-satisfaction and apathy, plaguing the church more than anything else. The Sola Scriptura dogma simply endorses the status-quo. The trouble is that we are quite content with the sort of Christianity even though it attracts fewer and fewer people.

Yet I still believe that the Reformed church of which I have been a life-long member has the capability and the potential to truly be a reforming element in the world, but it must retrieve the Lost Gospel of the Earth.

When I arrived in Canada in 1951 as a 23 year old, I was still completely a child of the neo-Calvinist movement, fed with it since birth. As a self-employed person since 1952 I had the opportunity and the desire to serve on boards of local and provincial Christian movements – serving from 1959-65 as the recording and corresponding secretary of the (Province of) Ontario Alliance of Christian Schools. That plus being secretary of the local Christian School society and member of its education committee took then perhaps 20 percent of my time, while simultaneously building a business and providing for a growing family. Amazingly in that 6 year period I was able to save $5,000 as a down payment, enough to build an 1800 square feet house, costing then $20,000, including the site- 80 x 180’ – situated on a major street in St. Catharines, On. Built-in was my home office from where I operated my real estate and general insurance business.

These where exciting years in which, as a friend put it, we threw a few bricks together and, miraculously, full-fledged Christian elementary and high schools emerged, fully in line with our neo-Calvinistic principles. We were truly convinced that we were helping God building his kingdom.

Since then, thanks to reading and translating Johan Herman Bavinck’s book, now entitled BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END, A RADICAL KINGDOM VISION, I have come to see that God’s Kingdom is not of human origin but is the New Creation to come. That’s why I believe with Bavinck that personal salvation and the salvation of the earth are two sides of the same coin: we can’t have one without the other. All the Christian schools and all the Christian churches and the people who make these possible, are useless and a waste of natural resources and good intentions if these institutions come at the expense of environmental cohesion, while fostering an implied Heaven belief.

This was again confirmed in that Memorial Service, where the preacher emphasized the resurrection and life eternal, but where the requested song “Guide me, O my great Redeemer pilgrim through this barren land”, reaffirmed the opposite.
This song was composed in 1745, when the earth had less than 1 billion people and was basically in pristine condition. The ‘pilgrim’ reference and the ‘barrenness’ mentioned, were philosophically inspired by Greek pagan thinking, seeing earth as a passing–through stage, with nature not seen as touched by God’s grace and heaven the ultimate goal. The Greek influence was again quite evident in the next verse, “When I tread the verge of Jordan”, which, just like the disdain for the earth, is directly taken from Greek Pagan Mythology, where the STYX is the river that forms the boundary between EARTH and the UNDERWORLD, while a piously renamed JORDAN gave it a biblical semblance.

We should not forget that hymns are usually the only way the people in the pew participate in a worship service, and, judging by the Presbyterian song book, at least half of them point to heaven. That’s what the average Christian holds true and is highly upset when this is contested.

We are being tested.

We only dwell on our earth for a very short while compared to eternity. Yet it is a tremendously important period because it determines our forever-future: our brief span of life here, some 80-90 years at most, is a bagatelle compared to eternity, yet it serves as the proving grounds for the Hereafter.

The belief that Sola Scriptura, that the Scriptures alone point us to the road to salvation, holds no longer true. It may sound pious, but it is a false piety, correctly labeled so by Bonhoeffer as Pious Secularism.

Christian endeavor of any kind has the tendency and the danger of seeing the church where we worship, the Christian schools where some send their kids, as the road to heaven. We forget that history marches on and current global developments warn us that we are racing toward creational demise, which urgently requires new thinking.

This is the month of Re-Reformation, 500 years after Luther.

This ought to be the year of rediscovering THE LOST GOSPEL OF THE EARTH, without which all what goes under the name of Christianity will become futile.
The only hope to revive the church is by totally changing the approach to the Good News.

Paul sets the tone.

Paul, in his letter to Romans, the very first chapter, makes an amazing statement.
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse: for even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools.”

Let me rephrase this passage from Romans 1 into everyday language. Here Paul writes that by simply looking at creation, living in it, seeing how the bee serves the fruit tree, how each segment complements another, discovering that everything is connected to everything else: this immense intricacy should convince us to detect the divine design, which leaves us no excuse. That’s why the Belgic Confession plainly states that:
We know God first, by the creation, preservation and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book to which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God, his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1: 20.
All these things are enough to convict humanity and to leave them without excuse.

This is our Father’s World, which makes it God’s PRIMARY OR DIRECT WORD, in contrast with the Bible which is God’s SECONDARY OR INDIRECT WORD finalized by human vote at the Nicea concilium in 350 AD.
With gusto we sing ’in the rustling grass I hear him pass – he speaks to me everywhere’. We mouth it, but we do not live it. We really don’t want to see. Intellectually we see, but in reality, in our day-to-day affairs we push this knowledge away, we repress it, we are knowers who do not know, seers who do not see, because this knowledge that the world we live in is “Our Father’s World”, and therefore HOLY, is too dangerous to fully live, is too difficult to make it true in our lives. So we invented heaven, taking the clue from pagan Greek philosophy.

The pagan Greek Heaven idea has gained a seemingly insurmountable foothold in the Christian church: people in the pew seem powerless to grasp that that ‘going to heaven’ is an impossibility because “God lives in inapproachable: nobody has seen God and nobody can see God”, Paul writes to his friend Timothy (1Tim.6:16), while John 3: 13 plainly states that nobody has ever gone to heaven. I once heard Billy Graham tell Larry King that when he dies, Jesus will take him by the hand and bring him to God. Pure nonsense and total contrary to the Scriptures.

In our heart of hearts we believe that somehow science will find a cure for Climate Change, that electric cars will do the trick and solar panels. At the deepest level this denial is rooted in a faith that there must be a technological fix for everything.

In religious terms we must be ‘born again’ in creation. Jesus wept because we claim to be ‘born again’ Christians, but we live like born again pagans, while the Religious Right call environmentalists ‘pagans’.

By and large the church has failed to call the actions of corporate and government polluters as a mortal sin against God’s creation nor have the clerics defended the earth in the same way they have defended the poor and victims of discrimination as God’s children.

Sad to say, but generally speaking we are only willing to accept those environmental reforms that can fit comfortably with our cultural, political, religious and economic assumptions.

It is high time that we formulate and implement a NEW GOSPEL OF THE EARTH CREED, so that we can make our religious traditions relevant to the environmental crisis that is upon us as it becomes more and more severe as Global Heating accelerates.

That New CREED must start with the statement that THE EARTH IS HOLY because God made it, and must continue with that most dreaded sentence that harming the earth is SIN.

We sing “Breathe on me breath of God”. ‘Breath’ in Hebrew is RUAH, which also means spirit and wind, the same forces that in Greek are meant in PNEUMA. Our lives have been activated by the breath of God.
We are breathing the same air that Jesus did. We breathe through CREATION. The air we breathe is generated and maintained by trillions of active organisms, from bacteria and termites, to flowers and pine trees. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide: we totally live in symbiosis with the trees which breathe out oxygen and breathe in carbon dioxide.
When we pollute the air which is all around us, we poison and sadden the breath (pneuma= spirit) that is really inside us and ourselves. “Thou shalt not kill” applies to all created matter.

THE NEW GOSPEL OF THE EARTH must not only contain that it sees Creation as holy, and harming it as SIN, but also that our eternal salvation depends on living holy lives, totally in awe on account of God’s marvelous handiwork, where everything – like an intricate mechanical clock – fits together in complete harmony.

Paul’s amazing statement, fully expressed under the aegis of the Holy Spirit, that we stand condemned for failing to acknowledge God’s voice in the cosmos makes me wonder whether we are saved when we do see creation to be of divine design, not knowing the Scriptures.

When we do see the Cosmos as God’s particular object of love, and love it in turn with every fiber of our body, mind and spirit, will God, on Judgement Day count that of sufficient merit for admission to THE NEW CREATION? I especially have indigenous people in mind.

I believe that in this month, exactly 500 years ago that Martin Luther, on October 31 1517, had the courage and the holy zeal to challenge the church of his day and start the REFORMATION, we, the church of 2017 can do no greater service to the humanity than reinstate THE LOST GOSPEL OF THE EARTH.
John 3: 16, GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD, the cosmos, must become the ultimate reality also for us.

More about that next week.

September 30 2017.

GET OUT: but how?

In our church we are part of a Bible study group which for the past 18 weeks has studied the Book of REVELATION, using N. T. Wright as a guide.
Last Thursday, September 28, we dealt with Revelation 18 which is headed by THE FALL OF BABYLON, and says
“?‘Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!’
She has become a dwelling for demons
and a haunt for every impure spirit,
a haunt for every unclean bird,
a haunt for every unclean and detestable animal.
For all the nations have drunk
the maddening wine of her adulteries.
The kings of the earth committed adultery with her,
and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.”
Then I heard another voice from heaven say:
“?‘Come out of her, my people,’b
so that you will not share in her sins,
so that you will not receive any of her plagues;
for her sins are piled up to heaven,
and God has remembered her crimes.

The GET OUT passage has long fascinated me, so I decided to write about it, remembering a line I once read, “I don’t know what I am thinking until I have read what I have written.”
While I wrote I remembered that Jeremiah also mentioned the same warning (Jeremiah 51:45): “Come out of her, my people! Run for your lives!”

Then I wondered how often the GET OUT theme occurred in the Bible, and was amazed how frequently this has been the case.

Right from the very beginning, in Paradise, Adam and Eve were forced to get out of paradise. Noah too was asked to leave the world in which he had grown up; it had become too sinful, so he was chosen to make a new beginning. Then it became Abram’s turn to depart from his patrimonial place to go on an as yet unknown destination.
Lot, his nephew was guided out by God’s angels, urging his family on with the curious words, “hurry because I can’t act until you are safe.” That made me wonder. My guess is that Lot’s name was written in the Book of Life, so it would be impossible for him to die with the sinners, because a name in that book cannot be removed, ever.

It seems to me that the place, Sodom and Gomorra the Lot family had to quit, very much resembles the situation today: a haunt for every impure spirit, a haunt for every demon, a haunt for every unclean bird, and every unclean animal.

The entire book of EXODUS deals with the fledging Israel tribe getting out – exodus – to go to the Promised Land. Later that same nation was banned to Babylon, and then returned: another phase in the long series of relocations.

Don’t forget that the first Christians had to make a very difficult choice: by getting out of paganism and converting to Christianity they had to abandon their immediate family, their friends, business associates, and be shunned by them, disinherited, not unlike today when Muslims become Christian.

The same was true with the Reformation, creating intense friction among families and communities, wars even.

A more recent event occurred in my own family, when Abraham Kuyper was the driving force seceding from the Dutch National Church to form a new denomination, the Reformed Church, of which my grandparents became members.
That brings me to today and that recurring theme:
“?‘Come out of her, my people,’
so that you will not share in her sins,
so that you will not receive any of her plagues;
for her sins are piled up to heaven,
and God has remembered her crimes.

Sins piled up to heaven have a double meaning, I believe. It’s both the CO2 filled atmosphere, causing floods and hurricanes that are becoming common place, as well as our actions causing great grief in HEAVEN.

Does “come out of her, my people” apply to us today?

It is plain to me that through the way we live we are killing creation. All of us, without exception, partake in this murderous process. We are guilty like hell, to say it crudely. The problem is that we have painted ourselves in a corner: there’s no way we can go back in time to the year 1800 before the Carbon Age.

I do believe, however, that even though we cannot avoid being partakers in these global sins, God will forgive us when we are aware of what we do. It means that we must constantly pray for forgiveness and do everything in our power to minimize the damage we do. We can’t get out anymore. We are stuck.

And global sins they are: the entire world is guilty. “For all the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries. The kings of the earth committed adultery with her, and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.”

What strikes me in this text is that again the earth is seen as a living body, and ravaging her is pure adultery, a direct sin against God. The reference to wine shows that the act is one of addiction, truly making us CARBOHOLICS.

Addiction is terribly hard to cure. It robs us of common sense, deprives us of sound reason intoxicated as we are with a substance that makes it almost impossible to see what’s really going on in the world around us. Just as an addict is oblivious to the effects of the vice, so we too ignore what our life style does to us and to the world we live in.

Of course we know. The signs are all around us. The ruling powers, especially those in charge of the mightiest nation in the world, openly encourage the use of substances that further poison the atmosphere, and all rulers, without exception openly state that their aim is ECONOMIC GROWTH which always, always, means more pollution, more harm. Television is kept in power because the merchants of the earth grow rich and richer: the heirs of WALMART are among the 0.01 percent, in Canada the Westons and Jim Patterson.

More and more regions of the world resemble utter desperation. Not only Puerto Rico where it will take months to restore electricity, not only parts of Texas or Florida or Mexico, where natural disasters, brought on by us poisoning the atmosphere are the direct cause of anger: the entire world is under threat, such as North Korea, Iran, the entire Middle East and now Asia as well.
In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya have been forced to flee from Myanmar, in the midst of a brutal army offensive that has been described by the UN’s human-rights chief as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

That is just one example of religious intolerance, instigated by Buddhists, supposedly peace-loving. Religious intolerance is on the increase. We see it in the Western world against Muslims, encouraged in the USA by the top ruler there.
There are increasing signs that the USA is on the brink of another Civil War, which most certainly will erupt if or when Trump is forced to resign or be impeached. Far-right elements are on the march – promoting nihilism, of which the US president is an obvious example.
There is more to society than a deteriorating environment. We also have created a global money system which is based on debt, – created by a mere touch on a computer screen. Once it is in existence, however, it must be repaid, because a debt is an obligation to repay.
Indeed the problems we face are multi-dimensional: they are not only environmental: they also are monetary, religious, political and ethnical. Since life encompasses all these facets, COMING OUT OF HER entails quitting all these different strata as well.

Yes, the problems we face are complicated: they together keep us chained to the system. Oh, Satan is so clever: we really don’t grasp the intricate way in which we are bound to Capitalism, that very web that keeps us glued to what Revelation 18 calls our sins and crimes.
I admit, instead of giving an answer to our plight, I have done the opposite: I have immensely complicated the situation.

So let me try to untangle this. I read three books on Revelation: REVERSED THUNDER by Eugene H. Peterson, N. T. Wright’s Bible Study Guide on REVELATION, and J. H. Bavinck’s Dutch EN VOORT WENTELEN DE EEUWEN, loosely translated as ON AND ON THE AGES ROLL. None of the three give me a concrete answer to my question: “How do we disengage ourselves from our current way of life” which we are discovering is highly destructive.

Lot and his family were guided out by the Angel of God. We, supposedly having come of age and are on our own. That is very frightening.

So, after all this loose talk, what do I do about it?

My life’s motto is Ora et Labora, Pray and Work. I run 2-3 times each week and often bike to Tweed – 11 km round trip. I ran the Terry Fox 10 km in good time. My mantra when I run is “Maranatha, Lord come quickly, Maranatha, Lord come quickly”. When I put my head on my pillow at 10 p.m. my lullaby is “Maranatha, Lord come quickly”.

Remember the ICE STORM now more than 10 years ago, when electricity was out for weeks not too far from where we live. Since then I have installed a frost-free hand pump on our well. My freezer is on solar panels, recently renewed, and so are our lights, CD player and TV.
I am very conscious of our carbon footprint, use our car sparingly. We have not renewed our passports, foregoing a recent wedding of a grandson in Minnesota. I mow our lawn using solar power, have a large veggie garden. For many decades we have been vegetarian.

Even though I increasingly regard church denominations as irrelevant – John 3: 16 is what counts today – I support the Presbyterian World Service and the CRC World Renew. My wife and I are active in our local church where we attend a weekly Thursday morning prayer meeting, choir and Bible studies. I am a member of the church’s environmental committee.

My theology has been shaped by Bonhoeffer and Bavinck, but goes beyond that. My botanist-animal-specialist friend tells me that homosexuality is found among animals, so why would it not be seen among humans? It also points to evolution. God gave us eyes to see and brains to arrive at conclusions to detect what goes on in God’s created Word, the COSMOS which he loved as his ultimate work of art, which we sold to the Satan, and which Christ bought back on Calvary.

We now wait for Christ’ return with bated breath, because the birth pains are becoming more frequent and severe, fully aware that Romans 3: 24 tells us that we are “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus”.

In these last days we consciously must treat creation as HOLY, as God’s DIRECT word. Deuteronomy 6: 4 says
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

We cannot split God from his creation, just as we cannot split the St Matthew Passion from Bach, or the Messiah from Handel. That is the Cardinal Truth the church seems unable to grasp.

The church must reshape worship to include Creation as God’s Primary Word, and so prepare the believers for the New Creation to come where the Bible will disappear as we will able to directly communicate with the authors, with Moses and Isaiah, with Amos and Jonah, with Job – if he were an actual figure – and whoever wrote the Song of Solomon and, of course talk to the apostles and Jesus himself. That’ll be lots of fun and provide for some rich reasons for merriment.
In the New Creation in the company of the true saints, of totally like-minded people, we can look back to our former times, and laugh.
It reminds me of Isaiah 51: 11, “Those the LORD has rescued will return. They will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.”

So ‘get out’ and look forward to everlasting JOY.

September 23 2017

POPE FRANCIS AND CLIMATE CHANGE.

Last week Pope Francis said the recent spate of hurricanes should prompt people to understand that humanity will “go down” if it does not address Climate Change. He also said that history will judge those who deny the science behind its causes.

I should add that Popes, in general, are among the best informed people in the world. So when he says that, “If we don’t turn back, we will go down,” we have to take this seriously.

Pope Francis did not elaborate on the term “we will go down”. The term reminds me of the ‘underworld’, the Hades, going into the pit, Sheol, the place where all anti-Christian forces are assembled, waiting for judgment.

The Bible often mentions that HADES place. You can find even it at the very end of the Bible, in Revelation 20: 13 where it says that “The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and all persons were judged according to what they had done.”
I imagine that denying Climate Change or abetting it, would be among the offences against the earth.
The Bible is quite explicit in calling the earth ‘God’s world’. God gave us the Scriptures – see Psalm 119:105 – to be “A lamp for our feet and a light for our path in creation, God’s Primary Word.” Bonhoeffer in his CREATION AND FALL, writes, “God, humanity and the earth belong together”. J.H. Bavinck in his BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END writes “We are taken from the earth, we belong to the earth, and we live through the earth.” Nietzsche writes, “Remain true to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you about super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not!”
After all this is the only earth we have and will be our habitat into eternity. God made no junk and will not junk what he has made.

I like Pope Francis. He is forthright, does not beat around the bush, is not very diplomatic, which is earning him the ire of the traditionalists, some of whom would love to see the Latin Mass returned to prominence and so elevate the status of priest as the only person who knows what the words mean, making them the true intermediaries between the common folk and a God whose preferred language apparently is Latin. For many centuries the Lord`s Prayer was recited in Latin: Pater Noster qui es in caelis, santificetur nomen tuum, etc. Our Father who is in the heavens (plural), may your name be regarded as holy..
Pope Francis has no illusions about the status of the human mind: “if we don’t turn back, we will go down”.
But….we can’t go back.
The trouble is that we no longer can turn back: we have burned our bridges and we have lost the art of survival. We no longer can function without causing ever more pollution and destruction. That`s why the Bible contains the book REVELATION.
Revelation, that last Bible book, makes fascinating reading. Take Chapter 12. There it says that THERE WAS WAR IN HEAVEN.

War in heaven?

Yes, apparently the Devil had a place there at one time. Remember Job? That most modern Bible-book relates how the Satan stopped in to see God and asserted out that Job believed in God only because everything had gone well for him. Then the Satan in heaven functioned as the accuser. It seems that at one point he became such a nuisance that he was kicked out of heaven, and landed feet first right here, on our earth.
The Bible pulls no punches: “But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! Filled with fury, because he knows that the time is short.” (Revelation 12: 12).
There’s where we are now: demonic armies have thrown themselves onto the world with unbridled ferocity and awesome fury.
We are at that decisive point in history where no longer God, but Satan rules the world, and the signs are everywhere. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become our enemy and full of revenge has thrown itself upon humanity.

We, so superior, with our electrical energy network, our mighty medical system, our military prowess, our fast cars and faster planes, our entertainment establishment, our ever more clever computers, all of which makes us feel so immense powerful and strong, now, in this hour, in a total humiliating fashion we are confronted that in the final analysis we helpless when hurricanes hurl toward us or earthquakes turn life upside down.

The ire, the wrath of creation, is directed especially against the City which, in Revelation 18, is called BABYLON.

In the old times, 2,000 to 3,000 years ago an empire was always portrayed around a big city, such as Babylon, Nineveh or Rome. We therefore must see this ‘great city’ as the heart of the new empires, the center from where this world-wide regime is being governed. So, it is this great city that is hit the most, its infra structure, the oil wells, the banks, vacation resorts reduced to rubble.

The Fall of Babylon

In veiled, secretive language John continues to tell us how all this is unfolding. The entire eighteen’s chapter of Revelation is devoted to the Fall of Babylon, our modern system.

Babylon! How deeply has been the impression Babylon has made on the ancient people of Israel, that after many centuries the name of this city appears in this prophecy. Some 500 years after the exile, after being forced to live in that ancient Babylon, the city of Nebuchadnezzar, the city where Belshazzar spoke his haughty words, where he received a rude awakening when the Persian armies secretly invaded it during the night, that city was still seen as the pinnacle of evil.

That city is now long gone, completely destroyed. Desert sand has covered it all, has crawled into its deserted defenses, and has blanketed the old ruins with a carpet of oblivion.

No, the prophecy has nothing to do with that ancient world city. It is clear that John had the Rome of his days in mind here, that city vested on the seven hills, the queen of the earth. It is from there, out from the heart of Rome that the military roads branched out to the far corners of the mighty realm. Roman legions penetrated to the very edges of the then known world. From Britain to India’s borders, the scepter of the Roman emperors held sway. When John wrote this all, the image of Rome was constantly in his mind. Rome is the city around which the entire empire is arranged as an immensely wide steppe surrounds a high mountain top. And, yes, in the days of John, the emperors in all aspects resembled the signs of the ‘beast’.

It is undeniable that John thought of Rome. Of course that does not mean that all this ultimately has to do with that city because the word Rome here is only a vague indication of the city of the last days that then – that is now! –will function as the core of the world that is to disappear.

It serves no purpose to speculate which city is indicated here: Houston, the center of the Oil Industry? Never mind. Now with the entire world ‘urbanized’ it simply indicates our contemporary world.

In the scenario of Revelation 18, John tells us how important entities appear. In the first place there is the beast, the emperor or tyrant or by whatever name he or she or it – OIL, GOOGLE, WWW, the USA? – goes. This personality or substance or entity is the undisputed ruler of the entire world. This tyrant apparently has a place of residence, that mysterious Babylon, where everything converges, the places where money and power rule.

Next to the tyrant we see the beast that rises out of the earth, the false prophet or the minister of information or propaganda, the advertising world, the Advertising News Empire, perhaps. And in the third place there is the state, the realm, that all-powerful entity spanning the world. Foreign wars are no longer an issue, because outside the boundaries of the realm there are no more forces that can match the power Babylon has. The only threat to fear must come either from God, from above, or from inside.

The way I see it is that we are experiencing what Pope Francis said about the recent spate of hurricanes which should prompt us to understand that humanity will “go down” if we do not address Climate Change, and that history will judge those who deny its causes.

So will we change?

Have you seen any signs from us, educated and well-informed, Westerners, to cut back and try to live ‘the simpler life’? By simpler life I mean staying at home, cultivate a veggie garden, foreswear the use of high-polluting transportation, such as airplanes, automobiles and cruise ships and make a conscious effort to reduce the carbon footprint.
Don’t for a minute think that we will change: as a human race we are addicted to carbon fuels. Pope Francis knows that and thus, in essence, he has predicted the end of the world as we know it. He has discovered – actually he knew it already – that he can’t change the church, which, supposedly is ruled by the Holy Spirit. If the church is beyond reformation, the world, ruled by the Satan, is a totally lost cause.

And if you think that collapse will be a slow process, you are wrong there as well.

There’s such a thing as THE SENECA PROCESS which, in essence says that once COLLAPSE comes, it comes rapidly. The Fall of Rome is a good example. Rome became a world power over a period of some 1000 years. The collapse took only decades.

When societal collapse is mentioned, there are two possible reactions. The most common one is that such a thing will never happen. Then, if you manage to convince people that it is possible, they try to do everything they can to keep the system going whatever it takes, not realizing that when this is successful we exceed the carrying capacity of the system which hastens the collapse. That’s what we are seeing now: an overshoot.

The Bible is quite clear here. It mentioned such a matter as The Seneca Effect, named after a Roman Senator, immensely rich, who lost favor with Nero, and was forced into suicide. Job, that famous figure in the Bible, is a perfect example of suddenly losing it all. Jesus, repeatedly warns us that THE END will come abruptly: like a thief in the night. Revelation tells us that (Rev. 18: 11) “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over ‘the great city’ because no one will buy their cargoes anymore…….(17) in one hour such great wealth has been brought to ruin.” Remember also ‘the last straw that breaks the camel’s back’.

Today everything is speeding up. We are racing toward the end. Global Warming is rapidly increasing. The ice melt in the Arctic is in overdrive. ARCTIC NEWS reports that, “Extreme weather is upon us. Global warming is increasing the intensity, occurrence, size, duration and impact of many catastrophic events, including wildfires, droughts, heat waves, cold snaps, storms, lightning, flooding and seismic events such as earthquakes and associated tsunamis. Ever larger numbers of people are getting hit directly by such events, as well as indirectly due to lack of fresh water, food, shelter, medicine, health care and emergency services.”

Matthew 24: 22 gives us a timely reminder, “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come…So you must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer starts his CREATION AND FALL with these timely words, “THE CHURCH OF CHRIST witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”
Hmmm.

When Pope Francis says that, “If we don’t turn back, we will go down,” he speaks Revelation talk.

September 16 2017

FAITH OF OUR FATHERS, LIVING STILL?

I grew up in a deeply religious household, solidly anchored in the Reformed faith: everything Christian: school, daily opened with prayer and bible reading, radio programs, political parties, newspapers, magazines: everything Christian.
In grade school every Monday morning we had to recite in front of the class, a song taken from the Psalter Hymnal and memorized over the weekend: for six years every week! Once all kids had had a turn, we, as a class would sing it. Yes, even now, some 75-80 years later, these songs come back to mind and I sing them, my wife joining in.
My father or mother prayed aloud with every meal, which was followed by the reading of a Scripture passage: no wonder I have acquired some insight into the Bible during the extensive exposure to the Written Word.
All this was reinforced on Sundays when we walked to church – actually in the years from 1929-48 the sidewalks were crowded with folks on their way to their different worship places – in the morning at 10 a.m. – and again at 5.30 p.m. when the Heidelberg Catechism was expounded.

As a teenager, after sitting in church twice for at least 90 minutes – if we were lucky – we, some 20 male high school students, gathered every Sunday evening, to listen to and discuss an essay on some Bible subject introduced by one of us teenagers, taking turns to do so before the intermission, followed by a general discussion on some political aspect in the second half.
We took turns being president, secretary and treasurer. Of course we opened with prayer, again an excellent training ground for later chairing meetings and learning formal procedures. It certainly made it easier for me to be a public speaker, and provided good training for debating any subject.

In those days we were seen as COVENANT children. With each baptism – and there were lots of children born in our large city church – we always, always sang Psalm 105: “The covenant God made with Abraham is confirmed in every child.”
The earlier Covenant with Noah between God, the human race and creation – confirmed by the appearance of the RAINBOW (Genesis 9) – was never mentioned.

I think Christians should reclaim the Rainbow as the sign of the COVENANT: we have first title to this divine affirmation.

There was, in my youth, some real devotion, a genuine reliance on the Lord, perhaps because the Depression – 1929-40 – followed by the War – 1940-45 – gave always plenty of reason to pray.
Today the urge to pray seems to have lessened, even though it could well be argued that the present times when we experience the relentless war between Creation and Humanity, the dangers of being sucked into the Consumer Society, and the pseudo-Christianity prevalent today are much more anti-Christian than in the Great Depression and during the wartime.

Early memories.

In our house two wall hangings stood out: an etching in copper, featuring the head of Abraham Kuyper, and a portrait of Queen Wilhelmina. We were really Royalty minded. My father often said that “God, Netherlands and (the house of) Orange” formed an unbreakable three-strand cord.

ABRAHAM KUYPER

In 1998 I attended an event at Princeton University in New Jersey, celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Stone Lectures given in 1898 by Abraham Kuyper.
In his lectures at Princeton in 1898 Kuyper argued that Calvinism was more than just theology—it provided a comprehensive worldview, encompassing all institutions and values of modern society.

Abraham Kuyper was a uniquely gifted man. Home schooled by his father who was a minister, he attended gymnasium and later graduated summa cum laude (with the highest possible marks) from university and obtained a doctorate in theology at the age of 25.
He had a varied career: not only as a journalist, statesman and theologian, but also as a real initiative taker: he was the founder of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands. He started a newspaper, the Herald, was the driving force behind the founding of the Free University of Amsterdam, formed a political party, the Anti-Revolutionary Party, and served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands between 1901 and 1905. In politics, he dominated the Anti-Revolutionary Party from its founding in 1879 to his death in 1920.
He also promoted the existence of diversity in social life and in education whereby Protestant, Catholic and secular elements each had their own independent schools, universities and social organizations.

Kuyper’s most famous statement.

Kuyper famously said, “Oh, no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’ God continually re-creates the universe through acts of grace. God’s acts are necessary to ensure the continued existence of creation. Without his direct activity creation would self-destruct.”

Our mental world!?

In his days – 1833-1920 – the world was still relatively pure. True, untold millions had died in the last decade of Kuyper’s life: World War I and the Spanish Flu, but the real dangers of our Carbon Age had not yet had an impact, while the population explosion was just beginning.
In other words, no real concern for the state of the planet was evident. Thus Abraham’s expression referring to “every square inch in the whole domain” had nothing to do with the physical state of the earth, and had everything to do with ‘our mental world”.
In that sense he truly was a child of his time.

Away with all symbols of the past?

There is a drive today to do away with statutes, inscriptions, symbols of the past because the names they represent had been associated with suppression of indigenous people, with advocating or tolerating slavery, and, in general ideas of male dominance that no longer are thought to be acceptable.
Abraham Kuyper, for instance, saw women exclusively as housewives, a helpmeet for the husband. In Grade 2 my teacher married: custom then required that she immediately quit her job and, presumably, get children. In grade 4 I was taught that black people were inferior and should be treated as such.
“O tempora, O mores”, exclaimed Cicero, Oh, the times, Oh, the morals.

Abraham Kuyper and his time.

In his days – he died in 1920 – the world had less than 2 billion people, and the atmosphere was still pure by today’s standards. I also believe that people then were smarter, more open to new ideas. There is increasing evidence that those who live close to nature have a greater maturity, have intelligence that sees matters more comprehensively.
Today everything is saturated with plastic particles. In the 19th and 20th Centuries the average intelligence increased but in the last 30 years this has been totally changed, especially in the developed countries, judging by international studies. Prof. Crabtree of Stanford University poses in his “Trends of Genetics” (2012) that the maximum of the human brain was reached several thousands of years ago and that now there have been unfavorable mutations.
Other scientists emphasize that intelligence must constantly be maintained, especially today in a time of automation and the preference of young adults for playing computer games rather than trying to fathom why reading certain classics deserve that label.
Professor Barbara Demeneix of the ” Musée national d’histoire naturelle”, an authority with a world-wide reputation is convinced that the main cause lies in the 300 percent increase of chemical products between 1970 and today. Last year she showed how these chemical molecules disturbed the function of the thyroid gland in pregnant women in such a way that there was a measurable negative effect on the IQ of children.

My point is that our capacity to understand what’s going on right now in church and society suffers from the stupefying influence of TV combined with a degeneration of the brain resulting from the thousands of chemicals in increasing measure invading our bodies and lowering our capacity to grasp what really is happening in our world. Now even our tap water is contaminated with plastic particles and so is the fish we eat: all carbon residues. We are simply mesmerized by our technical advances and unable to see the real state of the world out there.

The phrase “There are none so blind as those who will not see” applies not only to Religion but also to Climate Change and Economics.

Yes, Abraham Kuyper was a prominent pioneer in pursuing insight in matters Christian. We must honor him as such, but today we must advance beyond him. He also was a product of his time, building in the past: without Calvin there would not have been a Kuyper. Kuyper saw the kingdom in terms of human endeavors, such as Christian education from kindergarten through postgraduate.
But also, without Kuyper there would not have been a J.H. Bavinck who wrote that “the redemption of Creation and the redemption of a man or woman are two sides of the same coin. Personal salvation and the salvation of the planet go hand in hand.” Both Bavinck and Bonhoeffer see the Kingdom in eschatological terms: The New Creation to come!

“Personal salvation and planetary redemption go together!” That is revolutionary: it turns the message of the church upside down!

Our danger is that we see the Kingdom as a human initiative, regarding building Christian institutions as an end in itself, and so are tempted to see them as the final product.

Revelation 21, referring to the perfect conditions in the New Creation, explicitly mentions that there is no TEMPLE there, no special place for worship as the LAW of the LORD is written on the hearts of the redeemed. Ministers must think beyond the Scriptures.

The real problem is that most gospel preachers do not recognize God’s Primary Word. True, Abraham Kuyper stated that there is not a square inch in its whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’ But Dr. Kuyper here does not refer to a speck of earth, with its trillions of microbes. He does not have in mind that the earth in its entirety, its animals, soil, trees, rivers, seas, oceans, belongs to God, and must be seen as divine, as holy.

The Calvinistic-Kuyperian Christian still sees Society at large, its human institutions, its churches and its educational system as the place to be God’s domain. That is still the faith of our fathers, a faith that was a necessary step, but now must progress to take the Coming of the Kingdom in mind, the imminent arrival of the New Creation.

Had Abraham the Mighty – as he was known in his days – lived today, he, due to his superior grasp of the intricacies of the total aspects of life, no doubt would have been an ardent environmentalist.

Today we must go beyond the Scriptures and see Creation as God’s PRIMARY WORD. All Christians must start to preach and practice the GOSPEL OF THE EARTH. THE BELGIC CONFESSION points to that.
Here’s what this all- important confession says about us knowing God:
“We know God FIRST by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book…. As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20: “(the creation of) all these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse.”

Creation is God’s PRIMARY WORD. We must go beyond the Written Word and beyond church walls and implement a way of life that seamlessly fits into the New Creation to come.
We must remember that in that New Creation the Bible – God’s Indirect, Secondary Word – also will disappear.
Then, in eternity, we will be fully engaged in living and studying and integrating with God’s Primary Word, in the new Garden of Eden, so beautifully described in Revelation 22: “On each side of the river stood the Tree of Life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month (thus never a worry about daily bread). And the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations.

The environmental crisis is there for a purpose: it makes us recognize the HOLINESS OF GOD’S CREATION.

September 9 2017

500 YEARS AGO RELIGION WAS A RACKET: IS IT STILL?

Next month – on October 31 – it is exactly 500 years since Martin Luther revealed 95 theses stating his opposition to the then all-dominating Roman Catholic Church with particular emphasis on indulgences. He nailed his objections to the door of his church in Wittenberg, East Germany.
When my younger brother was a project manager in Magdeburg, not too far from Wittenberg, he, my wife and I visited that town in the year 1996.

Today the exact church door is gone, for the simple reason that the French army in 1765 destroyed the entire church. On the front steps of this newer structure – actually quite an ugly church – we saw two young druggies, totally out of it, perhaps a symbol of the state of religion there today.

For the past few months I have been reading Heinrich Boehmer’s excellent and exhaustive book, MARTIN LUTHER: ROAD TO REFORMATION. The author must have read every piece of Luther’s writings – and there still is an amazing trove of his memos, sermons, treaties, and correspondence available.

Then, now 500 years ago, there was only one denomination which had, of course, a monopoly on religion. It dictated what people were allowed to believe. Then too ‘times they were a’changing’, because printing had been invented, so books were coming on the market. Before that only tedious copying of manuscripts – manu = hand, and script = writing – was the sole way to obtain books, and thus terribly rare. Umberto Eco’s book IN THE NAME OF THE ROSE is a perfect example of that time, the story centering on the life – and crimes – in a 14th Century monastery where dozens of monks were daily engaged in transcribing – by hand and adding beautiful illustrations – and also translating lots of ancient documents. Now suddenly through the Gutenberg invention of printing, the masses could obtain books.

SALVATION FOR SALE

Then, by the grace of God, Luther appeared on the scene. The Roman church needed money as the now famous St Peter church was under construction, a costly affair, so the clever clergy designed a perfect tool to both raise money and combine this with a spiritual bonus.
In those days HELL and PURGATORY were the most dreaded destinations, so “So soon as a coin in coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs”. (Purgatory is the place where the dying were destined to go and be purged from their venal sins through fire). This was a true example of a racket, knowingly fleecing innocent people.

Luther, by now steeped in Biblical knowledge, decided to publish 95 theses condemning these practices, called INDULGENCES. Since it was just before the great indulgence festival of the castle church in Wittenberg (November 1 1517) he decided to summarize his doubts and critical considerations concerning the indulgence question in the more concise form of a number of theses. He had these theses printed on a placard, and through this channel invited the members of the local university to a public disputation on the saving power of indulgences. He headed his venture with the words, “NINETY FIVE THESES ON THE POWER AND EFFICACY OF INDULGENCES.

This invitation to a debate took place on October 31 1517. Before he set to work he first went on his knees to submit the matter to God.

And well he should, because his challenging the church, the all-pervasive institution, dominating all facets of life, had major consequences. Years after it resulted in the 80 year war of the Protestant Netherlands with Catholic Spain (1568- 1648), and even later caused the highly destructive THIRTY YEAR War between Europe’s North and South (1618-1648).

The Complacent Church.

True, the church in 1517 had become lax, had grown lethargic, had lost her moral moorings, and concerned members were ready for a change. Thanks to an abundance of pamphlets, thanks to an intellectual awakening, thanks to a more critical attitude toward the behavior of the clergy, all this combined to garner popular opposition to the established church: in other words the time was ripe for drastic new thinking. Luther’s act of broaching the hitherto unspeakable was the spark that set off an entire new way of behavior. People now discovered that Religion had become a racket, served not to honor God, but to elevate the instituted church to her greater glory and higher influence in all daily affairs.

A TRUE REFORMATION?

That it was a true Reformation is not correct. Yes, it loosened the shackles of the all-powerful church. Yes, it brought the Bible to the masses, and yes, it opened the door to various religious interpretations as people now were free to think for themselves and worship God in diverse ways. So, a Calvin emerged and a Zwingli; a John Knox found followers, just as Menno Simons did, after whom the Mennonites were named, the so-called Anabaptists.
However what all religions retained was the TWO REALMS doctrine: it left intact the REGNUM GRATIAE versus the REGNUM NATURAE, the split between NATURE AND GRACE, between the SACRED and the SECULAR, declaring in essence that EARTH is evil and HEAVEN is good. In that sense the year 1517 did not herald a true Reformation.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his ETHICS, recognized this problem. He wrote that since the inception of the New Testament church, the one thought that has determined its entire course has been “the conception of a juxtaposition and conflict of two spheres, the one divine, holy, supernatural and Christian, and the other worldly, profane, natural and un-Christian”. He continued, “There are not two realities, but only one reality and that is the reality of God, which has become manifest in Christ in the reality of the world…… (The Nature/Grace Dualism) has resulted in an ever increasing independence of the secular in its relations with the spiritual.”

As is now widely recognized the Pre-Reformation Church created a situation where eternal salvation could be bought with money, declared acceptable because it was spent to build religious edifices, constituting gross deception.
Although Luther challenged this sinful act, the basic problem, separating nature from grace, secular from sacred, was left in place, and has been with us as long as the church has been in existence.

SOCRATES VERSUS JESUS

From its very inception, the church has been influenced by Greek Pagan thinking, originating with Socrates and Plato. When Socrates died, he welcomed death. In The Trials of Socrates, Plato depicts Socrates’ last moments before his death. Plato quotes Socrates: “I’ll no longer stay put, but will take my leave of you and depart for certain happy conditions of the blessed”.
Socrates is certain that he’s on the way to heaven, and even says a prayer to the gods after drinking the poison: “‘One is, I suppose, permitted to utter a prayer to the gods – and one should do so – that one’s journey from this world to the next will prove fortunate”.
Socrates died to celebrate death, celebrating HEAVEN. Jesus died to assure life, celebrating life eternal in his new creation.

By and large the entire Christian church has opted for heaven, giving the faithful an erroneous message, becoming more evident each day as the entire creation is suffering from our actions, clamoring for a new earth. Scriptures are quite clear: John 3: 13 unambiguously says, ”No one has ever gone into heaven, except the one who came from heaven, the Son of Man.” John 3: 16 affirms that God loved the cosmos and was willing to offer his Son to buy it back from Satan, who today still is in charge (1 John 5: 19). That makes loving the earth our priority too.

The church, almost in her entirety has followed the Pagan Socrates faith, resulting in global neglect, now all too evident in the disaster of HARVEY and worse to come with IRMA.
Basically the church has made Jesus the recipient of sweet-sounding platitudes resulting in what Bonhoeffer called “pious secularism”. He also stated in his ETHICS, “Church-goers either seek Christ without the world, or they seek the world without Christ. In either case they are deceiving themselves.”

A NEW REFORMATION IS NEEDED.

All this begs for the final and ultimate Reformation.
Johan Herman Bavinck, in his book BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END: A RADICAL KINGDOM VISION writes, “The coming of Jesus Christ into the world has, when seen in the light of Scripture, as its sole intention the restoration of the Kingdom, the NEW CREATION. Christ’s suffering and death, indeed the entire order of redemption, has no other purpose than the realization of that Kingdom. Grace itself is not there for its own sake. The central point of the gospel is not us poor humans and our pain and suffering: its entire focus is aimed at the unique, powerful reality that God wants to reinstate his Kingdom.
It is God’s intent to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one over¬arching harmony. There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved in him. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the King¬dom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all wise will of him who lives and rules for ever. End of quote.
In other words: Human Salvation and the Salvation of Creation are two sides of the same coin: we can’t have one without the other. To say we love Jesus, but willfully polluting creation, is a contradiction in terms.

Sad to say, but the present-day church is no different from the pre-Reformation church. Then the Roman Catholic Church had a fire-sale on HEAVEN, guaranteeing deliverance from Purgatory and Hell, for a price. Today we have let go of Hell, and Purgatory too is no longer mentioned. Today we promise Heaven to anyone who is a faithful adherent of a denomination: nothing more than regular church attendance and a token contribution is required, and, at the graveside, the clergy will declare a safe passage to heaven. Basically the same bargain as the pre-reformation deal.

The final stretch.

All signs point to an early demise of our civilization, if that is the right word to describe our way of life. The Revenge of Creation is continuing. Our planet hosts close to Seven and a Half Billion people, the vast majority either living an extravagant life style or desiring to attain it by hook or crook.
Slowly we are discovering that our present state of consumption and our polluting ways have a definite expiry date, but we really don’t know how to end it and assume a more sustaining way.

In general the church does not have the answer to this cardinal question, mired as it is in its rites and customs, its preaching mode, its awkwardness with the Created Word, vaguely perhaps sensing that there is more to eternity than heaven, yet unwilling or unable to visualize a new creation, even though the Lord’s Prayer contains such lines as Thy Kingdom Come, and Thy Will Be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.
It is simply too stuck on semantics to be able to flesh out the entire Kingdom Idea as verbalized by Bavinck and Bonhoeffer, who both see it as an eschatological event: the perfect earth in a perfect setting, peopled by perfect people.
The heaven heresy is proving too powerful, far easier to proclaim than the advent of the Coming Kingdom, which requires NOW, TODAY, the beginning of a NEW way of Life, a PERFECT REFORMATION.

Yes, basically nothing has changed in the 500 year interval between October 31 1517 and today, in the year of the Lord 2017. Then Martin Luther affixed his 95 theses on the door of his church lamenting the error of his church and venturing with the help of God to change the church, now the task is even more difficult, and the people even more set in their ways, because it involves resisting the ways of The Evil One, who now unquestionably rules the world (1 John 5: 19).

We have, however, one advantage. Jesus saw this coming when he prayed, as recorded in John 17, “My prayer is not that you take them out of this world (no rapture, no heaven) but that you protect them from the evil one.”

The Father always hears the Son’s prayer.