Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

NOVEMBER 20 2016
FOR WHAT IS TRUE FOREVER, IS PRECISELY UNTRUE TODAY
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

That saying is vexing: it made me scratch my head; what does it really mean? Why did Bonhoeffer write this some 70 years ago in Hitler dominated Germany?
Let me guess. Bonhoeffer experienced a totally new situation in his life-time when a cultured and civilized society overnight was ruled by a cruel force, when evil became the rule of law, when stating opinions became tantamount to a death penalty.
Is that what is in store for the USA? I am afraid. Honestly, I am suffering from PTSD – Post TRUMPatic Stress Disorder. Hitler’s sudden rise in power was a true Black Swan. The same is true for the Trump victory.
These last few weeks I felt depressed because of what the next US president has in store for creation and the Mexican and Muslim people within his own country. I repeat, I am especially afflicted by what our earth will suffer because of the rise of Trump and his acolytes. Yes, I am often close to tears.
Trump’s ascendency is truly a BLACK SWAN event. I have a book by that name which I was re-reading even before November 8. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author, subtitled the book THE IMPACT OF THE HIGHLY IMPROBABLE. A Black Swan event is an occurrence that is thought to be impossible, but when it does it has immense consequences: it breaks the pattern: what was true forever is suddenly found wanting. Bonhoeffer said it a bit differently: FOR WHAT IS TRUE FOREVER, IS PRECISELY UNTRUE TODAY.
I can still picture how, in the debates with Hillary, Trump said: “Only I can fix it. Believe me!” which reminds me of Matthew 24:4, where Jesus said: “Watch out that no one deceives you”. Trump is the great deceiver, who cannot be trusted.

I lived in Nazi-occupied The Netherlands from 1940-45 as a teenager. Not the Dutch churches – they were thriving during the occupation – but the German Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches swallowed the Nazi propaganda, just as the American ecclesiastical scene has eagerly absorbed the gospel as preached by the Trump clan.
I disliked Trump even before he entered the political scene and his elevation to the presidency. Now I have stopped looking at TV, not wanting to see his phony features on the screen. Sounds silly, doesn’t it. The Bible says that we must love all people, but that does not mean that we have to like them.

For what is true forever is precisely not true today.

This saying by Bonhoeffer, and all of what he said as a theologian, is based on the Bible. Isaiah 43: 18, 19 says: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See I am doing a new thing!”

Jesus’ Second coming, when nobody, I repeat nobody expects him, is the ultimate Black Swan. Yes, believe the Bible: he comes when we least expect him. That’s why I keep on hammering at this theme, however unpopular it is.
The new is the real end of the old. It is not the extension of the old: it is completely new, totally different: the old has stopped: basta, finished: the new starts. The end is like the beginning, which also was radically new. Today, now that the End is in sight, we have to start thinking – and acting – how to live the New. We have to imagine – that is what the Bible tells us – what it is really like when Jesus has returned.
That return is the NEW that is in Christ. What does that mean? Christ died to start the new. We have to imagine the end of the old, the end of marriage, the end of the bible, the end of the church, the end of the OIL AGE, the end of carbon-saturated agriculture, the end of the automobile society, all instances of intense pollution: all this is forever banned in the really forever New Creation.

Unlikely as it seems, the church should speak within the old world of the new world. It is the church’s task to prepare its parishioners for the NEW WORLD, where Christ is All and in All. It has no other task today. But we cannot completely delegate this to the church, which, by all indications is not prepared to do so anyway. It may be willing, it may want to, but, by and large has never really thought this through. So now, as a VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO, a voice crying in the wilderness (because perhaps very few will really heed the call) it nevertheless must be true to its mission: to prepare its members for ‘the resurrection of the body and life everlasting’, a confession composed some 1700 years ago and now more true than ever.

This has implication for our life today, which is preparation for the new world to come.

So what do I regard as true forever and is precisely untrue today?

Let me continue with the church, still a dominant feature in my life. I sincerely believe that “extra ecclesiam nulla salus”, that there is “no salvation outside the church”. Of course, I do not believe that being a member of a church guarantees eternal life. I often think we are saved in spite of the church. Jesus still went to the temple even though he knew that institutional religion in his days would kill him. The apostles, even after Jesus had died, still did their religious duties there. Paul, that amazing man, was a fanatic church adherent, until his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus. Paradoxically he was arrested when he was persuaded to go to the temple.

Why do I still go to church?
I still go to church because God’s people are there. I have to associate with them for the simple reason that only there is “the communion of saints”, which, as a rule, is not found outside the church. Also “Tradition, tradition” is a big part of it, but so is the singing, the prayers, the routine coffee hour. I would feel very uncomfortable not going to church on a Sunday morning.
In earlier days when creation was not so ostensibly under attack, some 50-70 years ago, the church brought the message of comfort and joy, and, in days of hardship and need, as during the war time, it helped the destitute within their ranks, and brought a message of hope.

The realization of the new earth to come has changed my attitude to the church, which at best is silent on that score, afraid to upset the heaven-crowd. Fortunately the idea of a New Earth under a New Heaven is slowly gaining acceptance. Its emphatic and enthusiastic embracing would, I believe, revitalize the church. For what is true forever –the heaven idea- is precisely not true today.
I believe that the church stands and falls with John 3: 16: God so loved the COSMOS. The church has to wean itself off the heaven heresy and start embracing God’s first love: the earth as God’s Primary WORD.

Then there is the Economy.

Let me go to the theme that Trump and all politicians are trumpeting: economic –infinite – growth. His term will stand and fall on that score. His handicap is that we live in a finite earth, becoming more finite every day with each new crop year, with each water source depleted, with each river become polluted, with each air molecule filled with more unwanted CO2. The basic theme, that growth can go on forever, is precisely not true today, that’s why the world economy will soon collapse, and that’s why the world is becoming increasingly ungovernable.

Look around.

Great Britain lives in an “after Brexit” period; the USA enters a Trump reign where Ecclesiastes 10:16 gives the right description: “Woe to you, O land, when your king is a child!”; Greece and Italy have constant debt crises; Europe is top-heavy with bureaucracy and high social costs; China still increases its dangerous debt level; India is choking on foul air and filled with its polluted cities and waterways; Africa suffers from drought and a looming famine.

We are on a collision course with reality.

Our old order has run stuck. Renewal is no longer possible because we have gone too far on the road to nowhere. There simply is no turning back: our momentum is too great. We are like a supertanker heading toward an unmovable, unavoidable obstacle. All efforts to change course are doomed to fail, because we are stuck with the carbon-based system we have come to depend on, and now has proven fatal for the earth. Reports may say that GHG – Green House Gases – have leveled off, but that is not true: forest fires everywhere have a double edge: they deprive us of trees which absorb CO2 and they cause a lot of gases in the process of burning.
And then there is the Arctic: the North Pole warmer than Washington! In November! A Topsy-Turvy World! Even there! What was true forever – ice at the North Pole in November – is precisely Untrue Today! Even in Nature!

All this, by the grace of God, is happening, now, this instant, this very moment when we also are gaining insight to combat Climate Change, but it is too late to fully rely on renewables.

We should start with admitting that we have erred. That is the first step. I repeat; there’s where the churches should come in. After all they are supposed to deal with the HOLY, including the earth, and Jesus’ words: “Behold I make everything new.”
The problem with Jesus’ words is that he right away bounces these words back to us, suggesting: “with my help and guided by my Spirit, YOU make everything new!” How else can we fit in the kingdom that is imminent, when we don’t have a clue what new means?

So we had a surprise two weeks ago: Trump triumphed against all odds: a true BLACK SWAN event. That should wake us up! Suddenly here is a man, supposedly in the highest position a person can attain in the world, president of the richest nation on earth who denies that the earth is finite, who says that the earth can absorb any and all poisons we spout into her air and water and soil, and no harm will come to us.
That should start us thinking. If Trump can happen so suddenly then too the Second Coming should not surprise us. Like the true Devil he is, Trump will start shaping the world in his image. Brace yourself for a lot of new things, the complete opposite of what Christ has in mind for us.

Trump is right in one regard: the old is dying.

The political systems no longer work. The welfare state is waning, a state where the young are deprived while the old people enjoy luxurious boat cruises and universal health care. I don’t know what Trump and his buddies – if he has any – have in mind, but I am sure it will not benefit the people who voted for him.
Narcissist that he is, he probably already has thought about hiring artists to sculpture his image next to the other presidents on the face of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota’s Black Hills National Forest, the site of gigantic carved faces of U.S. Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. To come: the greatest of them all: President Donald J. Trump.

Brace yourselves for drastic changes in social welfare, now all financed by debt, scores of Trillions of debt.
From all indications: we are in for interesting times. Praise the Lord if you live in Canada, where, for now, matters are peaceful.

We, as people of the earth, are there to serve. Being at the top of the pyramid of natural life, our primary task is to serve everything below us, starting with creation. We are not there to enhance our image, to better ourselves at the expense of other people and natural matters.
Christ, as always, is our example: he did not come to be served, but to serve. Matthew 20: 28.

NOVEMBER 13 2016

TRUMP: GOD’S TRUMP CARD

I did not start a new blog until I knew the outcome of the election. Tuesday night I went to bed at 10 as usual, seeing the avalanche coming. At 5 in the morning, after a fitful sleep, the headline on CBCNN told the story, and I slept again for a couple of hours.
Already in the evening my thoughts went to a possible tack to take, so I started re-reading a book I had translated by J. H. Bavinck – BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END – A Radical Kingdom Vision.

Last week I wrote that we all are little Trumps. I also said that “we – stupid we – sold the Earth to The Evil One”, and wondered whether we will do it again when the USA elects TRUMP, which now is the case: IT SEEMS THAT THE DEVIL HAS BEEN THE REAL VICTOR HERE.

But wait, perhaps God planned this all along!

People in general, and Trump in particular, have no idea what actually matters in life. So a sober view of what life really is all about is in order. In this I am guided by Bavinck’s book, quoted earlier.
J. H. Bavinck wrote:

When we look at the very last pages of the Bible we cannot fail to notice how similar these chapters are to the first sections of the book of Genesis. Again we read about the Tree of Life; again we see the descrip¬tion of the river of the water of life; again are we confronted with the terrifying aspects of the divine judge¬ment. The end time again picks up the threads which have deter¬mined human life throughout the ages; in the end-time all things return to their beginning. Just as the book of Genesis paints us paradise, the place where human life started, so the book of the Revelation of John brings us back to that same place. End time and Urzeit, the primeval era, are indeed intimately related. In short, the end time reveals again the realities of the Urzeit, the billions of years when the stars were formed and matters slowly evolved.
And between these two, between Urzeit and the End time, we, the human race, are positioned. This is where history finds its place. History is therefore not an event without boundaries; it is not something that arises out of the haze of an unknown past which someday will end up in an undetermined future. No, history is delineated territory; from its very inception it is anchored in its basic form. History is the spark that jumps from the Urzeit to the End time, from the first Paradise to the final one where God himself will be both light and temple. History can do nothing else than again and again stir up the awe¬some forces that were born in the Urzeit. History can only realize what was revealed in the primeval era: the terrible, fatal, ruinous renunciation of God, and in contrast to that the magnificent reality of God’s grace. The entire mighty drama of life involving all nations and races—all the wars and calamities, all the hate and misery, all failures and pains—all this is nothing but the direct consequence of “the tragedies of tragedy” that took place in the Urzeit when Adam and Eve sold the Garden of Eden to The Evil One: Paradise Lost and history began.

And when all these centuries with their troubles and tears are history, then the thread will be picked up again at the coming of the divine judgement that the world will face.
To stand in history means to stand in the flash between those two, between the beginning and the end. To be human means to have a place between these two, between Urzeit and End time, between the two trees in the beginning and the judgement in the end.

That is how the Bible in living colors depicts the life of us men and women, each with their own life to live, each directly related to eternity and each simultaneously caught up in history.

So far the Bavinck quote.

The next day.

On Wednesday morning the thought went through my mind that we all get the government we deserve. In Canada we have been fortunate having had a mild version of Trump in the form of Stephen Harper which prepared the way for Justin Trudeau, who, after a year in power, still enjoys the most favorable ratings.
In the USA, after 4 years of Trump and Republican rule, in which they can implement their ideas of lower taxes, making the rich richer, doing away with benefits for the very people who put them in office, and, generally, undo whatever Obama has strived for, such as Climate Change and health care for everybody, deep, deep disillusion will be the direct result.
Is that the type of government our neighbors deserve? Trump will cause chaotic years, because we are not only running but rushing toward the End.

We all contribute in making creation run its course. Trump plays a very important part there. Of course, he hasn’t got a clue what the apostle Peter once wrote. 2 Peter 3: 10-12 also applies to Donald J. Trump: (10) “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 in it will be laid bare. (11) Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives (12) as you look forward to the Day of the Lord, and SPEED ITS COMING.

We speed its coming through daily praying “MARANATHA, Lord come quickly”, my mantra during my three-times-weekly run. Trump’s role in speeding the coming of the Kingdom is different.

Matthew 24: 22 relates Trump’s contribution to coming of the Kingdom: “If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive”. Trump suspending all environmental regulations, inciting China and India to do the same, will speed up the coming of THE DAY OF THE LORD. That is the Lord’s TRUMP card, the real Good News.
Trump, totally unwittingly, is God’s instrument in bringing about the New Creation by killing the old one, just as Pilate and Judas and the Pharisees did it by putting the Son of God on the cross, enabling the coming of the New Earth.

History repeats itself, but in a different form.

There is a definite parallel between the church in Jesus’ day which killed him, and the (American) church today which is determined to kill God’s creation by endorsing Trump, a self-confessed woman molester and unapologetic capitalist, who pursued wealth by hook and crook having no inkling that the Bible states that “The lust for money is the root of all evil.”

So what must we, as creation-loving Christians, do in an era where evil is now officially in power?
We must remember that these Christ followers live for only one goal: The New Creation. Bonhoeffer starts his book CREATION AND FALL with these remarkable words: “The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”

The goal of the church is so well defined in the Lord’s Prayer, where we are urged by Jesus’ very words to see creation as holy and to work for the Coming of the Kingdom.

Let me again quote J.H. Bavinck, this time in his description of the Kingdom. He writes:

The concept of the Kingdom contains a number of elements that are of the highest significance for our inquiry.
In the first place we must realize that God’s Kingdom has a cosmic character, which means that it comprises the entire world as we have come to know it. Not only are we humans part of that Kingdom, but it also includes the worlds of animals and plants. Yes, even the angels are part of this wider context: they too have a place in the harmonious totality of God’s Kingdom.
This implies that all parts of the world are attuned to each other. Nowhere is there a false note, a dis¬so¬nant that disturbs the unity, as everything fits harmoniously into the greater scheme of the totality. This applies both to each individual specimen but equally to the various circles or spheres found in creation. The celestial bodies follow their orderly tra¬jectories and do so according to God’s royal will, obeying his voice. And so the stars in their courses sound a melodious note in the great concert in which all creatures participate. The mountains rise up high above the water-saturated earth, their proud summits piercing the clouds; yet even these mountains are nothing but servants of Him who has planted and secured them by his power. On every page the Bible makes plain that the meaning of creation resides only in the one overarching motif: the motif of God’s Kingdom. That is why Scripture and Creation are never at odds: they always form a unity where the one reinforces the other.
So far Bavinck.

Let me emphasize this last line: “Scripture and Creation are never at odds: they always form a unity where the one reinforces the other.”
Yes, you can’t have the one –Creation- without the other –the Scriptures.

When the church is solely preoccupied with the Scriptures, God’s secondary, indirect Word, it loses the earth, God’s primary, direct Word. It then also fails to see what the Bible teaches. That’s how the church has prepared the way for a man who is proud of his sins, who is not ashamed to commit the greatest of sin: the sin against Creation, against God’s very work of art for which he sacrificed his son to rectify this abnormality.

Yes “Abnormality.”

God made the earth perfect: that is the normal state of affairs. Sin is the abnormality. And, as the last Bible book unambiguously states in its last chapter, Revelation 22: 11: “Let those who do wrong continue to do wrong; let those who are vile continue to do vile; let those who do right continue to do right; let those who are holy continue to be holy.”
The above text suggests that “Everything will become what it is; the true face of humanity will be revealed”. That’s what is happening in the Trump election. The Most Christian Nation on earth, the USA, with a church building on every corner, has no inkling of the real meaning of Christ’s birth, life, death and resurrection, of THY WILL BE DONE ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN.

The entire prayer the Lord Jesus taught us is an ‘ode to the Kingdom’. It has only one purpose: to tell us about what is in store for us in eternity, in life after death.
Where that kingdom perspective is absent, Proverbs 29: 18 paints an accurate picture: “Where there is no vision, the people perish, but blessed are they who keep the law.”

By and large the church has lost the vision of the kingdom, the glorious new creation that awaits those whose lives are consumed by this desire. The lack of that vision has led to the election of Trump and his party of misguided and repulsive Republicans, who pride themselves to represent THE CITY ON THE HILL, the shining light for the world to follow, now becoming THE CITADEL OF HELL for minorities, preparing the world for THE ANTICHRIST.
It will lead not only to a growing tendency for persecute minorities – both ethnic and sexual – but also cause an unprecedented increase in natural disasters world-wide, speeding up the coming of the Kingdom.

Here comes my Calvinistic background to the fore again, because we all, like sheep, have gone astray, forcing me to confess: “Oh, God, what have we done!”
Now, more than ever, we must ask for forgiveness, because we too are eager participants in the destruction of creation, the apple of God’s eye.
Psalm 115 comes to mind: “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands………Their makers will become like them” unable to see, unable to think, unable to act.

Yes, the election of Trump and his spineless partners spells the beginning of the end of humanity.
But: “Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth”.

NOVEMBER 6 2016

READY FOR JUDGMENT DAY?

Last week I picked up one of the last books written by the well-known Canadian born economist John K. Galbraith. I scanned the contents, but only read the last paragraph. The book A JOURNEY THROUGH ECONOMIC TIMES, ended with these words: “Our future will depend on the outcome of the quiet or perhaps not so quiet war between the comfortable and the underclass.”
This was written before 1994, and now, 22 years later this prophecy is being fulfilled.
In a few days we will know the outcome of the US election, a struggle between the comfortable and the underclass. As a comfortable person my preference is Hillary but I am afraid that this election will not solve anything: on the contrary it will only emphasize the immense difference between these two classes of people.
Last Monday I returned from a wedding in Minnesota, but we mostly stayed in Wisconsin at our daughter’s cottage. It was disconcerting to see so many TRUMP signs there. I spotted no HILLARY ones.
I sat at two dinners – the Rehearsal dinner as grandparents of the groom and the wedding meal – and both times talked with Americans about the election, including a Washington insider, a good friend of our daughter’s. He told me that Washington is getting bored with the election, sure that Hillary would win, which now, after the latest email disaster, is in doubt.
I have a theory why the F. B. I. released the 30,000 missing e-mails. The Federal Bureau of Investigation wants Trump to win to prevent a general uprising of the underclass when Trump loses. Both the military and the police are Trump adherents, so when a revolt against Hillary does come, the authorities may call in vain on those who have to enforce the law.
Our two daughters in the States are Democrats, of course, being comfortable, while one grandson is now married into a loyal Lutheran – and strong Republican – family: very nice people and good businessmen as well. But they vote Trump. Their attitude reminds me of Bonhoeffer who disagreed with Luther on his so-called TWO REALM thesis, separating faith from political convictions. During the Hitler regime – 1933-1945 – the German Lutheran Church overwhelmingly supported Hitler. Bonhoeffer fought that tooth and nail and it cost him his life: he dared to be different.

Back to John Kenneth Galbraith, who also wrote:
THE CONVENTIONAL VIEW SERVES TO PROTECT US FROM THE PAINFUL JOB OF THINKING.

I like that quote. Politicians want to get re-elected. One of their favorite promises is to say that they will engender Economic Growth. Trump promises 25 million jobs, and people believe him, a man who is a true disciple of Satan, the father of lies. A bit of thinking – yes, a painful job – would make it clear that we simply cannot have Infinite Growth in a Finite World. The world is tired and exhausted, and literally running on fumes, and polluted ones at that.

Conventional thinking by people and politicians never include creation, God’s earth on which we have the privilege to dwell and which God has given us to look after. That looking after has degenerated into exploiting the earth. The church at large sees God as holy but regards creation as disposable, fanatically adhering to the so-called Nature-Grace divide, separating nature from God. Imagine, splitting Bach from his music, or van Gogh from his paintings! Yet we do it with God. Go figure!

Slowly, but, I am afraid it is too late, we are discovering that we are indeed part of nature: harm nature and we are killing ourselves as well. Church leaders, almost to a man (!) vote for heaven: it is so much easier to go there than to live a life that reflects the eternity that is to come in a New Earth.

I once submitted a manuscript to an agent. His reaction: well-written, but due to the lack of a heaven perspective it will never sell. Does that really mean that this is an either/or situation? Either I am right or the church is? Is there no common ground in this matter?

John 3: 16 has convinced me that I am right and that the church is wrong. That famous text says that God loved the world, the cosmos, which God created perfectly, and which he gave to us as a totally harmonious entity. We – stupid we – sold it to The Evil One. (Will we do it again when the USA elects TRUMP?) God, however, still loved his precious earth so much that he offered his only Son as a sacrifice to buy it back – redeem – from the current owner, The Evil One. On Calvary, Jesus on the cross, the deal was made final, but the final transfer – the new owners moving in – will take place when Christ returns: in the meantime trouble, big time.

By and large almost the entire church remains heaven-oriented. I know why: the church wants to conform, just like the church in the Hitler days. Yet Jesus always was unconventional and always was direct, that’s why we too must dare to be different.

Yes, the Bible is controversial. We hardly ever hear a sermon on Jesus’ words that “many are called but few are chosen”. Matthew 20: 16 happens to contain that discouraging news.

Or take Christ’s obscure wondering whether he would find FAITH on earth when he returns. Luke 18: 8 relates Jesus’ question, surely a rhetorical one, of course, meaning that no, he will not find much of the sort of faith that sees his creation as holy, because faith in the New Creation is so downright unorthodox.

If the church really would proclaim that, if the church really would LIVE that God’s earth is holy, then very, very few people would come to church, because it would break with all accepted conventions, and would change the church into a “struggling for answers” community, making efforts to see the earth as holy, trying integrated living, venturing to factually live in harmony with God’s creation, attempting to change our way of transportation, switching to growing wholesome food, to sharing possessions with the less well off. Then efforts would be made to build and occupy energy efficient housing and perhaps doing away with automobiles and flying everywhere.

It looks that the Amish have the right answers after all.
Our entire political, social and economic establishment is set up to prevent us from questioning and thinking. Thinking is not enough, of course, because thinking has to result in action.

Basically most of us are conventional people: we hate to be different; we hate to stand out; we hate to go against the grain. In a word: we hate to be controversial because that is unpopular.

And that brings me to the LAST JUDGMENT.

Picture yourself standing face-to-face with Jesus. I imagine he will ask us some very pointed questions.

Here’s a little story about JUDGMENT.

When reluctant Peter was dispatched by the Holy Spirit to preach in Caesarea, in the heart of the Roman Occupation Force in Israel, he faced a large assembly never before exposed to the gospel. You know what his opening words were? Here’s what Peter said to these aspiring Christians: “(Jesus) is the one whom God has appointed as judge of the living and the dead.” (Acts 10: 42).

Those were his exact words. First thing Peter talked about was Jesus being the Judge. And what will Jesus ask us when we face him?
He will ask us first and foremost about our love or lack thereof of the cosmos for which he gave his life.

That brings me to THE LORD’S PRAYER, the most recited and least understood of all prayers. HALLOWED BE THY NAME is the first line. We have left the word HALLOW in there for a reason: it’s obscure, it’s basically meaningless, because we never use the word in daily encounters.

Nevertheless it means HOLY and refers to God’s creative powers as expressed in Psalm 33: 9 where God spoke and the earth was formed by his HOLY Word. Jesus, when he asked us to use that prayer as a model for all other prayers, started with the suggestion that we regard God’s creation as HOLY.

Back to JUDGMENT.

It seems to me that when Jesus sits in Judgment, every person alive or dead, you, me, our parents and grandparents, everybody, will be asked how we have dealt with that first, and presumably most important, part of the prayer he taught us: how have we dealt with creation. One of Jesus’ questions, perhaps the only one, will be: “How have you lived in relationship to my creation?” And we will tell the truth: before him no lie can stand.

And this brings me again to THE USA PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

In the entire 18 months election campaign, Climate Change was hardly mentioned. Trump and the Republicans deny this takes place.

But to live so that GLOBAL WARMING will not get worse, will never happen, or to put it in a positive stance, Climate Change will accelerate because we are too complacent and too self-satisfied. It’s simply too inconvenient, will require too many changes.

That means that, basically we all are little TRUMPS. The comfortable are just that and the underclass want to be like the comfortable. Climate Change will only speed up, unchecked, until we are confronted with self-inflicted collapse.

Here’s a little known item that I gleaned from THE ARCTIC NEWS. It writes that “One reason for the low sea ice extent is the high and rising temperature of the Arctic Ocean. On October 31, 2016, (LAST WEEK!) the Arctic Ocean was as warm as 17°C, or 14°C warmer than the average during 1981-2011.”

High Arctic temperatures mean that in these shallow waters, the methane Hydrates are starting to be released, a gas 100 times more lethal than our common automobile exhausts. When this happens, we could see a 10°C increase in the Global Temperature. Welcome to Hell on earth.

This indicates that any measure we take to reduce GHG, Green House Gases, is totally futile. No wonder 2016 will be the hottest ever recorded. It used to be that ice and snow would bounce back the warm sunshine, but now with most of the ice and snow gone, the dark waters absorb all the heat.

IT’S US AGAINST CREATION, IT’S US AGAINST CHRIST.

We, the human race, are fighting the War of all Wars: us against creation, us against the CREATOR. Not surprising that Jesus questioned our faith and wondered why so few follow his teaching
Of course, the result will be our total defeat, at the cost of all that we hold dear, including our own lives. THE WAR IS UNIVERSAL. The war is caused by our refusal to let go of the conventional, our refusal to accept our wasteful ways as sinful.

Before, when we were in wartime conditions, the poor and marginalized would face greater food scarcity and price insecurity, and the threat of violent conflict connected to this instability. In actual wars such as World War I and World War II, these people would often find themselves on the front lines while the richer were insulated or even benefited.

Not so this time. In our war against God and his creation, the rich, possessing more, will also lose more. It reminds me of the Iconoclast, when in 1530-60 the masses revolted against the rich church and against all established authorities. Now 500 years later, the dispossessed again will go where the possessions are and destroy them.

THE CONVENTIONAL VIEW SERVES TO PROTECT US FROM THE PAINFUL JOB OF THINKING.

Convention no longer works. All established authorities, from political to business to ecclesiastic, will cease to be. We have to start to think outside the box, think the way Jesus taught us: Love God and his creation above all other matters. That must be our priority from now one. And the second is like the first: love your neighbor, including your enemy, the Muslim, the Gay and Lesbian, like yourself. These two commandments have priority over all other rules.

THE BIBLE AND THE BIG BANG

Here’s what I think will happen.
It will start with a gigantic BIG BANG EARTHQUAKE. There may have been a BIG BANG to start it all, but there will be a BIG BANG to end it all. Of course, I am referring to our poor planet.
I know, you know, that the Bible is not a book that can be used to predict that then and there we will experience this or that. But the Bible does tell us that this earth which we have made into an ANTHROPOCENE, a human dominated planet, will someday be totally destroyed, not by an act of God, but by the fatal distortions we have introduced into our fragile atmosphere.
One of these killing conditions will be human induced earthquakes.

Oh, that frightening 24th Chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.

Its translators have given it the brief one-liner heading: SIGNS OF THE END OF THE AGE. That’s what we are experiencing now, these coming decades, which also may be among the last.
Here’s a direct quote from that chapter: “Nation will arise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.”
All this is happening right now!
I like that description: birth pains. Romans 8: 22 too uses that same phrasing: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”
Childbirth indicates that a New Earth will be born. The old earth, now almost totally polluted in all its formations, the soil, the air, the waters, will vanish, will disappear and a radical overhaul will take place, completely cleansing her from all human-induced contamination. Our old, tired, worn out earth is, nevertheless, young enough to be pregnant with the New Earth.
Once the mess we have created is repaired – which might take a couple of thousand years as the damage is so extensive, but happen it will because the earth has a tremendous self-cleaning capacity – then God will recall those (Revelation 14: 13) who have died in the Lord. They have completely rested from their labor and their deeds will follow them.
“What were their deeds?” you might ask. Jesus’ great commandment comes to mind: “Love the Lord and all his creation above all, and your neighbor as yourself.” These deeds are for eternity.
But before that happens we will experience tremendous – human-induced – earthquakes. Yes, Human-Induced. When God caused THE FLOOD he promised that he would never again destroy the then known world, implying that we would have the honors next time. And that’s what will happen.

A recurring theme in the Bible.

All of Scripture talks about that event, not just Revelation. The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, repeatedly refers to that last earthquake as well. And not only earthquakes but total sun eclipses, events not appearing in the time tables of the astronomers.

Amos 9: 5 already says: “the whole land will rise like the Nile, it will be stirred up and then sink.” Ezekiel 38: 19: “In my zeal and fiery wrath I declare that at that time there will be a great earthquake in the land of Israel”, and Joel 2: 10: “Before them the earth quakes.”
Eclipses of the sun? Amos mentions them too. “I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight.” And Isaiah, speaking about the Day of the Lord, says: “The stars of heaven and their constellations will not show their light, and the rising sun will be darkened (13: 10). Also in Matthew 24, in that great forecast for the future, Jesus (verse 29) says that the darkening of the sun is one of the signs of the coming end. Also that the moon shall be as blood, is a well-known thought in the prophecy. Joel speaks of this in the promise of the coming of the Spirit (2: 31) “The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.
Revelation, the last Bible book, on four (4) occasions mentions the earthquake: Chapters 6: 12; 8: 15; 11: 13, and, in the most ominous terms, in 16: 18, where it says that “No earthquake like it had ever occurred since humanity had been on earth, so tremendous was the quake. (19) The great city split into three parts and the cities of the nations collapsed.

Is this really true? Yes.

I follow Karl Barth’s advice: “Have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other”. (That was before the Internet, of course.)
Here is part of an article that appeared in the GUARDIAN last week. The headline said:
HOW CLIMATE CHANGE TRIGGERS EARTHQUAKES, TSUNAMIS AND VOLCANOES.
The essay said in part:
Global Warming may not only be causing more destructive hurricanes, it could also be shaking the ground beneath our feet.
Tornadoes, typhoons, hurricanes and mid-latitude storms – along with heatwaves and floods – are widely regarded as climate change’s shock troops; forecast to accelerate the destruction, loss of life and financial pain as planet Earth continues to heat up. It would be wrong to imagine, however, that climate change and the extreme events it drives are all about higher temperatures and a bit more wind and rain.
The atmosphere is far from isolated and interacts with other elements of the so-called “Earth system”, such as the oceans, ice caps and even the ground beneath our feet, in complex and often unexpected ways capable of making our world more dangerous. We are pretty familiar with the idea that the oceans swell as a consequence of the plunging atmospheric pressure at the heart of powerful storms, building surges driven onshore by high winds that can be massively destructive. Similarly, it does not stretch the imagination to appreciate that a warmer atmosphere promotes greater melting of the polar ice caps, thereby raising sea levels and increasing the risk of coastal flooding. But, more extraordinarily, the thin layer of gases that hosts the weather and fosters global warming really does interact with the solid Earth – the so-called geosphere — in such a way as to make climate change an even bigger threat.”

And THE GUARDIAN IS NOT ALONE.

The reliable journal NATURE affirms this. This prestigious paper provides convincing evidence for a link between typhoons barreling across Taiwan and the timing of small earthquakes beneath the island. Their take on the connection is that the reduced atmospheric pressure that characterizes these powerful Pacific equivalents of hurricanes is sufficient to allow earthquake faults deep within the crust to move more easily and release accumulated strain. This may sound farfetched, but an earthquake fault that is primed and ready to go is like a coiled spring, and as geophysicist John McCloskey of the University of Ulster is fond of pointing out, all that is needed to set it off is – quite literally – “the pressure of a handshake”.
And it isn’t only earthquake faults that today’s storms and torrential rains are capable of shaking up. Volcanoes seem to be susceptible too. On the Caribbean island of Montserrat, heavy rains have been implicated in triggering eruptions of the active lava dome that dominates the volcano there. Stranger still, Alaska’s Pavlof volcano appears to respond not to wind or rain, but to tiny seasonal changes in sea level. The volcano seems to prefer to erupt in the late autumn and winter, when weather patterns are such that water levels adjacent to this coastal volcano climb by a few tens of centimeters. This is enough to bend the crust beneath the volcano, allowing magma to be squeezed out, according to geophysicist Steve McNutt of the University of South Florida, “like toothpaste out of a tube”.
If today’s weather can bring forth earthquakes and magma from the Earth’s crust, it doesn’t take much to imagine how the solid Earth is likely to respond to the large-scale environmental adjustments that accompany rapid climate change. In fact, we don’t have to imagine at all. The last time our world experienced serious warming was at the end of the last ice age when, between about 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, temperatures rose by six degrees centigrade, melting the great continental ice sheets and pushing up sea levels by more than 120meters.
The bottom line is that as climate change tightens its grip, we must be prepared to expect the unexpected.

MELTING ICE MAY CAUSE THE ULTIMATE QUAKE.
As the kilometers-thick Greenland’s ice sheet melt, the faults beneath releases the accumulated strain of tens of millennia, spawning massive magnitude eight earthquakes. Quakes of this scale are taken for granted today around the Pacific Ocean’s “Ring of Fire”, but they are completely out of place near the North Pole. Across the Norwegian Sea, in Iceland, the volcanoes long buried beneath a kilometer of ice are being rejuvenated as the ice load weighing billions of tons melt away, prompting a “volcano storm” that will increase the volcano level by up to 50 times.
Yes, the most dangerous aspect of Climate Change is the melting of the ice in the world’s largest island, Greenland.
There the ice loss has been a staggering 270 billion tons of ice A YEAR!! during the last 10 years. Geologists expect that future ice loss may trigger earthquakes of intermediate to large magnitude if the crust underneath the modern ice cap contains faults prone to failure. The same applies to the huge volume of rain dumped by tropical cyclones, leading to severe flooding, which also may lead to earthquakes.
The bottom line in all of this is that as climate change tightens its grip, we will see more and bigger hurricane, more and bigger earthquakes, and in general disastrous natural disasters.
End of quotes.

THERE’S WHERE THE DANGER LIES!!: trillions tons of solid ice melting, torrents of water streaming into the oceans, unsettling the earth’s axis, robbing our planet of its delicate balance. Volcanoes darkening the skies.
Revelation tells us that the disasters will be world-wide: there will not be a safe hiding place, not a refuge anywhere. Cities, however, will bear the brunt of the turmoil.

I really don’t know what to advise because ‘nobody knows the day and the hour’, as that 24th chapter of Matthew tells us. Jesus does say that there will be general signs, and I believe that these signs are definitely there today.
There are clear indications today that the world is falling apart. Trump will not emerge as a winner in the US election, now only a few days away. But his popularity, embracing close to 2 out of 5 voters in the USA, serves as a sure sign that environmental turmoil translates into human misbehavior as well.
One of the laws of ECOLOGY states that “EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE.” God formed us of the earth, and when the earth suffers we all suffer, because the suffering of the earth is our doing.
We do well to heed Nietzsche’s warning: “to blaspheme against the earth is the most grievous sin”, because we directly blaspheme God’s majesty.

When God dictated the Ten Commandments to Moses (Exodus 20), he said: “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.”

That has nothing to do with swearing, with saying “Oh My God” occasionally, and has everything to do with harming creation, with misusing God’s name, blaspheming God, scratching out his signature and substituting it for our own. Since we do this continually, since we do this without thinking and without letup, God will not let us get away with that.
The earth, God’s earth, has her built-in defense mechanisms. Disturb its precarious balances and watch how the planet fights back.
It is exactly that which we are beginning to experience. God is not easily provoked, but once he is, nothing and nobody will be able to withstand his fury.

Revelation 16: 1 has a frightening message:
“Then I heard a loud voice from the temple saying to the seven angels: “Go, pour out the seven bowls of God’s wrath on the earth.”
The great earthquake – THE REAL BIG BANG – is merely the beginning of God’s wrath.

OCTOBER 23 2016

“CHRISTIANITY TODAY” AND THE HEAVEN HANG-UP.

Below is shown an editorial which appeared in CHRISTIANITY TODAY last week. I quote it in full, because it gives a clear picture of what constitutes orthodox Christianity in the USA.
Here it is:

As a non-profit journalistic organization, CHRISTIANITY TODAY is doubly committed to staying neutral regarding political campaigns—the law requires it, and we serve our readers best when we give them the information and analysis they need to make their own judgments.
We can never collude when idolatry becomes manifest, especially when it demands our public allegiance.
Just because we are neutral, however, does not mean we are indifferent. We are especially not indifferent when the gospel is at stake. The gospel is of infinitely greater importance than any campaign, and one good summary of the gospel is, “Jesus is Lord.”

The true Lord of the world reigns even now, far above any earthly ruler. His kingdom is not of this world, but glimpses of its power and grace can be found all over the world. One day his kingdom, and his only, will be the standard by which all earthly kingdoms are judged, and following that judgment day, every knee will bow, in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, as his reign is fully realized in the renewal of all things.
The lordship of Christ places constraints on the way his followers involve themselves, or entangle themselves, with earthly rulers.

On the one hand, we pray for all rulers—and judging from the example of Old Testament exiles like Daniel and New Testament prisoners like Paul, we can even wholeheartedly pray for rulers who directly oppose our welfare. On the other hand, we recognize that all earthly governments partake, to a greater or lesser extent, in what the Bible calls idolatry: substituting the creation for the Creator and the earthly ruler for the true God.

No human being, including even the best rulers, is free of this temptation. But some rulers and regimes are especially outrageous in their God-substitution. After Augustus Caesar, the emperors of Rome became more and more elaborate in their claims of divinity with each generation—and more and more ineffective in their governance. Communism aimed not just to replace faith in anything that transcended the state, but to crush it. Such systems do not just dishonor God, they dishonor his image in persons, and in doing so they set themselves up for dramatic destruction. We can never collude when such idolatry becomes manifest, especially when it demands our public allegiance. Christians in every place and time must pray for the courage to stay standing when the alleged “voice of a god, not a man” commands us to kneel.

This year’s presidential election in the United States presents Christian voters with an especially difficult choice.
The Democratic nominee has pursued unaccountable power through secrecy—most evidently in the form of an email server designed to shield her communications while in public service, but also in lavishly compensated speeches, whose transcripts she refuses to release, to some of the most powerful representatives of the world system. She exemplifies the path to power preferred by the global technocratic elite—rooted in a rigorous control of one’s image and calculated disregard for norms that restrain less powerful actors. Such concentration of power, which is meant to shield the powerful from the vulnerability of accountability, actually creates far greater vulnerabilities, putting both the leader and the community in greater danger.

But because several of the Democratic candidate’s policy positions are so manifestly incompatible with Christian reverence for the lives of the most vulnerable, and because her party is so demonstrably hostile to expressions of traditional Christian faith, there is plenty of critique and criticism of the Democratic candidate from Christians, including evangelical Christians.
But not all evangelical Christians—in fact, alas, most evangelical Christians, judging by the polls—have shown the same critical judgment when it comes to the Republican nominee. True, when given a choice, primary voters who claimed evangelical faith largely chose other candidates. But since his nomination, Donald Trump has been able to count on “the evangelicals” (in his words) for a great deal of support.

The revelations of the past week of his vile and crude boasting about sexual conquest—indeed, sexual assault—might have been shocking, but they should have surprised no one.
This past week, the latest (though surely not last) revelations from Trump’s past have caused many evangelical leaders to reconsider. This is heartening, but it comes awfully late. What Trump is, everyone has known and has been able to see for decades, let alone the last few months. The revelations of the past week of his vile and crude boasting about sexual conquest—indeed, sexual assault—might have been shocking, but they should have surprised no one.
Indeed, there is hardly any public person in America today who has more exemplified the “earthly nature” (“flesh” in the King James and the literal Greek) that Paul urges the Colossians to shed: “sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry” (3:5). This is an incredibly apt summary of Trump’s life to date. Idolatry, greed, and sexual immorality are intertwined in individual lives and whole societies. Sexuality is designed to be properly ordered within marriage, a relationship marked by covenant faithfulness and profound self-giving and sacrifice. To indulge in sexual immorality is to make oneself and one’s desires an idol. That Trump has been, his whole adult life, an idolater of this sort, and a singularly unrepentant one, should have been clear to everyone.

And therefore it is completely consistent that Trump is an idolater in many other ways. He has given no evidence of humility or dependence on others, let alone on God his Maker and Judge. He wantonly celebrates strongmen and takes every opportunity to humiliate and demean the vulnerable. He shows no curiosity or capacity to learn. He is, in short, the very embodiment of what the Bible calls a fool.

Some have compared Trump to King David, who himself committed adultery and murder. But David’s story began with a profound reliance on God who called him from the sheepfold to the kingship, and by the grace of God it did not end with his exploitation of Bathsheba and Uriah. There is no parallel in Trump’s much more protracted career of exploitation. The Lord sent his word by the prophet Nathan to denounce David’s actions—alas, many Christian leaders who could have spoken such prophetic confrontation to him personally have failed to do so. David quickly and deeply repented, leaving behind the astonishing and universally applicable lament of his own sin in Psalm 51—we have no sign that Trump ever in his life has expressed such humility. And the biblical narrative leaves no doubt that David’s sin had vast and terrible consequences for his own family dynasty and for his nation. The equivalent legacy of a Trump presidency is grievous to imagine.

There is a point at which strategy becomes its own form of idolatry—an attempt to manipulate the levers of history in favor of the causes we support.
Most Christians who support Trump have done so with reluctant strategic calculation, largely based on the president’s power to appoint members of the Supreme Court. Important issues are indeed at stake, including the right of Christians and adherents of other religions to uphold their vision of sexual integrity and marriage even if they are in the cultural minority.
But there is a point at which strategy becomes its own form of idolatry—an attempt to manipulate the levers of history in favor of the causes we support. Strategy becomes idolatry, for ancient Israel and for us today, when we make alliances with those who seem to offer strength—the chariots of Egypt, the vassal kings of Rome—at the expense of our dependence on God who judges all nations, and in defiance of God’s manifest concern for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed. Strategy becomes idolatry when we betray our deepest values in pursuit of earthly influence. And because such strategy requires capitulating to idols and princes and denying the true God, it ultimately always fails.
Enthusiasm for a candidate like Trump gives our neighbors ample reason to doubt that we believe Jesus is Lord. They see that some of us are so self-interested, and so self-protective, that we will ally ourselves with someone who violates all that is sacred to us—in hope, almost certainly a vain hope given his mendacity and record of betrayal, that his rule will save us.
The US political system has never been free of idolatry, and politics always requires compromise. Our country is flawed, but it is also resilient. And God is not only just, but also merciful, as he judges the nations. In these closing weeks before the election, all American Christians should repent, fast, and pray—no matter how we vote. And we should hold on to hope—not in a candidate, but in our Lord Jesus. We do not serve idols. We serve the living God. Even now he is ready to have mercy, on us and on all who are afraid. May his name be hallowed, his kingdom come, and his will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.

End of the CHRISTIANITY TODAY editorial.

My comments.

There is much in that editorial that I like, because it is good conventional Christian teaching. However (and here I fundamentally differ) I believe that this sort of orthodoxy can no longer be the criterion for the Christian today.

For instance: I have difficulty with the following sentence. Here it is:
“The true Lord of the world reigns even now……..”

In 1 John 5: 19 the apostle contradicts this when he writes: “The whole world is under control of the evil one,” affirming what Jesus himself prayed in John 17. That this is the case is all too evident in our unlimited use of creation-destroying fossil fuels.

Further in the editorial “substituting the creation for the Creator” is called idolatry. Of course we may not make an idol of anything created, whether that is a tree or a man or woman or economic growth. But, since God made the totality of creation, this does indicate that the creation as an entity is holy. After all we call the Bible holy.

Compare Creation to the Bible: the Bible’s composition, what to include and what to leave out, its order of content, the arranging in chapters and verses, all this is of human origin. Creation, however, is a direct act of God, has no human input at all. This makes Creation more holy than the Bible. Psalm 33: 9 says: “God spoke and it came to be; he commanded and it stood firm”. That statement is confirmed in John 1: “In the beginning was the WORD”, resulting in God’s Created Word, his PRIMARY REVELATION, his DIRECT WORD, compared to the Scriptures, which are his Secondary Revelation, his Indirect Word. The church has never recognized this distinction, even though the ancient (1560’s) Belgic Confession plainly teaches this.

And that brings me to what is lacking in that editorial: it lacks any mention of our sins against creation, and any referral to Climate Change (CC).

Yes, American ‘Christian’ voters have a difficult choice, but not as difficult the church leaders had when Hitler occupied the Netherlands from 1940-45.

Then too churches were faced with a difficult choice: was the Hitler regime legitimate or not? Those preachers who disagreed were imprisoned – my own brother-in-law was one of them – and they often faced death. Now the choice is even more pronounced: can a Christian participate in a society that is bent on self-destruction due to the use of fossil fuel? Trump’s party openly ridicules Climate Change, openly mocks the preservation of God’s creation. At least the Democrats dare to mention that CC word.

The editorial does not want to touch this, or, more likely, sees it as not important. I suspect that a good percentage of the readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY not only condone but are eager participants in The American Way of Life, which is non-negotiable, even though it destroys the cosmos which God loved so much that he sacrificed his only Son to buy it back out of the clutches of ‘the evil one.’ If the entire world would live as us North Americans we’d need 5 planets to accommodate this.

Jesus and the Cosmos.

I dare say that if we don’t love creation, the COSMOS for which Jesus gave his life to buy it back from THE EVIL ONE, we simply cannot love Jesus. Yes, you read this correctly! Loving creation and loving Jesus are two sides of the same coin!! When I say that I love Shakespeare, this has nothing to do with him as a person because what he created is regarded a treasure. How much more does this apply to creation and to the Creator, Jesus, whom we intimately know from Scriptures. Yes, loving creation and loving Jesus go hand in hand, something the church is failing to proclaim.

I tie it in with what I now call THE HEAVEN HANG-UP, which hangs over the church and the world as THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES. Pointing to Damocles means that the church, through its heaven stance, imperils the existence of the entire world. It’s the HEAVEN HANG-UP that prevents CHRISTIANITY TODAY as well as Christianity at large from proclaiming that Climate Change poses the greatest danger for God’s earth. Nowhere does the Bible point out that we go to heaven when we die. John 3: 13 explicitly states that nobody has gone to heaven except the One who came from there: Jesus.

It is also my considerate opinion that the HEAVEN HANG-UP is preventing the church from attracting new people to its constantly depleting ranks, while promoting pious secularism, as Bonhoeffer put it.

Here is a sentence from a David Brooks column in the New York Times, discussing a book from a distinguished academic who searched for the Truth. He rejected Christianity because “he thinks their emphasis on the next world disparages this world”.

Enter Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s father and both grandfathers were ordained ministers in the Lutheran Church in Germany. He knew doctrine and the Bible as few others. His church affiliation faltered when he saw how the church slandered and depreciated this world, while praising and exulting in a hypothetical world to come. To his mind the church drew odious comparisons between the things of this earth and the blessings of heaven. Nietzsche revolted seeing how the church (then and now) gushed in a very unsportsmanlike manner over an imaginary beyond, to the detriment and disadvantage of a “here,” of this earth, of this life, and posits another region—a nether region—for the accommodation of its enemies.

In his THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA Nietzsche wrote: “I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners whether they know it or not.
They are despisers of life, atrophying and self-poisoned men, of whom the church is weary: so let them be gone!”

He continued: “Once blaspheming against God was the greatest blasphemy……to blaspheme against the earth is now the most dreadful offence…”

The CHRISTIANITY TODAY editorial does not speak for the earth, God’s greatest work of art for which he sacrificed his only Son. CHRISTIANITY TODAY here is a perfect example of the state of Christianity Today by committing the SIN OF OMISSION when it does not mention what President OBAMA calls THE GREATEST DANGER HUMANITY faces: CLIMATE CHANGE, the immense peril facing God’s Holy Creation, a disaster much greater than an improbable Trump presidency.

All this is due to the HEAVEN HANG-UP which the church in general has with God’s precious planet. Most preachers are afraid to proclaim this, afraid to upset their parishioners. No wonder James 3: 1 is in the Bible.

OCTOBER 16 2016

ANTHROPOCENE

You may have heard the word “Anthropocene.” It’s a relatively new word, coined by a Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering the effects of ozone-depleting compounds.

Look at that word again. A bit of knowing Greek will tell you that it
comes from the Greek ‘anthropos’ which means ‘human being’, also found in ‘anthropology’, the science dealing with human behavior. The last 4 letters ‘cene’ is also of Greek origin, stemming from ‘kainos’ which means ‘new’. Thus the word stands for ‘the new human’ and we then have to extend it to ‘age’ or ‘period’. Thus freely transposed into ordinary parlor the sort of strange word ANTHROPOCENE really means: “the period or timeframe where we humans call the tune and are fully in charge.”

I associate the term ANTHROPOCENE with Psalm 115: 16. There it says that ‘THE HIGHEST HEAVENS belong to the Lord, but THE EARTH he has given to us humans.’

Oh, that Bible(!): confusing at times, because Psalm 24 says the opposite: “The Lord’s is the earth and its fullness, the world and all its peoples.” So what’s going on?

My guess is that the heavenly timetable is different from yours and mine. Often the Bible counts events which have not yet happened as something of the past. In heaven the past is the future and the future is the past. It is as if ‘time’ there is not a straight line, such as from year zero to infinity, or from creation to Christ and the cross to the New Creation. In heaven, time is more like a circle where the beginning is the End and the End is the beginning.

Yes, it is true, as related in Psalm 24 “the earth is the Lord’s”, just as Vincent van Gogh’s paintings always belong to him even though his descendants have long sold them to museums everywhere.

So, what then is true and what is false about the earth’s ownership? My bet is that both are true. God made the earth just as the St. Matthew Passion is forever associated with J. S. Bach but now is a world-treasure, or as the NIGHTWATCH is Rembrandt’s most famous painting but now belongs to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. So it is with the earth: forever the Lord’s but, with possession constituting 99 percent of ownership, we are the current owners.

And that is confirmed by the word ANTHROPOCENE.

Why that word?

Dr. Crutzen justified the term Anthropocene citing the following reasons:
1. Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet.
2. Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted.
3. Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems.
4. Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary productivity of the oceans’ coastal waters.
5. Humans use more than half of the world’s readily accessible fresh water runoff.

Let me take a closer look at item 1: Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. That is called Primary Productivity which Dr. Crutzen estimated at some 40 percent, and he is not alone.

PRIMARY PRODUCTIVITY

Our efforts to change the make-up of the earth is connected to “Primary Productivity,” a concept indicating the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the sum of earth’s plant energy that makes our lives possible. It is in essence “the total budget of life.” All humans and all animals eat either plants or eat animals that eat plants, and solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. It is this very activity that is now in danger because we appropriating too much of what is.
When Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden, Primary Productivity was at its peak: 100 percent. People lived long, long lives.

After the Garden of Eden, the number of people rose quickly, starting agriculture and making cities possible of which Cain was the prime mover. As a result Primary Productivity started to decrease.

In our age of rapid population growth this phenomenon has accelerated with earth-breaking speed. Consider the following, as quoted from “The Ingenuity Gap” by Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon.

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

There have been two efforts to figure out how Primary Productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other by biologist Stuart L. Pimm, Professor of biology at Duke University in Durham N.C. They both concluded that we humans consume about 40 percent of Earth Primary Productivity, 40 percent of all there is. That percentage may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet.

An update.

These estimates were made some 10 years ago. Since then we have had China’s and India’s growth rapidly accelerating, FRACKING also has been on a fast track, coral reefs have deteriorated big time, while the earth’s temperature has risen by more than One Degree Celsius.

Primary Productivity, now approaching 50 percent simply means that we, the 7 billion plus, have simply stolen the food of all other creatures, the birds, the whales, the tunas, the frogs, the elephants. The list goes on and on. Anthropocene really means that, with humanity in charge, there is no place for all other creatures. Trump and his followers embody that phenomenon, horrible as it is. The very fact that this is the case actually means that in reality there also is no longer place for us, either, mainly thanks to the dehumanizing of technology.

Can we still function as people?

Last week the New York Times reported a conversation with a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who said with a kind of deadpan resignation: “You know we are designing a world that is not fit for people.” George Monbiot in an article in the GUARDIAN dealing with the loneliness caused by modern technology, concluded:

“It’s unsurprising that social isolation is strongly associated with depression, suicide, anxiety, insomnia, fear and the perception of threat. It’s more surprising to discover the range of physical illnesses it causes or exacerbates. Dementia, high blood pressure, heart disease, strokes, lowered resistance to viruses, even accidents are more common among chronically lonely people. Loneliness has a comparable impact on physical health to smoking 15 cigarettes a day: it appears to raise the risk of early death by 26%. This is partly because it enhances production of the stress hormone cortisol, which suppresses the immune system.”

That’s why being an active member of a church group- any group actually- is so important, not so much the service, that too, but the coffee hour, the choir, the bible study, the prayer groups: the more activities, the better for health.

I also believe that loneliness comes from lack of genuine relationship with the rest of creation. We fail to see the trees as our neighbors; we no longer hear the birds sing or are able to see the twinkling stars while constantly exposed to pesticide-laden food and drink causing ill health.
Planetary stress too affects us. Last week The Arctic News reported that the ICE BUFFER around the North Pole is gone.

Why is that important?

This ice buffer used to bounce back massive amounts of ocean heat carried along sea currents into the Arctic Ocean. Now the sea ice is disappearing and this same heat, earlier absorbed by the massive ice buffer, now warms the Arctic Ocean, which in many places is less than 50 m deep.
What is so terribly frightening is that on that so shallow Arctic floor there are momentous methane masses, called Hydrates, billions of tons. It so happens that methane is some 20 times more lethal than our CO2 which we produce in billions of tons each year and is mainly responsible for Climate Change: ice out, heat in, weather haywire. Once these hydrates explode, we are done-for.

According to a Waterloo professor, Thomas Homer-Dixon, the future looks bleak, when what “ we have experienced , (are) so far only the earliest stages, just the leading edge, of the planet’s environmental crisis. Far, far greater environmental challenges are still to come.”

True, we have made great strides in alternative energy sources, both wind and solar. But the harsh truth is that for the foreseeable future there is no true substitute for oil. The sun shines only a certain numbers of hours in a year and we can’t command the wind to blow when power is needed. I know. I have both power sources and still need the ‘grid.’

A brief ‘energy’ history.

When wood ran out, some 400 years ago, coal came on line. When coal proved to be too polluting, oil and natural gas were available. Now, what do we do? Rely mainly on Natural gas of which the world still has plenty, but all in very remote locations, such as Siberia or Australia? It will take trillions of dollars to feed the North American market with adequate supply, assuming there is plenty of it left. Remember: natural gas too is polluting.

Thanks to oil, in my lifetime, the world’s population more than tripled from 2 billion to 7.2 billion. As late as 1945 my maternal grandfather had no electricity on his small farm. He managed with one horse and one help. Then people were mentally and physically equipped in coping with little or no carbon energy. These skills we have lost. Also much of the earth has been spoiled, unfit for intensive, organic, agriculture. We still have a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure powered almost exclusively by fossil-fuels. Cars, trucks, roads, boats, docks, airplanes, airports, hospitals, schools, farms, manufacturing plants, food processing centers, water-treatment plants – all run on fossil fuels. At home we have heat at the touch of a switch, and cooling is just as easy. All plastics, pesticides, and fertilizers are derived from that oil or gas as well. It is simply impossible for friendly energy to take over much of our modern systems. Do you drive a Prius? Are you off the grid? Talk is easy.
Primary Productivity now stands between 45 and 50, meaning that almost half of the world’s basic energy, vested in plants, trees, animals, has been used for the benefit of the human race, but in such a way that once it is used, it cannot be restored. Depleted oceans, soil degradation, disappeared species, cannot be re-created by human technology.

Yes, ANTHROPOCENE is upon us. God has given us, humans, ownership of the earth with God’s sole purpose – quoting Deuteronomy 32: 20 – ‘to see how we manage on our own without God’. So far the results have not been encouraging. Will we manage to right the wrongs? Will we manage to reverse Climate Change? Will we manage to re-stock the oceans? Will we manage to build a sustainable future?

No wonder people are uptight and cling to some false prophets such as Donald Trump. Believe me, there are no simple solutions anymore. I sincerely believe that we have gone too far to remedy the situation.