Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

APRIL 26 2015

Who is more influential in the church: Jesus or Socrates?

When Jesus died he exclaimed: “My God, my God why have you left me all by myself?” Jesus died in agony, surrendering himself to his Father: “Into your hands I commit my spirit.”
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.
Jesus saw the human body as holy, formed from the clay of the earth. Upon Jesus’ second coming his followers will be raised in perfection: no more death or disease. Jesus died to defeat death.

Both men died after a long legal process. Socrates was condemned to die because he was a bad influence on the Greek youth. Jesus died because he was a bad influence on the church of his day. Socrates gladly drank the chalice filled with deadly poison, seeing death as better than life. Jesus saw death as the ultimate enemy.
Both did not leave any personal writings: Socrates’ teachings were meticulously recorded by Plato, while we know about Jesus from the four Gospels.
Since Christianity became a global phenomenon, who has been more influential: Jesus or Socrates?
Sad to say: The Greek philosophy of heaven as the Christian’s eternal habitat has triumphed, thanks to Socrates. That’s the reason why most of Christianity – almost every expression whether that is Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, or every other denominational wing – has suffered from a form of dualism, splitting body from soul, sacred from secular. Originating in Socrates, as recorded by Plato, many ideas which were long regarded and accepted as the pure unadulterated essence of Christianity, such as the doctrine of an immortal soul, a self-denying attitude towards matters involving our body, and the view of sexuality as in itself ‘the sinful lust of the flesh’, are deeply rooted in Platonic thought.

It is evident everywhere. Look no further than the hymns we sing in church: in most of them there is a ‘heaven’ reference, and salvation only applies to men and women, never to ‘nature’, the whole creation, as plainly outlined in Romans 8: 22. I like the current Pope, but when I see him in his white robe, escorted by all male companions also immaculately dressed in identical pure habits, I see dualism at work: the church separate from society, as the priestly class represents God and his angels. Just as God is supposed to be sexless so these men are supposed to be that too. We know that reality is different. We cannot separate sex from life: denying the presence of sex is akin to denying creation.

It is no different in the Protestant wing. There may not be these elaborate ceremonial customs – still very much alive in the Anglican-Episcopalian Church and the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches – but the essence of the message has not changed, in spite of the Reformation, 500 years ago in 1517. There still is the Sunday session in the ‘sanctuary’, centering on the sermon while the rest of the week is devoted to ‘secular’ pursuits. Public education is seen as the national shrine where God is banned and consumerism is dominant. No wonder ‘religion’ is no longer popular as the relevance of Jesus has faded while the star of Socrates is soaring. If Christianity wanted to regain its prominence then it has to make it a 365/7/24 affair, centering on ‘creation’ the cosmos God loved so much.
It is evident that every theology depends for its public expression on some sort of philosophy. Dr. Robert Heilbroner in his book The Worldly Philosophers quotes John Maynard Keynes: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” What applies to economic matters is also true for theology. Most of what is generally considered Christianity is deeply influenced by dualistic Greek – Platonic – philosophy. The philosophy which shapes my Christian thinking is based on a line of thought by Abraham Kuyper who said, as Dr. Evan Runner put it: “All of life is Religion.” No dualism allowed.

Yes, “All of life is religion”.

It is the basis of my life. Nothing we experience falls outside our field of faith. When I run – which I do three times each week ‘religiously’ – I do so because my body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. When I grow food – which I do prayerfully – I do so because the soil on which I rely is holy soil. I see all my actions as religious.

Not so in most of North American churches, thanks to Socrates and Plato. There Gnosticism rules. The word comes from the Greek word ‘gnosis’ – no surprise as Socrates was Greek – which means “knowledge”. Harold Bloom, America’s foremost literary critic in his book The American Religion writes “The United States of America is a religion-mad and religion-soaked country. We think we are Christian. But we are not. So creedless is the American Religion that it needs to be tracked by particles rather than by principles. The American Religion is post-Christian, despite its protestations, and even that it has begun to abandon Protestant modes of thought and feeling.”
Bloom argues in his book that the American Religion, which is so prevalent among us, masks itself as Protestant Christianity, yet has ceased to be Christian. It has kept the figure of Jesus, a very solitary and personal American Jesus, who is also the resurrected Jesus rather than the crucified Jesus or the Jesus who ascended again to the Father. He quotes President Eisenhower notorious for remarking that the United States was and had to be a religious nation, and that he didn’t care what religious it had, as long as it had one. Bloom takes a sadder view: “we are, alas, the most religious of countries, and finally only varieties of the American Religion will flourish among us, whether its devotees call it Mormonism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, or what-ever-you-will. And the American Religion, for its two centuries of existence, seems to me irretrievably Gnostic. It is a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the-self, and the knowledge (gnosis) leads to freedom, a dangerous and doom-eager freedom, from nature, time, history, and community.”

The Late, Great Planet Earth

The Late, Great Planet Earth is a good example of American religious thinking. It outsold the Bible there. Dualistic America sees the earth, God’s pride and joy, as evil. No wonder Republican politicians, the Christian people’s representatives, have no regard for the environment and pursue warlike policies, anything that will destroy the earth and bring on Armageddon. The churches there are consumed by a premillennial eschatology. They read in the Bible that the Rapture will take place when all believers will be taken up into heaven before the great tribulation and Christ Second Coming, to establish a Thousand Year Kingdom on Earth.
The word “rapture” comes from the Latin verb ‘rapio’ which means ‘to seize in order to keep’. (Rapio, rapere, rapui, raptum= I have been seized). Our word ‘rape’ has the same root. Supposedly ‘rapture’ means that God will seize people in order to keep them in his kingdom.

Lindsey focused on key passages in the book of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation, and suggested that the foundation of modern Israel in 1948 plays a pivotal event in some conservative evangelical schools of eschatological thought. He also cited that an increase in the frequency of famines, wars, and earthquakes would lead up to the end of the world.
Although Lindsey did not claim to know the dates of future events with any certainty, he suggested that Matthew 24: 32-34 indicated that Jesus’ return might be within “one generation” of the rebirth of the state of Israel, and the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple. In his 1980 work The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon, Lindsey predicted that “the decade of the 1980s could very well be the last decade of history as we know it”. Well, we are still here.

That’s why America’s supports Israel

America’s support for Israel originates with Hal Lindsey’s book. Almost half of all Americans want to support Israel even if its interests diverge from the interests of their own country. Only a minority of Americans (47 percent) say that their country should pursue their own interests over supporting Israel’s when the two choices collide.
It is inconceivable that a substantial portion of Americans would want to support any other foreign country even where doing so was contrary to U.S. interests. Only Israel commands anything near that level of devoted, self-sacrificing fervor on the part of Americans. That’s why it is certainly worth asking what accounts for this bizarre aspect of American public opinion. The answer is that all this stems from wholehearted support for the ideology of Socrates. It has nothing to do with Jesus.
There are other, even more deeply penetrating consequences of the Socrates allegiance. Isaiah (Chapter 24) foretold this long ago:
The world languishes and withers, the heavens languishes together with the earth, the earth lies polluted under its inhabitants, for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant.

René Descartes, a devout Roman Catholic scientist, famous for Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) wrote that “The human destiny is to be ‘masters and possessions of nature’. Animals have no feelings, could be whipped, skinned and amputated because they lacked souls.”
It seems that environmental degradation, as foretold by Isaiah, leaves many Christians indifferent. We see this now everywhere in the world, no wonder chickens and turkeys raised in inhuman conditions contract diseases and have to be slaughtered by the millions, with the possible consequences that these illnesses will be conveyed to humans.

The result of this two-minded belief sees the human being as made in God’s image while nature is different, a supporting cast for the human drama, to be exploited. Nature is no more than the sum of its parts and can be reduced to those parts for human use dominating creation.
So who is more important in the church: Jesus or Socrates?
Socrates wins hands down.

Jesus lamented whether he would find faith on earth upon his return. Of course faith will never disappear. However the prevailing faith in Christian churches is faith in the great Socrates because he was the very person who propagated the ‘heaven’ belief. On the contrary, Jesus and his teaching centering on ‘love God – that is his creation – and your neighbor as yourself’, finds very few takers in the church.
The reigning forces in society, the Capitalistic Enterprises, are making it almost impossible to “love yourself’, let alone creation and one’s neighbors. By force of the monopolistic grip on the food industry, the transportation section, the entertainment arm, all forces inspired by the dualistic Platonic religion, it is almost impossible to free ourselves from these satanically inspired influences. It takes a good deal of insight, action and especially prayer to free ourselves there.
Jesus has promised us freedom. John 8: 33, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Jesus, unpopular as he is – witness the decline in church attendance – is nevertheless the only One who can free us from being enslaved to the Spirits of the Age. Only when we see LIFE as a unity, humanity one with land, sea, air, animal, plants, is permanent life possible. Socrates, in spite of his almost universal support, represents the forces of Dualism, separating us from the Truth and thus enslaving us, the very source of all ills, splitting us from the Source of Life.
Jesus died so that the eternal church would live. Socrates died and, by his death, corrupted creation to the core and robbed the church of its essence, the unity in
Christ and the freedom that comes with it.

Next week” We ain’t seen nothing yet.”

IS GOD DEAD?

APRIL 19 2015

Let me assure you right away that God is not dead. Can I say that he has retired? Yes, that makes more sense: he has removed himself from the scene in an ultimate act of humility to make place for Jesus. How else could Jesus inherit the Kingdom and we become co-heirs with him? Only at the death of the testator or with an assumption of power of attorney by another person can a transfer from one generation to the next be accomplished. Colossians 1: 15-20 is the key to understanding this drastic change. It bears repeating.
“He, Christ, is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation. For by him all things were created……..He is before all things and in him and by him all things hold together…… For God has pleased to have all fullness dwell in him and reconcile to him all things on earth or in heaven by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross”.
There you have it: everything imaginable is now in the hands of Jesus.

Why did Jesus come and God disappear?

Paul in this key-passage of the Bible tells us that Christ, by making the ultimate sacrifice, death on the cross, has now taken God’s place. For all practical purposes an orderly succession has taken place, from father to son. The coming of Jesus Christ into the world had as its sole intention the restoration of the Kingdom, the new heaven and earth. We need a new world because the present one is so damaged by us that it needs a complete overhaul. Christ’s suffering and death, indeed the entire order of redemption, had no other pur¬pose than the realization of that Kingdom. 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 that was lost in the Garden of Eden.
Here is another truth: there is no such thing as individual salvation. All sal-vation is of necessity universal. We are saved as members of the Kingdom, as future occupants of the New Creation. “Seek first the Kingdom”, Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount. Our goal in 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. Just as Adam’s sin shattered the world, so it will again become an orga¬nic unity in Christ. Christ is not only the priest who for us has restored the way back to communion with God, but he is also the King who estab¬lishes his saving rule over this fallen world. When he appears, says John the Baptizer, “the Kingdom of heaven is near” (Matt. 3:2), and when Jesus himself starts to preach the gospel in Judea and Galilee, his initial message is none other than the single proclamation that “the Kingdom of heaven is near” (Matt. 4:17). Through his suffering and death Christ rein¬states the Kingdom and unites in him all things under God’s rule. When he heals the sick, raises the dead and rebukes the demons, he demonstrates that all the strands of world his¬tory converge in him.
That kingdom comprises everything: it is always universal and cosmic in scope, benefiting the entire creation. Fact is that Christ, in his author¬ity over storm and sea, demonstrates that in him God’s Kingship embraces the entire world, which would be meaningless without him.

You’re not convinced?

Forget about heaven: believing of going there is the ultimate heresy. Here on earth we must find our calling, promoting the welfare of creation in preparation of the coming of the perfect earth. Jesus always used down-to-earth stories to illustrate his teaching. He was so popular because the Pharisees spoke in legal terms: the law, the law, the law is the goal. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The entire ministry of Jesus was to prepare the people of his day and the people of all eras, including, especially including the people today, for the Kingdom to come.

There is a parable that illustrates this entire concept.

It is the well-known parable of the Prodigal Son. The word ‘prodigal’ might turn you off, because it is not a word you or I use in daily life. Actually the word comes from the Latin – as so many of the English words- ‘prodigium’ meaning among others ‘an unnatural thing’. Thus the word ‘prodigal’ could be a person who goes against nature. Hmm, does that make us all ‘prodigal”?
You find the passage in Luke 15. In short this is what it says. A very well-to-do father had two sons, both of quite different characters. The younger son is quite rude, actually. He says to the father – Jesus here suggests that the Father represents God, the father – “It’s about time you kick the bucket and divide the estate. Life is more than mere work, and I want to enjoy myself.” So, believe it or not, the father complies, leaves the real estate – the entire farm enterprise – to the one son and his investment portfolio to the other. The young rascal cashes it all in and goes to the city where he lives as if his funds will last forever, as if his resources are infinite, exactly the way we live. Then depression hits, the stock market collapses, he loses all his ready cash, his friends leave him, and he is forced to take a dirty laborer job, tending pigs, the lowest of all chores. He comes to his senses, returns to the estate – broke and repentant at the mercy of the other son – where the father welcomes him, throws a big home-coming party. The other son gets wind of this, is upset and leaves.

What’s the real meaning of all this?

When Jesus tells a story his words have meaning for all eras, and for each of these eras the meaning is different as we progress in understanding.
So let me transpose this story to today. The youngest son sets the ball rolling. He approaches the father, states his intention that he wants to have the father step back completely – basically play dead – so that he can claim his part of the estate. To his surprise the father agrees, thinking perhaps that this is the best way to make a man of him (Deuteronomy 32: 29 comes to mind ‘to see what sort of person he really is’). Without delay the entire estate is divided up: the older son gets the real estate, the buildings, the land, the tools and farmhands that go with it, while the younger one gets all the other assets, the gold, silver, cash, stocks, bonds. It is well to remember that the older son retains the source of all the riches and remains responsible for the development.
We know the story: the younger son squanders his assets and returns.

So what is at stake here?

I see the father of the two so different boys as God who surrenders title to the two parties: the older in charge of the kingdom and its vision, the younger free to do with the earth’ treasures as he sees fit. In other words: church and world.
First the younger one: after a life of debauchery he returns to the father, who had granted him leave to experiment. There’s where our generation too finds itself. The younger son pours out his heart: “Father forgive me. I have sinned. I have acted against nature, wasted so much. I am not worthy to be called your son.”
The father replies: “you were dead, but now you are alive. Let’s celebrate.” This reply reminds me of Jesus’ words in the Last Supper (Matthew 26: 29) where he says that the next time “I will drink wine with you in my Father’s Kingdom, the New Creation.” Take note: real wine that gladdens the heart.
The Father and the younger son, now totally repentant, represent the new state of the Kingdom, an eternal party, complete with wine and the delicacies of the earth. The younger son once represented the consumer society which has now pretty well used up whatever the earth contains and now is at its wit’s end. He has seen the error of his ways, seen the futility of the throwaway society, has been reborn to the New Creation way.

And the older brother?

This is a more complicated matter. He is not the curious type. Rather than investigate the source of merriment – so unusual since he had total control – he asks a servant to find out what’s going on. This in itself portrays the person. Rather than going himself he asks somebody else to call out the father for explanation.
The curious part of this tableau is that of the three persons in this drama, he is the only one who did not die. The Father did when he divided the estate, the younger son did when he was at his wit’s end and was reborn to a new state. So how do I picture the older son? I see him as the stern Calvinist, the self-righteous Right-winger who has God in his pocket. I see him, nostrils flared, deep furrows on his face, shouting “Music! Dancing! Wine! And that in the middle of the work-week! Who’s minding the store?”

In my mind the older son represents the church, the institution in charge of proclaiming the Kingdom, and the instrument of preparing the people for the Coming of the New Creation, and failing to do so. Although Jesus had the then church in mind, the Pharisees so set in their ways, it is no different today. The contemporary church has not died to the old, has not embraced the vision of the Kingdom, but is still clinging to the outdated – Greek philosophy inspired – heaven heresy.

Back to Today

Both the church and the world are in an impasse. The old remedies no longer work. From basically the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the 1970s or maybe a little later we have seen material progress at work. During all that time, there was a steady increase in the availability of energy per capita. By White’s Law, which is one of the basic principles of human ecology, economic development is function of energy per capita. That is now coming to an end. We are at a cross road. We are running into the limits to resource extraction, as the cost of resource extraction start rising. Even though everybody is emotionally committed to the myth of progress, matters have stalled. The church too is confused and dying.

What to do now?

We have to plod on. God is still out there, the Father always on the lookout. He never interfered in the parable, and he will not intervene now either. We are on our own. There are no more easy answers. This is crunch time.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw this coming. He says that before we can meet Jesus in the New Creation we must reach a degree of maturity. Bonhoeffer calls this “coming of age.” Here’s what he wrote: “So our coming of age leads to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have to know that we must live as people who manage our lives without him.” (Letters from Prison.)

In other words, as we live in an age where God is hidden, it’s more and more a time where we have to assume greater responsibility whether we are ready or not. Bonhoeffer uses the phrase “coming of age.” Coming of age, in the context of our present situation, where the entire world is at the edge of total collapse, not only environmentally but also financially and morally, means that we have to be ready to meet our Maker. Jesus calls himself The Son of Man, meaning he personifies the human race. Coming of age means that we are ready to present ourselves as worthy representatives of humanity, fully aware of our place and task in the present situation and ready to take our place in the New Creation.

Is God dead? No, he is there in Jesus Christ, the firstborn of creation, the first really true human, but also the Primus inter pares, the First among us, his equals.

APRIL 12 2015

California always leads the way.

The last time I visited Los Angeles was in 2009 when one of our daughters lived there. While wandering in the Century City shopping Center on the edge of Beverly Hills, I noticed – as a man how could I miss it – that women there were showing a lot of cleavage, something not yet evident in more modest Ontario. Since then displaying one’s female attributes has become a pretty general phenomenon everywhere, especially among the more glamorous crowd. One look at the (British) Daily Mail confirms this. Also in California, now 40 years ago, Mega Churches were born, with the late Rev. Schuler leading the way in his Crystal Palace. This too quickly spread all over the USA.
Today California leads the way again, showing that water is a finite resource. Being deprived of adequate water will have major implications not only for the sunshine state but for the entire world. It is the first real Western casualty of Global Warming, with many more to follow. This past week I saw a map showing the exceptional drought conditions in the USA. More than half the country suffers from lack of sufficient moisture, either in the form of rain or due to depleting ground water, while the rest seems to be daily bombarded with violent storms. Bloomberg reported last week that “We aren’t nearing the end of California’s climate troubles. We’re nearing the beginning.”

Here is a small example what is on store for California homeowners.
I once had to appraise a property where the vendor had falsified the well’s water supply, from 0.1 gallon per minute to 10.1 gallon per minute. Naturally the purchaser sued the vendor and there’s where I came in. A single family dwelling with no assured water supply has a drastically lower value, as water must be trucked in at great cost, and a cistern is needed to catch rain water, if there is rain, that is. A well needs to be able to pump a minimum of 1.5 gallon per minute, or some 6 liters, to give homeowners sufficient water.

Just imagine that not only an entire state, California, not only several others, such as Nevada and Arizona, lack water, but more than half the USA land mass suffer drought conditions, and that exactly in those parts where most of the food – wheat, corn, soybeans – is grown. Next in line are the homeowners in the affected areas as all of them basically built their dwellings in the desert. Nature always wins.
For over 10,000 years people lived in California, but the numbers there were never more than 300,000 or 400,000. Now that state has 38 million people, with 32 million vehicles, living at the level of comfort that we all strive to attain. If California were a country it would have the eighth highest Gross Domestic Product in the world. We will soon discover in our pocket book that California supplies all of North America with the largest percentage of fruits, vegetables, almonds and nuts. To raise one single almond takes a gallon – 3.78 liter – of water. One walnut equals 5 gallons: plain nuts, of course, but so is our entire way of life. Watch our essential supplies shrink and prices skyrocket. The long-term outlook is for iflation.

When we visited Los Angeles every single family dwelling in our daughter’s neighborhood – on the edge of Beverly Hills – had a buried irrigation system because not having a green law was seen as unpatriotic. Palm Springs there is one of the more desirable locations, where, in the middle of the desert, the daily per capita water use is 201 gallons – more than double the state average. When I visited there the community offered a drought-defying tableau of burbling fountains, flowers, lush lawns, golf courses and trees. The noise and smell of mowed lawns were constantly in the air.

All this will change: drastically.

California again leads the way, and this time it means an exodus, the first and not the last of forced immigration from arid regions to the more habitable places. Already the lack of water has caused unemployment among farmworkers to soar as the soil turned to crust and farmers left half or more of their fields fallow.
“Climate conditions have exposed our house of cards,” said Jay Famiglietti, a NASA scientist in Pasadena who studies water supplies in California and elsewhere. “The withdrawals far outstrip the replenishment. We can’t keep doing this.”
Why has this drought situation not earlier been detected? Everybody knew that there had not been nearly enough rain for years, and that the winter snowfall in the mountains had been minimal. Blame stupidity and inertia. Democracy presupposes citizens capable of thinking for themselves rather than being misled by propaganda. But with the average family now holding two full-time jobs that are often uncertain, plus raising kids, there is little time for keeping informed so many refuse to think about such complex issues. The same is true of Climate Change, of course. There too nothing will be done to prevent even greater catastrophes, because drought is just the start of a string of disasters. TV and the mainstream newspapers – except the Guardian – fail to inform. For most economists their only religion is believing in an expanding economy. With elections looming in the Western World – the UK in May, Canada in October, and the USA having a perpetual political program – false promises will fill the TV screens, obscuring the true nature of nature.

A book that opened my eyes to reality was The Limits to Growth, published in 1972. The entire world acts – and perhaps even believes – that we live in an Infinite World. There is only one unlimited concept in the world, and that is God’s love for creation, of which we are an important part. In the meantime we act as if all is well, even when every day those who have ears to hear and eyes to see notice that we are approaching – no, we have already reached – the Limits to Growth. Literally what we are now doing to the planet and to human society is akin to burning down the house while we are still living in it. Today a wooden partition goes into the wood stove, tomorrow part of the outer wall. Soon the roof will collapse, but never mind, the show – growth – must go on. Everyone needs fuel, especially during a bitter winter, but only a mad man starts deconstructing the house in order to burn bits of it in the stove or fireplace.
Almost as mad as that is stealing bits of other people’s houses to burn, but that at least is not soiling your own doorstep – well not right away. In a world of limited resources and limited space we’ve now reached the point where raiding our neighbors’ houses – China and Africa come to mind – is the same thing as raiding our own house, because the net effect is the same – disaster on an unprecedented level.
Of course it’s easier to live in denial and keep on cannibalizing the world’s vital resources at an ever-increasing rate and pretend that it’s business as usual, but in reality it is anything but that. The alarm bells from commentators from all sectors: science, economics, religion etc. are getting louder and more frequent, better argued and with the raw data to back it up, but we are still not listening.

We are blind to reality, perhaps because we no longer have a choice, so we pretend.

It is beyond my capability to understand the economic mind. A few decades ago the tobacco industry fought tooth and nail to convince the nation that tobacco was not harmful. Now Capitalism is waging war against the “Limits to Growth” scenario. This anti-Limits apparatus is so strong now that it even dares to oppose science in order to defend growth. This is most evident today in the denial of climate change, especially among North America’s church-going people, with the fossil fuel industry leading the attack on climate scientists. The American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, The Club for Growth, the Heartland Institute, etc. can be counted on to conduct “independent” studies that reach conclusions supporting deregulated international trade, deregulated finance, repeal of environmental and welfare legislation, etc., all in the name of growth.

There used to be a song called “All you need is love.” Now the words have changed: “All you need is growth.” Where will it come from in a world where we are running out of water and arable land? The only growth is in war and war-like attitudes.
It’s the age-old battle again. When the Satan approached the first humans in the Garden of Eden, he or she convinced them that by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge they would be like gods, with access to unlimited riches, able to exploit all earth’s treasures. In other words: infinite growth. That false religion still rules the world. The church has a song: “Christ shall have dominion over land and sea.” We in our daily dealing follow the Satan rule where we practice “Humanity shall have dominion over land and sea,” with the inevitable result that we destroy both land and sea.

I once was part of that corrupt crowd, not on purpose by through ignorance. Just imagine: in 1965 Rachel Carson wrote “Silent Spring”. I got the book as a member of a book club, but gave it away without ever reading it. Now we know that what she said was entirely true, except the disaster zone is not only DDT but the entire world.
The evidence is clear that we are depleting all of our resources far too quickly, especially the land we use to produce food and draw raw materials from. What is the good of land when water lacks? The last few years land prices have skyrocketed. Now watch them plunge. Water shortages devastate the quality of land, just as deforestation exacerbates water loss and soil erosion. Couple this with increased damming of rivers, pollutant run-off into rivers, fracking and mining and we’ve a recipe for a water crisis, which will, in turn, lead to a food crisis.
Without fresh water we cannot have agriculture – this is the basic fundamental industry that keeps most people on this planet alive. But almost everybody in the world increasingly relies on intensive agriculture to provide vegetables, grains, fruit and meat. Instead of preparing to avert a major disaster, the political powers are gearing up for water wars rather than making a cooperative effort to save or increase our existing water resources and manage the use of water to reduce ridiculous wastage levels.

Some people in China are aware what’s happening. They wanted to warn the one-fifth of the world’s people there so they produced a film ‘Under the Dome’, highlighting the problem of water pollution and over-use in the unstoppable march of China towards economic supremacy. But the people on the top banned it. What these rulers cannot avoid, which will bring China’s economic miracle to an end, is the ultimate collapse of the environment that will force them to stop the machine. Bad air, bad water, bad land and total reliance on imported food will inevitably take its toll.
Of course these problems are not restricted to China: China is simply the canary in the coalmine. Across the Middle-East, Asia, Africa, southern Europe, USA and central and southern America there are increasing difficulties relating to the basics of food, water and the condition of the land.
While many of us are worried about ‘the economy’, whether or not we can afford that holiday or a new car, we should be far more worried about what we are going to eat and drink in a few short years from now.

The Bible – even for those who are not believers – contains a lot of wisdom. Paul, the apostle, wrote to his protégé Timothy that “The lust for money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim. 6: 10). That today is truer than ever. All crimes, including polluting, are driven by the love of money, without regard for the future. Solomon had some wise words to say stating that ‘a wise person looks ahead.’ That’s exactly what we are missing: wisdom. A wise person notices that our house, the ‘oikos’ on which the word ‘economy’ is based is on fire. Most of the people continue to watch the silliness offered on television, too pre-occupied, too tired, too uninterested in what’s really goes on in the world out there. To be wise is to look ahead and prepare for a different tomorrow.
For the future to come, look no further than California.

Next week: Is God dead?

I am getting ready to work my garden soil, starting indoors with carefully placing tiny seeds in compostable containers, later planting the seedlings outside in a cold frame as soon as the frost is out of the ground.

Forty years ago when our family moved from the city to the country, the soil around the dwelling I was building was pure sand. Not much grows on sand, so after completing our new home, I removed the thin cover of grass and started to wheelbarrow scores of loads of black mature manure from the next door farm – some 300 m away – and slowly the soil of my future garden turned color, from a yellowish sandy substance to a darker and more fertile growing medium. Each year I add new compost as well.

What I was doing was improving the substance we ourselves are: we are soil, we are of the earth. A long time ago, the Bible tells us, God fashioned the first human pair from the earth. The Hebrew word for soil is Adamah, from which Adam comes. The word adam reminded the Israelite immediately of the first Adam who was taken from the soil of the earth, hence the well-known saying: soil we are and to soil we shall return. Just as we have red clay and black soil, we too have people of different colors. The word ‘adam’ typifies the human race in its unbreakable unity. We all come from the earth and we all go back to the earth. Earth-bound we are, forever. We, the human beings, are adam, and belong to adamah, the life?bearing earth. With every sinew of our exis­tence we are tied to the earth, which bears us and feeds us.

But by and large we regard soil as disposable, just as we do people. We trample on it, pave it wherever we can, and, stupidly build our cities on its most fertile sections, because that sort of earth is good for digging and drainage, so we abuse it: it’s only dirt after all.

Yes, soil is treated as dirt that’s why we regard it with contempt. Yet all human life depends on it. Ancient Sanskrit texts have warned us: “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it will grow our food, our fuel, and our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it and the soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it”. Yes, destroy the earth and we destroy ourselves, and that’s exactly what we are doing.

Monsanto is no help. The ‘santo’ in Monsanto seems to suggest ‘sanity’ and ‘saint’ but the opposite is true. Monsanto deals in seeds specifically doctored to supposedly withstand pests and insects, while its weed killer, called Roundup, is now said to be cancer-producing. The GM – Genetically Modified – seeds cannot be used for seeding the next spring. How much better these seeds are still being debated. It seems to be that putting these altered substances in the soil may poison it forever. In my book when I see the word Monsanto I change it to Mon-morte, a substance associated with ‘morte’ = death.

We now have more than Seven Billion of ever more greedy eaters in the world. To keep up with global food demand, the UN estimates, 6 million hectares of new farmland will be needed every year. Instead, 12 million hectares a year or 30 million acres are lost through degradation. So we move to the next part of the earth: rip out the tropical forests, the Trees of Life, so that McDonald can offer us cheap hamburgers. That cure too has become a curse.

Soil. A miraculous substance. One handful contains more micro-organisms than all the people who have ever lived on the earth. To me soil is gold, my soil in which I plant potatoes and cabbages, onions and beets, carrots and tomatoes. Yet we treat it like, well, dirt.

A paper, by researchers in the UK, shows that soil in small patches that people cultivate by hand contains a third more organic carbon than agricultural soil and 25% more nitrogen. This is one of the reasons why our 2000 square feet – about 200 square meters – vegetable garden produces at least 5 times more food per square foot than mechanically worked soil.

A little aside, still to do with soil. The Middle East is in turmoil. Why? Oil is one reason, but more important is the soil or the lack thereof. The Middle East once was immensely fertile. The ancient empires of the Persians and Medes, the famous cities of Babylon and Nineveh all functioned so well and so long because their settings were like Paradise: luxurious land, high-yielding hummus, the original word for humans. No longer: overgrazing, stupid agricultural actions, greed in other words and endless wars, have turned these regions into deserts, now only still inhabited because of oil, that poisonous substance that will undo us all. Global Warming and looming food and water shortages will accelerate the coming collapse. Polluted earth breeds polluted people.

Civilization started in the Middle East. The Bible mostly plays out there. Loss of soil always creates turmoil and this turmoil even topples tyrants. War and pestilence might kill large numbers of people, but in most cases the population recovers. But lose the soil and everything else goes with it. That’s what’s happening in our suicide-bent world.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer has something to say about soil and the earth.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a theology professor in Berlin and totally opposed to the Hitler regime. He was hanged in April 1945, a few weeks before Germany collapsed. He was then 39 years old and the author of many books. I have his A Testament to Freedom a 530 page volume containing his essential writings. In it he takes the church to task as it has moved away from the earth and has embraced the pagan-idea of heaven, increasingly seeing the earth as evil. Here are his words: “Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from the earth in other worlds beyond: he gives us back to the earth as its loyal children.”

Bonhoeffer calls this ‘heaven message’ pious secularism. His words: “The Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth is pious secularism which also makes it possible to preach and to say nice things.”

In his Creation and Fall he is very outspoken as well. There he writes: “The soil and animals over which I have dominion, are the world in which I live, without which I cease to be. It is my world, my earth, over which I rule…. I belong completely to this world. It bears me, nurtures me and holds me….There is no dominion without serving God. Without God, without our brother and sister, we lose the earth. God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.” So far Bonhoeffer, my kind of theologian.

Then there is J. H. Bavinck

Bavinck too has written about this. In Between the Beginning and the End: a Radical Kingdom Vision, talking about Jesus, the Son of Man, humanity personified, he wrote: “Death by hang­ing severs the connection with the earth that feeds us all. Numer­ous nations still maintain the ceremony of treating a small child with special rituals when it first gets into touch with the fertile earth. This contact with the earth is an essential element of life. We are taken from the earth, we belong to the earth, and we live through the earth. Our bond with the earth is so strong that we cannot for a moment imagine existing apart from the earth, and hanging breaks the contact with the earth. Hanging places a person outside the great cosmic unity and puts him all by himself as an exile, outside the wider context of God’s glorious creation. That is why hanging is an eloquent expression of being expelled from God’s kingdom. When suspended above the earth, humans are placed outside the contact with the earth. Exiles, lonely and lost souls, humans are carried outside the powerful context of God’s life?energizing grace. Such is the signi­fi­cance of that dreadful death, death on the cross. The Scriptures, rather than emphasizing that death on the cross is pain­ful, point out that it foreshadows the cruel reality of carrying God’s curse.

A handful of Mud

In Tending the GARDEN in the chapter called “A Handful of Mud” I found this thought-provoking description. It is written by a missionary who lived in India. In the chapter he related something he experienced as a young child growing up far away from urban areas. He and his playmates had been skipping and hopping on the side of the steep hill. These slopes had been patiently terraced hundreds of years before, and now every terrace was perfectly level and bordered at its lower margin by an earthen dam covered by grass. While running, one of the boys had dislodged one of those dams resulting in water and mud seeping away. Along came an old man. This is what he told these rambunctious boys: “That mud flowing over the dam has given my family food every year from long before I was born, and before my grandfather was born. It would have given my grandchildren food, and then given their grandchildren food forever. Now it will never feed us again. When you see mud in the channels of water, you know that life is flowing away from the mountains.”

Soil is life. A handful of mud can make the difference between life and death.

Thanks to globalization, thanks to tireless tractors and huge harvesters, thanks to tree-removed mountain sides and acrimonious agricultural practices, no longer is a handful of mud treasured for its life-given potential.  The earth has become inert dirt, has become a medium to be made and molded in the image of the machine, just like the modern human race. The earth, now penetrated with pesticides, now artificially adulterated with fertility-killing fertilizer, now depleted with life-giving microbes, resembles the dead minds that operate the multi-million dollar behemoths, only interested in the price of corn and wheat and soybeans.

Soil always means toil. It reminds me of Genesis 3: 17: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life….. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken.”

Until that time Adam and Eve lived off the land, were gatherers, as the apples and berries and other edibles were there just for the taking. Monsanto asserts that the toil is taken out working the soil thanks to oil, but that is pure foil. This spring, as usual, I will brave black flies and pick potato bugs and do whatever I can to produce food by the old-fashioned and cumbersome way. That means digging my raised beds, and hoeing the weeds, and praying that the rains will be just right: not too much water, not too little. Since my soil is still very sandy, very porous, it can take a lot of water. Every year I seed and plant my garden in a different order, and with 7 large beds, I rotate my produce every 7 years.

All year we eat from my veggie garden: healthy organic food, home-grown: no carbon footprint there, no stuff imported from thousands of miles away, displayed to please the eye, treated to look good, on soil that is saturated with none of the ingredients that makes soil healthy.

We are what we eat. Only when food is grown on healthy soil can it produce healthy produce and healthy people. We are what we eat. No wonder illnesses multiply and tumors appear out of nowhere because soil without toil has become oil. Basically we eat poisonous oil. Soon shrinking government budgets, a product of stalled global economies will cause cutbacks also in healthcare. That means that increasingly we are on our own. Prevention is the best medicine. We are what we eat. Good soil means good produce, means healthy people. Good health starts with the Good Earth.

MARCH 29 2015

WE CAN’T LOVE JESUS IF WE DON’T LOVE CREATION

That’s quite the controversial statement. It hit me when I was doing one of my 3 times-a-week runs. In the winter I run indoors on my treadmill and I have a series of CDs I play when I do so. One song is based on John 3: 16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that who believes in him has everlasting life”. The choir kept on repeating the phrase, “God so loves the world”, and then my grey cells woke up thinking about people like Bach and Mozart, van Gogh and Rembrandt, and their exquisite works of art. We love these creators of master pieces not because of their personalities – we really don’t know them – we love them for their paintings or their musical talents. Thanks to the Bible we know a lot about Jesus, of course, but is that enough reason to love him?

So you say you love Jesus or God?

Let me take another example. While I am writing this I am listening to Bach’s majestic Mass in B Minor. I love Bach, that is to say I love his music. I don’t have a personal crush on Johann Sebastian, I really don’t know him all that well as a person. I know a few particulars about his life: his wives – 3 in all – died on him; he had 20 children, about half lived to be adults; he was a workaholic writer of music, the greatest in the world.

So what about Jesus? I love him too. Pray to him every day. When he lived on earth he did what no other person ever did: died to restore creation. He loved creation so much that he gave his life to restore it. Why did he love it so much? Simple. He created it, just as Bach created his oratorios and organ pieces.

Actually the Christian life boils down to the summary of the law Jesus gave us: Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and your neighbor as yourself. Loving God is not so simple. He is invisible, the Bible tells me. So how do we love God? We love him just as we love Bach, by loving his creation. Romans 1: 20 affirms that in a negative way. There it says that people are condemned because they have not connected creation to the Creator.  Colossians 1: 15-20 is more positive. It contains one of the greatest truths ever written. Here is what it says:

“For by Jesus the Christ all things were created: Things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible….all things were created by him and for him… and in him all things hold together….For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Jesus Christ and through him reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shred on the cross.”

There is the gospel in a nutshell. We love Bach because of his music. We love Jesus because of creation. This leads me to conclude that: Human redemption can be understood only as an integral part of the redemption of the whole creation. If we don’t love creation, we cannot love Jesus. It is as simple as that! Or as complicated! To be ‘born again’ means to treat the earth as holy, means trying always to stop polluting.

This week I am re-reading a book I bought on September 12 1998, almost 17 years ago. Since then I have read The Hidden Face of God at least 3 times before. Psalm 22 mentions it. Jesus quotes this Psalm when he hung on the cross to die: My God, my God why have you left me, one of the most moving exclamations ever recorded. Actually the Bible refers to God hiding his face 30 times. It means that God has left us to our devices because we have chosen to forget about God. That’s because as a society we have been increasingly abusing God’s creation, plundering it, polluting it, soiling and savaging it for the benefit of the few. These acts have caused God to leave us.

The author of The Hidden Face of God , Richard Elliott Friedman, a professor of the Hebrew language, writes that “the disappearance of God is a more terrifying condition than divine punishment, in a way that children would be less afraid of their parents’ punishing them than of their parents’ leaving them…….. It is one thing to cry out to one’s God and hear the divine voice saying, “You’ve been bad.” It is another to cry out and hear nothing but the sound of a thin hush………But either way, come to terms with this: in the Bible God creates humans, becomes known to them, interacts with them, and then leaves.”

There’s where we are.

We are left on our own: solely responsible for our world. That, my dear people, is the deplorable state we are in. We are in the most scary, frightening, mindboggling situation we can imagine. God has left us. We are on our own even though God still looks after his own people. His absence we can notice everywhere. The whole world is adrift like a rudderless ship on an ocean that is increasingly beset by dangerous currents, by immense hurricanes or typhoons, by unnatural ingredients, millions of tons of non-degradable plastic, choking fish and poisoning sea life in general, jellyfish crowding out every living thing, the waters now the planet’s garbage dump, also saturated with CO2. The whole human world too is adrift, fighting for the remaining green spaces, and ruining them in turn, plastering the economies with phantom money in a desperate attempt to engender economic growth, akin to trying to get blood from a stone.

The world’s unwise wizards are in lockstep to repeat the mistakes of the past because as ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ so the opposite is true as well as the wise words of Solomon attest (Proverbs 19: 3): “Peoples’ own folly ruins their lives, yet their hearts rage against the Lord.” When things go bad, people blame the Lord, when life is good it’s our doing, of course.

I was in occupied the Netherlands from 1940-45 where the Nazi Germans were the possessors of the land and robbed it blind, depriving us of our own food. That state of terror ended when the Canadian soldiers liberated our city on April 10 1945, now 70 years ago. That same sort of occupation is now happening to the Globe. Jesus, in Matthew 4, tempted by the Devil, readily admits that Satan can indeed give the world to Jesus if he only were to bow down and worship the Devil. Jesus knew that Satan’s reign would be temporary, ending when He returns.

The Covenant.

Here’s what happened. Many a thousand of years ago God made a covenant with humanity, a document that today would start as follows:

“Hereafter God will be known as the party of the first part, and humans will be known as the party of the second part.”

God, in essence, treated us as equals. In that covenant the relations between God and the human race were defined. God would always bless us. The things that Yahweh required of his human covenant partners where listed as given to us in Micah 6: 8 “To act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God.” Failure to do so would result in alienation and exile and would ultimately end in God leaving his people to their own devices.

This is the situation we humans encounter today, ending in total disaster, just as was the case when the Ten Tribes of the original twelve tribes of Israel vanished when they broke the covenant.

Where are we now?

We already have gutted half of the earth’s treasures. A new study in Sweden claims that we now have used up 50 percent of the earth resources. It scares the wits out of me because I once predicted in an essay When will Christ Return – see side bar – that the Lord will come back when we have used up half of creation for our benefit. A Swedish scientist claims in a new theory that humanity has exceeded four of the nine limits for keeping the planet hospitable to modern life. Environmental science professor Johan Rockstrom, the executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden, argues that there are nine “planetary boundaries” in a new paper published in Science – and human beings have already crossed four of them.

Those nine include carbon dioxide concentrations, maintaining biodiversity at 90 percent, the use of nitrogen and phosphorous, maintaining 75 percent of original forests, aerosol emissions, stratospheric ozone depletion, ocean acidification, fresh water use and the dumping of pollutants.

“The planet has been our best friend by buffering our actions and showing its resilience,” said Rockstrom. “But for the first time ever, we might shift the planet from friend to foe.” (My comments: God withdrew his protection).

Rockstrom’s planetary boundary theory was first conceived in 2007. His new paper reveals that because of climate stability, which began when the Ice Age ended 11,000 years ago, a planetary calm helped our ancestors to cultivate wheat, domesticate animals, and launch industrial and communications revolutions. But those advances have strained the stability of the planet, and Rockstrom says we have broken four boundaries: too much nitrogen has been added to ecosystems, too many forests have been cut down, the climate is changing too quickly and species are going extinct at too great a rate.

Ben Swann, Professor of Ethics from the University of Florida said that we have accelerated the extinction crisis through deforestation and ocean acidification, a development which is driving species to extinction.

“[Human] beings have increased, even from 1925, from 2 billion – which is considered to be a sustainable population for human beings, according to northern European consumption standards – to 7.2 billion at this point,” he said.

We are at a crucial point in human history. There are too many of us and we simply consume too much of the earth’s resources. It’s almost impossible to both love creation and Christ. Yet we can’t love Jesus of we don’t love creation. That is the ultimate dilemma we face. Only loving Jesus and having no regard for creation resorts, says Bonhoeffer, to “Pious Secularism”, so evident in the USA. Much of the ecclesiastical enterprise is based on loving God without ever defining this, except interpreting this in anthropological terms: love your neighbor. It is true that Paul writes that by loving our neighbor we have fulfilled the law (Romans 13: 8). However we forget that these are empty slogans when we don’t draw the lines all the way to life’s essentials: we undercut our love for our fellow beings when we pollute the very ingredients life depends on: soil, water, air.

Friedrich Nietzsche has written the remarkable words: “Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God dies. And these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful sin.” Nietzsche lost his mind when he saw a horse whipped to death. He was a sort of prophet, and I believe that in the cruel death of an animal he foresaw the death of creation, mindlessly murdered by a mad humanity.

We indeed have lost all sense of sanity. Basically, for those who reject the holiness of creation, God is dead. Living without God means the loss of the source of wisdom, with insanity as the ultimate result. Society at large abandoned God a long time ago. We still have some religious trappings, but they are basically empty of meaning.

How then shall we live?

That’s the perennial question. Visualize a world of total permanence and try to live by that vision, perpetually praying for wisdom and constantly asking for forgiveness, because it is an impossible assignment, yet one we must adhere too however falteringly. Only then can we really love Jesus and see him as the ultimate source of all happiness.

Remember:

Human redemption can be understood only as an integral part of the redemption of the whole creation. If we now don’t love creation, we cannot love Jesus. It is as simple as that! Or as complicated!

MARCH 22 2015

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Why do I tackle the problem of evil? My youngest brother – living in the Netherlands – sent me an article by a Jewish writer dealing with evil. He also sent it to my only other brother, a retired minister of the gospel with a doctorate in theology, living in Canada: we emigrated together in 1951. That youngest brother, an engineer by profession and a philosopher by inclination, keeps me on my toes by challenging me to take a stand, this time on “The Problem of Evil”.

The article he sent me was written by a Jewish philosopher, originally written in Hebrew I believe, (written while the author was in Jerusalem) and translated into Dutch. The man connects the problem of evil to Job, a person, almost as well-known as Jesus, and also often misunderstood, mainly because both Job and Jesus deal with the Problem of Evil. The author, being Jewish, only deals with Job, but I will also deal with Jesus, of course.

First Job

We all know something about Job. We know that he was famous for his afflictions and his supposed patience, a man fabulously rich who suddenly lost all his wealth, his children and in a violent argument with his wife was told to curse God and die.

We also may vaguely remember how three men, come from afar, visited him in his misery, joined later by a younger visitor and how these fellows made long speeches, to which Job replied. How finally God spoke up, vindicated Job, rebuked the four friends, after which Job received twice as much wealth back as well as his family.

The book is famous for that strange encounter with a mysterious figure called the Satan. Imagine: God and Satan, the two sworn enemies, make a bet, and here is where the Problem of Evil enters. God allows the Satan to introduce evil into the idyllic situation where Job and his family live.

Here’s how I see it. It seems to me that Job then represented the human world in ‘the beginning’, living a ‘paradise-like’ life, where everything was just perfect. The Satan is used by God to teach us all a lesson, because life is nothing else than one endless learning process: we never arrive, never quit learning, not even in eternity. Part of our ‘lesson’ is that Job was abandoned by God and left to the wiles of Satan. Actually the same happens to us. Yes, I mean that God has left us to cope for ourselves. In these last days God has declared us mature, old enough to live without his guidance. Deuteronomy 32: 20 says it all: “I will hide my face from them. I will see what their end will be.” That is the situation we face today: life without God and God testing us how we will manage without him.

The Jesus angle

So “How are we making out without God?” Oh, you don’t believe that we are on our own? Let me refer you to a noted theologian.

J. H. Bavinck, in his Between the Beginning and End: a Radical Vision of the Kingdom makes this quite clear. Here is a quote:

We are now faced with a development in creation that we cannot understand and control, but of which we daily exper­i­ence the terrifying consequences. We now see God’s work of art embroiled in the power of demons. Satanic forces have thrown themselves onto nature, onto us humans, onto the entire radiant creation. Nowhere does the Bible elab­o­rate on these matters, but once in a while it allows us a peek into the abyss of sorrow and hardship now evident everywhere. This is espe­cially evident in the Gospels. When Peter’s mother-in-law suf­fers from a fever, Jesus “rebuked” the illness and “it left her” (Luke 4:39). When Jesus and his disci­ples were at sea and a severe storm endangered the ship, Jesus “rebuked” the wind and said to the sea: “Be still!” (Mark 4:39). The forces behind that storm and behind that fever are satanic; the world of hid­eous demons plays a blasphemous role in these phenomena. Jesus shows us here a scenario regarding life in general—awesome storms—and what will affect us in particular—mysterious diseases—both with omi­nous con­se­quences. No longer is our universe one of only beauty and harmony, but, especially in our days, one of unpredictable powers which threaten us with annihilation from all directions. The world in which we live is dominated by demons. Every hour we experience the terrible influ­ence of this satanic situ­a­tion.

It is impossible to visualize the immense difference between the majes­tic, harmonious unity of creation as it emer­ged from God’s hand, and the frantic, demon?dominated planet in which we, the cursed human­ity, dwell after the fall into sin. The Kingdom is in shatters. That is the profound tragedy con­fronting the life of the world. This goes far beyond the fact that we have torn up its cohesion: it actually means that God has surrendered his own creation to Satan and his followers, whose only purpose is to abuse it and destroy it. The Kingdom, after all, com­prises all things, all plants, all animals, all people, all angels. The King­dom includes the sea and the land, the moun­tains and the valleys, all that was and is and is to come; and all of it is incorporated in a great and mighty whole. The Kingdom is the place where all things are in their rightful place and where everything can fulfill its function and deploy its potential in complete harmony with all that surrounds it. The Kingdom is synonymous with light, peace, joy, service to God, in harmonious vene­ra­tion. Where the Kingdom is being destroyed, where this structure comes apart at the seams, there is decomposition, brokenness, frag­men­tation, enmity, contra­diction, meaninglessness, darkness, death.

Jesus is the fighter against evil and has won the battle. Still today not God but Satan is in charge, just like he was allowed to intervene in Job’s life. There you have it: The Problem of Evil still with us. God allows this to see how we’d fare without him. The Satan now ruling the world accounts for the wars, the cancer pandemics, the Holocaust, Capitalism, Global Warming, and the total world-wide destruction we are busy completing. Remember: today not God but Satan still calls the tune.

In the article my Dutch brother sent me the author Moshe Halbertal writes about the Problem of Evil, quoting Hannah Arendt who attended the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann was the German official in charge of killing 6 million Jews in Europe. Ms. Arendt, being Jewish was forced to flee Germany in 1933, moving first to Paris then to the USA. Here’s part of the article, which I translate.

Hannah Arendt in her book “The origin of Totalitarianism” has elaborated the concept of ‘radical evil.’ She wrote that radical evil is not a crime against humanity but a crime against being human. Radical evil tries to do away with the characteristics of the essential components of the human existence: spontaneity, openness and pluralism. Radical evil is accomplished in the totalitarian fantasy by changing humanity, not affecting their physical state but by instilling in them completely predictable reactions, such as never doing anything unusual, always a total sameness, never altering their behavior. The Nazi concentration camps, being a monstrous experiment in absolute domination, turned out to be nothing else but death factories by turning human beings into living dead, people not even sufficiently alive to wish to be dead: they even lost the will to die, a symptom Arendt typifies as “the banality of evil”.

The perpetrators of these evils – the ordinary German people – were without remorse and didn’t see their actions as evil. This sort of evil – the banality of evil – has a deadening effect because what is lost is the ability to be ‘outraged’, the will to fight. These people simply give up. They are survivors interested only in self- protection. They have lost the capacity and desire to fight against evil.

Arendt at the time – after the Eichmann trial – talked about the German people who ignored what happened to Jews among them, favoring Hitler who provided them with jobs. They later backed him ‘for the greater glory of Germany’. Then their national anthem started with the words: Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, which means Germany, Germany above everything else. Their desire for jobs and glory overshadowed their feelings for justice and human dignity.

Moshe Halbertal is referring to us today, the Century 21 people. We too have lost the ability and the desire to fight against evil. We are like the Israel people wandering in the desert, rather being slaves in Egypt and having meat than being guided by God. They then had Moses to plead for them. We, almost all others, have no Moses: we are on our own!

We have lost the will to fight to preserve creation. The powers of advertising, the ease of daily living, the modern conveniences we, you and I, experience every minute of our lives, have killed us, have sapped us from the will to fight Climate Change and global injustice. The very church people who rule the USA and Canada – the Republicans in the States and Stephen Harper in Canada – are the leaders promoting death to us all. And we too are the willing victims, victims of evil.

We do have warnings, even though we ignore them. All crucial measures of the health of the ecosphere in which we live—groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity—suggest that our high-energy/high-technology society is unsustainable. Because we live in an oil-based society and are rapidly depleting the cheapest and most easily accessible oil reserves, we face a huge adjustment in the way of life on which our existence is based. We now have entered an era of “extreme energy” evident in such dangerous and destructive technologies as hydro-fracturing, deep-water drilling, mountaintop removal, tar sands extraction, all of which will hasten the coming calamities of climate change. Welcome to our affluent captivity where we ignore ‘the problem of evil’.

Back to Job. He is a fighter. Back to Jesus. His fight cost him his life. Job fights against his three so-called friends who accuse him of hiding his sin. His friends see wealth as the reward for living a good life. Job knows better, that’s why he fights back, even against God. He screams at God: “Why have you made me your target? How come that I am in this miserable condition?”

Scientists these days are talking about tipping points and planetary boundaries, about human activity pushing the planet beyond its limits. In a recent study, 22 leading scientists warned that “humans likely are forcing a planetary-scale transition with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience.”

In plain language it says that our biological resources – water, trees, soil, air – which we now take for granted, will be subject to sudden and unpredictable transformations probably sooner than later.

That means we are in deep trouble, something the church can no longer ignore, because that trouble plays out in a world chockfull with the inequalities that flow from deeply entrenched power structures, both within individual countries and between the so-called developed and developing worlds. Stir in the ecological crises which will greatly exacerbate existing problems rooted in the unjust distribution of wealth and power, and our troubles are likely to magnify exponentially. I see it as the role of preachers and self-appointed bloggers like me to warn our society that we are in deep denial, denial that is especially anchored in the relatively privileged sectors, such as organized religion where our affluence insulates us from the immediate consequences. Bonhoeffer’s advice to the Church of Christ, in his introduction to Creation and Fall, is: “To witness to the end of all things, to live from the end, to think from the end, to act from the end, to proclaim its message for the end.” In this the church fails miserably.

Therefore I see it as my duty to sound the unpleasantly loud alarm that we must drastically change the way we think, move, worship, especially the latter, because only as a community can we prepare ourselves for the future. In other words: like Job and Jesus we must fight insidious evil.

Fact is that we need a radical conversion. Many of us are shuttled by way of cheap gasoline from climate-controlled house, to an artificially lighted work-place, to a prepackaged supermarket, to a night in front of electronic amusement, and there is little, in all this, to shock one’s level of energy and material use out of the unconscious realm. Just as Job ‘in paradise’, we need a totally new way of life, not just ‘brother are you born again?’ but consciously trying to live a God- that means Cosmos- pleasing existence.

The sin of Job before his affliction, our sin today, is Anthropocentrism, the arrogant and deluded belief that the earth and the universe were designed for human (Anthropos) benefit and control, something the entire World, including all religions, believes with a passion. John 3: 16 is almost always wrongly interpreted as if it reads: “God so loved the human race….”

The Problem of Evil is now all-pervasive. In 1933-45 Hitler and his willing countrymen ignored what happened to the Jewish people. They paid a steep price. Today the entire world is complicit in perpetrating the evil of Climate Change. We will pay an even steeper price.

The Bible is quite clear on one cardinal point: We can’t love Jesus if we don’t love creation, the topic of the next article. This makes me wonder whether a deliberate Sin against Creation is equivalent to the Sin against the Holy Spirit. Look up Matthew 12: 31.

Next week: We can only love Jesus when we first love creation