How should we then live? Part 3

Posted on January 19, 2014 by Bert Hielema

JANUARY 19 2014

HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? (Part Three)

THE REAL AMERICAN RELIGION

Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land.

Caution: some of you may not like this Part Three.

“Guide me O Thou Great Jehovah” is quite a common Christian hymn: it also is quite unabashedly unchristian. The melody is majestic but the words are pure pagan because it preaches nothing but Gnosticism, that age-old heresy clearly condemned by the early Christian Church, but now so prevalent in Christian North America that we no longer recognize its heretical content: it is indeed a perfect example of the Real American Religion. Perhaps Dietrich Bonhoeffer, after a visit to the USA in the late 1930’s, pinpointed the cause. He lamented that “God has granted American Christianity no Reformation.”

Harold Bloom agrees. This 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.”

Bloom shakes his head in unhappy wonderment at the politically correct younger intellectuals, who hope to subvert what they cannot begin to understand, an obsessed society wholly in the grip of a dominant Gnosticism, typified by Fundamentalism. “Fundamentalists are everywhere where learning is too heavy a burden for mortal minds to carry,” observed one American scholar. Writes Bloom: “Fundamentalists, as unwitting Gnostics, do not believe that God made them. Their deepest knowledge is that they are no part of the Creation, but existed as spirits before it, and are as old as God himself.” The most treasured emblems of these people are the flag and the fetus. The paradox is that the fetus must not be aborted, but whether the infant starves or not seems a secondary matter.

Political Power, the Poor and the Bible

This past week Paul Krugman, in his column in the New York Times, wrote: “It’s much more difficult for Republicans, who are having a hard time shaking their reputation for reverse Robin-Hoodism, for being the party that takes from the poor and gives to the rich. And the reason that reputation is so hard to shake is that it’s justified. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that right now Republicans are doing all they can to hurt the poor, and they would have inflicted vast additional harm if they had won the 2012 election. Moreover, G.O.P. harshness toward the less fortunate isn’t just a matter of spite (although that’s part of it); it’s deeply rooted in the party’s ideology, which is why recent speeches by leading Republicans declaring that they do too care about the poor have been almost completely devoid of policy specifics.”

Yet the Bible and especially the Psalms constantly tell us to protect the poor and look after those who have trouble managing their lives. But, writes Ellen M. Rosenberg in The Southern Baptists:  “The Bible is less read than preached less interpreted than brandished…The Book has become a talisman.” This notion of the Bible is not so much Christian as Muslim, and has resulted in a disastrous anti-intellectualism rejecting most of Western intellectual history in favour of an inerrant icon, the limp leather Bible, hardly ever read as Scripture and understood what it really conveys: that God created, that we uncreated and that Jesus rectified the wrong by dying on the cross. Gnosticism’s knowledge is not knowledge in the usual sense. The early church father Irenaeus called it ‘pseudo knowledge’, an aberration of knowledge. Nowhere is this more evident than in American ‘gnosis’, for the end-product of that gnosis is the profound and relentless anti-intellectualism that has plagued and continues to plague American Religion and American Life as a whole.

Why is Gnosticism so wrong?

My NIV study Bible, in its introduction to the letters of John, has this to say: “One of the most dangerous heresies of the first two centuries was Gnosticism. Its central teaching is that spirit is entirely good and matter is entirely evil. From this unbiblical dualism flow the five errors of which the three most important are: (1) Man’s body is evil. (2) Salvation is escape from the body, achieved by special knowledge (gnosis). (3) Christ’s true humanity is denied in two ways: Christ only seemed to have a body, and/or the divine Christ joined the man Jesus at baptism and left him before he died.”

Rev. (Presbyterian) Philip J. Lee wrote Against the Protestant Gnostics. In it he quotes the great Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber: “The perpetual enemy of faith in the true God is not atheism (the claim that there is no God), but rather Gnosticism (the claim that God is known).” The fundamental problem between biblical faith and gnostic faith begins with two different world views. Biblical faith insists that the Creation is well made. Gnosticism denies that there is any direct link between the Creation and God. No wonder (Christian) Stephen Harper, Canada’s P.M., a fanatic adherent of Gnosticism, doesn’t care for Climate Change and pursues Economic Growth at all costs.

Yes, that full-throated- belt- it out- tune of which the opening line is Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah, Pilgrim through this barren land, is the unadulterated Gnostic gospel. Some versions have replaced Jehovah – which has ‘Witness’ connotations – with Redeemer, but since Gnosticism has no use of redemption (their adherents are pure spirits) this does not make the hymn any better. The song, in a very personal, individualistic way, asks for guidance on the way to heaven, but the Bible is no guide-book to heaven. It always appeals to the corporate body of believers. Faith is the opposite of finding ourselves; it is being found by God. Rev. Lee quotes 1 Cor. 1:9: “God is faithful, by whom you (plural) were called into the fellowship (koinonia) of his Son.” Koinonia is the Greek word Paul used to describe the particular form of participation with one another by which Christians are bound together. The form of the Lord’s Supper also uses koinonia: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation (koinonia) in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break is it not a participation (koinonia) in the body of Christ? In 2 Cor. 13 this is again used: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship (koinonia) of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

The Kingdom = the Coming of the New Creation

Johan Herman Bavinck, in his forth-coming book, simply called The Kingdom, writes that “the central point of the gospel is not us poor humans and our pain and suffering, but its entire focus is aimed at that unique, that powerful reality that God wants to reinstate his Kingdom. It is God’s intent to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one overarching harmony. There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved in him. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all?wise will of him who lives and rules for ever.”

Those are revolutionary words in North America bypassed by the Reformation.

So much for the “me” in Guide me. The rest of the line also goes against everything the Bible stands for. Pilgrim through this barren land agitates directly against the Genesis creation story where God, after each phase calls his act of creation ‘good’ and when our cosmos was completed, looked back to see what he had done, called the world and they who dwell there in ‘very good’. Pilgrims? No way. We are ‘adam’: of the earth, forever.

Rev. Lee makes an interesting observation regarding faith healing and speaking in tongues. He writes: “the purpose of such healing is obvious: it is to prove that although nature is evil, is crippling, blinding, deafening, deforming, killing, super-nature is healing, restorative and saving. ….A similar concept is involved in speaking in tongues: (at work is) the breaking of natural language barriers, the refusal to be bound by the linguistic rules of an earthly community.”

Gnosticism sees the function of religion as escape. Moody – after which a Bible Institute is named – in a sermon, told his audience: “I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, ’Moody, save all you can.’”

It is apparent to me that no denomination is free of Gnosticism. Where some confessions state it differently, almost all church members see Heaven as the believers’ final destination which is nothing else than a form of escapism, an integral part of Gnosticism.

Let me conclude with a quote from Johan Herman Bavinck taken from his magisterial chapter on the Kingdom where God’s Kingdom – the New Creation- is the believer’s final destination.

“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 world of animals and all 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 dis­so­nant 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 have their orderly trajectories and do so according to God’s royal will, obeying his voice, and so, in their course they sound a melodious note in the great concert in which all creatures participate. The mountains rise up high above the water?satu­rated earth, their summits piercing the clouds; they stand there in proud loftiness but 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 lies 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.”

Yes, not heaven, but this renewed earth, God’s Kingdom, so well described by Bavinck, is the Christian’s final ‘resting’ place. The refusal by the Church (even those denominations that treasure J. H. Bavink’s words) to even consider calling God’s Creation holy, is a direct result of gnostic influences.

The church is almost totally preoccupied with the written Word, the Scriptures, which are indeed called Holy. Father, Son and Holy Spirit form a unity. God’s direct Primary Word, Creation and the Written Word also form a unity. Reluctance and refusal to see the two Words as One is a typical characteristic of Gnosticism: we can’t have one without the other.

No wonder Gnosticism is the Real American Religion.

 

 

Next week: Part Four: Prophets

 

 

 

 

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How should we then live? Part 2

Posted on January 12, 2014 by Bert Hielema

JANUARY 12 2014

I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you (meaning you and me) and with every living creature that was with you – the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the Ark with you – every living creature on earth.”

                                                                     Genesis 9: 9-10

Even the Pope now tells us that the world lives under the global dictatorship of Capitalism. This is the cover from Pope Francis’ first important speech:

APOSTOLIC EXHORTATION

EVANGELII GAUDIUM

OF THE HOLY FATHER

FRANCIS

TO THE BISHOPS, CLERGY,

CONSECRATED PERSONS

AND THE LAY FAITHFUL

                                                 ON THE PROCLAMATION OF THE GOSPEL

IN TODAY’S WORLD

He started his exhortation as follows:

“The great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and an­guish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience. Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor. God’s voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades. This is a very real danger for believers too. Many fall prey to it, and end up resentful, angry and listless. That is no way to live a dignified and fulfilled life; it is not God’s will for us, nor is it the life in the Spir­it which has its source in the heart of the risen Christ.”

Has the Pope’s with his courageous words on poverty – which already have upset the billionaires – identified the real enemy? Doesn’t the covenant between God, us and creation have priority?

The Creation Covenant

In this second installment I will outline how religion in general and Christianity in particular has failed to abide by the most basic of covenants, that between God, the human race and all that lives and moves and has being. Not only have religious institutions chosen to downplay that creation is from God and thus holy, but large segments of Christian church outright condemn those who try to obey the laws of creation. Instead most church goers defend the actions of polluters, claiming that they are protected by the mandates of Genesis 1: 28-29, giving them dominion over the earth. At the heart of this argument is the failure to understand what “The Kingdom of God” stands for. There, in the Kingdom of God, the first shall be the last, the least shall be the greatest and ‘dominion’ means ‘serving’.

Why is creation not considered holy?

I am always puzzled how fundamentalist people can call the Scriptures inerrant and infallible with not a word out of place, yet its canon was fixed by majority vote of some 300 people at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, making it God’s Secondary Word. At the same time the church refuses to call Creation holy, even though it is God’s direct act, his Primary Everlasting Word. The Bible will disappear: the cosmos is forever. I can be critical of the church because I love the church and daily search the Scriptures. It is my considerate opinion that the church needs a new creation-centered focus: a theology of the earth. Next week I will pose a possible answer to this ‘creation is holy’ question.

Dr. Lynn White was right. Who? This history professor went back to trace “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis”. His essay was published in the journal Science. In it he suggests that the mentality of contemporary Christendom to regard the earth as a resource for human consumption was much older than Industrial Revolution, and had its roots in medieval Christianity and attitudes towards nature. …Citing the Genesis creation story he argued that Judeo-Christian theology have always believed and still is of the opinion that we can exploit the natural world because the Bible asserts man’s dominion over nature and establishes a trend of anthropocentrism, where we, as human, are at the centre of the universe, because we make a distinction between man (formed in God’s image) and the rest of creation, which has no “soul” or “reason” and is thus inferior.

Dr. White stated that these beliefs have led to an indifference towards nature which continues to impact an industrial, “post-Christian” world, and concludes that applying more science and technology to the problem won’t help, that our fundamental ideas about nature must change; we must abandon “superior, contemptuous” attitudes that make us “willing to use it [the earth] for our slightest whim.” He suggests adopting St. Francis of Assisi as a model in imagining a “democracy” of creation in which all creatures are respected and man’s rule over creation is delimited.

Now that the current pope has assumed the name of Francis will this dualism also disappear? No. The view that God is good and nature is evil still dominates the world’s churches. At the root of this gnostic heresy lies the common belief that, upon death, we go to heaven to be with God, pushing the earth away as irrelevant and disposable. The church’s body language, its hymns which never identify the earth as the human’s future home, almost always refer to heaven as the final destination, portray a different future. Many see the pursuit of ecology is a pagan practice, believing that technology is the solution.

The Lost Gospel of the Earth

In The Lost Gospel of the Earth Tom Hayden writes: “The 700-page Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity includes less than one page on environmental issues. In a chapter called ‘The Future of Christianity’ it notes that problems of population growth and resource decline lie ahead, but we are reassured that ‘it seems likely that new discoveries may provide the means for averting the cumulative threats of population explosion and diminishing food resources.’ There is no sense of a moral dimension of urgency in this Christian hope for a technological fix.”

Hayden continues: “The 1991 edition of Judaism by Arthur Hertzberg is advertised as an ‘anthology of the key spiritual writings of the Jewish tradition.’ This edition was revised to take into account the new questions which have been debated in Judaism in recent decades. But in 310 pages, there is not a single reference to the environmental crisis.”

I have several books by Roman Catholic theologians. I truly admire their concern for the environment. In 2000 I had a long discussion with Dr. Herman Fiolet, a former professor at the R. C. University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands who holds a double doctorate in both Reformed Theology and Roman Catholic doctrine. When I met him in his apartment in Hilversum our long discussion finally stranded on our conflicting views on eternity and sin. I see polluting a sin, see driving a car a sin. We need a new definition of sin, emphasizing our sins against creation. This past week I read an Anglican statement that “Without an acute awareness of sin, the entire ecclesiastical enterprise becomes redundant”. My Roman Catholic friend believed that, mostly based on the teachings of Teilhard de Chardin, ultimately the human race will attain perfection. The well-known priest Thomas Berry expressed this also in his The Dream of the Earth. Both Dr. Fiolet and Berry say that “This earth is already now capable of being heaven”. No word on Christ making all things new, including the New Earth, after we, as humans, have run it into the ground.

There is much that I agree with in Teilhard’s reasoning, such as “Until the human is understood as a dimension of the earth, we have no secure basis for understanding any aspect of the human.”

The traditional view of Catholics was expressed by New York’s Cardinal John O’Conner when on Earth Day 1990 he admonished his flock that “the earth exists for the human person and not vice-versa.” No Gospel of the Earth for this cardinal.

Is Sin against Creation a sin against the Holy Spirit?

Increasingly I see sin against creation as the original sin, and would even venture to suggest that it constitutes the sin against the Holy Spirit, that same Spirit of God that hovered over the waters ‘in the beginning.’(Gen. 1:2). I see the original sin as the human failure to ask permission from the tree in the Garden of Eden to take the apple, and thus placing itself above the tree, upon which we depend for our oxygen: trees can live without us but we can’t live without trees. The tree signifies life.

I realize that this is a controversial statement and therefore I write it with a great measure of hesitation. Suffice it to say that overall there is little or no concern by the church for the cosmos which the Lord created. I just does not seem to register with the church people that God loved the cosmos more than he loved his son, offering up Jesus, his only Son in order to buy back the cosmos, his work of unsurpassed art, that treasure with its ultimate complexity yet totally harmonious, a world which we take for granted and refuse to call holy.

I was greatly surprised to find that even Reformed thinking is deeply influenced by the prevailing notion that we can redeem the earth. The book that asserts this is the 1980 Earth Keeping, Christian Stewardship and Natural Resources, written primarily by Calvin College people, a post- secondary institution owned by the Christian Reformed Church. Frankly the scenario painted by the team of authors is no different from that offered by the Teilhard de Chardin adherents. Here is a quote looking ahead to 2025, where people who left the earth in 1980 by space ship, return. “After landing safely, we were greeted by a crowd of healthy, happy-looking people – much excited at our having set down in their area…..The leader of that welcoming group began to describe to us the changes that had taken place since our departure forty-five years ago. (They find that) the concept of stewardship and the ideal of justice it entails have been incorporated into the general mentality of twenty-first century people…..we act in light of that planetary vision, a sense of the delicate balance of the inter-relating parts of Earth and the wish to care for all creation.”

Now, Thirty Five years later, we know that this sort of utopian talk is just that: the raw reality of fallen humanity is becoming more and more evident. I find it highly disturbing that not even the segment of society which calls itself Reformed Christian has the correct view of the future.

So what about the secular crowd, those who have no heaven to go to?

In 1974 I bought a book by Robert Heilbroner, an eminent economist and author of many books, including a text book on Economics. In An Inquiry into the Human Prospect Heilbroner writes: “Nor is it easy to foresee a willing acquiescence of humankind individually or through its existing social organizations, in the alterations of life-ways that foresight would dictate. If then, by the question “Is there hope for man?” we ask whether it is possible to meet the challenge of the future without the payment of a fearful price, the answer must be: No there is no such hope.”

At least that is straightforward. No hope. He continues: “The death sentence is therefore better viewed as a contingent life sentence – one that will permit the continuance of human society, but only on the basis very different from that of the present, and probably only after much suffering during the period of transition………..the long-term solution requires nothing less than the gradual abandonment of the lethal techniques, the uncongenial life-ways, and the dangerous mentality of industrial civilization itself.” Linus Pauling who twice won a Nobel Prize in two different fields, expressed similar views, and so did Jane Jacobs in her Dark Age Ahead.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote: “The churches are interested in fighting only a rearguard action for survival and preservation of their privileges and perquisites.” Based the Genesis 9 covenant, Bonhoeffer also wrote that God, the human race and the earth belong together. Isn’t time for the churches to proclaim and practice that truth?

 

Next week part 3: The real American Religion.

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How should we then live? Part 1

Posted on January 5, 2014 by Bert Hielema

JANUARY 5 2014

HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?

(Part 1)

Introduction

I intend to write a series on the above theme. So far it looks like it will have at least 5 instalments, possible as many as 10. Perhaps it will become a book: just kidding. It’s easy to write a book: it’s publishing that’s the hard part. So, no book.

Back to my topic. Francis Schaeffer (1912-84) posed the question of How Should we then Live? in which he traced Western history from Ancient Rome until the time of writing (1976) along three lines: the philosophic, scientific, and religious.

Both in his book and in the later film series he advocated a return to biblical living, believing that in this way we would be able to fashion a faithful way of life and be an example for a just society. As we all know, the Bible can be explained in different ways. The segment of society that read the book and saw the videos followed the interpretation of Jerry Falwell. His conservative movement subsequently degenerated into the Tea Party poopers, the Christian Right, the Prosperity Gospel crowd and lately the Republican Party which cut off unemployed aid and food stamps to needy recipients. Oh yes, these people also deny Climate Change. Where New York City is building dikes to protect it from rising waters, North Carolina, a Republican stronghold, a state very much subject to hurricanes and storm surges, refuses point-blank to erect protecting walls, instead relying on God to save them from drowning. In short Schaeffer’s book suffered from the Law of Unintended Consequences, resulting in the total opposite of what the Bible teaches on ‘loving one’s neighbour’.

The title How Should we then Live? is taken from Ezekiel 33: 10, the King James Version. This text in the NRSV reads in full: Now you, mortal, say to the house of Israel, Thus you have said: “Our transgressions and our sins weigh upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live?”

Paul D. Hanson, a Harvard professor, in his book The People Called starts out to say that “There is no life that is not community. And no community not lived in praise of God.” Commenting on Ezekiel he states that this entire bible book is structured around a series of visions that portray Yahweh’s response to the sacral impurity of the land, an element that Schaeffer and his later followers neglect to mention, a situation that finds its New Testament equivalent in Romans 8: 22: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in pain of childbirth right up to the present time”. If that was true in Paul’s time in around the year 50 A.D., how much more is this the case in the year of the Lord 2014.

It is with this all-encompassing groaning in the background that I will start this series, and begin with outlining where we are on the time-line of history.

We live in ‘ending’ times.

Geert Mak in his study of a Frisian village a few decades ago traced the development of that tiny town from an integrated self-sufficient economy to a place where its spirit was killed and God disappeared.

There, in Friesland, in that unique Dutch province, Geert Mak’s story is about farmers and money, about the small merchants and the encroaching city, about the new people who were and remained strangers. It’s all about the years in which everything was sacrificed on the altar of progress, how machinery eliminated the farmhands, how the automobile killed the small independent stores, how commuting to the city resulted in a village full of outsiders. That’s how God died there. All this made true Paul D. Hanson’s thesis that “There is no life that is not community. And no community not lived in praise of God.”

Everywhere in the world this process is repeating itself thanks to the automobile, not only killing community, but also killing the planet. Gone is the agrarian era, the period when life was determined by tradition and parental authority, by stable norms, by a quiet pace of life and certain standard of attitudes.

Yes, we live in ‘ending’ times. Here’s why.

In the first few centuries Anno Domini the church was a tiny persecuted minority. Emperor Constantin gave the church in the year 313 the freedom of religion and a short time after, church membership was a ticket to promotion. In the following centuries –during the entire Middle Ages – everybody was automatically a member of the church and there was a strong connection between church and state.

Now we have entered the godless era: God has left the public scene as the church has ceased to be an influence in society. Ninety nine percent of children in public school have never been in church and know nothing about God and even less about Christ who often is an unknown among the church members as well. Jesus’ wondering (Luke 18: 8) “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” is close to fulfillment.

There are also multiple other endings, some good. In the past few decades we have seen the end of white supremacy. This period started in the 16th Century with mostly European nations colonizing almost all of Africa and a good part of Asia, and has now effectively ended. But also, just as small villages within a country lost their soul, the same is now true for entire countries, where capitalistic domination rules, where the world has become more uniform by stifling religious expressions and losing colourful traditional hallmarks.

Endings also are taking place on a sociological plane. Fortunately male supremacy is gone. But also the typical male trades and jobs are vanishing rapidly, and in many ways men are at a distinct disadvantage in an economy where the service industry is expanding while factory jobs are disappearing quickly. The End of Work is approaching, with robots taking over everywhere even in low wage countries. With women achieving financial independence and with birth control eliminating the matter of child-bearing, with artificial insemination becoming more acceptable, the need for marriage and men is being questioned.

Especially on the ecological scenery the endings are endless. A few years ago Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature in which he lamented that Climate Change would completely alter our natural make-up, create impossible challenges for trees to cope with higher temperatures and cause animals unable to adapt soon enough to changed climatic conditions. Already birds are far fewer in number while frogs, snakes, honey bees and butterflies are threatened everywhere. The same holds true for fish.

There is the growing awareness that the End of Oil is near. That’s the title of another book I have. Right now we are consuming crude oil at the rate of around 30 billion barrels per year or 85 million barrels per day. For a global civilization that is based almost entirely on a plentiful supply of cheap fuel this is going to present some considerable challenges. If we look over a 40 year period, from 1965 to 2005, we see that by the end of it, humanity was using two and a half times as much oil, twice as much coal and three times as much natural gas as at the start, and overall, around three times as much energy: this for a population that had “only” doubled. This simply means that our average carbon footprint had increased substantially, mainly because China and India have come on stream in the global consumption race.

Not only are we entirely dependent on crude oil for all our fuel and materials, but without cheap crude oil, and natural gas to make nitrogen fertilizers, we could grow no food. Take soya beans grown in Brazil. These beans are not consumed locally but are transported around Brazil and around the world. Oil-derived fuels are necessary not only to run the tractors and combine harvesters, but the trucks, ships and planes to move the crop onto the world markets. In addition, we see the vast clouds of dust being thrown up behind the marching army of mighty machines which represents the loss of top-soil, which means that we not only face The End of Oil, but also The End of Soil, because even if we could solve all our energy problems, we are consuming the living and fragile portion of the earth’s surface that is our ‘adam’, our soil, and upon which we are utterly dependent to grow any food at all. We have “lost” around one third of our soil in the past half century – much of this through unsound and unsustainable agricultural practices – which does not bode well for the survival of a surging human population.

Another feature is that this land was once rain forest, which has been cleared to use the land for farming: trees needed to absorb our CO2. That same soil becomes unproductive within only a few years and so it is necessary to move on and do the same land-rape again and again.

There also are increasingly signs that Climate Change – warmer temperatures and more volatile weather – will decrease crop yields, exactly at a time when more people eat a beef-based- grain-fed diet, which brings me to the question of potable water. It takes 1000 tons of water to produce one ton of grain. This is especially a crucial question in China with 1.3 billion people to feed, and the lowest per capita amount of water available in the developed world. Already 3.3 million hectares – 8 million acres- of agricultural land – almost the size of the entire country of the Netherlands – is totally unfit for growing, due to pollution, and much more land only marginally so. Cancers is now the main cause of death.

There are many more ‘endings’, such as ‘the end of pensions’ since longer lives and bottom-feeding yields play havoc with actuarial calculations. With more people unemployed, or disabled, or worried sick, or simply living longer, all feeding at the federal pay- trough and lower tax revenues, public assistance may also become a perk of the past. Who knows: the way money is being created out of nothing, we soon may see The End of Money as well. It also is becoming apparent that we are witnessing The End of Privacy thanks to the NSA, the US- operated National Snooping Authority. Another nightmare is the End of Stable Weather. Insurance companies have an immense problem on their hands: How to calculate adequate premiums for the Great Unknown: the future weather? Should I mention the End of Sexual Discrimination? That too is a sign of the End .

Does all this signify “The End?”

With so many endings at work it is legitimate to wonder whether indeed we are at what Francis Fukuyama wrote in his 1992 book “The End of History?” His words: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

How wrong he was. In the 22 years since he made this statement we are experiencing the end of democracy, being replaced by a dictatorial regime in Russia, by plutocracy of the financial institutions and North America and by the rule of bureaucracy in Europe.

I am afraid that there is no happy ending. The momentum of ‘endings’ is unstoppable. There is no way back: there only is a going forward to the inevitable “End”, because we can no longer restore what has been lost; we can’t even re-imagine a natural way of life because we have burned all bridges to the past.

Since we can only minimally revamp the way we live, what we can do and must do is to take bearings where we are, change our expectations for the future and mentally and if possible physically adopt a fundamentally different way in which we move and have our being.

Never before in the history of the human race have we been confronted with such challenges and never have we been more ill-prepared to cope with these problems. There is a saying: The future belongs to those who prepare for it. That is especially true for those who believe in the New Creation to come. The time of transition is passed. We are now in the future which will dominate the 21st Century.

 

Next week part 2: how all major religions have failed to take the ‘Gospel of the Earth’ into account.

 

 

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Our World Today

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Bert Hielema

December 22 2013

Looking back and looking ahead

I always have a few books on the go, especially now when I am preparing for a series on How Should We Then Live? Fortunately I don’t have to go to the new 6000 square feet Tweed Library for this, because my reading is quite selective, in books gathered over the years, many from the no longer there Changing Times book store operated by a good friend. In the course of my new series starting January 5 2014 I will no doubt identify many of my sources.

It’s almost the end of another year. Last December I quit writing for the Ontario, Canada-based Christian Courier, a bi-weekly magazine, after having been part of that team for close to three decades. I felt that my monthly column of some 750 words was not enough to convey what I felt needed saying. I also sensed that they really did not want a prophetic voice to create a measure of disquiet into the mix. So I decided to write a weekly blog of some 2000 plus words – the length of a sermon – so that preachers if they were so inclined, could use my blog for their Sunday homily. (That never happened, as far as I know.)

Yes, my writings have sermon overtones, and I have done that on purpose. I see sermons not as expositions exclusively based on the Bible, but clear cries for actions, based both on God’s Primary Word, Creation, and guided by the Scriptures, God’s Secondary Word. Stubbornly, and mistakenly I believe, the church relies strictly on Sola Scriptura, the Scriptures only, pays only lip service to God’s Primary Word, and so, by and large, ignores the agony of God’s creation. My suggestion made this past year to have a Day of Repentance, an opportunity to shed tears in sorrow and agony, to cry out loud and clear that we have to change the way we live, was totally ignored.

My call in life

I feel that, with the Day of the Lord looming, I have to shake up the wider thinking crowd, be that Roman Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, all those who confess to be monotheists. This past week I was reading Martin Buber’s Pointing the Way. In an essay entitled Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour, this great Jewish philosopher wrote in 1954 – 60 years ago!!-: “The end of all history is near. Creation has grown old…….The present aeon, that of the world and world history, hurries powerfully to the end.” He then – this Jewish professor, living in Israel – wrote: “The antithesis of the coming age to all historical ages is expressed most strongly by a sentence of the Johannine Revelation that surpasses all that can be imagined ‘Time will no longer be.’”

So in January 2013 I started to write my weekly blog, viewed by some 70,000 people in the past year, more than 2300 in the past week alone, with readers in China constantly in third place, after the USA and Canada.

Why am I what I am? What has shaped me?

Some biographic details. In 1957 I expanded my insurance reach from life insurance only to include a full range of policies: automobile, fire, sickness, casualty. In 1959 a client of mine was dying of lung cancer, only in his late forties. I saw him die, not able to eat or drink, but still hooked on cigarettes. I then decided to quit smoking. I turned my negative addiction into a positive one, by taking up running, which I still do 56 years later, quite a bit slower, I admit.

It is funny that the reason I came to live in the country-side had to do with the church. The minister in the Christian Reformed Church we were attending in St. Catharines, On., was so dogmatic and caught up in such a rigid historical framework that, rather than reasoning – which proved to be impossible – I left, having sold our house, my insurance agency and real estate office before we moved.

For a while we were part of an intentional community with weekly house-worship, but that did not work out. So we became members of the local Presbyterian Church.

I learned a lot from our communal experience. Life is a constant education. Being an enterprising person, I soon was able to establish a real estate appraising business, which expanded quite rapidly.

It was a move, initially somewhat resisted, yet one we, as a family, have never regretted, even though the first years were difficult. The change from city to country – 5.5 km from the village – taught us a lot, both about human nature, the nature we live in, and our own spiritual and physical condition.

All this happened almost 40 years ago.

I guess that living in the country has re-shaped my outlook on life. Right now, when I glance up from my laptop, I see trees, trees to the north, trees to the west, and trees to the east. Our house is built into a small hill so that the north side is one storey, with one small window there, and the south side is two storeys with large southerly exposed windows on both floors, heating the house when the sun shines in the winter. Trees, I see them everywhere.  They give me comfort in the sure knowledge that it is here where I belong. When God created the earth, its entire surface was covered with trees. Julius Caesar in his book De Bello Gallico, which I had to read in Latin as a 14 year old, wrote that his legions, for days on end, marched through the woods of Europe: trees, trees, and more trees.

Shortly after our family came to Tweed, we planted thousands of trees. I have read somewhere that, for an urban person, having a high carbon footprint, it requires 4,500 trees to provide him or her with the needed oxygen which trees exhale while absorbing CO2. Our beloved automobiles need a rich mixture of oxygen to be able to propel its carbon-burning engine. No combustion without oxygen.

The Lord has blessed me in our marriage and in our earnings. Both are prerequisites for a long life. That’s what a long-term study has discovered. This study also concluded that the quality of personal relationships (for example, a “warm childhood” which I had) was the strongest predictor of a healthy and fruitful life. The other great influence is life-time learning, something that is certainly true for me. I am also happy to report that, as I grow older, I am more aware of my contentment: lately something like euphoria occasionally wells up in me, a spontaneous sensation of happiness that I have never experienced before in that measure.

I have also observed the devastating effects of alcoholism, not in my life, fortunately or in our immediate family, but in the community of which we were part for a while. For my friend alcoholism was the cause, not the consequence, of his unhappiness. Divorce was the result, and also premature death.

My question, at the age of 85, is: “why am I as happy as I am, actually happier than I have ever been?”

I can name a few reasons. Thanks to rewarding self-employment we have acquired enough resources to live comfortably, enjoy a carefree retirement, while doing something, like writing this blog, which is work, but not really. Also the tension of being self-employed is no longer there; our five children are all happily married and self-supporting, and our grandchildren also do well. Perhaps the most rewarding of retirement is that I have time to think. No pressure from anybody. I do my best thinking when running which, in the winter, I do on my treadmill. Also I find serenity in cultivating a large vegetable garden and can fully engage in my hobby of reading and writing. And of course, living in the present helps me not to think about the looming existential threats of illness and death.

Why are my wife and I happier now than ever? Is it simply a matter of having found the right partner or perhaps having rubbed up against each other so long that the rough spots have become smooth? Perhaps over the years my wife has become more independent, for a variety of reasons, while I have become more dependent, particularly when retired and spending more time at home, sharing the work in cleaning and meal preparation, and so becoming more companionable. One study shows that also at work are hormonal changes that ‘feminize’ husbands and ‘masculinize’ wives. An empty nest too is often more of a blessing than a burden.

But this happy outcome—more contentment and better marriages—depends crucially on having the means to live in comfort. Without that, it is hard to imagine such equanimity in the face of old age. If you don’t know whether you can afford to heat your home this cold winter, or pay your grocery bills, or hire help if you become disabled, old age is a particularly harsh time of life. A good old age also depends on remaining reasonably healthy, and that has been the case with both of us.

Of course ultimately, old age ends in death, or, as Jesus always puts it, in sleep. Because really that’s what death is. When my mother was on her death bed, she asked me: “what happens when I die.” I was dumbstruck. She had been to church every week without fail, often twice, yet for many death remains the great mystery. For me it is not. We sleep, and, just as in sleep, in death too time stops, until the Lord returns and wakes everybody up. The last verse in the bible book Daniel tells us: “As for you, go your way till the end. You will rest – sleep – and then at the end of days (now fast approaching) you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.” Isn’t that wonderful?

In old age my sources of pleasure are different. I am totally turned off on TV, read something all the time, including the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and all sorts of books, both fiction and non-fiction. And then, of course, there is my blog: a constant pre-occupation and a constant brain exercise. In the winter looking after the wood stove, getting wood in from my wood shed, also keeps me hopping. I am very fortunate that the local pallet factory sells its waste wood, all nice pieces of hardwood of various sizes.

Yes, we have every reason to be thankful, in spite of the state of the world, where the future for our grandchildren looks gruesome, as we face unsustainable population growth, disastrous climate change, depletion of natural resources, pollution penetrating everywhere, increasing inequality, both within and across countries, and violent tribalism of all forms, national and religious. Dealing with these problems will take a lot more than marginal reforms, and I don’t see that coming. Particularly in the United States and Canada, but also in the rest of the world, big money calls the shots, and it is most concerned with the next quarter’s profits.

Last week I saw an article I wrote more than 25 years ago, reporting on an environmental conference I had attended in Madison, Wisconsin, organized by the World Council of Churches: the very best speakers, but poor attendance. No wonder the conference lost money. Even after more than two decades nothing has changed in the Christian community. To continue to write seems increasingly pointless. But, the Lord willing, I will keep it up, because times are rapidly changing and the pace is increasing. Perhaps because being over a certain age, time seems to pass much more quickly. Who knows, as our bodies slow, time speeds up, and with it Climate Change which will progress so quickly that we are left unprepared, especially spiritually.

Personally I find it hard to remember that I’m no longer young, despite some physical signs, since I’m the same person and in many ways have the same feelings. What has increased is my faith in the coming of the New Creation, and its speedy coming.

Till next year.

I will skip December 29. I hope that your Christmas may not centre on that doll-like infant Jesus- ‘no crying he made’ as the song goes – but on the full-grown Christ who is to come, the first-born of creation: Redeemer and Judge.

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Our World Today

Posted on December 15, 2013 by Bert Hielema

DECEMBER 15 2013

THE GAME IS OVER. CARPE DIEM.

Last week I saw a picture, taken in the Arctic on December 3, showing methane rising from the Arctic Ocean and entering the air we all share, the methane count reaching as high was 2425 parts per billion. On November 9 that level exceeded 2661 parts per billion (ppb). In the past this count has always been quite low because methane is locked in the permafrost, which now no longer is ‘perma’nent.

Methane, (CH4), is a much more potent greenhouse gas than Carbon Dioxide (CO2). While CO2 levels are counted in ppm (parts per million), and methane in ppb they are directly comparable because in their lifespan methane has an influence on the weather more than a 1000 times stronger that the global warming mass of a cloud of CO2 of the same mass.

Huge methane clusters are positioned deep below the Arctic Ocean surface holding vast amounts of this lethal gas. Just one part of the Arctic Ocean, the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS), contains 1700 Giga tons of CH4. A Giga ton is a large amount, a bit more than 11,000,000,000 regular tons.  A sudden release of just 3% of this amount could add over 50 Gt of methane to the atmosphere, and experts consider such an amount to be ready for release at any time, because the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.  The amount of carbon stored in hydrates globally is now estimated to be 63,400 Gt, according to a recent calculation by Klauda & Sandler, enough to incinerate the entire earth.

Just let those figures sink in for a moment as the methane moves up and out. The total methane mass in our atmosphere right now is 5 Gt –Giga tons. The 3 Gt that has been added since 1750 accounts for almost half of all global warming.

Imagine what kind of warming would take place if the methane in the atmosphere suddenly grew by 1100 percent: its impact would threaten to destabilize sediments under the Arctic Ocean and trigger further methane releases. Such a positive feedback would cause the world to heat up, not gradually, not a fraction of a degree at a time, but with a sudden leap. The Big Bang in reverse.
This could well mean that the game is over. Carpe Diem, live it up!! There’s nothing we can do – of course there’s something we can do – but the bitter truth is there’s nothing we will do to prevent our world to go up in flames. That’s perfectly plain from what happened in Warsaw a few weeks ago.

What happened in Warsaw put the icing on the cake of Global Warming.

There in Warsaw, Poland, the COP 19 – which stands for the Conference of the People – met. This is the 19th time the UN convened somewhere in the world to come to a solution on Climate Change, also known as Global Warming. It’s better called the 19th COP-OUT.

Last week I read an analysis on what really happened there. Harald Welzer, 55, who teaches social psychology at Flensburg and St. Gallen Universities in Germany, was my guide here. His most recent book is “Selbst denken. Eine Anleitung zum Widerstand” (“Think for yourself: A Handbook for Resistance”). I found his essay in Der Spiegel, a German weekly. I will present the gist of his remarks, interspersed with my comments, paraphrasing and editing.

Frightening stuff

 

He writes: “When the United Nations Climate Change Conference wrapped up in Warsaw the weekend before last, it did yield a result despite what most observers and disappointed NGO representatives believe. The unofficial result was that the world in general has stopped any efforts to do anything about global warming. In other words, climate change has been definitively removed from the global policy agenda. It has been given a free hand thanks to Capitalism.”

He continued: “The intense concern over climate change triggered by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports in 2007 and widely popularized by Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” has disappeared. At that time even Angela Merkel made an appearance in the Arctic as the “climate chancellor,” decked out in a red all-weather jacket.”

Here’s what really happened there. The United States’ lack of interest in an international treaty was camouflaged by its argument that gas extracted by fracking is more climate-friendly than coal, even though a recent report discovered that much more methane escapes by this process than originally stated. In Japan, the Fukushima disaster and resulting phase-out of nuclear power has provided those responsible with an excellent argument for why the country now needs to burn more coal in order to stay economically competitive. And Australia, Poland and Russia have never really grasped why global warming should stop anyone from burning everything the oil rigs, mines and pipelines have to offer in the first place. China? The world’s largest polluter? Its dirty coal will keep our Dolla(d)ramas stores stocked so that we can save a few pennies.  Canada? That country calls its tar sand derived oil ‘ethical’ because its Prime Minister is an unbeliever as far as Climate Change is concerned.

Capitalism has triumphed

The people promoting Capitalism are of the opinion that technology will come to the rescue: “of course we will find a technical solution to this problem,” is the reasoning of the executives of the oil and coal companies, exhibiting the typical hubris of the rich. That the world will grow warmer by three, four or five degrees Celsius has become of secondary importance. The primary goal is the growth in national economies which require an ever-growing dose of energy so that their business models are to continue functioning. Seen in that light all scientific projections are mere theories. Business and clever software will find a fitting solution.

A good example of the wrong paradigm can be found in Greenland where the exact opposite happened. There the temperature dropped some 1500 years ago. The Vikings left Greenland – which had been really green – in part because they clung to animal husbandry despite practically having to carry their cows out to pasture in the spring, because the lack of winter feed had left the animals too weak to walk. The Vikings would have just needed to come up with the idea of eating fish instead, but to them that seemed as inconceivable as renouncing the idea of growth does to nations today. The Vikings believed they could not live without cows, just as we believe that a high quality of life rests on expanding the resource sector.

New Race for Survival

The Warsaw refusal to set limits to CO2 emissions has set off a new race: which part of the globe, in this world of boundless resource exploitation and unfettered pollution, will manage to remain the least affected by Climate Change. Economically powerful societies here have a considerable head start over those who embraced capitalism later or have the misfortune of being located in the wrong part of the world. These are the so-called “failed states”, where their inhabitants have little legal protection or where there are no obstacles to ravage land, water and raw materials of all kinds: they will suffer the most.

In these circumstances we can expect that the search for minerals will intensify as they become harder and harder to find. The scarcer a resource, the greater the unmet demand for it, and thus the higher the asking price, and the more we, consumers, will pay for the end product, be that oil or iron or food products. The greater the demand, and the smaller the supply, the more favorable the conditions are becoming for the suppliers. Scarcity is thus, in principle, good for business.

The capitalist economy, in fact, has had great success with this principle. No other economic system in history has generated and distributed more wealth in such a comparatively short a span of time. However, this expansion taking place in a finite earth, will sooner than later begin to consume itself.

A fanatic is a person who has lost direction and redoubles his effort.  

What each country is aiming for is to extract as much oil and gas as is possible. ‘People in the know’ know that The Game is up, and so the fuel-fanatics redouble their efforts to get to the last drop of oil or chunk of coal. That “Earth Summits” and “Climate Conferences” to save the planet keep on happening, even though none of these have ever resulted in real change, let alone to a reversal of the trend: they are mere window dressing. Every nation is out to keep its economic advantage. The US cannot possibly fail to exploit the ‘fracking’ advantage. Canada cannot possibly fail to exploit the tar sands. China and Australia cannot possibly fail to exploit their coal fields. Failure to do so would be an impediment to growth. So nothing ever changes. Carpe Diem: seize the opportunity to create an economic advantage.

This also applies to the Climate Fighter. All these global gatherings, all these climate research institutes, all these concerned scientists have a vested interest in Climate Change: it gives them jobs, prestige, a public forum, but none of that will reduce CO2 emissions: on the contrary they even contribute to their annual increase, because they are part of the larger system.

Is there another way?

Capitalism, according to Schumpeter, thrives on ‘creative destruction.’ It constantly needs to invent new ways to entice customers to do away with the old and embrace ‘the new and improved’ version of something useless. This axiom has now led to ‘creation destruction’ and we have been eager participants in this ultimate game, ultimate in the sense that it is testing – and now exceeding- the limits of the earth.

It’s an entirely new ball game. The first thing we must do is to analyze what we have been doing and still are doing. It is no longer business as usual, neither can we give up and claim that our little effort does not amount to anything anyway. It does, because our personal salvation is at stake.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer starts his book Creation and Fall with the remarkable words: The Church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end. Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am to do a new thing.(Isaiah 43: 18-19).

That simply means that we need now a new way of thinking and a new way of living. The church needs a new m. o., a different ‘modus operandi’, in line with what Bonhoeffer writes. Forget about the old. Preaching has to be recast. The old truths no longer work. We have heard it all before and the main result has been to turn off the young people. Sermons must focus on what is the come. Of course we need church services. Of course we have to pray and sing and encourage each other. Of course we need bible readings. All these have become more necessary than ever, but we have to use the Written Word as an introduction to and nourishment for preparing ourselves more and more for the Created Word, that solid firmament on which we now live and whose newness is near. Hebrew 5: 14 tells us that ‘solid food is for the mature.’ If we are not mature by now we will never learn, after all the church is in the business to make people grow and be an instrument to make all things new. That includes the practical day-to-day consumption of food and business and energy saving ways, and healthy life style, a way of living that can ease our transition to the New Creation, the End of which Bonhoeffer speaks. The church has to counter the destructive ways of Capitalism which professes that “the lust for money is the source of all good,” totally opposite to the words of Scripture.

The Game is up. The methane monster is the newest and ultimate menace. Once it explodes, the Day is here.  Carpe Diem really means: Seize the Day. Carpe Diem really means that we must embrace the Day of the Lord’s coming, make it our own, totally identify with it and live accordingly.

 

 

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Our World Today

Posted on December 8, 2013 by Bert Hielema

December 8 2013

THE AGE OF DENIAL

Just after I had decided to write a series on “How then shall we live?” trying to combine the Creation Word with the Written Word I went to the local library where a book sale was going on. There I bought for $5.00 three books, one by Robertson Davies, a children book to read to our 5 and 7 year old grandchildren when they are here at Christmas, and a book by a number of authors, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, with the intriguing title of Covenant for a New Creation.

I very much believe in divine guidance, and I saw this as an affirmation that in the coming year I must pursue this difficult, self-imposed assignment to struggle with the question “How then shall we live?” in these last days.

Some of you may recognize the topic: it is the title of a book by Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984), who with his wife ran L’Abri, a retreat in Switzerland some 50 years ago. I will write more about this book and this couple in my first blog in January.

Yes, I very much believe that we are living in the last of days. All signs point to that. Jesus, in that revealing 24th chapter of Matthew, with the heading Signs of the End of the Age, gives some indication in verse 32. He points to a tree – Jesus often takes examples from creation – a fig tree in this case. Here is that passage: “Now then learn this lesson from the fig tree: as soon as the twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see all these things, you know it is near, right at the door.”

What things are so plain to see for those who have eyes to see? The most glaring sign is “the great abomination” mentioned in that chapter, referring to the world-wide pollution of which Climate Change is the most pronounced feature, which also indicates that we live in The Age of Denial, especially relating to these final matters.

 Denial persists

Last week I read an article in the December 2 New Yorker: Letter from Handan with the title In the Air, and subtitled: Discontent grows in China’s most polluted cities. Here is an excerpt: “There’s a joke that a Handan person went to Switzerland and the air was so good that he began to feel sick from all the oxygen. So they quickly hooked a tube to a car’s exhaust pipe and he sucked on that for a while until he felt better.” Denial anyone?

The truth is that China’s pollution- this great abomination, which is getting worse – is influenced by the same religious misconception as most Christian thinking. Back to the article: “For much of the past two millennia, Taoism (which places a high value on closeness with nature) was politically eclipsed by Confucianism, with its more worldly concern for family and society. Mark Elvin, a professor emeritus of Chinese history has argued persuasively that China’s disregard for the environment has roots in this heritage. The ideal Confucian ruler saw the mastery of nature as part of humanity’s triumph over barbarism.”

Is it any different in the Western World? The observation Lynn White, a professor of church history, made in 1967 is still very relevant today. He wrote a scathing essay in the most prestigious scientific journal in the USA, the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His article entitled The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis was widely read and reprinted in thousands of environmental studies published in the decades following its appearance in Science.

Dr. White focused on the environmental attitudes and values set out in Genesis and how they might have fostered ill-treatment of nature in Christendom throughout the ages. He argued, in effect, that since it is written in the first few chapters of the Bible that human beings alone among all creatures were created in the image of God and given dominion over nature and charged to subdue it, the Jews and Christians, taking this message to heart, attempted to live by its light. They regarded themselves as beings apart from the rest of nature, licensed by God to rule over it and bend it to their purposes. After two thousand years of putting this vision of the human-nature relationship into practice with increasing success, the 20th century’s technological wonders and the 20th century’s environmental crisis are the end result.

In my next year’s series on How then shall we live? I will explore and critique this further. Suffice it to say that by and large the church still adheres to a dualistic view, and thus most certainly is part of The Age of Denial.

During 2013 I have written my weekly blog of some 2000 words and have been encouraged by the increasing number of visitors from all over the world. It looks that my blog will have close to 70,000 visitors in 2013, well over double the number in 2012. Only the Lord knows whether I have changed anybody’s mind, given that we live in The Age of Denial.

Why this denial?

People in general, continue to avoid serious thought about human population growth, the predictable effects of global warming, the degradation of the oceans, and even the depletion of top soil in the Midwest. Believe it or not, but Peak Oil is still an issue today, and will be increasingly so in the years to come even though there now is a temporary new supply, which will actually speed up The Coming of the Lord because fracking releases a lot of extra methane and other pollutants. Don’t get fooled by this fracking frenzy, which is proclaimed as the new Saviour of the United States.

My regular readers may remember that I have written extensively about the issue of Peak Oil. Basically, it is the observation that there is only so much easily obtainable oil. Let me use a graphic example. Imagine an erect penis. Place this full-blooded male member on the centre of a timeline of 10,000 years. For the first 5000 years the line is flat. Then suddenly there is this Eiffel Tower structure, depicting the sudden onset of oil, its peak and its demise, spanning no more than 200 years. For the next 5000 years the line again shows nothing. That illustrates our oil usage: no more than 200 years of a-historic extravagance. Right now we are at the pinnacle, around the point when we have used half of what was originally there. The second half, however, lacks the easy extraction of the first, because fields become depleted, new fields are smaller, are harder to find and take much more energy to develop.

The United States hit its peak oil production around 1970, and it has been in decline ever since. It’s true that with improved technology, we can squeeze a few more drops out by drilling deep offshore, slant drilling, and steam cleaning the tar sands, but these are expensive and highly polluting methods. We have probably been at or around the point of peak oil for most of this decade.

The economic effects of peak oil are as obvious as they are frightening. The most immediate result is an increase in oil prices, something which will slow down economic activity. For the sudden entente with oil-rich Iran look no further than Peak Oil. There was a period in which Saudi Arabia could influence the world’s rate of oil production by turning up the flow, but even that is a thing of the past. Fact is that we will be spending the rest of our lives, and our children their own lives, dealing with the consequences.

On a personal note.

This past week we had our TV re-connected after doing without it for 2 years. Now that we again have an opportunity to visualize what’s going on the world out there, our television set just sits there, not used for days on end. I simply don’t feel inclined to waste my precious time. I am already sorry that there was a special deal from Bell TV. Oh well, the Olympics coming up and the World Soccer tournament, so OK, one can’t be ‘culturally deprived’ forever. The greatest danger of TV is that we won’t deal with reality and remain in denial. Peak oil is just one of the big denials we persist in holding onto. Global warming is obviously the other, as our political discourse shows only too well with conservative Christians voicing the most vocal opposition to this issue. It is severely sickening how people who regularly go to church have no clue how deeply they offend God by this denial which turns off potential Christ believers. TV is controlled by Capitalism which has a vested interest in the status quo and is financing propaganda campaigns solely to squash the communication of scientific reality. When you hear a United States Senator call global warming a hoax, you know we have a big problem. When it’s the Republican Party policy, it’s an even bigger problem. To my shame, “Conservative’ Stephen Harper, Canada’s Prime Minister, is also a Global Warming denier.

Yes, population growth. When I was born in 1928 there were some 2 billion people, mostly well fed, but very few obese. Today there are more than 7 billion and obesity has become a global plague. Even though projections are that the human population of the world would be in excess of 12 billion people by the end of this century, this will never happen. When we consider global warming, declining supplies of petroleum, the expanding population, and depletion of soil quality, we are looking at the perfect storm for humanity.

So what are the remedies? That’s why I am starting that new series, not that I expect that the world will change direction. That just won’t happen. That also is not my motivation. My sole aim is to prepare people for the New Creation to come, something we have to practise now if we want to be ready for Christ’s return.

There are signs of hope. 

One of them is the new pope by the name of Francis, who chose this name to show his affinity to Francis of Assisi, who wrote

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is error, truth;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek

To be consoled as to console;

To be understood as to understand;

To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

The sign of hope is that, in his address to the world-wide Roman Catholic Church, he condemned the capitalistic system. No other pope before him has ever done so in such clear language. Pope Francis said: “Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”

Thanks to Capitalism a large segment of America’s workforce is under employed. Millions in North America don’t make enough money, working for Wal-Mart and other big box retailers, to feed themselves properly. They require food stamps, a feature that, thanks to the Republican Party, has been cut back. They are the victims of what the Pope refers to as “trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.”

The pontiff also wrote:  “While the earnings of a tiny minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies, which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. … A new tyranny is thus born. … The thirst for power and possessions know no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule. Behind this attitude,” Francis wrote, “lurks a rejection of ethics and a rejection of God.” That is because ethics inevitably represents a judgment that “makes money and power relative.”

Will it make a difference? That is not the issue. Jesus proclaimed the same message and even now, after Two Thousand Years his words too are not being heeded. Yet, in the end, when he returns, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord. We all have to be Anthropoi Teleioi, people that keep the End – the telos – in mind.

 

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