Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

DECEMBER 1 2013

A PEEK INTO A FUTURE WITH PLENTY OF PEAKS

 We live in interesting times, perhaps the most intriguing period ever. Even though, for the last 7 decades, ever since 1945, the world has dramatically changed, many more changes are coming, none for the better.

Before the World War 1914-1945 – which killed Ten Percent of the people who were alive in 1900, more than 100 million, mostly men – almost all people had a rural connection. My grandparents worked only with real horse power. The horse was a friend of the family, and all their cows had names, were part of the larger household. The chickens enjoyed so much freedom that sometimes they became a road hazard. Now most people live in cities, cows have computer chips, extensions of the robot milk machine, and chickens? Don’t ask.

Oh, the good old times in my youth!! Yes, I mean that. No I am not nostalgic: then times were much better than for today’s young people. In my youth we created our own entertainment, played games of our own invention, often outside, and there were plenty of jobs. I saw how my parents and grandparents, in spite of the dirty Thirties, lived in tranquility, had real community, lots of visiting with friends, enjoyed home-made music and acting, were members of choirs and brass bands, enjoyed a viable church life and often had group outings on the bike.

The Oil Change

Oil changed all that, heralding the onset of alienation: it made God disappear. Jacques Ellul, professor of law in Bordeaux, France, in his master piece The Technological Society explained how people do only things for which they are emotionally ready. The pre-war society was not mentally prepared for the passivity that is now so prevalent. Perhaps the killing fields of Europe had such a psychological impact on people that they became conditioned to welcome the oil economy, which has dominated the world ever since. Shooting and bombing, seeing people maimed, undergoing incarceration in concentration camps, observing how the European Jewry was eliminated, experiencing the physical destruction caused by warfare, perhaps spiritually prepared people to embrace the carbon-laden community, the eco-killing society that is now on the verge of eliminating us all. Only highly extreme events are able to evoke our emotions, soon forgotten. By and large we are beyond deep-rootedness, incapable to engage in heartfelt empathy. It reminds me of Jesus complaining “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.” (Matt. 11: 17).

Perhaps society has always suffered from lack of empathy. Paul, in his letter to the Romans (Rom. 13: 11), complains that “the hour has already come for you to wake up from your sleep.” That’s one reason why the bible is still relevant, because the people are still asleep and the preachers, by and large, fail to rouse them, even though “salvation is nearer than when we first had faith”, to continue that same text.

Today’s attitude reminds me of Rev. Martin Niem?ller (1892 -1984) who was a prominent Protestant pastor in Germany. As an outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler, he spent the last seven years of Nazi rule in concentration camps. He is best remembered for the quotation:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Socialist. 

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out–  Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me.

In connection with our present planetary predicament here’s my variation:

Climate Change first hit the Maldives, but I did not speak out–

Because where I live, the sea is far away.

Then a tsunami hit Fukushima, but I did not speak out–

Because I don’t live in an earthquake prone area.

Then a super typhoon hit the Philippines, but I did not speak out–

Because no hurricanes have ever been reported here.

Then Climate Change hit us all, and there was nobody left to speak for me.

Fundamental changes.

In my lifetime the world’s population has more than tripled. The world economy expanded some 15-fold, energy use increased 20 times and industrial output expanded by a factor of 40. Nothing even remotely like this has ever happened before in a finite earth. If I were to draw a graph then every item mentioned would go straight up. The higher it goes, the more fragile the expansion: it is not like a mountain that has a broad base and were the top is as solid as its footing. No, here the climb up has only one basis: the cosmos-killing production of oil, gas, coal. Solar and wind power play no part in the energy game, or better, energy gamble. In the last 60 years we have used ten times more energy than our forebears did in the millennium preceding 1900.

It is on that shaky foundation that we have built on 21^st century existence. No wonder matters are back firing.

There is a beautiful passage in Ecclesiastes:

What has been is what will be,

And what is done is what will be done;

And there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there a thing of which it is said,

“See this is new?”

It has been already, in the ages before us.

There is no remembrance of former things,

Nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to happen

                                                            Ecclesiastes 1: 9-11

These words are now out of date. There is something new under the sun: it is the story of environmental change around the world. Humans, under the obedient guidance of the Great Satan, have been the willing allies of his Imperial Majesty, the Prince of this world – as Jesus labelled him.

We delight in the possession of new gadgets. People get stabbed on Black Friday in the USA, the day after Thanksgiving there, celebrated just last week. They are there to grab one of the new toys that need no imagination or personal know-how, except some technical manipulations, tools that keep us from personal interaction, from eyeball-to-eyeball exchange.

Of course, there have been a lot of unparalleled prosperity and advances in science and medicine, in transportation and communication. Still all this comes at an ultimate cost: Climate Change. We, all 7.1 billion of us human beings, have managed something no previous generation could ever accomplish, thanks to oil: we have upset the balance of the earth.

A few weeks ago the 19^th Climate meeting took place, under the auspices of the United Nations. The Nineteenth! Every other year the experts gather from all over the world in the thousands at considerable expense to the climate to hammer out a climate pact. Somehow the fuel for airplanes is exempted from the carbon count: of course: all these government and UN officials can only come by flying machines, the highest polluting agents in the world. In none of these 19 meetings, from Kyoto in Japan to The Hague and now in Warsaw, anything has ever been accomplished. In the meantime pollution has accelerated, and is still peaking. Finally a UN official has admitted that the goal of a temperature increase of 2 degree Celsius is now impossible: it will be more than 3.6 degree Celsius, which in reality means Hell on Earth. The Ice Age came about when the temperature dropped that much.

Peak Oil?

Peak Oil? Not by a long shot. I know I predicted Peak Oil more than 10 years ago. I was wrong. The high price of oil has unleashed new supplies: the highly frightful fracking folly. The US energy department said North America will add 1.5 million barrels per day (m b/d) of oil supply this year, mostly from shale, and 1.1m b/d next year. This new supply is coming just as Iraqi Kurdistan opens a new pipeline to Turkey. Iraq’s output crashed to 2m b/d over the summer as al-Qaeda attacks reached a crescendo, but Baghdad claims output is poised to recover. The International Energy Agency expects Iraq to triple supply to 6 million b/d by 2020. And now the world’s energy companies under the guise of US diplomacy have concluded a new accord with Iran. The Saudis are furious: not only will this lower the price of oil world-wide, but also the people in Tehran worship Mohammed in a different way than the Saudis do, and that is dangerous: the smaller the religious differences, the greater the fury . The tinder-box Middle East is in the grip of a Sunni-Shia civil war comparable in ideological ferocity to the clash between Catholics and Protestants in early 17th Century Europe. There too both parties worshiped the same God, but in a slightly different way. That war lasted Thirty Years from 1618-1648 and devastated Central Europe. The Saudis need a high oil price – a minimum of $100 per barrel – to keep its restless population from revolting. The Iran agreement is nothing else but appeasing capital. The West needs growth – even when the fate of the Earth is at stake. According to one report issued for the Warsaw conference, just 90 corporations worldwide are responsible for two-thirds of the greenhouse gas buildup over the past 200 years that is driving global warming. These corporations—mainly giant oil and gas monopolies and coal mining companies—cling to their profit interests in the face of threats to the survival of the human race.

Interesting times, anybody?

We live in interesting times. We face the final battle: the forces of life, including the ecosystem, are being transformed into forces of death. The monster Typhoon Haiyan is only one of the first tragedies. Nature and global elites seek to exploit the planet’s last drops of blood and its repressed masses are joining to make the days of descent squalid and terrifying.

In these extreme times we will have to navigate our way. In our current world full of peaks, we have to find security. If there is no radical change – and it does not look that way – we will be forced to choose how we will die, whom we will cling to, what we will risk. Wisdom is required. Where will our allegiance lie? Who will be our God? Will it be Capitalism? Or will it be the Maker of Heaven and Earth? It reminds me of the prophet Elijah on the Mount Carmel when he cried, “If the Lord is God, follow him; but is Capitalism is God, follow it.” The choice is stark: Life or Death.

Is there a peak in our Future?

There already are lots of peaks. In a sense it now is Peak Everything. We already have peak population. The fact that we have growing pollution means that we use up more air than the atmosphere can absorb. Wide-spread unemployment means that we have more people than the labour market can absorb. Low return on money means that we have more money than the economy needs. Polluted water means that we have Peak clean water. Peak everything means that we are in for a long period of decline, going down-hill, affecting our financial systems, food supplies and personal welfare. All this will also severely affect our personal psychological coping mechanisms.
Yes, we are in for a dangerous period of adjustment, until we have learned to live within the Earth’s resource limits, which will only arrive in the New Creation. Better get ready.

In my 15 years of blogging, I have mentioned that if China can manage to grow without endangering its population, there is hope for the world. That is not happening. True, China’s economy is still growing rapidly, more than doubling in size every eight years. China consumes more than twice as much coal as it did a decade ago, the same with iron ore and oil. It has quadrupled its highways, and has almost five times as many cars. It also has unprecedented pollution problems, affecting water and air, endangering billions of lives. China has no alternatives to coal to fuel its industrial machine, meaning that pollution there will grow unabated.

China is as vulnerable as a china teacup, which, when dropped, shatters into a thousand pieces. That will happen to China. The same holds true for the entire world economy: built on the shaky foundation of ultra-polluting carbon fuel. In a world of Peak Everything, be prepared for the worst.

Starting in 2014 I am planning to write a series on “How then shall we live?”, trying to combine the Creation Word with the Written Word, something I have advocated for some time. What we need is a Creed for the Cosmos, a New Creation theology.

November 24 2013

How come we keep on running to the abyss?

I don’t know whether you ever had a conversion. I did. It happened in 1973, now 40 years ago. That year I received a book each from two different friends. The first one was a Dutch book and dealt with life after death: Sterven.. en dan?, which means We die… then what? It opened my eyes from believing in heaven to seeing that our eternal destiny is a renewed earth. That completely changed my outlook on life. A bit later another friend gave me The Limits to Growth, a rather technical book with all sorts of graphs and tables and computer projections, basically saying that in the future we will hit limits in mineral use and in agriculture. Then Climate Change was not yet an issue.

Both fit in with the aim of my blog which is to convey a sense of urgency in affecting a change of attitude, similar to my conversion, even though I fully realize that it is beyond my persuasive power to do so. If there is somewhere one single person in the world reading my blog (this past week I had 2073 visitors, with the USA having the most readers, followed by Israel and China) who undergoes such a change of mind, my life has not been in vain. My conversion, which has been a slow process, makes me now realize that the Bible is a tool, a necessary tool to understand God’s plan for creation, but a tool nevertheless, a means, not an end.

Here’s my reasoning.

 God’s initial intention was to have Adam and Eve, which the Bible depicts as the first human pair, to start a new humanity in a perfect earth. That plan did not work as they somehow sold the creation God had deeded to them, to his adversary, the Satan. However that was not the end of the matter. God, in his love for the cosmos, allowed his Son to be sacrificed as payment for buying back his beloved world. Even though that payment has been made, the final closing of the transaction will not take place until Jesus returns to his world, giving Satan a free hand till then. Also a time-span of a few thousand years was needed to develop the full potential of the earth and test the ultimate know-how of humanity, something that is coming to an end, as all things now are back-firing, including all religious expressions.

 Religion will cease?

Yes. Look at Revelation 21: 22. There the author writes that “I did not see a temple in the city”, the city being the New Creation, Christ’s Kingdom. That to me suggests that there will be no place for either the Bible or the church in the New World to come. Neither will there be marriage, as Jesus himself said when questioned on that topic (Luke 20: 35). Well, take a look around. Already we see these developments as, it seems, marriage is going out of fashion. Today the largest group of people in the Western world are the singles – adults who live alone. The church too is losing ground left and right, even though ‘religions’, all sorts of them, are flourishing. Last week the synod of the C of E met discussing the situation in the Church of England, which is losing its status as a dominant place in society because the young are abandoning it in droves. The archbishop of York, Dr. John Sentamu, compared wrangling within the church to ‘rearranging furniture when the house is on fire’. The archbishop of York has warned the Church of England that it must end its internal arguments and focus on spreading the word of God and attracting new worshippers if it is to avoid obsolescence. In a passionate address to the General Synod on November 18 , John Sentamu said it was time to “evangelise or fossilise”, adding that teaching people about Christ was as central to the church’s mission as worship. He added, “Reorganising the structures, arguing over words and phrases while the people of England are left floundering amid meaninglessness, anxiety and despair….On the label, the church tin says: ‘Open here for salvation, peace, hope, purpose, love, Kingdom … but when it is open, inside the tin we so often find humbug, or – if we are Anglicans – fudge.” So they approved female bishops.

The word ‘evangelize’ comes from the Greek ‘eu’ and ‘angelos’ the ‘good’ ‘message’. But the church is no longer sure what ‘the good message’ is. What does the church expect? That the same, tired way of communicating – the sermon- that hasn’t worked in the past, will this time bring different results?

The problem is that the church has a one-dimensional view on The Word, confining its product to the Bible only. Creation is God’s Primary Word: the Bible is God’s Secondary Word. Unless and until we see that the one won’t work without the other, no amount of ‘evangelism’ will work.

In the new Creation there will be no church and no Bible: the law of the Lord will be written on our hearts: holistic living will be automatic: that’s why we as humanity are now going through the final phase, learning through trial and error how to live the New Creation Life. Not easy. In all this the final goal is the care for the cosmos, God’s precious work of art. The Bible in all this is a tool, even though it is a necessary one most of the time. Psalm 119: 105 simply says that “Your (secondary written) word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path (in God’s primary created Word.) The Lord Jesus did not die to save the written word. The Bible will disappear when it has become redundant. Jesus died to save the creation, God’s Primary Word.

 Another radical thought.

Perhaps for some the Bible is not even needed. Romans 1: 20 hints at that. Freely interpreted this text says that if we really have a close look at creation, if we see how it all fits together as a harmonious entity, where, when we disturb one element- say the climate – the entire structure is affected, seeing the cosmos as a divine miracle, then, yes, we are on the way to salvation. Only God’s eternal power and divine nature – his invisible qualities – was able to construct such a magnificent and majestic totality. “By not acknowledging this we stand condemned” says this text. The corollary, the other side of the coin, is that when we do confess that only an all-wise God could have wrought such a marvelous reality this same God will accept this confession ‘without the person knowing about the bible and Christ.’

Aboriginal beliefs come to mind. They often see creation as holy. I believe that when we see creation as holy and treat it that way, we are closer to God than when we see the Bible as holy, but give no thought to creation at all.

Enough.

It is very difficult to rid ourselves of an addiction. Addiction? Yes, we are suffering from being carbo-holics. (Thanks, L. V. T., for helping me coin that word.) We are addicts when we can’t live without a certain substance. Any negative addiction is fatal. Alcoholics can’t live without imbibing on a regular basis, even when it leads to family breakup, bad health and premature death. Our addiction to carbon does exactly the same to our planet: it leads to a Carbon-corroded cosmos.  We can see it in our attitude toward Climate Change. In spite of all the climate summits, promises of “voluntary restraint,” carbon trading and carbon taxes, the growth of CO2 emissions and atmospheric concentrations have been accelerating. In the early 1960s, CO2 ppm – parts per million -concentrations in the atmosphere grew by 0.7ppm per year. In recent decades, now that China and India have industrialized, the growth rate has tripled to 2.1 ppm per year. In just the first 17 weeks of 2013, CO2 levels jumped by 2.74 ppm compared to last year. Does that disturb us? Are we upset?  I haven’t noticed it. Nobody has approached me, lamenting that this sudden jump in CO2 levels is suicidal. Perhaps the matter is beyond our capability to grasp. The required global awareness, necessary to handle the current situation, has become impossible to achieve. As a human race we are no longer able to handle our own power. We, as carbo-holics, are incapable to fathom the predicament we are in: typical of an addictive condition.

Of course that means we are marching toward disaster, “sleepwalking to extinction” as the Guardian’s George Monbiot once put it. Why can’t we slam on the brakes before we ride off the cliff to collapse?

Simple. Our addiction is generated by the rich who live off our weakness. Take the tobacco industry. For the longest time it denied that smoking tobacco was a health hazard. Now the oil industry plays down the dangers of Climate Change and especially the Coal Cartel claims that coal is clean or can be used without endangering the planet.

It all boils down to who is in charge of our economy. The Psalms talk about ‘the proud men’s disdain’ for the poor.  The rich can – to some extent – escape the consequences of our increasingly dangerous globe.

We live under a corporate capitalist system that no longer can change. The GDP must grow or it dies. Its entire structure is based on ‘more’. Governments too depend on growth. Only then can they pay our generous benefits, our increasing cost of health-care, our ever-growing pension benefits. Growth at the cost of our very basis of life: our soil, air, water. Bernanke and his board has been pumping money into the banks in a desperate attempt to try to induce inflation, so that their debts will be reduced. It is not working. Our world is finite, and we are approaching its limits.

We, small folk, have no voice in this matter. We have little choice but to go along in this destruction, to keep pouring on the gas instead of slamming on the brakes. But we won’t slow down, let alone stop, because we too are addicted to growth: we need jobs, so we always hope that somehow something miraculous will happen.

We are fast approaching the precipice of ecological and economic collapse. The engine that has powered three centuries of accelerating economic development, revolutionizing technology, science, culture and human life itself is, today, a roaring out-of-control locomotive mowing down continents of forests, sweeping oceans of life, clawing out mountains of minerals, pumping out lakes of fuels, devouring the planet’s last accessible natural resources to turn them into “product,” while destroying fragile global ecologies built up over eons of time. Between 1950 and 2000 the global human population almost tripled from 2.5 to more than 7 billion. But in these same decades, consumption of major natural resources soared more than six-fold on average, some much more. Natural gas consumption grew nearly twelvefold, bauxite (aluminum ore) fifteen-fold. And so on. At current rates, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson says that “half the world’s great forests have already been leveled and half the world’s plant and animal species may be gone by the end of this century.”

Until…..

Remember Easter Island. Jared Diamond, a professor of geography in L.A. wrote a 575 page book simply called Collapse, subtitled:  How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. He devotes one chapter to Easter Island, discovered by Jacob Roggeveen on April 5 1722, Easter Sunday. There that globetrotting Dutchman saw something most astonishing, a landscape with huge stone statutes, but devoid of trees and inhabitants. Apparently the native religion required these immense images, which came at the expense of the native trees, used for transporting logs and scaffolding. Wrote Diamond, ”What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say? Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood”?

The Easter Islanders had a fanatic faith in their stone idols until death. We have a similar misplaced trust in capitalism until death doth us part.

Today the only matter we can depend on without fail is that we can no longer depend on anything, except on one cardinal matter: The Lord made no junk and will not junk what he has made. Christ will return to claim his precious creation. Be part of that newness.

November 17 2013

It is time for the church to change its focus.

What is the church’s focus now?

I have been a faithful church goer for about 80 years. That qualifies me to discuss the church and its focus, which, in my experience has always been the Bible, the Scriptures, the Written Word. All sermons and songs were and still are centered on the Book of Books.

When I was young the church was at the centre of life: twice to church on Sunday, youth meetings, tremendous devotion and loyalty, especially during the war in the Netherlands 1940-45 when the church also was the social centre.

After the war, after study, after a compulsory spell in the Dutch Army, I immigrated to Canada in 1951, where the same focus prevailed, with again the church being an important part of life, on par with getting married, establishing a family and starting a business. Quite soon Christian education became part of the package: being member of boards and committees both on the local and provincial level, also involved in other Christian endeavours to the point where my life seemed to revolve around these matters. The timeframe here was about from 1957 till 1965, the year I became an elder and was, for the first time, directly involved in the church as an organization. Somehow I didn’t serve out my three year term. Let me say that ever since then I have seen the church in a different light: a very human institution. Pierre Berton, not a churchgoer, was, in 1966, commissioned by the United Church in Canada to take a look at the church. His assessment was captured in the title of his book: The Comfortable Pew. Comfortable and comfort can be poles apart. The church is in the comfort business: the paradox is that this should make people uncomfortable, especially now.

The times have changed.

We no longer live in comfortable times. Jacques Ellul, professor of law in Bordeaux, France, in his book Hope in Time of Abandonment, wrote in the Preface that his book has to be seen in the light of “The decisive importance of the Promise, the approach of the Second Coming, the Eschaton which comes (his emphasis)”. The title of the French original was L’Espérance Oubliée, which means The Forgotten Hope.  The English version gave a different emphasis: hope, unlike the original French version. Having Abandonment in the title reflects Ellul’s belief that God has turned his back on us and is silent. Ellul wrote: “It is my belief that we have entered upon an age of abandonment that God has turned away from us and is leaving us to our fate”. He adds that this does not mean that religion is gone: “Never have people believed as much, everything and nothing…… the modern world is loaded with religion…. The most can be said that man has completely desacralized the natural environment but has transferred all the sacred to the cultural and the social (and, I may add, the economical.)”

He is not alone in this. Richard Elliott Friedman, Professor of Hebrew in California, wrote in his The Hidden Face of God, that the phrase “God hides his face” occurs over thirty times in the Hebrew Bible. He singles out Deut. 32: 20: “I shall hide my face from them; I shall see what their end will be.” With these words God gave humanity the opportunity to go on their own, to live without God, God’s reasoning being that if they are so wise, if they think that they have grown up and can fend for themselves, I will give them a free hand.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer mentions this also when he wrote that “So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him.” (Letters from Prison.)

And that is exactly where we are as the year 2013 is coming to a close.

A new necessary phase

I believe we now are in a new phase in the history of humanity in which we must prepare for the ‘age to come’, the age of ‘The Kingdom’, when we are indeed totally on our own. Adam and Eve were far too naïve. Next time, when the new Paradise appears, God wants experienced people to steer creation, people who learned by trial and error to live holistically.

As a society we live totally without God. True God is still real on a personal basis – there’s where the church comes in – but politically, economically, socially, we live under a Satanic rule. J. H. Bavinck, in his forthcoming book The Kingdom, writes that “We are now faced with a development in creation that we cannot understand and control, but of which we daily exper­i­ence its 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.” He later sets out to describe the Kingdom, which is to come in the New Creation and will encompass the totality of cosmos, from the most basic amoeba to the highest form of development, the human race.

That now Satan is in charge is beyond dispute. The horrible hurricane that hit the Philippines is just one of the many signs that we have unleashed satanic forces.

This week there is another Environmental conference going. Reports the New York Times: “The typhoon that struck the Philippines produced an outpouring of emotion on Monday at United Nations talks on a global climate treaty in Warsaw, where delegates were quick to suggest that a warming planet had turned the storm into a lethal monster.”

I was at U.N. environmental conference # 8 in the year 2000 in The Hague, the Netherlands. There, 13 years ago, nothing was accomplished. Again nothing concrete will emerge in Warsaw either, because on each nation’s agenda Economic Growth is still the priority. We are ‘fiddling as Rome Burns” as the expression goes.

As usual, the world is ahead of the church.

The world only has ‘the world’. The general belief in the church is that people go to heaven, a heresy Satan has successfully sold to the church. I believe that’s why the church is at a dead end, and loses members left and right. That eternal life will be lived on this our very own earth, is a foreign concept to almost the entire faith spectrum, from Islam to Judaism to Christianity. It’s different for the secular world out there who only have our planet.

The world is waking up to the future, if any. Here is what Robert Jensen, full professor of Journalism in Austin Texas writes: “Individually and collectively, we have failed to create just societies or a sustainable human presence on the planet. …My conclusion: There is no way magically to solve the fundamental problems that result from too many people consuming too much and producing too much waste, under conditions of unconscionable inequality in wealth and power.” He continues: “When we reflect on our history as a species and the nature of the systems that govern our lives today, the sensible conclusion is that the steps we need to take won’t be taken, at least not in the time frame available for meaningful change. This is reality, and sensible planning should be reality-based.”

He writes: “Hope is for the lazy. Now is not the time for hope. Let’s put hope aside and get to the real work of our understanding our historical moment so that our actions are grounded in reality. My thesis: Our task today is not to scurry around trying to hold onto the world as we know it, but to focus on how we can hold onto our humanity as we enter a distinctly different era of the human presence on the planet, an era that will challenge our resolve and reserves. Call it collapse or the apocalypse or the Age of Aquarius—whatever the name, it will not look like anything we have known. The future will be defined by the continuing drawdown of the ecological capital of the planet well beyond replacement levels and rising levels of toxicity, with the resulting social conflict exacerbated by rapid climate destabilization in ways we cannot predict specifically but that will be destructive to human well-being, perhaps even to human survival.”

Dr. Jensen goes where no churches I know go. He says: “Today our moral challenge is how to live on a planet of 4 billion, 3 billion, 2 billion, maybe less. How are we going to understand and experience ourselves as human beings— as moral beings, the kind of creatures we’ve always claimed to be—in the midst a long-term human die-off for which there is no precedent? What will it mean to be human when we know that around the world, maybe even down the block, other human beings—creatures exactly the same as us—are dying in large numbers not because of something outside human control, but instead because of things we humans chose to do and keep choosing, keep doing?”

Of course the Bible in Revelation strongly hints at major disasters to come. This professor from Texas again: “If you think this is too extreme, alarmist, hysterical, then tell a different story of the future, one that doesn’t depend on magic, one that doesn’t include some version of, ‘We will invent solar panels that give us endless clean energy,’ or ‘We will find ways to grow even more food on even less soil with declining natural fertility,’ or perhaps, ‘We will invent a perpetual motion machine.’ If I’m wrong, explain to me where I’m wrong.”

Environmentally and economically we are in a free-fall. Says Jensen: “That brings to mind the old joke about the fellow who jumps off a 100 story building and, when asked how things are going 90 floors down, says, ‘Great so far.’ Advanced technology based on abundant and cheap supplies of concentrated energy has taken us a long way on a curious ride, but there is no guarantee that advanced technology can solve problems in the future, especially when the most easily accessible sources of that concentrated energy are dwindling and the life-threatening consequences of burning all that fuel are now unavoidable. To dismiss these issues because people allegedly don’t like disaster messages is akin to telling people in the path of a tornado to ignore the weather forecast because disaster messages are a turnoff.”

The situation is serious, so serious that we need a new focus.

Christians, supposedly, are the only ones who have the answers. The world is out of options. Dr. Jensen again: “When we come to terms with these challenges—when we face up to the fact that the human species now faces problems that likely have no solutions, at least no solutions that allow us to continue living as we have —then we will work at accomplishing whatever we can, where we live, in the time available to us.”

Remember: Our future is here, that’s why God wants experienced, holistic folk in the new world to come. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:48, tells us to be ‘perfect’. Actually he didn’t say that. He said be ‘teleios’ which means ‘holistic’, always keeping the ‘telos’ in mind, the end result, because we are destined for eternity, the ultimate holistic society. In these last days when all things are falling apart, the message has to change, away from a fictive heaven as our destination, away from our capitalist ‘growth at all cost’ approach, an economic system that magnifies human greed and encourages short-term thinking, while pretending there are no physical limits on human consumption, a true death cult.

“Collapse” is in the cards. It’s time to say that our comfort means not to preach escape to heaven, but to proclaim the ultimate (dis)comfort, that our world’s expiry date is close, and a (re)newed world is on the way. The church is or should be in the business to prepare the faithful for the Kingdom to come: God made no junk and will not junk what he has made.

Part of that message is to grieve for degrading God’s earth to junk in line with Jeremiah: “My grief is beyond healing, my heart is sick within me” (Jer. 8:18)… “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved” (Jer. 8:21). He also prophesied that Jerusalem would fall, the temple be destroyed, the king and priests be exiled. Nobody heeded his call. History will simply repeat itself.

The sad truth is that the church will not change and people will not hear the Kingdom message. People will not hear that we have strayed too far, that there is no way to return to the right relation within the systems in which we live. I know there are those whose heart is sick and whose grieving for creation is deep. When we feel that inner pain then this means we have confronted the truth about our fallen world. Then we are ready to assume our real humanity.

Ellul gave his book the title L’Espérance Oubliée, The Forgotten Hope. The Church, by and large has forgotten the hope, the hope of the Coming Kingdom. Ellul starts his book by mentioning the Eschaton, the last days just before the Kingdom is to come. We live in that period. His last line is Maranatha: Lord come quickly.

November 10 2013

John 3: 16: For God so loved the world….: houtoos gar ègapèsen ho theos ton kosmon

The Greek original is there for a particular reason. That sentence contains two words in the Greek that we all know: agapè and cosmos. The verb ègapèsen has agapè nas its root. It means “unconditional love”. My 2000 pages Webster dictionary defines cosmos as “The world regarded as an orderly harmonious system”.

I am always extremely puzzled that the church only pays lip service to John 3: 16. Tell me: if God unconditionally, without a grain of reservation, with everything God possesses, loves the cosmos, do not we, who claim to his followers, have that same holy duty?

We know the words of John 3: 16: they have been set to song, they are among the most quoted in the church and also the most misinterpreted. Of course God loves us, but his loving us is included in the totality of the cosmos. God equally loves the trees, the soil, the air, the birds, everything that lives.

Something else that never fails to astound me: how can we say we love our neighbours when we poison their air, contaminate the water, etc. etc. which we do all the time. We sing in church “’This is my Father’s world” but once out of church we drive away without ever given a thought that by slamming the door of our vehicle shut, our minds are equally shut to the air pollution we generate in God’s harmonious divine order. “Sin bravely” said Martin Luther, and I agree, but should we not at least pray for forgiveness because we have painted ourselves into such a corner that our entire existence depends on driving a car?

I guess the sad truth is that we, all of us, are in the grip of money: you, me, basically everybody. This is not because we want that but because we have allowed ourselves to become so entangled. We have become victims of a system that has been devised by the Satan whose aim is diametrically opposed to God’s. Where God wants harmony and cosmos, Satan wants destruction and chaos: his sole aim is to destroy God’s well-ordered system.

The more perceptive among us are discovering that money, far from being harmless, is actually the great destroyer. Because of the subdivisions we live in, we are forced to own one or more automobiles. To be able to drive from our far-flung residences and work-places we have paved the woods, mined the mountains, eaten the seas, eliminated species, causing all the large land and sea animals of the earth and most of the birds to become extinct. Money is at the root of all this.

Yes, we live in a society obsessed with money, an infatuation that equally applies to all religious institutions. Money is the most important rule in today’s society and the acquisition of it is seen as its highest goal. Money makes the world go round and goes around the world with a velocity equal to the speed of light and in torrents unequaled in history: the daily flood amounts to Trillions of Dollars. Because of Money the global economy is like a jet plane, fast, comfortable and when it crashes, its fall is also spectacular. And fall it will.

And what has all this to do with Jesus?

When Jesus came to earth, forever to retain the status of both God and Human, he could have been a human being of any description, stature, degree and condition; and yet he chose to be poor. The English poet Christopher Harvey said of him in the seventeenth century:

It was Thy Choice, whilst Thou on Earth didst stay,

And hadst not whereupon Thy Head to lay.

 No wonder that throughout the Middle Ages Jesus is appearing not just as God, but as a pauper. Curiously the fastest growing Protestant movement in the USA preaches the theology of prosperity, which promises material success as well as eternal salvation. With such a complete reversal of what Jesus portrayed in his life, we do well to investigate the relationship between Jesus and money a bit closer.

I am convinced that Jesus had some basic misgivings about money – just as some of us do at times- because we all know that wealth and its acquisition makes people do crazy and often dishonest things. “The love of money is the root of all evils,” is Paul’s warning to Timothy and this probably was one reason why Jesus did not like money. I think that with Jesus there also was a deeper reason, something very personal. I get the impression that Jesus went out of his way to avoid contact with money and was even loath to touch the stuff. Why do I make that assumption? Well, Jesus has a perfect recall of everything, past, present and future and so had perfect insight, hindsight and foresight into everything. We will recall that his betrayal, his suffering and death was directly associated with money. How would we feel – how would I feel – if I know that money would eventually kill me? Well, I think that this view governed Jesus’ attitude towards money and perhaps even towards economic theory.

Jesus and Money

Here are some concrete examples. Take the feeding of those thousands: Jesus knows that if these people had gone off to buy bread and fish in the neighbouring stores, the merchants, being good businessmen, would have suddenly increased the prices of these basic food items because of greater demand. The law of supply and demand is certainly not a latter-day invention: it has existed as long as people have traded. That’s what economics is all about: charge high when everybody needs it. It happened in Ontario and Quebec with the prolonged blackout during the ice storm: the few candles available tripled in price overnight in the disaster areas. So what did Jesus do to forestall this price-gouging? He simply by-passed the economic law of supply and demand and created bread and fish ex nihilo- out of nothing- well, almost out of nothing.

Then there is that so uncharacteristic incident where Jesus almost went berserk when he chased the money changers out of the temple, upsetting much more than the tables. After all having these business people do their work in the temple was an age-old tradition and necessary to keep the Jewish house of worship functioning properly because only certain kinds of money were accepted in the temple. How else would the pious supplicants obtain the proper animals for sacrifice? I think it was money and its abuses that made Jesus so angry. Another, more indirect, indication: I find it curious that Judas, the unredeemed among the disciples, carried the purse and handled the finances: Judas, who loved money more than Jesus. In the end he ended up with thirty pieces of silver and then discovered that money as an idol wants our very lives. In that sense we are much closer to Judas than to Jesus. With ‘we’ I include all people in the over rich West. Also to me a tip-off was Jesus’ great disdain for the nominal value of currency, evident when Mary spent perhaps a year’s income on that precious oil. “So what,” Jesus remarked, “So what if such a large sum was spent. It is only money.” Or consider the occasion when Peter was asked if Jesus would pay the temple tax. “Of course,” is Peter’s immediate reaction, “of course Jesus pays.” But for Jesus this was not such a straightforward matter. Why this reluctance to pay the temple tax? Well, I have my theory about this. I think Jesus knew that perhaps this very money given to the temple was going to buy his life and ensure his death.

And then, in an ironic twist, with almost a touch of black humor, Jesus shrugs his shoulders and says: “OK, not important. Let me not major in minors. Go to the lake, catch a fish and there you’ll find a silver coin enough for the both of us.” I like that. Jesus is never skimpy. And, of course, with this gesture, he shows that all the fish in the sea and- by implication- the cattle upon a thousand hills, are his.

Here we see Jesus’ royalty coming through. Queen Elizabeth never carries a wallet. Wherever she goes on an official visit, she goes free. Jesus is the same and much more so. Here he shows that he is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, but people do not recognize him that way.

Dualism exposed

Remember that familiar encounter with the Pharisees who were out to trick him? They asked Jesus whether Jews should pay the Roman head-tax. The story is well known. Jesus calls for a denarius (No, he does not carry money on him) and asks; “Whose image?” They dutifully answer, “Caesar’s.” Jesus replies: “Give to Caesar what belongs to him and to God the things that are God’s.”

Here is a story we have grown up with in the church. On it we have based the separation of church and state and have interpreted this to mean that there are two important divisions in society: God- religion – and the State. Well, we live in times where all automatic responses need to be questioned, so let me try another angle. In the first place Tiberius, the then emperor, could not possibly have owned the coin any more than the heirs of George Washington or Queen Elizabeth have the legal right to the bank notes which carry their images. In his compact answer Jesus touches upon two important segments of society: the political-economic reality represented by Caesar and money on the one hand, and the eternal as expressed in the Kingdom of God on the other. He implies in the political part that, no, he would not support an armed revolt or even passive resistance to Rome, and in the economic sector Jesus asserts that the tax and the coins themselves are simply a human device and that all of life, including money, is a matter of faith. That the latter is becoming more clear every day with Mr. Bernanke, the great money wizard, fabricating $85 Billion every month, $1 Trillion a year. Jesus then already implies that the value of money is sheer fiction. The only matter that counts is the eternal – God’s kingdom- which is at hand.

So here is a curious twist in the historical explanation of this incident. Where Jesus, by his life and in this particular instance proclaims an almost puritanical and revolutionary renunciation of the world of money, today we explain this passage to mean exactly the opposite. Where Jesus saw only the Kingdom – which includes all things, also money – as the dominant factor of his life and his followers, and money at best a minor player, today, based on this very text we believe that there are two realms of equal importance: Caesar, the State, represented by taxes- money – and the Church- God- Religion- in charge of the sacred. Here we are face to face with a dilemma: where Jesus abhorred money by all indications because it contributed to this death, we adore it. Where Jesus lived without money, our lives are centered on it. Jesus once made a radical statement: “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” In our Western world everything is about money: the stock market, the strength of the dollar, the price of gold, three items mentioned in almost every newscast. Let’s not kid ourselves: Mammon is God, the Dollar is King in the world and its possession a holy grail. We now put a price tag on everything. First on Jesus – 30 pieces of silver – and now also on the rest of creation: indeed money has become the great destroyer. We all participate in that criminal act, even as we drive to and from church. Jesus was sold for the price of a slave: we are selling creation to serve us as a slave. We, as 6 percent of the world’s population cause 40 percent of the world’s pollution, in perfect accordance with the aims of Capitalism which defines itself as Creative Destruction. I am more and more inclined to think that Capitalism and its exponent, the global money economy, is the Anti-Christ, focused more and more on credit-debit-pin numbers such as 666, the almost perfect number, never to attain ‘7’ the perfect one. I think that’s why Jesus feared money because he foresaw how destructive it would be for him, for his creation and for us.

He died so that we too could be included in his life, a resurrection life, a far better life than we can ever live in a money society. If we want to share in that life then we must regain a new sense of value; we must reset our priorities to have our treasures expressed not in money but in love, in genuine compassion for all God’s creatures, humans, animals, trees, flowers, air, water.

In the final analysis, what does John 3:16 really mean?

The text means that God loved the cosmos so passionately that this love even surpassed the love he had for his son. For us this means that we too must love the cosmos also above the love we have for our spouse, our children or grandchildren. Think about that when mounting that carbon-fed iron horse. At stake is eternity.

Next week:

Is it time for the church to change its focus?

Two of my readers sent me an article, published last week in

De Groene Amsterdammer a Dutch periodical in print since 1877.

Frank Mulder, a writer-journalist was the author.

I found the article of such value that I have, to the best of my ability, translated it, also, of course, because it fits in with my views on both religion and economics.

Since the Dutch version is more than 3500 words, I will present it in two parts.

Money is our God.

Part One.

Summary:

Capitalism is more than a model. It is a religion according to a growing number of independent thinkers. “Is it possible that theology can teach something to economists?” asks Frank Mulder.

Here it is:

I am looking for Mammon! Theologians: take note!

Haven’t you heard of that crazy human who, for all to see in pure daylight, grabbed a gold bar, carried it onto the trading floor and kept on yelling “I am looking for Mammon! I am looking for Mammon!”

Never heard it before? It’s Nietzsche’s famous parable about the fool who declares that God is dead. However “Being dead”, according to the explanation of the scientist Phillip Goodchild, “now means that this time it’s money’s turn to die.”

Why? Picture the stock market today. Because there are so many floor traders who don’t believe in Mammon they started to ridicule the man. Some wondered whether “He has been bought out”, another person suggested “Perhaps he went bankrupt”; somebody else asked. “Maybe he left for China, where people don’t pay capital gains tax.”

While all these money-men crowd around the besotted man and poke fun at him the fellow jumps up and down, looks straight at them and, totally bewildered, yells: “Where did Mammon go? I know what happened! We killed him – you and I! We all are his murderers! And how did we do that? How were we able to rob the world of her treasures? Who pushed the delete button to wipe out those crazy calculations? What’s going to happen now that we have exposed all our possessions to all possible risks? Where in heaven’s name are we going? Are we gambling it all on the throw of the dice? Are we venturing into the Great Unknown, into the Infinite Nothingness?”

Comments Philip Goodchild: “Yes, the god of money is dead and we have killed him,” in his essay on the debt crisis. He wrote this in a periodical not read by economists but by theologians. So theologians take note! That is not a random event because, according to Goodchild, economics belongs to the realm of theology. Economics also has everything to do with crisis and redemption, with promise and debt. Therefore economics is a power worth listening to because we cannot exist without it. And that means that it resembles a god. That’s why, in order to analyze this, we must involve theology.

Here is another voice

In a restaurant in Prague we find Tom?š Sedl?cek busy drinking a ginger lemonade. The 36 year old economist with Attention Deficit Hyper Activity symptoms races through life as a writer, producer, university lecturer, advisor to the Prime Minister and chief macro-economist with the Czech bank CSOB.

He caused quite a furor at home and abroad with his book The Economy of Good and Evil. In it he borrows, seemingly at random, those economical and theological snippets he finds interesting.

Economics is more than mathematical formulas, asserts Sedl?cek.

Economists often act as if markets are rational, as if suspended above us there is some sort of intelligence making sure that the outcome is rational. But that is a myth, just as the homo economicus, always on the alert to maximize utility, is a myth. “Mathematical models are beautiful but they exist only in our imagination” so says Sedl?cek. “People often say that they work in theory but not in real life. Actually the opposite is true. It functions well in real life, but it is difficult to reconcile this with our theories: that’s why we wrap them in all sorts of concoctions: myths in other words. “Nothing wrong with that” says Sedl?cek, “as long as we realize that they are pure inventions, but, of course, contemporary economy never admits that. Let’s face it: it also takes place in many other sciences. Before you criticize our models, they say, come and study with us for five years: only then can you grasp our methods of validation. Well, that was precisely the way the monks in the Middle Ages reasoned. In my opinion they exactly resemble each other. In those days, monks studied, wearing black clothes; now these people are dressed in white.”

Economists presume that the economy is like a machine, something easy to grasp. “But no, that’s not the case at all. The economy is not something tangible. It cannot exist without the state. It is not a machine: the economy has a soul, so to say.”

Sedl?cek wants to know how that soul comes into being. “It’s a matter of ethics, a product of our culture, the end result of age-long discussions about good and evil. It goes back all the way to ancient Greek wisdom, to the Judeo-Christian theology. Without that heritage our economy would have never assumed its current form.” Only when we recognize this basis, according to this Czech citizen, is it possible to reveal the myths and the religious background of the modern economy.

Goodchild and Sedl?cek are only two persons out of a growing body of people who look at the economy with theological eyes.

Take money. Money cannot possibly be reduced to a material phenomenon. Here’s an experiment: place a Hundred Dollar Bill on the table during a meeting. Every few seconds our eyes focus on that piece of paper. It exercises a power by its very presence, independent of time and context. It possesses magic. Theologians call that spirituality. Two Thousand years ago Jesus spoke words which were difficult to digest for his followers: “You cannot serve two masters. You cannot serve God and the Mammon.” The Mammon – a word that carries with it the meaning of money, of security, of authority – strives to attain divine status. Indeed, it is an idol, an idol of the unjust sort, says Jesus, an idol who blinds people.

How is that possible? How can money cause visionary distortion? In other words, how can money impose its own value system? That becomes plain when we observe the two functions which form the basis of money, so say the money experts. In the first place money is a means of exchange. We trade, exchanging goods for money, because in that way we can create more prosperity. That makes money the great symbol of mutuality, of reciprocity. By means of money we are able to suppress evil and scarcity. Our society which cannot function without money, substitutes traditional values, such as benevolence, with this win-win standard, while traditional vices, say envy and greed, are more and more regarded as positive.

Money can also be used as a means to add and subtract. In that way too money can influence our outlook on the world. It’s impossible for money to express everything in dollars and cents. Take love for instance or nature, or community feeling. Basically money is only concerned with tangible items, it’s purely utilitarian. It cannot possibly measure pain and enjoyment, yet even there, money structures society.

Our economic system uses money as the preeminent building block to structure Capitalism. This allows money to have an even greater impact on society. Money does not only colour our values, it also needs our trust, so says Simon Critchley, a British philosopher. In a telephonic interview he explains: “We cannot regard the economy merely as a tool because it is much more than that. Capitalism is an ideology. We regard ourselves too modern to have superstitions, but capitalism is a faith structure, and the crisis in our economy is a crisis of faith. It was for valid reasons that the Romans, at times, featured the goddess Fides – Faith – on their coins. Money is based on faith.”

Critchley – himself an atheist – acknowledges that money tends to assume a dominating position, something in line with what Jesus suggests. Critchley states: “We assume that we are taken in by the goods we buy, but that is not true. It’s money that we worship. Financial markets bank on that. That’s the reason why our entire economic order acquires a religious structure. It’s strange that we hardly give that a thought.”

Although Capitalism has a religious structure this does not mean that it has a religious dogma. All it has is a religious worship structure. Already in 1921 the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamins wrote this in his essay Kapitalismus als Religion (capitalism as religion). Willem Schinkel, sociologist and philosopher, explains what he meant with that. “Capitalism is the worship of debt. That concerns all of us because we all have debt. The word ‘credit’ has as root the Latin verb ‘credo’ which means ‘I believe.’ In Christianity there is the concept of redemption but in the Capitalist type of religion the debt is never repaid. Debt is the basic ingredient. We have to go into debt in order to maintain consumption. In short: debt rules, and because we are part and parcel of this structure, it is difficult to offer criticism.”

Just as in the ancient religions, so too capitalism has its own fetishisms with their peculiar features. Schinkel again: “Just as animistic shamans promote fetishes in the form of images, the credit agencies capture the chaotic financial world out there by means of easy to understand graphics and tables. These acquire authority, a spiritual weight that supersedes the tangible.”

Look at the current Greece situation where the credit agencies devalued its financial situation, blindly following the computer systems, and so brought an entire continent to the brink of bankruptcy. Or look how the Central Bankers, the High Priests of the Capitalist Religion, with a single out of place word are able to cause currencies to tumble.

This comparison with the priests of primitive cultures has already years ago been made by Bob Goudzwaard, economics professor emeritus of the (Amsterdam) Free University, a person who has never been afraid for a bit of theology. According to Goudzwaard all modern ideologies contain at a certain moment traces of theology, including Capitalism, of course. According to him this has to do with a primitive mechanism, that is to say the reversal of goal and means. As individual or as society we pursue legitimate goals, so he explains in his book Hope in Troubled Times (Wegen van Hoop in tijden van Crisis). “We pursue Prosperity or Peace. But when these goals are threatened, we grab every possible means or instrument to get to these goals regardless of the cost. Take economic expansion, a means that in 1957 in the Treaty of Rome is mentioned by name as the necessary road to Prosperity and Peace. A later further development was the deregulation of financial markets. After that the ‘Lisbon’ requirement expressed it even more concretely by mentioning annual three percent economic growth. Everybody, from government minister to banker, claims of course that: “Growth as such is not the goal: our real aim is prosperity and peace for the sake of national wellbeing. But, yes, growth it is the necessary tool.”

According to Goudzwaard this sort of reasoning makes us directly dependent on these provisions. What is really happening is that we put blinkers on, narrowing our vision, which religion tends to do. Goudzwaard asserts that the same thing happened in primitive cultures. People, in times of national distress, ceded part of their authority to what they perceived as higher powers, their idols. Consequently this led to actual worship, complete with certain norms and values. Even human sacrifices were made.

This same assimilation of values Goudzwaard also notices in the modern economy but then on a more rational and systematic level and therefore much more pervasive. “That’s why it has become a virtue in the name of dynamism to break up functioning businesses and sell them piecemeal,” according to Goudzwaard in an interview prior to the credit crisis.

Next week: How do we get rid of the devil?

P.S. Readers of this blog come from more than 25 countries. The largest block of visitors comes from the USA. The second largest group is from CHINA.

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By Bert Hielema

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Preview

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