I ended the chapter on “Trust” (see chapter Nine) stating that being accused of following the devil puts me in good company, as Jesus was accused of the same thing! This brings me to another thread which has become increasingly important during my spiritual travels: the New Testament picture of the Pharisees. This thread began while I was in seminary and continues to advise me to this day.

First of all, the Pharisees were not “bad guys.” They have been given very negative press because of the New Testament account of their opposition to Jesus, who he was and where he originated. But the Pharisees were the teachers of the scriptures in their day. This was the group whose main task in life was to study the Bible and to teach others to follow its direction for life. The modern-day equivalent would be we who claim to know the scriptures, who spend our lives in reading, studying, and meditating upon the scriptures. In this, there is no difference between the first-century Pharisees, and todays Evangelicals.

A brief aside here for a lesson in Greek! The English term “evangelical” is a direct transliteration of the greek word “euangelion”, also often used in verb form, “euangelizo”. This term means, most literally, “good news”, or, as it is often translated, “gospel”. The verb form, then, becomes transliterated as “evangelize”, or translated, “to proclaim good news”, or “to preach the gospel”. As it has come to be used today, then, to evangelize, or to preach the gospel, means preaching the Bible. So that the term “Evangelicals”, as applied to a certain branch of Christianity, has come to mean those who hold most closely to the Bible. That is the basis for the connection I am making between Pharisees and Evangelicals. Both groups profess to being the group who adheres most closely to the scriptures. Both groups proclaim the message of the scriptures. Both groups admonish everyone around them to live according to the scriptures.

As I write this, in early 2012, there is an election heating up in the U.S. Because I lived much of my life in the States, I pay close attention to the political scene there. This is due to personal interest, memories of politics when I was younger, and also because the U.S. is the strongest military power and the strongest economy in the world. What happens there affects all of us around the globe. This is especially true in Canada. The U.S. is our closest neighbor; we have the longest unarmed border in the world between us.

And what I am hearing is that as the Republican Party holds their primary elections, much of the rhetoric coming out of the mouths of contestants lays claim to be biblical. While I am pretty cynical about how close to actual biblical truth they are, they claim to be basing their positions on biblical truth. A large portion of the Republican Party wants to force everyone in U.S. society to live according to the scriptures, at least according to their own particular version of the scriptures. Once again, my cynicism about all of this is that they tend to take a very populist view of what the scripture actually says. None of them seem to understand the true core of the gospel truth of scripture. As is true of most of the political world, they hold their fingers up in the air to test the direction of the wind. Whatever they sense is the prevailing direction of the winds of understanding truth among voters becomes their position.

Going back to the biblical account, who did Jesus target for his most vehement words? It was the Pharisees. Did Jesus rant and rave about the oppression and injustice of the occupying Roman government? Did he rail against the cruelty of foreign military forces on their soil? Did he criticize neighboring countries for their injustice or lack of freedom? No! He criticized his own people.

The case could easily be made, and is made, by many biblical scholars that Jesus himself was a Pharisee. He certainly lived and taught in the tradition of the Pharisees. He was called “Rabbi” by his followers and by the Pharisees themselves. His position in the society of his day was that of an itinerant teacher of the Pharisees, one who studied the scripture, one who taught the scripture, one who admonished his followers to live by the scripture. So when he lashes out at the Pharisees, he is lashing out at his own. He calls them blind guides, blind fools, serpents, a brood of vipers (Matthew 23.13-36).

As I grew in my understanding of the connection between the Pharisees of the New Testament and the Evangelicals of my own day, I became more and more clear of where I stood in relation to my own group, the Evangelicals. It became more and more obvious that my trust must be in God, and God alone. I could not trust the Church to decipher just what the scriptures–which Evangelicals proclaim to be God’s Word–was saying. I must depend on God, and devote myself to hearing him clearly. I must trust him. He will not lead me astray. He will not allow me to get sucked into falsehood. He wants the absolute best for me. It is up to me to listen, to have ears to hear what he is saying.

One other aspect of this whole Pharisee/Evangelical issue, and my fellow Christians’ admonition to not get waylaid by the trickery of the enemy, is that of intellect. As I follow my path, I have come to see more and more that what I was actually doing in the past was relying on my mind. It was an intellectual exercise in reading and understanding and figuring out the Bible. So, it begins to seem to me that in Evangelical circles the one who has the clearest mind, the most articulate preacher or proclaimer, determines what is truth. The person who can argue the clearest wins the day. And those of us who just fumble along doing the best we can with what we know submit to those articulate voices among us.

Now, I don’t want to be totally negative about all this. Many of God’s preachers are gifted by him to clearly proclaim the truth. Along with the prophets of old, he gives the voice and he gives the message which is to be proclaimed. And because I believe that to be true, I still participate in the organized religion of my heritage, the Church. I still listen to my Christian brothers and sisters, taking their advice and admonitions seriously. But I also take it with a huge grain of salt. I check with Spirit which things I can hold onto as truth, and what I can allow to drop by the wayside as not helpful.

Yet another aspect of the connection I see between the Pharisees of the New Testament age and today’s Evangelicals concerns me deeply. The Pharisees were, as outlined above, the most serious holders to biblical truth in their day. They were the ones who devoted their entire lives to studying the scriptures. They had schools of thought which debated the truth of the Bible, determined to know exactly what God was saying to them through the ancient writings. They wanted to get it right. They did not want to miss anything God had for them, any truth he wanted them to know.

As an aside, it was very likely in this context that Jesus engages the leaders in the temple at age twelve in questions about scriptural truth, and astounds them with his wisdom at such a young age. Another example of Jesus engaging the Pharisees in discussion of scripture occurs in Matthew 22.34ff. Apparently the hot topic of the day was to get at the core of the Law, the heart of the scriptures. What is the central commandment of the Law? As a Rabbi, greatly respected by the people, they sought Jesus out to see how he would respond to this question. And his answer silenced them!

So, even though history has brought the Pharisees into disrepute, in their day they were the respected scholars and teachers of scriptures. From the New Testament scriptures I think it is pretty obvious that they were often quite smug in assuming they knew God’s word. They knew the scriptures.

And yet, they missed it! When God sent his Word, in the human person of Jesus, to the earth, the very ones who thought they knew God and his word, missed it, or missed him!

I find, to my dismay, elements of this same smugness in todays Evangelicals. All too often I encounter attitudes of confidence in knowing what scripture has to say. After all, we have studied the Bible for centuries. We have resources coming out of our ying-yang. There is no shortage of books, references, resources of all sorts, on the Bible. Millions of Evangelical Christians spend years, if not their entire lives, in the study and teaching of scripture.

Are we in any way in danger similar to the first century Pharisees in missing God when he appears? I truly believe this is a very real danger. The only reassurance I have is that I know God to be endlessly merciful. I do not believe that he will deliberately deceive us. He will appear to us in a way in which we are able to perceive him. In subsequent chapters I will outline more clearly my present-day understanding of God and how he is working in today’s world.

But for now, I think that we Evangelicals need to take a serious look at our way of relating to God. When he does appear on earth, we do not want to be caught sleeping.

Throughout the nineties, and into the double-aughts, I was outside my Mennonite Brethren roots. I attended a small, non-denominational church called Barnabas Christian Fellowship (BCF). The pastor, Jeff Imbach, became a key mentor for me during this time. My years with Barnabas were both healing and a time of learning, a lot. Prior to my joining BCF Jeff told me that Mennonites tend to focus on guilt. “Here at Barnabas we focus on grace.” I discovered how true that was. I have never seen a church group live out grace as well as Barnabas. Many people gravitated to Barnabas who had been seriously injured by church experiences in the past. This included me. I had gone through a tremendously painful experience in the mid-eighties while pastoring a church. BCF was a place and time of healing from that experience.

People at Barnabas were broken in so many ways. And they were accepted, completely. They participated in leading services, in teaching, in sharing their lives with the church. Barnabas was truly a miraculous group!

When Jeff Imbach resigned from his position we tried valiantly to keep Barnabas going. We managed for a couple years. But so much of the church’s identity was wrapped around Jeff’s deep spirituality and his profound teaching that it didn’t work. BCF just wasn’t the same without Jeff and we finally closed the doors around 2004.

Following the closing of Barnabas I floated along church-less for awhile, but eventually ended up back in the Mennonite Brethren fold. My first MB church experience in the double-aught decade was a small church plant in my city. This closed after three years of not growing. So, in a period of less than five years, I went through two church closings! These are not easy experiences but I learned a lot, in different ways, from each of these times.

The closing of this second church led me to join another Mennonite Brethren Church, this one right down the street in my neighborhood. A larger, city church, it is quite different from any church I have been part of throughout my life. And I am surprised that I enjoy it as much as I do!

While my theology continues to veer off from traditional church orthodoxy I find myself feeling at home in a setting where people know me, where quite a few of us have similar backgrounds, where I am continually reminded of where I have come from, and how far I have come, in my beliefs and in my own spiritual journey. Not everyone at the church accepts some of the directions I am going, including my pastor, but I feel accepted as a person. The music is very good, the preaching is creative and stimulating, the people very friendly and welcoming. I feel at home there.

Trust and obey,

For there’s no other way,

To be happy in Jesus,

But to trust and obey.

(old gospel hymn)

This chapter was lived very much in concert with my wife. As Peggy and I moved through the nineties and into the double-aught decade, we were in our forties, moving into our fifties. Our two sons graduated from high school in the mid-nineties, and although they would live for awhile in the same basement rooms they grew up in, they were living their own lives, on their own schedules. Our involvement in parenting was entering a new stage, one which opened up whole new vistas for us both.

One thing this caused for us was an evaluation of where we were in life. Where have we come from? Where are we going? What about life as we get older? Retirement? I tried out a few different things during this time, but nothing seemed to “click”. The first two to three decades of my adult life had been spent in numerous types of jobs. I had never followed any one career line. As a result, I found myself approaching fifty without any “career” as such. I had done a little of this, a little of that, but nothing for longer than four years or so.

This lack of a definitive career line had the result of no long term retirement planning. I had no built up retirement savings to look forward to. I had no company pension to rely on. Ten years after beginning her career, Peggy left employment for full-time private practice as a clinical social worker — and financial uncertainty comes with self-employment.

But the two of us, through discussions over a period of several years, had been growing in our trust in God, the Creator of the universe, the Source of all life. Both of us had changed dramatically by that time, in our conception of just who, or what, this Source might be like. But we both had seen evidence of the unlimited care that we were receiving from the Creator. Peggy had moved away from regular participation in organized religion. I continued to be part of Church without her. But we both still had strong beliefs, instilled in us from childhood on.

We eventually came to this place:  we needed to make decisions about our lives and futures, based not on fear of being destitute, based not on money, but on where we felt the Source, God, was leading us. That meant that jobs, career moves, everything, must be based on what the Divine wanted of us. We were to live in the moment, as far as that is possible in today’s world. We were not to live for the future, which almost always has some basis in fear and anxiety. We were to place each day into God’s hands, trusting that he wanted the very best for us, trusting that he had our best interests in mind, trusting that whatever came would be the way he wanted us to walk.

This became acutely clear to us when we were looking at a new step which would involve a lot of money. We are not rich folk. We don’t have a lot of money squirreled away for the future. We basically live from week to week on our earnings. Where would these thousands of dollars come from for this new venture? We felt very clearly that it was Source who was asking us to do this. And we also felt that if it was God calling, the money would be there. We believed that our decision to follow or not should be based not upon money but upon Spirit. We took the step, and are still following this path, and the money continues to show up! In many different ways, the Divine has supplied our needs.

Once again comes the image of path, travel, walking, the Travels of a Mennonite Heretic!!! The picture this brings to my mind is of a forest path in the mountains. As I walk along the path, I don’t see very far ahead. I concentrate on each footstep, careful not to stumble over tree roots, loose rocks, etc. Occasionally I catch glimpses of the way ahead. Sometimes these glimpses can seem overwhelming. “Oh man, I’ve got to climb all the way up there?” Sometimes these glimpses can be encouragement. “Oh wow! I can’t wait until I get over there!!!”

Looking back to where I’ve come from is often similar. Sometimes I can see only a few steps behind me. Other times I can catch glimpses of how far I have travelled, the terrain I have climbed through. But the actual travel is very routine. I put one foot in front of the other. Step after step after step. There is a cleansing rhythm to hiking in the mountains, to walking anywhere, actually. Step, step, step. Not thinking about how many more steps I have to take. Not thinking too much about how far I’ve come, (although this might be more difficult!). The positive result of looking back, for me, has been encouragement at how far I’ve come over the last bit.

Thinking spiritually again, if I look back a decade, or two, or three, I can realize that back when I believed a certain way, whether about life, about truth, about God, about the Bible. And if I take stock of what I believe now, I am encouraged that I have grown in these life-shaping understandings.

This trust in the Divine, which holds the entire universe in its care, has grown to magnificent proportions in the last few years. As alluded to earlier, it has freed me up to just rest, knowing that I don’t have to know everything, knowing that I don’t have to figure everything out myself.

And this leads me to yet another thread which has been growing throughout the past couple of decades. This place of rest, of not having to have everything figured out, has led me to see that for most of my life, my “faith” was more based on intellect than it was in an actual spiritual exercise of trust.

Several years ago the church I was part of closed its doors, and I was left without a church home. For awhile this was okay. I decided not to make church shopping a priority. I would live for a period without Church in my life. This was part of learning to trust that God knows where my life is; he knows what I need at this point in my life, etc. This Church-less-ness lasted for about eight months or so.

When talking to a friend one day, I decided to try out a local church, about a block from my house. I had attended there before, but had never felt this was my church “home”. It happened to be a Mennonite Brethren Church, the denomination of my heritage. So I went to the pastor to find out what he and the church were all about these days. I immediately liked the young man who had recently moved from being the youth pastor to lead pastor. But I told him he needed to know what sort of parishioner he was getting if I was to join his church! “Pastor,” I said, “my trust in God is secure. I am one hundred percent sure of who I am in God. I trust him supremely. I do not have the same trust in Church.” He assured me that was okay with him, that he welcomed people who had more questions than answers.

I have been going there for close to four years. And I love it! Even though my theology is becoming increasingly more heretical, that is, less orthodox, I still enjoy this church. For one thing, it keeps me at least a little connected to my heritage. Many city Mennonites in Alberta have their origins in Manitoba, where Mennonites proliferate. So we have common backgrounds. The pastor himself was born and raised in Winnipeg, and pastored in the very church I was raised in for the first few years of life, and which my grandfather had pastored for the last three decades of his life. This church, which my great-grandfather had planted, is the first Mennonite Brethren Church in Canada, the Winkler Mennonite Brethren Church, established in 1888. And another great-grandfather of mine had become one of the strong leaders in the earliest decades of its life. I have very deep Mennonite roots, and I welcome occasional reminders of this.

The other thing I enjoy about participating in Church is that it continually reminds me of my scriptural roots. Hearing sermons and discussions on the Bible are a constant reminder of where I have come from. True, I participate in these discussions with a much altered mindset than earlier in my life. But it is all part and parcel of God’s truth. I truly feel that where I am today is built upon that foundation from my past, both in terms of heritage, and the Bible.

And I find this faith in the Divine being tested periodically when I begin to share just a bit of my current beliefs. When I told the pastor I no longer trusted the Church, but that my trust was in God, I did not go into great detail. Part of my distrust of the Church, or, if not an active distrust, at least a lack of trust, includes not trusting the Church’s book, the Bible, as much as I used to.

That statement alone is enough to cause most evangelical Christians to have their hair stand on end! The Bible is God’s Word; how can you call it the Church’s book? And yet, as hinted at in an earlier chapter, it was the Church who put together the collection of writings today known as the Holy Bible. This is not readily accepted or known by many mainstream Christians.

And while I still revere the Bible as holy writing, my faith is not in the Bible. I trust God. And I feel very strongly about that. For most contemporary Christians, faith in God is almost inseparable from faith in the Bible. How can I be sure when I am following Spirit that I am being led in the right direction? How can I be sure which spirit it is that I am following? The devil is depicted by the Church as being a tricky fellow, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. How do I know it is not the devil who is leading me, perhaps leading me astray?

Again, I have learned to rest through all this. Ultimately, it is not my place to determine. It is my place to trust. It is my place to follow. It is my place to be obedient. And I consider myself in good company! Jesus himself was accused of being of the devil. (See John 7.20; 8.48-52; 10.20; Matthew 12.23-27.) And he came to reveal the wisdom of God to us. “Learn from me . . . and you will find rest for your souls,” (Matthew 11.29 – see entire passage of 11.25-30).

So, if Jesus came to reveal God to us, and was accused of being from the devil, what does that say to us in our day? Whenever someone questions which spirit I am following, I just rest in my relationship with Spirit, and trust that God knows what he is doing and what he is asking of me.

My reading (and occasionally hearing first-hand accounts) about NDE’s exposed me to the idea of reincarnation. Time-wise we’re talking about the nineties now. Not very many NDE’s broached the subject of reincarnation, but enough to cause me to sit up and take notice.

My initial response was that there’s got to be a way to explain this that does not necessitate a belief in reincarnation, or past lives. I wasn’t sure how, but I felt sure there was an answer there somewhere. After all, scripture says we are, “. . . appointed . . . to die once, and after that comes judgment . . .” (Heb 9.27).

There were too many questions about reincarnation. For one thing, the logistics don’t make sense! Given the population explosion in the last century, there do not seem to be enough people having lived in the past for everyone alive today to come from a previous life.

Furthermore, if we die, and then are reborn, what’s to say we don’t go back and forth in time? Like maybe when I die as Dennis in this life, I might go back to live a life in prehistoric China or something! And if that’s so, then what’s to prevent me from believing that all of our individual lives, all the people living today, are just one being, having lived over and over and over, going back and forth in time, and each time living a different life? It was too complicated. My little brain just could not comprehend all this! There had to be another answer!

As we moved into the 21st century, I sort of kept this concept on the back burner. But I found myself gradually becoming more and more used to the idea that we quite possibly have lived lives in the past. One day, I ran across some research done at a U.S. university which studied reports of children who would talk, at very young ages, about previous lives they had lived.

The researchers found such reports from many cultures and from many belief systems. Although these children’s stories were more prevalent in places where reincarnation was an accepted part of life and faith, accounts came from a wide spectrum of cultures. In places where reincarnation was a belief, this could easily be explained by the fact that children’s stories of having lived other lives would be listened to seriously in that culture and not be dismissed as childish fantasies.

But more telling was the fact that many of these children’s stories came from the U.S. and other cultures where reincarnation was definitely not part of the prevailing belief system. Fascinating stuff, and in a form not easy to ignore.

Then one day my brother Wesley, my dear, conservative-minded brother, not  naturally given to exploration of the spirit, generally content to live life without much questioning, sent me the name of a book I should read. “You cannot read this book without believing in reincarnation,” he said. And it was this book that pushed me over the edge. Another way to put this:  God pulled me kicking and screaming into believing in past lives!

The book which became the final answer for me was Soul Survivor, by Bruce and Andrea Leininger. It is an account of their son, James, who, at age two, began having nightmares where he would wake up kicking and screaming about being burned. Upon advice from their doctor, the parents began allowing him to go through these nightmares–while standing by, watching and listening, not waking him up. At times during the day Andrea would ask her son what he was playing, and he came up with things he had no previous experience of in this life. He named names of companions which were not typical childhood names. He named a ship he had flown an airplane off of. He named the type of airplane he had flown.

Andrea came very quickly to the conclusion that her son was experiencing a life he had lived in the past. Bruce was more difficult to convince. I could readily identify! The Leiningers were conservative, fundamentalist Christians, and Bruce just could not reconcile his beliefs with the idea that his son was the reincarnation of someone else. Soul Survivor is essentially the story of a father’s struggle to explain his son’s visions in some way other than reincarnation.

Bruce began compiling information on the bits and pieces coming from his son’s dreams. The family’s entire house became an archive of material. Since the material from James’ recollections was not in any sort of logical or chronological order, Bruce’s research took a lot of time. But after several years Bruce came to the conclusion that there just was no other explanation for his son’s knowledge than that James had lived the life of a U.S. World War II pilot in the Pacific who had been shot down.

Bruce and Andrea were able to contact surviving members of this former pilot’s military group, and took their son to a reunion. He was able to tell others at this reunion details of his previous life which no one could have known. The Leiningers were able to contact a surviving sister of the downed pilot. She also, after visiting with James, unreservedly accepted the idea that this child (now around eight years old or so) was her brother reincarnated. The family went to the island where James had been shot down, and he could remember some of the geography of the area. They dropped a rose into the water at the very spot where his plane, in a previous life, had gone down in flames.

Well, what could I do? I either had to accept that this boy was a reincarnated World War II pilot, or I had to dismiss the father’s story as so much baloney. Given my predilection toward respect for others, acceptance, and so on, I could not do that sort of violence to these people. Their story was entirely credible from every angle. They were not seeking fame or reward for this incredible story. They just wanted to help their child through these dreams, help him come to terms with who he had been in another life. In this way, they were like any other parent. They loved their son so much that they wanted to help him understand. I could not dismiss their story without seriously disrespecting them as people.

So, there I was. I now believed in the truth of reincarnation. What next? The first result of crossing this hurdle was that so much of what I read took on new meaning. And this included scripture. I was able to view scriptures I had known all my life with new eyes. And that, as any spiritual seeker knows, is an exhilarating place to be! I no longer had to be uptight about how my new understanding of truth fit into my old understanding of truth. I was at a place where I did not know how this reconciled. But I was also at a place where it didn’t matter much that it didn’t reconcile. True, I continued, and continue to this day, to mull all this over, and wonder how it fits, but I realize that it is not up to me to make sure it fits. Somehow, God’s truth, in all its forms, will be consistent in the end. It is not my duty to force it into consistency!

I will come back to where this thread has led me in more recent times. But I want to deal with another significant thread in my life which was occurring about this same time. As alluded to in the previous paragraph, I was beginning to trust God more and more as he was leading me into truth and not worrying my poor little head about the details. In other words, I was learning to trust that God knew what he was doing, and that he knew where he was leading me.

While my seminary training solidified my biblical roots, and began a thread which has run right into the present, other influences cropped up along the journey. One of these was reading about near-death experiences (NDE’s). About the same time I began seminary I encountered the seminal book on NDE’s, Life After Life, by Raymond Moody. Fascinating stuff!

And what fascinated me particularly was the consistency of NDE’s. So many people, a high percentage of those who had these experiences, reported similar elements. Moody’s valuable contribution was to distill these common experiences into a picture of what a typical NDE was like.

From the eighties onward, I would read about NDE’s whenever I encountered material on them. Though not obsessed by them, they continued to fascinate me. The picture they give of the afterlife, although admittedly limited, is thrilling. These experiencers are showing us a glimpse of the spiritual dimension. Christianity believes in this dimension, but does not know a lot about it. There are many opinions formed from Church teaching on the matter, but little actual data.

And here is data! Through the eyes of people clinically dead and revived we can begin to see a little bit of what “heaven” is like. So, what is it like?

For one thing, that dimension into which these people go upon dying is completely, unwaveringly, one of acceptance and love. They experience comfort, support, encouragement, and wisdom. They encounter wise beings who are there only to help them.

They are given perspective for the return to their human bodies. Many of the people going through these NDE’s do not want to return to their bodies. This dimension is so filled with peace and love compared to their lives on earth, why would they want to come back?

But of course there are limits. The information we have about this heavenly dimension comes only from those who do come back. We cannot know about those who died and do not return. Those people who do come back from an NDE are almost universally restricted in how much of “heaven” they were allowed to experience. So the ones who come back to tell about this are able to give us a glimpse of the spirit dimension. But only a glimpse. Not a complete, or full picture.

NDE’s vary as to the depth the person was allowed to go into the spirit world. Many are brief encounters, coming only to the gates of heaven, so to speak. Others go very deep into this world, and come back with much fuller pictures of where we go when we die.

One thing which occasionally showed up in these NDE’s was the idea that we live multiple lives. This was difficult for me to accept at first, given my conservative religious upbringing and training. But this idea began yet another thread in my life’s journey, which will be treated in the next chapter.

The ideas inferred by NDE’s seem to cause great consternation in some Christians’ minds. There are many aspects to this picture of the spirit world which do not fit with orthodox Church teaching. And predictably, the Church reacts. To my eyes, it over-reacts needlessly. Initially, there was much discrediting of the whole phenomenon of NDE’s. “It is all just a biochemical reaction as the brain near death”, or some such foolishness. I could not believe the lengths to which some people went in their mental gymnastics to try and explain these folks’ experiences away.

Why are we so afraid of our own, or others’, experiences? We talk in church about “experiencing God”. But when people actually do experience something of God, then all kinds of resistance springs up. Why? Is it because we are so tied to our own beliefs of how things “should” be that we can’t allow ourselves to be challenged by anything outside our belief system? When people talk of spiritual truths in language and words with which we are unfamiliar, do we immediately shunt these words aside, ascribing them to heresy?

When it came to NDE’s, I adopted a stance that these individuals had experienced something. Any other stance would’ve been disrespectful to that person. Non-acceptance of his story basically says I believe he is lying.

So, okay, you experienced something. Now, what does your experience tell me about the spirit dimension? What did you learn about God and the afterlife? How does that fit with my present beliefs? Do I have to shift anything? What is God saying to me personally through your experience?

Before I move on to deeper considerations of these questions, I want to make one more observation about NDE’s. Pretty much everyone who has one of these experiences comes out of it a changed person. They find themselves more loving, more ready to listen to others, more sensitive to their own spirits, much deeper people than before. Some of these “conversions” are radical and dramatic, others a lesser shift in focus. People who have never believed in God, or any form of religion previously, come away with a deep appreciation of God and the spirit world, feeling loved and cared for beyond anything they have ever imagined possible.

But not nearly everyone, not even close to a majority, seeks out organized religion. Generally, it is those who have previously been involved in organized religion who perhaps continue, although with a much deeper and quieter understanding of what this is all about. Some leave their religion. But I have heard very few stories of NDExperiencers who become more religious after their experience. An encounter with God does not drive them to Church. Experiencing the spirit world makes them more spiritual, less afraid, more peaceful, loving persons. But it does not make them more religious. More often the opposite.

Could this be one of the reasons the Church is threatened by NDE’s? Hmmm. I wonder. If that is the case, it says more about the Church’s need for control than it does about the integrity of NDE’s.

As mentioned in the previous chapter on apocalyptic writings, there is a stream of thought which began to emerge in my thinking early on, probably during the 1980’s. While it came out of apocalyptic writings and study, it does not deal as much with end-of-the-world scenarios, as it does with the makeup of present-day society. And that stream has to do with prophecies about Babylon.

In the biblical book of Revelation there are very strong images of Babylon, and very strong words against her, specifically in chapters 17 and 18. In its own day, to its intended audience, as I outlined previously, this message about Babylon would clearly have been heard as a reference to Rome. Rome was the oppressing city. Rome was the imperial power which kept all other forces under an iron fist. It was the controlling force in all of Europe, the Middle-East and Africa. Rome’s aspirations reached to the entire world, or at least the entire known world of the time. They wanted control, and would stop at nothing to gain this control.

Rome was the oppressor. Cries for justice needed to be voiced against this authoritarian controlling force. But those voices could not overtly name “Rome” as the oppressor, out of fear for their own lives and the safety of those around them. They needed to camouflage the message in ways their audience could understand, but that could not be directly linked as a pronouncement of judgement against Rome. So “Rome”, for the primary audience of Revelation, becomes “Babylon.”

“Babylon” harkens back to the Old Testament and the story of the tower of Babel, told in Genesis 11.1-9. At Babel, people decided to consolidate their power-hold on society by building a tower whose top reached the heavens. Yahweh (God) could see that once they accomplished that, “. . . this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them” (Genesis 11.6). So, “. . . from there Yahweh scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth” (11.9). God opposes humans consolidating power into one central authority.

This is the message John the revelator was conveying to his first-century Palestinian audience, believers who were being oppressed by the central power of Rome. While Christian churches of the first-century were the primary recipients of his message, I believe that these words can also contain meaning for us today. What contemporary message can we gain from this cryptic, ancient writing? I offer several suggestions.

For one, the language of Revelation 18 carries a strong set of words having to do with commerce. Buying and selling, making of fine goods, transporting of goods, food, spices and cloth, jewelry, precious metals are all mentioned. So commercial, corporate enterprises are the object of these judgements.

Then, anyone associated with this commercial activity is implicated as well. Ruling authorities, merchants, shipmasters, seafaring men, sailors, craftsmen, artists — all are mentioned. In other words, anyone who has benefitted monetarily from the buying and selling, the transportation, and the manufacturing of goods — including the artistic endeavors of prosperous societies, ruling powers, taxation authorities — all are under judgement.

Who does this speak to in today’s world? Who does this sound like?

Somewhere along the timeline of my life, probably around the late nineties, I ran across the label, “Bilderbergers.” This secret society was formed in the aftermath of World War II. The name comes from the resort Hotel de Bilderberg in the Netherlands, where the first meeting of this group took place. At least yearly, an exclusive list of powerful and elite are invited to these meetings. Around 120 to 140 attend, chosen from European royalty, the world’s top financial and business leaders, and government officials. At these meetings, world economics are discussed and solutions debated. All of this is unofficial, but given the powerful nature of those attending, direction for western economies emerges and finds its way into governmental policies.

While the Bilderberger group is oriented toward Europe, many prominent and powerful Americans have participated over the years. David Rockefeller of the U.S. has been one of the primary organizers of these highly secretive meetings. But there are other equally sinister and secretive groups which are oriented more to North American interests. The Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations are two of these. There is much overlap of membership in all three of these groups, as well as other secret societies.

Basically what this consists of, in my eyes, is the ruling elite — the financially powerful — who are trying to gain financial control over the entire world, including heads of major international corporations, powerful political leaders, and owners of the major media outlets. Combining old money of the royals with the “new” money of corporate executives, they hold all the cards. They influence, if not outrightly control, who will be leading the western economies and governments. They control society through manipulation of money as well as the media. They inject fear into populaces for the purpose of increased control.

No accountability exists for their actions. International in scope, they are not answerable to any one government; they supersede nations. And it is not purely money that is the goal. The members of these secret societies are so wealthy that money means almost nothing to them. They are after power and control. Some of them feel they are destined to rule in this way. It is their God-given role to be in power over the world; this is not questioned. They don’t actually care about individuals in the various nations over which they hold sway. Populaces are there only for their own manipulation and to do their bidding.

World-wide financial institutions such as the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the World Bank, G-8 and G-20 meetings, are instruments by which the ruling elite seek to consolidate their power. When weaker economies fail, they extend credit, but only at the severe price of increased control of the resources and power structures of these countries. We all noticed the consolidation of banks and other institutions in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, another move to strengthen their hold on power.

I see these ruling elite as building once again the tower of Babel, in an all out effort to control the world. The tower in this case may be somewhat figurative, compared to the physical, ancient ziggurat built in Babel. But figurative though it may be, it is every bit as dangerous as the tower of old. Probably more so.

If my view of these matters carries any element of truth, these ruling elite are setting up a power structure at odds with what the Creator of this universe desires. From the point-of-view of heaven, this contemporary tower of Babel cannot and will not be allowed to continue. At some point, the Divine will certainly reach down and thwart all efforts at control over peoples’ and nations’ destinies.

It is with great irony that I watch U.S. politics. The party which proclaims the greatest connection to religious faith is also the party which walks most closely in step with Babylon, the ruling elite. Decreased taxation for the rich, decreased regulation of the exploitation of this planet’s resources, decreased “welfare” programs — all go hand-in-hand with the desires of the ruling elite. Mavericks who stand up against their designs are either eliminated outright, or are effectively throttled to the point that they are no longer able to hinder the plans of the elite.

I do have hope, however! I recently read a book called Unplugging the Patriarchy, which outlines in allegorical form a spiritual battle being waged between emissaries from heaven and the earthly powers-that-be. Lucia René and her cohorts worked at destroying the rings of power which have been wielded by the ruling elite for decades, if not centuries. I would like to think that the financial collapse of 2008 was the beginning of the end for those who seek to lord it over us for their own gain.

We shall see. I think that this year, 2012, will be a telling time when it comes to the power structures of Babylon and how the future of this planet will unfold.

One thread in the journey of my life has been a fascination with end-of-the-world issues. This began already in my teens. In the small, inner-city church in which I grew up, we would occasionally have guest teachers come in for series of Bible studies. Those I remember most vividly are the ones having to do with biblical prophecies, especially the books of Daniel and Revelation. I was fascinated as teachers would hang up long sheets of timelines, with all of the seven this’s and seven that’s on them.

Then in the seventies we had the book, The Late Great Planet Earth, which spread like wildfire through churches. This book contained an even more detailed outline of all the biblical prophecies, how everything fit together. Of course, this ignited fierce speculation on how all these prophecies would be fulfilled in our day.

When I attended seminary in the early eighties, I took courses on Revelation and other biblical prophetic literature. Here I was able to attain a much more balanced and clear-eyed view of what role the biblical prophecies actually played in the life and history of the Church. Working as an associate pastor I even taught a course on Revelation. I was still enthralled with these apocalyptical writings, but now was seeing them with a calmer perspective.

While I had come to a much saner outlook on biblical prophecy, it continued to fascinate me. I would read novels about the end of the world; I loved movies dealing with the topic. I continued to keep all these ideas in the back of my mind, always wondering how all this would turn out, how things would fit together at the end of time.

As I moved through the nineties and into the double-aughts decade I began to encounter writings and lectures on 2012. Here were prophecies from other cultures, chiefly the Mayan, but also other ancient societies, which dealt with end-of-the-world events. And all from very different perspectives. Speculation was growing that the year 2012 would somehow be the culmination of human history upon this planet. My thinking, as I was exposed to these other views, was that all of this new stuff had to somehow “fit” in with the old stuff I had learned earlier in my life from the Bible.

As I sit here writing this at the beginning of the year 2012, I still wonder how it will all “fit” as this year’s end approaches. I certainly no longer believe all the old ideas about how biblical prophecies will be fulfilled. I believe that the biblical apocalyptical writings had specific messages for their own audiences, in first century Palestine and before. And I still consider them relevant writings for us today.

But I certainly do not believe that we can take them in any sense literally. They were not “literally” intended to be taken literally! Their language was highly symbolic. Their references were veiled in apocalyptic language. All of the symbolism in them pertained to their own day, and to their own audiences. All of the visions and cataclysmic scenes were for them, primarily. They were not written for us. We can learn from them, but they do not outline modern history. I have heard way too many biblical preachers go through way too many sorts of intellectual gymnastics trying to fit things in to current events to give any of it much credence.

Another aspect to this thread as it works its way through my life time, is going to be dealt with in another chapter. This has to do not so much with apocalyptica, but with new interpretations of scriptures for today.

But before I move entirely away from this topic, there is one stream of apocalyptic writing which I want to deal with separately, in the next chapter. While it stems from prophetic writings, it has not to do as much with end-of-the-world topics as it does with lessons we can learn about today’s world.