Uniting Earthweb

Our world is hurting on any sober assessment.  

Global warming is now on everyone’s lips.  While this fashionable rhetoric will probably wane in public consciousness, the scientific testimony will remain, pointing to the slow and inexorably warming of Earth with serious consequences for future generations.  The ozone layer is already eroded causing more skin cancer.  Species loss is threatening the planet’s biodiversity.  We are consuming many of the Earth’s resources at unsustainable rates.

At the national and local scale environmental degradation is evident. Our waters and fish are contaminated by chemicals. Sewage disposal, polluted air, contaminated industrial sites, noisy roads and airports and the disposal of mountains of waste are problems which confront us now. The battle rages over logging of forests, productive land is being lost yearly to salinity, our soil erodes and degrades at an accelerated rate and our inland rivers are dying.  At the personal level much modern urban development is an affront to our eyes, ears and noses (1).

The environmental crisis is a crisis of global existence itself.

Lynn White brilliantly pointed out nearly forty years ago, that our environmental crisis has religious roots (2).  Specifically for us Australians that means Judaeo-Christian roots.  He asserts we have a fundamentally exploitative way of thinking about our land and resources, our environment. This goes back to the command in Genesis 1.28 to “fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth”.  When I first read White’s article thirty years ago as a practising environmental scientist it troubled me greatly.  My Christian faith wanted to refute it, but my practical experience kept whispering: “True, true!”  It obviously also had its impact on the theologically articulate, since it almost single-handedly spawned ecotheology.  

The ancient three-decker view of the world had God at the top of the apex, humans below God and the rest of nature on the bottom at human disposal (Psa 8; Gen 1.28). This model of balanced and structured management permeates the whole of the Old Testament. It offers a rich theme for development and is the root of all modern environmental protection programs.  

Its weakness in today’s world is that God is no longer at the top of the social apex. The Cartesian/Newtonian basis of modern science and technology may have reduced the non-human world to a mechanistic system, subject to human manipulation, but at least it took shape in a world which still considered itself answerable to God. It was not a totally free agent to please itself at will. Today the technological fruits of the enlightenment have removed that restraint in our secular world. But the exploitative attitude towards nature, an attitude traced back to the Judaeo-Christian belief in domination, remains. Human greed and arrogance now rise supreme over every other species on the planet. There is no longer any restraining sense of responsibility to a higher power.

Models for Christian responses?

It is the role of ecotheology to explore answers to this religious question.  As a non-theologian, I am emboldened to offer a simplification from which the more theologically informed would probably shrink.  In my view there are broadly two Christian/religious responses to the environmental crisis:

• stewardship of nature, and
• kinship with nature.
  

The stewardship model comes from Adam, the gardener placed in Eden to tend it (Gen 2.15), and the Israelite tenant farmers who held the land on trust for God (Lev 25.23).  It is the root of all modern secular environmental protection programs.    The stewardship model of caring for nature usually carries the secular title: “sustainable development”.   

In my view, as commendable as it is, the stewardship approach frequently fails to protect the non-human world in the final analysis, because its point of reference is God and us or, in the more familiar secular model, the human species alone. So on these grounds we argue that tropical rain forests should be preserved because they are the gene pool for development of future medical drugs for us, or because they are the lungs of the planet which purify the air we breath - not because they have an intrinsic value of their own which we should respect. Thus we only conserve enough of them to yield their benefits to us. The secular version is anthropocentric and the Christian theanthropocentric (3). On both scores nature tends to come out a poor second.  

In a subset of this stewardship approach, an eschatological view sometimes prevails that finally unites humankind with God apart from nature. Nature is no more than the backdrop to the stage on which the great drama of redemption is played out, to be rolled up and replaced after the finale (Hebrews 1.10-12; 11.13-16; 2 Peter 3.12-13).  Such an approach is not particularly conducive to valuing nature and the environment highly.

An alternative Christian view is the kinship model. But it is not easy to articulate or grasp.  Running through the Bible is a strand of faith which places a high value on non-human creation apart from its value to us. Psalm 104 is a beautiful expression of it. Psalm 148 and other scriptures call on all creation, not just humans, to praise God. Paul looks for the redemption of all the created world, not just the human component (Rom 8.18-23; 1 Cor 15.23-28).  Christ is the Cosmic Power in Whom all creation exists and will be renewed (Col 1.15-20; Phil 3.21; Rom 11.36; 1 Cor 8.6; Eph 1.10, 4.10; Rev 5.13).  This is the “creation faith”.

This position, favoured by some scholars and theologians, is essentially based on our innate sense of kinship with nature. We want to save the trees or whales because we sense some deep chord of empathy with them. The warm inner glow of the environmentalist?  But perhaps it is more than that!  This feeling has its roots in the concept of creation faith. We are not above God’s creation, but embedded in it; a part of it; kin with it. This is the spring of our deepest feelings of environmental concern. From this perspective the rational arguments for conservation in long-term human (= economic) interests follow on from but are secondary to our initial instinctive reactions to “save the trees”.

Augustine of Hippo and Martin Luther develop this high view of nature in classical terms. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is the modern Christian prophet of religion and nature, although he strangely spiritualises the Divine consummation (4). But the living example was Francis of Assisi who appears to have loved birds and animals with a truly Christian love.  Lynn White proposed St. Francis as patron saint for ecologists.

Theologians have built on this view in recent years to develop a new understanding of Christianity fully consonant with scientific knowledge, including the development of life. The diversity, complexity and novelty displayed by various levels of nature betray the purpose of existence and are the measure of the creative spirit in life. We humans remain firmly embedded in a continuum with the rest of nature and not outside of it. We are kin with it.

In this view Christian love can logically extend to the non-human world (5). God is strongly identified with the creative spirit manifest in nature; His revelation in Jesus Christ is given a new and rich extension.

Despite the attractiveness of weaving our innate love of nature into a coherent theological understanding, there remains a risk that the uniqueness of the Christian revelation may be lost in a sort of sophisticated pantheism. This is probably why many theologians have felt more comfortable with the stewardship notion.

How might we personally respond as Christians?

The individual outworking of such considerations, whatever model appeals to us personally, is a realization that, if our environmental problems are in part ‘religious’ in origin, then their solution may ultimately be in part ‘religious’ in nature.

Religion - and the Christian religion is no exception - has been a powerful force for changing attitudes throughout recorded human history.  We are told increasingly by governments, experts and advocates of environmental change that ‘technological fixes’ will not be adequate to solve the environmental issues which confront us.   Fundamental changes in attitudes are frequently called for across a wide spectrum of public debate and advocacy.  Perhaps then ‘religion’ has a larger role to play than merely to salve the consciences of adherents troubled by ecological challenges.  Perhaps ‘religion’, even in some transformed manifestation, has a wider communal role to witness and set examples in a largely secular world.  Perhaps it needs to do more than merely to speak to its own.

On a personal note, I have been a practising environmental scientist and engineer for 36 years of my professional career.  Commitment to the goals of my profession has been important for my life.  Throughout that time I have also been a committed Christian, obviously also important for my life.  I have struggled for much of that time to understand how faith and profession interact, but without coming to any definitive resolution.  My attempts to engage, very much from a non-professional level, with professional theological thinking on the issues have been helpful, but not definitive.  Of the two options outlined above, the kinship model seems to me holds out the greatest hope for the future; yet for many years I have felt more comfortable working within the stewardship model - indeed I have sometimes felt intense frustration with zealous, ‘deep-green’ advocates of what could be called a ‘kinship’ approach.

If there is an answer on the personal level, it has eluded me.  But one of the most helpful discussions I have encountered was an article by John Cobb, one of the earliest ecotheologians of the ‘process theology school’ (6).  He outlined five possible individuals responses, summarized here, perhaps inadequately:

1. Christian realism:  entering the political arena to join with others in winning environmental change, albeit incrementally; being prepared to be make compromises and taste the ‘dust of the arena’ in the course of the struggle;
2. The eschatological attitude:  recognizing that the present political arena ultimately disillusions;  living and experimenting in hope of a less corrupted world;  living in expectation of the Kingdom and being empowered by it, as were Jesus’ disciples, yet without any assurance of seeing it in their/our time;
3. The discernment of Christ:  being ever alert to discern “where Christ as the incarnate Logos is at work in our world”;  working as a community of loving Christians to discern the Lord’s presence in the emergence of unforeseen opportunities, new ideas and creative imagination related to nurture of creation;
4. The way of the Cross:   celebrating life while swimming against the tide of consumerism and self-gratification, at whatever personal cost that entails;  identifying with poverty;  standing out of the main-stream of our societies, sometimes in the tradition of the classical Christian ascetics and monastics;
5. Prophetic vision:  speaking out publicly against and from within social orders which institutionally degrade God’s environment;  recognising that in proclaiming uncomfortable and unwelcome truths, the prophetic cry is raised:  “Where there is no vision, the people perish”  (Prov 29.18, Micah 3.6).
   

To Cobb’s responses I would simply add, as a present reality, the response adopted by many Christians today, albeit not a very environmentally friendly response:  the expectation of the imminent ‘Rapture’, in which the earthly environment is swept away or destroyed to make way from perfection from or in heaven.  This corresponds approximately to Santmire’s metaphor of ascent (7).

Most of us can find empathy with one or more of the above positions in our various responses.

Footnotes 

(1) Commonwealth of Australia 2001 State of the environment report 2001 CSIRO Publishing, Canberra.

(2) White, Lynne 1967 The historical roots of our ecological crisis Science 155:1203-7.

(3) Santmire, Paul H 1985 The travail of nature.  The ambiguous ecological promise of Christian theology Fortress, Philadelphia, pp 149.

(4) Ibid, pp 55-73, 145-173.

(5) Nash, James A 1991 Loving nature.  Ecological integrity and Christian responsibility Abingdon, Nashville.

(6) Cobb, John Jr. 1979 Christian existence in a world of limits Environmental ethics 1:149-158.

(7) Santmire, ibid, pp 13-29.