Sermon: Ecological Theology

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Ecological Theology ^[i]

By Charles Rush

January 29, 2006

[ Audio (mp3, 4.5Mb) ]

is year, I got a copy of a letter one of our kids wrote to Santa. It said, "Dear Santa, These are things I would like for Christmas: 1) For wars to stop 2) Poor people to have good homes 3) Everybody to have a good Christmas (because no one wants to have a rotten Christmas 4) Homeless people to have food and other things you need. Santa, I would also like for you to have a jolly Christmas. P.S. I live on Beech drive in New Providence but for Christmas I will be at 451 Wolf avenue in South Orleans, Massachusetts." I'm sure Santa tucked the change of address in a pocket somewhere… It's a lot of scraps of paper to keep up with. I take it as evidence of small impact that we are having on our children when they ask first for an end of war.

Spirituality makes those changes in us doesn't it? In the past few years, I know that I've been doing some new things in my life that I never quite felt the need to do before spiritually. Periodically, I've been prayerfully engage in communing with nature. I suppose that most of us start through that practice in earnest the older we get. Bill Coffin, who is now old and frail, recently said, "Nature looks different the closer you are to joining it."

We were recently in Hawaii visiting my son and every day I went diving for a while and every day I would see a sea turtle to swim with for a while. Once they sense that you are not aggressive, they just sort of swoosh a few feet from you, slow and graceful, like the primordial ancestors that they are. They don't like you to swim behind them where they can't see you but if you come at them head on, they will practically hit your mask like "Hey, what you know?" I find it meditative to swim along with them, completely quiet under the water, so beautiful, ancient, non-anxious.

We had a similar experience with Whales off the coast of Scotland when I was on sabbatical. We were on a small boat and we chanced upon a pod of Minke whales that were breaching right around the bow of the boat. It is the strangest connection when you make eye contact with these ancient Mammals. We have that deep limbic resonance with them. I'd love to swim right along with them if only I found 40 degree water refreshing and moved like a jet ski. It is a kind of primal spiritual connection that fundamentally carries with it a moment of mutual blessing.

For the last several years, I've been lucky to be out in Montana in the fall. It is a beautiful place with picturesque trout streams. A big part of what I like about being there is driving 40 miles down a two lane macadam road, passing maybe two cars. We get off onto a dirt road and cover a few more miles. When you get out of the truck, there is a quality of quiet we just don't have on the East coast. A few years ago, I was walking out across a field, the horses were off in the distance. Dusk was approaching. Up ahead about 100 yards was a coyote that had just entered a clearing from the brush. I wasn't moving and he was surprised to see me. Coyotes are very skittish of humans generally, but more so in Montana because the ranchers hunt them pretty hard. 100 yards is very close. He turned to assess threat level. He moved a few yards, stopped and looked back, moved a few more, stopped. I love those moments where you are figuratively and literally standing in the boundary between civilization and wilderness interfacing with one of the creatures from the beyond. Jean Jacques Rousseau might have been entirely naïve and utopian about his views of the state of nature. Nevertheless, there is something of a spiritual calling from wilderness that is also undeniably real. No question that a great part of that for all of us gathered here derives from a certain deprivation from nature that is part and parcel of our daily lives in our great Metropolitan exurbia, where our world has all been tilled, tamed, tunneled, and tarred.

For me, and I'm sure for you too, the spiritual wonder that comes looking up at the night sky on the boundary with wilderness has become compounded with the knowledge of solar systems and planetary evolution. Our nearest neighbor Mars, in many ways, so similar to the Earth, yet devoid of substantive atmosphere, subject to oscillating temperatures that make it even technically impossible to visit at the moment, unable to sustain organic life in all probability. Carl Sagan, the astro-physicist from Cornell, was fond of pointing out that given the 'Billions and Billions' of stars out there (I loved the way he used to say that), he suggested that there should be on the order of 10,000 planets with an atmosphere equivalent to the Earth. Perhaps Professor Cummins can do the math for us on this one, but the instance of planets like ours is exceedingly rare and we have never yet found anything closely approximating it in 80 years of systematic earnest searching.

The spiritual wonder about our world is compounded with this knowledge, sensing our cosmos and our place in it, Kenneth Boulding was apt when he first coined that phrase that we all live on "Spaceship Earth", underscoring as that pregnant phrase does, our atmospheres fragility and our common dependence on it. There is something about reflecting on 'life itself', the simple and profound reality of it's existence that ought to produce of gratitude, awe, and what Rudolf Otto used to call the Mysterium Tremendum- a wonder-filled reverence that gets to your bones.

Perhaps because we are entering a new chapter in our social/cultural consciousness what I have just described is increasingly common sense to most people, even if they haven't yet articulated it concretely. We recognize a kind of common need for an ecological theology. We have a sense of our spiritual relationship to the earth and we understand that this entails social, economic, and political implications yet unplumbed. At the moment, our arguments are of second order reflection, they are mainly arguments about how to properly analyze the complexity of factors that are mutually interdependent in causing trends that affect us globally. What we don't know is far too large. And that affects the degree to which we can understand the extent of the impact of industrialized society on global health. Likewise, it affects the degree to which we can predict the earth's ability to, so to speak, repair itself or otherwise absorb the by-products of advanced industrial civilization.

But, it seems to me, that we are rapidly entering an era where we presume Common Sense that we need to work towards a "sustainable society", a term that has only been coined in our life-time.

You may recall that about 40 years ago, Lynn White wrote an article for Science magazine that suggested that Christianity was largely responsible for developing an anthropocentric spirituality that in turn encouraged a form of technological advance and scientific approach that sees nature as a sphere to be conquered. This predisposed us in the West to a general under-appreciation of the innerconnected character of our total ecosystem, a precursor to ecological crisis.

At the time, he juxtaposed Christianity's view of the Transcendent God that is over and against the natural order with the common pagan world view that saw the gods inhabiting every field, stream, forest and mountain. In the pagan rituals that follow the seasons of the year, he saw a more integrated relationship between the divine and nature that encouraged a harmonious appreciation for the natural realm and our place in it.

Today, this benevolent view of the pre-Christian world pagan world, is no longer so easy to presume. Now that archeologists have the ability to study micro-organisms in a fairly sophisticated manner, we have numerous examples of ecological disaster in the ancient world on sites that were previously only the subject of quandary as to why they suddenly came to an end. And it is quite likely that we will establish more in the future. It is just not likely the case that the ancient tribes were uniformly benign like the Indians that Kevin Costner meets in "Dances with Wolves". It is a better Hollywood vision than an accurate depiction.

However, there is no question that Christian theology, in conjunction with Western philosophical trends, contributed to notions of human dominion over the natural order that were easily corrupted into a tacit exploitation of the natural order.

The roots of this are given right in the first two chapters of the bible in the two accounts of creation. In the account in Genesis 1 (that we read this morning) God tells Adam and Eve in verse 28, "Be fruitful and multiply, and 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."

As Kenneth Cauthen and others have pointed out, today we might wish that the words 'subdue' and 'have dominion' had been edited for environmental sensitivity. In Hebrew, the word subdue 'suggests English equivalents such as conquer, subjugate, violate, bring into bondage, force.' And 'have dominion over' suggests equivalents such as 'tread down, prevail against, and reign over.'[ii] The text has the spiritual value of teaching us that the world around us is good but it also suggests that the world around us is to be used for human benefit, perhaps principally for human benefit.

Now, there is certainly a place for notions of subdue and have dominion in our relationship with nature. Every time I drive around New England or all across Europe and see those quaint stone walls, I think, each and every one of them was pulled from a field, loaded on a cart, and stacked by hand. In the deep South of my childhood, you had these incredible vines, of which Kudzu is only the most well known, that would take over everything. It is important to remember that, for the vast majority of human history, simply clearing fields, planting, and tending took enormous time and energy… It felt very much like subdue or be subdued. No doubt about that.

I still marvel at Tractors and back hoes. But, at some point, and that point would be in the late 1800's our technology became sufficiently efficient and powerful that 'subdue' and 'have dominion' took on ominous connotation.

We can't get rid of this dimension in scripture, but we have to also balance it with the word for our generation which actually comes from the Second Creation story in Genesis 2. In that story, after God creates Adam and then Eve, God points them to the Garden Earth that God has created for them and God to tend the Garden. [iii]We are stewards of the precious natural order that preceded us and sustains us. Today we need to emphasize this latter dimension but up until relatively recently, we have not.

No, Christians theologians tended to actually speak of the uniqueness of humanity and to define that uniqueness explicitly. We emphasized our moral capacity, our rational capacity and we did this in distinction from other animals in order to underscore our special relationship with God.

At the same time, philosophy was also beginning to take up the question of human nature in a substantive way, to try to explicate the meaning of human existence. I take only one of the many decisive contributors, Rene Descartes. Descartes was searching for an indisputable ground for his epistemology (How do we know what we know) and he began to doubt his senses as they are not totally reliable. He continued doubting the existence of the world around him because he could not completely experience it. He continued the process until he came upon his famous maxim Cogito Ergo Sum, I think, therefore, I am.

Reason, rationality, was the only firm basis for philosophy. And it was constitutive for understanding human nature. Mathematics was the fundamental syntax for describing reality and theoretically we ought to be able to understand the world as a complex mechanism. Given the limitations of the scientific approach at the time, they tended to speak of it in terms of a clock.

After Descartes, in the West, we speak of the schools of Dualism, those who tended to juxtapose the rational faculty and accentuate the uniqueness of reason in human beings as that which is definitive of who we are and what we are about.

Now there is no question that this contributed to a certain objectification of nature and it encouraged us in the West to overestimate what distinguished us from nature rather than to focus on what we held in common.

I might just point out one simple difference that typifies our present day approach with that of the Enlightenment when Descartes was doing his important work. I started a book this summer that Pat Calhoun gave me on the Science of Love. Neurologists and Psychiatrists wrote a book about how our brains work and why we mate the way we do. Fascinating read. They point out that our emotional life shares quite a great deal in common with all mammals because this part of our brain has largely the same structure and function in all higher mammals.

No great surprise, but humans and chimps have almost identical facial expressions for joy, sadness, laughter and anger. Even though we can't rationally communicate with other mammals, we can read their emotional states, sometimes in a very sophisticated relationship. This is why some people feel so deeply involved with their dogs. As the scientists would say, you share deep limbic resonance with your pet. You read each other emotionally. You communicate.

Turns out, no big surprise, that the emotional dimension of our existence is a huge part of what we are about. You don't hear anyone at the Hair Salon saying, "Let me tell you about a rational break through I had this morning." No, it's 'let me tell you about my boyfriend.' Occupies a huge amount of energy and time.

And it is what we have in common with mammals. From the Enlightenment, say 1650-1950, we were concerned with what distinguished us from animals. Now, we are thinking more about what we have in common.

Why? I presume that our collective subconscious recognizes that we have to address these issues maturely and think about our place on the planet collectively if we are to keep "Space ship Earth" sustainable into the future.

In the Enlightenment and the post-Enlightenment we reveled in rationality. Socially, it was a period of phenomenal technological break through, scientific mastery and engineering feats. We celebrated every advance, nearly intoxicated at times with our own sense of accomplishment and control of the world.

And we might have continued on this path for many more centuries except that metaphorically and literally, at mid-Century we engineered the Atom bomb. We so mastered the world with the application of reason that we have now figured out a way to kill not only our selves but, metaphorically, all life on Earth. Robert Oppenheimer's words upon seeing the first Atom bomb were so prophetically prescient. He quoted the Bahagavad Gita "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

In so many ways since mid-century the consequences of our technological success have begun to manifest themselves in ways, we now have to deal with: pollution, advancing populations, the impact of agriculture on rivers, just to name a few of the myriad of issues. We have become victims of our own success. This is the challenge of our age, how to figure out to bend the power of technology towards morally and spiritually holistic ends that can address issues of balance and sustainability. This is our inexorable challenge and it will shape all aspects of our world- our theological world-view, our economic incentives, our political structures, our moral understanding of the good life. So I invite you to think about this further today in the next hour with Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig from the Goddard Space Institute.

By the way, I was noting todays theme of ecological theology at a staff meeting earlier this week, waxing eloquent about it's importance, when Julie and Holly said 'so that is why you bought a pick-up truck that gets 15 m.p.g. this week?' Bring me right back down. Oscar Wilde once said, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

[i] I am indebted to Kenneth Cauthen's paper "Christianity and Ecology: The Emergence of Christian Biopolitics" for this sermon. You can find the paper at www.frontiernet.net/~kenc/ecology.htm. His observations on Genesis I credit directly. Likewise, his general observations about Cartesian dualism and it's impact on Western thought. His generation introduced this subject to mine. As such, it is difficult in an introductory way for the disciple to be distinguished from the Mentor. On the broader level, there is nothing of intellectual substance in this sermon that is not already in his concise paper, in part because we set for ourselves the same subject, in part because we simply agree. His long and thoughtful work on theological ecology have earned him the reputation of being sober and mature in his judgments.

[ii] Ibid. p. 5 of 10.

[iii] Ibid. p. 6.