Stimulus Vol 15 Issue 4 November 2007 |
Table of ContentsThe “Other”, the “Gift”, and “Priesthood”: Zizioulas’ eucharistic and eschatological theology of creation “We love because God first loved us”: Experiences of creation and community in A Rocha field centres The earth as a “garden” for all creatures: Lynn White forty years on For the beauty of the earth What game theory can tell us about saving the world Fair weather: who should pay for climate change mitigation? Being just where we are in a climate of change Mapping the coming cultural revolution Jonathan Edwards’ ecological and ethical vision of nature Arks and spaceships: children’s stories, political visions, and the environmental crisis How should Christians treat animals? Jack Spong at St Luke’s, Masterton St Imulus: Ps Dr Jesus MA, PhD, MBA, I presume? |
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November 2007 |
EditorialImagining a healed world
Imagining a healed world Christians in the twenty-first Century need to heed especially the call to a renewed inner relationship with the natural world, and to resist the cultural mandate to control. As one phenomenologist has said, “The idea of a universe that is selfsubsistent – standing entirely on its own, fully operational and intelligible, independent of anything outside itself – is both odd and modern.” If Christians retreat to an other-worldly preoccupation it does no good to ourselves or the world.
Christian eschatology, however, has been problematic. To get our theology sorted in this area requires a new eschatological outlook, one that eschews the premillennialism so common in evangelical churches. Another Christian story has emerged in the last few decades, a story which affirms continuities as well as discontinuities between this world and the next, taking both the world to come and this world seriously. The earth will not be consumed by fire, but transformed, or laid bare. Our work now matters in some inconceivable way. We work either for shalom, or we choose against God’s larger shalom, and these choices are significant.
The kingdom of God is here and now in the matter of our bodies and in the life and experience of this earth – because of the incarnation – and not exclusively in the future, or elsewhere. God’s purposes in salvation and redemption extend to the whole of creation and culture, and not to humanity alone. In a recent paper J. Richard Middleton draws out the holistic intentions of the scriptural narrative in Acts 3:19-21, Eph 1:9-10, Col 1:19-20, 2 Peter 3:10-13 and Rom 8:19-23. In these passages we hear the creation will be liberated, and that God will restore everything. Moreover, says Middleton, human praise and worship is primarily through culture, not in the other-worldly disembodied worship of much Christian piety. These new emphases help us to balance the this-worldly and other-worldly emphases of Scripture. If in the end our eschatological fate is here on a transformed earth, if God will dwell on earth, then this partly helps to resolve the old dichotomies that have served to distract us from ecological responsibility and from our place in nature and the presence of God in nature.
Thus the resources for our healing are present in the Scriptures, and also in our churches. We are communities of hope rejecting both the presumption and the despair of the world, and receiving creation as contingent gift. We are also communities which understand repentance, or turning around. And churches are the locus of the gospel of healing. Prayer for the earth is also prayer for healing. Jesus, I believe, draws on the deep healing of the universe, present in God’s world, present in the touch of the God/man Jesus, and sometimes given in a lesser form to other humans. Jesus shows as much as anything else that healing is present in nature, as much as brokenness and decay. How this relates to climate change is that it gives us hope. Many commentators now believe we may have gone beyond some point of no return. Cynicism or despair are natural outcomes of taking climate change seriously, but the healing stories might give us hope. Because of these stories we can imagine a new and healed world.
This is an auspicious year for such reflection. Not only have we heard that Al Gore and the International Panel on Climate Change have jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to warn and educate in this area, but it is also forty years exactly since Lynn White Jr. aired his grievance with the Church in the pages of Science. In this issue of Stimulus, Duncan Roper’s paper looks directly at the intervening period, and argues that in one interpretation White is saying what Tolkien also unfolds in his epic saga; that there is for humans a “simultaneous realisation of a calling to unfold the potential of creation whilst caring for the creaturely integrity of all its inhabitants.” In calling for a renewed relationship with the earth, however, there are many competing voices. In this respect Duncan also shows that there are three blind alleys to be avoided: secularism, pantheism and Gnosticism.
White himself was not opposed to Christianity and advocated the resurgence of the Franciscan tradition within the faith as being more hospitable to creation than are other modern variants. He argued that the Christian presumption of dominion had given rise to our problems and that there must at least in part be a religious solution. Since White wrote, the Church – or those parts of the Church not anticipating Armageddon – agonised over these charges. Christians came to see that we have a duty to care for the earth, and that whatever was meant by “dominion” it was not the rape and abuse and careless utilitarian squandering that we had participated in, or at the very least had not critiqued adequately in western culture.
More recently we have dwelt upon our connection with nature at a level deeper still. Andrew Shepherd engages with the work of Zizioulas, the Orthodox theologian who is now a part of our western theological conversation. Andrew – with Zizioulas – critiques the assumption of sameness that enters into much ecotheological discussion. We are not just the same as nature; in our freedom we have distinctiveness, but this is in order that we might love and be in communion with the creation, rather than using it always for our utilitarian purposes. What we have failed to do, Christ has achieved, and we can enter into this communion through the Eucharist. Action is good, but so is the “ceasing from our endless activity.” Andrew’s paper gives a deep and wide beginning to our discussion.
Anthony Dancer takes up a related theme, arguing that we must not let creation care become a new form of dominion. We are blind to the extent to which we have lost this communion of which Andrew speaks. Sometimes saving the earth becomes yet another form of technological control and domination. Climate change needs social change, he says; it should not be considered a part of creation care. We should be asking the question “who are we?” and not just “what can I do?” He dreams of a world in which the community is informed by ekklesia, in which reality is mediated by Christ and not technology, in which our ethics are an “improvisation” informed by our eschatology.
Arguing for theological communion and a new ekklesia can at times lose sight of who we are as embodied human creatures. This task is taken up by Carolyn King and Murray Sheard who enter the fraught territory of game theory. Carolyn King draws out the complexities of altruism and the “prisoner’s dilemma”, showing that sharing is risky when you don’t know the other partners but makes more sense in smaller stable communities. Churches, she thinks, can “play a vital part in encouraging this process,” and we would all be better off if we understood these deep human tendencies and their origins. Murray Sheard also asks the question who will pay for fixing the ecological crisis. He raises important ethical questions about how we decide these questions in the international arena; which generation and which countries or individuals should pay the costs associated with climate change?
For John Flenley the most interesting question is what makes a beautiful landscape. If we are to enter again into some meaningful relationship with nature we must make sense of the deep attractions and the deep beauty that nature represents. John uses “prospect theory” to persuade us that an attractive landscape must have elements of a grand prospect, of danger and of refuge within it. He draws on imagery and symbols in other areas like the crucifixion to ask why an image that is on the surface so desolate should be central to our lives. These considerations, too, take us deeper into the mystery of our basic connection to the planets fauna and flora.
Richard Storey fills out the history of A Rocha, and of the New Zealand group who are now attempting to start a field and education Centre here, offering practical and experiential advice to young people, churches and schools, as well as engaging in practical scientific environmental restoration projects.
A non-Colloquium paper in this issue addresses a related theme, our responsibilities to animal well being and health. Regardless of arguments for and against vegetarianism, the status and well being of animals is an urgent ethical consideration. Michael Morris makes the case for being a vegan, arguing that eating and using animals cuts short that animal’s God-given gift of life.” He joins an increasing number of theologians and philosophers arguing for animal rights.
The core papers presented in this issue of Stimulus are from a one-day Colloquium on Creation Care at Bible College, Henderson, on May 22nd. This Colloquium was jointly sponsored by A Rocha, an emerging Christian environmental organisation now affiliated with A Rocha International, and TANSA (Theology and the Natural Sciences in Aotearoa), a centre for science and faith dialogue within the Tyndale/ Carey Graduate School, partly funded by Metanexus.net. We are very grateful to Stimulus for their willingness to devote this issue to the theology of creation care.
Nicola Hoggard Creegan for the editorial committee Douglas Maclachlan Publisher
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Being just...in a climate of change |
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“...to be part of the gospel imperative to transform minds and put faith in God into practice.” |
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STIMULUS THE NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT AND PRACTICE |