Christianity and Ecology

Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-Being of Earth and Humans
Edited by Dieter T. Hessel and Rosemary Radford Ruether
Series Editors: Mary Evelyn Tucker & John Grim
Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions Publications
Harvard University Press, 2000
720 pages
ISBN 0-945454-20-1

This volume brings together in one place the thoughts and reflections of many of the thinkers who have defined the conversation over the last few decades between Christianity and ecology. Theologians such as Rosemary Ruether, Sallie McFague, Thomas Berry, James Nash, Ian Barbour, Daniel Maguire, and Larry Rasmussen all have essays in this volume. Gathering these and other prominent authors into one volume makes this collection an important resource for secondary teachers and students. The articles are succinct and well written and many would make for excellent reading assignments for secondary students. The volume is well indexed, with the added delight of a select bibliography that gives readers some idea of how extensive the literature is in this field. The bibliography alone is enough reason that this book belongs on the bookshelves of secondary teachers. Do not let the size of this book daunt you. I must admit that I had some trepidation in thinking about working my way through more than seven hundred pages of text. Once I began reading the essays that fear vanished.

So many of the essays in this collection are excellent. It is difficult, if not impossible to talk about them all. Quickly, I might mention Dieter Hessel and Rosemary Reuther's introductory essay, "Current Thought in Christianity and Ecology." With both a short history of the dialogue between Christianity and Ecology and summary paragraphs of each article, I would suggest you take the time the read it. It is well worth it.

I have chosen to speak more in depth about three articles that represent diverse approaches to the topic. The first is Sallie McFague's "An Ecological Christology: Does Christianity Have It?" Ms. McFague simply states that "since Christology is the heart of Christianity, we must ask whether Christology can be ecological (pg 29)." She develops a typology of Christological motifs: prophetic, wisdom, sacramental, eschatological, process, and liberation to frame her larger question. Once this is done she walks readers through each of these motifs and their ecological assets and limitations hoping they can at least "suggest the rich ecological potential of contemporary Christologies (pg 30). "Simply put, an ecological Christology is rooted in the vibrant notion of "God with us" that draws resources from the various typologies. "Specifically, the following points emerge as needed dimensions of an ecological Christology: the insistence on justice to the oppressed, including nature, and the realization that solidarity with the oppressed, including nature, and the realization of that solidarity with the oppressed will result in cruciform living for the affluent; the need to return to the earth, respecting and caring for it in local, ordinary, mundane ways: the recognition that God is with us, embodied not only in Jesus of Nazareth but in all of nature, thus uniting all creation and sanctifying bodily life; the promise of a renewed creation through the hope of resurrection, a promise that includes the whole cosmos and speaks to our ecological despair; the appreciation of the intrinsic worth of all life forms, not just of human beings; and finally, acknowledgment that human salvation or well-being and nature's health are intrinsically connected (pg 33)."

Douglas Burton-Christie in "Words beneath the Water: Logos, Cosmos, and Spirit of Place" wants to look at the potentially reciprocal relationship between the roots of American literature, which he believes are bound to a "spirit of place," and early Christianity images, functions, and motifs of the logos. From this combination he asks can we connect the incarnate Word to the spirit of place. "I want to ask here whether reading these two traditions together might help us deepen our capacity to attend to, to respond to, and care for the natural world. Can the Christian understanding of the Word incarnate - in all its cosmological and sacramental fullness - illuminate our experience of the natural world on this continent and our poetic expression of the that experience. And can the American experience of the natural world and its various literary expressions - with its acute sensitivity to the language of the land - deepen the Christian understanding of the Word incarnate (pg 318)." He believes they can. Citing the literary works of Thoreau, Denise Levertov, Richard Nelson, Mary Oliver, Annie Dillard, and Louise Gluck, Mr. Burton-Christie suggests that there is a voice that speaks in nature. By following the directions of writers such as these we can begin to "recover a sense of the Word as incarnate in every living being - as creator, renewing presence in the world, as source of all languages, all storytelling, community, the cosmos itself (pg 332)." In essence, we "remythologize the Word in the idiom of our own native places (pg 333)."

Quite different again is Daniel C Maguire's "Population, Consumption, Ecology: The Triple Problematic." Mr. Maguire begins his article by asking, "What is the common good ?" The definition he gives of the common good is: "The matrix of minimal livability within which individual good can be pursued (pg 403)." From there he goes on to look at how the common good is not being maintained globally, and is in fact greatly endangered. In his short primer on the state of the planet he discusses the basics requirements for planetary health of water, soil, and air. Chillingly and astutely he discusses how humans have become a threat to the planet by our polluting or poisoning of these basic necessities of all life. From there he draws the connections between the global poisoning, "poisons are as globalized as capital," and poverty. The statistics are staggering. "Women constitute 70% of the world's 1.3 billion absolute poor, own less than 1 percent of the world's property but work two-thirds of the world's working hours (pg 405)." The global population is expected to rise to 9.4 billion by 2050 in a world where the "overconsumption of the few impoverishes the many (pg 406)." The rise of corporate capitalism, driven by a profit motive, that must by definition increase production and create increased consumption, has in effect created a new global religion of buying and having. By looking a definitions of religion, as that which tells us what the world is and what our role and status in it is, we see that this is what consumerism has become. Maguire is not being metaphorical in his indictment of this idolatry of greed. But he also wants to challenge this creed of commerce. And to do that he turns to "the renewable moral energies in Judaism and its Christian and Muslim progeny (pg 413)."

He sees Israel as fundamentally rethinking: (1) power and authority, (2) status, (3) ownership and property, (4) they linked social and distributive justice to peace; and (5) they fashioned a psychology of shock therapy and raised it to the level of high art (pg 414). Once these ideas are thoroughly explained he connects them with a creative expansion into the ecological domain as: (1) our power and authority over the rest of nature, (2) the status we give to the rest of earth life, (3) how much we dare commodify natural resources, (4) how rights language applies to all of nature, and finally (5) how to shock humankind into a new reverence for other species of life in the earth community (pg 414)." Mr. Maguire warns too of anthropocentric hubris and our need to reexamine our beliefs and conceptions about God, particularly those which foster this type of hubris.

This volume is a significant contribution to the dialogue between Christianity and Ecology. I encourage teachers to read it.

Tom Collins
Seabury Hall
Makawao, Hawaii

return to Harvard Series of Religions of the World and Ecology