Celebrating Nature by Faith

Studies in Reformation Theology in an Era of Global Emergency

H. Paul Santmire

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781532699719, 9781532699726
• eBook ISBN: 9781532699733
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Sometimes it is helpful to take one step backward, in order to take two steps forward. In this insightful volume, H. Paul Santmire draws on his long-standing and widely recognized engagement with ecological theology to propose that the traditions of the Protestant Reformation, rightly read, offer rich resources today for those who are struggling to move forward to respond theologically to the crisis of a planet in peril and thereby to celebrate nature by faith.

1

Living with Nature according to the Bible

From Stewardship to Partnership1

How shall we humans live with nature? That is the chief question I want to have before us in this chapter. And that, I take it, is one of the premiere questions facing the human species today.

There are other premiere questions familiar to us, to be sure. Such as: how shall we humans live with each other on planet Earth? And: how shall the poor and oppressed human creatures and indeed all the living creatures of the Earth secure their own places so that they can justly flourish? All these questions, of course, are interrelated and none of them can be rightfully answered apart from the others.

But I want to focus on the first question here, about how we humans are to live with nature, as long as it is understood that the other two are very much on my mind, too. As, moreover, those of us who identify with the Christian tradition today are driven to ponder that first question, many of us, especially those of us who treasure Reformation traditions, will as a matter of course also find ourselves driven back to the Scriptures.

So moved, we may well continue to ask Martin Luther’s own premiere question as he searched the Scriptures—how shall I find a gracious God? But, with no less spiritual passion than Luther’s, when he asked his question of the Bible, we will surely want to ask the question I have already highlighted—how shall we humans live with nature? Or, to use a term with more biblical resonance: how shall we humans live with “the earth”?

That question has, of course, preoccupied concerned citizens on planet Earth with a sense of urgency in recent decades—although, along the way, other concerns like the pursuit of power or the pursuit of happiness or the pursuit of security appear to have pushed that urgent question out of sight and therefore out of mind, all too often. But for those Christians who have refused to be distracted by those other popular concerns one answer to the question of living with nature has been offered, again and again, and on biblical grounds: we humans shall live with nature by being good stewards.

I believe that there is a better answer to that question, and, indeed, that that better answer can be abundantly illustrated as we search the Scriptures: partnership, rather than stewardship. I propose to make that case now, with a fresh approach to relevant biblical texts. As these explorations unfold, too, I hope to show that the partnership idea opens up—as a kind of exegetical key—wider and perhaps not yet widely acknowledged vistas of biblical apperceptions of nature that are exciting to contemplate. But first I want to give the stewardship idea its due. In a sense, it has served us well.

The Force of a Familiar Theme: Stewardship

Stewardship is a venerable theological theme. No one can legitimately fault the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, the Advertising Council, and the Environmental Defense Fund for working together to encourage religious communities and their members to respect the earth, to “reduce, reuse, recycle,” to buy recycled goods, and to use energy efficiently, all for the sake of environmental justice. The rationale for this campaign seems to be fundamentally sound, too, biblically and theologically: “The earth is the Lord’s. We are its stewards.”2

Stewardship, as a matter of fact, has been promoted by American Churches with some success, more than any other theological theme, in response to the global environmental crisis. In support of that commitment, in the past few decades, an enormous amount of biblical and theological work has been invested in defining and defending the theology of stewardship, some of it highly sophisticated.3 Of particular importance, in this regard, is the prophetic emphasis on “ecojustice” espoused by some of the most outspoken advocates of the stewardship theme.4

Along with these kinds of theological and ethical commitments, ecumenical and denominational agencies and local congregations have also joined with various other public groups in the name of better stewardship of the Earth’s resources, in order to influence the policies of timber companies, agricultural conglomerates, and other corporate interests, sometimes with tangible, positive results. Call all this the first wave of theological responses to the global environmental crisis.

With this, I am well aware, as a former parish pastor and a teaching and writing theologian, that the construct of stewardship has regularly been invoked in Church circles, often enthusiastically, for another purpose, too: to undergird Church fundraising. Many Christian congregations in the U.S. have regular “stewardship campaigns” every fall. Such fundraising efforts are often supported by national agencies, some of them ecclesial, some of them independent, on occasion in competition with each other. In this sense, stewardship has become a major Church industry in the U.S. in our times.

Fatefully, Church fundraising campaigns that invoke the stewardship construct also typically reach out to embrace—nature. We are told by the official spokespersons for these campaigns to be thankful for all God’s blessings: thankful for the blessings of the creation as well as for the blessings of our own financial resources. This is my judgment about these matters: I believe that the word stewardship, if it is to continue to be publicly employed in Church circles, should henceforth be restricted to such financial campaigns, and not be used to describe what Christians’ relationships with nature ought to be. In a word, let Church fundraising be one thing and Church engagement with nature be another. Indeed, the construct of stewardship, when understood as the chief frame to describe normative human relationships with nature, has a number of problems. However it might be interpreted or reinterpreted, the idea of stewardship tends, by default if not by intention, to suggest an anthropocentric, managerial approach to nature. I will not argue that point here.5

Instead, as I have already signaled, I want to propose a much more comprehensive construct to describe the biblical understanding of how we humans are to live with nature—partnership. The time for the Church’s theologians, preachers, and lay leaders to launch this second wave of understanding the human relationship to nature has now arrived. This is all the more a theological imperative since there had been a revolution in scholarly studies of the biblical theology of nature in recent decades.6

The Emergence of a Biblical Theme: Partnership with Nature

This is my contention: that in order to reflect the complexities and the richness of biblical testimony in this respect, it is best for us to develop a theology of partnership with nature, which will hopefully, in due course and with sufficient scholarly discussion, begin to take the place of what appears to be the more limited theology of stewardship of nature which now is being widely preached and taught.7

And more. I hope that it will be apparent that this chapter’s argument will also have the effect of reinforcing the theme of theocosmocentrism in theology...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Living with Nature according to the Bible
• Chapter 2: Martin Luther’s Theology of Nature
• Chapter 3: Joseph Sittler’s Pioneering Vision of the Cosmic Christ
• Chapter 4: The Theology of Nature as an Emergent Field of Promise
• Chapter 5: Celebrating Nature by Faith
• Bibliography