Ecotheology

A Christian Conversation

Kiara Jorgenson, Alan G. Padgett

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781467459822
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

Just as God loves creation, so are Christians called to care for it. Now, amid the accelerating degradation of our global environment, that task has taken on greater urgency than ever. How should Christians respond to the climate crisis and widespread pollution of earth's shared commons, water and air? How might Christian communities think about human responsibility to other living creatures?

In roundtable format, Richard Bauckham, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Steven Bouma-Prediger, and John F. Haught navigate the layers of what it means for humans to live in right relationship with earth's lifesystems. After each contributor's essay, the other three contributors issue a response—including points of disagreement and questions—thereby modeling for readers productive and respectful dialogue. The ecumenical conversations in Ecotheology represent the diverse viewpoints of contributors' theological and practical commitments, exploring creation care through a variety of frameworks, including natural science, biblical studies, systematic theology, and Christian ethics.

1

Being Human in the Community of Creation

A Biblical Perspective

Richard Bauckham

We human beings are trashing God’s creation. To some extent we have been doing so throughout history, but in the modern period the damage we do has increased exponentially. This is the brutal fact that must set the context for any responsible Christian thinking about the relationship between humans and other creatures.

Take, for example, the oceans. They and the immense number and diversity of living creatures that inhabit them constitute a very large proportion of God’s creation on this planet, as the psalmist realized (Ps. 104:25), even though he cannot have known just how vast are the oceans or just how extraordinary the species that live in them—still innumerable even to modern science. Scientists have barely begun to explore the dark depths of the oceans, which turn out to be unexpectedly teeming with strange life-forms.

For most of history, humans have felt powerless in the face of the sea and have not thought we could possibly do any damage to it. Until recently that was largely the case. People may have overfished local areas, but the problem was always local and temporary, and, since fish are naturally very fertile, stocks always recovered. Any debris we dumped in the sea was literally a drop in the ocean. But in the last half century much has changed. The huge increase in demand for fish by a growing human population, crucially combined with industrial methods of fishing that destroy far more life than the fish they take, have reduced much of the ocean floor to underwater deserts. Our pollution of the oceans has become deadly to marine life, creating ever-increasing “dead zones”—oxygen-depleted regions of sea close to land, where the largest populations of marine creatures would naturally occur but now struggle to survive.

Then there is plastic. We used to think of it as one of the most useful and benign of human inventions. Unfortunately, much of it ends up in the oceans, where it floats along the currents and endangers marine creatures and sea birds. Millions die every year from entanglement with plastic rubbish and ingestion of plastic bags. Plastic never degrades; it merely disintegrates into tiny particles that get into the marine food chain with poisonous effect. It is hard to see how this plastic pollution can ever be effectively reversed, even if it is halted. Finally, in the oceans, human emissions of greenhouse gases are causing both warming and acidification, dramatically changing the functioning of marine ecosystems. Coral reefs, which are unique communities of life, have become well-known casualties.

At creation God “blessed” the creatures of the sea, endowing them with fecundity, and told them to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas” (Gen. 1:22). They have done so spectacularly well—until now. By desertifying the oceans and rendering them inimical to life, modern humans are directly opposing and frustrating the creative intention of God for the sea and its creatures. Whatever the meaning of our God-given “dominion over the fish of the sea” (Gen. 1:26), an issue to which we shall return, this cannot be it.

I have sketched this specific area of ecological destruction, as an example, as it is the one of which most of us have been most oblivious until very recently. From our land-based and human-centered perspective, we have not noticed. But the more we do notice what is going on in a world of which no part is now immune from the effects of human activity, the more extensive our disastrous impact on other creatures turns out to be. To follow where the argument of this essay will take us, we should note the phrase “other creatures,” which I have deliberately used rather than a term such as “the environment” or “the natural world.” Other creatures are not just something else besides us, a nonhuman world from which we are separate, but our fellow creatures. We and they are all creatures of God—however diverse—and we belong with them in this world that God has made for his own delight and for the interdependent flourishing of us all.

DOMINION AS A PROJECT OF DOMINATION

We human beings are trashing God’s creation. How and why has this come about? There is no simple or single answer. A very general theological answer might be: human sin and human fallibility, two factors that are closely intertwined in much of human history. But we also need to think about how humans in particular cultures understand their relationship to the rest of the natural world, because undoubtedly some ways of thinking of that relationship influence human behavior in ways that are more or less damaging to other creatures. The most relevant culture in any discussion of the roots of the modern ecological disorder is the modern West, which has also influenced much of the rest of the world in the modern period. In the early modern period, the Bible and the Christian tradition were so important that even relatively new intellectual developments, such as the origins of modern science, occurred within a Christian framework of thought, though later, especially in the wake of the Enlightenment, the intellectual traditions of the West developed in a more secular direction.

In this context, what we could call the Baconian interpretation of Genesis 1:26–28 has a special importance. I use this term to refer to an understanding of the human dominion over other creatures whose genealogy goes back to Francis Bacon in early seventeenth-century England.¹ If historical theology were not defined as narrowly as it usually is, Francis Bacon would have a significant place in it. Bacon created the vision that inspired the great scientific-technological project that has in large part made the modern world. The extent to which Bacon foresaw where this project would take us—including humans redesigning animals, for which bioengineering now has the means—is astonishing, though, like most utopians, he foresaw only the benefits and none of the downsides.

In creating the ideology of scientific-technological progress that is so characteristic of the modern world, Bacon gave it an exegetical-theological basis in a reading of Genesis 1:26–28. He was the first person to interpret the dominion given by God to humans at creation as a mandate for the progressive exploitation of the resources of creation for the improvement of human life. Previously it had often been seen as justification for the use of creation for human benefit, but only in the sense of authorizing the ordinary ways in which people already made use of the nonhuman creation: farming, hunting, fishing, mining, and building. It was not seen as a project humans were commanded to pursue.² But Bacon, in the context of the new sense of human power over the natural world that came with the Renaissance, understood subduing the earth and ruling over creatures to be a goal for which science and technology were the means. In fact, he understood science and technology as the means by which humans could recover the power over creation that they had before the Fall. Whereas the role of religion in human life was to remedy the effects of the Fall in the spiritual and moral sphere, the task of science and technology was to restore the human dominion over the earth. He envisaged it as the labor of dedicated scientists over many generations, as indeed it became.

Bacon’s vision was a lofty humanitarian ideal: scientists were to work for the good of humanity. But his view of the value of the natural world was purely utilitarian: the natural world was made by God as a resource from which humans could fashion things of much more benefit to human life. It was given in order to be remade by human ingenuity. Notions such as human responsibility for creation, care for creation, and conservation of the natural world would have sounded very strange to Bacon. His language about the dominion is aggressive. The human task is to conquer nature and force her under torture to work for human benefit. In fact, the language of conquering nature runs right through the Western tradition of science and technology. Only in the twentieth century was it filtered out of common scientific discourse. In the course of the modern period, Bacon’s vision was secularized. Many scientists and engineers were, of course, devout people, as many still are. But it was not difficult to drop God from the Baconian project. That nature is God’s creation made no real difference to the pursuit of the project. Essentially nature became raw material for the human creative enterprise.

There is much more to modern science than the role Bacon gave it. A quite different impulse in the ecoscientific enterprise—to understand, to appreciate, and therefore to conserve—is also deeply rooted in the modern scientific tradition and has fortunately come into its own, alongside the utilitarian attitude to nature, in the recent past. At the same time, the Baconian vision of exploiting and transforming nature for human benefit has become more and more problematic. During at least the last half century, in addition to delivering undoubted benefits, the Baconian project has also been immensely destructive in ways that were either unheeded or unanticipated in its heyday. If we care about the trashing of God’s creation, the Baconian project needs radical reassessment, as it has received in the green movement, among both Christians and others. For Christians, it must mean going back to the Bible and asking whether Bacon’s reading of Genesis 1:26–28 is justified or adequate.

STEWARDSHIP IS NOT ENOUGH

Moved by the ecological consciousness of our time, many Christians have abandoned the Baconian interpretation of the human dominion over other creatures. Probably most of these would say that Genesis 1:28 is not a mandate for exploitation but an appointment to stewardship.³ In other words, the human role in relation to other creatures is one of care and service, exercised on behalf of God and with accountability to God. Creation has value not just for our use but also for itself and for God, and Christians are to care for creation as something that has inherent value.

The notion of stewardship—along with kindred terms such as “guardianship” or “earthkeeping” or (the one I prefer) “responsible care”—has, I believe, proved very valuable in enabling Christians to reimagine the human relationship to the rest of creation and to begin to undertake the responsibilities that entails in our age of ecological catastrophe. However, I also think that this model has serious limitations. The notion of stewardship actually goes back to the seventeenth-century English lawyer Matthew Hale, who understood it in legal terms: humans are God’s estate managers charged with looking after and improving his property. While this certainly included a notion of the inherent value of the natural world, it also stressed the need for wild nature to be restrained, corrected, and improved. Left to itself, the natural world is chaotic and violent. It needs humans to impose order on it and to develop its otherwise wasted potential.⁴ With such a pedigree, it is possible for “stewardship” to encourage nothing more than a somewhat softer version of the project of mastering and improving nature through technology. This is probably not what most Christians who use the term understand by “stewardship,” but it illustrates the ambiguity of the term. We now know, of course, that nature is intricately ordered in ways that encompass change, but we are more prone to disrupt its order than to improve it. Modern ecological science teaches us great respect for the order of the natural world, but the notion of stewardship itself need not include that. A related problem is that, as is widely agreed, we now urgently need to preserve wilderness, to let wild nature be itself without human interference, insofar as that is still possible. The notion of “stewardship” too easily implies that nature in some way needs us if it is to realize its full potential.

However, the main reason I think we need to go beyond the notion of stewardship is this: much modern Christian thinking about the human relationship to the rest of creation is deeply in error, in that it has been understood as a purely vertical relationship, a hierarchy in which humans are placed over the rest of creation in a position of power and authority. The “stewardship” interpretation has this in common with the Baconian reading. But humans are also related horizontally to other creatures; we, like they, are creatures of God. To lift us out of creation and so out of our God-given embeddedness in creation has been the great ecological error of modernity. We urgently need to recover a biblical view of our solidarity with the rest of God’s creatures on this planet, which is our common home. We need to locate ourselves once again where we belong—within creation.⁵

CREATION AS A COMMUNITY

For this purpose I advocate the idea of the “community of creation” as a model for conceiving this world of diverse creatures to which we belong. Since the word “community” usually refers to a human community, some readers may find this extension of the word strange and may misunderstand it. But the word has long been used in ecological science to refer to the diverse living inhabitants of a particular ecosystem together with the inanimate components of their environment. It evokes the way that such creatures are interdependent and interrelated in many complex ways.⁶ In taking the word in a theological sense, I am extending it to refer to the whole global ecosphere, and by referring to the community of creation, I am making its relationship to God its Creator an integral part of the concept. To see ourselves within the community of creation is to become aware of our own creaturehood and of all we share with the other creatures of God on this planet. We are not independent of the rest of creation but participants in the interconnectedness of life and the many components of inanimate nature. To see the natural world around us, below us, and above us as a community to which we belong is to reenter creation, the community from which in many ways modern humans have become estranged. It is to recognize the relationships of which, in modern urban and industrial civilization, we have become oblivious but which have never ceased to sustain our life and our flourishing. It is to live in conscious mutuality with other creatures.

Human communities are more or less diverse, and people have a variety of different roles and relationships within them. The community of creation is immensely more diverse, and so the interrelationships of its members are correspondingly much more varied. So the notion of a community of creation does not exclude a distinctive place and role for humans within it. But the point is that such a place and role are within creation, assumed and exercised in relation to fellow creatures. ...