Cultivating Reality

How the Soil Might Save Us

Sutterfield

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621896074
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

We are, at our base, humus-beings. Our lives are dependent upon the soil and we flourish when we live in this reality. Unfortunately, we have been a part of a centuries-long push to build a new tower of Babel--an attempt to escape our basic dependence on the dirt. This escape has resulted in ecological disaster, unhealthy bodies, and broken communities. In answer to this denial, a habit of mind formed from working close with the soil offers us a way of thinking and seeing that enables us to see the world as it really is. This way of thinking is called agrarianism. In Cultivating Reality, Ragan Sutterfield guides us through the agrarian habit of mind and shows Christians how a theological return to the soil will enliven us again to the joys of creatureliness.

1

The Soteriology of Soil

“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

—Aldo Leopold

I look forward to February because it is in that month, with the days still short and cold, that the hope of spring begins. We start plants in seed trays, sprouting and nurturing them in window sills and greenhouses, getting ready for the late days of March and early April when the Arkansas garden season begins with force. It is in February that I also begin to work the soil, to add compost and manure, and nurture the ground that is necessary for any good gardening. Beneath the soil, billions of microbes take the nutrients I add and build whole networks and systems of life. It is these microbes that will deliver much needed nitrogen to the roots of the plants; it is this living soil that is the beginning of any good growth. We call this soil humus and it is connected to the very nature of ourselves as humans, reflecting the Hebrew idea that adam (humankind) was formed from the adamah (humus). We are essentially humus-beings—people who gain our life from and are completely dependent upon dirt. This is a truth we can deny only at our peril.

But what does this mean for Christians and what does it mean for the church? How are we to address this reality in our anthropology that is always modeled on the example and person of Christ? Here I want to argue why a thing called agrarianism—a habit of mind formed through the understanding that our lives are dependent upon the soil—is important for the church, particularly in this age and time. I want to show that the church needs agrarianism to help it recall and articulate its implicit anthropology and ecology.

This is not a book where we will explore the specific thinking of particular agrarians, since there are already many good books that have done so, but rather this is an exploration of some common agrarian themes with an eye to how those themes might speak to Christian communities and their members. We begin with the basics: reality.

Not long ago, I had a conversation, by old fashioned hand-written letter, with my friend Fred Bahnson. Fred is a farmer, writer, and sometime preacher. Fred believes that farming is an essential human practice and vocation, perhaps our most fundamental work. What concerned Fred in this particular letter was how to express to Christians the importance of the agrarian habit of mind—the critical nature of questions of farming, food, and table to our Christian life. I thought a good deal about Fred’s concern and it occurred to me that what agrarianism is really about is living in the truth—it is realism at its best. The call to Christians to learn from agrarians is then a call to Christians to form a habit of mind that will deepen our sense of reality. And this is essentially what salvation is—a deliverance from false realities into full reality as embodied in Christ. Agrarianism can help Christians embrace this salvation. As Fred wrote, “I think the agrarian life, grounded as it is in reality, is capable of bringing people out of Babylon and training them to live in the New Jerusalem.”

This salvific potential of agrarianism may seem a bold claim. The church after all has long been in the salvation business—how can agrarianism with its attention to dirt and gardens and livestock help save the church? As Fred indicated, it is in its very grounding, its attention to these basic, physical realities of life that agrarianism can help call us “out of Babylon” and train us “to live in the New Jerusalem.”

The church has lived in a constant struggle throughout its history to escape from the grounded realities of dirt. The “spiritual life” has become its domain and whether explicitly stated or not, salvation has come to mean the deliverance of souls and not bodies, persons not planets. We have come to ignore the God who promises the deliverance of a world and hope for the nations, the God who saves a people whose work is to deliver the creation that is waiting in eager longing for these people to embrace their call.

When we forget that God wants to save creation, and we deny our vocation to join God in this work, we are brought into false realities—powerful idolatries that lead us away from seeing the truth of ourselves, God, and the creation of which we are members. We need concrete practices that will cultivate our ability to live in reality, practices that will enable us to stand on reality’s firm ground rather than eventually crash into its hard edge. Agrarianism is simply a name for habits of mind and body that call us to the most significant intersection of our life and the life of the whole of creation—the table at which we eat.

The reality of the table has been a changing one, one marked by illusions and idolatries that the church has far too often done little to unveil, bowing our heads at the golden arches rather than the golden calf. Rather than the table being a place where we eat the abundance God has provided us through the careful management and cultivation of creation, our tables are now filled with foods that are wreaking havoc on our bodies and the creation. These foods are abundant, but their abundance is dependent on a mining of nutrients from the soil, the abuse of animals, and the exploitation of people. Agrarians call this form of false abundance “industrialism,” a form of economy that is the antonym of an economy based on craft and cultivation.

An Economy of Icons or an Economy of Idols?

In describing the industrial economy as opposed to the agrarian one, it might be helpful to borrow the images of idol and icon from the philosopher Jean-Luc Marion. As Bruce Benson describes Marion’s concept of idol and icon, “the idol is something that merely reflects our gaze, [while] the icon points our sight to something beyond it and thus to something beyond ourselves that we cannot master.”1 The industrial economy is an economy of the idol. It reflects the gaze of our false understandings, twisted through disordered desires and addictions. Value in this economy is dictated through supply and demand, both easily manipulated through property systems and advertising. This is the economy of consumerism, driven by demand whatever those demands are. The agrarian economy on the other hand is an economy of the icon. It is an economy where value is received rather than made; its absolute measure always tenuous. An economy of the icon sees the world as a place of abundance rather than scarcity and it does not propose to name every good within it.

Perhaps the best agrarian statement on the economies of the idol and the icon is Wendell Berry’s essay, “Two Economies.” Berry describes a conversation he had with fellow agrarian Wes Jackson about a better way to determine value than that offered by the money economy. Berry proposed that an economy based on a measure of energy would be preferable, but Jackson disagreed, saying that such a measure is still not broad enough. “Then what kind of economy would be comprehensive enough?” Berry asked. Jackson “hesitated a moment, and then grinning, said, ‘The Kingdom of God.’”2

Berry goes on to agree with Jackson, because the “kingdom of God” does properly name an economy whose scale of value is comprehensive enough to fit with reality. “The thing that troubles us about the industrial economy,” writes Berry, “is exactly that it is not comprehensive enough, that moreover, it tends to destroy what it does not comprehend, and that it is dependent upon much that it does not comprehend.” These statements are exactly the statements we could make of an idol—the problem of an idol, whether made of concrete or concepts, is that it is not comprehensive enough, that it limits the divine to our outlines and understanding, and yet an idol is also dependent upon what we cannot understand—it is able to maintain its pretensions toward divinity because of the borrowed light that it mirrors and mimics.

The answer to the industrial economy, writes Berry, is “an economy that does not leave anything out, and we can say without presuming too much that the first principle of the Kingdom of God is that it includes everything; in it, the fall of every sparrow is a significant event.”3 Like an icon, whose image cannot contain what is represented, the agrarian economy within the Kingdom of God must operate within an economy, which including everything, “can never know either all the creatures . . . or the whole pattern or order.”4 Our position must be one of care and caution, just as a good Christian must be guided by a “fear of the Lord.” This fear, to borrow a metaphor from Dallas Willard, is not because God is mean, but because God is dangerous.5 God in this sense is like electricity—electricity is not malicious, but it is dangerous—woe to the one who takes it lightly. It is the same with the economy of the Kingdom of God. As Berry writes, “Though we cannot produce a complete or even adequate description of this order, severe penalties are in store for us if we presume upon it or violate it.”6

To begin sorting out the economy of the idol and the icon, how the industrial economy and the agrarian economy play out, let us return to the table. Perhaps the best way to express how this might begin to happen is to say that agrarianism requires us to take account of and responsibility for our ignorance while industrialism claims that we have all the knowledge we need. There is no better way to explore this than in how both ways of seeing look at food.

At the Table with Our Ignorance

For agrarians we are responsible for our food whether we grow it or cook it ourselves or whether we let someone else do those things for us. An agrarian economy is centered on helping us become better at fulfilling those responsibilities rather than thwarting them. The ideal of the agrarian economy is a farmers market where farmers and customers are in close communication, the customers even working some with the farmers to get a better sense of how their food is grown. Questions are encouraged and openness and transparency are ideal. “How are the animals slaughtered?” is answered with “come see.” “How are the crops grown” is answered with “come help.”

In the industrial economy, however, food is divorced from its history. Apples may have labels of which countries they came from, but beyond the brief imagining of a plane ride there’s no story that the customer can become a part of—it is a life in fragments. A supermarket, even at its edges where the food is most whole, is an end point of a great deal of processing and polishing. Vegetables are shrink-wrapped, apples waxed, carrots trimmed and cut so that whatever productive part we might play in the eating of our food is taken away. The goal is a product to be consumed.

On the other side of industrialism is a secretive system of agriculture that relies on the large scale production of starches and proteins that are endlessly reformed into the many food products that fill the shelves of grocery store aisles. From corn to pigs, the industrial system talks in terms of abstraction—Tyson is no longer a chicken and beef company, it is a protein company. Cargill doesn’t raise pigs, it provides “protein solutions.” Of course animals—literally beings with spirits—do not fit within such a model easily. The only way that they do “fit” is through an incredible level of abuse and violence that leads to chronic outbreaks of disease that must be fought with routine antibiotics, which in turn create resistant bacteria that seriously threaten human health.

A Life Lived Through Proxy

Most of us would be appalled at the violence that is inherent in the industrial system, but this violence is very difficult to see, even for those who participate in it, because in the industrial system each part is divorced from another so that wholes are made invisible. Against this, agrarianism would remind us that we are responsible for this violence to the degree that we enjoy its products. The burger we eat quickly on a road trip is directly tied to eroding corn fields in Illinois, the pesticide ridden tomato fields of Mexico, genetically modified soybeans in Arkansas, water depleting wheat fields in Nebraska, and lagoons of manure laced with antibiotics in Colorado. Agrarianism holds us responsible for these realities because one of the central ideas of agrarianism is that we live through proxies and we are responsible for our proxies.

A proxy is the transfer of one’s agenc...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Chapter 1: The Soteriology of Soil
• Chapter 2: Dependent, Limited Creatures
• Chapter 3: Commonwealths
• Chapter 4: A Body of Earth
• Chapter 5: No Small World
• Chapter 6: Dirt Time
• Chapter 7: Humility: The Recovery of Fear
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography