Rising Rooted: How Creation Theology Roots Us in Belonging

California’s fires are flaring and fast. Powerful winds are fanning the fires with force, seeing burning areas twice the size of San Fransisco. Risks of human lives, more than human lives, trees and vegetation, and structures are all at risk as the Kincade Fire alone grows to over 75,000 acres. These fires, and their accompanying rolling electric blackouts, are indiscriminate and they speak with a collective voice: our house—our oikos (Greek for “house”) is on fire.

The Amazon is on Fire. The Congo River Basin, is on Fire. Oceans are warming. In September 2019 the New York Times amongst other news outlets reported the research that the number of birds in the United States and Canada has declined by 3 billion, or 29 percent, over the past half-century. Scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the “natural” or “background” rate and, say many biologists, is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly 65m years ago. This is the age of the Anthropocene—the age when Humans activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. This is the age when in many ways, humanity behaves like a voracious fire, rapaciously consuming everything in our path.

How does our faith respond to this crisis? How do our theologies—these are our religious stories we tell ourselves about the nature of God and subsequently ourselves—respond to this ecocide? I’ll tell you what is not helpful—stories that tell us that our home is ultimately in heaven and that we are just passing through this planetary domain. No, we need theologies that are functional in that they tell us the truth of our existence: that we are created from this earth. Let us recall that Adam’s name in Hebrew is adamah, translatable as ground or earth, and that in this creation cosmology he is formed out of humus—a large group of natural organic compounds, found in the soil, formed from the chemical and biological decomposition of plant and animal residues and from the synthetic activity of microorganisms. And we are part of this organic earthen material! We belong to the land, to the Earth. The Earth does not belong to us.

We must shift from a consuming people into a communing people, a people who commune and are personally and sacredly connected to our places and our planet. To lean into this kind of worldview, we need a sound and rooted Creation Theology, an understanding of God that is present in our planet, placed here as a liberating and regenerative rising incarnation force for the sake of all of our—human, more-than-human and our planet’s—future.

I want to go to the book of Job for the wisdom it contains regarding how we are to be in relationship with our places and listen intently to the sacred guidance given by the more-than-human world.

Job 12:7-12 The Message (MSG)

“But ask the animals what they think—let them teach you;

    let the birds tell you what’s going on.

Put your ear to the earth—learn the basics.

    Listen—the fish in the ocean will tell you their stories.

Isn’t it clear that they all know and agree

    that God is sovereign, that God holds all things in God’s hand—

Every living soul, yes,

    every breathing creature?

Isn’t this all just common sense,

    as common as the sense of taste?

Do you hear already how a good Creation Theology upsets the Great Chain of Being—this hierarchal social structure that places humanity at the top as the crowning glory? It says that the wild ones—the untamed animals, lands, waters—have been given the gift of speech, that they can be read as sacred script—that they have a subjectivity and personhood that cannot be controlled, coerced, or conquered. They offer an ecological way of living that is interconnected, and interrelational. They hold a mirror to God, reflecting to us how to live in flourishing ecological relationality. We are meant to court this wisdom of the wild, not corner it, capturing it and reducing its life purpose and value to a commodified and objectified thing. For to do that would be to crush the very presence of God.

A Good Creation Theology is a Decolonizing Theology.

For at its core is a liberation for all human and more-than-human life that occurs as a result of getting rid of this hierarchical illusion of separation—that we are separate from one another, from the earth, from the orcas…. for this illusion of separation—this dysfunctional myth— is what has allowed the colonizing hubris to take, to desecrate and oppress.

A good Decolonizing Creation Theology honors, respects, listens to, and affirms the indigenous and native voices and way of living that was generative and symbiotic for millennia. It joins with the Lummi Nation in saying: “What we do to the web of life, we do to ourselves. If any strand of the web is broken, the whole web is affected.”

A Decolonizing Creation Theology centralizes the voices of the voiceless and unheard—specifically the earth and more than human communities—and gives them dignity and sacred value.

“But ask the animals what they think—let them teach you;

 Listen—the fish in the ocean will tell you their stories.

    let the birds tell you what’s going on.”

What do you think Tahlequah also known as J35 in our resident orca whale population was saying as she carried the remains of her baby on her nose through the waters of the Salish Sea for days during her display of grief during the summer of 2018? Do you think she has something to teach us about the damming of our watersheds? Our over-fishing practices? How to make salmon populations thrive?

What do you think the albatross chicks were telling us with their dead bodies on Midway Island in the northern Pacific Ocean, their bellies filled with plastic? We must retune our ears to those who speak in the tongue of the wild—hearing clearly what they are saying through their silent slide into extermination. I invite you to meditate on this and connect to your own answer.

A Decolonizing Creation Theology aligns oppression of the earth with the oppression of bodies and understands that liberation of marginalized people will occur in tandem with liberation of land. C.S. Lewis rightly said that what we call human power over nature has actually become the power exercised by some people over others, using nature as a tool. Ecological injustice leads to social injustice, and vise versa. When we look to the bodies made invisible by systematic oppression, we see a demonstration of what has been done to the planet. We see the interconnection between empirical power and the deforestation and development of the Amazon and the life-threatening impact on indigenous tribes.

“Put your ear to the earth—learn the basics.” Earth teaches us that a Decolonizing Creation Theology is a move toward solidarity with the subjectivity of the natural world. Hear this: humans have been limited in how they understand “personhood” (this is the quality of subjectivity of a being, often tied to liberty and equality) to the degree that we have given personhood only to human beings and to corporations…I’m sorry, but what?!? Corporations are attributed subjectivity, liberty, equality, but a vast population of humans are not let along the self-regulating body of Earth?!? Thank all that is good in the universe that this is changing with the development of Earth Law, a global movements to give personhood back to the planet.

In early July, Bangladesh became the first country to grant all of its rivers the same legal status as humans. From now on, its rivers will be treated as living entities in a court of law. The landmark ruling by the Bangladeshi Supreme Court is meant to protect the world's largest delta from further degradation from pollution, illegal dredging and human intrusion. The Ganges has also been granted this status as well as An Indian court has recognised Himalayan glaciers, lakes and forests as "legal persons.” There are various court cases and decisions happening like the globally.

The idea of environmental personhood turns that paradigm on its head by recognizing that nature has rights and that those rights should be enforced by a court of law. It's a philosophical idea, with indigenous communities leading the charge. This is the worldview shift that Jewish philosopher Martin Buber talks about in his theories of an I/Thou relationship. This is the seeing the other as a sacred Thou, a holy person in all their inherent dignity. And you know, you cannot steward a person…you can only steward an object. That has an inherent power-over position. When we move towards a solidarity posture with Creation we stand up for the land, we stand besides the watersheds, we speak for the Orcas, we see ourselves no longer as separate but AS the wild and wonder-filled body of the more than human Other. Do you see this critical move?

“We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we've lost our connection to ourselves.”

—Andy Goldsworthy

A decolonizing Creation Theology recovers an indigenous worldview within the Hebrew and New Testament scripture that sees land as central, nature as revelatory, and creation as sacred—the Body of God. The world as God’s body is a way of re-mythologizing our sacred stories and elevating them to a planetary and cosmic scale. While it invites the whole cosmos to participate in the divine unfolding and meaning of life, it also gives deep value to the very essence of creation. It allows for a planetary scope down to the particular particle. This model allows for the Sacred to be seen, sourced, and sacramentally present in and through the world and leads us into a knowing that “that we as worldly, wild, creaturely bodily beings are in God’s presence.” The world becomes not only a source of the sacred, but a place that must be profoundly cared for in response to our interanimating connection.

We need God to inhabit this place, for such a creation-centered religious interpretation leads to a deep sense of the sacramentality of all things. We will grow into the kind of people we are meant to be insomuch as we are rooted, connected, re-membered within the whole assembly of creation.

A good creation theology is also common sense theology that understands affirms the science of ecology, opening us up to think about what is a good climate theology—especially poignant this season as we witnessed the first ever global climate strikes this past September 2019. Therefore, I would also suggest that a good Creation Theology is a sound climate theology, one that speaks through the elements demanding attention and action.

You ride on the wings of the wind,

You make the winds your messengers.

Psalm 104:3-4

The Sacred is revealed through the elements. As much as Holy Mystery is revealed through wind, so too is this Sacred Presence revealed through Fire. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God, it will flame out like shining from shook foil.” Where have we seen this in scripture? Remember Moses and the Burning bush in Exodus chapter 3? Could this not be the moment when God is saying to us with each forest a’flame: take off your shoes for this is holy ground? Could this not be the moment of transformation when we awaken to our deepest calling? A call to bear witness to the holiness of creation?

Could climate warming be the very fire that is calling us to take off our shoes—our colonizing ego, our Western mind, our capitalist consumption—and recognize and reconnect to the world as holy ground? I ask you to put your imagination to this uptopic task for the sake of a flourishing future for all living beings.

A Good Creation Theology is a Climate Theology.

Climate Theology is a justice-for-all theology. If our faith communities are not talking about, and putting action towards, the Amazon fires and the reality of catastrophic climate warming, then we must come to terms that our faith is complicit with climate change in that it orients around a colonizing worldview, one that is based on the violence caused by an illusion of separation and that abundance is for the few and rich.

The ancient symbol of God as Trinity discloses truths about the essential interconnectedness of both the fragile ecology of the human soul and of the planet we inhabit. The interrelatedness that ecologists find in the biosphere on Earth and the interrelatedness that science discovers at all levels from quantum physics to cosmology are all sustained at every moment by a God who is Persons-in-communion. Humanity along cannot bear the image of the Divine. We can only do so in our own interrelatedness with Other—the more than human world, other-than-us humans, and the cosmic presence of the Sacred.

Black writer and activist Alice Walker, most notably known for her best selling book, The Color Purple, and her impact on womanist theology, understood that the Earth will assuredly undo us if we don’t learn to care for it, revere it, even worship it. Walker warns: “While the Earth is poisoned, everything it supports is poisoned. While the Earth is enslaved, none of us is free….While it is ‘treated like dirt,’ so are we.” We will be image bearers of God insomuch as we are in communion with the Earth and subsequently with one another. When we are persons-in-communion we will live into our essential interrelatedness, spurring us towards climate activism and creation solidarity. A justice-for-all climate theology attunes and demands our attention to a collective response to global deforestation, the EPA’s rollback of clean water protections, the frenetic drive to continue to mine for finite energy sources. And this only scratches the surface, am I right?

“What is good for the world will be good for us.”—Wendell Berry

Climate theology would affirm that is good which conserves and promotes all living creatures (human and more-than-human alike), especially the most vulnerable; that which is bad is everything that prejudices, oppresses, and destroys living creatures. A good climate theology demands a hard gaze at how our collective and personal human actions are complicit with the reality of climate crisis, and challenges us to make lifestyle choices NOW that will honor the future of the sacred earth, the more-than-human world, and provide hope for a flourishing future for ALL life on Earth.

Climate theology then is an earthy spirituality that reunifies the sciences with religion and spirituality affirming the spiritual potential of matter, fundamentally changing how we experience the material and living worlds. This is a theology that speaks with birdsong and whale tears; that speaks with winds and fire; that speaks with twining roots would have us LISTEN to the wisdom within these voices and in response, fall in love with this beautiful home, our oikos, our Earth.

A climate theology would be about the political and civic work of renewing commitments and reconnected communion in such a profound way that we will participate in the heart of the world, by directing our living and sacred earth towards life instead of death.

Hear how German poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke is in conversation with Job, and how this poetic offering affirms a creation theology that is decolonizing in nature and climate responsive, and therein lies our hope:

How surely gravity’s law,


strong as an ocean current,


takes hold of even the smallest thing


and pulls it toward the heart of the world. 

Each thing

—
each stone, blossom, child—


is held in place.


Only we, in our arrogance,


push out beyond what we each belong to


for some empty freedom.


If we surrendered 
to earth’s intelligence


we could rise up rooted, like trees. 

This orientation lifts up a new kind of people, remembering that we are meant to embrace creation in a posture of solidarity, cultivating an ethical responsibility toward “the least of these” on our planet. Let us remember a sense of wonder, kinship and belonging to the world. This remembrance of a vital, sacred connection WITH creation is for our sakes and the sake of the wide and wild earth in whose being we are profoundly and beautifully entangled.

Tour of Extinction

“But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you.”

— Job 12:7

"See Me" by Lori Christopher 

The world has been captivated by the display of grief as an orca whale mother (Tahlequah also known as J35) has carried the remains of her baby on her nose through the waters of the Salish Sea for days. A member of the critically endangered sorter resident clan of orca whales, Tahlequah gave birth to her calf on July 24. For reasons unknown at this time, the calf lived for only half an hour. Since the death of her newborn, Tahlequah has been carrying the lifeless body on her nose or in her mouth in an unprecedented display of grief as she and her pod have moved northward through the San Juan Islands. 

There are many excellent articles and reports about what Ken Balcomb, the founder of the Center for Whale Research, is calling a “tragic tour of grief.” You can read the timeline of this maritime mourning through The Seattle Times as well as through many other press and publications. This sorrow that we are witnessing is hitting our hearts hard. People are reporting feeling an empathetic response to J35’s loss as they reflect on their own profound suffering and heartache. Within this mutuality, there is also an overwhelming sense that we are beholding an anguish beyond the edge of even our own human comprehension. We may mourn with Tahlequah, but will it be enough to bring about the requisite change to ensure the future of this magnificent form of life? 

This grief tour is the death knell of extinction. How does one put down the body that contained the very kernel of hope for survival? How does one let go of the embodiment of faith that ensures that there will be a tomorrow? 

The beloved and decomposing body Tahlequah carries is a clarion call to awaken the world to the collective bones of mass extinction; it is beyond a strident warning. It is a SEE ME and WAKE UP demand to confront what our human presence is doing to the biodiversity of the more than human world. This is her flag, her desperation, her plea. We can no longer just bear witness without bearing the arms of action. We can no longer simply stand beside as another species ceases to exist on account of our human-centered ways. To think this orca pod will remain without changing anything is insanity for we cannot expect different outcomes while repeating the same behaviors over and over again. Furthermore, to not change our ways, to simply allow this precious form of Life to starve away is a form of evil for which I do not know how we can account. 

This week I have been daily present to the very waters that this pod calls home, a sea where I have seen the black triangular fins slicing through waters, orcas breaching and swimming my whole life. This week the waters have been still and silent, eerily echoing the steady loss of biodiversity and life of this orca calf. I have stood by the sea, salty tears streaming down my face, asking this great body of Living Earth what needs to be done; desperate for a hope that would emerge through the very lapping waves that also carry Tahlequah and the bones of her babe. It is not a mystery why these beings are being brought to the brink of extinction. She is informing us of what needs to be done.

Tahlequah as Mother, as the archetypal portal of future generations, as the very seat of Creation is stoically carrying her calf as a clear and stirring command to abandon our still-birth ways that lack the life-force to listen deeply to animals, birds, Earth, and those that live within the sea. She is calling out to us as a great prophetess of the sea, echoing Job's wisdom that the more-than-human world offers us insight and understanding to the Sacred and our True Selves. She is informing us in the most poignant and powerful of ways to no longer see ourselves as separate and apart from the great assembly of creation: will we hear and respond?

---

Respond with Hope. Respond with Action. 

It has been 3 years since there has been a successful birth for the Southern Resident Orca. These whales have a 19 month gestational period and because they are starving to death they are losing these babies in the late term of pregnancy. There are very few breeding pair possibles left and if something doesn’t change NOW extinction is inevitable. This pod has lost nine of them in a one year period due to starvation. Now there 75 whales left....the lowest number in almost 50 years after the population of these families were decimated by a rush on Orca captivity for aquarium entertainment. 

Scientists agree that the only thing that will save this beloved species from certain starvation is the breaching of the Lower 4 dams on the Snake River allowing the salmon a habitat up river in which to spawn in cold clean water. Salmon is a key staple food source for this orca population and it is because of a lack of this food source that the orcas are starving.  

To find out more about this process please visit www.damsense.org

Contact Washington and Oregon Senators & Governors as often as you can in response to what Tahlequah is requesting. Below are then numbers that need to be called and a script to help you if you aren’t sure what to say. If you are asked for a Zip code and don’t live in Washington use 98101. And if you live in Washington and need a Oregon Zip code 97212.

Please call Washington Legislators:
Senator Patty Murray
(202) 224-2621‬
Senator Maria Cantwell
(202) 224-3441
Governor Inslee
‭ (360) 902-4111‬

Please Call Oregon Legislators:
Senator Jeff Merkley
(202) 224-3753
Contact: www.merkley.senate.gov/contact/
Senator Ron Wyden
(202) 224-5244
Contact: www.wyden.senate.gov/contact/
Governor Kate Brown
Phone: (503) 378-4582

Call Gov. Inslee (WA) (360-902-4111) & Gov. Brown (OR) (503-378-4582) and tell them to breach the lower 4 dams on the Snake River!

Call Script:
Phone or Email
"Hello Governor or Senator _____________ My name is _________ and I am calling to insist you implement the plan to breach the lower 4 dams on the Snake River with no further EIS (environmental impact studies) We have completed these studies for 25 years costing tax payers millions and the answer s always the same the only way to save our salmon is by increasing there spawning habitat. These constant studies are just a stall tactic. Meanwhile the Salmon of the Pacific Northwest and the Southern Resident Killer Whales are going extinct. The time is NOW.... Ken Balcom from the Center for Whale Research says if we are lucky we have another have until the end of 2018 to get started breaching. In addition these dams aren’t adding even adding power to the grid and are costing Tax payers millions. DON’T let this happen on your clock do the right thing....let it be your legacy Breach the lower 4 dams on the Snake River NOW to save millions of tax dollars annually, bring wealth & jobs to a region and restore salmon runs which will save the southern resident Orcas from going extinct."

Thank you to Michelle Seidelman for this wisdom and guidance for how to act in response to our empathetic grief. 

Restoring the Land. Restoring Ourselves.

Photo credit: Tom Reese 

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”

-Muriel Rukeyser

The shocking staccato of a lone M60 unloads into the forest filling the air.  A strange-bird-like call answers in response. Tucked amongst the overwhelming English Ivy towers and sharp Himalayan Blackberry walls, strewn mattresses are habitat to both syringes and streetwalkers.  The foul odor of feces and rotten food mixes with the residual tang of fornication and fear, layered upon decades of human-dumped garbage and debris. Stolen goods are hidden and found, rerouted through the overgrown invasive underbrush to avoid being spotted. And the bird-like call screeches through the branches and leaves once more. Perched on a muddy knoll with back to the trees and facing the structured, regulated life of the city, sits a lone figure clothed in threadbare layers of mismatched sweaters and socks sending sonorous signals through the air. These are distinct from the now-silent warbles and trills that should be present in this urban forest; these particular shrieks offer an alerting call for those illicitly trading in sex and drugs.  

Stay out of these woods, was the explicit message. These woods are scary, bad, and degraded; and we don’t belong there. So fear-filled is this forest that neighboring immigrants and refugees are known to make gestures to ward off the evil eye when they walk on crumbling sidewalks beside the trees’ shadows. So avoided is this forest that neighbors living on opposite sides of the wall-like greenspace maintain veils of social and racial distinction and separation, and go to great lengths to drive around the woods to access neighboring community assets. A fugue-state surrounds this forest; neighbors have chosen to file their fear away into a state of forgetfulness, neglecting this natural world and creating a chasm between the people and a place that could serve to create harmonious, interconnected community. 

This is the story of Seattle’s Cheasty Greenspace as it was when my husband and I moved next door to it in 2004. And this was the land that began to call out to me, imploring that I begin to reimagine how this particular place could be restored with a renewed story; how reconciliation with this land held a key to the unity of our community. As I witnessed the hotbed of activity flowing to and through these woods, I wondered how these trees could be experienced without dominant feeling of fear and separateness. For every stolen vehicle that was left in front of my house, for every ton of garbage and waste that was dumped upon the forest floor, for every red-eyed dealer that understood this landscape could cover his traded addiction, I began to be curious if we could imagine something profoundly different for this space.

It was as if the woods began to whisper to me, to call out to me, to summon me to restore an ancient story—one where the dignity of the land and the people were intimately interconnected, where the natural world thrived, and all living things flourished together in harmonious inter-relationship.

This urban wild whispered to me of a wholeness, of a restored ecosystem, that could be achieved through equal parts of forest and human restoration. I began to realize that this particular forestscape was a contributing part to the equation that left so many people wondering about the physical and social health disparity of our community—human and more-than-human alike.  

 Seattle’s Rainier Valley, racially and economically diverse, and historically underserved, has the highest chronic health and crime rates in the city. This area is also an identified “Open Space Gap Area,” meaning a community with no access to open green spaces within a half mile of residences. The irony of a neighborhood where children’s lives are at risk of vehicular hit-and-runs, and gun-shots fill the air more than bird-song, while a massive 43 acres of forest sits within the very midst of this community is glaringly obvious. The inherent connection between holistic human health and the state of this forest demanded my attention. The state of this forest and its ecological well-being began to offer itself as an accompanying answer to the chronic questions around oppression and poverty in our community. The trees offered insight into the well woven roots of injustice and environmental degradation, and how an interrelated relationship with them could inform a sense of being deeply at home both in our particular neighborhood, and subsequently, on our planet. By rewilding this particular place of Living Earth, we would be essentially rewilding ourselves as well.

Ecotheologian and ethicist Larry Rasmussen powerfully posits that “We are not so much at home on earth, as we are home as earth.” The integrity of the natural world renders our most basic and fundamental task: to live in such ways that ensure a flourishing and regenerative life for all of the created world and for all future generations within it. So how we live in our particular places matters as we are meant to be in deep interrelationship with the whole assembly of creation. And how we live in our particular places very much determines whether ecosystems within a bioregion will thrive. Rewilding becomes the process by which we support and live into healthy and whole ongoing relationships within the natural world; I would venture that rewilding becomes a process of returning to a state of belonging, to a state of home. However, we cannot begin to talk about rewilding the Earth, or our particular places, until we begin to rewild our understanding of God. When we begin to engage this sort of divine wholeness, we begin the critical task of rewilding ourselves as well. I believe that through rewilding our bioregional ecosystems, we begin the transformative work of rewilding the image of God. 

Western Trillium within Rattlesnake Ridege (qʷalbc to dx̌aclbac)

We carry wildness within. This inner-landscape (what I would call a soulscape) has historically been accessed by stories and myths, and sacred rites and encounters with Mystery. Western civilization has told stories of human separation from the natural world, built upon traditional interpretations of foundational Judaeo Christian scriptures that places humanity hierarchically at the top of the great chain of being, and essentially, God’s vice-regents on earth.  Interpretations of scripture such as this has resulted in humanity seeing the natural world as secondary to ourselves, and reducing it to a resource, its value in its commodification and contribution to a Western way of living. This has also resulted in the mental framework that has allowed humanity to extract, denude, deforest, and destruct Earth and her living systems. And, it has resulted in humanity’s own sense of homelessess. 

 If we are to truly rewild the Earth, we must rewild ourselves and how we see humanity as the image bearer of the Divine; we must bring our sacred stories and our soulscapes back into full and whole relationship with the more-than-human world. Like the presence of the interlacing petals of the Western Trillium (Trillium ovatum), which only grows in restored and rewilded forestscapes, we must see ourselves within an inter-animating relationship with the whole assembly of creation.

When we too are rewilded, then our work of ecological restoration within our local bioregions becomes the Great Work of integral becoming and belonging as home as earth.

God’s Grandeur within the World House: A Liberated Vision for Our Common Home

Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Ecological conversations place us in political arenas, fundamentally because power resides in land. An environmental ethic began to take shape in the consciousness-raising 1960's as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s work began to expand the focus of his civil rights movement to extend to economic human rights throughout the world. The laws of economics and ecology are one and the same, each derived from a fundamental principal of sustainable habitat, or household for all life. The intersection of King’s economic human rights intersected the environment (ecology) in the understanding that our planetary household requires space and the means for a flourishing life for all living things.  Environmental ethicist and theologian Larry Rasmussen argues that, “Without adequate hospitable habitat, nothing lives.”

Dr. King understood the work that was required of us all to live together in peace in our “inherited large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together."

This beloved community, this “world house” must be integrally and harmoniously connected with the earth community, for the earth is every creature’s home. 

This sense of an interrelated home planet (oikoumene) invited new interpretations of Christian stewardship and dominion, and countered theologies that would see humanity as perpetually disconnected sojourners finding solace and home in heaven alone. Pope Francis’ encyclical letter, Laudato Si’ On Care for Our Common Home, famously represents the movement the Church’s social and moral teachings are taking in response to the human causes of the ecological crisis. With a deep lean towards the consensus of sciences, the liberal Christian environmental movement was born, which created political agency and demand for regulations and policies that would protect the whole of life. 

Whereas an ecologically focused interpretation of biblical scripture landed liberal streams of the Christian faith at home on Earth, faith in the Apocalypse has been another powerful driving force in American politics, especially for Christian-right views. This belief underscores Capitalism and empowers climate deniers, because ultimately for Christian fundamentalists, a future on our planet is irrelevant because within an apocalyptic lens, the Earth has no future. Environmental destruction is not only disregarded, but welcomed—even hastened—as a sign of the coming Apocalypse. This particular hermeneutic finds anchoring in the author of Hebrews words, “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through.” Couple a theology of being heavenly bound with a world that is going to be destroyed by hellish brimstone, then what is there to save? Indeed, conservation becomes a moot point especially when subduing the earth is translated as resource consumption for capitalistic and colonizing culture, and is more in line with the End of Times.  To be fair, the theological lens of stewardship was used by evangelicals to address environmental problems. 

Problematic to a theology of stewardship is that what it lacks in mutuality, it makes up in capitalism and colonization without limits. 

It was also co-opted by the conservative evangelicals, including many leaders of the Religious Right. In 1999 the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty gathered clergy, theologians, economists, environmental scientists and policy experts in Cornwall, CT to develop a “Judeo-Christian” understanding of stewardship to be applied to environmental policy. The Cornwall Declaration of Environmental Stewardship, which came out of this gathering, promotes a “strong anthropocentrism, a commitment to libertarian, free market economics, and a deep mistrust for mainstream science…and that the human person is the most valuable resource on earth.”

The Cornwall Alliance calls the environmental movement “radical” and claims “this so-called green dragon is seducing your children in our classrooms,” while “millions [are] falling prey to its spiritual deception.” Peter Heltzel argues, “It is clear that the Cornwall Declaration is more than a call to environmental stewardship; it was a vigorous apologia for free market capitalism.” The agenda behind the straw-man, or shall we say,  straw-dragon, of environmentalism was deeply embedded in the consumption-driven spirit of capitalism.  Emphasizing the close relationship between evangelical and capitalism, William Connolly writes, “The right leg of the evangelical movement is joined at the hip to the left leg of the capitalist juggernaut.” Because of these deep connections between nationalistic evangelical monotheism and capitalistic consumerism and colonzation, attempts at evangelical environmentalism often perpetuate a theology of capitalistic conquest and white dominion even amidst its best attempts to respond as stewards and care for creation.

photo by Jason Drury 

The connections to land subjugation, people oppression, capital gain, and a monotheistic god have far deeper roots than modern conflations. According to Hebrew Bible scholar Richard Elliott Friedman, the ancient Israelites produced the first enduring monotheism—the belief in a single god. The difference between Israelite monotheism and the pagan religions of that era was not simply a “matter of arithmetic: one God rather than many…. Pagan religion personified [nature’s] forces, ascribed a will to them, and called them gods.” In contrast, ancient Israel, for the first time in the history of human symbolic consciousness, conceived of a god above and beyond the now-desacralized forces of nature. This shift left land and its inhabitants vulnerable.  Joshua 17:14-15, which is set in the context of two chapters of land distribution to the house of Joseph, has Joshua instructing his followers to bará (cut) down the trees in the forested high country to make more room for their expansive colonization. The Revised Standard Version translates bará as “clear”: “And Joshua said to them, ‘If you are a numerous people, go up to the forest, and there clear ground for yourselves in the land of the Perizzites and Rephaim, since the hill country of Ephraim is too narrow for you.” Commentaries on this passage are in agreement that there was an ancient stand of extensive forest in this region, and that Joshua was encouraging the House of Joshua to turn their complaints into action and enlarge their borders by taking matters into their own hands by dispossessing the original inhabitants of the country by cutting down the trees for their own advantage; partly for the building of more cities and towns, and partly for preparing the land for the use of pasture. Land was a resource to be used to both grow a nation state as well as to conquer people; it was no longer home to the imminent divine.    

This separation had great significance in the forming of the Western Christian mind. Biblical writers imagined that humans occupied a more exalted position in the natural order than the nature-based pagan religions conceived. Humans, sinful though they are accord to this world-view, occupy “a position on earth comparable to that of God in the universe.” Church father Paul of Tarsus perpetuated this Hebrew concept of human primacy over the natural world into the early Christian church. In Paul’s letter to the Romans, he wrote that God had abandoned pagans because they “worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:25). This reinforced a theology of complete transcendence from the created world, and to venerate nature in any way would lead to a pantheistic Christian culture in which, theologian Paul Tillich noted, “the term pantheist is a ‘heresy’ label of the worst kind.” Herein laid the normative foundation for most of American Protestantism and Catholicism until the 1960s, one that was a human-centric and desacralized valuation of the natural world. An environmental movement that would see the other-than-natural world as having independent and inherent value apart from the human would be suspect and against the evangelical will of a deistic God. 

The contemptuous mundi tradition delivers important moral consequences. Mark Wallace states, “If nature is not a sacred place, but a potential site for idolatry, then it is properly regarded as the domain of human beings, who because of their superior reason, have been designated by God to be God’s vicegerents over the entire created order.” Much of the evangelical critique in response to this seemingly scripturally sanctioned theme is that it lands itself squarely in the framework of pantheism or panentheism (i.e. God is the tree vs. God is in the tree).

A biblical, eco-centric model that supports Divine imminence and insistence that humans are not the center of the universe is a radical departure from our most fixed notions. 

The life and work of the French mystic and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin is an example of this sort of radical voice, who in Hopkin’s phrase, understood the “world as charged with the grandeur of God.” Teilhard had a profound understanding of the sacramentality of the cosmos, as both the signifier of the Divine and a location of divine action and energy.

Sacramentality is a way of seeing the cosmos as a holy arena in which the things of the earth are not only signifiers of divine love but in some sense are active participants in the Divine; the material world is the instrument through which God comes. 

To this end, Teilhard delighted in progressive science and wrote prolifically around his scientific specialties of paleontology, geology, philosophy, and theology.  His great contribution, amongst others, was as a Christian thinker in the field of evolutionary science, which altered the scope in which the Western world traditionally viewed the human. His study of humanity’s place within Deep Time allowed him to critique the predominant use of redemption oriented theology and return to a more functional creation theology where the sacramental subjectivity of the universe is embraced. Every single living being was sacred—all en-souled bodies, the soil and the stars!

Teilhard’s contribution to sacred evolutionary cosmology was profound, and in many ways provides the inroad to how the Church can move collectively beyond our historical divisions towards a posture that sees and serves the wounds of our planet through the lens of sacred personhood and poverty. The existence of poverty is a social cause the universal Church embraces. Key to the Latin American liberation theology movement of the 1960s and 1970s was that the agency of the poor gained a voice and it was they that demanded the structural analysis and change to restore their rights. Ecoliberation theologian Leonardo Boff, who was heavily influenced by Teilhard and Martin Luther King, Jr., claimed that the not only was the earth sacred, but it was now to be counted amongst the poor as it too has been systematically under assault from the plundering of development as practiced by capitalistic societies. This move towards environmental justice challenges both liberal and evangelical Christians to actively respond to the physical suffering and ecological vulnerabilities of poor communities.

Can the Church unify around this paradigm shift of not only seeing how the planet’s poor people are impacted by climate change, but that this environmental crisis is occurring because of an irrupted and impoverished planet?

Perhaps, but this positions the protagonist agent as the dominant culture in a hierarchical manner that doesn’t fully restore rights or dignity to the planet itself. Is it possible for the Earth herself to give expression of her sufferings and her hopes, and demand the systems that allowed for environmental destruction to be addressed?   

Whanganui River

In early 2017, the Whanganui River in New Zealand and the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India were granted the same status as a person, much like the protective status given to humans and corporations. These bodies of land and water now have their own legal, living identity, “with all the corresponding right, duties and liabilities of a legal person.” To pollute or damage these rivers will be legally equivalent to harming a person. No longer constrained as a resource humanity could exploit, re-source, or manage, this move recognized the sacred design of mutuality between planetary systems and people. In this revolutionary judicial law, these bodies of water have been given personhood. They are no longer simply a resource to be subdued, used, and dominated for the sake of humanity. They have inherent value simply for their being. This idea of the personhood of planetary features isn’t entirely new. 

    In 1972 legal scholar Christopher D. Stone argued in his famous essay, “Should Trees Have Standing?”, that rivers and trees and other “objects” of nature do have rights, and these should be protected by granting legal standing to guardians of these voiceless entities of nature, much as the rights of children are protected by legal guardians designated for this purpose.  Stone’s argument struck a chord with U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. That same year, Justice Douglas wrote a dissent in the case of Sierra Club v. Morton, in which he argued for the conferral of standing upon natural entities so that legitimate legal claims could be made for their preservation. The river, Douglas wrote, “is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes—the fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.” 

Fifty years on the Christmas Eve preceding his assassination, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood in his pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and told the congregation that in order to achieve peace on earth, “we must develop a world perspective,” a vision for the entire planet. “Yes,” he said, “as nations and individuals, we are interdependent.” He continued on with a statement that could easily have been proclaimed Wangari Maathai or today’s #NODPL water protectors, Dr. King stated,

“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated.” 

The earth is beginning to have a voice through this acknowledged personhood that will demand its inherent right to liberated life. This is the voice of the poor, the voice of the oppressed, the voice of the absent. The earth’s voice can now be included in the critical formula in how to serve the poor that has been advocated for by liberation theologians: “the preferential treatment of the poor.” This does not mean that we have the option to be committed to the poor; rather, this expressed primacy of the poor in Scripture is rooted in the unmerited love of God.  This is the kind of renewed theology of creation that Tielhard imagined, and one that responds adequately to the anthropocentric supremacy in Christianity, together with biblically rooted commitment to justice for the poor and vulnerable ones. To an extent, the ecological crisis, and in particular, the climate change crisis within it, have given rise to this earth-centered spirituality that sees all created things-rivers, forests, oceans, and all the creatures therein-charged with the grandeur of God. “This is our faith,” Dr. King told his church on that December morning. “As we continue to hope for peace on earth,” he went on, “let us know that in the process we have cosmic companionship.”

This is our hope: a sacred world house, a collective planetary home in which together we advocate for the rights to life and a flourishing future for all.  

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Bibliography 

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