JANUARY 12 2014
I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you (meaning you and me) and with every living creature that was with you – the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the Ark with you – every living creature on earth.”
Genesis 9: 9-10
Even the Pope now tells us that the world lives under the global dictatorship of Capitalism. This is the cover from Pope Francis’ first important speech:
APOSTOLIC EXHORTATION
EVANGELII GAUDIUM
OF THE HOLY FATHER
FRANCIS
TO THE BISHOPS, CLERGY,
CONSECRATED PERSONS
AND THE LAY FAITHFUL
ON THE PROCLAMATION OF THE GOSPEL
IN TODAY’S WORLD
He started his exhortation as follows:
“The great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience. Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor. God’s voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades. This is a very real danger for believers too. Many fall prey to it, and end up resentful, angry and listless. That is no way to live a dignified and fulfilled life; it is not God’s will for us, nor is it the life in the Spirit which has its source in the heart of the risen Christ.”
Has the Pope’s with his courageous words on poverty – which already have upset the billionaires – identified the real enemy? Doesn’t the covenant between God, us and creation have priority?
The Creation Covenant
In this second installment I will outline how religion in general and Christianity in particular has failed to abide by the most basic of covenants, that between God, the human race and all that lives and moves and has being. Not only have religious institutions chosen to downplay that creation is from God and thus holy, but large segments of Christian church outright condemn those who try to obey the laws of creation. Instead most church goers defend the actions of polluters, claiming that they are protected by the mandates of Genesis 1: 28-29, giving them dominion over the earth. At the heart of this argument is the failure to understand what “The Kingdom of God” stands for. There, in the Kingdom of God, the first shall be the last, the least shall be the greatest and ‘dominion’ means ‘serving’.
Why is creation not considered holy?
I am always puzzled how fundamentalist people can call the Scriptures inerrant and infallible with not a word out of place, yet its canon was fixed by majority vote of some 300 people at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, making it God’s Secondary Word. At the same time the church refuses to call Creation holy, even though it is God’s direct act, his Primary Everlasting Word. The Bible will disappear: the cosmos is forever. I can be critical of the church because I love the church and daily search the Scriptures. It is my considerate opinion that the church needs a new creation-centered focus: a theology of the earth. Next week I will pose a possible answer to this ‘creation is holy’ question.
Dr. Lynn White was right. Who? This history professor went back to trace “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis”. His essay was published in the journal Science. In it he suggests that the mentality of contemporary Christendom to regard the earth as a resource for human consumption was much older than Industrial Revolution, and had its roots in medieval Christianity and attitudes towards nature. …Citing the Genesis creation story he argued that Judeo-Christian theology have always believed and still is of the opinion that we can exploit the natural world because the Bible asserts man’s dominion over nature and establishes a trend of anthropocentrism, where we, as human, are at the centre of the universe, because we make a distinction between man (formed in God’s image) and the rest of creation, which has no “soul” or “reason” and is thus inferior.
Dr. White stated that these beliefs have led to an indifference towards nature which continues to impact an industrial, “post-Christian” world, and concludes that applying more science and technology to the problem won’t help, that our fundamental ideas about nature must change; we must abandon “superior, contemptuous” attitudes that make us “willing to use it [the earth] for our slightest whim.” He suggests adopting St. Francis of Assisi as a model in imagining a “democracy” of creation in which all creatures are respected and man’s rule over creation is delimited.
Now that the current pope has assumed the name of Francis will this dualism also disappear? No. The view that God is good and nature is evil still dominates the world’s churches. At the root of this gnostic heresy lies the common belief that, upon death, we go to heaven to be with God, pushing the earth away as irrelevant and disposable. The church’s body language, its hymns which never identify the earth as the human’s future home, almost always refer to heaven as the final destination, portray a different future. Many see the pursuit of ecology is a pagan practice, believing that technology is the solution.
The Lost Gospel of the Earth
In The Lost Gospel of the Earth Tom Hayden writes: “The 700-page Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity includes less than one page on environmental issues. In a chapter called ‘The Future of Christianity’ it notes that problems of population growth and resource decline lie ahead, but we are reassured that ‘it seems likely that new discoveries may provide the means for averting the cumulative threats of population explosion and diminishing food resources.’ There is no sense of a moral dimension of urgency in this Christian hope for a technological fix.”
Hayden continues: “The 1991 edition of Judaism by Arthur Hertzberg is advertised as an ‘anthology of the key spiritual writings of the Jewish tradition.’ This edition was revised to take into account the new questions which have been debated in Judaism in recent decades. But in 310 pages, there is not a single reference to the environmental crisis.”
I have several books by Roman Catholic theologians. I truly admire their concern for the environment. In 2000 I had a long discussion with Dr. Herman Fiolet, a former professor at the R. C. University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands who holds a double doctorate in both Reformed Theology and Roman Catholic doctrine. When I met him in his apartment in Hilversum our long discussion finally stranded on our conflicting views on eternity and sin. I see polluting a sin, see driving a car a sin. We need a new definition of sin, emphasizing our sins against creation. This past week I read an Anglican statement that “Without an acute awareness of sin, the entire ecclesiastical enterprise becomes redundant”. My Roman Catholic friend believed that, mostly based on the teachings of Teilhard de Chardin, ultimately the human race will attain perfection. The well-known priest Thomas Berry expressed this also in his The Dream of the Earth. Both Dr. Fiolet and Berry say that “This earth is already now capable of being heaven”. No word on Christ making all things new, including the New Earth, after we, as humans, have run it into the ground.
There is much that I agree with in Teilhard’s reasoning, such as “Until the human is understood as a dimension of the earth, we have no secure basis for understanding any aspect of the human.”
The traditional view of Catholics was expressed by New York’s Cardinal John O’Conner when on Earth Day 1990 he admonished his flock that “the earth exists for the human person and not vice-versa.” No Gospel of the Earth for this cardinal.
Is Sin against Creation a sin against the Holy Spirit?
Increasingly I see sin against creation as the original sin, and would even venture to suggest that it constitutes the sin against the Holy Spirit, that same Spirit of God that hovered over the waters ‘in the beginning.’(Gen. 1:2). I see the original sin as the human failure to ask permission from the tree in the Garden of Eden to take the apple, and thus placing itself above the tree, upon which we depend for our oxygen: trees can live without us but we can’t live without trees. The tree signifies life.
I realize that this is a controversial statement and therefore I write it with a great measure of hesitation. Suffice it to say that overall there is little or no concern by the church for the cosmos which the Lord created. I just does not seem to register with the church people that God loved the cosmos more than he loved his son, offering up Jesus, his only Son in order to buy back the cosmos, his work of unsurpassed art, that treasure with its ultimate complexity yet totally harmonious, a world which we take for granted and refuse to call holy.
I was greatly surprised to find that even Reformed thinking is deeply influenced by the prevailing notion that we can redeem the earth. The book that asserts this is the 1980 Earth Keeping, Christian Stewardship and Natural Resources, written primarily by Calvin College people, a post- secondary institution owned by the Christian Reformed Church. Frankly the scenario painted by the team of authors is no different from that offered by the Teilhard de Chardin adherents. Here is a quote looking ahead to 2025, where people who left the earth in 1980 by space ship, return. “After landing safely, we were greeted by a crowd of healthy, happy-looking people – much excited at our having set down in their area…..The leader of that welcoming group began to describe to us the changes that had taken place since our departure forty-five years ago. (They find that) the concept of stewardship and the ideal of justice it entails have been incorporated into the general mentality of twenty-first century people…..we act in light of that planetary vision, a sense of the delicate balance of the inter-relating parts of Earth and the wish to care for all creation.”
Now, Thirty Five years later, we know that this sort of utopian talk is just that: the raw reality of fallen humanity is becoming more and more evident. I find it highly disturbing that not even the segment of society which calls itself Reformed Christian has the correct view of the future.
So what about the secular crowd, those who have no heaven to go to?
In 1974 I bought a book by Robert Heilbroner, an eminent economist and author of many books, including a text book on Economics. In An Inquiry into the Human Prospect Heilbroner writes: “Nor is it easy to foresee a willing acquiescence of humankind individually or through its existing social organizations, in the alterations of life-ways that foresight would dictate. If then, by the question “Is there hope for man?” we ask whether it is possible to meet the challenge of the future without the payment of a fearful price, the answer must be: No there is no such hope.”
At least that is straightforward. No hope. He continues: “The death sentence is therefore better viewed as a contingent life sentence – one that will permit the continuance of human society, but only on the basis very different from that of the present, and probably only after much suffering during the period of transition………..the long-term solution requires nothing less than the gradual abandonment of the lethal techniques, the uncongenial life-ways, and the dangerous mentality of industrial civilization itself.” Linus Pauling who twice won a Nobel Prize in two different fields, expressed similar views, and so did Jane Jacobs in her Dark Age Ahead.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote: “The churches are interested in fighting only a rearguard action for survival and preservation of their privileges and perquisites.” Based the Genesis 9 covenant, Bonhoeffer also wrote that God, the human race and the earth belong together. Isn’t time for the churches to proclaim and practice that truth?
Next week part 3: The real American Religion.