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THE ECOLOGICAL OF JOSEPH SITTLER

Thesis

Submitted to

The College of Arts and Sciences of the

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

The Degree of

Master of Arts in Theological Studies

By

Andrew M. Courter

Dayton, Ohio

May 2019

THE ECOLOGICAL CHRISTOLOGY OF JOSEPH SITTLER

Name: Courter, Andrew M.

APPROVED BY:

Brad J. Kallenberg, Ph.D. Faculty Advisor Professor of Department of Religious Studies

Kelly Johnson, Ph.D. Faculty Reader Associate Professor of Religious Studies Department of Religious Studies

Sandra Yocum, Ph.D. Faculty Reader Associate Professor of Religious Studies Department of Religious Studies

Daniel Speed Thompson, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Religious Studies Chair of Department of Religious Studies

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ABSTRACT

THE ECOLOGICAL CHRISTOLOGY OF JOSEPH SITTLER

Name: Courter, Andrew M. University of Dayton

Advisor: Dr. Brad J. Kallenberg

This thesis attempts to highlight the of Joseph Sittler as a resource for

Christians seeking to engage our current ecological crisis theologically. More specifically my aim is to articulate Sittler's diagnosis of the theological problems which contribute to the ecological crisis faced during his life. I attempt to clarify Sittler’s own diagnosis by comparing it with that of Lynn White’s influential article “The Historical

Roots of our Ecological Crisis” in order to demonstrate the ways Sittler, in some ways, anticipates and goes beyond White. Then, I examine Sittler’s constructive theological attempt to address these problems through his that if all things were created in and through, and sustains and holds all things together, then the through the of in Christ all things are saved. According to

Sittler, Christ as the fullness of all creation saves all things through his incarnation. The , then, should lead to care for the natural world.

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To Emagean French, my grandmother

June 22, 1926 – December 25, 2015

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For any project of this magnitude I relied on the help and encouragement of many

of my teachers, friends, and family. This project would not have been possible without

the helpful eye of Kelly Johnson and Sandra Yocum. There instruction and support

throughout this project was instrumental and I am tremendously grateful for the amount

of and energy they committed to the project. Special thanks to my director, Dr.

Kallenberg, for his persistence and throughout this endeavor. His sharp thinking

and writing processes have made me a better teacher and reader. I owe him a special

thanks.

Likewise, without the guidance and assistance from, and friendship with Jason

Heron, I cannot imagine completing this process. His helpful comments shaped my

thinking at such crucial and I am eternally grateful for his support. The writing process has shown me how true it is that friendship is a necessity for the good life.

Without such friends I would have never had the stamina to finish.

I owe a debt of gratefulness to my mother, who encouraged me to attend undergrad even when I had no in doing so. Due to her I discovered my own passion in theology and exposed me to the teachers who would definitively shape me as a person. I am grateful for her , support, and wisdom throughout my entire academic career.

Finally, and most crucially, I want to thank my wife, Kelly Courter. Her continuous outpouring of love, patience, and support made my entire degree possible. I cannot imagine doing this without her and I cannot overstate my appreciation for her persistent support and encouragement.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... iii DEDICATION ...... iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………. v INTRODUCTION ...... 1 Methodology ...... 4 CHAPTER ONE: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF JOSEPH SITTLER: BIOGRAPHY, LITERATURE REVIEW, AND SOURCES...... 12 Biography ...... 12 Literature Review...... 17 A Theology for Earth (1954) ...... 17 Called to Unity (1962) ...... 21 Ecological Commitment as Theological Responsibility (1970) ...... 23 Essays on Nature and (1972) ...... 26 The Scope of Christological Reflection (1972) ...... 28 and the Care of the Earth (1973) ...... 32 Sources ...... 35 Scripture ...... 35 Allan D. Galloway’s Cosmic Christ ...... 36 Conclusion ...... 41 CHAPTER TWO: UNEARTHING THE PROBLEM ...... 43 Lynn White’s “Historical Roots of the Ecological Crisis” ...... 47 We always change our environment ...... 47 Medieval and modern Western technology and science ...... 48 Three expressions of Medieval Christianity ...... 49 Christianity and the historical burden of for the ecological crisis ...... 53

Christian participation in degradation as unfaithful to the ...... 54 Nature and grace and the natural world ...... 54 The perceived absence of God in the natural world ...... 57 and Christianity’s willing participation in environmental degradation ...... 60 Comparing and contrasting Sittler and White on Christianity ...... 64 Similarities regarding Christianity’s participation in environmental degradation ...... 64

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Sittler’s disagreement that ecological degradation is inherent in Christianity ...... 66 Conclusion ...... 69 CHAPTER THREE: THE ECOLOGICAL CHRISTOLOGY OF JOSEPH SITTLER ...... 73 Genesis and Sittler’s ontology of the human person ...... 76 Genesis and the triad of relations: God, fellow humans, and the natural world ...... 76 Neglect of any relation hurts oneself and others ...... 81 Modern Eschatology and the limitation of grace as articulated in Scripture ...... 86 Christ saves all things because He is the maturation of all things ...... 92 God’s of all things through Christ in the Letter of Paul to the Colossians ...... 92 Athanasius’ reading of Col. 1:15-20...... 95 The imitation of Christ as the restoration of right relationship with all things ...... 99 Christ embodies the relations constitutive of the human person perfectly ...... 99 The imitating Christ draws one towards the restoration of the triad of relations ...... 103 Conclusion ...... 104 CONCLUSION: THE FORM OF THE ANSWER……………………………………………..106 Sittler as the anticipation and way forward after White...... 106 Sittler argues that the redemption brought by Christ also reaches all things...... 107 The imitation of Christ draws one towards restoration of right relations ...... 109 A Critique of Sittler’s work and thought...... 111 Sittler’s style makes a concise articulation of his position extremely difficult ...... 111 Sittler’s Christology fails to engage the person of presented in the ...... 112 Sittler fails to engage the primary sources of the Fathers on which he depends .... 112 Conclusion ...... 113 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 114

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He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making through the blood of his cross.

--Colossians 1:15-20

INTRODUCTION

. . . What should we be without The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken? Ask us, , how we shall call Our natures forth when that live tongue is all Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean Horse of our courage, in which beheld The singing locust and the unshelled, And all we mean or wish to mean.

--Richard Wilbur, “Advice to a Prophet”

In 1967, Lynn White Jr. published his lecture given in 1966 entitled “The

Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” in the journal Science and dramatically influenced, and some might even say established, the academic study of and nature. In 2017, on the 50th anniversary of “Roots,” scholars from an array of academic disciplines contributed to a volume acknowledging the influence and debt White’s 1967 article had on their respective discipline.1 According to the volumes editors, Todd

LeVasseur and Anna Peterson, White’s “Historical Roots” essay became the “foundation, jumping-off point, and lodestar for countless academic endeavors and even a new subdiscipline or two.”2 More specifically LeVasseur and Peterson note the influence of

White’s essay on the study of religion and nature, noting that the essay is used and cited

1 Todd LeVasseur and Anna Peterson, “Introduction,” in Religion and the Ecological Crisis: The “Lynn White Thesis” at Fifty, ed. Todd LeVasseur and Anna Peterson (New York: Routledge, 2017). 2 Ibid, “Introduction,” LeVasseur, and Peterson, 1.

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“by almost every academic working on religion and nature (or ecology), environmental

ethics, , and ….”3 Many theologians began writing

about the intersection between religion and nature in order to respond to White’s critique

of Christianity and its role in the environmental crisis and perpetuating ecological

degradation. For this reason, White’s critique has largely determined and shaped the way

in which engaged the field of ecological theology. Recently, some scholars

have begun to acknowledge the ways in which beginning with White may have stunted a

more robust theological account of Christian witness as it pertains to humanity’s relation

to the natural order. More specifically, eco-theologians such as Willis Jenkins have

argued that White assumes a Christian “” and over-emphasizes its influence on

the Christian moral life. Jenkins argues that theological responses to White are over-

determined insofar as they also assume the same emphasis on “cosmological mappings,”

or worldview.

Cosmological mappings can obscure the native terrain here because, by historical accident, a particular sense of ‘worldview’ already shapes recent theological responses. That is to say, Christian has so oriented its contributions to the worldview’s discussions that it can misrepresent or obscure significant contours of its own ‘moral frameworks and orientating narratives.’ Consequently, it often enters discussions of religious environmentalism with its most powerful and most useful theological resources concealed beneath cosmological overlays.4

So, while theological responses to White may accept or deny his accusations, they too

often do so while accepting White’s general assumption. Jenkins even goes as far to say

3 Ibid. 4 Willis Jenkins, Ecologies of Grace: and (New York: University Press, 2008), 11.

2 that White’s essay “set the agenda for Christian environmental ” for decades to come.5 White’s thesis and the way in which he deploys it

makes room for great diversity, and quite alternative proposals have proliferated. However, in the success of White’s article in sustaining debate, the diverse literatures of late-twentieth-century Christian environmental thought concentrated their development in reference to White’s peculiar notion of environmental worldviews.6

One way in which Christian theologians can avoid White’s influence is by examining the works of Christians who thought and wrote on the relationship between humanity and the natural world prior to White’s influential essay. For this reason, the work of Lutheran theologian Joseph Sittler, who began writing about the responsibility of Christians to care for the environment as early as 1954, may provide a fresh and insightful way forward for

Christians looking for constructive theological reflections and proposals prior to White.

Jenkins also identifies Sittler as a source for Christian reflection that “[identifies] and

[deploys] theological resources [that are] adequate for making environmental issues intelligible and urgent for human experience.”7 Jenkins remains one of the few scholars who on one hand identifies the ways in which White’s influential article has influenced and determined the theological discourse surrounding Christianity and the natural world; and on the other hand recognizes Sittler as a resource for those seeking to move beyond discourse predetermined by White’s thesis. Unfortunately, Jenkins only writes a few paragraphs on Sittler and how he may be helpful.

Long before critiques such as those raised by Lynn White, Sittler was arguing that being Christian entailed responsibility for care of the natural world. His basis for

5 Jenkins, Ecologies, 11. 6 Jenkins, Ecologies, 11. 7 Jenkins, Ecologies, 15.

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Christian responsibility to care for the natural world was based on a robust Christology

that was central to his thinking. Joseph Sittler saw a theological lacuna that left

Christianity unable to address the scientific explorations of his time. According to Sittler,

this lacuna was founded in part on a strong division between nature and grace which led

to an understanding of the natural world devoid of the presence and grace of God. To

address this problem, Sittler sought to recover a biblical and ancient Christology that had

over time been displaced. If Christ creates and sustains all things, humanity should stand

in relation to the natural world through Christ. The brought about in Christ

should then lead to the flourishing of human and non-human creation.

Methodology

Before I explain the aim of this thesis, a definition or explanation of terms central

to Sittler’s thinking is in order. To call Sittler’s Christology ecological, rather than

cosmic, is to suggest that the focus of his Christology is not just the depths to which the

salvific work of Christ penetrates, as might be implied by the term cosmic. Rather, to

call Sittler’s Christology ecological is to emphasize how Christ restores the web of

relations of which humans are part. The salvific work of Christ, as the one who creates

and sustains all things therefore necessarily brings up all things into the scope of his redemptive work. Christ embodies the web of relations because He creates and sustains them. He therefore brings all reality into His redemptive fold.

Over Sittler’s career he uses the term ecological to suggest the “web of relations”

within which we find ourselves. And since Christ brings all things into Himself, His

salvific act can be rightly understood as ecological. Sittler that a Christology as

large as reality itself cannot help but be intimately intertwined with the of

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creation. “So the first proposal I want to make is that the question of reality is itself an

ecological question! Because the question is ecological, reality itself must be spoken of

ecologically. Reality is known only in relations.”8 Sittler’s Christology aims to reach

into every dimension of exploration possible by humanity. It does so in order to have a

theology that speaks to all aspects of humanity’s existence. To suggest, therefore, that

his Christology is ecological is not simply to suggest that it belongs to the Christology

section of an ecological , or a theology for nature, but to suggest how

Sittler’s own thinking reflects the interconnectedness found in creation. There are no

isolated entities in Sittler’s understanding of the world. All of creation stands in relation.

Sittler is therefore not utilizing Christology as a tool to address a problem, but as a way of

understanding and interpreting the world. Sittler is attempting to articulate the

deficiencies he sees in the contemporary western church which has narrowed the work

brought about in Christ and offering a different way of understanding the world that

embraces the depth and scope of the reality of the Christian .

Additionally, Sittler’s usage of the terms “nature” and “grace” require some

clarification. Peter Bakken defines Sittler’s usage of the term nature as “not merely

‘,’ [but rather the] the motions and structures of the human as tending

toward or away from God, but also encompassing the whole of society and the physical

environment, ‘artificial’ as well as ‘natural.’”9 The distinction between what is made by

humans and what is not does not suggest that no connections can or should be made

between what we might call the artificial environment, such as buildings and telephone

8 Joseph Sittler, “Ecological Commitment as Theological Responsibility,” in Zygon 5 (June 1970), 174. 9 Joseph Sittler, Evocations of Grace: The Writings of Joseph Sittler on Ecology, Theology, and Ethics, edited by Steven Bouma-Prediger and Peter Bakken (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000), 5.

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poles, and natural environment, such as crevasses, caves and ponds, but rather to clarify

what it is I mean when I utilize the term “natural world.” By “natural world” then, I

mean the latter; the movements of the non-rational created order.

Sittler claims to use the term “grace” as Athanasius did. In Essays on Nature and

Grace Sittler defines grace as “the goodness and lovingkindness of God and the activity of this goodness in and toward his creation.”10 Later, in the same book, Sittler argues that

his usage is in line with its usage by some of the like Athanasius. “Grace, for

Athanasius, was both a comprehensive term for the created goodness of all reality, and a

term wherewith to specify the incarnated presence and historical focus of that Light

which is God.”11 Sittler then quotes when he argues that

Athanasius did not, like and some later theologians, find it necessary to denigrate nature in order to glorify grace. On the contrary, he took his stand as the defender of the goodness of nature against its detractors; for this defense of the goodness in all the reality was at the same time an act of praise for the God of grace. There was not only in the creation, there was even grace in creation.12 Sittler believes that if all is from a gracious God, all is necessarily graced, including the

natural world. Peter Bakkan describes Sittler’s use of the term “grace” as “not simply

that divine acceptance whereby an individual’s are forgiven, but a disturbing, even

violent energy that is a living and active presence in the whole of creation.”13 Stephen

Bouma-Prediger rightly says that “Sittler’s ruminations on grace are varied and

complex.” There is little doubt part of the complexity is due to Sittler’s writing style.

10 Joseph Sittler, Essays on Nature and Grace, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 24. 11 Sittler, Essays, 64. 12 Sittler, Essays, 65, citing Jaroslav Pelikan, The Light of the World (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 45. 13 Sittler, Evocations, 5.

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However, Bouma-Prediger argues that grace, for Sittler, is the “answer to the question about the contingency of existence.” It is “the reality, energy, and of God.”14

One further clarification is necessary regarding what Sittler means when he says

“ontology.” Sittler does not outright define what he means when he uses this word.

Furthermore, he uses it with such frequency that I cannot just avoid using it due to its vague and various definitions historically and with Sittler. In personal correspondence with Steven Bouma Prediger, whose dissertation is, in part, on the Christology of Joseph

Sittler, he suggests that the best definition for what Sittler means when he talks about ontology is “the of ontos or the study of being: ontology [as] a kind of -

-an attempt to understand and explain the nature of reality.” 15 As I will explore below, over the course of his career, Sittler tries to draw Christians away from an understanding of “ontology of isolated entities, or instance, of forms, of processes, whether we are reflecting about God or man or society or the .” Rather, for Sittler, “[t]he only adequate ontological structure we may utilize for thinking things Christianly is an ontology of community, communion, ecology—and all three words point conceptually to thought of a common kind.”16 Later in his career, Sittler would condense this line of thinking and simply call it an “ontology of relations.”17 I will argue in chapter two that for Sittler, Christian in an ontology of isolated entities stems from a theological error of a dramatic separation between nature and grace, and the church is in need of a recovery of an ontology of relations which is founded on the person of Jesus Christ.

14 Stephen Bouma-Prediger, The Greening of Theology: The Ecological Models of Rosemary Radford Ruether, Joseph Sittler, and Jürgen Moltmann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 70-2. 15 Steven Bouma-Prediger, email correspondence with author, June 16, 2017. For more on Bouma-Prediger on Sittler’s ontology, see Bouma-Prediger, Greening, 79-85 and 191-202. 16 Sittler, “Commitment,” 174 17 Sittler, “Commitment,” 176.

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The general aim of my thesis is to highlight the theology of Joseph Sittler as a resource for Christians seeking to engage our current ecological crisis theologically.

More specifically my aim is to articulate Sittler's diagnosis of the theological and ontological problems that inhibit the Christian imagination in the West,18 and to understand how his Christology attempts to offer part of a theological solution. To understand the problem Sittler is attempting to address through his Christology, I will examine Sittler’s historical context. I therefore begin with a biographical sketch of Sittler and a precis of some of relevant works on ecological theology. Almost all Sittler’s writings are occasional essays or are in the form of an essay. Concisely summarizing his work is also complicated by his literary style, which often can be vague, imprecise, and intentionally “unsystematic.”19 In order to relieve the reader of the burden of Sittler’s sometimes frustrating prose, I will offer a précis of some of the writings that make up his corpus. In addition, condensed exposure to his relevant writings will also allow for the reader to gain a better grasp of Sittler’s terminology and major themes.

In chapter two, I will examine the argument of Lynn White Jr. in his essay “The

Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis.” Due to the way in which White’s article has

18 By , Sittler means primarily Protestants and Catholics. Orthodox, in Sittler’s view, do not share the same theological tendency as those who share the tradition. Sittler sometimes makes grand claims about “Christianity,” which should be interpreted as a critique of a particular manifestation in Western Christian thought, rather than Christianity as a whole. At times, Sittler will simply refer to “the West.” By “west” he means more broadly, Christian and non-Christian alike. 19 Moira Creede, Logos and Lord: A Study of the Cosmic Christology of Joseph Sittler (PhD Diss, University of Leuven, 1977), xx. Steven Bouma-Prediger comes to a similar conclusion in his PhD dissertation, see Bouma-Prediger, Greening, 71. Sittler intentionally sought to not write in a systematic fashion. He believed that professors practice their discipline “around a well-defined item within an enormous web. He is most clear about the item if he ignores the web!” Additionally, Sittler’s “own disinclination to a theological method is grounded in a strong conviction that one does not devise a method and then dig into the data; one lives with the data, lets their force, variety, and authenticity generate a sense for what Jean Daniélou calls a ‘way of knowing’ appropriate to the nature of the data.” See Sittler, Essays, 3 and 20 respectively. It must also be noted Sittler's tendency to always use the masculine pronoun. This, I believe is an overlooked mistake on his part. Due to his frequency of its use, however, I will not correct its every use.

8 shaped, framed, and inspired theological responses to his overall claim regarding

Christianity’s culpability in the ecological crisis, I will begin by examining White’s argument in his influential 1967 essay. After examining White’s critique, I will explore

Sittler’s own diagnosis of Western Christian participation in environmental degradation which stem from a major theological error: a dramatic separation between nature and grace. This error manifests itself in contemporary Western Christianity in an other- worldly eschatology which understands heaven as an escape from the corrupted world. I will then examine the similarities and differences between White and Sittler’s argument.

White’s argument complements Sittler’s own insofar as they both see the contemporary expression of Western Christianity as apathetic and complacent in environmental degradation. As early as 1954, Sittler was making similar critiques of contemporary

Christian apathy towards the natural world. The substantial difference between their two critiques, and reason why Sittler’s work is significant to Christian scholarship today is because Sittler offers a similar critique of contemporary Western Christianity but attributes his critique not to something inherent with Christianity itself, but to infidelity to a scriptural and traditional expression of the Christian faith.

Chapter three is a close reading of Joseph Sittler's cosmic Christology claim that if all things were created in and through, and Christ sustains and holds all things together, then the through the incarnation of God in Christ all things are saved. According to

Sittler, Christ as the fullness of all creation saves all things through his incarnation. The imitation of Christ, then, should lead to care for the natural world. I begin by examining

Sittler’s understanding of how the story of Genesis describes the relationships constitutive of the human person: relations to God, fellow humanity, and creation. I then

9 briefly show the ways in which Sittler understands the laid out in Genesis as a dominant theme in both the Old and New Testaments. In doing so I will exegete the verses most often cited by Sittler but will also supplement his argument with some additional resources from which Sittler also utilizes in order to help further clarify

Sittler’s argument. Next, I will demonstrate how Sittler believes Col. 1:15-20 to be the most succinct articulation and summation of the dominant scriptural theme of the relationship between God, humanity, and the natural world, and will provide his exposition of that text. According to Sittler’s reading of Col. 1:15-20, if Christ holds all things in Himself, then all things must be taken up in the salvific work of Christ.

Additionally, he believes that his interpretation of Colossians is scripturally consistent and is also supported by its use by the early , particularly Athanasius.

Lastly, Sittler argues that the relations constitutive of the human person, namely with

God, fellow humanity, and creation, are held together and sustained perfectly in the person of Jesus Christ. According to Sittler, ’ understanding of Jesus as the recapitulation of articulates a persuasive understanding of how Christ embodies the ontological relations explored in Genesis perfectly. Sittler then argues that only through the imitation of Christ are proper relationships with God, fellow humanity, and creation possible.

Due to the lack of scholarly engagement with Sittler’s corpus, most of my sources will be primary sources. Sittler wrote for many different journals and magazines and not all his work could be accounted for in my search for his primary texts. However, most of his primary sources are available and have been consulted in order to find the themes I attend to in this thesis. Furthermore, I have listened to several speeches and lectures that

10 were recorded and made available on his archival site. Due to the scarcity of secondary sources engaging Sittler’s work I also rely heavily on the sources Sittler uses throughout his life, homing in on several that come up multiple times over the course of his academic career. I attempt to utilize what secondary sources are available on Sittler’s work, including four dissertations and several articles.

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CHAPTER ONE:

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF JOSEPH SITTLER: BIOGRAPHY, LITERATURE

REVIEW, AND SOURCES

The poetry of earth is never dead . . .

--John Keats, “On the Grasshopper” Biography

Born in Upper Sandusky, Ohio on September 26, 1904, Joseph Sittler was raised

by his mother, Minnie Vieth Sittler, and his father, a Lutheran , who was also

named Joseph.20 The younger Sittler would say later in his life that “his experiences in

the rural Midwestern congregations his father served disposed him, from an early age,

toward theology that attends to the whole of creation and ‘that can penetrate the ordinary

problems of human existence, including the care of the earth.’”21 In an interview in 1977,

Sittler claims that “he was concerned about the care of the earth, even as a young child.”

He goes on to say that “I grew up in a small town, so I was able to enjoy the trees,

streams, bird, and animals and when I became a theologian, I did not forget them.”22

While not much more is known about Sittler’s upbringing, the era of his upbringing, its

geographical location, and Sittler’s own attention to the natural world from such an early

20 http://www.josephsittler.org/biography/. 21 Bouma-Prediger and Bakken, Evocations, 2-3, quoting from Joseph Sittler, “Closing Address: Creating a Rhetoric of Rural Values,” in “Preliminary Report: A Family Farm Action Agenda,” Xeroxed booklet from “A Time to Choose: An Ecumenical Event on the Future of Family Farm Agriculture in Wisconsin,” (8-9 March 1985) (Madison, Wis.: Wisconsin Conference of Churches, 1985), 38. 22 Quote by Sittler, Hazel Barnes, Spokane Daily Chronicle, “Faith Urges Care of the Earth” 10/8/77, p. 4.

12 age are suggestive that Sittler was a part of a broader Protestant agrarian tradition that was popular in rural America as early as the late nineteenth century.23

While the situating of Sittler within the Protestant agrarian tradition is only speculative, the character of the Protestant agrarian tradition is important in two ways.

First, it is a specifically Protestant agrarian vision. Within the American context there existed a agrarian movement which had many similar, but also many divergent elements. It is therefore reasonable that Sittler’s historical, geographic, and religious context suggests that Sittler would be influenced by the Protestant strand of the Christian agrarian movement that was occurring in various places across the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century. Second, expression of the Protestant agrarian tradition during this time argued that the human person must exist in right relationship with the land. The care of the land, often called , was to respect, honor, and care for

God’s creation.

Sittler would go on to study and graduate from Wittenberg College in 1927 and the Hamma School in 1930, which at the time was part of Wittenberg College in

Springfield Ohio. 24 At Hamma, Sittler’s “studies focused on Luther and Kierkegaard,

23 See Kevin M. Lowe, Baptized with the Soil: Christian Agrarians and the Crusade for Rural America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Lowe explores this rural expression of Christianity that always maintained a strong conviction that proper relationship with the land brought about the flourishing of both the land and the people and argued that the connection between God, the people, and the land was clear in the Scriptures. While Lowe does not mention Sittler, or ever cite his work, Sittler would seem to be a part of this tradition, and would bring it with him into the academy, unlike many who advocated for it on the farm. 24 In 1830, a group of Lutheran ministers set out to establish a school to train future Lutheran ministers. It would eventually be known as the Evangelical Lutheran Theological . In 1840, however, the Lutheran church experienced a schism which split the church in Ohio into two groups: the English of Ohio and the Joint synod of Ohio. The former joined the Lutheran Church in America, while the latter joined the American Lutheran Church. The Joint Synod retained control over the Evangelical Lutheran Theological Seminary while the English Synod went on to establish Wittenberg College, which would eventually become Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio in 1845. In order to have a similar school for training minsters, Wittenberg established Hamma Divinity School in 1906. In 1964, the school would be called the Hamma School of Theology. Also, during this time, the English and Joint Synod were

13 rather than on .”25 Peter Bakkan notes that Sittler’s choice of study was unusual for his time. Rather than study a more rigid Lutheran , as was common in the time, Sittler chose to study Søren Kierkegaard, who Bakkan notes was not well known in America at the time. Bakkan goes on to suggest that

Sittler was thus very early on at the cutting edge of American Lutheran theology, rather than bound to the rigid formulations of the received tradition of . The earlier portion of his subsequent theological career can be seen in part as an effort to be true to the spirit of the tradition without being captive to the letter.26

Following his studies at Hamma Divinity School, Sittler’s life can be divided into four parts: his time as Pastor, his two teaching positions, and his retirement.27 In 1930, following his graduation from Hamma Divinity School, Sittler would become the Pastor of Lutheran Church in Cleveland, Ohio and would reside there until 1943. As a pastor, he

continued his studies at the University of Heidelberg; at Case Western Reserve; and at Oberlin Theological School, where he was a lecturer in 1942. For Sittler, being a pastor meant being a theologian. Preaching was a deliberate theological act, and theology served preaching.28 Regarding his time as a pastor Sittler argued that

[a]ll my teaching career and my thirteen years in the pastorate were lived on the margin of the church’s life, where the church meets the world. . . I was ordained the week the stock market crashed; 70 percent of my people eventually were out of work in the midst of a great industrial city [Cleveland]. . . I had to do theology on the street.29

reconciling various differences and eventually agreed to reunite and merge Hamma School of Theology with the Evangelical Lutheran Theological Seminary. The new seminary would be called Lutheran Seminary and located in Columbus, Ohio, where it remains today. See http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Hamma_School_of_Theology 25 Peter Bakkan, The Ecology of Grace: Ultimacy and Environmental Ethics in Aldo Leopold and Joseph Sittler (PhD Diss, University of Chicago, 1991), 30. 26 Bakkan, Grace, 30-31. 27 These four phases follow Bakkan’s division of Sittler’s thought, Bakkan, Grace, 31. 28 Bakkan, Grace, 31. See also Gravity and Grace, 67 29 Joseph Sittler, Gravity and Grace (Minneapolis, Augsburg Fortress, 2005), 52.

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Throughout his career Sittler understood himself first and foremost as a preacher and continued his work of encouraging people in the church to get out into the world. In

1943, Sittler accepted an appointment as Professor of Systematic Theology at Chicago

Lutheran Theological Seminary, a small seminary for the American Lutheran Church. It was also during this time Sittler was also continuing his own studies at the University of

Chicago, though never completing a PhD. 30 As a professor, Sittler continually sought to bring students into the world in order to see the grace of God in all of creation.

My theology is not one derived from nature, it is a theology of the incarnation applied to nature which is quite different.... My theological career has been a not- wholly-successful effort to drag my students out of the church—out of the church!—into what is happening in the world. My general effort was to lead them to appreciate the reality of the natural, the historical, the cosmological world of the galaxies in order that their theological speech would be intersective of the world their listeners take for granted.31

Throughout his academic career Sittler sought to bring together theological categories with modern academic disciplines and studies. He had a love for poetry, particularly

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Shakespeare, architecture, classical and jazz music, and ecology.32 Even as his eyesight began to fail near the end of his career, Sittler could be found on the grounds of Chicago Divinity School planting trees and other flowers.33

While Sittler’s first publication, The Doctrine of the Word in the Structure of

Lutheran Theology, appeared in 1948,34 he reached the pinnacle of his career in 1961 when he gave the keynote address as “a leading member of the Commission on Faith and

30 Bakkan, Grace, 32. 31 Sittler, Gravity, 54. 32 http://www.josephsittler.org/biography/ 33 Peter W. Bakken, “Nature as a Theater of Grace: The Ecological Theology of Joseph Sittler,” in Evocations, 16. 34 “Joseph Sittler, The Doctrine of the Word in the Structure of Lutheran Theology (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1948; Board of Publication of the United Lutheran Church in America, 1948).

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Order, the highest theological council of the World Council of Churches (WCC).”35 In

his speech, entitled “Called to Unity,” Sittler argued “that [their] moment in history [was]

heavy with the imperative that faith proposes for the madly malleable and grandly

possible potencies of nature—that holiest, vastest, confession: that by him, for him, and

through him all things subsist in God, and therefore are to be used in joy and sanity for

his human family.”36 The New Delhi speech gave Sittler the opportunity to advocate for

a Christology that he saw as sorely needed for his time, and to advocate for further

thought into the expansion of the typical categories of Christology. “Time magazine

ventured the opinion that the most original and challenging address to the Assembly was

given by Dr. Joseph Sittler, Lutheran professor at the University of Chicago Divinity

School.”37 As both a pastor and professor, Sittler sought to address the “spirit of our minds,” a phrase from Ephesians 4.38 Sittler argued that the “penetration of what

Paul calls the ‘spirit of our minds’ is the fundamental task of the religious and theological responsibility in the ecological issue.”39 This explains why Sittler often sought to identify ideas and ways of thinking as the source of the problem for our theological and

therefore ethical ways of understanding and engaging the world.

By the time of his retirement, Sittler had been teaching at the collegiate level for

58 years.40 He would teach at the Chicago Divinity School from 1957 to 1974, then

would go on to become the "Distinguished Professor in Residence at the Lutheran School

35 http://www.josephsittler.org/biography/ 36 Joseph Sittler, “Called to Unity,” in The Ecumenical Review 14 (January 1962), 185-186. 37 Conrad Simonson, The Christology of the Faith and Order Movement (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 94. 38 Sittler is most explicit about his attempts to change and address the “spirit of our minds” in “Ecological Commitment as Theological Responsibility,” in Zygon 5 (June 1970), 172-81; also, in Southwestern Journal of Theology 13, no. 2 (Spring 1971), 35-46. 39 Sittler, “Called,” 176, emphasis mine. 40 http://www.josephsittler.org/biography/

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of Theology in Chicago,” where he taught until 1986.41 Joseph Sittler died on December

28, 1987. He was “survived by his wife, Jeanne; six children, Stephen, Joseph Jr.,

Barbara, Philip, Bay, all of Chicago, and Hans, of Brooklyn; and five grandchildren.”42 It

was noted in his brief obituary in the New York Times that he “wrote two books about

the church's responsibility for the earth's ecology: The Ecology of Faith, published in

1961, and The Care of the Earth, in 1964.”43 Both texts represent the major emphases in

Sittler life: they both were collections of that demanded attention to the world as

saturated with God’s grace that challenged Christians to live in it as such.

Literature Review

Most of Sittler’s writing are to address specific issues in specific times. He wrote

only for occasions, whether it be a , essay, or extended meditations aimed at

helping preachers perfect their craft. Due to the unsystematic nature of Sittler’s writings,

it can often be difficult to offer a concise and clear articulation and presentation of

Sittler’s own argument. In this section, therefore, I will offer a precis of the relevant writings pertaining to Sittler’s ecological Christology in order to help the reader understand the various individual strains that make up Sittler’s Christological corpus.

A Theology for Earth {1954}

“A Theology for Earth,” explores the relationship between Christianity and the

natural world, by considering his two simultaneous Christian vocations: first, the

41 http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/04/obituaries/joseph-sittler-83-dies-was-lutheran-scholar.html 42 http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/04/obituaries/joseph-sittler-83-dies-was-lutheran-scholar.html 43 http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/04/obituaries/joseph-sittler-83-dies-was-lutheran-scholar.html See Joseph Sittler, The Ecology of Faith (Lyman Beecher Lectures), (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961). See also, Joseph Sittler, The Care of the Earth (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964).

17 vocation of a Christian theologian, and second as “a vocation to citizenship in the twentieth century.”44 The former “binds him to history, history in general and ecclesiastical history in particular. In obedience to this first vocation he must always look back and look down with responsibility, with gratitude, and in complete teachableness.”45 The latter requires one to “look his day full in the face, participate in the joyous thud of ideas in collision, listen to its multiple voices, [and] become a creature of its vitalities and torments.”46 The tension Sittler sees between the two vocations is the difficulty of communicating the former to the latter. Christians have found themselves unable to communicate the strange symbolic world of Christianity to the current age.

The symbols of the past have become foreign: the mobility common to the American way of life has produced a “creeping symbolic starvation; the very matrix of small meaningfulness in life which can become the womb of profounder and vaster structures of meaning is rendered anemic, becomes sour and brittle.”47 Sittler argues that the mobility that is so common in contemporary America starves us of a sense of place, rendering us ignorant of the importance of place in our lives and ways of thinking.

44 Joseph Sittler, “A Theology for Earth,” in The Christian Scholar 37, no. 3 (September 1954), 368. 45 Sittler, “Theology,” 368. 46 Sittler, “Theology,” 368. 47 Sittler, “Theology,” 369. Sittler describes mobility this way: “A young man is born in Ohio, goes to school in Massachusetts, marries a girl from Virginia. Their first child is born in the Bronx, baptized in a church that knew them not as children and will not see them in old age. The young father goes to work in Manhattan for a chartered in Delaware, writes advertisements for the consumption of people he never sees and for whom he has no immediate responsibility. And at any time, he may and probably will be ordered to move in two weeks to Dallas, Texas, there to pick up certain contacts (how expressive a word, that, for the way we moderns meet one another!) that will be useful to him when after two years he is transferred to Seattle, Washington.” See “A Theology for Earth,” 368-369. Additionally, throughout his career, Sittler would continue to flesh out this “American spirit” and the how we are to pay attention, now more than ever, to St. Paul’s heed to change “the spirit of our minds” (Eph. 4:23). Sittler’s solution is a spirit of attention. It is in beholding God’s creation, recognizing its beauty and realizing our mutual dependency. See The Role of the Spirit in Creating the Future Environment in Evocations, 59-75; “An Aspect of American Religious Experience,” in Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America, vol. 26, 1-17, 1971; and “Ecological Commitment.”

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Consequently, Sittler believes the division between nature and grace also feeds an

understanding of Scripture that also is ignorant of the importance of place. Sittler sees

the division of nature and grace and its consequences as a particularly acute issue in Neo-

Orthodoxy.

In my own vocation as a teacher of Christian theology, I have felt a deepening uneasiness about the tendency in , generally known as neo- orthodoxy, whereby the promises, imperatives, and dynamics of the are declared in sharp and calculated disengagement from the stuff of earthly life.”48

When a theology for earth—the place God has deemed home for humanity—is neglected, those on the outskirts who are attentive to the earth will “act as midwives for nature’s unsilenceable meaningfulness, and enunciate a theology of nature.”49 Sittler therefore

often cites St. Francis, Goethe, John Keats, John Milton, and Gerard Manley Hopkins as

examples of such “midwives for nature.” Theology that neglects a theology for Earth,

according to Sittler, tends to attempt to silence the unsilenceable voice of nature through

dominion and exploitation. An alternative relationship is possible within the Christian

Scriptures and traditions: “that man ought properly stand alongside nature as her

cherishing brother, for she too is God’s creation and bears God’s image.”50 By living in

48 Sittler, “Theology,” 369. Not much later in the article, Sittler offers his most poignant critique of neo- orthodoxy: “Alongside of this dis-ease with neo-orthodoxy’s almost proud repudiation of earth, and the feeling of some profound biblical promise distorted thereby, has gone another—a feeling that earth, fallen, cloven, and sinful—because given of God, capable in spite of all of becoming the cradle in which Christ is laid, is a transparency for the Holy…. Christian Theology cannot advance this work along the line of an orthodoxy—neo or old—which celebrates the love of heaven in complete separation from man’s in earth, abstracts commitment to Christ from relevancy to those of earth which are elemental to being.” See p. 370 and 373, respectively. 49 Sittler, “Theology,” 370. 50 Sittler, “Theology,” 372. Sittler does not describe how creation might bear God’s “image.” The of God’s image typically refers to the Imago Dei which is reserved for humanity, so what exactly Sittler means is unclear. It could be that he is referring to the way in which creation points towards God, as it is described in Romans 1:20.

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mindfulness of our mutual dependency on creation, Christians, and humanity more

broadly, can avoid the tendency towards tyranny and rape of the Earth.51

Finally, Sittler articulates an inchoative form of his ecological Christology. “It is

of the heart of the Christian faith that the mighty, living, acting, restoring Word actually identified himself with his cloven and frustrated creation which groans in travail.”52 That the Word became flesh is an indication that humanity and all its relationship (to humanity, nature, and God) might be made right and restoration brought to the entire cosmos. “God--man--nature! These three are meant for each other, and restlessness will stalk our hearts, and ambiguity our world until their cleavage redeemed.”53 The elements

of bread and are reminders of our home, our connection to it, dependence on it, and

the restoration and redemption of it all. A theology that separates one’s understanding of

heaven from the life lived on earth, “which abstracts commitment to Christ from

relevancy to those loyalties of earth that are elemental to being” is one alien to

Christianity.

In “A Theology for Earth,” we see the beginning forms of Sittler’s Christology

and an early articulation of what will become essential to it: namely what Sittler will

come to call the “triply-constituted” identity of the human person. As Sittler’s career

continues the he will continue to articulate the ways in which his Christology relies on

the three relationships he understands to constitute the human person: God, fellow human

persons, and the natural world.

51 Sittler, “Theology,” 372. 52 Sittler, “Theology,” 373. 53 Sittler, “Theology,” 373.

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Called to Unity {1962}

Delivered to the World Council of Churches General Assembly in New Delhi,

India, on November 21, 1961, and later published in The Ecumenical Review in January of 1962, “Called to Unity” claimed that if Christ is the one described in Colossians 1:15-

20, then the church is called towards unity because it is He who holds all things together.54 In his own words, Sittler makes clear that the thesis of his address is:

that our moment in history is heavy with the imperative that faith proposes for the madly malleable and grandly possible potencies of nature--that holiest, vastest, confession: that by him, for him, and through him all things subsist in God, and therefore are to be used in joy and sanity for his human family.55

In a time of environmental degradation, it is nothing but a Christology of nature that is rooted in the person of Jesus Christ that can guide us to right relation with the natural world. “Redemption is the name for this will, this action, and this concrete Man who is

God with us and God for us-- and all things are permeable to his cosmic redemption because all things subsist in him.”56 The dualism between nature and grace that Sittler saw in contemporary Western Christianity was an error not unlike the “Colossian error,” namely,

to assume that there were ‘thrones, dominions, principalities and ’ which have a life and power apart from Christ, that the real world was a dualism, one part of which (and that part ensconcing the power of ) was not subject to the Lordship of the Creator in his Christ.57

54 It’s important to note that Sittler had been involved in studies of humanity’s relationship with the natural world sponsored by the World Council of Churches (WCC) since the 1960’s. See Creede, Logos, 245-88; Simonson, Christology, 69-100, 138-68. Sittler’s membership with the WCC goes back to 1951 and through the WCC participated “in an official Roman Catholic-Lutheran study group as well as in study groups that brought Lutherans and members of other Reformed communions.” See Bakkan, Ecology, 33- 34. 55 Sittler, “Called,” 185-186. 56 Sittler, “Called,” 177. 57 Sittler, “Called,” 178.

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This dualism persists, Sittler argues, in theology in the West, in part because of

Enlightenment thinking. With each new great scientific discovery God seem pushed further and further from the workings of everyday life. The processes of the natural world no longer seemed be held together by God but by gravity and the workings of a mechanical . “[T]he realm of grace retreated as more of the structure and process of nature was claimed by now autonomous man.”58 Sittler goes on to claim that

in our time we have beheld the vision and promises of the Enlightenment come to strange and awesome maturity. The cleavage between grace and nature is complete. Man’s identity has been shrunken to the dimensions of privatude within social determinism. The doctrine of the creation has been made a devout datum of past time. The mathematization of meaning in technology and its reduction to operational terms in has left no mental space wherein to declare that nature, as well as history, is the theater of grace and scope of redemption.59

The great hymn of Colossians and the work of Athanasius and Irenaeus present for Sittler a way to move forward and a vision of the redemption brought about in Christ that is as expansive as the cosmos. Sittler’s “Called to Unity” address is one of the more concise articulations of the theme of redemption in Christ. Peter Bakken, whose dissertation examines the work of Joseph Sittler, summarizes “Called to Unity” as follows:

[Sittler] claims that Christology is irrelevant unless it is related to our earthliness-- which includes hunger, war, and the care of the earth. Western has inherited a dualism of nature and grace that has shrunk Christ to personal and historical categories. However, in Colossians and Irenaeus we have a model for a Christology of nature commensurate with the cosmos we now inhabit, and which can lead the churches to true Christian unity.60

58 Sittler, “Called,” 181. 59 Sittler, “Called,” 183. 60 Peter W. Bakken, Joan Gibb Engel, and J. Ronald Engel, Ecology, , and Christian Faith: A Critical Guide to the Literature (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 85.

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In order for humanity to address the questions facing them today—questions of quantum

physics, quarks, and —then Christianity would need to understand how the life,

, and resurrection of God incarnate penetrates the depths of humanity’s inquiries.

We live in a kairos where Christ and Chaos intersect, a moment in which the fullest Christology is marvelously congruent with man’s power-founded anxiety and need. Contemporary man expresses his hurt in terms of his broken or uncertain relationship to society and nature.61

In Christ, Sittler would argue then and throughout the rest of his career, we find the

relationship between humans and God, humanity, and nature healed and exemplified.

“Called to Unity” is Sittler’s first attempt to express his comprehensive

understanding of the problem plaguing the imagination of Christianity in the West:

namely, a kind of dualism. Furthermore, Sittler offers a Christology centered around his

reading of Colossians 1:15-20 as the solution to the dualistic problem. According to

Sittler, a problem as expansive as environmental degradation needs a solution equally as expansive. Sittler then suggests nothing less than a Christology as expansive as the

cosmos is sufficient enough to address the problem contemporary society now faces. The

New Delhi address is one of his most systematic pieces on the topic of nature and grace

and Sittler Christological solution and will remain so until Essays on Nature and Grace is

published in 1972.

Ecological Commitment as Theological Responsibility {1970}

Here Sittler addresses how all of reality is ecological because it all stands in

relation. “Reality is known only in relations.”62 He finds this simple statement at odds

61 Sittler, “Called,” 186. 62 Sittler, “Ecological Commitment,” 174.

23 with the way of understanding the world in conflict with post-Enlightenment thought, much of which the West has inherited.

I mean by such a statement that we must think it possible that there is no ontology of isolated entities, or instance, of forms, of processes, whether we are reflecting about God or man or society or the cosmos. The only adequate ontological structure we may utilize for thinking things Christianly is an ontology of community, communion, ecology-- and all three words point conceptually to thought of a common kind.63

Summarizing Calvin, Sittler argues that “God is the name for that one from whom all things flow. Man is what he is because he is related to that one.” That human persons are created in the , does not point to a substance, but denotes a relation. All words within the Christian vocabulary are defined within this relationship and are thus relational words.64 The Christian, then, is charged with the responsibility to “behold”

God. In our beholding we become able to be attentive to the beauty of God’s created order but also to realize our mutual relation to it. Bakken argues that for Sittler, to

“behold” means “we must honor the integrity of other beings and ‘think’ in relations, that is, recognize human beings as both natural and historical. The relation of theology and ecology is best understood within the doctrine of grace as created and uncreated.”65 To behold is not to stand in reverence as “other” to what is around, but to see how we are in relation with what is around us.66 Beholding, then, both acknowledges our relation to

God, while also our relation to all His creation. “[A]n ontology of relations begets a beholding in relations, and this begets a thinking in relations.”67 If all things are known in their relation to God, is an ecological word that denotes all things being

63 Sittler, “Ecological Commitment,” 174. 64 Sittler, “Ecological Commitment,” 174. 65 Bakken, Grace, 86. 66 Sittler, “Ecological Commitment,” 175. 67 Sittler, “Ecological Commitment,” 176.

24 brought into right relationship through the person of Jesus Christ. It is important to make a key note regarding Sittler’s work: namely, that Sittler believes the fundamental task of his work is to change the “spirit of our minds.” Here he is referring to St. Paul’s reference in Ephesians 4:23. The concept of the “spirit of our minds” is significant because Sittler’s arguments, throughout his career, are against mindsets, or ways of thinking, that have proven problematic or even blasphemous to Christian living. Sittler is attempting to orient the western church towards Christ, and therefore towards right and proper action in the world. To do this, he must address the dominant “spirit of our mind” which has narrowed and distorted the scope of Christ’s salvific work. This “spirit of our mind” has therefore led, according to Sittler, to forms of life that are blasphemous.

It is difficult, according to Sittler, but not impossible to get the church to understand how an issue like pollution is “biologically disastrous, aesthetically offensive, equally obviously economically self-destructive, and socially reductive of the quality of human life.” But it is extremely difficult to get “even Christians to see that to so deal with the Creation is Christianly blasphemous.” Sittler goes on to argue that a

proper doctrine of creation and redemption would make it perfectly clear that from a Christian point of view the ecological crisis presents us not simply with moral tasks but requires of us a freshly renovated and fundamental theology of the first article whereby the Christian faith defines whence the Creation was formed, and why, and by whom, and to what end. The word essential to such renovation is not the social, aesthetic, economic, or even scientific word, but the Christian word—!68

Sittler finally suggests that “ecology, that is, the actuality of the relational as constitutive of all that lives, is the only theater vast enough for a modern playing out of the doctrine

68 Sittler, “Ecological Commitment,” 179.

25

of grace.”69 God has created the world and its animals in such a way that demonstrates

the vastness of His grace. It does so because God, as a gracious God, cannot do anything

else but create graciously.

In “Ecological Commitment as Theological Responsibility” we see Sittler

seriously develop his understanding of the triad of relations that constitute the human

person that he began 16 years prior in “A Theology for Earth.” One of the functions for

Sittler’s articulations of the “triply-constituted” relations of the human person is to suggest that our responsibility as Christians is to “behold,” or to keep in our mind the relationships essential to us. Sittler suggests that the Christian responsibility of beholding helps to address the problematic “spirit of the mind” in Western Christianity with regards to its understanding of its own relationship to the natural world.

Essays on Nature and Grace {1972}

Considered Sittler’s most thorough and definitive work, Essays on Nature and

Grace argues that Christians must re-imagine the doctrine of grace in ways that regard all

of God’s creation as graced. “Sittler relates the doctrine of grace to the ‘environmental

problem,’ noting that must speak to a culture in which the scope of the

known universe and of human powers to alter and perhaps destroy the earth has reached

unprecedented magnitudes.”70 Sittler addresses how abuses of persons and nature stem

from a failure to see the world as graced by God. There is no reality in which God is not

the creator and sustainer, and all therefore is brought into right relations through the

person of Jesus Christ. The set of essays traces the historical understanding of grace

69 Sittler, “Ecological Commitment,” 180. This would be the way Sittler would define the term “ecological” or “ecology.” 70 Bakken, Grace, 86.

26 through the Scriptures, early church, , and into our modern times. In doing so Sittler argues that Western Christianity’s conception of grace has been narrowly relegated to that which is other-worldly. Sittler believes that that the scope of grace was narrowed so much that the sanctifying grace of God was only understood to encompass human persons. Sittler therefore argues that

the doctrine [of grace] must be relocated for our time, and a fresh way must be found to propose the reality of grace to men who understand the cosmos as a closed system. . . Where is grace in a world that has been experimentally taken apart by empirical science, its laws disclosed, its structure and process translated into statistical terms, and the knowledge of which, even if fragmentary, is sufficient to secure predictability and enable fantastically complicated manipulation of its forces and processes?71

At the heart of the text is one of the animating centers of much of Sittler’s work: his desire to see theology penetrate and extend to all areas and disciplines of human inquiry.

Sittler’s concluding charge is that Christians need to acknowledge and live in such a way that understands all of creation as , graced. A Christian denial of that fact is condemnation on us, and blasphemy of the God we claim to .72

In Essays, we see Sittler’s most developed argument regarding the dualistic problem facing Western Christianity and the biblical Christology articulated by the fathers that stands as the solution. Sittler, in many ways, is not articulating a new

Christology, but is rather applying a biblical Christology to the problem of environmental degradation by Western Christians in a mid-to-late twentieth century American context.

In doing so, Sittler brings together many of the strands he has been weaving since 1954 in

“A Theology for Earth” namely, a cosmic Christology rooted in Scripture and the Church

Fathers, an idea of the ontological relations constitutive of the human person rooted in

71 Sittler, Essays, 1-2. 72 Sittler, Essays, 122.

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Genesis, and an articulation of the problem as a separation between what we, as modern

Western Christians, think is natural and what we think of as “other” to the natural, or even opposed to the natural, called “grace.” In many ways, Sittler is leveraging what he believes to be human ontology as the way forward for human flourishing and restoring of

the relationships currently broken due to a problematic and unbiblical “spirit of the

mind.”

The Scope of Christological Reflection {1972}

In “The Scope of Christological Reflection” Sittler reflects further on the

argument he first laid out eleven years prior in his pivotal but controversial speech

“Called to Unity.” He first praises and recognizes the ways in which theologians have

been “giving fresh attention to the doctrine of creation” and praises these new

developments and insights.73 Sittler notes that in a single journal, Theology Today, in

only a two year period, two major articles try to take seriously the articulation of a

refreshed doctrine of creation.74 Sittler claims that both articles aim to take the following

quote by Wolfhart Pannenberg seriously:

The word “God” is used meaningfully only if one means to it the power that determines everything that exists. Anyone who does not want to revert to a polytheistic or polydaemonistic state of the phenomenology of religion must think of God as the creator of all things.75

73 Joseph Sittler, “The Scope of Christological Reflection, in Interpretation 26 (July 1972), 329. 74 Diogenes Allen, "Theological Reflection on the Natural World," Theology Today, 25:435 ff. (68 f.). Diogenes Allen was the Stuart Professor at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1981 to his retirement in 2002. His academic were in the philosophy of Leibniz and Simone Weil, as well as the of Simone Weil. See, https://web.archive.org/web/20150411022528/http://ptsem.edu/index.aspx?id=25769804987 See also, George Hendry, “The Eclipse of Creation,” Theology Today 25 (January 1969): 435-45. “George S. Hendry was the Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Seminary from 1949 to 1973.” See http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0040573612453163?journalCode=ttja 75 Sittler, “Scope,” 329, citing Wolfhart Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology, trans George Kehm (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970), Vol. I, p. I.

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For Sittler, the “thrust” of these articles and the trend towards a fresh view of the doctrine of creation is quite clear:

Just as in the the doctrine of creation is a necessary correlate to the doctrine of the divine redemption, so in contemporary theological efforts to articulate a doctrine of Christ which shall have a magnitude competent to declare his Lordship over all things, the creation of the world by God (since Schleiermacher interpreted as meaning only the sustaining and preserving of the world) must again be made a fundamental dogmatic affirmation if Christology is to be unfolded to the dimensions of its intrinsic fullness.76

The intrinsic fullness that Sittler speaks of here is the fullness of all creation. For Sittler there must be a correlation between the doctrine of creation and the scope of God’s redemptive work through Christ for Christ is the Word through which the Father creates.

That the scope of the redemptive work of God through Christ needed to be as expansive in scope as the doctrine of creation, Sittler argues, was the thrust of his argument at New

Delhi: “to inquire how contemporary man’s engagement with the natural world might draw Christological thought into orbits of meaning coordinate with the magnitude of modern man’s transactions with the natural world.”77 Additionally, due to the fresh attention to the doctrine of creation Sittler sees a new way of thinking about Christology emerging from the old one summarized the hermeneutic of “ the Lebenswelt (the realm of man’s experience of the world-as-nature). . . .”78 Sittler attributes the hermeneutical perspective of the Lebenswelt to Schleiermacher and argues that this perspective “no longer specifies the world dimension demanding understanding.”79 Sittler sees the work of Bultmann as an attempt at moving beyond these categories by using the historical facts

76 Sittler, “Scope,” 329. 77 Sittler, “Scope,” 329. 78 Sittler, “Scope,” 329. Whether Sittler’s assessment of Schleiermacher and his hermeneutical work is accurate is beyond the scope of this project. Sittler’s point would remain even if his understanding of Schleiermacher is argued: the way we have been understanding and arguing Christology no longer correlates or relates to humanity’s engagement, understanding, and exploration of the natural world. 79 Sittler, “Scope,” 329.

29 to look forward to whereas the authors and church fathers accomplished this by looking backward.

The theologians of hope (Bultmann and those following his method), by reflecting forward to God, are trying to accomplish by the facts and energies of the world- historical categories precisely what the fathers of the church, including the writers [of] the New Testament, sought to accomplish by reflecting backward upon events and energies of ’s historical experience. The first efforts were necessary; current efforts are no less so. But to suppose that the subtleties of Lebenswelt-analysis dissolves or sufficiently enfolds into silence the world-status question is an illusion.80

In suggesting this, Sittler is not attempting to suggest that Schleiermacher was off base, or necessarily incorrect, but rather that Schleiermacher was speaking to a particular audience with particular ways of thinking and understanding the world.

We have come to the end of the Schleiermacher road, not because the statements of Schleiermacher are erroneous, but because the world placement of the person who asks the question about God and Christ and himself is no longer an inhabitant of Schleiermacher’s world.81

Schleiermacher’s statements may have been needed in his time due to his “world placement of the person,” but his days are over, and a new (old) paradigm is needed in for contemporary society. A new paradigm is needed because society stands in a different placement and now asks different questions of the Christian faith. In an age where men stand on the moon, gain knowledge of the universe, and discover the quark, a different, ancient, and more robustly biblical conception of Christology and nature and grace is needed in order to speak to the discoveries and anxieties of contemporary society. The categories of inquiry must be expanded to relate to the scientific explorations of which humanity is currently engaged. Commenting on the use of some of

80 Sittler, “Scope,” 331. 81 Sittler, “Scope,” 331.

30 the social sciences in theology, Sittler argues that these disciplines alone do not articulate the fullness of the redemption brought about in Christ.

Social is a true descriptive discipline. But not true enough. I am what I am not only as one with, among, and in self-forming transactions with men; I am who and what I am in relations to the web, structure, process, and placenta of nature. And because and insofar as contemporary theology ignores that…. its reflections about the adequacy of redemption in Christ will be uninteresting because [it is] insufficiently real.82

Academic disciplines such as psychology and social psychology, according to Sittler, still do not encompass the robust of the Christian faith. Sittler’s understanding of anthropology though

is incommensurable with Cartesian notions of self-hood. If the self is to be redeemed by Christ, and if that self is unspecifiable apart from its embeddedness in the world as nature, then ‘the whole creation’ of the and of Romans 8 is seen as the logically necessary scope of Christological speech.83

Sittler then briefly addresses the complaint he has faced since “Called to Unity” regarding his lack of attention to whether Paul intended a cosmic and doctrinal

Christological reading of Colossians 1:15-20, since exegetes have argued the text is a hymn. Sittler utilizes a then unpublished paper presented to the Chicago University

Divinity School by Paul Ricoeur in which he argues that “[t]he sense of a text is not behind the text, but in front of it.” Over time, then, new meanings spring forth from the text as it engages new readers in new historical contexts whose milieu cannot help but push the text into new and uncharted territory.84 In his defense of his use of Colossians,

Sittler argues that “[t]he ‘intentionality’ of the writer (even if we could fully recover it!)

82 Sittler, “Scope,” 333. 83 Sittler, “Scope,” 333. 84 Sittler, “Scope,” 335. This quote in its entirety is from Ricoeur that Sittler cites can be found in a later published work by Ricoeur, see Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, TX: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 87.

31 is not the limit of the life and energy and career of the text --as the doxological text [Col.

1: 15-20] moves through the centuries.” So even if Colossians 1:15-20 is a doxological hymn—as Sittler’s critics have argued as a reason the text cannot be utilized as Sittler does—Sittler believes the Colossian text can nevertheless be useful to Christians as they seek to engage and obey the Scriptures in a new era.

For a long time the extraordinary amplitude of Colossians 1:15-22 was reduced to dogmatically less embarrassing size by dismissing it as superheated rhetoric fashioned by the writer to relate Christian claims for Christ to the scope of Gnostic speculation, and indeed, possibly to have borrowed its image from that tradition. This tactic is no longer possible.85

Sittler believes that the Christian faith must be articulated by Christians in a way that reaches the scope of human exploration. Humanity has explored the biological cells and the stars, so a theology which matches such magnitude is needed. “An ecological worldview will require belief statements appropriate to the dimensions of faith energies.”86 Christology must catch up with the great expansion of knowledge brought about by scientific advances and do so in a way that articulates a doctrine of redemption as vast as the cosmos itself.

Evangelism and the Care of the Earth {1973}

In this brief piece Sittler argues that caring for the earth is not a calling one has as a Christian, as if it were a role or ministry some are called to and others not. Rather, caring for the earth is constitutive of what it means to be a Christian.87 He supports this claim through four main points. The first is that “man is who and what he is and can become because he is constituted by three forces that cross—and he is who he is because

85 Sittler, “Scope,” 334-5. 86 Sittler, “Scope,” 337. 87 Joseph Sittler, “Evangelism and the Care for the Earth,” in Evocations, 203.

32 these forces intersect in him.”88 Of those forces, the first is God’s creative power.

Humanity is formed by God, and “is because God is.”89 Because the human person was created by God he or she is thus a creature. Even if one were to want to ignore this single fact he or she is unable to escape it. Second, humanity is formed to be among other rational creatures. Adam was not created alone. Indeed, it was not right that he should be alone (Gen. 2:18). Rather, was created to be Adam’s companion. “I am who I am because I am a man-among. God made me; but he makes me as a plain biological entity by the communion of others. I have parents; I have children.”90 The third force is that

God makes humanity dependent upon the non-rational creation. “I can live without for a month, without water for a week, without air for perhaps six minutes. I am stuck with God, stuck with my neighbor, and stuck with nature within which and out of the stuff of which I am made.”91 For Sittler, these are relations that are essential to one’s being. They are non-negotiable, as much as we attempt to live otherwise. “I may love

God, hate God, ignore God. But I can’t get unstuck from God. I may love my neighbor, hate my neighbor, or ignore my neighbor. But I can’t get unstuck from my neighbor.

And I may love the world, hate the world, or try to ignore the world. But I cannot get unstuck from the world.”92

Sittler’s second reason for his overall claim that caring for the earth is constitutive of what it means to be Christian is that when God created , He placed them within all of creation. It was there that humanity found its home. The natural world is

88 Sittler, “Evangelism,” 203. 89 Sittler, “Evangelism,” 203. 90 Sittler, “Evangelism,” 203. 91Sittler, “Evangelism,” 203-4. 92 Sittler, “Evangelism,” 204.

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not something to escape from but the very reality through which we know God. His third

reason, building upon the second, is that humanity is placed in the garden and

subsequently commanded to tend it and to care for it. Sittler’s final point is that the

garden flourishes when humanity obeys this command and in return it leads to the

flourishing of humanity because it is part of God’s proper ordering of creation.93

If in piety the church says, ‘The earth is ’s and the fullness thereof’ (Psalm 24:1), and in fact is no different in thought and action from the general community, who will be drawn by her word and worship to ‘come and see’ that her work or salvation has any meaning? Witness in saying is irony and bitterness if there be no witness in doing.94

The proper expression of the Christian life cannot ignore the basic ontological relations

God has placed us within. To claim that the earth is the Lord’s yet ignore these relations

and act as if the world is insignificant to the Christian life is to fail to witness to the

universe made right in the person of Jesus Christ. We see in this article, one of Sittler’s

later writings on ecological Christology, Sittler again addressing the same kind of

problematic “spirit of the mind” that he really first articulated in “Called to Unity.” The

“spirit of the mind” that Sittler seeks to address continues to captivate the Western

Christian imagination and create a lacuna between the Bible’s teaching regarding our

ecological responsibility and ontological relations which support that responsibility, and

what Sittler sees in the lives of many Western Christians. Sittler utilizes his ontology of

relations in order to call his readers towards obedience to the Christian life, an imitation

93 As Lowe demonstrates the mindset that the land needs tending to, and that tending was not destructive but essential to the mutual relationship that existed between humanity and the natural world distinguishes Sittler from those who would argue for conservation. This conservation mindset is different from the Agrarian in that it sought to avoid impacting creation at all, seeing all human interaction as destructive. For more on the Christian connection with the conservation movement, see Mark R. Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 94 Sittler, “Evangelism,” 206.

34 of Christ, and the realization—or “beholding” as Sittler has described it in other articles—of the relations essential to us as humans.

Sources

Scripture

Without a doubt, the most recurring source from which Sittler draws upon was

Scripture. Some of this was due, in part, to his Lutheran heritage.95 It is also due, in part, to his experience as a pastor, whose job was to declare the text—the Word of God—to these people, in this particular moment. In his first published book on preaching, some thirteen years after leaving that ministry, Sittler claims that declaring and preaching the

Word of God is like preaching from a riverbank. One may return to the same spot, only to find it different: it is not the same river that flows in front of the reader and the reader in some ways has changed as well. “From Incarnation to culture is a straight line, for the determination of God to embody his ultimate Word places man’s relation to that Word inextricably in the web of historical circumstances.”96 Sittler continues by arguing that:

[t]he Word is not naked, it is historically embodied. The hearing situation is not naked either, and culture is the name for that ecological matrix in which the embodied will and deed from above addresses the embodied hearer at every point along history’s river.97

Even when one returns to the same Scriptural text, it can be read anew due to the changing of the reader itself. So, it is, also, with that of the preacher to the congregation.

The same text is never the same because both the preacher and the congregation are never the same that read it the last time.

95 His first published book, originally given as a series of lectures for the Knubel-Miller Foundation lectures for the ULCA (United Lutheran Church in America, was entitled The Doctrine of the Word in the Structure of Lutheran Theology. 96 Joseph Sittler, The Ecology of Faith: The New Situation in Preaching (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961), 4-5. 97 Sittler, Ecology, 5

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For Sittler, Scripture is always at the forefront of his mind when supporting his

arguments. Throughout his works there are repeated texts that are foundational to his

thinking such as Genesis 1, Psalm 104, Romans 8, Colossians 1, and Ephesians 4. These texts provide continual and ongoing reflection on the ways in which God’s grace permeates all of His creation. Additionally, these scriptural texts challenge the spirit of

the age to return to a grander, fuller, more robust Christology.

Allan D. Galloway’s Cosmic Christ

Allan D. Galloway was born in 1920 in Stirlingshire, Scotland. He graduated

from Glasgow University with a degree in philosophy and went on to study systematic

theology under at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He returned to

Europe to finish his PhD at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and in 1951 Galloway

published his dissertation under the The Cosmic Christ. For a time, he was Professor

of Divinity at Glasgow University. During his life he would deliver the Kerr Lectures at

Glasgow University in 1966, which were then published as Faith in a Changing Culture, and a series of Gifford Lectures in 1983-1984, also at Glasgow University.98 He would

go on to become ordained for ministry by the Church of Scotland. Galloway passed

away at the age of 85 on February 4, 2006.99

Galloway’s Cosmic Christ provides the historical and philosophical foundation

from which Sittler launches. He is a recurring source for Sittler throughout his career,

drawing on him as early as his “Called to Unity” address in 1962, returning to him again

in Essays on Nature in Grace in 1972 and in various other speeches throughout his

98 http://www.giffordlectures.org/lecturers/allan-douglas-galloway. 99 http://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/allan-galloway-1-1105293#ixzz3wUUnSUyj.

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career. Sittler acknowledges the debt he owes to Galloway in Essays: “[i]t is a responsibility, and a pleasure, to record here my debt to Dr. Galloway’s work. While I had, before reading The Cosmic Christ, come some distance along the road marked out by the argument of these essays, Dr. Galloway’s work was instructive, stimulating, and supportive.”100

The Cosmic Christ articulates a cosmic vision of redemption, beginning in the early testimony of Israel in the which finds its fulfillment in the vast cosmic Christology of authors like St. John and St. Paul. Galloway argues that a cosmic

Christology was clear in the writings and theology of the New Testament authors and can be traced from the philosophy and theology of the Israelites. The question then, is why is cosmic Christology largely forgotten or ignored in contemporary theology? Galloway attempts to address this question by providing a narrative from the ancient Israelites to modern day which traces the understanding of the natural world in Christian history.

After Galloway’s survey of the biblical texts, he examines the battles between the early

church fathers and the Gnostics: a battle between a cosmic Christology and a dualism that

elevates the and degrades the natural. He examines how the early church

fathers, Clement, , and particularly Irenaeus, articulates a cosmic Christology to argue that the view of the Gnostics limits the salvific work of Christ to only parts of creation. According to these church fathers, the salvific work of Christ is operating

throughout the universe.

The battle with the Gnostics that takes place early on in Christian history

continues, according to Galloway, in various forms but with the same key components

100 Sittler, Essays, 100.

37 into the Middle Ages. Galloway argues, and Sittler in some ways reiterates, that a key moment was in ’ distinction between nature and grace. Galloway reads

Thomas as arguing that

[i]n so far as nature as a whole participates in the final end, it does not do so as receiving any direct benefit from the work of Christ, but only in virtue of that natural goodness with which it was created—a goodness independent of the additional gift of grace, and therefore unaffected by the Fall, in which grace was lost, and equally unaffected by the work of redemption, in which grace was restored.101

For Galloway, the division between nature and grace is further illustrated in Thomas’ understanding of the , which he contrasts with Irenaeus’: “For Irenaeus, the union of spiritual and material benefit in the symbolizes the ultimate unity of nature and grace implied in Christian salvation. But for Aquinas, the fact that the sacraments are administered in a material element is merely God’s gracious concession to man’s regrettably sensuous nature.”102 He continues with this contrast by arguing that

[f]or Irenaeus, the Incarnation and saving work of Jesus Christ meant that the promise of grace was held out to the whole of nature, and that henceforth nothing could be called common or unclean. For the church of the Middle Ages, on the other hand, nature was essentially common, and, if not positively unclean, at least seriously deficient in the shining whiteness of the in the empyrean heaven, and essentially incapable of sharing in such .103

101 Galloway, Cosmic Christ, 126. 102 Galloway, Cosmic Christ, 128. 103 Galloway, Cosmic Christ, 128. It is important to note not only Galloway’s interpretation and rejection of “Thomas” but also the context with which this interpretation is being made. When The Cosmic Christ is published in 1951, Catholicism was still, by and large, under the influence of the Neo-Scholastic interpretations of Thomas. It was precisely around the time that Henri de Lubac and Marie-Dominique Chenu began to make arguments for what came to be known as the Nouvelle Théologie and eventually transcendental ; see James C. Livingston and Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Sarah Coakley, and James H. Evans Jr., Modern Christian Thought: The Twentieth Century (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 198 and Fergus Kerr, Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians: From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007). I say this to suggest that Galloway seems, then, to not be rejecting Thomas per se, but rather a particular dominant hermeneutic during his time. It is, however, not to suggest that their interpretation was unfounded. This particular thomistic hermeneutic dominated the Catholic imagination. It is seen most clearly in Rev. Thomas L. Kinkead, The Baltimore Catechism No. 4 (New York: Baronius Press Ltd, 1885). So, Galloway’s judgment is indeed accurate, and this interpretation of Thomas was in the process of being overturned into something more in line with Galloway and Sittler’s thinking. Sittler’s identification of the problem and subsequent response, then, is in many ways like de Lubac.

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This dualism is further exacerbated during the Renaissance104 when science begins to

search for objectivity.

[The sciences] treated the world as though it had no transcendental significance such as might be ascribed to it in theological propositions.”105 He goes on to argue that “[t]he scientific Renaissance emphasised the contrast between man’s outward environment and his inner spiritual nature. It emphasised the incongruity of the determinate laws governing physical environment with the religious and moral aspirations of personal life.106

This dualism finds its zenith in the work of Kant, and more broadly in German

Idealism. German , for Galloway, is a synthesis of continental Rationalism and

British Empiricism. “The sharp duality between nature and value in Kant arose

fundamentally from an epistemological problem, and was an expression of the already

existing dichotomy in culture, brought into being by the rise of the new science.”107

Galloway goes on to claim that “[t]he Kantian system tends towards dualism simply

because, at the outset, it accepts this dichotomy as ultimate, and develops an

epistemological and metaphysical basis for it.”108 Hegel, then, provides the appropriate

corrective to this Kantian system by arguing that the observer is never truly “other” to the

subject it seeks to observe. Thus, object and subject are never completely separate, but

rather always entangled and engaged in some way. Galloway sums it up this way: “‘self’

and ‘world’ are correlative terms. One cannot speak of ‘self’ except as a self having a

world. One cannot speak of ‘world’ except as the world of a self.”109

104 Galloway emphasizes more the renaissance as the start of the scientific way of thinking while Sittler argues that it was in the Enlightenment that such thought came to maturity. 105 Galloway, Cosmic Christ, 133. 106 Galloway, Cosmic Christ, 139. 107 Galloway, Cosmic Christ, 156. 108 Galloway, Cosmic Christ, 156-7. 109 Galloway, Cosmic Christ, 191.

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For Galloway, the realization that we are part of and known through the world must be the new starting point for theology. “Physical nature cannot be treated as an indifferent factor—as the mere stage and setting of the drama of personal redemption. It must either be condemned as in itself evil or else it must be brought within the scope of the redemptive act.”110 The second to last chapter is rightly entitled “The Form of the

Answer.” Galloway seeks not to answer the question of how theology should be done in this particular setting, but rather offers his argument in The Cosmic Christ as the form of the answer.

Sittler, then, can be read as addressing the answer in his particular context, addressing the ways in which this new paradigm shapes how Christians act in the here and now. In many ways, Sittler’s work is an application of the work started by Galloway in The Cosmic Christ. For Galloway, “[o]nce a community has accepted a redemptive faith, the impact of their environment upon them forces them either to narrow their concept of redemption by giving it an other-worldly interpretation, or to widen its reference so as to include the hole of their environment.”111 Sittler, as I hope to show, is firmly convinced of the latter.

Galloway is significant because Sittler does not diagnose the problem in a concentrated and succinct manner, but rather over decades in various spurts. Before

Sittler’s first mention of Galloway in “Called to Unity,” there are no theological arguments that rely on Irenaeus, nor the kind of historical and philosophical analysis that

Galloway provides. Rather, before 1962, we find Sittler relies primarily on Scripture to make his point. It seems safe to suggest, then, that Galloway provides a strong

110 Galloway, Cosmic Christ, 205. 111 Galloway, Cosmic Christ, 232.

40 foundation for Sittler, and a rich philosophical and historical source from which he continually draws.

Conclusion

I began this introduction by first giving an overview of my task as a whole, followed by a summary of each chapter and how the subsequent chapters fit into my overall aim. Beyond that, the aim of this introduction was to offer a brief biographical sketch of Sittler’s life and writings in order to better highlight and explain some of the major themes and influences present throughout his career. By understanding the biographical context by which Sittler was shaped we gain a better grasp of his arguments and . Sittler’s context is particularly important with regards to his understanding of Aquinas, which at least early on he seems to have inherited from Alan

Galloway and Neo-Scholasticism more broadly.112 I examined Sittler’s biographical context and various written works first in order to help orient the reader to his general

concerns and gain insight into the conceptual frameworks he continually relied upon in

112 An example of what I mean can be found in Sittler’s “Called to Unity” address in which he offers an extended quote from Galloway to argue for why we must attend to the Christological vision of Irenaeus rather than the one we currently have founded in a more scholastic dualism. In this extended quote, Galloway is utilizing a difference in the sacramental theology between Irenaeus and St. Thomas as an example of understanding of nature and grace that we have and must reject (the latter) and one we must rediscover and inhabit (the former): “In Irenaeus . . . there are not two orders of goodness, but only one. All goodness, whether it belongs to this world or to the final consummation, is a manifestation of the grace of God. It is the same grace of God which sustains nature even in its fallen state and which confers salvation in Jesus Christ. The residual goodness in nature can even be regarded as an anticipation or foretaste of that salvation. The same . . . appears also in Irenaeus’ attitude toward the sacraments as compared with that of the church of the Middle Ages. For Irenaeus the union of spiritual and material benefit in the Eucharist symbolizes the ultimate unity of nature and grace implied in Christian salvation. But for Aquinas that the sacraments are administered in a material element is merely God’s gracious concession to man’s regrettably sensuous nature. (P.II. QI, A.8). For Irenaeus, the Incarnation and saving work of Jesus Christ meant that the promise of grace was held out to the whole of nature, and that henceforth nothing could be called common or unclean. For the church of the Middle Ages, on the other hand, nature was essentially common, and, if not positively unclean, at least seriously deficient in that shining whiteness of the saints in the empyrean heaven, and essentially incapable of sharing in such glory.” Sittler, “Called to Unity,” 181; citing Galloway, The Cosmic Christ, 128ff. It should be noted that Galloway’s—and therefore subsequently Sittler’s—citation of the Summa is inaccurate and does not pertain to the content he is reflecting on. It is not clear where he is getting this summation of St. Thomas.

41 his various speeches, articles, and sermons. Due to his writing style, which is best describe as occasional, a précis of his works was necessary before we begin a more thematic look at his overall arguments and weave these various concerns and foci throughout his career together into a synthesized argument.

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CHAPTER TWO:

UNEARTHING THE PROBLEM

The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shores Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d; But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world

-Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”

In order to understand Joseph Sittler’s Christology and how he understands it to

address the theological problems of twentieth century Western Christianity, we must first

understand his diagnosis of the theological problem that has lent itself to Western

Christian participation in environmental degradation. However, before we examine

Sittler’s critique, I will first examine Lynn White Jr.’s essay “The Historical Roots of the

Ecological Crisis.”

In December of 1966, Lynn White Jr. presented an essay, which was published in the journal Science in 1967, entitled “The Historical Roots of the Ecological Crisis.” The essay gained enormous attention and continues to be an animating part of the debates concerning Christianity and its role in the environmental crisis and eco-theology. The attention is due, in part, to the essay’s claim that Christianity, as “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen,”113 and “bears a huge burden of guilt”114 for the current ecological crisis. In his article, “After Lynn White: Religious Ethics and

113 White, “Crisis,” 1205. 114 White, “Crisis,” 1206.

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Environmental Problems,” Willis Jenkins states that “Christian environmental theologies

have been especially shaped by White’s thesis because they have needed to fashion some

response to the elegant power of his complaint.”115 There are many in the field of environmental ethics, and Christian environmental ethics, that see the field of Christian environmental ethics starting as a response to White’s thesis. “Lynn White wrote before there was a field of environmental ethics, and his article’s conception of environmental crisis helped to shape early inquiry in the field.”116 Jenkins suggests that insofar as the

field of Christian environmental ethics was developed out of a response to “Roots,”

White’s argument establishes the paradigm through which the discipline operated. “In

the forty years since the initial publication of White’s essay, Christian eco-theologies

have robustly responded. Nearly every book on the relation of Christianity to its

environment refers to White’s thesis, and most introduce their argument as a definite

response to it.”117

Sittler’s work is significant due to White’s enormous influence in theology, and

even more particularly in the field Jenkins calls ecotheology, not simply because Sittler’s work came almost twenty years prior, but because it follows similar historical narratives and theological motifs in a way that can be seen to anticipate White. Both Sittler and

White offer a similar critique regarding Western Christian participation in environmental degradation. Sittler, however, offers a theological response to what Sittler and White agree is a theological problem. Additionally, White’s essay has been tremendously influential to the field of Christian environmental ethics, and environmental ethics more

115 Willis Jenkins, “After Lynn White: Religious Ethics and Environmental Problems,” in The Journal of Religious Ethics, 37, no. 2 (June 2009): 283. 116 Jenkins, “After Lynn White,” 290. 117 Jenkins, “After Lynn White,” 285-6.

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broadly. So, since Sittler was making similar critiques and offering more constructive

and developed theological solutions prior to Lynn White, Sittler may allow for a

perspective on the relationship between Christianity and the natural world that is not

reacting to White’s initial claim. In this way, I believe Sittler is a beneficial, and

understudied, resource for Christians seeking to engage the field of ecology the

environmental ethics theologically. In this chapter, then, I set out to examine White’s

argument in his “Roots” essay. After a careful and close reading of that argument I will

then examine Sittler’s critique of Western Christianity. To do so I will weave together

numerous sources to provide the most complete form of Sittler’s argument.

Central to White’s argument is the claim that Christianity, particularly Western

Christianity, bears a large burden for the contemporary ecological crisis because

environmental degradation and that this degradation is inherent in Western Christianity

itself. I am aware that this is a contentious claim. It is unclear whether White actually believes Christianity is the way he describes or if he is simply critiquing a particular

manifestation of Western Christianity. White seems to suggest in parts of his “Roots”

essay that at times, as in during the early church and in the life of Saint Francis, this was

not the case. Rather, it can be argued that since White himself is “a churchman,” who

received a Master’s degree from Union Theological Seminary and was raised by a

Presbyterian , does not believe Christianity negatively impacts the environment.

So why make the claim? I think White makes it for two reasons. First, due to White’s

rhetorical use of hyperbole, he makes claims that are broad, sweeping, and lack enough

precision to make the definitive claim that he doesn’t believe Christianity must be like

this. Second, and more importantly, Sittler later comes to believe this is the claim White

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is making. So, while it is debatable whether White actually believes this claim, Sittler

thinks he does. 118 In his own diagnosis of the problem, Sittler argues that Western

Christian participation in environmental degradation is a form a blasphemy and infidelity

to the Christian tradition and offers a faithful reading of the Scriptures and early church

fathers as a corrective to the contemporary theological errors. After providing a close

reading of both arguments, I will examine the similarities and differences between the

two and examine Sittler’s response to White’s claims.

While this chapter will deal with the diagnosis of the problem of Western

Christian participation in environmental degradation in White and Sittler, the next will

deal explicitly with what exactly fidelity means for Sittler and his theological solution of fidelity. I should be clear that I am not suggesting that White’s essay was not original or insightful and that somehow history was wrong to deem it so. Rather, I am suggesting that for Christians articulating the story of Christian thought regarding its tradition and the natural world, or those interested in the historical U.S. theological engagement between theology and the natural world, Sittler stands as a resource. Sittler’s work has largely gone understudied, and this has led Christian theologians to claim that “White’s thesis invented a relation between religion and environmental problems that pressured faith communities to pay theological attention to the living world around them, thereby

helping them to foster reform projects.”119 However, as I briefly mentioned in the first

chapter, there were small rural communities who do have a history in the U.S. of

118 For more on White’s biographical and academic history, see Candance Barrington, “Lynn White Jr.,” in Handbook of Medieval Studies, ed. by Albrecht Classen, 3 vols. (Berlin: deGruyter, 2010), volume 3, 2711- 2720. 119 Jenkins, “After Lynn White,” 303. Emphasis mine.

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attempting to articulate a faithful expression of an ancient tradition. Sittler, stands firmly

within such a history.

In “The Historical Roots of the Ecological Crisis,” White claims that the predominant expression of Christianity during the Middle Ages was the soil in which modern Western technology and science are rooted and therefore bears a large burden for the current ecological crisis.

White argues that while humans have always affected the natural world, contemporary effects rapidly increased in scope and frequency of impact.

White begins his argument by establishing the fact that humans have always had

an impact on their environment. “All forms of life modify their contexts.”120 That

humans do impact our environment is not particular to our species. What is particular to

humanity, however, is our ability to make dramatic changes to our environment. “Ever

since man [sic] became a numerous species he has affected his environment notably.”121

White then offers several examples of impact on the environment that is particular to humans: the Aswan Dam, overgrazing, the clear cutting of forests by the Romans to create ships and tools for war, the automobile and its effects on the sparrows that formerly ate the manure from the horses that used to dominate the streets.

Our current age, White argues, is unlike any other prior in its ability to affect the natural world. The marriage of technology and science in Western Europe and North

America has given human persons an ability to manipulate and form the natural world in ways never previously conceived.

The emergence in widespread practice of the Baconian that scientific knowledge means technological power over nature can scarcely be dated before about 1850. . . . Its acceptance as a normal pattern of action may mark the greatest even in since the invention of agriculture, and perhaps in nonhuman terrestrial history as well.122

120 White, “Crisis,” 1203. 121 White, “Crisis,” 1203. 122 White, “Historical Roots,” 1203.

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The rate in which humanity is impacting the natural world, and power by which we are

shaping and affecting the natural world is unlike any time in history. Yes, humans have

always impacted their environment, but not to this extent.

When the first cannons were fired; in the early 14th century, they affected ecology by sending workers scrambling to the forests and mountains for more potash, sulfur, iron ore, and charcoal, with some resulting erosion and deforestation. Hydrogen bombs are of a different order: a war fought with them might alter the genetics of all life on this planet.123

The same is true of our use of fossil fuels. White recounts the problems London had with

smog in the late thirteenth century. The contemporary consumption of fossil fuels,

however, “threatens to change the chemistry of the globe’s atmosphere as a whole, with

consequence which we are only beginning to guess.” Most solutions to the problem of

fossil fuel consumption, according to White, are far too simplistic and do not get to the

root issue, which are the prevailing morals and “presuppositions that underlie modern

technology and science.”124 White therefore seeks to identify and address the historical

presuppositions in modern science and technology in order to more fully address the problem at hand.

White claims that the predominant expression of Christianity during the Middle Ages was the soil in which modern Western technology and science are rooted.

White begins his historical exploration by first claiming that modern science and technology is “distinctively Occidental.” By “distinctively Occidental,” White means

that modern science and technology have been shaped particularly by European and

American influences. “Today, around the globe, all significant science is Western in

123 White, “Roots,” 1203-4. 124 White, “Roots,” 1204.

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style and method, whatever the pigmentation or language of the scientists.”125 The roots

of the influence of the West on scientific and technological thought goes further than the

Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, and could be as early as 800 A.D. White then

offers a brief précis of the history the various advancements and technologies of Western

Europe.126 White then suggests that since both scientific and technological movements

“got their start, acquired their character, and achieved world dominance in the Middle

Ages, it would seem that we cannot understand their nature or their present impact upon

ecology without examining fundamental medieval assumptions and developments.”127

White therefore seeks to better understand the ways Medieval society understood the person in relation to the natural world.

White identifies three ways the predominant expression of Christianity during the Middle Ages understood the relationship between human persons and the natural world that constitutes the milieu from which our current understanding of technology grew.

White argues that even by the 7th century humans began to utilize technology and

science to affect the natural world in more “violent” and aggressive ways. The early

plow, according to White, needed two oxen and “scratched” the surface of the earth to

allow a farmer to plant seed. A more forceful method was necessary to sustain such

practices in northern Europe. Therefore, a new plowing method was introduced; one

125 White, “Roots,” 1204. 126 It should be noted that technology in western (Latin) Europe is White’s area of expertise. White earned his PhD at Harvard with a dissertation on Sicilian monasticism and was later published under the title Latin Monasticism in Norman Sicily. In this book, White examines “the political and cultural status of fifty-one religious houses in Norman Sicily.” See Barrington, “Lynn White Jr.,” 2711-2715. White’s later works would focus on religion and technology in the medieval ages. To further illustrate White’s connection between a distinctly Christian milieu and technological and scientific advancement see White’s entry in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 11 under “Technology, Western.” Here White argues that “[o]bviously, as Hellenistic Alexandria and pre-Ming China show, striking advances in engineering have occurred quite apart from Christian influences. Nevertheless, it appears that in the specific historical situation of medieval Western Europe, Christian views provided a fertile soil for the vigorous growth of technology. . . . Lynn White Jr., “Western Technology” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer, vols. 11 (New York: Scribner, 1982), 650-664. 127 White, “Roots,” 1204-5.

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which required eight oxen and violently attacked the land. White believes the newer and

more violent methods belong to a broader way of understanding the human person’s

relationship with the natural world. Therefore, predominant religion of the Middle Ages

must be examined is because “[w]hat people do about their ecology depends on what they

think about themselves in relation to things around them. Humane ecology is deeply

conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny—that is, by religion.”128 And the

dominant religion during the Middle Ages that influenced the creation and use of

inventions such as the new plow, was Judeo-Christianity. While Christianity is not as

explicit in today’s culture as it was in the Middle Ages, White still believes that it is the

operating presumption behind modern science and technology. White argues that even

though contemporary

forms of thinking and language have largely ceased to be Christian. . . . the substance often remains amazingly akin to that of the past. Our daily habits of action, for example, are dominated by an implicit faith in perpetual progress which was unknown either to Greco-Roman antiquity or to the Orient. It is rooted in, and is indefensible apart form, Judeo-Christian teleology.129

For White, while the explicitly Christian ways of thinking have faded, the implicit

assumptions remain. White then addresses three major Christian presumptions which

manifest themselves in modern technology and science: time and efficiency, the land to

be used for human benefit and rule, and non- making possible the view of the natural world as disposable.

In White’s first point, he claims that the shift from a cyclical notion of time to

Judeo-Christian understanding of time as linear lead to “an implicit faith in perpetual

128 White, “Roots,” 1205. 129 White, “Roots,” 1205.

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progress.”130 “Christian time,” as White would reiterate in his other writings, was

therefore “unrepeatable and unidirectional,” meaning that it was one of the most

important resource to steward.131 In “Roots” as well as his other writings, White argues

that the linear and unidirectional nature of time inherent in Judeo-Christianity teleology.

White’s critique of Christianity does not, however, stop him from acknowledging that there are individuals within the Christian tradition who seem to be outliers to this anthropocentric thinking, like St. Francis. Nevertheless, for White, individuals like St.

Francis are outliers, rather than recipients and representatives of an ancient and biblical way of thinking.

Second, the Judeo-Christian creation narrative and its inherent teleological understanding of the nature of time frames progress to mean, according to White, that the natural world was available to humanity as a resource to be used for dominated for human benefit and discarded. “Man [Adam] named all the animals, thus establishing dominance over them. God planned all this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes.”132 According to

White, the Genesis creation narrative explicitly tells the tale of the natural world being

created to for the purposes of serving and humanity.133 For White, Christianity “not only

established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man

130 White, “Roots,” 1205. 131 White, “Western Technology,” 663. 132 White, “Roots,” 1205. 133 Whether White believes this claim or instead is articulating the position he is attempting to critique has been debated. However important this question is, it is outside the scope of my summary of White’s argument here. More important to our purposes is that Sittler believes this is what White believes. In a summary of some of Sittler’s audio recordings, Sittler is stated to have said that White argues in “roots” that White believes this reading of Genesis. See Joseph Sittler, Recordings of Joseph Sittler: Summaries of Audio Recordings Held in the Sittler Archives, (Chicago: Lutheran School of Theology Chicago, 2009), 65, 68, and 70. Hereinafter all further citations will be noted as “Recordings.”

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exploit nature for his proper ends.”134 White’s particular reading of the Genesis story

leads him to make the claim that in its Western form, “Christianity is the most

anthropocentric religion the world has seen.”135 White’s claim about Christianity’s

insisted anthropocentricity is a logical extension of his preceding argument regarding the

Judeo-Christian nature of time. If time is linear and therefore unrepeatable, it stands as the ultimate resource to steward well. A unilateral view of time places a premium on labor and human progress. Wasted time is time humanity will never get back, and “God planned all [of God’s creation] explicitly for man’s benefit and rule: no item in they physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes.”136 For these reasons

White argues that Christians understood the natural world as the means for humans, by

God, to utilize their progress towards God.

Lastly, White claims that the “victory of Christianity over paganism was the

greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture” and that “by destroying pagan

animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the

feelings of natural objects.”137 It is therefore, according to White, because of the explicit

licensing of the natural world to the service of human purposes, coupled with the victory

over Christianity over pagan animism that has lent itself to exploitation and abuse of the natural world in service to the progress of humankind. White explains that “[t]he spirits in natural objects, which formally had protected nature from man, evaporated. Man’s effective monopoly on spirit in this world was confirmed, and the old inhibitions on the

134 White, “Roots,” 1205, emphasis mine. 135 White, “Roots,” 1205. 136 White, “Roots,” 1205. 137 White, “Roots,” 1205.

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exploitation of nature crumbled.”138 In his article on “Western Technology” in the

Dictionary of the Middle Ages, White offers a more succinct summary:

In animistic societies, like those of antiquity, if one kills an animal, one placates its spirit; one negotiates with a tree before felling it. Christians have always felt free to do what they want with other natural objects, without considering their concerns. The technologist’s approach to materials and the forces was simplified and made more direct by the new religion. Christianity is ruthlessly anthropocentric; paganism was not.139

White’s stark contrast leaves little ambiguity for his assessment on the essence of

Christianity and its role in environmental degradation in ancient and modern western society.

Christianity, therefore, bears a large burden for the contemporary ecological crisis and a rethinking of “our old religion” is necessary to arrive at an alternative Christian view.

If it is religion that caused the current ecological crisis, then according to White,

only a religious solution will be sufficient. “What we do about ecology depends on our

ideas of the man-nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going to

get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old

one.”140 White’s suggestion for an alternative view, however brief, lies in the “clearly

heretical” views of Saint Francis of Assisi.141 According to White, Francis “tried to dispose man from his monarchy over creation and set up a democracy of all God’s

creatures.”142 White then retells the story in which a town is plagued by a violent wolf,

which Francis meets and subsequently converts. Francis, however, only represents a

138 White, “Roots,” 1205. 139 White, “Western Technology,” 663. 140 White, “Roots,” 1206. 141 White’s determination of Francis’ work as “heretical” is another contested part of his thesis as is his interpretation of Francis’ argument for the “democracy of all God’s creatures” (1206). Whether or not these claims are historically and theologically valid are important, but nevertheless outside the scope of my project. 142 White, “Roots,” 1206.

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passing moment in the larger Christian tradition, according to White. St. Francis’ vision

of harmony been human and non-human creation was “quickly stamped out.” Francis

represents a failed rebellion to the medieval view of humanity and its relation to the

natural world. He represents an outlier within the Christian tradition and White goes as

far as to call him “the greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history.” White finds in

St. Francis the kind of rethinking of the Christian view of the humanity and its relation to the natural world necessary if the ecological crisis is to be addressed. It is for this reason,

White proposes, but does not develop, the idea that St. Francis serve as the patron saint for ecologists.

According to Sittler, Christian participation in environmental degradation is unfaithful to the Christian tradition.

Sittler suggests that the historical root to Western contemporary Christian participation in environmental degradation is the conceptual division between nature and grace that took definitive shape in the Enlightenment

Sittler makes his argument regarding the theological errors which have led to

Western Christian participation in environmental degradation clearest in “Called to

Unity.” Here, Sittler argues that the tendency to divide the world into a kind of dualism,

into that of the heavenly, marked by grace, and the temporal, marked by that which is

natural, has been an ongoing struggle and temptation as old as Israel.143 However, the

143 Sittler describes his reading of the relationship between Israel and the natural world in this way: “The fundamental meaning of grace is the goodness in and toward his creation. Israel knew God in that way, but this knowledge is never specified in the sense of being identified with a term, or a concept, or a single action having an primacy. “See Sittler, Essays, 24. We will explore further Sittler’s understanding of natural world and its relation to Adam and Israel in the next chapter.

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dualism or divide came to its “awesome maturity” and took definitive shape in the

Enlightenment.144 In “Called to Unity” Sittler claims that

For fifteen centuries the Church has declared the power of grace to conquer egocentricity, to expose idolatry, to inform the drama of history with holy meaning. But in our time we have beheld the vision and promise of the Enlightenment come to strange and awesome maturity. The cleavage between grace and nature is complete. Man’s identity has been shrunken to the dimensions of privatude within social determinism. The doctrine of creation has been made a devout datum of past time. The mathematization of meaning in technology and its reduction to operational terms in philosophy has left no mental space wherein to declare that nature, as well as history, is the theater of grace and scope of redemption.145

As humanity began to predict and understand the laws that governed the universe, God

was thought to be stripped from the natural world and replaced with what became known

through empirical and objective science. Similarly, the scientific outlook brought about

by the Enlightenment fostered the view that the natural world was not thought to be

animated by the grace of God, but rather operated by inherent laws and was seen as

mechanical and calculable. This resulted, according to Sittler, to the graces of God being

seen primarily in the human person and not in the natural world.

[t]he doctrinal cleavage particularly fateful in western Christendom, has been an element in the inability of the church to relate the powers of grace to the vitalities and processes of nature. At the very time, and in that very part of the world where men’s minds were being deepeningly determined by their understanding

144 In The Cosmic Christ, Galloway traces the history of the “dualistic” struggle from Israel, into the New Testament, through the church fathers, but ultimately finds that Kant’s theological metaphysics epitomizes the nadir of Enlightened Christian thought. According to Galloway, Kant epitomizes the dualism of his enlightened culture and builds an epistemological metaphysics on the assumption that Galloway says in founded in the scientific Renaissance: an emphasized contrast between a person’s outward environment and their inner spiritual nature (144-5). While Galloway utilizes Kant as his exemplar of the kind of thinking brought about by the Enlightenment, he too is clear that such metaphors can only go so far. “It is not so much a similarity between the content of Kantian philosophy and the content of the Gnostic speculations that I am suggesting. The only real similarity is in the practical religious outcome—that is, in the way it affects our religious attitude to our immediate situation in the physical world, the world in which we act” (146). Yet, while Sittler largely avoided explicitly claiming that Enlightenment thought had its roots in , he nevertheless argues the dualism of the Gnostics as an apt metaphor both problems should drive us to a historical Christology, rooted in Scripture, which necessarily breaks down dramatic distinctions between the natural world and grace of God. 145 Sittler, “Called,” 183.

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and widened control of the powers of nature they were so identifying the realm of history and the moral as the sole realm of grace as to shrink to no effect the biblical Christology of nature.146

According to Sittler, what used to be associated with the movements of in the

cosmos was replaced by the laws of the natural world, which seemed to leave the graces

of God as primarily evident in human persons. Due to the “awesome maturity” of

Enlightenment thought, the natural world which was once thought to be animated by its

Creator and saturated with His graces, was now understood to have a raison d’être of its own. The realm of the moral and of grace, once with a scope as grand as creation, was limited to the human arena.

For Sittler, when nature is divided from grace, the church “is tempted to become a cowering coterie of the devout, cultivating her interior life in a certain kind of fright and turning from the world as from a dirty place.”147 Because Sittler thinks that being

Christian does, on a rudimentary level, entail care for the Earth he argues the job of the

theologian is to usher forth the and thinking of the church into contemporary

times in order to correct Christian thinking and therefore Christian engagement with the

natural world. Theologians, according to Sittler, have an obligation to recover the

biblical vision of grace in the natural world and humanity’s relation to it in order to better

equip Christians to live faithfully in the contemporary western world. The present

ecological crisis, then, offers a profound opportunity for theologians.

146 Sittler, “Called”, 181. 147 Joseph Sittler, “Commencement Address,” Evocations, 35.

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According to Sittler, because of the dramatic separation between the concepts of nature and grace, the presence of God, or grace of God, was thought to be removed from the natural world

According to Sittler’s diagnosis, the Enlightenment produced a mindset which

understood the natural world as mechanical and neither steeped nor pervaded by the

grace of God. Sittler argues that while Christians may not explicitly state that God is

absent from the natural world, the sentiment is present implicitly in how they engage with

the natural world. The grace of God was thought to be removed from the movements of the natural world as humanity’s curiosity and knowledge of it grew to encompass the planet and beyond. As the natural sciences learned more about the natural world, the notion of God as the operative agent was replaced with a notion of the natural world as having its own autonomous forces and mechanisms.

In the Enlightenment the process was completed. Rationalism, on the one hand, restricted redemption by grace to the moral soul, and , on the other hand, turned down the blaze of the Colossian vision so radically that its ta panta was effective only as a moral or mystical incandescence. Enlightenment man could move in on the realm of nature and virtually take it over because grace had either ignored or repudiated it. A bit of God died with each new natural conquest; the realm of grace retreated as more of the structure and process of nature was claimed by now autonomous man. The rood-screen in the Church, apart from its original meaning, has become a symbol of man’s devout but frightened thought permitting to fall asunder what God joined together.148

148 Sittler, “Called,” 181. By “ta panta” Sitter is referring to the phrase in Colossians 1:15-20: “all things.” It remains unclear what exactly Sittler means by his use of the term “Pietism” as it is not used in his other works and he does not define the term in its use here. My assumption is that he means the seventeenth century Lutheran religious movement categorized by affective and sentimental expressions of individual religious piety. Galloway describes it this way: “Man [sic] was no longer simply “shut in” by the universe [as it was assumed in the Ptolemaic universe]. Rather, he was lost amid its boundless space and ceaseless motion, and had no place of his own at all. Then as a development of this theme, there came the Newtonian physics which seemed to imply the universal reign of the laws of motion. Thus, instead of being enclosed within an impersonal system which menaced his personal life was an illusion in any case. What had been the menace of Fate at the beginning of the Christian era under the Ptolemaic astronomy, now, under Newtonian physics, became the menace of sheer determinism.” See Galloway Cosmic Christ, 150.

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The amazing scientific discoveries brought about an “awesome maturity” to the division between the natural world and the grace of the Lord. As the natural world was further explored using methods and modes of thinking that maturated during the Enlightenment, a conceptual separation between God’s grace and natural world became the predominant spirit of the age. Sittler seems to argue that as the natural world was explored and given its own from God, almost in conjunction, humanity understanding of the relationship between the natural world and the human person weakened. What once was

God’s acting in history became the work of the laws of gravity, biology, chemistry and thermodynamics.

Where is grace in this world that has been experimentally taken apart by empirical science, its laws disclosed, its structure and process translated into statistical terms, and the knowledge of which, even if fragmentary, is sufficient to secure predictability and enable fantastically complicated manipulation of its forces and processes?149

For Sittler, the supposed removal of the grace of God from the natural world led to a privatization of the faith, a shrinking of the scope of God’s grace to include only the human person.

“Restricted redemption,” or the way Sittler described the shrinking of the scope of

God’s grace, was evident to Sittler with his conversation with various parishioners in

Chicago. “‘What does environmental preservation have to do with Jesus Christ and his church?’ they ask. They could not be more shallow or more wrong.”150 Conversations like this one prove, in Sittler’s mind, that some in the church have separated care of creation and Christian discipleship. It demonstrated to Sittler that the treatment of the natural world and the ecological problems being identified in his day seem to his

149 Sittler, Essays, 1-2. 150 Sittler, Gravity, 4.

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parishioners as concerns outside of the scope of Christianity. Ecological problems seemed somehow other to their commitment and calling to be disciples of Christ. His church members understand ecological concerns as something alien to their life as

Christians. For Sittler “restricted redemption” does not adequately reflect the scope and magnitude of the Christian faith as articulated in the Bible and in the church fathers.

When we turn the attention of the church to a definition of the Christian relationship with the natural world, we are not stepping away from grave and proper theological ideas; we are stepping right into the middle of them. There is a deeply rooted, genuinely Christian motivation for attention to God’s creation, despite the fact that many church people consider ecology to be a secular concern.151

Sittler, as I will argue in the next chapter, spent his life arguing that for Christians to be

concerned with the proper care and stewardship of the natural world is part of what it

means to be Christian. Sittler’s work, then, is to “relocate” grace: to recover the “catholic

comprehensiveness in the doctrine of grace.”152 Humanity’s desire to know the world

and search the cosmos, as Sittler articulates it, was a part of our original created impulse

to “tend” to creation; to work with all of creation to know the uncreated Creator God.

Therefore, that our explorations into the material world have distanced us from the

Creator is symptomatic of a tragic, misguided, and skewed conceptual framework by

which we understand the world: what Sittler calls “the spirit of our mind.”

151 Sittler, Gravity, 4. 152 Sittler, Essays 83.

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Sittler argues that one of the manifestations of this theological error is an eschatology which rendered the material world as temporary and provided the theological rational for Christianity’s willing participation in environmental degradation

The separation of nature and grace manifested itself, according to Sittler, in an

“other-worldly” eschatology which does not give value to the natural world. By other-

worldly is implied an understanding that the natural world was temporal and disposable.

An other-worldly eschatology, therefore, is an understanding that salvation as a category reserved for humanity, rather than to the natural world. Sittler argues that many Western

Christians believe the natural world is other to the human person. By other, Sittler means that the Western church’s concern is for the eternal salvation of human and that the state and treatment of the natural world is categorically different due to its temporal status. For Sittler, the attitude which regarded the natural world as outside the scope of redemption by God in Christ was most evident in Neo-Orthodoxy. Sittler mentions his unease with Neo-Orthodox thought regarding the natural world because he thinks it perpetuates the false division between nature and grace. Sittler’s unease is not to suggest that he was necessarily writing against Neo-Orthodoxy, but rather that in Neo-Orthodoxy

Sittler sees a prime example of the kind of spirit of the mind” he is attempting to address.153 Sittler first states that he has long “felt a deepening uneasiness about the

tendency in Biblical Theology, generally known as neo-orthodoxy, whereby the

promises, imperatives, and dynamics of are declared in sharp and calculated

disengagement from the stuff of earthly life.” In Sittler’s view, the division between

153 A friend of Sittler’s, H. Paul Santmire, follows Sittler’s broad critique of Neo-Orthodoxy by explicitly addressing the anthropocentric thought in the writings of in The Travail of Nature. See H. Paul Santmire, The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 145-54.

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nature and grace and subsequent removal of God from the natural world brought about a

particular problem in the Christian theological imagination. He continues to argue that

Christian theology cannot advance this work [justice to the vitalities of earth] along the line of an orthodoxy—neo or old—which celebrates the love of heaven in complete separation from man’s love in earth, which abstracts commitment to Christ from relevancy to those loyalties of earth that are elemental to being. Any faith in God which shall be redemptive and regenerative in actuality dare not be alien to the felt ambiguities of earth or remain wordless in the resounding torments of history and culture. For the earth is not merely a negative illustration of the desirability of heaven.154

Additionally, in a forward the only major collection of Sittler’s works, Evocations of

Grace, Martin Marty recalls how Sittler’s “Called to Unity” address received “cheers from some (e.g. Eastern Orthodox), jeers from others (e.g., neo-Orthodox), and incomprehension from still others.155 One of Joseph Sittler’s friends within the Lutheran

Church, H. Paul Santmire, may be able to help us understand the division between

Sittler’s thought and that in the Neo-Orthodox camp. Santmire argues that Barth perpetuates the understanding that humanity is the crown jewel and focus of God’s creation and that all else is seen as secondary.156 In Barth’s theology, creation is like a

boat that carries humanity towards God. If the boat was to sink but its passengers survive

and still arrive at their destination, the boat would still have accomplished its purpose.

Creation is then like a temporary home which witnesses to God.157 It serves only as an

154Sittler, “A Theology for Earth,” 369, and373-374 respectively. 155 Martin Marty, “Foreword,” in Sittler, Evocations, xi. 156 To call Santmire a friend is somewhat of an understatement. In his theological autobiography Santmire talks about Sittler having an enormous impact on his theology. They first met when they were both selected to write a theological study guide on behalf of the Lutheran Church in America in 1973. Santmire had read Sittler’s work and recalls how he “sat at [Sittler’s] feet and particularly benefitted from reading his Essays in Nature and Grace.” For further insight into Sittler’s impact on Santmire, see https://hpaulsantmire.net/theological-autobiography/ (accessed May, 2016) and Santmire’s dedication of his book The Travail of Nature “to Joseph Sittler: Pioneering Theologian of Nature.” See Travail, v. 157 H. Paul Santmire, “Towards a Christology of Nature: Claiming the Legacy of Joseph Sittler and Karl Barth,” Dialog 34, no. 4, 1995, 270-280 (quotation and summary on 274). More recent attempts have been made to suggest that Barth poses a much more constructive way forward for theologians seeking to theologically address the responsibility of Christians to care for creation. See Willis Jenkins, Ecologies of

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instrument to achieve God’s intention of saving humans. Sittler addresses nature-as-

instrumental way of thinking in “Called to Unity.” Citing Galloway, Sittler argues that

Unless one is prepared to accept a dualism which condemns the whole physical order as being not of God and interprets redemption simply as release from the physical order, then one is forced to raise the question of cosmic redemption, not in contrast with but as an implicate of person redemption. Physical nature cannot be treated as an indifferent factor—as the mere stage and setting of the drama of personal redemption. It must either be condemned as in itself evil, or else it must be brought within the scope of God’s redemptive act.158

To think of the earth as disposable and simply an instrument that God has used to save

those most important to Him exemplifies the ways in which the church accepted

assumptions about the world from a truncated, and predominantly analytic conceptual

framework. For Sittler these assumptions accepted by Christians in the contemporary

Western church are antithetical to the teachings in the Bible, and in Sittler’s mind,

abandon the fullness of the testimony of Scripture and work of Christ! I will further

explore why it is that Sittler thinks that below.

Even more important to Sittler, are the ways in which the dualistic and

instrumental modes of thinking enable western Christians participate in environmental

degradation. Using the language of St. Paul, Sittler makes clear that he is attempting to

articulate a particular “spirit of the mind” common in contemporary western Christian

theology that he argues has limited the redemptive work of Christ. The “spirit of our

mind”, by Sittler’s estimation, is an arrogance that stems from anthropocentric ways of

Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 153-188. To further prove the importance of retrieving some of the thought of Joseph Sittler as a resource for our current theological time, Jenkins is one of the few people who mention Sittler at all in a discussion of Christian theology and the environment but only gives Sittler one paragraph on page 17. 158 Sittler, “Called,” 178-9, cited in Galloway, Cosmic Christ, 205.

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understanding humanity’s relation to the rest of God’s creation. Instead, what is required is a sense of “beholding” or attention to creation as it relates to humanity and vice versa.

This way of regarding things is an issue that the religious community has got to attend to before it gets to the more obvious moral, much less the procedural and pedagogical, problems. For we must somehow bring under question the notion that man in his historical entity, his individual selfhood, is so set apart from the rest of God's Creation that he can deal with it with Olympian arrogance as if it had no selfhood of its own by virtue of the Creation. Unless somehow we recover and fashion anew a religious consciousness which disintegrates this, we shall only accomplish a sufficient cleaning up of industrial procedures to secure profits and a reasonably comfortable life for one generation or so, and fail to penetrate the heart of the problem. This penetration of what Saint Paul calls the "spirit of our minds" is the fundamental task of the religious and theological responsibility in the ecological issue. And this applies all the way to such issues as the way we regard water (that it may be clean), air (that it may be pure), and things (that they be allowed to live and be their unperverted and undistorted existence).159

While western Christians may not confess outright that they believe the natural world to

be other, disposable, or outside the scope of salvation, it is nevertheless the logical

outcome given their understanding of heaven, salvation, nature and grace. Sittler

believed this spirit of the mind should be addressed because it was through this lens we

see the world and act as Christians. To address the spirit of the mind is first an

intellectual task, but it cannot remain just an intellectual exercise but rightly finds its

completion in right action. When Christians do not “behold” creation or stand in relation

to creation in a way that Sittler believes to be wholly biblical, Christians believe the

natural world as other, and see it as something to be used and disposed or conquered.

One of Sittler’s prime example for the willingness of Christians to view nature as

something to be controlled and dominated is found in his description provided in Essays

of a newspaper article in the New York Times

on the day the huge tanker Manhattan broke through the hitherto unpenetrated arctic ice, [the New York Times headline] read “Man’s Ancient Enemy

159 Sittler, “Responsibility,” 175-6.

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Overcome!” This statement is an illustration both of the depth of the perversion that popularly prevails as regards man’s living bond to nature. . . . That a vast and life-preserving ecosystem of ice, tundra, permafrost, and animals, all supportive of an ancient culture and way of life should be regarded as an ‘enemy to be overcome’—this uncalculated language is witness to a stupor of mind which is more perilous because uncalculated.160

For Sittler the language utilized in the Times article manifests the problem in the current way of understanding the relationship between humanity and the natural world. Here, the natural world is something to be dominated. The natural world is a site for conquest.

In sum, for Sittler, in the Enlightenment, a dualistic way of thinking of the natural world and humanity came to “awesome maturity.” Through the discoveries of science and an increasing understanding of the laws and forces governing the natural world, God was thought to be removed from the natural world. Sittler sees the perspective that God is removed from the natural world made manifest in an other-worldly eschatology present in contemporary theology and a view of the natural world as other, disposable and sites for human conquest. For Sittler, the problem of Western Christian participation in environmental degradation is rooted in a theological error: a dramatic separation between nature and grace.

While Sittler and White agree on many of the contributing factors to the contemporary ecological crisis, Sittler disagrees with White’s assumptions regarding the essence of the Christian faith.

Sittler shares many historical and narrative similarities with White regarding Western Christianity’s participation in environmental degradation

Sittler finds many things with which to agree in White’s argument as presented in

“roots.” They agree, for instance, in the most basic premise of White’s article: that

160 Sittler, Essays, 126, fn. 25.

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Christianity played a role in what has become an ecological crisis; historically

participating in and continuing to perpetuate acts of degradation against the natural world. As argued earlier in this chapter, both suggest that it was during the medieval period conceptions of the human person, per White, or unbiblical theological misconceptions of nature and grace, per Sittler, created the groundwork by which

Christian participation in environmental degradation was fostered. Both Sittler and

White, suggest the contemporary ecological crisis took root during a particular historical period. Almost as if following the same historical narrative as set out by Sittler in

“Called to Unity,” White suggests that “[i]t was not until the late 18th century that the

hypothesis of God became unnecessary to many scientists.”161 White’s critique of

Christianity supports Sittler’s claim that the grace of God was thought to be removed

from the natural world and that the claims of the natural world are categorically different

from the claims of theology and are therefore incommensurable.

Additionally, White argues that “[w]hat people do about their ecology depends on

what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is

deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny. . . .”162 For Sittler, White’s

aforementioned claim represents the heart of what Sittler understands as the primary

problem. For Sittler, insofar as Christians understand the natural world to be outside of

the scope of God’s redemptive work through Christ, then Christianity will perpetuate a

treatment of the natural world in which it is seen as temporary, disposable, and

unimportant to the Christian faith. White’s example of the dualist mindset was the recently elected Governor of California, who

161 White, “The Historical Roots,” 1205. 162 White, “The Historical Roots,” 1205.

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spoke for the Christian tradition when he said (as is alleged), ‘when you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all.’ To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West.163

It does not seem hard to imagine Sittler using such a quote to support his own similar

critique of contemporary Christianity: that it has seemingly stripped the grace of God

from the natural world and therefore sees the natural world as disposable and temporary.

However, while Sittler and White share many similar critiques, Sittler would not view the

Governor as an embodiment of fidelity to Christianity. According to Sittler, insofar as

Western Christian views and treats the natural world as disposable, it commits and is unfaithful to the Christian tradition. The act of treating the natural world as a heretical act or proclamation gets at the heart of Sittler’s critique of White’s work: namely, that

insofar as contemporary Western Christianity willingly participates in environmental

degradation, it represents an infidelity to the Christian tradition, not something inherent to it.

Sittler disagrees with White’s assumptions that ecological degradation is inherent or essential to Christianity.

One fundamental difference, which I demonstrate in the next chapter, is that

Sittler believes that contemporary Western Christianity’s participation in ecological degradation is a perversion of a biblical and historic Christianity. For Sittler, this participation is a sign of infidelity to the Christian message, not something inherent to it.

One brief aside is in order: as I have stated above, what White believed about the essence, or nature, of Christianity is not entirely clear. Nevertheless, what is significant

163 White, “The Historical Roots,” 1205. Notice that Sittler and White both find the issue particularly in “Western” Christianity.

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to this study is what Sittler believed White to be arguing. It is clear in Sittler’s responses to White in his lectures and recording that he believed White to be leveling a critique

against the very nature of Christianity itself.164

According to Sittler, White assumes the dualism between humanity and nature as

inherent in Christian thought. Sitter argues that Christianity does not have to be

anthropocentric, even while maintaining a Judeo-Christian teleology. More to the point,

Sittler argues that Christianity, or Christian societies, are not the only cultures which

harm the natural world.165 The problem of environmental degradation, therefore, cannot

solely be attributed to Christian teleology. As Sittler understands it, the teleology of

Christianity is one in which all of God’s creation is brought up in the Christ; for in Him

all things hold together. The cosmic redemption is a theme found in both Old and New

Testaments and therefore representation a more accurate articulation of a Judeo-Christian

teleology. The error that has led to contemporary western Christian participation in

environmental degradation, according to Sittler is rooted in a dramatic separation

between nature and grace in Christian thought. Sittler argues that an intimate relationship

to the natural world is constitutive of what it means to be human. We will explore this in

the next chapter.

More specifically, one of the fundamental mistakes made by White in his critique

of Christianity in “roots,” according to Sittler, is White’s interpretation of Genesis 1 in

which Adam is told by God to “have dominion” over the earth. Sittler argues that

164 There is no evidence of Sittler specifically addressing White in print. All we have of Sittler’s engagement with White is via recorded lectures that were partially transcribed. For more on the recordings, see footnote 124 above. 165 Sittler argues in one of his lectures that while Christianity is responsible for the current “environmental mess,” he could “give examples from non-Christian cultures which also harm the environment.” See Sittler, “Recordings,” 65-6.

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White’s understanding of that phrase is not correct and that the “world” of the Old

Testament authors should be kept in mind when interpreting that text. For Sittler,

Adam’s call to “have dominion” is not a license to abuse and treat the natural world as

purely instrumental. Rather, Sittler argues that it is a call to tend, or care, for the natural

world. He claims the Hebrew word means “to hold a thing in its proper order.”166

According to Sittler, it is the ’s translation of the Hebrew that created the hermeneutical problem.167 Sittler argues that the Vulgate renders the phrase “to hold

nature down in its proper place.”168 This interpretation does not take into consideration

the way in which the Old Testament author would have understood nature conceptually.

Namely, that “there is no word for nature in Hebrew. Instead, the Hebrew refers to ‘what

God hath made.’ There is no notion of a self-enclosed world of nature.”169 Sittler ends

his lecture with comments on White’s “roots” essay by citing St. Augustine: Abuse is use

without grace. Sittler concludes the lecture by arguing with White’s critique regarding

Western Christianity’s participation in environmental degradation in “the historical roots”

but disagrees with his analysis of its cause within Christianity itself. Sittler briefly

mentions how he can identify other cultures equally as anthropocentric without any

Christian influence.170

166 Sittler, “Recordings,” 65-6, 68. 167 Sittler, “Recordings,” 70. 168 Sittler, “Recordings,” 70. 169Sittler, “Recordings,” 70. 170 This may simply be an indication of a poor reading with regards to White’s argument insofar as it is related to the growth of technology and science in relation to Christianity.

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Conclusion

Lynn White Jr.’s influence on the field of environmental ethics, and Christian

environmental ethics in general is difficult to overlook. And as Western Christians,

particularly in the United States, begin to examine U.S. Christian responses or attention

to environmental degradation, Sittler represents one of the more prominent figures during

the twentieth century. Sittler shares, and sometimes seemingly anticipates some of

White’s arguments presented in “Roots.” However, White and Sittler break dramatically

about what is actually an essential expression of Christianity. What makes Sittler’s

contribution unique is his articulation of a biblical and traditional expression of

Christianity which envisions the entire cosmos as wrapped up in the salvific work of

Jesus Christ. The Christology articulated by Sittler is one that at once addresses

contemporary Christian participation in environmental degradation while also attempting

to draw contemporary Western Christians back towards the historic vision of Christ’s

redemption of all things. Regarding the former, in Essays on Nature and Grace Sittler

argues that the doctrine regarding the grace of God in relation to the experience of

humanity in the world of nature

must be relocated for our time, and a fresh way must be found to propose the reality of grace to men who understand the cosmos as a closed system. The old theological rubric of ‘Nature and Grace’ did not have to attend to Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Marx, Freud, or to the world-and self-understanding which has been engendered by the knowledge and insight these names represent.171

Regarding the latter, Sittler understood such a relocation to be his task as “a constructive theologian.” According to Sittler,

[m]y responsibility required that I, as both an individual and a representative of the community of faith, put that tradition on the battle line where theological

171 Sittler, Essays, 1.

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affirmations meet the general human affirmations: to reason and construct forward into a new situation the old statements of the church and the believing community.172

Articulating the traditional Christian faith in such a way that addresses the issues of

contemporary society was a theologian’s primarily task according to Sitter. It would

seem that Sittler’s conception of a theologian stems from his understanding of the role of

the pastor: to usher in the Word to these people at this particular place in time. In this

way, his time as a pastor shaped his understanding of his role and task as a theologian.

Christianity, as Sittler understands it, has placed itself at odds with the needs and

explorations of contemporary society. The end of Christian doctrine cannot tolerate such

a situation: an inability of God’s church to speak of the God of all creation to His

creation.

Doctrines are not born. . . . in an unchanging vacuum. Doctrines are evoked, clarified, refined, given force and precision within the challenge of exact circumstances. It is the precisely the job of the theologian to offer themselves as the midwife so such redefinition in light of new contemporary situations and problems.173

What was needed in Sittler’s time was a fresh (and ancient) take on Christology, one that brought man back into proper relation with the dirt from which he came and one that

found the grace of God in all things and therefore God saving all things.

Unless some huge, primarily religious, and commanding vision of the future of the world can seize, release, and exalt our spirits free of our unregarding, arrogant, and ultimately suicidal operations with the creation, we shall continue to be bombarded by the awesome data of ecological disaster, but remain unsupplied with a theological indicative as big as the issue and an ethicality unexpanded to appropriate dimensions.174

172 Sittler, Gravity, 50. 173 Sittler, “Called,” 185. 174 Sittler, Essays, 116-117.

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Throughout his career Sittler saw an inability of the church to articulate a message rooted

in doctrines of nature and grace with cosmic implications to a society that was eager to

find meaning in the cosmos. “That the church, on the frontier where new problems press

and a new kind of mind inquiries [sic], is embarrassed in advancing its work so long as

its Christology remains formally imprisoned in categories which are felt by the initiated to be inadequate and by the uninitiated to be irrelevant.”175

It is to this ecological Christology we now turn. Sittler quotes Galloway in

“Called to Unity” to demonstrate what he thinks is at stake if the church refuses to

examine its understanding of the natural world.

Unless one is prepared to accept a dualism which condemns the whole physical order as being not of God and interprets redemption simply as release from the physical order, then one is forced to raise the question of cosmic redemption, not in contrast with but as an implicate of personal redemption. Physical nature cannot be treated as an indifferent factor—as the mere stage and setting of the drama of personal redemption. It must either be condemned as in itself evil, or else it must be brought within the scope of God's redemptive act.176

For Sittler, what is stake is not just the treatment of the natural world, but the very understanding of the unity of all things in the person of Jesus Christ. Our neglect of the natural world is symptomatic of a larger misunderstanding of the ways the person of

Jesus Christ has brought all things together through the resurrection. This means we are connected and related to all things, including the natural world. “We must think it possible that there is no ontology of isolated entities, or instance, of forms, of processes, whether we are reflecting about God or man or society or the cosmos.”177 What Sittler is

proposing is what I am calling his “ecological Christology.”

175 Joseph Sittler, “A Function of Christology,” Lutheran Quarterly 6 (May 1954), 122. 176 Sittler, “Called,” 178, citing Galloway, Cosmic, 205. 177 Sittler, “Responsibility,” 174.

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In the next chapter I will examine Sittler’s Christology as the constructive theological proposal to the problem of Christian participation in environmental degradation. According to Sittler’s reading of Genesis 1, humans are constituted by three fundamental, or what Sittler calls ontological relations: to God, fellow humanity, and the natural world. These relationships are essential to our flourishing, and to neglect them is to harm humanity and the natural order. Additionally, Sittler argues that in Colossians

1:15-20 we see that Christ holds all things together. The imitation of Christ, therefore, draws one into right relationship to God, fellow humanity, and the natural world.

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CHAPTER THREE

THE ECOLOGICAL CHRISTOLOGY OF JOSEPH SITTLER

. . . What should we be without The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken? Ask us, prophet, how we shall call Our natures forth when that live tongue is all Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean Horse of our courage, in which beheld The singing locust of the soul unshelled, And all we mean or wish to mean.

-Richard Wilbur, “Advice to a Prophet”

In chapter one I establish the historical context out of which Sittler’s thought

grows. Additionally, I provide a summary of some key texts and examine the sources

that seem to have made the deepest imprint on Sittler’s thought and work. I also

demonstrate some of the prevalent themes in Sittler’s writings, especially his diagnosis of

the problem facing contemporary Christian thought and society at large. In his work in

the church and the university Sittler saw a theology aimed at “disengagement from the

stuff of earthly life.”178 Finally, I tried to give a broad sense of Sittler’s solution to these problems and the way he articulates his Christology throughout his academic career.

178Sittler, Joseph. “A Theology for Earth.” Christian Scholar, 37, no. 3 (1954), 369.

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In the previous chapter, I examined Lynn White Jr.’s essay “The Historical Roots

of the Ecological Crisis.” I do this, in part, because of its influence on the field of

Christian environmental ethics and how it shaped that field of study. Placing Sittler’s

own diagnosis of the problem of Western Christian participation in environmental

degradation next to White’s allowed for a comparison of the many similarities and

substantial differences—namely with regards to the nature or essence of Christianity—

while also looking at the way Sittler frames a similar critique and solution prior to White.

In doing so my aim was not just to offer insight into Sittler’s work and thought, but to

state the importance of his work as a Christian theologian who wrestled with these

questions before they were framed by White. As a “pioneering theologian of nature,”179

Sittler’s first task was to address the conceptual framework that fostered a bifurcated

understanding of the biblical concepts of nature and grace which manifested itself in

contemporary Western Christian thought through an other-worldly eschatology. Sittler

viewed this manifestation of an other-worldly eschatology as a Christian blasphemy, or

form of infidelity. For Sittler, the distorted understanding of nature and grace provided a profound theological opportunity for learning: “We live in a kairos where Christ and chaos intersect, a moment in which the fullest Christology is marvelously congruent with man’s power-founded anxiety and need.”180 Put differently, Sittler believed that the

distorted understanding of nature and grace presented an opportunity to present “the

fullest Christology.” At the heart of Sittler’s Christology is a doctrine of grace and the

redemptive work of God through Christ that was as expansive in scope as the doctrine of

creation.

179 Santmire, Travail, v and xii. 180 Sittler, “Called,” 186.

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In this chapter I aim to describe Joseph Sittler's ecological Christology. In doing

so, I will highlight how Sittler provides a theological solution to a theological problem by

returning to the scripture and the teachings of some of the early church fathers. At the

heart of Sittler’s Christology is a return to obedience to Christ, and obedience to Christ

leads to right relationship with the natural world. For Sittler argues that if Christ

maintains all things in Himself, then Christ necessarily saves all things and is therefore

the fullness of all creation and not just of human beings. Right relationship to Christ

should therefore lead to right relationship to the creation. Sittler’s ecological Christology

hinges on his interpretation of Genesis 2. According to Sittler, the three relationships

found in Genesis 2 are constitutive of the human person (to God, fellow humanity, and

creation). Sittler believes this triad of relations is a dominant theme in the Old Testament

and continues in the New Testament and in the early Church fathers. Additionally,

Sittler’s ecological Christology seeks to remedy the problems of nature and grace that have plagued the mind of Western Christianity by demonstrating that all creation stands

in relation insofar as it is held together in the person of Jesus Christ. Christ, as the creator

and sustainer of all that is, holds all things in himself and therefore brings all things into

Him. Thus, the salvation brought about by Christ reaches into the depths of all creation,

since all creation is sustained by Christ. All reality is made right through the Word of

God. As the recapitulation of Adam, Jesus Christ perfectly embodies the triad of relations

established in Genesis and reiterated throughout Scripture. Therefore, obedience to

Christ should draw humanity into right relation with God, humanity, and the natural

world. This, in turn, allows for the flourishing of all of God’s creation.

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I will begin by exploring Sittler’s interpretation of Genesis and the relations

constitutive of our humanity are described. What the early chapters of Genesis establish for Sittler is that the relations constitutive for the flourishing the human person is to God, other humans, and the natural world. Neglecting these relations damages the human person, other people, and the natural world. For Sittler, the biblical articulation of our

connection to the natural world finds its crescendo in Colossians 1:15-20. I will then

further explore how Sittler understands the claim in Colossians that Christ creates, is in,

and sustains all of creation and therefore saves all creation. Furthermore, I will argue that

Christ, as the recapitulation of Adam, perfectly embodies the ontology described in

Genesis. This will establish the last part of my argument in which I articulate how Sittler

describes obedience to Christ as central to the Christian task of living in right relations

and that Christian living will foster care for all of creation. If Christ embodies all of

humanity’s relations perfectly, imitation of our Lord will also foster right relations. For

Sittler, fidelity and discipleship to Christ means sanctification of the natural world.

According to Sittler’s reading of Genesis, human persons are created in relation to God, humanity, and the natural world, and neglect of any of these relations harms the individual, other persons, and the natural world.

Sittler uses the creation narratives in Genesis to articulate how Adam and Eve know themselves in the fullest sense only when they know themselves in light of their relations to God, fellow humanity, and creation

“God—man—nature! These three are meant for each other, and restlessness will

stalk our hearts and ambiguity our world until their cleavage is redeemed.”181 Sittler utilizes the story of Genesis as well as the broader witness of the Old and New Testament to demonstrate that fundamentally, human persons are created with relations to God,

181 Sittler, “A Theology,” 373.

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humanity, and the natural world. According to Sittler, the story of Genesis describes the three relations constitutive of the human person: God, fellow humanity, and nature. We will therefore examine these relations beginning with humanity’s relation to God.

The first and primary ontological relation—or relationship constitutive of the

human person—according to Sittler is to God. As creatures, we are first and foremost

dependent on the creator as the one who wills our existence into being. “Man is because

God is; God wills man to be. God is the Creator; man is created creature.”182 That

humanity is created by God, who is uncreated, demonstrates the first and fundamental

order of relationships. “God is the name for the one from whom all things flow. Man is

what he is because he is related to that one.” Furthermore, “the fundamental term imago

Dei is not a term that points to a substance, an attribute, or a specifiable quality, but one

which specifies a relation. The fundamental terms of the Scripture—God, man, love, ,

hate, grace, —are all relational words.”183 That rational and non-rational

creation is all so aptly described in the term “creature” implies that their fundamental

relationship is to the Creator. Sittler puts it this way: “I may love God, hate God, ignore

God. But I can’t get unstuck from God.”184 All creation exists because it was willed by

the Creator. All that is created, and all creation exists, therefore, in relation to God.

Humanity then, according to Sittler, is most fundamentally oriented towards relationship

with God, the Creator.

The human person is also related to his or her fellow humanity, and in Sittler’s

account of Genesis this demonstrates the second ontological relation. In what is

182 Sittler, “Evangelism and the Care of the Earth,” in Evocations, 203. 183 Sittler, “Commitment,” 174. 184 Sittler, “Evangelism,” 203-4.

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sometimes described as the second creation in Genesis 2, the Lord acknowledges that it is

not good for Adam to be alone and brings all creatures before Adam to name and none

prove to be suitable helpers for him. For this reason, the Lord “caused the man to fall

into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs” from which

the Lord fashioned Eve (2:21). According to Sittler,

man is formed by the fact that God made man to be among his fellowmen. God made one; then he made another. The one can’t be one without the other. A solitary man is no man at all. I am who I am because I am man-among. God made me; but he makes me as a plain biological entity by the communion of others.185

We are because of two other people. Our existence is marked by dependency, first to our

parents, but later by our relations to other persons. The fact that Adam needs a companion is support for Sittler’s argument. Then the Lord said, ‘it is not good for man

to be alone. I will make a suitable helper for him’” (Gen. 2:18). As Adam names the

animals he cannot find a proper companion among them, and Eve is created from Adam,

flesh of his flesh: human from human. An individual’s relation to other human persons is

needed in order to flourish as the Lord has created us. The relationship between persons

therefore is one that is constitutive of our being, according to Sittler.

Sittler argues that the third ontological relation is to creation itself. Not only were

humans created to be in relation to God and to fellow humanity, but we were also created

to be in relation with creation itself. When Adam was formed from the clay of the

earth—a sign of our connectedness in and of itself—God gave him the earth to take care

of and steward. “For then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness,

so that they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock

185 Sittler, “Evangelism,” 203.

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and all the wild animals, and over all the animals that move along the ground. . . “

(Gen.1:26). 186 Humanity is formed from the very stuff of the natural world, and are then

created in the image and likeness of the Triune Lord in order to steward the very world

from which they were created and on which they are dependent. Within the first chapter

of the first book of the Bible, the relationship between humanity and the natural world is

established as one of co-dependence.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground— everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good (1:28-31a).187

These passages lay the groundwork for Sittler’s theological anthropology and frame the relations that Christ perfects as the incarnate Lord.188 According to Sittler, what Genesis

1 and 2 demonstrates is the way in which the human person is in relationship both to

God, other humans, and the natural world. All three elements are present in the telling of

Adam and Eve. Therefore, for Sittler, Genesis describes the ontological relationships

necessary in order to flourish as we were intended by the Creator. Humanity, therefore,

reaches its fullest created potential, or actualization, only when it lives according to its

proper relations: when it imitates Christ.

God makes man out of, within, and absolutely dependent upon the whole world that he has made. I can live without food for a month, without water for a week,

186 When using this verse, Sittler uses the NEB translation which states that man is “to rule” the earth and subdue it”. According to Sittler, this “ruling” is “clearly a rule by ‘caring.’ See Sittler, “Evangelism,” 204. Sittler’s understanding of “caring” and “careless” treatment of the natural world will be addressed below. 187 Reference from the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible 188 When I refer to Sittler’s theological anthropology, I do not mean it in the way typically understood within Lutheran or Protestant usage (what are human persons composed of?). Rather, I mean it to suggest that Sittler was concerned not with the parts but with the relations that make up the human person, or what Sittler would call the “communion of relations,” see Sittler, “Ecological Commitment,” 176.

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without air for perhaps six minutes. I am stuck with God, stuck with my neighbor, and stuck with nature (the ‘garden’), within which and out of the stuff of which I am made. I may love God, hate God, ignore God. But I can’t get unstuck from God. I may love my neighbor, hate my neighbor, or ignore my neighbor. But I can’t get unstuck from my neighbor. And I may love the world, hate the world or try to ignore the world. But I cannot get unstuck from the world.189 These relations to God, fellow humanity, and to creation are, in Sittler’s understanding,

constitutive of the human person. According to Sittler, “Christian theology says that a

person’s being, selfhood, sense of who he or she is, is constituted by relationship in such

a way that if any one of them is damaged, the individual’s being is damaged.”190 Thus the essence of the human person is made up of this communion of relations. If it is true that the human person is best described as a communion of relations, as Sittler suggests, many of the problems identified in chapter two are symptomatic of humanity’s neglect of one or more of these relations. A false understanding of the human person would then seemingly inhibit human flourishing in its most complete sense. In “Ecological

Commitment as Theological Responsibility” Sittler argues that

Reality is known only in relations. This statement conflicts with the very structure of a good deal of post-Enlightenment thought in the Western world. I mean by such a statement that we must think it possible that there is no ontology of isolated entities, or instances, of forms, of processes, whether we are reflecting about God or man or society or the cosmos. The only adequate ontological structure we may utilize for thinking things Christianly is an ontology of community, communion, ecology—and all three words point conceptually to thought of a common kind. ‘Being itself’ may be a relation, not an entitative thing.191

For Sittler, we are shaped by the world around us, and can only come to know it by our

interaction or relationship with it. Reality, therefore, can only be adequately understood

189 Sittler, “Ecological Commitment,” 203-4. 190 Sittler, Gravity, 54. 191 Sittler, “Ecological Commitment,” 174.

80 through relations. If Sittler is correct regarding the importance of these relations to the human person, what then is the consequence when these relations are neglected?

Neglecting any one of these relationships distorts oneself and injures the other (fellow humanity and creation)

Genesis 3 describes the fall in all these aspects and illuminates the human person’s desire to be like God—a denial of one’s own creatureliness—and the repercussions of that denial on one’s relationship to God, fellow humanity, and the natural world. In the story of Genesis Adam is created to exist “under the Creator; with a fellow creature (Eve) and is ordered to tend the garden. If he neglects any one of these relationships, he diminishes himself and hurts his world.”192 Outside of this brief interview, Sittler does not elsewhere use the word “neglect” to describe what happens when we are not attentive to our ontological relations, or relations constitutive of what we are. So why do I use the term neglect here? Sittler uses various terms to describe our distorted relationship to God, fellow humanity, and the natural world. At times, such as in “Evangelism and the Care of the Earth,” Sittler uses the word “careless” to explain

Genesis 1:26 and what it means when Scripture talks about man’s “rule” over the natural world. Here, Sittler’s argument is that rule cannot mean a lack of care for the natural world. Rather, for Sittler, it is synonymous for “care,” though he does not explicitly exegetically and hermeneutically how he comes to that conclusion. Here he contrasts a

“caring” and “careless” relationship towards the natural world. The latter, according to

192 Quote by Sittler, Hazel Barnes, Spokane Daily Chronicle, “Faith Urges Care of the Earth” 10/8/77, p. 4.

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Sittler, “in creation as in a family, is a kind of ruling that is catastrophic. It ultimately destroys the ruler.”193 In “The Care of the Earth,” Sittler utilizes St. Thomas Aquinas’

profound dialective of use and enjoyment that distorts and impoverishes life when it is not acknowledged and obeyed. To use a thing is to make it instrumental to a purpose, and some things are to be so used. To enjoy a thing is to permit it to be what is prior to and a part from any instrumental assessment of it, and some things are to be so enjoyed. . . . Where [a thing] is enjoyed it adds grace to a truth; where it is used it induces and anesthetizes a lie.194

Sittler uses Thomas to say that “abuse is use without grace: it is always a failure in the counterpoint of use and enjoyment.” I am drawing attention to Sittler’s single use of

“neglect,” then, because it seems to be able to touch on these various phrases and descriptions of what happens when we fail to acknowledge our ontological relations: abuse, carelessness, disregard. and devalue. Furthermore, Sittler does not expound in his interview above how it is that neglect of those elements harm the human person. Yet, we may get a sense of how this is true if we examine some of Sittler’s other writings, using the interview quote as a sort of hermeneutical key.

The human person’s neglect of any one of these three relationships injures both humanity and the natural world. Neglect of humanity is reciprocal in that it hurts both the perpetrator (i.e. fellow humanity), and the natural order. The account of the Fall given in Genesis 3:8, 12, 13, and 16 demonstrates the repercussions of sin on these essential human relations.

“The man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God walking about in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and they hid from him among the trees” (3:8).

In choosing to eat the fruit in the garden, Adam and Eve fundamentally injured their

193 Sittler, “Evangelism,” 205, emphasis mine. 194 Sittler, “Care,” 95.

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relationship to their Creator. It was an act of autonomy on behalf of Adam and Eve, an

attempt to be like God. Adam and Eve were told not to eat of the tree of knowledge of

, and yet they did. As a result, they looked at one another and felt ashamed,

and subsequently hid from the Lord. Due to their neglect of the relationship with God,

they brought about a strain: where there once was open communion, now results in

hiding and .195 Adam and Eve’s decisions to eat the fruit, at least according to

Sittler, harms their relationship with God because the decision is a denial of Adam’s

creaturely nature—or a denial of what constitutes being or what he is.

First, man is formed by God. Man is because God is; God wills man to be. God is the Creator; man is created creature. Man’s existence is subsistence; that is, another is, and wills man, and man is because of that. Man may not like this, will this, want this –and, like Adam and Eve, he does strange things to change this. He wants to be by, for, with himself. But he cannot successfully buck the structure. He is stuck with God.196

Neglecting one’s relationship to God therefore distorts the biblical understanding of what

a human person is: a creature. Acknowledging our dependency on God and our

relationship to Him is central to the Christian life and is, as we will examine, exemplified

perfectly in the person of Jesus Christ.

In Genesis 3:12, 13, and 16, the neglect to God’s command for Adam and Eve to

not eat of the fruit creates animosity between them, harming a relationship designed to

help one another. Adam blames Eve for their sin of seeking to be like God, and Eve

blames the serpent. The biblical text explicitly states the kind of harm to the essential

relationship will have on their relationship when the Lord is speaking with Eve: “’I will

195 It should be noted that I am intentionally avoiding the use of the word “sin.” My avoidance of it is not because it is not an accurate word to help describe the root of the neglect, or the neglect itself, but rather because Sittler rarely uses the word. It is not clear why Sittler seems to largely avoid such a potent and important word when discussing our relationship to the natural world, but he seems to avoid it. Therefore, I will avoid it in order to evade using and defining a word Sittler seems to have chosen not to. 196 Sittler, “Evangelism,” in Evocations, 203.

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make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor will you give birth to

children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you’” (3:16). When

humanity overlooks its fellow humanity, it denies the necessity for companionship that is

described as central to the human person in Scripture. In Sittler’s own words:

Second, man is formed by the fact that God made man to be among his fellowmen. God made one; then he made another. The one can’t be one without the other. A solitary man is no man at all. I am who I am because I am a man- among. God made me; but he makes me as a plain biological entity by the communion of others. . . . Absolute aloneness is not only pathetic; it is impossible.197

To neglect our relationship with our fellow humanity injures humanity, creation, and in

the end, ourselves. Our lives are so marked by a dependency on others for our

flourishing that to deny our dependency would be harm ourselves by going against God’s

order and design per Genesis. By disregarding fellow humanity, we participate in a

distortion of ourselves as creatures who are necessarily social and dependent on other

people. By doing harm to our fellow humanity due to a distorted understanding of the

relationships essential to us, we injure the other insofar as we hold back what is necessary

for their flourishing as well.

In Genesis 3:17-19 we do not see Adam and Eve neglect the natural world. What

remains significant, however, and suggestive of Sittler’s argument regarding humanity’s

ontological constitution is that humanity’s relationship with the natural world is affected

even though it is, seemingly, not involved in Adam and Eve’s actions. They do not seem

to neglect the natural world, yet we see Adam and Eve’s actions have ramifications to all

parts essential to them. What might once have been a productive and harmonious

197 Sittler, “Evangelism,” in Evocations, 203. This narrative regarding being “a biological entity,” however true, demonstrates the way that Sittler is not explicitly interpreting Genesis here because Adam and Eve are not biologically dependent on parents.

84 relationship is now marked by painful and laborious toil amongst thorns and thistles.

Sittler argues that both humanity and the natural world are injured when humanity neglects the natural world because they are connected. The following quote bears repeating:

God makes man out of, within, and absolutely dependent upon the whole world that he has made. I can live without food for a month, without water for a week, without air for perhaps six minutes. I am stuck with God, stuck with my neighbor, and stuck with nature (the ‘garden’), within which and out of the stuff of which I am made. I may love God, hate God, ignore God. But I can’t get unstuck from God. I may love my neighbor, hate my neighbor, or ignore my neighbor. But I can’t get unstuck from my neighbor. And I may love the world, hate the world or try to ignore the world. But I cannot get unstuck from the world.198 When we are not attentive to the relationship between humanity and the natural world we are distorting what humanity is and the ecological web of relations in which it has been placed (with others, and with the created order), thus injuring itself, fellow humanity, and the created order.

The ways in which contemporary western society seems largely ignorant of how their harm to the natural world harms ourselves seems to be the state of Sittler’s audience for much of his writings and lectures. He seems to find himself speaking to a people, who have abused and misused their position and relation to the nature world, and many are now harmed by it. By neglecting creation, we participate in a distortion of ourselves as creatures, necessarily dependent on God, others, and the created order for our existence. In the most basic sense we require the natural world for our survival. All creatures require food and water to survive. Humans require clean air that is dependent on other living organisms to purify. By overlooking or disregarding creation, we injure

198 Sittler, “Evangelism,” in Evocations, 203-4.

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ourselves, fellow humanity, and the created order. Our relationship to the natural world

is unavoidable.

Man’s place is the ‘garden,’ this world. Man is not alone in this world, not even when his aloneness is unalleviated by the companionship of the fellowman. For creation is a community of life abounding—from the invisible microbes to the highly visible elephants, the vastness of the mountains, the sweep of the seas, the expanse of land. These are companions of our creaturehood are not only there: they are there as things without which I cannot be at all! They surround, support, nourish, delight, allure, challenge, and talk back to us.199

We cannot escape our relationship to the natural world. It is a constant force shaping and

molding us and who we are, whether we are attentive to that or not.

In sum, Sittler believes that Genesis demonstrates the relationships constitutive of

us as humans that are required for our flourishing in the fullest, intended sense. These relationships—to God, our fellow humanity, and the natural world—are unavoidable, but when neglected, intentionally or otherwise, harm or diminish the human person. The importance of the triad of relations is seen throughout Scripture—a point vaguely argued by Sittler but explicitly examined and argued in Galloway—and Sittler sees a relationship between neglect of the triad of relationships and a limiting of the understanding of the scope of grace.

Sittler argues that centrality of the triad of relations in Genesis is a theme throughout the Scriptures.

In Sittler’s most concise treatment of the scriptural warrant for his claim regarding the centrality of the triad of relations constitutive of the human person, Sittler turns to the language of Scripture as evidence. Sittler’s approach here is vague and lacks exegetical rigor. Likewise, Sittler does not trace the relationship between humanity, its relationship to the natural world, and God canonically, walking through the various books that make

199 Sittler, “Evangelism,” in Evocations, 204.

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up the Christian canon explicitly showing where this connection is present.200 Rather,

Sittler seeks to argue, with broad strokes, the ways in which the grace of God in the

human person is related and connected to the grace of God in the natural world. Sittler

will argue, utilizing the text of Colossians 1:15-20 that the connection between God,

humanity and the natural world reaches its climax in the person of Jesus Christ. As I

will examine in the next section below, the connection made between the human person

and the natural world made explicit, at least according to Sittler, in Genesis allows for the

redemption made possible in Christ to effect all of creation itself.

In Sittler’s most concise Scriptural account of the triad of relations established in

Scripture as a continuing theme in the Scriptures—accumulating towards its most

dramatic articulation in Colossians—begins with an examination of the language of the

Old Testament. According to Sittler, the “dominating central term [in the Old Testament]

is ‘redemption.’”201 Sittler’s argument then is that the very nature of the word

“redemption” is one that is necessarily relational.

The basic [Old Testament] terms of hesed, tsedeq, charis are words whose fundamental referent is the cosmos that God loves—primarily the human community to be sure, but not in isolation from the rest of Creation. . . .Salvation

200 One explanation behind why Sittler did not attempt a more detailed examination of the theme of the relationship between God, humanity, and the natural world in Scripture may be because Sittler thought it was already sufficiently done. In The Cosmic Christ, Galloway offers a robust account of the tri-fold relationship theme in Scripture, especially concerning how understudied this theme was in the 1950’s. Further evidence for this theory is that this section of Essays is teeming with quotations from Galloway. Even sources not citing Galloway are, in fact, from Galloway, see fn. 205. For more a recent examination into the ways in which Israel’s infidelity to God brought about a negative impact on the natural world, see Ellen Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For a history of this idea in American see Kevin M. Lowe, Baptized with the Soil: Christian Agrarians and the Crusade for Rural America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 201 Sittler, “Evangelism,” in Evocations, 204.

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is an ecological word in the sense that it is the restoration of a right relation which has been corrupted.202 Other central terms such as chen, which Sittler defines as God’s initiating grace, and chesed, which Sittler defines as faithfulness or in all covenants and relationships based on chen, necessarily entail a relationship with God’s creation.203

A feeling for the form and function of such statements [regarding chen and chesed], intregral as they are to Israel’s understanding of God, of how he manifests, rules, blesses, and intends for his people, indicates that later large categories under which life was divided into life-as-nature and life-as-history are useless for grasping the structure of Israel’s faith. It must rather be seen that God is “the Holy One,” that all that is given, and all that happens as event and process is to be related to his faithfulness in mercy and . This fidelity and presence is manifested in “the glory” and nothing that is or happens is intrinsically incapable of refracting this glory. The “glory of thy people Israel” is the lens in the eye of faith through which all things—natural, personal, social, historical—are beheld. . . . Nature is not an entity or a process set alongside God and having its own autonomy, its own ‘insides,’ its ‘laws.’ It is, rather, continuous with the reality of God as Creator.204 While not directly addressing the triad of relations, Sittler is establishing the relations

between God, humanity, and the natural world through the lens of God’s grace in all things. One further example of the relationship between God, humanity, and the natural world is significant for Sittler’s argument. Sittler’s example, again, is an examination of

202 Sittler, “Commitment,” 177. It seems that Sittler is using “redemption” and “salvation” interchangeably here. 203 Sittler, Essays, 24. 204 Sittler, Essays, 24. Sittler here does not cite where these terms—“life-as-nature” and “life-as-history”— come from. He makes no arguments to specific arguments or uses of these phrases, rather simply just using them. To explain what Sittler is trying to articulate when he uses this phrase Bouma-Prediger argues that “In [Sittler’s] doctrine of creation he not only seeks to avoid a utilitarian anthropocentrism, but also a reductionistic . In other words, natural science does not have the only or the final word on how we should properly view creation. For example, Sittler argues against any separation between nature and history on biblical as well as scientific grounds.” Bouma-Prediger then quotes the same section in Essays, arguing that “[t]here is a congruence of modern scientific and biblical worldviews on this matter. According to Sittler, “the life-world that characterizes our time and to which an adequate Christology must be proposed includes both the world as nature and the world as history. I would suggest to you that so does the biblical world.’” See Bouma-Prediger, Greening, 82ff; citing Joseph Sittler, “The Sittler Speeches,” in Center for the Study of Campus Ministry Yearbook 1977-78, ed. Phil Schroeder (Valparaiso: Valparaiso University, 1978), 45.

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the language of the Old Testament and what that language means or does not mean.

Sittler argues that the language in the Hebrew Scriptures do not even contain a word

equivalent to our usage of “nature.”

The Hebrew vocabulary includes no word equivalent to the word “Nature.” This is not surprising if by “Nature” we mean “The creative and regulative physical power which is conceived of as operating in the physical world and as the immediate cause of all its phenomena.” The only way to render this idea into Hebrew would be to say simply “God.” We should have to describe a particular physical activity through anthropomorphic phrases such as the “voice” of God, heard in the thunder; the “hand” of God, felt in the pestilence; the “breath” of God, animating the body of man; the “wisdom” of God, ultimately conceived as His agent in creation.205 For Sittler, the lack of distinction within the for “nature” as something

other than God is an indication that all activity in the natural world was not seen as a

force autonomous or disconnected from the will or grace of God. In fact, Sittler argues

just the opposite seems to be true. The activity in the natural world was seen as another

manifestation or the grace and will of God. The same, of course, is seen in the works of

humans as well: “Nebuchadnezzar can be the strange agent of this glory [the glory of thy

people Israel, of God, ‘the Holy One’]; the glory which ‘thou hast set above the ’

is also declared by the heavens.”206 The sentencing following this quote bears repeating:

“Nature is not an entity or a process set alongside God and having its own autonomy, its

own ‘insides,’ its ‘laws.’ It is, rather continuous with the reality of God as Creator.”207

Thus, for Sittler, the vocabulary of the Hebrew Scriptures points to the intimate relationship between God, humanity, and the natural world. Furthermore, this same

205 H. Wheeler Robinson, Inspiration and Revelation in the Old Testament (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1946), 1, quoted in Sittler, Essays, 36; also quoted in Galloway, Cosmic, 31. 206 Sittler, Essays, 24. 207 Sittler, Essays, 24..

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relationship can be seen in the New Testament to its logical, cosmic, conclusion in the

person of Jesus Christ.

In order to understand how the emphasis on the relationship between God, humanity, and the natural world is present in the New Testament, we must understand

Sittler’s own hermeneutical principles. In doing so, we will establish a continuity with

what Sittler has argued is evident in the Old Testament with the Christology Sittler

develops from his reading of the letter to the Colossians. Since the early Christian

community that authors the New Testament texts is an extension of a community shaped

and formed by the Old Testament texts, the same connection between God, humanity,

and the natural world can be seen in both testaments. For Sittler, the Old Testament is,

therefore, the context through which the “New Testament testimony to Christ and the

scope of his grace may be understood….”208 Sittler’s argument in Essays regarding the

Old Testament and

Israel are intended as a background whereby what shall presently be said about the movement of New Testament testimony to Christ and the Scope of his grace may be understood both in its Christ-concentration, and in its extent. For if the doctrine of the divine redemption there centered upon Christ is not assessed as moving toward the same spatial largeness as characterized the Old Testament celebration of the ‘space of the glory’ such a movement will continue to be ignored in Christian theology, or rejected, or regarded as marginal or esoteric.209 Sittler continues by arguing that,

If grace, as witnessed to in the New Testament, is to be proposed in fresh ways of address as actually the will and power of God in Jesus Christ for the redemption of men, and if the actuality of contemporary man’s formation-as-man in virtue of his life-conditions and transactions with nature is to be taken seriously, then Christian theology must explicate a doctrine of grace in continuity with the

208 Sittler, Essays, 25. 209 Sittler, Essays, 25.

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Scripture and in such bold and new reformulations as the reality of grace and its salvatory power demands.210 In Sittler’s argument, an articulation of grace that does not stand congruently with that of the Old Testament diminishes the account of grace exemplified in the New Testament, and therefore cannot offer a robust account of Christ’s saving power. It therefore is of the utmost importance to see the ways in which the saving power of Christ is articulated in the New Testament—particularly in Colossians—is a continuation of what was revealed and understood in the Hebrew Scriptures. In other words, there is not a dramatic or entirely different set of theological assumptions between Israel and the New Testament authors.

The community that produced the New Testament did not undertake its task of witness to Christ with a full heart and an empty head. Nor did it fashion its statements with minds that were innocent of the substance, texture, referential opulence, or historically solidity of the terms, images, and symbols of the people of the old covenant. They bore witness to Christ as the center and intention of all these; but the Christ to whom they bore witness was in continuity with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. . . When the community spoke of Christ’s doing they were speaking of God’s doing; when they cherished and transmitted Christ’s speaking they were reporting what they believed to be an address to them and through them of the reality of God. This faith, this continuity, and this intention was, indeed, generative of a community that knew itself to be constituted by an event that was nothing less than a new form of the God-relationship; but the articulation of that new form at the same time testifies to the old in the very substance of its reportorial and testimonial language.211

The New Testament, according to Sittler, is a blossoming of the themes found in the Old

Testament. Even within the New Testament itself, Sittler argues that there is “an undiluteable momentum, a ‘blooming’ of the language of Christ-testimony, in the New

Testament.” Unfortunately, these broad arguments are all Sittler offers in Essays as far as

210 Sittler, Essays, 25. 211 Sittler, Essays, 27.

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an examination of the relationship between God, humanity, and the natural world in the

New Testament.212

The most in-depth examination of the logical expansion of the rhetoric of grace in

the Old Testament in the New Testament is the Christological hymn in Colossians, which

represents an excellent example of the crescendo in Christological imagery and rhetoric.

It is also the heart of Sittler’s ecological Christology.

Sittler argues that if Christ creates all things, is in all things, and sustains all things, then all things are brought into the fold of God through the salvific work of Jesus Christ

Sittler argues that the understanding of God’s redemption of all things gives the necessary context for understanding Paul’s letter to the Colossians

The Christology of Joseph Sittler rests firmly on his understanding Colossians

1:15-20, which is a font for his continual engagement throughout his career.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. (Col. 1:15-20, NRSV)

212 Again, for an explanation of why this may be the case, see fn. 200. For example, Galloway utilizes the to argue that salvation cannot be a removal of the humanity from the natural order. In Revelation, John’s vision of the reign of the Kingdom of God was not abandonment or removal of non- human creation, but a sanctification of the created order, represented by the . In his vision, John illuminates another aspect of such an eschatological cosmic redemption in his description of the New Jerusalem: “I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (Rev. 21:22-23). Galloway’s commentary on this text is that there will be no temple in the New Jerusalem because the division between the secular and the Divine, the graced and the natural, has been closed. See Galloway, Cosmic Christ, 35. This bit of would be a helpful critic of the other- worldly eschatology Sittler found prevalent in contemporary Christian thought.

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Central to Sittler’s Christology is St. Paul’s claim that all things were created in Christ

who is in and sustains all things, then all things are brought into the fold of God through

the salvific work of Jesus Christ. 213 “[A]ll things,” according to Sittler, “are permeable

to [Christ’s] cosmic redemption because all things subsist in him.”214 Sittler argues that

the idea of cosmic redemption that Paul argues in Colossians stems from the Jewish

understanding of God’s grace that permeates all things. Sittler’s reading of Paul in

Colossians, that all things are brought into the fold of God through the salvific work of

Jesus Christ, is therefore rooted in a trajectory that exists within the entirety of Scripture,

and as we will see finds further and affirmation from and in the church

fathers. For Sittler, the Christological claim in Colossians establishes the reach of God’s

saving work through Christ into all the cosmos. That God’s saving work through Christ

reaches all the cosmos is necessarily so because it is in Christ the cosmos are created and

sustained.

The relational prepositions “in” him, “through” him, “for” him are here constitutive of a Christological claim that stretches out endlessly in time, space, and effectual force. The reality of Christ as the focal point for world and life meaning is sunk back into “invisible God,” is that energy whereby “all things hold together,” and is proposed forward into the yet uncut pages of historical life as God’s purpose and power “to reconcile to himself all things.”215 The rhetoric of cosmic expansion and Christological extension found in first century

Christians, according to Sittler, “could not be avoided.”216 Whereas the contemporary

213 I am aware of the contested nature regarding the Pauline authorship in the letter to the church in Colossae. Sittler describes any objections to the issue of authorship as “legitimate but not crucial.” He discusses the point more in-depth in Essays, 38 and “The Scope,”. Overall Sittler see’s such objections as distractions to the thrust of the text itself. On the issue of authorship, I agree with Sittler, and do not see how more attention to this issue would be fruitful to the overall thrust of Sittler’s argument, and therefore will deliberately not address this issue here. 214 Sittler, “Called” 177. 215 Sittler, Essays, 46 216 Sittler, Essays, 36.

93 understanding of nature and grace sequesters God’s redemptive grace into the personal realm of the individual moral life, through Colossians Sittler is attempting to expand the doctrine of redemption to its intended biblical scope: all things. Yet, why did Paul find it necessary to articulate this kind of Christological imagery? What is the context for this letter?

According to Sittler, the context that brought about the Apostle Paul’s letter, in part, was to address an issue with a particular line of thinking that sought to glorify the spiritual realm and demonize the material order.

The Colossian error was to assume that there were ‘thrones, dominions, principalities and authorities’ which have a life and power apart from Christ, that the real world was a dualism, one part of which (and that part ensconcing the power of evil) was not subject to the Lordship of the Creator in his Christ.217 According to Sittler, Paul’s cosmic Christological expansion then seeks to save the community in Colossae from the errors of dualism. The Apostle Paul in the opening of his letter goes further than almost any New Testament author by offering the most explicit and succinct attempt at a doctrine of cosmic redemption. The articulation of the cosmic implications of the incarnation in Colossians is why Sittler, throughout most of his career, returns to the Colossian text in mediations and as a for his rational. The scope and understanding of grace as articulated by St. Paul—and in

Scripture more broadly—is significant for Sittler because he does not see that same understanding of grace in contemporary Western Christianity. “The doctrine of grace has been almost exclusively administered in relation to man as sinner.”218 He goes on to say elsewhere that grace has been “completely identified with the work of God according to

217 Sittler, “Called”, 178. 218 Sittler, Essays, 14.

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the Second Article, the grace of God in Jesus Christ”219 and that “Christology is reduced

to .”220 Finally, Sittler argues that the “almost exclusive elaboration of

Christology under the article of redemption is reductive to the biblical scope and of the

richness of theological tradition.”221 For Sittler sees in the testimony of Scripture—from the Old Testament through the New and explicitly in Colossians 1:15-20—a vision of

God’s saving redemption brought about in Christ that is as expansive in scope as creation. Moreover, Sittler does not rely on simply his interpretation to make this point.

Rather, Sittler argues that his vision stands in continuity with that of some of the Church

Fathers, particularly Athanasius.

Sittler utilizes Athanasius’s reading of Colossians 1:15-20 to argue that there is a precedent for Sitter’s view that Christ creates, is in, and sustains all things

Paul’s great Christological claim begins with Christ described as “the image of

the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth

were created. . . .” Sittler finds Paul’s statement to be part of a Christological affirmation

that seeks to protect the fact “that creation, redemption, and sanctification have their

source in God, that this God is not identical with, but is present in, what he creates, is

present in the redemption of what he creates, and is present in all restoration, uniting, and

upholding of his redeemed creation.”222 Because by the Word of God all things came

into existence, by that same Word, that is Christ, all of creation is brought into the fold of

redemption. Christ, as the image and Word of the invisible God, creates all things just as

His Father, whom the people of Israel called “Creator.”

219 Sittler, “Speeches,” 42. 220 Joseph Sittler, “Nature and Grace: Reflections on an Old Rubric” (Dialog, 3 Autumn 1964, 255. 221 Sittler, Essays, 11. 222 Joseph Sittler, “The Presence and Acts of the Triune God,” in The Gospel and Human Destiny (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1971), 91.

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Redemption is the name for this will, this action, and this concrete Man who is God with us and God for us—and all things are permeable to his cosmic redemption because all things subsist in him. He comes to all things, not as a stranger, for he is the firstborn of all creation, and in him all things were created. He is not only the matrix and prius of all things; he is the intention, the fullness, the integrity of all things: for all things were created through him and for him.”223

To call Christ Word of the Creator is to echo the claim in the that Christ is the Logos, the Word of God. Sittler quotes Galloway to better clarify what Sittler means when he uses the term Logos.

It is unfortunate that modern theology has always regarded the Logos doctrine primarily as a doctrine of the person of Christ rather than as a part of the doctrine of the work of Christ. The two can never be completely separated, of course. And the Logos doctrine is manifestly a doctrine of the person of Christ. But if we interpret it against its background in Paul, we shall see that it is a doctrine of the person of Christ which arose in answer to the problems of interpreting the works of Christ to the Gentile world. Therefore, in the long run, it is primarily as an assertion of the cosmic significance of the work of Christ that we should see it.224

Sittler says that “[t]he Word in which all is created is the same Verbum which became flesh in Christ.”225 Sittler explains his rational further by arguing that “’The Word was in the beginning with God.’ He [Jesus] is (for us) in the Incarnation; there we see him. But

He is before the creation of the world.”226 Jesus Christ, is then, the incarnate Word that was before all creation, and according to the testimony of the Gospel of John, the same

Word in which all things were created and are sustained. Sittler continues in such a way that sets up his final link between the uncreated Word, the incarnation, and how the

Incarnate Word could save all things. “When man was created he was created through the Son and in the Son and is to reach his destiny in the Son.”227 But if “man” was

223 Sittler, “Called,” 178. 224 Sittler, Essays, 32, citing Galloway, Cosmic Christ, 54. 225 Sittler, Essays, 58. 226 Sittler, Essays, 58. 227 Sittler, Essays, 58.

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created to reach its destiny in the Son, how can all of creation be saved through this man,

Jesus Christ? We will explore how Sittler utilizes his anthropology from Genesis to do

so below.

In Essays, Sittler utilizes the thought, and more specifically the Christology, of St.

Athanasius as faithful reflection and articulation of a cosmic Christology. Sittler finds St.

Athanasius’s articulation of a cosmic Christology particularly helpful because, according

to Sittler, Athanasius utilizes a cosmic vision as response to a kind of “philosophical

atomism.”228 Athanasius’ Christology is particularly helpful for Sittler because he sees a

similar kind of “philosophical atomism” in contemporary Christianity in which Christians

see the world as “other” to them. Summarizing Athanasius, Sittler argues that “[g]race,

for Athanasius, was both a comprehensive term for the created goodness of all reality,

and a term wherewith to specify the incarnate presence and historical focus of the Light

which is God.”229

But how does Sittler’s interpretation function within his overall argument? How

does Sittler’s understanding of Colossians, which is he believes to stand in continuity

with Church Fathers like as Athanasius, function for Sittler in his broader argument

regarding theology, the natural world, and contemporary Western Christianity?

Primarily, Sittler’s understanding of Colossians 1:15-20 demonstrates the fact that the

natural world cannot be other to humanity, for it holds together in the same person of

Jesus Christ that Christians worship and seek to imitate. Sittler argues that “grace, for

228 Sittler, Essays, 64. Sittler does not define what he means by “philosophical atomism.” It would seem to mean the emphasis that a thing is but a sum of it’s parts, and that those parts are what make up the thing. Sittler most readily identifies this with contemporary western societies over-emphasized division of nature and humanity, and how their subsequent divisions only make up one or the other of the separate wholes. 229 Sittler, Essays, 64, citing Emile Mersch, The Whole Christ (London: Denis Dobson, 1938), 264, which is citing Oratio contra gentes, 42, P. G., Vol. 25, 84.

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Athanasius, was both a comprehensive term for the created goodness of all reality, and a

term wherewith to specify the incarnation presence and historical focus of that Light

which is God.”230 If Christ sustains all things, and holds all things together, the same

salvation brought to us, humanity, by Christ is also for all of creation. For the same grace

that saved us is the same grace that enlivens the natural world.

For Sittler, his understanding of God and his relation to the natural order through

Christ means that the facts of the natural world that are discovered and articulated by the

natural sciences cannot be isolated clusters of information unrelated to other disciplines

like philosophy and theology. Sittler argues that if Christ is the creator and indweller of

all things, all things are not “a tumbled multitude of facts in an unrelated , for in him

all things hold together.”231 Christ, as the Word of God, holds all things together in

himself and therefore necessarily redeems all things by the Incarnation of the same

eternal Word. In Him reality finds its center; in Him the web of reality is held together as

the sustainer of all things. The Colossian hymn is central for Sittler precisely because it

exposes the dramatic distinction between nature and grace that fostered an other-worldly

eschatology and enabled Christians, willingly or otherwise, to participate in

environmental degradation. Care for the earth is a theological responsibility if

understood through the lens of the cosmic Christological hymn articulated in Colossians.

While Sittler utilizes Athanasius in Essays to address a similar “philosophical atomism” that he sees in contemporary Christianity, Sittler finds Irenaeus helpful in addressing the dualism Sittler also sees as prevalent in contemporary Western

Christianity. But one further element remains missing, for in his New Delhi addresses,

230 Sittler, Essays,” 64. 231 Sittler, “Called,” 178.

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Sittler argued that “however, in Colossians and Irenaeus we have a model for a

Christology of nature commensurate with the cosmos we now inhabit. . . .232 Through

Irenaeus, Sittler argues that Christ is the perfect human, the recapitulation of Adam, and

perfectly reflects the “triply-constituted” relational identity of the human person “to God,

man, and nature” that Sittler identifies in Genesis.233

Only through the imitation of Christ are proper relationships with God, fellow humanity, and creation possible

Christ as the means who creates, is in, and sustains all things embodies the relations constitutive of the human person perfectly

In the most developed articulation of his Christology, Sittler relies again on the

trajectory of the Scriptures and their subsequent articulation by the fathers to show how

Christ brings about the redemption of “all things.” Sittler argues, most extensively and

clearly in Essays, that from the beginning the human person was created to know himself

or herself fullest in Christ. In order to explain how the human person knows himself or

herself fullest in Christ, Sittler relies heavily on the thought of Irenaeus. Sittler is explicit

about why he thinks Irenaeus is relevant for this particular time in Christian history:

because of his systematic “exposition of God’s grace and man’s experience of the world-

as-nature;” because Irenaeus formed his Christology in response to a dualism similar in

many ways to the dualism of Sittler’s time, and “because ever-renewed forms of that

232 Peter W. Bakken, Joan Gibb Engel, and J. Ronald Engel, Ecology, Justice, and Christian Faith: A Critical Guide to the Literature (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 85. 233 Joseph Sittler, “The Care for the Earth,” audio lecture, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, July 17-20, 1961. Accessed via the Joseph Sittler Archives at https://www.josephsittler.org/audio/. See also, Sittler, “Evangelism”, 203-205.

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heresy have been a steady accompaniment to the course of catholic Christology,

Irenaeus’s ‘model’ has a startling potential for our time.”234

What then does it mean, according to Sittler’s understanding of Irenaeus, for the

human person to be fulfilled in Christ? For Sittler, it has to do with the proximity of our

lives to the person of Jesus Christ.

Adam, Irenaeus says, was created by God in God’s Imago and Simultudo, and was put into God’s creation by the same God who sent Christ into the world. Like Paul, Irenaeus plays out the strong contrast between Adam and Christ. But whereas in the Western theology prevailing after Irenaeus the fall of Adam was stressed almost exclusively, Irenaeus fastens attention upon what Adam was for, which is to live, body and soul, in accordance with God’s will. By virtue of this accent upon the possible divine intention for man, what is stressed between Adam and Christ is not their separation but their connection.235

Christ personifies the perfect human. Put differently, Sittler argues that “Christ was the

pattern upon which God created man. Christ is the man about to be—the Homo futurus.

While all things were being formed Christ was in the mind of God….”236 According to

Sittler’s understanding of Irenaeus, Christ is not summoned in response to the sin of

humanity, but rather was always destined for incarnation.237 How can this be so?

Sittler argues that for Irenaeus, only the uncreated can be perfect for it had no

beginning or end, unlike temporal things. All created things are therefore imperfect by

necessity of their being created and temporal. Thus Adam, even before sin, was

imperfect. Because Adam was created and therefore imperfect and temporal, so Irenaeus

describes him like a child. Irenaeus describes Adam’s imperfection before sin like the

immaturity of a child: his imperfections were not due to his sinful nature but due to his

234 Sittler, Essays, 56. 235 Sittler, Essays, 58. 236 Sittler, Essays, 58-9. 237 The fact that humanity always needed Christ, regardless of sin or not, could be one plausible explanation as to why Sittler did not address the topic or use the word often.

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temporality. What this means for Irenaeus is that Christ, as the God-man, was always

destined to come in order to bring about the maturation of creation. So, had Adam never

chosen sin, Christ still would have come in order to bring about the telos, or maturation

of creation. Christ does so because in his person was the creator and sustainer of the

universe. Sittler summarizes this part of Irenaeus’ thought as follows:

The healthy, newborn child, says Irenaeus, while unable to talk, possesses every likelihood of becoming able to do so. An injury, to be sure, may prevent the development. And this is the situation of Adam in the world. He is a child, created in the image of God. That he lacks something is not due to sin. No injury has yet happened to the child. Uninjured, he is yet a child, he does not realize what he is yet to be. All the while, however, there is already in creation one who is the full image of God, the Son.238

Using the newborn metaphor, the salvation brought about by Christ is a modeling of the

actualization of the human person in all his or her relations. Christ then, for Irenaeus, is

the only true human; all others are in some way deficient, or less human. Sittler describes

our telos in Christ this way:

When man was created he was created through the Son and in the Son and is to reach his destiny in the Son. By this insistence, which characterized early Christian thought, creation and redemption, nature and grace, are formally kept together in a way which when broken, leads to literally endless theological confusion. Irenaeus, on the contrary, holds that everything is created in the Son, and thus secures a theological way to hold nature and grace together.239

Sittler argues that “For man, to be unsaved means to remain undeveloped; salvation is

maturation and fulfillment.”240 Christ embodies what humanity was created to be. As the

238 Sittler, Essays, 59. It should be noted, that Sittler does not ever cite Irenaeus directly, but relies on secondary sources for his interpretation of Irenaeus. Sittler’s phrasing here is very similar to that used by Gustaf Wingren in Man and the Incarnation, a text Sittler claims was very influential on him with regards to the thought of Irenaeus. See Gustaf Wingren, Man and the Incarnation: A Study in the Biblical Theology of Irenaeus, trans. Ross Mackenzie (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Pub., 2004), 20. This is also not surprising considering Sittler’s claim regarding Wingren’s influence on him, see Sittler, “Recordings,” 152. Here Sittler mentions that Wingren introduces Sittler to Irenaeus in 1962. It would seem, then that Sittler was introduced to Irenaeus just before his infamous New Delhi speech, in which Irenaeus has a crucial role. 239 Sittler, Essays, 57-8. 240 Sittler, Essays, 58.

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recapitulation of Adam, Christ embodies the ontological maturation of the human

described in Genesis. When it comes to addressing the ontological error Sittler sees in contemporary society, his Christology focuses on what a human is.

Just as it is the characteristic of God to create, it is the characteristic of man that he is created. He is made, he not simply is. His ontology is a resultant of a decisive action: and his ‘isness’ is not a static ontological being but a becoming.241

One’s life is most human when it is oriented towards the Lord and when one strives to

continually realize one’s complete dependency on Him. When human persons are

oriented towards the imitation of Christ, they move towards the fullness of their own

humanity, both individually and corporately. Movement towards Christ is movement

towards the realization of our humanity because Christ is the maturation of the human

person. And for Sittler, the fullness of our humanity means right relationship with the

relationships constitutive of the human person: God, humanity, and the natural world.

Sittler therefore implies that Christ lived with full awareness of his dependency on God,

lived in right relationship with his fellow humanity, and right relationship with the natural

world.242

Sittler’s ecological Christology is aimed at addressing the two errors regarding

nature and grace and an exaggerated subject-object distinction—an understanding that the

natural world is other to the human person and both, humanity and the natural world, are

separate autonomous forces. By emphasizing the cosmic vision of the incarnation and

how through the imitation of the incarnate Lord we are drawn closer to Christ who is the

241 Sittler, Essays, 58. 242 I will examine the latter of Sittler’s Christological implications in my conclusion. There, I will argue that Sittler does not adequately demonstrate how it is, particularly in the Gospels, how Christ lived in right relationship with the natural world. Sittler’s argument here relies almost exclusively on the Christology of St. Paul in Col. 1:15-20 and Irenaeus’ articulation of recapitulation rather than from Gospels, or the actual recorded life of Christ.

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creator and sustainer of all created reality. Through the imitation of Christ, the creator

and sustainer of all created reality, Sittler sought to recover a biblical conceptual

framework that he applied as a salve to the malady facing contemporary western society

because to be drawn towards Christ is therefore to be drawn into right relation with the

natural world when understood in its biblical vision. But to what end? Is Sittler simply after a kind of intellectual conversion? The answer must be an emphatic “No!” For

Sittler, attempting to only address and change the spirit of our mind is to fall back again into a kind of contemporary Gnosticism. As I will show, right doctrine, Sittler argues, must find its logical end in obedience.

For Sittler, the imitation of Christ properly orients oneself towards right relationship with God, fellow humanity, and creation

Right relationship with God, humanity, and the natural world leads to flourishing

for all of God’s creation. Christ is the maturation of the human person and therefore

embodies right relationship with all such relationships. Therefore, according to Sittler,

only by means imitating Christ, as the recapitulation of Adam and the maturation of

humanity, are proper relationships with God, fellow humanity, and creation restored.

This claim, however, is implicit with Sittler, and buried under his own understanding of

the ethical life: namely, that it begins with proper understanding.

Sittler draws out his understanding of the imitation of Jesus most clearly in one

of his earliest published texts, The Structure of Christian Ethics, where he argues that

“the Christian life is [in the testimony of the New Testament] understood as a re-

enactment from below on the part of men of the shape of the revelatory drama of God’s

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holy will in Jesus Christ.”243 Sittler goes on to quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics where

Bonhoeffer argues “formation comes only by being drawn into the form of Jesus Christ.

It comes only as formation in His likeness, as conformation with the unique form of him who was made man, was crucified, and rose again.”244 According to Sittler, if Christ, as

the recapitulation of Adam, is the fullness of humanity—and embodies right relationship,

with among other things, the natural world—then the imitation of Christ should lead to a flourishing of all creation because it embodies the one who created, is in, and sustains the universe, and embodied perfectly the triad of relations which constitute the human person.245

Conclusion

The person of Jesus Christ is central for Sittler. It is Christ who heals the false

spirit of our minds which have distanced us from the natural world and distanced us from

God. The ecological Christology as espoused by Sittler is one that sees the incarnation of

God in Christ as penetrating the very reaches of human society and knowledge. There is

no escape from His salvific work. He sustains and brings all things into Himself and

thereby bridges the false divide between nature and grace that led to participation in

“other-worldly” eschatology and degradation of the natural world. For, according to

Sittler, if all things were created in Christ who is in and sustains all things, while

additionally exemplifies the complete maturation and perfection of humanity, then the

243 Joseph Sittler, The Structure of Christian Ethics, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958), 37. 244 Sittler, Ethics, 39, citing Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Macmillan Company, 1955), 18. 245 The questions as to what exact actions, or what it might mean to be in right relationship with the natural world in a practical sense is left unanswered by Sittler. It would seem, that in many ways, he wants to give form to the answer rather than its particulars. This seems prudential on his part.

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imitation—or “reenactment,” as Sittler will describe it—of Christ should bring about living in right relationship with God, fellow humanity, and the natural world.

We have not affirmed as inherent in Christ—God’s proper man for man’s proper selfhood and society—the world political, the world economical, the world aesthetic, and all other commanding orderings of actuality which flow from the ancient summons to tend this garden of the Lord.”246

Sittler seeks to apply a Christology that breaks down the contemporary conceptual

understanding nature and grace.

Nature and grace are categories necessary in order to do justice to Christ, the Savior of the world. But if they are absolute and contradictory categories they distort and reduce the doctrine of creation. . . . The doctrinal cleavage, particularly fateful in western Christendom, has been an element in the inability of the church to relate the powers of grace to the vitalities and processes of nature.247

Christ does so by modeling complete and proper dependency on God and humanity, and

the natural world. Christ exemplifies a life of dependency, a life in proper relation to

God, to humanity, and to the natural world. The Scriptures proclaim our dependency as

intrinsic to what it means to be a creature. Utilizing dependency as a starting point breaks down the contemporary illusion of autonomy of the natural world and of the self.

Acknowledgement of the reliance on God, other people, and the natural world means an ethical responsibility to care for all. Christ embodies these relations perfectly. He stands as the exemplar of what it means to be human. And if true, the imitation of Christ should draw us closer to right relationship with God, fellow humanity, and the natural world: just as Christ exemplified.

246 Sittler, “Called,” 184. 247 Sittler, “Called,” 181.

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CONCLUSION:

THE FORM OF THE ANSWER

This is the bare form of the answer, but it is not its substance. . . . It cannot ultimately be expressed in objective propositions, but can only be shared in the active response of faith.

(Allan D. Galloway, The Cosmic Christ)

We have been indoctrinated by the virtues of the frontier And they were admirable . . . But the frontier is gone.

(Joseph Sittler, “The Care for the Earth”)

As the evidence of ecological crisis and concern for the natural world continues to amass, more Christians, those belonging to the contemporary Western church, are looking for ways in which their faith may provide constructive answers and ways forward. Joseph Sittler stands as a relevant and insightful resource for Christians looking for answers.

Sittler’s earlier works anticipate, in some ways anticipate Lynn White Jr.’s infamous 1967 essay, while also offering a more constructive solution.

Since the influential critique by Lynn White Jr., many Christians engaged in the enterprise of Christian environmental ethics argue—rightfully so—in response to White.

Sittler, as an earlier voice in the Western contemporary church, provides insights that at once foreshadows and affirms that of White, but also goes beyond White by offering a constructive proposal, or rather re-proposing, of a biblically rooted, interconnected, and

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unified vision of all of Creation which is together into the person of Jesus Christ.

Whereas White argues that Western “Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the

world has ever seen," Sittler argues that the form of Christianity articulated by White

represents an unfaithful and unbiblical manifestation or articulation of the faith rather

than something essential to it. 248 Both agree that the articulation offered by White

existed as an articulation and manifestation of Christianity and continues to exist well

into their day.249 Additionally, both find the manifestation of that understanding of

Christianity practically damaging to the natural world. Furthermore, Sittler’s corpus— both before and after White’s 1967 argument—offer a more constructive account of what faithful and biblical Christianity in which the scope of God’s redemptive work in Christ is as large as the scope of creation itself.

Sittler argues—based in the testimony of Scripture and in the Church Fathers—is if all things hold together in Christ, then the redemption brought by Christ also reaches all things.

Sittler believed that his primary task, as a theologian and pastor, was to address the problematic “spirit of the mind” prevalent during his lifetime. His challenge to the contemporary church was simple: it must recover the faithful scope of the biblical vision of God’s saving work through Christ. Sittler, with the help of Alan Galloway, saw the trajectory clearly in the Scriptures: beginning with creation and Adam and Eve, articulated through the Old Testament, and given its logical cosmic end in New

Testament, particularly in the to the Colossians. Almost as if to justify and

248 White, “Roots,” 1205, emphasis mine. 249 Alan Galloway more directly anticipates White’s argument insofar as Galloway attributes the separation of nature and grace in medieval Catholic thought as the seed that bears fruit during the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment. So, whereas Sittler only says Enlightenment, Galloway gives a much more precis theological manifestation, particularly in St. Thomas.

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confirm Sittler’s account of the scope of the redemptive implications of the incarnation,

the Church Fathers also attributed the saving works of Christ to all things as the Word

Incarnate. For Sittler, however, this was not merely a Christology that was cosmic in scope, but rather a Christological vision that drew us into creation by emphasizing our

existence within the web of creation and reality itself. Though the term was never used

by Sittler himself, what he argued was a thoroughly “ecological Christology.” Sittler’s

ecological Christology emphasized relation to reality and the natural world as the reason

for its cosmic implications. Sittler is never as potent in this line of thinking as he is in the

end of Essays:

It follows from the logic of life in the only way the term has meaning for a person, that the entire creation—within which and as a part of which I am, have an identity, and without which I cannot conceive of being an identity at all, but only an emptily potential entity—must be sufficient object of the divine redemption. . . . Because men exist and are as relational entities, only a redemption among can be a real redemption. Only, that is to say, when the meaning and act of redemption is within the web of creation can a salvable identity be ‘saved’ in any sense that makes sense. . . . What and who might be a person apart from this web? A no- thing. The redemption of the world must be permitted to mean what it says, or it will cease to mean anything meaningful. In a bluntly human sense my redemption must include the possibility of redemption of everything. For I am no-thing apart from everything.250

For Sittler the faithful, biblical, and ancient way of understanding the redemptive work of

God through Christ is absolutely necessary in order to promote the right relationship with

the natural world and to begin to re-articulate a theology that speaks to the contemporary

human with their new knowledge, longings, and experiences.

250 Sittler, Essays, 110-1.

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The imitation of Christ should lead to a restoration of right relationship with the triad of relations constitutive of the human person: God, fellow humanity, and the natural world.

If Christ holds and sustains all things together, then the imitation of the person of Jesus, the incarnate Word, embodies what it means to be human perfectly, which brings about the change in the spirit of our mind that is needed in our time. Sittler’s ecological

Christology was an attempt to bring theology to answer the questions which the church had seemingly avoided; in short, to make theology relevant to the natural world. He understood his work as a logical expansion of the thought which was so influential on

him: a reiteration and expansion of the themes of Scripture, the fathers, and of his own

Lutheran tradition. Sittler believed that Luther’s profession was “a tactically necessary focus for the doctrine in that time and situation. For sola gratia spoke both of the source of grace and of the place of its encounter.”251 In this way, Sittler is reiterating

and offering up a contemporary Lutheran cry: sola gratia.

The reasoning for why Sittler may have focused so intently throughout his lifetime on Christology may be found in one of his earlier texts mentioned above, The

Structure of Christian Ethics, published in 1958. Originally given as the Rockwell

Lectures at the Rice Institute, Sittler abandons the notion of the Christian ethical life as being shaped by principles. He criticizes the ethics of and argues that the structure for Christian ethics is rather a person: the person of Jesus Christ. It cannot be reduced to a principle from his teachings, or a diluted springing from the

Sermon on the Mount, but rather the structure of Christian ethics is the person of Jesus.

Put differently, Jesus does not do just acts, rather Jesus is justice. Justice is not

251 Sittler, Essays, 77.

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something outside of him that He must tap into, so to speak. As such, the ethical life

involves participation and engagement with this person. It involves modeling and

imitating this person. In Essays, Sittler puts it as follows:

Faith is participation, and participation is reenactment, and the stages of reenactment are the same as the stages of the Act. ‘To know him’ is not a matter of cognition at a distance or an obedience by affirmation. Knowledge is a gift given to giving one’s self over to that renewal of the self which is nothing less than a ‘resurrection from the dead.’ Suffering and death, the reality of Christ’s life, are actual reenactments within the life of faith.252

Following Jesus is not about understanding the right answers to the moral quagmires of one’s day, though “action may sensitize cognition.” In the journey of a life oriented towards God “[w]e do not do what we should only after we are clear about all the facts; we also learn about the facts when we go the way we must.”253 Being a of Christ

is not simply a matter of following a set of principles that could somehow be boiled down

from the life and teachings of Christ. Participation means the Christian life towards the

embodiment of the Word of God is always in via. Recovery of the Christian message and the biblical vision and scope of God’s redemptive grace, according to Sittler, means that discipleship for a Christian should lead to living in right relation with God, humanity, and the natural order. Sittler’s body of work can be read as trying to call the church back

towards faithfulness to the truths of Scripture in order that we may with all of creation

move towards Christ within our current milieu. The closing section of the final chapter in

Sittler’s Essays is entitled “Ethicality and Verification.”

By ethicality is meant the necessity for the organization of life toward continuation, care, and enhancement if life is to be at all. . . . When grace is postulated as the reality of God, as the reality of the life of the Father in the Son,

252 Sittler, Essays, 35. 253 Sittler, Essays, 117.

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witnessed to by the ‘internal testimony of the ,’ then literally all that is must be invested with an interpretation congruent with that postulation. By ethicality, then, is meant not only a way of acting in accord with and as an actualization of that faith, but a way of understanding that begets the possibility to access all things from that center.254

Action, then is heart of Sittler’s writings. His writings focus on problematic “spirit of the

mind,” but this is not to say that he is not concerned about actions, “This is to say that the

telos of doctrine is action, the fulfillment of right teaching is not right teaching but

decision and deed.”255

Sittler’s Christology is not without its weakness; namely his style, lack of engagement with the Gospels and the Church Fathers.

I firmly believe that Joseph Sittler’s ecological Christology is a promising resource for Christians looking to engage theologically in the ecological crisis. It is not to suggest; however, I am not without some critiques of his work. I have three major criticisms or concerns of Sittler’s work that would need to be addressed or avoided if

Sittler was to be a resource for contemporary Christian theology.

Sittler’s style makes a concise articulation of his position extremely difficult.

As I mentioned in my introduction, one of the biggest difficulties with articulating

Sittler’s position is his rhetorical and unsystematic style of writing. His style is excellent

for a preacher, but difficult and at times abstract in an academic setting. For instance,

Sittler provides few concrete examples of the problem he is attempting to address. While

it can be said that he is addressing an ideology, he provides very few examples of the way

his thinking manifests itself in the actions of the church or society at large. To better

254 Sittler, Essays, 120. 255 Sittler, “Called,” 185.

111 understand what he means, then, one must piece together various arguments which are not always presented clearly or constantly.

Sittler’s Christology fails to engage the person of Jesus presented in the Gospels.

With regards to Sittler’s use of Scripture, I am largely persuaded by his argument and meta-narrative of the biblical text. However, Sittler seems to ignore the ways the text does not fit his narrative. One example might be the story in the in which Christ curses the fig tree (Mark 11:12-14). What are we to make of texts in which the person of Jesus that Sittler is asking us to imitate seems incompatible with his understanding of the triad relations constitutive of the human person? His Christological vision may suffer from being too based in a Christology instead of the person he asks us to be like as presented in the Gospels. Even when not articulating his Christology, Sittler rarely engages the Gospel texts and instead routinely engages a few , namely

Colossians and Romans, and the Psalms. To fail to engage the person and teachings of

Jesus as presented in the Gospels in any Christology seems problematic.

Sittler fails to engage the primary sources of the Church Fathers on which he depends.

Finally, Sittler’s lack of primary sources and direct engagement with Athanasius and Irenaeus—the Church Fathers on which much of his Christology hinges—leaves open the major possibility that Sittler is misrepresenting their thoughts and beliefs. Sittler relies exclusively on secondary sources to argue what both Athanasius and Irenaeus believed. Sittler’s over-reliance, or ever dependency, on secondary sources for the

Church Fathers could be problematic because Sittler does not seem as attentive to the historical and theological context of the authors and relies on their interpreters for those significant pieces. Sittler relies so heavily on the thought of the Church Fathers as a kind

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of justification for his Christological reading of Scripture that a misinterpretation of their

thought would have serious impact on Sittler’s argument. As someone wholly

incompetent to judge Sittler’s use of the Fathers, I find this to be potentially problematic.

Conclusion

Since Sittler’s death in 1987, many more theologians have become increasingly

concerned with the environment and have fought to locate and articulate the resources

within the Christian tradition which demonstrate the centrality of our care for the natural world to the Christian faith.256 However, contemporary theologians are still attempting to

wrestle with what an account of Christianity that embraces, to paraphrase Sittler, a

doctrine of redemption as expansive in scope as the doctrine of creation.257 Sittler, therefore stands as a resource—however overlooked his work often is—for those looking to engage theologically in the ecological crisis. His diagnoses of the conceptual flaws in some of the modern ways of understanding the world stand as a helpful guide for further reflection. Additionally, his corpus provides an articulation of an ecological Christology

as the robust heart and center from which further theological reflection can spring.

256 Ellen Davis, Francis, Willis Jenkins, Elizabeth Johnson, Jurgen Moltmann, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Norman Wirzba just to name a few. 257 Sittler, “Called,” 178.

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