Eco-Congregation Ireland Hosts Ireland S First Inter-Church Conference on the Environment

God’s Creation - Our Responsibility?

‘For You love all things that exist… Your immortal Spirit is in all things’

A selection of talks from

Eco-Congregation Ireland’s inaugural conference

Dromantine Conference Centre, Newry, Co Down

September 14 & 15 2012

To find out more about the conference and to see a selection of photos see http://ecocongregationireland.com/archives/3663.

1 Contents

Is the Bible Green? Reading Scripture Ecologically page 3 ~ Prof David G. Horrell

A Theology of Creation p 17 ~ Prof Stephen Williams

Oneness and Cultivating Unity p 29 ~ Dr Anne Primavesi

Money, Consumerism and the Spirituality of Our Times p 35 ~ Dr Alastair McIntosh

A New Humanity: The Quest for Well-being in the 21st century p 42 ~ Rev Peter Owen-Jones

2 Is the Bible Green? Reading Scripture Ecologically

~ Prof David Horrell

Department of Theology & Religion, University of Exeter

Many Christians have become convinced, in view of the pressures and challenges that now face us, that they must become ‘green’, that the Christian faith can and must be practised in a way that expresses an ecological commitment to the sustaining and flourishing of all the diversity of creation. Others remain sceptical, or pursue different priorities. The question I want to address here is about the influence of the Bible on shaping and informing such views: To what extent does the Bible support and inform a kind of ecologically responsible Christian faith and practice? Of course, different Christian denominations and traditions understand the Bible, its status and authority, in different ways, so its influence on Christians’ ecological convictions varies. But there would be common ground in regarding the Bible as a foundational and canonical document, which is important as a source to shape Christian faith and conduct.

The broader context for these questions is the prominence of environmental issues in public and political debate. From being a somewhat fringe concern a few decades ago, environmental issues have in recent years become established as perhaps the most urgent subject of global concern. Although there are sceptics, it is increasingly difficult to deny the issues of climate change, species extinction, and so on, and difficult to doubt that human action is a primary cause of such problems. There is a range of reasons to explain the causes of environmental degradation (technology, increasing consumption, a large human population etc), but the influence of religion is also important. Religions of whatever kind shape our “worldview” – our attitudes and beliefs concerning ourselves, our role and purpose, in relation to all that is around us.

Unsurprisingly, in the context of growing awareness of such problems, there have been many efforts to present the Bible’s teaching as supportive of ecological commitment, to find a green message in the Bible. The recently published Green Bible (Har-

3 perCollins, 2008) is an example of such efforts. This new edition of the NRSV trans- lation, in which texts related to the earth are printed in green, reflects a conviction that the Bible offers a positive message about caring for the earth.

According to the Preface:

Our role in creation’s care may be a new question unique to our place in history, but the Bible turns out to be amazingly relevant. In fact, it is almost as if it were waiting for this moment to speak to us. With over a thousand references to the earth and caring for creation in the Bible, the message is clear: all in God’s creation – nature, animals, humanity – are inextricably linked to one another. As God cares for all of creation, so we cannot love one dimension without caring for the others. We are called to care for all God has made (p. I- 15)

In a nutshell, I want to argue two things, both of which are hinted at in my title. First, that the Bible is not a green book, or at least, not straightforwardly or unambiguously ‘green’. What I mean by this will hopefully become clear. As on other issues – such as women’s equality, slavery, war and violence – the Bible is ambivalent and diverse, leaving a complex legacy. What this also means is that interpretation of the Bible is crucial. Secondly, therefore, I want to argue for the importance of developing ecological readings of the Bible. Again, what I mean by this will hopefully become clear.

1. Lynn White’s critique of Christianity

A good way to begin to think about these issues is to return to one of the most famous and most cited contributions to the whole ecotheological debate: ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, published in the journal Science in 1967 by the medieval historian Lynn White Jr. White provocatively argued that the Christian worldview, rooted in the creation stories and the notion of humanity made in God’s image, represented the most anthropocentric (human-centred) religion the world has ever seen. The Christian worldview introduced a dualism between humanity and nature, and established the notion that it was God’s will that humanity exploit nature to serve human interests. Thus Christianity, according to White, bears ‘a huge burden of guilt’ for introducing this Western worldview that has permitted and promoted the active

4 and aggressive conquest of nature to serve human ends. It is worth noting, however, that White does not want to reject religion. He writes:

Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny — that is, by religion… 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 (White 1967: 1205-206).

Indeed, he ends his article by proposing St Francis of Assisi as a patron saint for eco- logists.

There has been much debate about White’s argument, which many would reject. But it is a useful starting point because of the way it provocatively suggests that the Chris- tian tradition – and the Bible in particular – may not have left a positive legacy so far as human attitudes to the environment are concerned. Without citing biblical texts as such, White points us to the creation stories as potentially problematic.

2. Is Genesis 1 to blame? ‘Dominion’ over the earth.

White’s criticism of Christianity implicitly highlights Genesis 1.26-28 as a particular problem. This text has been enormously influential in shaping Christian (and Jewish) views of the ‘creation’ and of humanity’s role and status within it. The idea of being ‘made in the image of God’, something uniquely said of humans here (Gen 1.27), has profoundly shaped Christian views of the status of human beings. This text in Genesis appears to give humanity a God-given right to rule and use the earth for our benefit. Around the time of the rise of modern science (15th-16th centuries onwards), for important figures such as Francis Bacon, this text helped to inspire a sense of the ‘voca- tion’ to comprehend and control nature. It was not understood then to teach the idea of environmental stewardship. This, of course, is unsurprising, since such issues were not on the agenda for ethical discussion. But that goes to show how much depictions of what the Bible says and teaches are products in part of the context in which the

5 Bible is being read. Even some recent ecologically committed scholars, such as Nor- man Habel, founder of the Earth Bible Project, see this text as problematic:

The verb kabash (‘to subdue’) not only confirms the status of humans as having power over Earth; it also points to harsh control. Subduing the land meant crushing opposing forces. There is nothing gentle about kabash… The orienta- tion of the human story (Gen. 1.26-28) is overtly hierarchical: humans are au- thorized to rule other creatures and to subdue Earth (Habel 2000: 46-47)

3. Re-reading Genesis as ‘stewardship’

More recently, many Christian environmentalists have sought to reinterpret this potentially problematic legacy by describing human responsibility as stewardship: this is a central concept in much environmental ethics and theology, in evangelical circles and also in other denominations and traditions. Sometimes people write as if the Bible, and Genesis 1-2 in particular, directly instructs us to be stewards of the earth. Other readings are seen as misunderstandings, which we can now correct. One of the ‘Trail Guide’ Bible studies in The Green Bible, for example, deals with the theme of stewardship, stating that we ‘are meant to live… as stewards of creation’. The questions for reflection indicate that the image of dominion has been liable to be ‘misun- derstood’. Indeed, ‘[t]his stewardship role’, we are told, ‘is important enough that it is mentioned several times in the creation narrative’ (p. 1226). Genesis 1-2 are the main basis for the view of humans as called by God to exercise environmental stewardship, to care for creation.

However, such a position is not without difficulties: First, stewardship terminology does not actually appear in Genesis 1–2, and is actually used rather little in the Bible, and never to define, explicitly, what the human relationship to creation ought to be. Genesis 2.15 is also often cited, where the first human is placed in the garden of Eden ‘to work and keep it’. While this might perhaps undergird a notion of environmental stewardship it should be clear that this is not exactly what is in view here: this is about

6 working as an agriculturalist, and in any case, the first humans are soon expelled from that garden!

Some people, notably Clare Palmer, have also argued that stewardship is a problematic basis for environmental ethics. Palmer suggests that it implies humanity’s separation from the rest of the world, and conveys the idea ‘that the natural world is a human resource, that humans are really in control of nature, that nature is dependent on humanity for its management’ (Palmer 1992: 77-78). As such, it may be seen as a rather patronising ethic, which inflates the importance and centrality of humans and does not do justice to the ecological truths that ecosystems flourish perfectly well without human management and that humans are also utterly dependent on the ecosystems that support our life. The Earth Bible Team (based in Australia, under Habel’s leadership), therefore, in outlining ecojustice principles with which to approach the biblical material, prefer to speak of ‘mutual custodianship’ – stressing that just as humans have a responsibility to care for the earth, so the earth (as a whole living system) exercises a function of care and support for us.

4. More difficulties in the Bible: ‘eschatological’ visions of an imminent End

Difficult issues are also raised by biblical visions of the future (‘eschatology’ refers to reflection on the end times), with their images of cosmic destruction, the rescue of believers, and the coming of a new heavens and a new earth. In Mark 13, for example, we read Jesus declaring that ‘there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs… Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away’ (vv. 8, 31). In 2 Peter 3, where the writer is assuring his readers that the ‘day of the Lord’ will indeed come, we are told that ‘the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed…’ (v. 10). Furthermore, the author urges his readers to live in such a way that they will ‘hasten’ the end, since they look forward to the time when a ‘new heavens and a new earth’ will appear (vv. 12-13). From the earliest times Christians have looked for the return of the Lord and for the day when salvation would be attained. So why care for the earth if it is soon to be destroyed, and if God’s

7 plan is to rescue a small number of faithful humans and grant them eternal life in heaven? Some Christians anticipate a ‘rapture’ of Christians from the earth, prior to a time of great tribulation, or expect an imminent return of Christ. Such beliefs can suggest that preserving and caring for the earth is not a priority for Christians, and have probably influenced anti-environmental policies and decisions (especially in the USA). Fundamentalist beliefs can, and not infrequently do, go hand in hand with political and ethical convictions that favour allowing industry free reign to flourish and expand, minimal governmental restriction, and a focus on ‘family values’ such as opposition to abortion and gay marriage. Rather than environmental action, evangel- ism to save individuals is seen as a higher priority. The “Resisting the Green Dragon” project, for example, sees environmentalism as a great (satanic) threat to true Christi- an faith, warning believers against it.

It is not surprising, then, that a conservation biologist, David Orr, has suggested that ‘belief in the imminence of the end times tends to make evangelicals careless stewards of our forests, soils, wildlife, air, water, seas and climate’ (Orr 2005: 291).

5. Reclaiming the vision: transformation not destruction

Once again, however, different perspectives have been proposed. Just as Genesis 1–2 has been reread as a text teaching environmental stewardship, so Christian environmentalists have sought to reclaim these eschatological texts and traditions by arguing that they do not envisage the destruction of the earth but rather its transformation. The vision is not about binning the old earth and producing a new one, like a magician bringing a fresh white rabbit out of a top hat. Rather, it is argued, God is in the process of making all things new (Rev 21.5), and this implies that humans should indeed care for creation, joining in with the purpose and activity of God to transform the earth to a place where righteousness, justice and peace are at home. Thomas Finger, for example, an evangelical writer, argues that ‘[i]f the present creation will not be destroyed but renewed, it would seem important to care for it today’ (Finger 1998: 1).

8 Yet again, there remain questions about whether all the texts can be reinterpreted in this way, and whether this entirely solves the difficulties. Is salvation “beyond” this world compatible with the salvation “of” this world? Does an ecological vision auto- matically imply the salvation of everything, including every person? What of the early Christians’ apparent belief that the end would be very soon? And if God will redeem the earth and transform it to a renewed creation, do we need to worry about the impact of our own actions?

6. Highlighting other biblical texts: new resources for environmental ethics?

Another important strategy in the light of our environmental problems and concerns is to focus on different biblical texts – texts which seem to offer more potential for an environmentally positive vision. As we shall see below, this kind of strategy or approach to the Bible – bringing to the centre texts that seem to address a current need – characterises the way Christian theology and ethics have often tended to work. Unsur- prisingly, in a context when environmental issues are a prominent challenge, attention is drawn to texts that might help to resource a theology which challenges the traditional preoccupation with the salvation of human beings, and stresses the ways in which the whole cosmos is bound up along with humanity in God’s saving purposes. There is a wide range of biblical texts (as well as aspects of the somewhat difficult texts mentioned above) to which ecotheological writers have drawn attention (see Horrell 2010 for a more extended treatment of these).

For example, Genesis 1–2, as well as raising certain difficulties, also make ecologically important points: the account in Genesis 1 repeatedly declares creation ‘good’, and depicts humans and animals as originally herbivores – the violence of predation is absent from creation at the start (Gen 1.29-30). Genesis 2 depicts humanity as made from the dust, a living creature like all the other animals. Genesis 9.1-17, the (so-c- alled) covenant with Noah, is actually and explicitly a covenant made with every living creature, and with the earth itself (see vv. 10-17). According to this text, the whole earth, and not just an elect segment of humanity, is bound in covenant relationship with God. Some of the Psalms offer grand and poetic depictions of the whole created order as a manifestation of God’s glory (e.g., Psalms 19.1-6; 104) and as called to ex-

9 press praise to God (e.g., Psalms 96.11-12; 148). (See also the Benedicite found in the Greek version of Daniel and taken up in St Francis’ ‘Canticle of the Creatures’.) This idea of the praise of the whole creation may make an important contribution to a theology that seeks to imbue all things with value and status (in God’s sight), as well as suggesting that the goal of salvation encompasses all things, and not just a few select humans. Indeed, in some of the prophetic visions of Isaiah (11.6-9; 65.25) what is de- picted as the establishment of righteousness is a state of peace and wellbeing for the animal world as well as good news for oppressed humans. The vision of an end to violence and predation – the lion eating straw like the ox – recalls the depiction in Gen- esis 1.29-30.

The book of Job also offers some striking and fruitful material. When God finally appears to speak to Job (Job 38.1–42.6), instead of assuring Job of his beloved, special status, the speeches emphasise Job’s insignificance, his ignorance, and list the diverse wonders of creation. Creation, it seems, has its own intrinsic value and relation to God, without there being any sense that it exists for the benefit or welfare of human beings – a rather different picture, perhaps, from that which emerges in Genesis 1. Notice how Job, apparently, gets the point (Job 40.4-5; 42.1-6).

In the New Testament, Jesus’s famous references to God’s care for birds and flowers are often taken to indicate concern for nature on the part of Jesus (Matthew 6.25- 34//Luke 12.22-31). These texts may therefore convey an important point about the value of all living creatures, though, like some of the other texts we have considered, they are not entirely unproblematic from an environmental perspective: Jesus’ main point seems to be to stress how much more God cares for humans.

In the letters of Paul there is one passage that has very frequently been cited, and for good reason: Romans 8.19-23. Uniquely, Paul here depicts the whole creation as bound up with the suffering of humanity, longing for the eschatological revelation of the sons of God. This passage provides the most substantial New Testament support for the idea that God’s saving purposes encompass the whole creation, not just humanity. A similar theme is expressed in rather different language in the opening

10 chapter of Colossians. Here the writer (who may or may not be Paul himself) stresses the idea that God’s redemption in Christ encompasses all things (Col 1.15-20). (I offer some further comments on the ecological potential in Paul’s letters in section 7 below.)

Finally, there is the vision of the new Jerusalem in Revelation 21–22, which some writers have seen as a positive ecological vision, a promise of transformation and redemption for the whole creation. Once again, though, it is not entirely straightforward to see this as an eco-friendly vision: note, for example, that the new Jerusalem is a massively urban construction (Rev 21.12-21).

It is important to stress, therefore, that none of these texts gives a blueprint for creation theology or environmental ethics; and the examples listed above form only a sample of the many texts that might fruitfully be engaged. The texts were written in an ancient world with different presumptions and priorities from our own. They do not simply set out what Christians living in an age of climate change should believe and do. But they do help to generate a positive vision of the value, beauty, and ultimate worth of the whole earth which can perhaps inspire and undergird a positive ecological stance and committed environmental action. In short, such biblical texts can, I would suggest, help to reshape Christian theology and ethics in ways appropriate to the ecological challenges we face.

7. Greening Paul? An example of ecological engagement with the Bible

As just one illustration of how such creative and constructive ecological engagement with the Bible might proceed, I return briefly to the particular case of Paul. As mentioned above, there are two obvious ‘eco-texts’ in Paul: Romans 8.19-23 and Colossi- ans 1.15-20. Romans 8 in particular is very frequently quoted, and is important in ex- pressing both the idea of creation’s groaning and also the hope that all creation will one day share in the liberation and freedom that God intends. Colossians 1 speaks of the reconciliation of all things in Christ. An important question is whether these can be more than isolated proof-texts. A traditional focus in readings of Paul has been on justification by faith, a focus in which the imagery of the law-court, with guilt and ac-

11 quittal, is prominent. Can there be a new lens to refocus Pauline theology and ethics in a way more relevant and appropriate to an ecological age? (In the following re- marks, I sketch briefly some of the ideas in a book, Greening Paul, that I co-wrote with Exeter colleagues Cherryl Hunt and Christopher Southgate.)

In 2 Corinthians 5.19 Paul speaks about God ‘reconciling the world, the cosmos, to himself in Christ’. Elsewhere in Paul we find a kind of panentheistic vision of all things incorporated into God, or into Christ (e.g., 1 Cor 15.28). We may, I think, suggest that the centre of Paul’s theology may be seen as God’s saving act in Christ to restore and reconcile all things – an act which has universal and cosmic scope. Such an idea presents the vision of salvation in an ecologically-relevant way.

But would such a theological vision also entail ethical responsibility on the part of humans? That is a rather crucial step if Paul’s thought is to help shape Christian environmental responsibility. It is pretty clear that Paul’s ethics are focused on Christian con- gregations. And a central value in his ethics is the call to love, or what I think we can label ‘other-regard’ – looking to the interests and welfare of the other. Does this apply only within the church, or only to other humans? This is one area where we can use Paul to think beyond, perhaps even against Paul. Paul seems to imply that the calling of the Church is to live out, to anticipate, the patterns of reconciled relationships that characterise the new creation. Paul does not, however, see or specify that this might imply responsibilities beyond the human community. Given the priorities of our own context and location, we can however discern such implications in Paul’s vision: if, as Colossians 1 suggests, the community encompassed by reconciliation in Christ includes and encompasses “all things” – literally everything – then the community to which our moral responsibilities relates includes all things without limit. We have an obligation to seek well-being, peace, reconciliation and flourishing not only for other humans, but also for other creatures – and perhaps for ecosystems, landscapes, habit- ats and so on, too. It is, of course, not straightforward to work out what that might mean in practice: Isaiah’s vision of wolves lying down with lambs is all very well, but wolves and lions cannot subsist on a vegetarian diet. Nonetheless, one might develop a vision of reconciliation in which there was, say, space for all creatures to flourish

12 without the threat of extinction. Paul does not provide a blueprint for ecotheology and ethics, but he can perhaps play some part in resourcing an ecological theological vision that inspires responsible living in our world.

8. Dealing with an ambivalent legacy: the unavoidable need for interpretation

The Bible, then, offers some material which emphasises the intrinsic value of all creation and its inclusion in God’s saving purposes. But it is hard to claim that the Bible offers a clear or consistent message about the need to value and preserve the environment. This is unsurprising: on other issues of ethical concern – like slavery, the equality of women, and so on – the Bible also bequeaths an ambivalent legacy, which Christians and scholars have interpreted and argued about in various ways.

Despite lots of material which seems to claim that the Bible “says” or “teaches” this or that, there is always and inevitably interpretation going on when such claims are made. The South African theologian Ernst Conradie talks about doctrinal keys or con- structs as the way in which biblical interpretation operates. We read the text – a product of a very different and ancient world – in our own context, shaped by our own convictions and priorities. Certain key motifs or ideas help to focus the biblical material, bringing certain themes and texts to the centre, while pushing others to the mar- gin. This is the process by which new (and ever-changing) meanings are constructed, relevant to the situation in which we find ourselves.

The history of biblical interpretation demonstrates a similar process at work through the ages: Augustine argued that the scriptures centred on love for God and love for neighbour, and that anyone who read them otherwise had not grasped their true concern. Luther found in Paul’s letters a doctrine of justification by faith that became the theological centre of the Protestant gospel; Paul’s letters, especially Romans and Galatians, therefore became especially key texts. Luther read the Bible in the light of that doctrine, even though that meant some texts being regarded as of dubious value (e.g. the letter of James). In the twentieth century Liberation theologians began to read the Bible afresh in the light of their social experience, and found God’s liberation of the poor to be the central story (now the letter of James has much to offer!). The story of the Exodus, and Jesus’ message in the synagogue as recorded in Luke 4.16-21,

13 come centre stage. In each case, though this is not always acknowledged, the Bible is read in the light of the challenges of a contemporary context, which leads to certain themes or ideas becoming key, and others being marginalised, even criticised.

Our contemporary context, with its pressing environmental challenges, suggests the need for a fresh reading of the Bible, and a reconfiguration of the Christian tradition. This will include a process of putting different texts centre stage. Instead of focusing on humanity’s importance and future salvation, we might draw on certain biblical texts to stress how God has entered into covenant with the whole earth, calls the whole universe in all its diversity to praise, and promises to liberate the whole creation from suffering and decay.

9. Conclusion

So, in conclusion, the two phrases in my title point to two different ways of thinking about what the Bible is and offers. Is the Bible green? Well, in a sense, no: it does not consistently or unambiguously teach an eco-friendly message but contains a diversity of material, some of which is rather problematic from an ecological perspective. As on other issues, it is a question of how the Bible is interpreted, and being open about the fact that contemporary concerns and priorities shape the way we read and make sense of the Bible.

Yet, put more positively, the Bible does offer much material that can be fruitful for developing an ecological theology and ethics. In other words, scripture can be read ecologically. The challenge for Christians is to show how the Bible, and the range of post-biblical Christian traditions, can be interpreted afresh – reconfigured – in our contemporary context, and can provide a strong basis for environmental ethical action. I have given a brief illustration of how this might proceed by looking at Paul, one of the figures central to the New Testament’s theology, but one who does not obviously or initially appear to offer much by way of ecological material. Just as the churches have responded to challenges in the past through fresh engagements with the Bible and with tradition, so now too is a time to reshape Christian theology, liturgy, and ethics to equip Christians to live and act with ecological sensitivity and responsib-

14 ility in a world faced with the devasting consequences of human irresponsibility and undisciplined consumption.

10. References and Further Reading

Berry, R. J. (ed.), (2000), The Care of Creation (Leicester: IVP).

Berry, R.J. (ed.), (2006), Environmental Stewardship: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present (London & New York: T&T Clark)

Finger, Thomas (1998), Evangelicals, Eschatology, and the Environment (The Schol- ars Circle; Wynnewood, PA: Evangelical Environmental Network)

The Green Bible (London & New York: HarperCollins, 2008)

Habel, Norman C. (2000), 'Geophany: The Earth Story in Genesis 1', in Norman C. Habel and Shirley Wurst (eds), The Earth Story in Genesis (Earth Bible vol 2; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), 34-48.

Horrell, David G., (2010) The Bible and the Environment (London & Oakville, CT: Equinox).

Horrell, David G., Cherryl Hunt, and Christopher Southgate, (2010), Greening Paul: Rereading the Apostle in an Age of Ecological Crisis (Waco, TX: Baylor Uni- versity Press)

Horrell, David G., Cherryl Hunt, Christopher Southgate, and Francesca Stavrako- poulou (eds), (2010), Ecological Hermeneutics: Biblical, Historical, and Theological Perspectives (London: T&T Clark)

Orr, David W. (2005), 'Armageddon Versus Extinction', Conservation Biology 19: 290-92.

Palmer, Clare (1992), 'Stewardship: A Case Study in Environmental Ethics', in Ian Ball, et al., The Earth Beneath: A Critical Guide to Green Theology (London: SPCK), 67-86 (Also reprinted in Berry 2006).

White, Lynn, Jr (1967), 'The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis', Science 155: 1203-207. [Reprinted in many places since, and available on various web- sites.]

15 Further material on this topic, intended primarily for school teachers and sixth-form students, but hopefully also accessible and of interest to church groups, is available at: http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/theology/research/projects/beyondstewardship/

Prof David Horrell teaches modules on a wide range of New Testament topics in the Department of Theology and Religion at Exeter University, including New Testament ethics. He is co-author of ‘The Bible and the Environment: Towards a Critical Eco- logical Biblical Theology’ and ‘Greening Paul: Rereading the Apostle in an Age of Ecological Crisis’.

16 A Theology of Creation

~ Prof Stephen Williams

Professor of Systematic Theology, Union Theological College, Belfast

Introduction

Theologians sometimes regard themselves as ‘generalists’ – people whose responsibility is less to develop a particular area of expertise than to try to lend a hand here and there in thinking through the whole range of issues on behalf of the church. Accord- ingly, what follows is not the product of any particular competence on my part in environmental questions. Nor does my remit require much detailed knowledge. I am charged with the task of saying something about ‘a theology of creation’ quite generally, albeit in the context of our eco-congregational concerns.

In my experience, too few theologians take environmental questions seriously. I was one of the early Green voters in a West Wales constituency when the Green party polled a small number of votes – I forget the number, so let me randomly say 354, for the sake of argument. When I (uncharacteristically) told someone which way I had voted, he remarked that I was the mystery man. He had learned that the other 353 lived in a commune out in the hills and wondered who this random voter was. Many years later, when I came to my present job in Northern Ireland, I found that theological interest in the environment was amusedly regarded as quirkish. Yet, in a book published in that very year (1994), the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, was distin- guishing between at least six forms of ecology – conservative, statist, socialist, liber- al-capitalist, feminist and anarchic self-managerial.1 Would that we theologians had a similar analytic zeal.

What I shall not do here is to enter into theological controversy of the kind that would be appropriate in a conference of theologians on ‘Theology of Creation’. ‘Creation’ and ‘God as Creator’ are theologically controversial matters. Historically, the Christi- an church has, by and large, worked with a clear distinction between Creator and

1 See The Fragile Absolute, the relevant extract being found in E&E. Wright (eds.) The Žižek Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) 65.

17 creature. In the twentieth century, what has been called a ‘quiet revolution’ in theology occurred, as panentheism glided to the theological forefront.2 Of course, there have been more radical challenges to the tradition than panentheism; we think, for example, of eco-feminist challenges, where the questions of the meaning of the word ‘God’ and the language by which we refer to God arise, as they had done for a long time previously across the theological and philosophical board. Important as are these differences, I do not pursue them in the context of our launch Eco-Congregation Ire- land conference. Aware of the risks involved in using this phrase without detailed elaboration, I am gearing the following discussion to what might be called loosely a ‘biblical theology’ of creation. Some will maintain that, if something is a biblical theology, it is also our normative theology for today; theology must always be biblical. Others will believe that outlining a biblical theology is an historical exercise, but that constructive theology today ought not simply to reproduce and often ought to quarrel with it. Of course, this is a very crude and entirely inadequate characterisation of differences. However we personally stand in relation to what I am calling ‘biblical theology’, let us, at any rate, try to see what such a theology looks like in relation to creation.

Before outlining its content, we should remark on the ‘tone’ of biblical theology – its ‘ambience’. Enter the pine marten. By the end of the last millennium, these little creatures were regarded as extinct in England and Wales. Then, in this present millennium, reports began to accumulate and it was no longer extinct. A pine marten was spotted near my home town of Aberystwyth in Wales. What does it look like? Well, it has brown fur and proudly sports a bit of creamy-yellow front. It loves the woods. It is apparently the only mustelid (member of the weasel family) with semi-retractable claws. It has been known to feast on jam and peanut butter. This description should evoke spontaneous delight and the thought of their extinction should be miserable. The word ‘spontaneous’ is the important one. I want to take an innocent, untutored child’s view. Children raised on farms, for example, do not experience animals as do urbanites. They will soon know that pine martens can be regular little nuisances, to

2 ‘Panentheism’ differs from ‘pantheism’. The latter is the belief that God is virtually identical with the world: God = Nature is one way of putting it. ‘Panentheism’ is the belief that all things are in God not that God is all things. So it does not simply identify the world with God, but neither does it distinguish sharply between Creator and creature. For the ‘quiet revolution’, see P.Clayton and A. Peacocke, In Whom we Live and Move and Have our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Sci- entific World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).

18 put it mildly, and you do not have to be on a farm to know that. Forget their cuddly creamy fur; only an urban romantic could drool over them at a distance. But imagine a child who is raised to think of or treat animals (and people) with kindness and gentle- ness seeing pictures of pine martens and learning just a little about them, without being exposed to their seamier side. How should he or she react? The answer is, surely: with natural delight. Suppose you ask such a child whether we should care about their extinction. The answer would be: obviously! How could anyone think differently? Pine marten extinction is intolerable.

Children often love fairy tales. In connection with talking beasts and birds in beast- fables and fairy-tales, Tolkien spoke of ‘the desire of men to hold communion with living things’.3 When children mature, they learn that the animals need an environment to sustain them and they should then begin to take an interest in that environment. But why? Just because the animals are what they are and just because the environment is what it is. This is obviously not going to apply to all animals, some of which may be the objects of fear and revulsion. However, when an animal is liked, it is liked for what it is. Nothing more is needed to stimulate affection. What we love, we wish to conserve. Love is a principle of permanence. To lose this basic sensibility is not to grow into worthy adulthood. It is to allow adulthood to do away with what is good in childhood.4 A theology of creation must be adumbrated aware that sheer being can be a source of delight, even if not all being functions like that. And that is an initial reminder of the form in which we are meant to know God, other humans, non- human animals and non-animal creation. It is dominantly in the mode of love. An au- thentic biblical theology of creation cannot be detached.

Basic Elements of a Theology of Creation

3 ‘On Fairy-Stories’ in D.Sayers etc., Essays presented to Charles Williams (London etc: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1948) 57. Although Tolkien is not speaking with specific reference to children here, he does discuss the connection between children and fairy-stories in the course of his essay. 4 This is memorably impressed on us by Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s book, The Little Prince.

19 We pick out here five basic principles grounded and specified in the Hebrew Scrip- tures/Old Testament.5

1. Creation, regarded as the work of the Creator, is good. It is important to realize that ‘good’ does not mean ‘perfect’ in the sense of ‘complete’ and ‘lacking nothing’. ‘Good’, in this context, probably means something like ‘fit for purpose’.6 God ap- proves of his own creation, which has both a character and potentialities which please him.

2. Humankind is designed for dominion. ‘Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea…” ’ and everything else (Genesis 1:26).7 It has been alleged that this dominion (the ‘ruling over’) gives humanity a fateful mandate to exploit creation and, in reaction to this claim, others have insisted that ‘dominion’ spells out ‘stewardship’, not ‘exploitation’. This seems to me basically right, although the point has to be stated carefully. The word translated ‘rule over’ does not, of itself, mean ‘stewardship’. But humanity is given dominion after God has already pronounced creation good so, obviously, the human task is not to tread underfoot what is good but to celebrate and cultivate its goodness. If creation satisfies God, God is obviously not going to bestow on humans the task of lording over it exploitatively for purely selfish purposes. ‘Stewardship’ is therefore fair enough in the long run; at least, it puts us on the right track for understanding the theological implications of this text.

3. The redemptive plan of God includes creation: the case of Noah. The covenant an- nounced in connection with Noah (Genesis 9: 8-17) is sometimes called ‘the Noahic covenant’, but it is a covenant which embraces the whole creation. It is remarkably broad. When people talk of ‘covenant’ in the Hebrew Scriptures, they usually have Abraham or Sinai in mind and these are certainly a dominating presence. But the covenant with Abraham, made in the interests of the nations and highlighting the re-

5 I distinguish between the Hebrew Scriptures and the Old Testament in terms of the respective order in which the canonical books appear. So the terms are often interchangeable. 6 Gordon J. Wenham emphasizes ‘fitness for purpose’ in God’s sight, not ‘fitness’ according to human criteria, Genesis 1-15 (Waco, Texas: 1987) 18. 7 In the following verse, it is specified that ‘man’ is ‘male and female’. So women, and not just men, are given dominion over creation.

20 sponse of human faith, is made with a descendent of Noah, for Abraham is a descend- ant of Shem and, therefore, already heir to a covenant which God had made with creation (Genesis 11: 10-26). Divine concern for all creation contextualizes divine concern for its human crown.8

4. God providentially sustains creation. This emerges throughout the Old Testament eg. when God is acknowledged as the one who supplies food for the beasts, and it comes to famous expression in Jesus’ teaching that God feeds the birds and clothes the lilies of the field (Matthew 6: 26-30). Indeed, we are bidden to train our eyes de- liberately and studiously on the birds in order to perceive the work of God.9 It is an important passage for illustrating the relationship of scientific and religious accounts of the providential order. When Jesus said that our heavenly Father feeds the birds, he knew as well as anyone that birds feed themselves. Observation shows us that and scientific analysis will give us the detail. That is how God does it. A scientific account informs us how it is done and a religious account informs us that this is how God does it. They are entirely harmonious.

5. Eschatologically, peace is pictured as something holistic, involving all creation. When we take the Bible as a whole, it is not always easy to sort out what is presented to us in pictorial, imaginative terms from what is set before us in terms of explicit literal expectation. This applies to eschatological images or teachings found, for example, in the prophets or in the book of Revelation. But the vision is of a renewed and transformed creation or cosmos, not just of transfigured humanity. We shall return to the question of literal interpretation, but there is no reason to believe that Jewish ex- pectations of a new earth are abandoned in the New Testament, which twice uses the language of ‘new earth’, just as the Hebrew Scriptures twice use the language (Isaiah 65:17; 66:22; 2 Peter 3:13; Revelation 21:1).

Much more could be said in relation to a theology of creation. We could, for example, quarry the Psalms for what they say about the creation’s praise of its Creator. Biblical

8 We need not here enter discussion of the question of the relative importance, in God’s sight, of non- human and human creation. All is important. 9 Such is the strength of the language Jesus used here in enjoining on us observation of the birds, that this passage has been regarded as providing a biblical basis for bird-watching. See John R.W.Stott, Christian Counter-Culture: The Message of the Sermon on the Mount (Downers Grove, Illinois: Inter- Varsity Press, 1978) 164.

21 doxology accompanies and surrounds biblical theology. As far as the environment is concerned, it seems blindingly obvious that the principles which inform a biblical theology of creation and the language in which those principles are stated or upheld impel us in the direction of a strong, positive concern for the environment. What God has created, pronounced good and cares for, must be the object of human attitudes in line with this. This is surely incontestable.

However, is not biblical theology not hopelessly naïve in the third millennium? We are not thinking directly here of the differences amongst theologians, as mentioned earlier. We have in mind the post-Darwinian intellectual situation. Darwinism or neo-Darwinism has apparently posed at least three threats to Christian faith and theology. The first is its challenge to the account of creation in Genesis 1. I do not pursue that here. Actually, there is no need to regard it as a threat, unless you read that account literally and there is no good reason for doing so.10 Evolutionary theory as such causes many no religious difficulties, as long as we affirm that the evolutionary process was set up by God – it is God’s creation device, much as the way in which birds feed themselves are God’s providential device. In fact, Charles Kingsley told Darwin that, through an evolutionary account, he was delighted to discover a ‘conception of Deity’ which was so ‘noble’ as to have ‘created primal forms capable of self-development’. Darwin was so impressed with this that he quoted these lines in the second edition of The Origin of Species.11

The second is its challenge to ‘the argument from design’. Arguments from design are arguments to show that (a) the universe shows evidences of design and (b) if there is design, there is obviously a designer. It is widely judged that Darwin demolished that argument: what we take to be ‘design’ can be explained in ‘natural’, non-design, terms and we need not invoke a designer. I do not pursue that question either. Fairly complex philosophical issues are involved. But, in any case, Christian faith does not depend on an argument from design. It neither originated in nor is based on an infer-

10 The reasons for not reading Genesis 1 in terms of a literal six-day creation owes nothing at all to Dar- win. Over the course of church history, long before the advent of modern science, that chapter was read in different ways. For the impact of archaeology, rather than Darwin’s theory, on the reading of Genes- is in the second half of the nineteenth century, see Richard S Briggs, ‘The Hermeneutics of Reading Genesus After Darwin’ in Stephen C. Barton & David Wilkinson, Reading Genesis After Darwin (Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 59. 11 Quoted by Denis Alexander, Creation or Evolution: do we have to choose? (Oxford: Monarch, 2008) 171.

22 ence to a designer on the basis of clearly perceived design. Of course, we believe in design and designer, but there is room for disagreement amongst Christians as to whether this is patient of logical demonstration.12

It is the third challenge that we must take up. It is connected with the second, but has a harder edge. The threat to the theology of creation outlined above comes from the kind of world described in the Darwinist account. Let us describe the threat in the following terms. Christians talk about ‘creation’. Would it not be better and more honest to talk about a ‘jungle’? Any Creator who designed our sort of universe is worse than a monster of the jungle. If Christians find reason to be concerned for the environment, that may be all to the good, but, if they are logical, they must do so in the teeth and not on the basis of traditional belief in God as Creator. For the Christian God cannot really be benign and is not consistently regarded as a conservationist. Look at the pain, cruelty, waste and purposelessness which characterize what Christians call ‘creation’. A traditional Christian theology of creation is in deep Darwinian trouble.

This is the challenge which I wish now to take up, all too briefly. If we are to sustain a biblical theology of creation for today with a positive outcome for environmental concern, we do so in a Darwinian context. Let us accept at least a broad evolutionism and an account of nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’.13 How shall we adumbrate a biblical theology of creation in that context? What follows is not an attempt to outline a com- prehensive theodicy (explanation of God’s ways in the light of evil and suffering). It leaves many relevant intellectual and theological bases uncovered. Within these limits, I try now to state five principles for a biblical theology of creation in a post-Dar- winian context. Creator and creation in post-Darwinian perspective

1. Evil is a dark mystery. ‘Evil’ is a theological category which may or may not be used and, if it is used, used differently, in non-Christian world-views. When we en-

12 In philosophical literature, arguments from design are known as ‘teleological arguments’. 13 Christians, of course, reject evolutionary naturalism – a view of evolution embedded in an atheistic world-view – and maintain that it is logically confused to believe that evolution implies atheism. Nor does a commitment to evolution entail a commitment to Darwinism; there are non-Darwinian theories of evolution. For a way in see T.B.Fowler and D.Kuebler, The evolution controversy: a survey of competing theories (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007). Of course, the question of human evolution and its interpretation generates its own peculiar set of considerations.

23 counter objections to Christian belief in God as Creator, what is immediately striking is that the problem is already flagged up right at the beginning of the Hebrew Scrip- tures. According to Genesis 3:1, the crafty serpent was a creature. In light of what pre- cedes and what follows, it is hard to make sense of this. Up to this point, we have been told that what God created is good. So the serpent, being a creature, is meant to be good. After this point, we read that the serpent is the seductive opponent of God. So the serpent, although a creature, is obviously bad. Genesis is obviously quite delib- erately flagging up this problem. In big bold letters, it is making the statement that the appearance of a malevolent force in the extra-human creation is an inexplicable mystery. It is not a problem foisted on Judaism or Christianity by its opponents. It is an- nounced in the Scriptures. We could say that one tenet of Judaeo-Christian belief is that the presence of evil is inexplicable. Is the Bible signalling some sort of pre-human disorder in the created order? Certainly, it is saying that human responsibility is to be exercised in the context of combat. In terms of creation, there seems to be something not just out there, but in there. However, the story is extremely brief and no explanation is offered at the time. Presumably that is the point: we are confronted with a dark mystery.14

2. Human freedom requires a corresponding world. A number of thinkers over the centuries have argued that the presence of evil is accounted for by human freedom: for humans to be truly free to love and serve God, they must be free to deviate from that goal and devise evil. What has that got to do with creation? It seems impossible to conceive of human freedom without conceiving of a material world which itself is at least fragile. If I strike and wound you, it is a moral evil, but I am only able to in- flict the wound because your body is vulnerable in any case – you could fall down and hurt yourself. If I am able to kill you, it is only because it was always possible for you die a natural death. Cosmic phenomena which cause suffering are sometimes called ‘natural evils’, in contrast to the moral evil of which humans are capable. Speaking very generally, the point here is that a world which contains human beings who are in some respect free to be and do good must be one in which they are free to be and to do evil and moral evil is possible only in a world which contains elements of natural

14 The Christian tradition has often talked about fallen angels as the background to the serpent. Whether or not this works or is firmly grounded in the biblical text, it simply pushes the problem one step further back: what explains the fall of angels, if angels are created by God? It is interesting to notice that nothing is said in Genesis 1-3 about the creation of angels.

24 evil. This is obviously not meant to be a complete explanation of the natural order; it is only to highlight one point.

3. Natural evil is not simply evil. What causes us to regard volcanoes and earthquakes, for example, as natural evils is not that there is something evil about volcanoes and earthquakes. On the contrary, geologists affirm that such turbulences are necessary to fructify our earth. They are accounted evil because of their effects on those who suffer from them. It is for scientists, rather than for theologians, to enquire into the place of volcanoes or earthquakes in the wider natural scheme of things. Broadening out our account, it seems that we have been increasingly learning to regard the cosmos in terms of inter-connected phenomena. The fluctuating inter-connectedness of phenomena – everything is bound together - was emphasised long before the arrival of Chris- tianity by the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus. If you have ‘x’ or the possibility of ‘x’, then you must have ‘y’ or the possibility of ‘y’. Flourishing has a shadow side. Again, we are not attempting an explanation of all evil and suffering. We emphasised above that we are in the realm of a grim mystery. God’s cosmos is not simply being explained by saying that everything good must have a shadow side for the good to be there at all. But what scientists say about interconnectedness is worth our theological attention.

4. There is testimony in Scripture to the futility and transience of all things. Speaking generally, post-Darwinian science portrays a cosmos marked by meaninglessness and purposelessness of some kind or to some degree.15 So does the scriptural book of Ec- clesiastes. Bible translations sometimes read: ‘Vanity, vanity – all is vanity’ or ‘Meaningless, meaningless - everything is meaningless’ (1:2; 12:8) and other possibil- ities for translating the Hebrew word in question include something like ‘fleeting’, ‘transient’, ‘evanescent’ – perhaps conjuring up the picture of a smoke which van- ishes. The message of the Teacher, in Ecclesiastes, is that it is useless to try to understand the world from within the world. Search for patterns of meaning within the world and you will not find them. From a certain point of view, the world lacks purpose and meaning. That seems to spell the futility of the cosmos and the futility of human wisdom. The Teacher concludes by saying that there is meaning in life, but it is

15 Bearing in mind the teleological arguments, some will, of course, want to insist at this point that this is only one side of the question; that purpose and meaning are also disclosed.

25 living a life which serves and is accountable to God which gives meaning. Our lives are meaningful on that level, but their meaning cannot be read off a cosmos which be- trays no pattern of purpose. So between the serpent in Genesis and the message of Ec- clesiastes (which has many echoes of Genesis) the biblical texts themselves indicate some of the perplexities that surround creation.16

5. Creation is a project whose completion lies in the future. Genesis was written from within the community of the people of Israel, a community whose beliefs were distin- guished from those of other Ancient Near Eastern societies. It was a community with a future, on the move, whether physically and literally or when it was viewing life in terms of an historical future where God would bring certain things about. When we read the creation narratives in tandem with prophetic eschatology, we find that creation is the beginning of a divine project, so it has to be understood eschatologically. Read further, in the light of the New Testament, Genesis turns out to record the beginning of a process whereby God designs not just to become acknowledged as universal Lord of the cosmos but even to dwell with his people on a new earth (Revelation 21:2-4). Until that time, we behold a cosmos that has the air of futility and decay about it, a groaning, incomplete, even warped, cosmos whose destiny, at the hands of its own creator, is yet to be attained (Romans 8: 19-22).

As we could have said more in connection with our initial outline of a theology of creation, so we could elaborate here when considering creation in a post-Darwinian light. We could, for example, attend to what the theological tradition has termed ‘evil as privation’, the view that evil is basically a lack of something, rather than a positive substance. For example, I should use the energy of praise positively; when I do not and succumb to envy instead, the positive energy is converted and perverted into the negative – lack of praise = envy. We could multiply examples. Along these lines, we could ask about evil as the misdirection and perversion of positive energies in creation. But we shall not enter these thickets. However, the fifth and final point made above in outlining a post-Darwinian theology of creation brings us to some conclud-

16 At the very least, we must say with Craig Bartholomew that there is ‘a strong link’ between Genesis 1-4 and Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiastes (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009) 92 and one might describe the connection more strongly than that: see D.M.Clemens, ‘The law of sin and death: Ecclesiastes and Genesis 1- 3’, Themelios 19.3 (1994) 5-8.

26 ing observations about the motive to care for creation. It also returns us to our frustrat- ing friend, the pine marten.

Conclusion

It seems appropriate to conclude with a brief word about the basis of our concern for God’s creation. Concluding my initial outline theology of creation, I indicated that it was difficult to see how anyone could not believe that it gave us a theological basis for care. But over the last half-century in theology, particular emphasis has often been put on the motivational effect of our beliefs in the eschatological future of creation. God means to redeem and not to scrap creation, which is the strongest affirmation of its goodness. Far from leaving us to wait until the eschaton, this motivates us to care for that which has a future in his eyes. Our stewardly dominion means aligning our present concerns with future cosmic reality. This is an understandable point of view. There is no doubting the importance of the biblical prospect of the new earth and, stirred by it, we may be galvanized into action, including action that cares for the earth. What God loves and wants to establish is what humanity should love and want to establish.

However, it seems to me that we must be cautious. The biblical materials often come before us in the form of images. What in particular survives on the new earth, we do not know. We have no idea whether it will be inhabited by animals and, if so, what relation they bear to animals on this earth. We do not know how far environmental devastation will go and what the relation is between the present earth and the new earth. Not only do we not know; we do not need to know. And if we do not need to know, we have to be careful about the exact description of our motivation. Am I to care any less for animals on account of my ignorance of their eschatological status? If I am prepared to believe that the cosmos may eventually be starved of hydrogen, reduced to dead stars and black holes, does the fact that this is possible adversely affect my motivation for caring? Surely not. My care for my body right now is independent of what future form it may or may not take; so with animals and the wider environment. In the ordinary-language sense of the word ‘hope’, whose object may or may not be realised, I may hold out high hopes for this world. However, Christian hope is more than this. It is riveted to promise, not to possibility. With regard to specific cosmic

27 particulars, God has surely promised little. It seems to me, then, that the basis of our concern should be love, rather than hope, in the theologically strong sense of ‘hope’. I shall love the earth without being sure of its future. That is what should drive the Christian, whatever the detailed content of her or his hope.17

17 My book

Prof Stephen Williams is Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological College, Belfast. He has published in different areas in biblical studies, theology and intellectual history, including ‘The Limits of Hope and the Logic of Love’ and ‘Revel- ation and Reconciliation: a Window on Modernity.’

Oneness and Cultivating Unity

~ Dr Anne Primavesi

Fellow of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Study of Religion, Birkbeck College, University of London

28 Twenty years ago, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Develop- ment in Rio, the Latin American Churches asked the World Council of Churches (WCC) to address the issue of militarism because the UN conference would only speak about ‘defence’. I was given that task. We met in a seminary in an industrial- ised area outside Rio where the “whites” at the conference were warned not to go outside the campus because they would not be safe. People of colour, however, would go unnoticed in a local population descended from slaves who were brought into the country to work on plantations during the colonisation of the continent by European Christians hundreds of years earlier.

Since that Rio Conference, we have had two Iraq wars, the invasion of Afghanistan and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as well as billions spent on deadly military drones. In this time of climate change, when economic capital needs to be spent on safeguarding the planetary resources of all life on earth, both the funding and the effects of the militarism of the leading Christian nations are, by default, one of the greatest human threats to those resources.

This is the case because in a global capitalist culture dominated by militarised world economies, the problem is agreeing on and funding positive political decisions based on scientific premises about climate change: decisions that favour both those we think of as friends and those we think of as enemies. To do this would go against the aims and perceived national interests of governmental and bureaucratic apparatuses that create and maintain massive ‘defence’ and ‘security’ industries. These have been built up within a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity and despair of change that renders any thought of a different world order seem idle fantasy. Main- taining, indeed prioritising, them means that ecologically, they are dead weight: army units, guns, surveillance systems, obsolete and developing nuclear weapons as well as propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive – and produce nothing (Graeber 2011: 382). Except, of course, death, desolation and desecration of the land.

Simultaneously, scientific technologies are contributing positively to raising awareness of our global interconnectedness: offering unprecedented opportunities for seeing our individual lives as interdependent and sustained by the same earthly resources as all other creatures. But what life-enhancing political and economic conclusions are drawn from these scientific data-based premises? Such conclusions are not part of the scientific agenda: nor do scientists see drawing such conclusions as part of their job description. That has been my experience over the past 20 years. Most recently I was at a conference on ‘planetary resources’, a concept formulated and researched by the

29 scientist Johan Rockstrom as a new approach to global sustainability. The name speaks for itself. Transgressing one or more boundaries of those resources may be de- leterious or even catastrophic due to the risk of triggering non-linear, abrupt environmental change within continental to planetary scale systems. The resources include climate change, ocean acidification; stratospheric ozone; biogeochemical nitrogen; phosphorus inflow to oceans; global freshwater use and the rate at which biological diversity is lost (See Rockstrom website in References).

At question time, I asked about the possible impact of militarism on these planetary resources. The question was courteously received by Rockstrom, but sidestepped, indeed dismissed as irrelevant by other scientists. I raised the scientific question out of a theological concern about the oneness of our planetary existence which, for me, is the greatest theological as well as scientific challenge of our time. And it is against that background that I talk about seeing ‘Oneness’ and ‘Cultivating Unity’ as the context and defining purpose of an eco-congregation today.

This theological context was most powerfully defined for me in 1931 by the Ger- man Jewish Rabbi Leo Baeck: What, then, is this new principle, this force that means revolution? Put in its briefest form, it is the idea and the challenge of the One. This challenging idea is firstly the One Thing, the one thing that alone is needful, that which has been commanded, the good, the right. Secondly and mainly, it means the one Being who has proclaimed this One Thing and demands it from us, the One God beside whom there is none else. And finally, it means the unity and totality of humankind [with all living beings]. It means that through this One Thing, and therefore with our whole heart and soul, we are to serve the one God (Baeck 1958: 23-24).

Baeck’s unified and revolutionary vision of our lives on Earth comes from someone who later endured the horrors of Theresienstadt concentration camp; emerging from it as an eloquent embodiment of peacefully meeting ‘the challenge of the One’. For him, it meant carrying out the command to do what is needful, the right and the good, even in the direst circumstances. The revolutionary force of his deceptively simple message of oneness not only continues to challenge ideas about our lives and about the world today. It also challenges us to make the principle of the ‘One’ an earthly reality. In its simplest terms, this requires ‘One Thing’ from us: a living, whole- hearted commitment to doing what is good and right within and for the One Com-

30 munity of Life on Earth; a community sustained by a unified system of planetary resources. For Baeck, the religious, revolutionary force unifying the world is the belief that, through doing what is good and right for all within that community, we serve the One God: and so love, reverence and preserve the Oneness of life.

‘Cultivating Unity’, which I take as the defining purpose of an eco-congregation, is a phrase used by Richard Pervo (in the latest Hermeneia commentary on Acts) to translate the Greek koinonia. Instead of the usual translations of ‘fellowship’ or ‘brotherhood’ it denotes the bond between belief and action exemplified both in Je- sus’s life and in that of his apostles (Acts 2:42). Pervo defines the revolutionary force behind this early Christian lifestyle as ‘cultivating unity’; that is, ‘cultivating oneness’. This is what it means to serve the God of Jesus: as opposed to the militarist koinon or cult of a deified Roman Emperor. The clash between the two is played out in the account of Peter’s reluctant conversion to the idea of welcoming the Roman centurion, Cornelius into the apostolic community (Primavesi 2011: 17-20)

In her commentary on Galatians Brigitte Kahl notes that from the perspective of Rome, koinonia between Messianic Jews and uncircumcised Gauls (or Galatians) must have appeared as an upsetting irregularity. It implied lawless conduct and dis- turbed the koinon in as much as it interfered with provincial reverence for the divine emperor (Primavesi 2011: 118). But that koinon is what has prevailed within European Christianity since the Council of Nicea (325 CE). It is described in Eusebi- us’s account of the Council’s concluding imperial banquet: Detachments of the bodyguard and troops surrounded the entrance of the palace with drawn swords, and through the midst of them the men of God proceeded without fear into the innermost of the imperial apartments, in which some were the emperor’s companions at table while others reclined on couches arranged on either side. One might have thought this a picture of Christ’s kingdom!

This mythic Roman militarist koinon has prevailed within European Christianity. Yet the ideal of koinonia persisted and persists as a challenge to Christians; both individually and as members of official Christian churches. The challenge is met wherever ‘doing what is right and good’ means refusing to differentiate between humans on the grounds of race, religion or sex in order to justify violence against them; and refusing to use any distinction between ourselves and all other-than-human creatures in order to justify violence against them.

31 Where the challenge is positively met, it is a good and right response to Jesus’s appeal to live peaceably; an appeal he based on the unity of God’s practical and nondis- criminatory concern for all Earth’s creatures: Love your enemies and pray for those persecuting you so that you may become sons and daughters of your Father; for he raises his sun on bad and good, and rains on the just and unjust (Matthew 5:44-45; Luke 6:27- 28, 35c-d).

It also pays heed to his uncompromising prayer that we may receive the Father’s forgiveness ‘as we forgive those who trespass against us’. As a Jew subject in life as in death to Roman military authority, Jesus’s appeal to love and forgive our enemies (which implicitly means they are no longer seen as enemies) means acting nonviolently toward them. It foreshadows Leo Baeck’s emphasis on doing what is good and right for all, regardless of their attitude to us personally. This is the proper religious response to the One creating and sustaining the life of all through the gift of Earth’s planetary resources. So doing what is good and right for all is a moral imperative: one that may make life-changing demands on us, even to death itself. It is a positive response to the biblical vision of God: Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is One!(Deuteronomy 6:4) This God ‘is not partial and takes no bribes’, or, in modern terms, ‘has no favourites’ (Deuteronomy 10:17). This is a God who sees our lives as a whole; whose unifying gaze encompasses all creatures within a land that supports all life from the beginning of the year to its end: And if you will obey my commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, that you may gather in your grain and your wine and your oil. And he shall give grass in your fields for your cattle, and you shall eat and be full (Deuteronomy 11:13-15).

This religious premise for living nonviolently, for supporting and being supported by a peaceable earth community, is now endorsed by the social/scientific Gaian paradigm. Its basic premise is that we have no scientific mandate either to assume we are independent of, or in charge of, the natural world to which we belong. What we do have is a unique ability to understand the laws that govern and unify that world and, based on that understanding, a corresponding rational desire to live accordingly.

32 Presently, our insights into climate change and its effects are based on the scientific premise that the sun and the rain, temperature rises and droughts, ocean acidification and air pollution ultimately affect friend and foe, cattle and grass, bee and bear, bird and fish, tree and seed alike. And that our lifestyles are now making disproportionate demands on this shared resource base. The scientific premise now serves as a solid ground for the religious exhortation to live peaceably.

So in practice, continuous scientific monitoring of the effects of climate change on the global atmosphere, on wildlife, on biodiversity, on plant life, on seas worldwide and on the melting of the Arctic ice cap not only challenges North Atlantic governments to continue funding such research. It should also challenge them to increase it by discontinuing funding the production of ever more sophisticated and deadly weaponry: such as the nuclear submarines housed in Scotland at Faslane and in France at Ile Longue, with their warheads supplied and maintained by the United States.

Meanwhile, the religious Christian koinon, in its many official forms, prays for peace while investing large amounts of its pension funds in mining corporations and weapons manufacture. This would have come as no surprise to Leo Baeck. In his lifetime, the Christian churches in Germany not only supported the greatest human military machine in twentieth-century history: they also acquired particular infamy by supporting policies aimed at exterminating its Jewish subjects. In his magisterial study The Churches and the Third Reich, Klaus Scholder notes that, during March 1933, internal and external legal changes took place at the end of which Protestantism publicly endorsed the Nationalist revolution and Catholicism offered a thinly dis- guised capitulation to it. In both churches at that time the decision was taken that no comment would be made on the terrorism of the new system and, in particular, on the persecution of the Jews now beginning in Germany. This decision did not go unchallenged, nor was it made in a day. Rather, it was the result of a development in which political and church-political arguments gained the upper hand over simple Christian responsibility (Scholder 1987: 254-255).

The legal changes based on ‘rational anti-semitism’(!) were argued for on the basis of human difference, that is, on having one’s heredity defined by the Jewish race in contrast to the smaller Central European races: out of which, according to Lutheran tradition, the German ‘Volk’ was formed. The church’s position was determined ‘not

33 by political factors’, but rather by ‘participation in the sacraments’. While in retro- spect, says Scholder, this may seem incomprehensible or inadequate and even scan- dalous, during the 1920s there had been a plethora of special laws for racial as well as ethnic minorities throughout the civilised world; without the political and church public feeling that this was a basic abrogation of the rule of law. It was no accident that Scripture scholar and theologian Otto Dibelius rejected the intervention and criticism of the American churches in regard to the treatment of the Jews with the argument that the German churches were not intervening in the American Negro question (Scholder 1987: 375).

What remained largely unexpressed within the official Christian churches, or even considered, was the striking similarity between the social position of Jesus in Roman Palestine, the Jews in Germany and that of the vast majority of American negroes (Thurman: 34). Those German and American pastors who did express pastoral concern on these grounds saw that Christians had drawn great guilt upon themselves by keeping silent when they should have spoken out. Neither Protestant nor Roman Catholic Churches took part in political resistance to Hitler’s policies in the strict sense, though there were numerous personal links with it. So those who resisted, like the Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Jesuit priest Alfred Delp, were considered outsiders in their two churches (Scholder 1989: 118-119).

This structural moral failure within the Christian koinon is integral to and implicit in European colonization and has long been painfully evident to indigenous colonised peoples. Negro Christian scholar Howard Thurman notes the simple historical fact that Jesus was a Jew and that it is impossible to understand him outside the sense of community that Israel held with God. How different, Thurman exclaimed, might have been the story of the last two thousand years if the link between Jesus and Israel had never been severed! The second important fact is that Jesus was a poor Jew. The economic predicament with which he was identified by birth placed him within the great mass of human beings on earth. The third fact is that, unlike Paul, who was a Roman citizen, Jesus was a member of a minority group within the control of the dominant force, the koinon of the Roman Empire. All these facts, said Thurman, remain important.

It is also important that Jesus’s life and teaching accords with the Jewish religious basis of Baeck’s ‘One Thing’. It brings into sharper focus the corresponding and essential role to be played by Christians exercising koinonia, cultivating unity between all living creatures on the basis of God’s indiscriminate love for them. For an eco-

34 congregation, such cultivation is a defining, ongoing activity that consciously unifies our individual relationships with God with those of all earthly lives nourished by planetary resources: regardless of species, race, creed or power. That is the funda- mental religious as well as scientific basis for our living peaceably (Primavesi 2011: 14-29, 80-97).

It is also at the heart of Baeck’s ‘One Thing’, demanded of us more urgently now by science rather than by religion. But on either basis or rather, on both together, it means raising our awareness of living in an already unified earth community; and then rising to the challenge posed by that reality. Now more than ever, the challenge is a moral as well as a scientific one. Yet within major Christian communities preserving this basic earthly unity has not been considered or seen, as it was by Jesus and by Baeck, as a categorical religious imperative that demands a collective as well as a personal response (Baeck 1958: 25).

Historically, the command to do what is good and right to everyone, regardless of race, religion or sex, has been more breached than observed in Christendom. Indeed, the challenge has been met most consistently and successfully by Buddhist nations, Gandhi-inspired political movements and small peace-based Christian religious communities such as Quakers, the Amish and other such groups and individuals. Having rejected the militant theology of the koinon embodied in Roman imperial Christianity and its offshoots, in different ways the latter try to embody Jesus’s vision of a positive, life-enhancing response to God’s indiscriminate gifts that sustain the One sacred community of Earthly life in all its diversity.

References: Baeck, L. (1958). God and Man in Judaism. London, Valentine, Mitchell and Co Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York, Melville House Pub- lishing. Pervo, R. I. (2009). Acts: A Commentary. Minneapolis, Fortress Press. Primavesi, A. (2011). Cultivating Unity within the Biodiversity of God. Salem, Oregon, Polebridge Press. Rockstrom, J. at http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32 Scholder, K. (1987). The Churches and the Third Reich. London, SCM Press. Scholder, K. (1989). A Requiem for Hitler and Other New Perspectives on the German Church Struggle. London, SCM.

35 Thurman, H. (1976). Jesus and the Disinherited. Boston, Beacon Press.

Dr Anne Primavesi is Fellow of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Study of Religion, Birkbeck College, University of London. A systematic theologian focusing on ecology, her books include ‘Cultivating Unity within the Biodiversity of God’ and ‘Making God Laugh: Human Arrogance and Ecological Humility’.

Money, Consumerism and the Spirituality of Our Times

~ Dr Alastair McIntosh

Fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology, Glasgow

Many years ago when my children were young I was part of a babysitting circle. The way it worked was that, when you joined the circle, you got given four coloured pieces of paper, each of which represented one hour of babysitting. That was your birthright – your share in what it meant to join the economy of the babysitting community – and when you moved out of the area or your children grew up you were duty bound to pay four tokens back so that the economy remained in a proper balance.

Now it seemed to me that this circle, devised by local parents, perfectly illustrated what money is. Those tokens could also be traded for other things, like gardening or excess garden produce. They were a local currency, based on confidence, which is to say, con-fidere or “faith together”. They illustrate the primary quality of money – money as a simple token of exchange between one another – and we might note that Jesus used money in this way because the disciples kept a common purse.

Jesus also said that when you lend, expect nothing in return (Luke 6:35). It is not clear whether he meant not to expect the loan back, or whether he meant not to take interest on the loan, but in this context it doesn’t matter because if he meant not to expect the

36 loan back, he’d hardly have been demanding interest! If the primary quality of money is to be a medium of exchange, its secondary quality is that it carries the capacity to make money out of money – to generate “interest” or as the Bible calls it, “usury”. Some people try to reserve the use of the word usury only to excessive levels of interest, but I can see no Biblical basis for this. As the passage illustrated in the (above) picture puts it: “thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbours by extortion, and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord God” (Ezekiel 22:12, KJV). As such, usury is very clearly cast as a form of idolatry.

It gets worse! Imagine back in the babysitting circle … Imagine that instead of play- ing a straight game, one member of the group decided to exploit the secondary quality of babysitting tokens, and he or she did lots of babysitting, cornered the supply of tokens, and then offered to lend them back … at interest! Such a person would then be able to live off unearned income. Injustice would creep into the system. It was for this reason that the Medieval Catholic Church tried to outlaw usury, and why strict Islam still does so to this day. It was for this reason also that the Old Testament proposed times of Jubilee – that every seven and fifty years, debts would be cancelled, to pre- vent the economy from being skewed and injustices from building up.

We, however, live in a world that since the Reformation has lost such restraints. John Calvin very reasonably argued that usury was happening anyway and so, he said, it was better to have it “accommodated” in a way that would try to keep it reasonable. The background to Calvin’s logic was that the Jews were already practicing it towards Christians. Why were the Jews doing that? Over much of Medieval Europe, the Jews had been marginalised. As part of the psychology of trying to make out that Jesus was a Christian but not a Jew, Jews became stereotyped as the “Christ killers”. This resul- ted in anti-Semitic racism all the way to houndings and pogroms. The Jew became the “wandering Jew”. Gold was easy to carry with you. That provided the base for banking and lending, and so the picture emerged of Shylock, the Merchant of Venice, who was in many ways Christendom’s own shadow side inasmuch as it had helped to create him.

Calvin’s accommodation of usury as interest is why world banking developed such an edge in Geneva. At first such banking was seen as a responsible trade. I am a Quaker, and both Lloyds and Barclays were originally Quaker banks that succeeded because they valued truth and integrity in public affairs. But over time that changed. There was no Jubilee. There became no restraint. The expectation of a rate of return on capital – whether as interest or as dividends – fuelled the growth of capitalism. Capital- ism is control of the economy via capital. It allows for the possibility that an in-

37 vestor’s sole interest is what they’re going to get back out of it … and whenever we move money from one account to another, or seek the lowest price for a product, we are all feeding the competitive spirit that comprises capitalism as distinct from the alternative, which would be a co-operative spirit of mutuality. We are all complicit. Look in the mirror of the corporation in a free market society, or the government in a democracy, and it is our own collective shadow that we may see reflected back.

With growing inequity of the distribution of capital aided by the secondary quality of money – the ability to make money out of money – consumerism started to take off. The economies of Europe and America became distorted by both the first and second World Wars in the twentieth century, and after each of them governments were concerned with how to keep their economies booming. Men like Edward Bernays (a nephew of Sigmund Freud) and Ernest Dichter (both of whom lived until the 1990s) were pivotal in advising governments and corporations on a new way of boosting their economies. The economy was no longer only to satisfy human needs. It also had to generate wants. It had to create markets for perceived needs that had not previously existed. Bottled water is a good example, but there are many. Fuel became “a tiger in your tank.” Shoes became less about protecting the feet than making them sexy. Ci- garettes were to “blow your troubles away” because with a cigarette “you are never alone.” In short, and in theological language, products took on an idolatrous role.

Psychologically, the “depth boys” in advertising, such as Bernays and Dichter, studied the work of psychologists like Freud, Adler and Jung and used these works, intended for the therapy of the human soul, to figure out how to exploit it. How could the complete range of emotions – love, joy, sex, hate, guilt, fear, anxiety – all be used to push products? How could they be placed on the hook of advertising, lowered into the un- conscious, and used to trigger buying behaviour? In short, how could a consumer-ad- dicted society be created?

Allied to all of this was a shift from real reality to virtual reality. No longer was our sense of world to be parochial, “of the parish”. That was deemed “inward looking”. And yet the very word ‘parochial’ comes from the Greek para meaning alongside (like with parallel lines), and oikos meaning the household and its economy. It is the same Greek root from which we get the words ecumenical and ecology. Diocese also has the same etymology – dia meaning through and oikos meaning the home or neigh- bourhood. As such, a parishioner was a neighbour, a fellow sojourner through a place, and when Jesus asked “Who is our neighbour?” the answer takes us very deeply into questions of fair trade and how we might invest any money that we have.

38 Deeper than that, a non-idolatrous view of the oikos, of the household or the economy, takes us to the heart of the divine nature. It is significant that the most com- monly cited miracle in the gospels is the feeding of the five thousand (or thereabouts, the numbers vary from version to version). What was happening here politically is very significant. The Roman Emperor saw it as his function to feed the people. Jesus, however, was saying “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

His was what the French Jesuit Jean Pierre de Caussade called “the sacrament of the present moment.” That was why Jesus recommended that we celebrate the Eucharist “in memory” of him. Amongst other things, he is revealing to us a lesson in real economics.

The Greek word used in the gospels for “in memory of” is anamnesis. Its literal meaning is “without amnesia” or “without loss of forgetfulness.”

It is as if we need to be periodically woken up from our spiritual sleep. We need to be, and the hyphens are deliberate, re-minded. We are called to re-member that which the hustle and bustle of everyday life and, yes, its commonplace violence, has dismembered.

To me, this is what Jesus was doing with the bread and wine. He was calling us to the sacrament of the reconstitution of a world and humanity that is broken, like his own world and physical body was shortly to become.

By saying “Do this in anamnesis of me,” he is calling us back to the forgotten nature of nothing less than … what? … the fullness of reality.

And what is that reality? It is “bread” – which is to say, the material substance of the world made up of atoms and energy; and “wine” - the quickening of the Spirit that gives life.

So here we have Jesus, a human being of woman born, foster child of a carpenter, grounded like us all in space and time to live and die; but at the same time, Christ as a “persona” or face of God in whose image we too are fashioned, beyond all dichotomies of gender, social class and even religion, grounded in the pleroma which is to say, the fullness of all eternity.

The story of the Last Supper invites us to step outside of space and time and to gather around that table. What is this God-man doing? He is picking up an ordinary piece of

39 bread from off a table that had been mindfully prepared.

He is raising up a goblet of wine – that fruit of sunshine-warmed and hand-toiled soil that in Middle East cultures symbolised spiritual euphoria.

And he’s saying something that sounds very far out. He’s re-minding us that “this bread … is my Body” and “this wine … is my Blood.”

He’s calling us back to the mystical truth of our inter-connection, of true nature as branches on the tree or vine of life – roots in the soil, fruits in the heavens - in community with one another. In “communion” with the Providence of Creation, with its grace-given “daily bread” provide-ance of that which gives life.

Different religions have different names and metaphors for such cosmic consciousness, but in some of our traditions this is what it means to be participants as the Communion of Saints in the Body of Christ.

This is the consequence of the breath of the Holy Spirit having breathed itself out into the void, the poetry of “the Word made flesh”. It is the deep song of the Earth, the archetypal patterning of reality without which “nothing was made that has been made” and with which we acquire vision of the heart because here is “the light of the world.”

This is not pantheism – God as nature - limited only to what is visible, known, immanent. Rather, it is something more. It is pan-en-theism: God present in nature but also, God transcendent. God able to be in this world, in all its joys and crucifixions, but also present outside of it, holding the cosmos as a mother cradles her awakening child, or as Jesus put it, as a hen enfolds her chickens.

Here, as Hebrews 1:3 tells, is the power that “sustains” the world. Here, as 2 Peter 1:4 puts it, is our invitation to “become participants of the divine nature.”

In Roman Catholic tradition, the Council of Trent in 1551 defined transubstantiation as “that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the Blood.”

I think in the sense that I have tried to explore here that this is very true. The differences between our religious traditions perhaps start to fall away when we observe that the “conversion” in question of the bread and wine is precisely what

40 Jesus said it was: anamnesis, a re-membering, a fresh seeing, a conversion in consciousness that is the sacrament of the present moment, an apocatastasis or unveiling of the state that is.

This is the Real Presence of the divine that renders the whole world implicitly holy.

This is that very flesh and blood cosmic love which has, since the beginning of time, always been there, and always will be there, come what may in the come-to-pass of the vicissitudes of both our personal lives and of this planet Earth.

This is the true basis of the economy. Seek this and all other things shall be added unto us. But seek money for its own sake … and the day will come when you find that the Celtic Tiger never was indigenous, and that it turns and feeds on the hand that put too much faith in it.

How do we seek the economy of God? “Be still and know that I am God.”

How do we see it? “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.”

How do we practise it? “For God so loved the world…” but be gentle on ourselves, for while we might hear and act on the pain of the world, it is ultimately God that carries it.

An additional note by Alastair McIntosh:

I have defined consumerism as being consumption in excess of what is necessary to live a dignified life. It is the addictive seeking of surplus beyond sufficiency. It is about seeing satisfaction in life in the wrong ways. And so, as Mick Jagger put it, “I can’t get no satisfaction … ‘cause I try and I try and I try.”

However, it is not necessarily a spiritual virtue to live a hair-shirt life. Jesus received gifts of gold, myrrh and frankincense. He wined and dined eating bread, fish and, by implication, the Paschal lamb flavoured with bitter herbs. He tells us in Luke 7 and Matthew 11 that while John the Baptist lived abstemiously, “the Son of Man comes eating and drinking” – and yet those who would do down the spiritual life were not happy either way.

41 It is fun to party in a right balance with the rest of life: Jesus certainly seemed to have done so and, not least at the wedding feast at Canna, when the equivalent of an extra 900 bottles of wine were manufactured (if we might opt to read the first miracle in John’s gospel literally)! As such, if part of seeking to live in dignified sufficiency is to include letting our hair down now and again, graciously enjoying life’s material pleas- ures, as a part of its blessing, having sought first the realm of Heaven, then how might we distinguish providential consumption and improvident consumerism? As the Muslims would put it, how can we distinguish what is “halal” from what is “haram”?

I have been helped very greatly in this question by an essay written by the late black American feminist, Audre Lorde. It is published in her book, Sister Outsider (Cross- ing Press, USA, 1984), and don’t be put off by the essay’s title, which is “Uses of the Erotic.” Here Lorde is not limiting her use of the word “erotic” to the sexual. She means it as the expression of Eros (originally the Greek God of love) to mean connection whereby the heart is engaged. The true erotic, for Lorde, is about all connection with feeling.

This then enters into all our relationships. Lorde therefore says: “The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic - the sensual - those physical, emotional and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings.” Now the help that this understanding offers to us in trying to distinguish grace-filled consumption from crass consumerism lies in Lorde’s distinction of the truly erotic from the merely pornographic. While the erotic is about sensation with the heart engaged, she sees the pornographic as being about sensation without the heart’s engagement. The sensations that we are talking about here can come through any of the senses. They can be sexual, for sure, but also music, food, art or the scent and sight of flowers. Indeed, all the things that come to us from the economy and its wider situation within the Earth’s ecosystem. All that comes from the ‘parish’ as para-oikos in Greek – that which is ‘alongside’ the oikos, the economy and ecology, of “the household”.

If we extend Lorde’s notion to this ‘eco’ or oikos as a whole, then relationships that are purely instrumental, objectifying, exploitative, and competitive in an unrestrained manner are intrinsically pornographic. They are wrong relationships because they cause hurt. As Buddhism teaches, they come from the attachment or craving to things that causes suffering and that is why Mick Jagger couldn’t get no satisfaction, though

42 he tried and he tried and he tried.

In contrast, relationships with the heart engaged are right relationships because they have their roots in love and nourish its fruits. Such is providential relationship. It is grounded in the grace of God.

In Biblical terms, we see this strongly in the erotic imagery of the Song of Solomon. It is also present in the Wisdom literature, such as the magnificence of Proverbs 8, re- flecting (as it arguably does) the feminine face or “consort” of God. Jesus himself connects with this in Luke 7 and Matthew 11 where he identifies with “Woman Wis- dom” in saying: “but Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds” (or “by her children”). We might also note that in both Hebrew (hokmah) and Greek (sophia) the Holy Spirit is gendered feminine. As such, it brings a beautiful gender balance to the Trinity if we consider that the Father is male, the Spirit is female, and the Child in whom, as Paul tells us, “there is neither male nor female,” is androgynous - which can be understood as including, and being beyond, both genders.

In contrast to such tender eroticism that is, ultimately, the love of God coursing through our bodies as temples of the Spirit, pornography is about seeking sensation without the heart engaged. We see this very clearly in unequal or abusive sexual relationships. It could be seen as the difference between “having sex” and “making love”. Or to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, when speaking about his play Mrs Warren’s Profession, “a prostitute is not naturally lascivious but unnaturally penniless”.

This distinction between right relationships as embodying the truly erotic, and wrong ones as being pornographic, can be extended beyond Audre Lorde’s discussion and applied to all of our relationships with one another and the Earth. If we seek pleasur- able sensation that is not in right relationship, not crafted by love made manifest as care and justice, then we are in a pornographic relationship with those things. Such is pornographic consumerism. To “repent” would then be to seek to restore the heart into our lives, to reconnect with “the passions of love, in its deepest meanings.” As Je- sus constantly teaches us, that is something that must be asked and waited for. Our position is therefore that of the Song of Solomon (3:3) where: “The watchmen found me as they made their rounds of the city and I asked them, “Have you seen my true love?” (Song of Solomon, 3:3).

In all of this we must be one another’s watchmen and women. That is the importance of building communities that seek fair trade products, agricultural produce that em- bodies high animal welfare and care for the soil, just labour relationships and all the

43 rest. It is about living out the passions of love in all its meanings. This is true spirituality as distinct from mere religiosity or crass competitive economics, and this I believe is what Christ meant when he said that if we seek first the things of Heaven, then we shall find everything else as well.

Alastair McIntosh is a Fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology in Glasgow, Direct- or of the GalGael Trust, Honorary Fellow at the School of Divinity (New College), University of Edinburgh, and Honorary Senior Fellow of the College of Social Sci- ences, University of Glasgow. His books include ‘Radical Human Ecology: Intercultural and Indigenous Approaches’, ‘Rekindling Community: Connecting People, Environment and Spirituality’, ‘Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition’ and ‘Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power’.

See www.alastairmcintosh.com.

44 A New Humanity: The Quest for Well-Being in the 21st Century

~ Rev Peter Owen-Jones

Vicar of Glynde, West Firle and Beddingham in Sussex, broadcaster & author

The eternal quest for well-being.

The quest for well-being underlines the course humanity has taken since the beginning. In our age we are surrounded by images of sun-drenched beaches, smiling couples on posters for health insuranc, and history has handed us the enigmatic medieval pleasances, the romantic movement, all of these testament to an unquenchable desire for well-being. We are born into a world full of stories which contain directions to happy ever afters. We inherit religions and heavens whether we want them or not. We arrive within a system and, whilst that system is going to have its obvious differences from place to place, it is still a society with its traditions, its demands, its bills, its moralities. Our lives, to a certain degree, are set within the cauldron of struggle and, to a certain extent, we have not yet as a species learned to truly understand this struggling. This struggle is perhaps reflected in our desire to experience beauty, really to be as relaxed as we can about being here for the time that we are.

Despite the fact that we in the west, in our society, we have apparently never been wealthier, it is also a fact that we have never ingested such huge amounts of anti-de- pressants. The truth is that capitalism was never conceived to make us happy: it has been very successful at making some of us rich, and therefore I do not feel inclined to berate it for something it was never designed to do, but a system that sets each individual human being against each other is never going to create or, more importantly, engender a sense of communal or individual well-being and I am not sure whether my children's generation are going to invest in this way of 'being a society' any more. I am also not sure, however, how much longer we can describe ourselves as ' free' as long as we increasingly have to pay increasingly more for this version of freedom.

45 There is surely a tipping point where the demands of the system become heavier than any benefits it might happen to offer. When societies approach that point, the resulting stress on the individuals who make up that society begins to show itself. We are, perhaps, much closer to that point as a society than we are really being honest about and, once that point is passed, there is always revolution. At some point over the next twenty years the new generation will wake up and realise the true extent of the social manipulation that they have been subjected to. They will then look into the distance of themselves. I don't like the roads revolutions take - they are for the most part journeys into the brutal, the vicious and the bloody - this is because they are power battles, they are about control, the victors take control. What kind of peace can ever be built on blood?

It is very important, I feel, to understand that the quest for well-being reveals within its pathways the shadow of itself, our own tolerance of injustice, corruption and the deeper into this mirror I look my capacity for greed, for selfishness, for the pitiful need to control. That the quest for well-being and happiness, if it is not simply expressed and mediated on a material level, is always the starting point for revolution and, as Gandhi understood, the manner of the revolution will always reflect the nature of the society that emerges from it, that we cannot have a society based on well-being and happiness unless we have a revolution characterised by happiness and well-being. We cannot have a revolution based on happiness and well-being until first of all we connect with the first truth and it is that all life is connected. We exist with, and are utterly dependent upon, the myriad forms of life that we share this planet with: in that sense we are many beings, we are not the individual that we imagine we are. The journey of my life from conception to growth to this adult existence is the narrative of connectedness. The oneness that Christ speaks of is the state of communion with God - God is in communion with all life - we enter that place of communion through ac- knowledging our connectedness. The story of humanity’s journey since the reformation has been written from a point of separation. We are in the perilous position we face because we have not acknowledged the first truth - the connectedness of all life. We cannot ever have peace on earth until we make peace with the natural world, until we live in peace with the natural world. Christianity needs urgently to embrace a big- ger vision of peace on earth.

I find it strange that religious visionaries have been humanity’s most potent revolu- tionaries but they have never been described as such. Much of their individual legacies have been mired by institutional in-fighting or hijacked by their own cultural conservatism, but that doesn't change what they have had to say about living happily and finding well-being. Firstly, I don't want to convert anyone - that's not what this is

46 about – neither, come to that, is believing in a divine force or an afterlife or Christmas or Ramadam. It is just that in 54 years I have not found any other sources that deal so directly with the quest for happiness and well-being. The fact that we see these dreams and visions as religious ideals has in many instances watered down their vera- city but, set apart from religions and institutions, they are still dreams and visions and, for the most part, they still retain their revolutionary vision for being human. Perhaps that is what makes them almost uncomfortable: because they ask a lot of each one of us. So they should.

There are four areas I would like to gently explore. The first is the soul.

Soul is the Source

Being physical and impermanent, and I'll come onto that later, being alive now here breathing - come on - look at us as we are: it is nothing other than extraordinary! What an adventure, what a ride! However difficult, however painful at times, however perplexing and physically challenging, Life is a gift. An experience we unwrap. If there is a revolution coming - something the deep ecologist Joanna Macey calls ‘the great turning’ - it is not to do with our physical existence; it is to do with human identity. How we are what we are. Really, what is beginning to take place is a spiritual revolution - a discernible movement from one mode of being human to another. We are coming to the end of one age and the beginning of another. You won't find this in the news or in the shops; not yet. This change is taking place deep within us: at its heart is a knowing and understanding that we are souls, spirits in a material world. This change is coming about because of the great advances in medicine, in particular, but also in communications and a general level of comfort in the west, at least, that humanity has never really accepted before. The need to simply survive is not as pressing, as urgent as it has been in the human past.

Whilst the experience of life comes with no guarantees, modern medicine has enabled us to be slightly more relaxed about being here for the time being; we are not living under the same fragile licence as our forebears did. Not living under the same fragile licence is creating a new space. Whilst we are hard-wired at a very deep level for physical survival, the demands made upon us emotionally and spiritually to physically survive are not nearly as immediate as they would have been, even only four generations ago. One of the by-products of not having to concentrate on physical survival, not to have that ringing in our ears all the time, has meant, much to the surprise of science, that we are becoming more spiritual. We have the great privilege of having more space to experience existence rather than endure it. We have become more re-

47 laxed about living, being, because the threat of it all ending in plague or TB has been, for the time being, reduced. Of course, we still fear the pandemic but it appears slightly further away to us than in previous generations.

This really has created space for the soul: it has given time for the soul that human living up until now did perhaps not afford. The old religions in the West, at any rate, are declining because they existed within the framework of the fragile licence and, within that framework, life was much less certain, so you needed to constantly repent because you were not sure that you would be able to do so next week. So we have more space, more mental space, in which to explore. I can only speak of my experience here and that it has been one of understanding that the ‘I’ that has this body is not this body but something simply living within it. But it is when I look at others and see them as having a similar experience to mine that everything changes: when I see you as souls, just like me, inhabiting a body which is, for the most part, identical to mine. When I recognise that right now we are having a shared experience and, once I have accepted that I am talking to souls - soul to soul - not to bodies, at that moment it is as if everything calms down and I am not struggling any more. It feels rather like coming home that I recognise you as a soul experiencing life, just like me, and there is a tremendous sense of peace within that knowledge, that knowing that I have not ex- perienced before and maybe in the future we will be able to bring that inner being much more to the surface. To understand that when we start to live consciously as souls, then our sense of well-being in the midst of this experience will be greatly en- hanced, perhaps because it is the truth of who and what we are.

This is perhaps what Christ meant by parables such as the treasure in the field, the pearl of great price: he was talking about consciousness, he was a teacher of consciousness. The treasure in the field is the field itself: no more, no less. So I would say: number one is to become soul conscious - it is from here that everything else begins. Our current religious models are based largely on a re-enactment of the Christian calendar. I concede that for hundreds of years it provided a rhythm for life, but really the Christian calendar has very little to do with the teaching of Christ. Are we not in the position now in regards to Harvest festival where we are actually celebrating the eradication of butterflies and song birds, not to mention the environmental cost of what is produced in other lands and flown here? If we were to acknowledge our connectedness, our oneness, would our harvest festivals sound the same? When Christ speaks of God caring for the sparrows - and goes on to say how much more then does God care for us - what he is saying is that, as sentient beings, we can know the love of God more deeply, not that the sparrow is loved any less than we are. Therefore …

48 Honour the flies

I love what the Jain traditions has to say about our relationship with the natural world. First of all, we are asked to experience the natural world as something sacred and therefore something that we do not harm. It is this ' not harming' that is so essential to our experience of being who we are. In the west we have never lived in peace with the natural world, it has not been our tradition, it has not been our way of seeing ourselves. We have been predators, despoilers, eradicators and, when we see the natural world, that is the reflection of ourselves that we see in it.

The deep ecology movement invites us to see our humanity differently - through our relationship with the natural world. Invites us into a vision where we are not predators, despoilers and eradicators, but nurturers and guardians - where we exist in a state of communion with the environment. We have in the west never lived in this way: this, in part, has to do with the human identity we have inherited from previous generations, which has a great deal to do with their understanding of the sacred. But the Jain tradition and the emerging deep ecology movement have recognised that it is not possible for human beings to reach a place of well-being and ultimate happiness if we are living at war with the natural world. I am afraid this state of war is deeply en- trenched in our way of life and making peace will rightly ask a great deal from each one of us. The evidence of war is stark: just one look at the rapidly declining numbers of song birds, butterflies and invertebrates in this country is sobering enough. If that can't reduce us all to tears, then the United Nations red list of critically endangered species surely will … and all of these desperate figures, these salutary facts, present the greatest challenge to all the so-called world religions, because it has been under their watch that all this has, and is, taking place. The whole idea that you simply have to believe in God to be saved looks increasingly ludicrous and utterly disconnected from the backdrop of devastation unfolding at our hands in the natural world. Christ's call was for compassion, not to celebrate history but to realise the conscious state of compassion, to become compassion, to become love.

There are, however, some signs of real hope: the organic movement, the countless NGOs working to protect and nurture. I'm not keen on the term ' alternative sources of energy': it is natural energy and all of us should welcome and support its re-emer- gence, natural energy works with what is given rather than what is taken. It moves us closer to harmony with the natural world and living in an underlying harmony with the environment is nothing other than essential to realising a state of happiness and well-being. This state of harmony needs to be present on every front of our existence. Up until now technological progress has largely been sold to us claiming that it will

49 make living more easy and one of the main illusions that we have all subscribed to is that easy living will give us happiness and well-being. It hasn't! And it hasn't been able to do that because we haven't begun to measure the complete cost of the dish- washer in terms of what it costs the environment to be made and brought to our door and the environmental costs from there on in. The current world financial system is based on one element – gold - and does not take into account the cost, the impact, that our way of life is having on the rest of the planet. It has become dangerously one-di- mensional, hiding the true cost behind what is fast becoming an outmoded economic model for the planet. How many trees are felled on my behalf so that I might read? How many butterflies poisoned on account of my loaf of bread? How many dead fish are thrown back so that I might eat one? Yes, we move a little closer to this way of understanding by measuring our carbon footprint but really none of us has any idea of the true cost of the manner of our existence and, yes, that is going to make pretty harsh reading but we languish in illusion until we face that truth. Because that truth will reveal how disharmonious our current form of existing is in our relationship with the natural world. Just imagine what it might be like to be a nurturer, a guardian! What manner of beings might we become celebrating all life, carrying one life and living in a manner where we recognise one life carrying all life? That is the revolution we need to awaken to that reflection of ourselves as nurturers and guardians, to be conscious that our well-being is intricately linked to the well-being of all life on this beautiful planet that we share.

The philosopher and theologian Albert Schweitzer writes: “Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things man himself will not find peace”. The release of recognising this truth is immense: to realise that all birth is my birth, all breath is my breath, all blood is my blood, all pain is my pain, all love is my love. Oneness.

Realise that nothing belongs to you

The belief that we own things is actually a far shallower illusion than we might believe, but the weight of carrying the belief that things actually belong to us is far heavier than we have realised, and so many of us carry so much. Houses, cars, clothes, computers, paintings: it is a long, long list. It serves the financial and governmental institutions to foster an idea of ownership: it comes from an ancient exchange mech- anism. Kings, Queens, Moguls offered protection in return for allegiance and tax, and vestiges of this ancient arrangement still very much remain. The self-acknowledged first duty of any government in this country is the defence of the realm. But for you and your family to be defended the deal is you give something in return: that is where the very powerful idea of ownership comes in.

50 Fast on the heels of the idea of ownership comes the idea of value and there just happened to be a very handy little metal called gold that everyone eventually agreed should be the benchmark for value. As I mentioned previously, this system of valuing things on gold alone has become increasingly dangerous for all of us. First of all, ownership is not a reality - it is merely a belief system. Our society functions on the belief in ownership and value. Part of the environmental crisis we face is down to the fact that we believe in ownership - in ownership of fields, woods, rivers, trees, sheep … cats! One of the tenets of ownership is that if we believe it is ours we will take better care of it. Just one look at the state of planet earth is enough to show how flawed that argument is and the belief system from where it came.

Don't we tend to take better care of things when they don't belong to us, when we have borrowed them from a neighbour? The belief in ownership and our one-dimen- sional value system as one of the great blockers of well-being and happiness but it is relatively easy individually to find a way through. You just don't believe in it any more: that's all there is to it, you let it go. Do it now! Pick up what you believe is your pen and say to yourself, “This isn't mine. It's just a pen that I happen to be holding in my hand. The pictures on the walls - they are not mine. This house, this apartment - this isn't mine either - I just happen to be experiencing life here for a while. Really, I am just taking care of it for the next person who lives here. And this field, this field doesn't belong to me, these flowers, these grasses they don't belong to me, right now it is being used by a plethora of life. I might use some of it to create hay to feed some cattle that I am taking care of but neither the field nor the cattle belong to me, I am just taking care of them. The idea that we will only take care of something if we own it diminishes our human being because it is rooted in selfishness and that is the reflection of ourselves that we will reach by following that path.

The great Buddhist philosophy of ‘non-attachment' and Christ's observations on ma- terialism invite us into a different way of seeing ourselves. Just look at the body language of ownership: it's mine. Both Christ and Buddha reached a state of being where they recognised that the state of constantly craving more and more possessions means that the illusion of ownership has taken a hold. The illusion of ownership, or of seeking to own, will only result in an almost constant state of craving, agitation and dissatisfaction, worry, as we find ourselves or choose to become entangled in the roots of a system that has set us against each other competing for the possession of things that were never ours to take and are never ours to own. By not subscribing to the illusion of ownership actually frees us from selfishness and possessiveness and you and I become human beings that take care of things for the sake of others and we

51 will feel quite differently about ourselves as a result. Should Christians own property? Should dioceses own churches?

Embrace your impermanence

Sometimes I clatter around antique markets looking for presents. In many of them you can find old black and white photographs of faces from the beginning of the nineteenth century: men sporting fabulous moustaches, couples standing in front of church doorways, children holding puppies. I assume all of these individuals are now dead. Our fear of death is one of the main stumbling blocks to well-being and happiness, just knowing that we cannot last in this particular form that at any moment, this moment could be our last, tends to generate a state of uncomfortable tension, unease. If that is the case, then I have not completely accepted the reality of my own impermanence. Organic life on this planet exists and re-exists in a constant cycle of death and birth: my body is umbilically linked to that cycle and there is nothing any of us can do to escape it. Some of us may believe in an after-life and that may act as a kind of ‘death insurance' for us but a recent survey discovered that those with religious beliefs were just as fearful of death as those claiming to have none. So what do we do with the leaden weight of mortality? As our bodies fold inexorably into old age … Our field of reference for life begins within our mothers and, when we emerge from her womb, our world ends, or our world extends, to no more than a couple of feet.

As we grow, the world grows with us until one day we realise that I am ‘me’. There are two things that happen at that point: the first is we become self-conscious. It is a momentous point of awakening. This point of awakening is there in the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Having eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they then recognise for the first time that they are naked. With the awakening of self-consciousness, the ego rises and stakes its claim. At the age of 53, I am just beginning to celebrate the fact that we are not born into something immutable - we are born into a fluid, moving reality. By taking part in that reality, we take part in creation: in that sense we become creation. The astrophysicists will tell you that the dy- namism of birth and death, this constant state of movement, means the universe lives, and it is perhaps movement, change, evolution that is the signature of existence. I love the fact that in probably no more than 350 million years life on this planet will be un- able to exist as the sun expands and ultimately consumes this beautiful world. Planet earth is perhaps now in full bloom.

When we look around the rest of this solar system, every other planet, it would appear, does not have this cacophony of life that we are experiencing. And all of us are

52 constantly presented with a stark choice: we can either fear the reality of our impermanence, which is right at the root of our fear of death, or we can celebrate it, understanding that this is our flowering, brief and confusing, agonising and wonderful, that this is the signature of a universe we are a part of and that is part of us.

The happiest elderly people I know tell me that they are in a greater state of wonder at the sheer reality of life than they have ever been and that looking back over their lives their memories appear increasingly numinous and extraordinary: their relationships, their sorrows, their struggles, their joys. As one elderly man put it: “I never realised how beautiful it is and it becomes more beautiful every day.” I asked him about death, did he fear it? “Of course,” he replied, “But not nearly so much now that I have found wonder. Really, it feels like I have opened a door into the stars and at some point some of me will go through.”

It is the state of wonder, the ability to wonder, that is not only the antidote to fear, but the cure for the ills on the lid of the tin that we all experience from time to time. And it is this state of wonder that is the critical key to well-being and happiness, maybe because within it is an acceptance of the utterly ethereal impermanent reality that we are in, here in the earth of each moment, the moment now. The key perhaps to the state of wonder is in being real about our impermanence and about our fragility, our vulnerability. Saint Francis saw this, I think, very clearly: from a place of vulnerability comes compassion, from compassion comes love and love is the mother of peace. We have much to become.

Rev Peter Owen-Jones is Vicar of Glynde, West Firle and Beddingham in Sussex, England. He is also an author and television presenter. His 2009 BBC documentary, ‘How to Live a Simple Life’, saw him turn his back on consumerism to follow in the footsteps of St Francis. His other TV series include ‘Around the World in 80 Faiths’ and ‘Extreme Pilgrim’. His books include ‘Bed of Nails’, ‘Psalm’ and ‘Letters from an Extreme Pilgrim: Reflections on Life, Love and the Soul’.

*********