Ten Principles of Christian Earth Stewardship
April 24, 2016 § 5 Comments
Christian theologians began addressing the destruction of creation in a serious way after Rachel Carson published her landmark book Silent Spring in 1960. For my first book on earthcare, I read a lot of these books and began synthesizing the main common themes. I found ten such themes.
The first several principles define God’s relation to creation as its Creator. Principle four—the central principle of Christian earth stewardship—defines the human’s proper relation to creation. The rest of the principles define the human’s proper relation to God vis a vis creation. Together these principles define a covenantal triangle, a three-way set of mutual promises and obligations, though these Christian theologians mostly ignore God’s side of the covenant and focus only on ours.
Here are the ten themes or core ideas I found in this literature:
- “The earth is the Lords”: God is the sovereign proprietor of creation—not humans. (Ps. 24:1)
- “Behold, it was utterly good”: God’s creation is inherently good.n (Gen 2:4)
- “The heavens are telling the glory of God”: The creation glorifies God; therefore so should we, especially in our earth stewardship. (Ps. 19:1)
- “Have dominion . . . “: We are given dominion over creation, but only in trust as stewards. (Gen 1:28)
- “A little lower than God”: Among the creatures, we humans enjoy the privilege of God’s special favor. (Ps 8)
- “Because they worshiped the creature rather than the creator”: We worship the transcendent Creator, not the creation. (Rom 1:25)
- “I am establishing my covenant with you”: Covenant is the rightful context for our earth stewardship. (Gen 9:8)
- “Open your hand to the poor”: Responsible earth stewardship calls for social justice. (Deut 15:11)
- “The time has come . . . for destroying those who destroy the earth”: We are called to responsible earth stewardship; harming creation is a sin.
- “The creation waits with eager longing”: Salvation in Christ offers the prophetic promise of a new covenant with creation. (Rom 8:19)
Writers supported these principles with biblical proof texts. Soon I will provide a document with the passages I found either in my reading or in my own research. I reviewed it briefly and saw some problems with it; I haven’t looked at it in a while.
A lot of these Bible passages don’t really work very well, in my opinion. A lot of the time, you must argue from inference and stretch the meaning pretty thin, at that. The most glaring case are those supporting the idea that destroying creation is a sin. This is the key claim of Christian earth stewardship, and yet nowhere in the Bible does it say this outright.
All Christian theology must work within the basic framework of its sin-salvation paradigm, in which the basic human problem, not just spiritually, but in all human spheres, is sin, and the irreplaceable solution is salvation in Christ. So Christian earth stewardship theologians must add bad earthcare to the already long list of sins, a list that is dominated by things that have been on the list for millennia and have been more clearly defined in the Bible.
But I am getting to my critique. For, after writing most of this book, I came to the depressing conclusion that the book led to a dead end, that Christian earth stewardship was itself a dead end, and that some new approach was required. I felt I had to start over, after years of research and writing.
Quaker Earthcare Testimony—An Opening
April 23, 2016 § 1 Comment
From opening to leading to ministry
In 1990, Buffalo Meeting asked New York Yearly Meeting’s Friends in Unity with Nature task group to bring them a program for the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day, which was still celebrated on Sundays then. NYYM’s FUN had been established by the little group that heard the word from Marshall Massey’s address to the FGC Gathering several years before.
A f/Friend and I went to Buffalo, and I had my notes all ready. But while praying over them the night before, I had an opening. I would later find the opening articulated by Matthew Fox in The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, so I know the basic ideas were in the air, but to me it came as a thunderbolt, a new revelation. The opening was this:
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made. (John 1:1-3)
If the Christ was the Word, the Logos, the organizing principle and order of creation, then to destroy creation was to re-crucify Christ.
Now I knew the Bible pretty well and immediately, meaning began branching out from this white hot source point, leaving trails like fuses to other Bible passages and new ideas. I was on fire. The next morning I shared this stuff with the meeting, receiving a cool reception. I don’t think they were expecting a Scripture-based sermon.
Well, neither was I. I had spent the last couple of decades bashing the Bible and being openly hostile to Christians and their ideas. But here I was quoting the Bible and sharing what was obviously a Christian message.
Over the next few weeks, the ideas just kept coming. The fire within me just got more intense. It became clear that I was led to write a book, a book of biblical earthcare theology.
Because this was such a cross to my will, I asked my meeting for a support committee. I was afraid that my hostility toward the Bible and toward Christianity would interfere with the truth I was seeking. I didn’t get the support I wanted and that is another story. But I found I had to go on without that support anyway. Soon I was applying to be a resident student at Pendle Hill, intending to start my research and my writing there. I was at Pendle Hill for two terms, coincident with the first gulf war in 1991.
I continued my research for several years, studying the Bible intensely and also reading Christian earth stewardship theology. In 1995, I went to Earlham School of Religion under the Patrick D. Henry Scholarship for Christian Writers and began writing in earnest. The result was How Long Will the Land Mourn: A Synthesis and Critique of Christian Earth Stewardship. The title comes from my favorite Bible passage on earthcare:
How long will the land mourn,
and the grass of every field wither?
For the wickedness of those who live in it
the animals and the birds are swept away,
and because people said,
“He does not see what we do.”
In the next post: the Ten Principles of Christian Earth Stewardship, the first fruits of this leading.
The Foundation of our “Testimonies”
April 21, 2016 § 8 Comments
You hear Friends say sometimes that our testimonies are founded on the belief that there is that of God in everyone—that, as Philadelphia Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice puts it, “We believe there is that of God in every person, and thus we believe in human equality before God” (p. 75). But this is untrue in several ways—historically, theologically, and psycho-spiritually.
First, anti-historically, if you will, Friends have only meant what we seem to mean by the phrase “that of God in everyone” since sometime around 1900 when Rufus Jones gave the phrase its current “neoplatonic” twist.
By “neoplatonic” I mean the idea that we each possess a divine spark, a shard of the divine, which serves as our vehicle for mystical experience of the greater Divine, an idea that had its roots in Plato’s philosophy and was subsequently developed by Plotinus (204-270 CE) and later neoplatonist philosophers. Rufus Jones found in this idea a key to religious experience in general and to Quakerism in particular, and he was, I believe, the first to apply the idea to Fox’s phrase “that of God in everyone”.
Meanwhile, this is not at all what George Fox had in mind when he used the phrase “that of God in everyone”. For him, “that of God” in a person was the work that Christ was doing in them to save, transform, and sanctify them. Fox used the phrase almost exclusively in his pastoral writings, not in his doctrinal writings, including in the passage that everyone quotes as their source for the phrase. He is saying there that if you do your own inner work then you will be able to answer the work Christ is doing in others with integrity because you’ve been there yourself.
So much for the anti-historical use of “that of God” as foundation for the testimonies. Historically speaking, our testimonies derive from two sources, an outward and an inward.
Outwardly, they derive from early Friends’ distinctive reading of scripture. Sandra Cronk’s pamphlet Peace be with You: A Study of the Spiritual Basis of the Friends Peace Testimony lays this out for the peace testimony in wonderful detail. The “testimony of equality” has its roots, I believe, in our refusal to give hat honor, which arose, I believe, from early Friends’ distinctive reading of a line from the book of Acts, chapter 10 verses 34 and 35:
Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.
This Friends understood to mean that God judges all people equally regardless of their social station. Peter is speaking to the household of Cornelius, a centurion who had sent for him because of a vision. Cornelius had prostrated himself when Peter arrived and Peter “took him up, saying, “Stand up. I myself am also a man.” Peter then went on to point out that “it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath showed me that I should not call any man common or unclean”.
But the deeper source for the testimonies is inward. For early Friends, the testimonies arose from within. Friends experienced the “testimonies”, not as outward moral principles to which we should adhere, or even as ideas they got from the Bible, but inwardly as the moral force of the Light of Christ within them, which brought them into that “Life which taketh away the occasion of all wars”, as Fox said of what we now call the peace testimony. So the first-order source of our testimonies was the Light, and the second-order source was scripture, which confirmed the divine truth that had come to Friends first as inward revelation.
And so it is with us today. Speaking “psycho-spiritually”, we do not turn away from violence and turn toward peace because we believe in that of God in others—or because we believe in any outward principle or notion at all—but because “that of God” within us—the Light—turns us away from violence and toward peace. We know the truth of the “peace testimony” or any testimony because the Light has revealed it to us inwardly, just as it did for early Friends. . . . In theory, at least.
So the belief in that of God in everyone has nothing to do with the traditional Quaker testimonies. . . . Except that now it does, by virtue of having been embedded that way in the religious worldview of an awful lot of Friends. Never mind that this is a misreading of the phrase. Never mind that this usage tends to point us outward toward a theological notion, rather than inward toward the source of Truth. Never mind that it both distorts and forgets our history. Lots of Friends now believe that there is that of God in everyone. And for that matter, lots of Friends believe that this idea is the foundation of our testimonies, even if they are wrong about that—or are they?
Maybe this idea of a neoplatonic, or neo-Gnostic “that of God” within us is new Light. Maybe this idea is a true revelation, manifesting through Friend Jones initially, and now speaking to that of God within many of us today. Maybe there is a “that of God” in each of us. The idea’s been around for a hundred years, after all; it’s stood the test of time, if not the test of rigorous philosophical/religious scholarship, careful study of our tradition, or thoughtful historical research.
The idea doesn’t work for me, I must say. I am too much of an empiricist and existentialist. I have not experienced that of God in other people in any way that would allow me to make such a sweeping and profound generalization about human/divine nature. I have experienced the Light within myself, yes, but not a “divine spark” in myself or in others.
I have experienced something truly extraordinary and transcendental both in myself and in others, however. The leap for me is calling that “something” divine, calling it that of God. This something I have experienced seems blessedly human to me, even if it is transcendental in nature. Maybe some Friends feel that anything transcendental in the human should be considered divine.
Well—let’s say for matters of discussion that there is, in fact, “that of God” in everyone, whatever that means (another concern of mine: we use the phrase all the time but have never collectively explained to ourselves in any meaningful terms what we mean by it).
Nevertheless, “that of God” in everyone is NOT the foundation of any of our testimonies. It is NOT where our testimonies come from, either historically or experientially. We could add it to our story about the testimonies with integrity only if we clarify its role: it is a theological speculation about the nature of the human and of the human’s relationship to the divine that many of us find compelling. But it remains a “notion”, a theological idea, until we ourselves have experienced it. And it has no proper place in Quaker “doctrine”—what we tell people about ourselves—until the community comes to unity collectively around the experience—the experience, not the idea—as divine truth.
Through the Flaming Sword 