Principle 3: The purpose of our earth stewardship is to glorify God

This principle defines the proper purpose of an economic system in a Christian community. The word ‘eco-nomics’ literally means the laws of the household. The purpose of the earth household, as earth stewardship interprets its laws, is to glorify God. For thousands of years, human households accommodated themselves to the divine laws of earth household, more or less, or they perished. And, according to the Bible, the divine laws of earth household have served the divine interest, to divine glory.

Until now. As Thomas Berry puts it, industrial human civilization has taken creation off of God’s ‘auto-pilot’ system and put it on manual control. Human tools—human technologies—have given humans the leverage that makes ‘manual override’ of creation possible. Now human ‘laws’ govern how we use these tools, whose interests they serve. In practice, this mostly has been the interests of stockholders and private property, at least in the modern Western, over-developed economies. The earth stewardship principle of God-glorifying purpose challenges this usurpation of purpose. Earth stewardship demands that we align the interests of human households of every scale with the laws inherent in earth household.

This applies to all four types of human ‘households’—that is, to the four types of human organization that produce and consume:

• family households;
• businesses, ruled by the laws of profit and loss;
• nonprofits of all kinds, including religious organizations; and
• communities, and the governments that manage not just the business of the community (justice and peacekeeping, education, war and the military, records, public health and welfare, etc.), but also the commons and the community’s infrastructures.

Earth stewardship writers, like their secular environmentalist counterparts, have focused primarily on family households, as consumers, and on governments, as regulators. They have focuesd less consistently and less vigorously on direct challenge to corporate households, leaving that to governments as their surrogates in this arena. They also have tended to forget about themselves, to forget about congregations, in particular, as communities that produce and consume, and as communities that could model new ways for households to live on the land.

I believe the main focus of earth stewardship should be on these latter two hitherto less attended-to kinds of households. Business cares not a fig for the glory of God. Its purpose is profit. And business drives most of the destruction of creation.

Earth stewards should develop a much more creative and aggressively prophetic voice regarding business and economics, challenging both the system and the organizations and institutions that give it a body. On the positive side, earth stewardship should guide the creation of businesses that praise God and augment rather than diminish God’s handiwork. We should redefine business interest from profit and loss to service and protection. And we should redefine work.

Work as worship

If we believe that the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament proclaims His (sic) handiwork, then how, in practical terms, should our own handiwork—our earth stewardship and our human labor—add to creation’s worship? Beyond, that is, the obvious responsibility to do nothing that would diminish or degrade creation’s praise, which basic principle we have almost completely forsaken in our wantonness. What positive implications flow from the principle of purpose, beyond the obligation to restore what we have destroyed, to the degree that we can?

We are the only creature that, like God, creates with our handiwork. This means that the work of our hands and minds should be offerings of worship.

We should be able to joyfully lay what we make and do upon the altar of our worship as tokens of our gratitude, in imitation of God’s love of beauty and goodness, in respect of God’s abundance. The products and services of a faithful Christian economy, including our systems of delivery—transportation, packaging, advertising, etc.—should be fully recyclable and/or renewable, so as not to diminish but rather augment creation’s abundance and providence.

Just as importantly, work itself should be a blessing, not a curse, Genesis chapter three notwithstanding. The earth steward is right to question the Bible’s curse of labor. Yes, our toil is painful sometimes, but not always. Not all labor is a curse. Indeed, we often find joy in our work. And which glorifies God more, our pleasure in our labor, or our pain? Is the Judge of Genesis 3 so enamored of His (sic) judgment that only pain and sweat do satisfy? If so, then God would want us to deliberately add to the pain of work with workplaces of torture. Which, actually, greed and heartlessness all too often allow.

Rather, does not God’s judgment hang more heavily over bad business management, over the often distorted relations that govern our labor? Does not the Book of Life record whether we have loved our neighbor, down to the least of them—whether their wages can support a family and leave them an inheritance? Whether the wage slaves are set free? Whether the debtor finds mercy? Whether the worker, regardless of station, can know pleasure, growth and satisfaction in what she or he does? For whatever we do unto each other in our management of labor, we do unto the carpenter’s son. Thus, in how we make things no less than in what we make does the glory of God shine.

Principle Two: We worship the Creator, not the creation

Divine presence in creation—earth stewardship is protecting God’s revelation, for God is present in creation.

God may not dwell in nature in any way that invites our worship of nature. But God has certainly been present in nature in ways that invite our worship in nature. All of the important divine revelations in the Jewish and Christian and even Quaker traditions have taken place outdoors, often in wilderness, and usually through natural agency. Let’s list them:

Universal and symbolic revelation

• The act of creation itself—the Word of John’s gospel at work, God’s first revelation.
• God first speaks with Adam and Eve in the Garden—God’s first communication/revelation to humans.
• The Deluge—God first uses nature as a weapon.
• God promises covenantal peace to Noah; the rainbow as sign/revelation.
• Revelation to the patriarchs and matriarchs
• God promises fertility, a nation, and a landbase to Abram, taking him outside to count the stars (Gen 15:4-5), and again “near the great trees of Mamre” (Gen 18:1).
• God delivers Isaac from human sacrifice and renews the Abrahamic covenantal promise—a mountain and wilderness revelation. [Gen 22]
• Jacob wrestles with God/God’s angel and receives his name-giving as Israel—a river revelation. [Gen 32:22-32]

Revelations to Israel—the origins and deliverance of the people Israel

• God commissions Moses at the burning bush—a mountain and wilderness revelation.
• God redeems his tribe and creates a people at the Passover and Exodus.
• God reveals the law at Sinai—a mountain and wilderness revelation.
• God gives Ezekiel visions of the temple’s reconstruction by the River Chebar—a river revelation.

The origins of Christianity

• God provides signs at Jesus’ birth.
• God provides signs at Jesus’ baptism—a river revelation.
• Jesus is tested in the wilderness—a wilderness revelation.
• Jesus teaches the twelve and feeds the thousands; the sermon on the mount—mountain revelations.
• Jesus is transfigured—a mountain revelation.
• Jesus faces another trial in Gethsemane—a mountain (non-)revelation.
• Jesus is crucified—a mountain revelation.
• Jesus is raised from the dead.
• Jesus ascends into heaven—a mountain revelation.

Continuing revelation today

• The sacraments—baptism and the Eucharist—revelations through water and the fruits of the vine.

The Quaker tradition

• George Fox has a vision in which “I was come up into that state in which Adam was before he fell, in which the admirable works of the creation, and the virtues thereof, may be known, through the openings of that divine Word of wisdom and power by which they were made.” (Journal, Nickals ed., p.28)
• Fox has a vision on Pendle Hill of “a great people to be gathered”.
• Fox convinces several thousand Seekers at Firbank Fell and the Quaker movement is born in that beautiful, isolate place.
• John Woolman—several outdoor revelations.

God clearly prefers to communicate with God’s people outdoors, in natural surroundings or, better yet, in wild places. Especially on mountains or near rivers. Furthermore, many of us (certainly this is true of me) have had our own transforming religious experiences in nature, often as children or adolescents.

Nevertheless, despite the powerful lessons of our own tradition, we worship indoors. Our seminarians study under fluorescent lights. Their spiritual directors do not think of sending them into the wilderness for 40 days and nights of spiritual formation under the direct tutelage of the Holy Spirit and the Creator Father, even though this is what Jesus himself did. Unlike Jesus, who could have been a trail guide for the desolate places of Galilee, we often do not even know where our water comes from or where our waste goes.

Moses, Elijah, Jesus—these prophets knew the spiritual ecology of their landbases, none better than Jesus. He went to particular places for specific spiritual purposes. Why? Because the written tradition (not to mention local lore now mostly lost to us) gave these places religious-historical meaning. And because the landscape itself supported that meaning. Mostly, this had to do with thunderstorms, rain and lightning—that is, with the climate, topography, and ecology of Palestine, with the character of divine revelation, and with the character of the Divine Revelator. These prophets not only knew their ‘ecology,’ they also knew their God.

Ecology, specifically the climate and topography of Palestine, have played a defining role in the origins of our religious tradition and how we understand God’s revelations to us. Yet the earth stewardship tradition goes out of its way to warn us off of the very practices that brought Moses and Jesus into intimate communion with the Creator.

Every religion fears its mystics. They are out of your control. And they claim a higher source of authority, one that comes directly from God, than that of the people, structures, and rituals that a tradition can offer. They are going to trust the ideas and religious impulses that come from such direct revelation more than the ideas and behavior that predominate in any tradition. George Fox and Jesus himself stand shoulder to shoulder as rebel mystic prophets.

And the western religious tradition has always feared the paganism that lies so close to its own roots, but against which it has always defined itself. “Pagan” comes from the Latin pago, meaning to farm; “heathen” comes from heath—the western religious tradition has always also feared the people of the land, indigenous peoples, people who find the Creator in creation. And so it has turned its back on even its own foundational traditions of revelation in nature.

Modern religious earthcare practice should return to nature, where all the evidence of our own tradition suggests we are most likely to encounter God.

Principle 1: Creation is good . . . so where is the gratitude?

Introduction

Our goal is Christian community that lives gently on the land and offers pragmatic and prophetic alternatives to the world’s ways. Over the past 60 years, earth stewardship theologians have answered this call from God with increasing maturity and creativity. Our faithfulness to God’s call has included strong commitment to our tradition. Thus, while many tributaries have fed the movement, its main themes of Christian earth stewardship remain in the mainstream of Christian tradition.

However, its influence in real Christian communities and on the wider society has been minimal. In the last chapter, we explored some reasons why this might be so. We entertained some questions and challenges that might open ways toward deeper, more successful engagement with our ecological problems and options. Now I want to answer some of these questions, to move from the descriptive, rhetorical, and exploratory to the prescriptive, critical and provocative.

I’m going to challenge each principle one by one, but many of my questions and observations and criticisms cut through the individual principles to challenge the framework of earth stewardship as a whole. Indeed, many cut through earth stewardship as a niche theology within the tradition to challenge the fundamentals of the tradition itself. This is one of the marks of the severity of the ecological crises we face, that they call even our foundations as a civilization into question.

I am not optimistic, not about the prospects for change I outline in the following pages. Religious communities are inherently conservative, and rightly so. It should be hard to change an ancient yet living tradition. I don’t expect the mainstream of Christian tradition to change. But it has happened in the past. It happened in Judea two thousand years ago.

I do have faith, however, in the Holy Spirit. Something will happen. I may have it all wrong about the details, or even the broad outlines, of the revolution I propose. But I do expect God—the Mystery and Reality behind our religious experience—to reach through our inertia and ignorance and even our sinfulness to activate life-affirming changes in us—in some of us, anyway. In you and in me? What do you think?

Let’s find out . . .

Principle 1: Creation is good—so where is the gratitude?

I am sitting on the porch of a little cabin in the Poconos. Before me the hill slopes steeply down to Lake Wallenpaupack. The grass is lush, bright emerald in the sun, a deeper forest shade where the huge white pine throws its silhouette. The surrounding forest marches down to the lake on the right; on the left, from the water’s edge, the tree line angles up and to the left, framing the prospect of the lake. Across the wind-riffled grey of the water, on the farther shore, the forest climbs back up to the sky.

Robins hunt worms in the greensward. Swallows hunt the air above, zooming in their crazy patterns, flashing their underbellies as they bank, returning occasionally to the boxes on their poles placed around the fenced-in garden. Behind the fence, whose planks are blotched with moss, lie strawberry plants, tomatoes, a huge rhubarb plant—an acre of food. So good! So much to be thankful for!

But when, as a person raised in the Christian tradition, would I join my religious community in concentrated gratitude for all this? Where is the date on the religious calendar for the religious feast of thanksgiving?

These colors, the scent of pine, the song of birds, the brush of the breeze upon my face, the taste of this coffee and those strawberries; the food, the fuel, the building materials and fabrics; the sun, the clement climate, the aluminum for the boat and the refined oil that drove my wife and I here; my body and its senses, my brain and my words, my joy in the moment, my very life itself—all this—creation—all this is the first expression of the Creator’s goodness, unfolding for eons before the Incarnation and the Atonement. And without these first gifts, the Incarnation and Atonement could not have occurred. Yet when in the annual cycle of the Savior Son’s gifts do we remember and celebrate—and give thanks for—the prerequisite gifts of the Creator Father.

Perhaps you will point to Thanksgiving, the holiday. But Thanksgiving is uniquely American, or at least North American, and it is a secular holiday—it takes place on a Thursday. Moreover, Thanksgiving is rooted in history, not in the land. Without the tradition of desperate Pilgrims and generous Wampanoags, would the European settlers have come up with Thanksgiving on their own? By contrast, thanksgiving is the essential religious impulse of Indigenous peoples the world over. My traditional Mohawk friends begin every single gathering with their thanksgiving prayer. I have known that prayer to last 45 minutes. In the praying person’s own words, it reverently catalogs all the things we have to be thankful for, in categories, like a Walt Whitman poem.

Earth stewards raise up the inherent goodness of creation, and God bless them for it! But their tradition gives them precious little support. Why? Why is the Christian tradition so thoughtless, so thankless for all this goodness? Why has the Christian tradition historically ignored the land, its gifts and even their Giver, the Creator, with the attention of its heart, mind and spirit?

First, because Paul and his Gentile churches abandoned Jesus’ peasant roots. Paul spoke in mystical abstractions instead of folksy sayings and parables of the sower. A Roman citizen and an itinerant tradesman, he cared nothing for the land-based economy of Jesus’ first followers; rather, he cared about life in the city. More importantly, he threw over the law. As the exploding demographics of Gentile city-dwelling converts swamped the original Hebrew peasants and fishermen who were the first to hear the Good News, Christianity lost the spirit of thanksgiving. The Greek fear of death and the promise of resurrection replaced the Passover remembrance of Israel’s creation as a people and God’s gift of the Promised Land.

Paul delivered the second blow to the spirit of thanksgiving, also: Christ-centeredness. Where Jesus put the Father at the center of his life and teaching, Paul put Christ at the center of his—and ours. Jesus redefined God as Father; Paul redefined God as Son. Thus was the Creator downgraded to a second-tier godship.

And speaking of downgrades, the third blow was the Christian obsession with the Fall and the notion that creation was suffused with sin. Creation may have started out good, as we earth stewards claim, but no more. And the root of all that sin?: An animal, a vegetable (okay, a fruit), and a woman. And following the Fall?—God’s curse, of creation, fertility, and work. Add to this Paul’s Greek disgust with “the flesh”—it’s temptations, its corruption and eventual death—and you have a radical denial of the goodness of the Creator’s gifts in all its essential forms, a series of stumbling stones on the path to thanksgiving.

As a result, the first principle of creation’s goodness looks to me like a loser. Reestablishing the inherent goodness of creation against a deeply entrenched urban and Christo-centric tradition with its ancient bias against the flesh and a terminally corrupted world is nigh on hopeless. So far (and especially these days), apocalypse seems the winner instead—the expectation that God will destroy a fallen creation as one of His (sic) last saving acts—not some thankful return to a belief in its inherent goodness. No matter how sweet the taste of a strawberry or the dip and sweep of a tree swallow, the plagues and flames and death of Revelation seem more attractive, at least to some Christians. No, I fear that the hopeful enthusiasm for creation’s inherent goodness is a noble cause as a principle of earth stewardship, but a lost cause. Sin will win the war for the Christian imagination as it always has.

On the other hand, the earth stewardship writers (and also the apostle Paul) who insist that, while creation may be good, God does not dwell in creation in any way that would invite worship are only half right. God does dwell in creation, and that should invite worship, not of creation, but in creation, of its Creator.

So I say drop this principle. Or deal more realistically with our alienation from the natural gifts and processes of creation, gifts and processes upon which all civilizations depend—the fact that almost no one knows how to grow their own food anymore, or slaughter their own meat, gather their own fuel . . . It makes more sense to us to give thanks for Wal-Mart’s “low prices every day” and HD TV.

And we should deal more creatively with creation’s alleged fallenness and its detractors. Do we really believe in the Fall, as some species-defining moment of disobedience that infected all the human race and, indeed, all of creation, with sinfulness and corruption for all subsequent time until the End? Do we really believe that nature (animal, vegetable, woman) is the cause? Do we really believe, as I was taught, that there were no poison ivy or mosquitoes until Adam ate that apple? Is creation really utterly corrupt, not utterly good?

All this rests, of course, on the power of stories, as the fundamentalists and literalists rightly perceive—evolution as the story of creation versus Genesis 1-3. Where do we as earth stewards stand on this matter of creation’s true story? For Genesis 1–3 is not the true story of creation; it is a myth that nevertheless forms the foundation of our earth stewardship theology. Why should it? We will return again to the problem of sin when we look at principles eight and nine, that bad earth stewardship is a sin and that salvation in Christ is the cure. Maybe then we can decide whether we believe in creation’s goodness.

I’m still reviewing the book I almost finished on Christian earth stewardship, and have two new sections to share.

So far, I’ve posted:

• Ten Principles of Christian Earth Stewardship, just the briefest summary of a much more detailed treatment of the principles I culled from years of reading.
• Christian Earth Stewardship—A Dead End, which I probably should have left to the end. This describes how I came to feel that the stewardship approach used by most Christian theologians today just isn’t enough; it may even be an obstacle to truly effective earthcare.

Now I want to post two more lengthy entries and the link to a resource:

• Christian Earth Stewardship—Strengths and Weaknesses—this post.
• Christian Earth Stewardship—Assumptions—available now.
• Scriptural references for the Ten Principles and for other areas of earthcare concern.

Christian Earth Stewardship—Strengths and Weaknesses

Strengths

The greatest strength of Christian earth stewardship is that it is mainstream. It speaks to many people with a fuller understanding of the gospel, it opens a way into Christian environmentalism that many people can follow. It has defined for the first time whole new questions for Christian faith and practice that are nevertheless faithful to the gospel message. It maintains a celebratory and positive spirit, as well, no easy task in the face of our environmental problems. It does this by focusing on the Creator’s power and Christ’s redeeming love.

Christian earth stewardship is also articulate. Its writers give us good reasons for being good stewards. They develop solid arguments for nature’s intrinsic worth without negating its instrumental value to human endeavor. By tying creation’s goodness to the Creator’s goodness, and by focusing on our capacity for righteousness—by prescribing a dominion tempered by obedient stewardship—they strike a pragmatic balance between human and nonhuman need, and raise a fence against human greed. Also, stewardship effectively defines human humility—knowing our true place in the scheme of things—as essential to our communal identity.

This movement genuinely strives for justice. It is very clear that social, political, and economic injustice help to cause and exacerbate our environmental problems and that environmental solutions must include progress toward peace and justice. Earth stewardship is especially sensitive to the international sphere, to the ecological dimensions of the suffering of the world’s poor, especially, and how structural economic oppression drives ecological collapse.

Weaknesses

The most obvious problem with earth stewardship theology is that it isn’t working. At least not fast enough. While it goes too far to claim, as some have, that Christian tradition is the cause of our environmental crisis, certainly the tradition has done very little to stop it. Christian communities (by which I mean congregations and larger groups like synods, conferences, dioceses and other denominational and inter-denominational organizations) are in most cases no more eco-sustainable than the wider society. Its members and leadership are no more likely to speak out against ecological malpractice or to present viable concrete alternatives than non-religious people. Christian earth stewardship is not reaching the communion of believers with its message, and the communion is not evangelizing the wider society toward earthhealing and earthkeeping.

We must ask ourselves why?

The reasons are related to our manner of proclamation and to the matter that we proclaim; that is, to church structure and institutional life, and to the compelling power of the Word in our time.

If the people in the pews and the congregation as a community are to internalize these new values and ideas, their pastors and priests have to internalize them. This means seminaries have to internalize them. To guide these institutions, their governing bodies need to internalize them. We need to eco-evangelize the administrative leadership of denominations and the boards of their seminaries; we must reach out to their faculty and student bodies, and, of course, to their administrators.

The gospel successfully communicates the grace of God when it speaks with meaning and power to the needs of the people, when it heals, when it opens doors into hope, when it shows people who they can be and what they can do in the world to matter.

The environmental crisis is a frightening, confusing, and hopelessly huge problem for most people. At the same time, it is rarely perceived as a direct personal threat in the way that a shrinking economy is, or the behavior and social future of our kids, crime and drugs, the disintegration of the family. How is earth stewardship relevant to these other problems? In fact, how is the gospel as a whole relevant?

Many people want to experience their salvation, not just believe in it. Christian earth stewardship will begin to transform people’s lives and their churches when they experience it as an integral part of a gospel message that speaks to all of their concerns. When it reduces their anxieties, upholds them materially as well as emotionally and spiritually, when it provides their families with strong stable support, when it gives them joy in God—then this landed gospel will blow into our lives “like the rush of a violent wind.”

We earth stewards must ask ourselves: Where is the transforming power of the gospel message as a whole? How is the earth stewardship message integral to this God-breathed core of teaching and practical guidance? How do we communicate the urgency of the environmental crisis and the relevance of our vision of salvation as essential elements of Jesus’ message?

So far, Christian earth stewardship is mostly theology. It has not explored its practical, real-life implications very deeply. This is its second greatest weakness.

This isn’t a problem in itself. It is perfectly natural for new understandings of the gospel to arise among theologians who are actively reflecting on their tradition and its relation to the world, and to find expression as ideas in words. Only now it is time to begin translating our faith into practice. What are the implications of earth stewardship for church potluck dinners, baptismal practice, Bible study, Sunday school curricula, parish groundskeeping, witness in the local planning board, community economic renewal, housing…? What concrete alternatives can we provide? What is our new vision for Christian living and how do we get there?

To make this next move, earth stewardship theologians need to overcome a third problem: we must take ourselves more seriously. The Ten Principles have powerful far-reaching potential for social transformation if we take full responsibility for them. Most earth stewardship writers stop short of declaring the full radical implications of their own principles.

At the heart of the problem is the declaration that earth stewardship is the right management of God’s property, which we hold in trust. To proclaim that the land belongs to God—and to take that proclamation seriously—challenges the very foundation of capitalist economics and enlightenment political theory, in which every individual has the right to life, liberty, and property. So far, earth stewardship writers have made the claim of God’s sovereign ownership of creation, and then let it go. This is a hot potato, a root principle of earth stewardship that we cut up into fast-food french fries. We should either drop it and deny God’s claim on the land, or fully develop a new understanding of property ownership that is grounded in the gospel.

Another principle that earth stewardship has sown on the path and then left to the birds is covenant. This is an ideal theoretical context in which to get real about land tenure and land use law. Now we are ready to develop real covenants. What sorts of binding agreements can we make with each other and with God about how we live on the land? Inside the church, how do we hold each other accountable for our ecological practice, both in family households and in the household of the parish? Outside the church, how do we hold corporations, utilities, and our governments and other social institutions accountable under the law?

Or is covenant merely a rhetorical device?

When we take these principles seriously, we realize that reform isn’t enough. So far, earth stewardship is a reform movement. However, our problems—social, political, economic, ecological, even religious—are so interrelated that the piecemeal, issue-oriented, institution-based, reactive measures that characterize both secular environmentalism and Christian earth stewardship are insufficient, even when taken all together. You can’t save the ozone layer without political regulation, economic conversion, and restructuring, redefining consumer desire through the media, changing agricultural practice, and understanding that shredding the ionosphere tortures the worship of the firmament into a screaming lament for God’s handiwork. Everything has to change because everything is interrelated. This means revolution, not reform.

Nonviolent social transformation on this scale requires radical alternatives to community life. Here, the Christian tradition is one step ahead because we already have communities that are (theoretically) aligned to God, not to the over-culture, and they remain the last bastion of hope (though under siege) for holistic community. When we look more closely at parish life as the locus and focus of ecological ministry, what opportunities do we see? If we think more boldly, what new alternatives for community life does God offer us? When we look at the early Jesus movement as a revolutionary one, does it inspire us with our own revolutionary alternatives?

The final question is one of leadership. Who will start? And when? Revolutions build in a community until someone strikes a spark. That spark catches among some—usually the young and the dispossessed—and then others try to stamp it out. They usually succeed. Has the tinder been laid? When the movement ignites, will our leadership answer with wisdom and joy or with fear? with ideas and support, or with alarms and wet blankets?