When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound,
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry (2018); The Peace of Wild Things.
US President Richard Milhous Nixon is of course best known for being the only American president to resign, amid the lies and the cover-up of the Watergate scandal. It is also fairly well-known that he effectively prolonged the Vietnam War, by scuppering peace talks just before the 1968 US General Election, which, had they succeeded might have seen his Democrat rival Hubert Humphrey overtake him in the race for the White House.
Given this wretched record, it probably comes as something of a surprise that Nixon was actually responsible for two positive, and what would be seen as liberal, domestic strands in his presidency. Firstly, he did more for Native Americans than any other president in the 20th Century. Secondly, he established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in his first term of office, in response to growing concerns about environmental issues, both in America and across much of the world. The same pressures preceded the huge participation in the US to mark the first Earth Day on 22nd April, 1970.
It was during the establishment of the EPA and other environmental measures that Nixon famously said to Congress that it was time for “man to make his peace with nature.” Yet here we are over 50 years later and the degradation of the environment continues apace, with the current US President seemingly determined to wage war on creation, rather than make peace with it.
Creation season
A new season has recently been added to the church calendar; the Season of Creation, which is strictly speaking a mini season within the season of Pentecost, running through September, up until Sunday 4th October. As American theologian, preacher and writer Diana Butler-Bass has put it: “The Season of Creation explores and celebrates the natural world and the human relationship with the environment.”
The season is an opportunity for Christians and non-Christians alike to explore just what we should and indeed should not be doing when it comes to our relationship with the environmental world around us.
Dominion vs stewardship
There has long been a debate within theological and philosophical circles about the meaning of certain passages in Genesis, the opening book of the Bible. Chapter 1 v: 26 – 28 reads:
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish in the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Then in the next chapter, Genesis 2:15:
“And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.”
In 1967 Lynn T. White, Professor emeritus of history at University College Los Angeles, laid down the gauntlet to the churches by claiming that the environmental crisis had come from the Judeo-Christian way of thinking that God had made man in his own image, given man dominion over the world and therefore, in the words of Michael Turgeon: “nature has no value apart from what it provides us, and thus we are free to exploit it without consequence.”
White could also have pointed to humanity’s desire for industrial progress, not to mention greed and the influence of the capitalist system in creating the modern industrial world which he bemoaned so much.
White’s thesis provoked a counter view which emphasised that the Judeo-Christian tradition was being misunderstood, and that the tradition really stands for humans being good stewards of the Earth, although we have often failed to live up to the ideal. Indeed, it can be argued that there are far more Biblical references to the beauty of Creation and to being good stewards, than any mentions of having dominion or being able to simply exploit the earth for our own ends. But also, in response to White, since the late 1960’s theologians and philosophers have become much more interested in what we might call ecotheology, and this underpins the idea of the Season of Creation.
Stanislaw Rabiej, a Polish academic has attempted to synthesise the different ecological trends in theology that have developed since the late 1960’s. Rabiej mentions Pope Francis’ papal encyclical Laudato Si’ Movement and Roger S. Gottlieb’s A Greener Faith; a major survey of the rise of environmentalism. These are two examples of the way in which ecotheology has grown in recent years, and been documented.
Rabiej (Uniwersytet Opolski; 2021; ‘Ecotheology in the service of Religion and Science’) also notes that:
“The era of ecotheology did not develop fully until the 1960s. It was first publicly announced by the Protestant ecotheologist Joseph Sittler. Inspired by the Letter of St. Paul to the Colossians, Sittler called for a new theology of grace (charitology) that would include, not exclude, nature.”
At the same time Sittler was talking to ecotheologists such as Aldo Leopold and ecologically sensitive Christian poets including Gerard Manley Hopkins.
In this way and through the work of many others such as Bill McKibben in the United States, the last 60 years have seen the development of ecotheology, which has led to the establishment of the Season of Creation. This has been accompanied by calls for theologians and scientists to work more closely together to help find solutions to our environmental crises, and by calls for Climate Justice whereby those suffering from the effects of climate change should be helped as appropriate, and that any transition to a greener economy should be fair.
Thomas Berry and John Zizioulas
Two people particularly singled out by Rabiej for mention are Thomas Berry and John Zizioulas.
Of Thomas Berry (1914-2009), Rabiej says this:
“He believed that humanity, after an era of thoughtless exploitation of the planet’s resources, was ready to assume a new role. Its essence would be to understand oneself as part of a larger, interdependent earthly community, consisting a community of subjects, and not a set of objects. He argued people to be at a critical turning point, marked by the transition from the “Cenozoic Era” to a new phase of evolution that would become either an “Eco-Era” characterized by a stronger human-earth relationship, or a “Technozoic Era” in which man would dominate and exploit the planet through technological expansion. He also announced that the transformation of humanity’s priorities would not be easy. This “great work” will be accomplished in several institutional spheres: in the political and legal order, economic and industrial life, education and religion.”
It is also noted that Berry calls upon us to return to an earlier form of Cosmological Christianity, in order to help us to respect the environment more and to better understand our place within it, rather than above it. Perhaps in this way we could return to the wisdom and spirituality so clearly displayed in the Middle Ages by St Francis of Assisi.
Developing this theme further, Zizioulas has written about the way in which the philosophical trend towards anthropocentrism, the line of thought which places man above nature, has contributed to the environmental crisis. This way of thinking has been traced all the way back to Plato in Ancient Greece; although there are also those who would challenge it.
Comment
The Season of Creation is an opportunity for us to stand back and think more deeply about our place in nature and our role in sustaining it. In so doing it is an opportunity for science and religion; which are often and, in my view, unfairly portrayed as enemies; to come together to help us to discover just what the problems are and how we can solve them.
As the Scottish writer Alistair McIntosh has put it: Climate Change is a cultural, psychological and spiritual crisis, with its roots deep within our psyches as humans.
We undoubtedly need the science to guide us and should reject any political or academic leader who refuses to follow the science rigorously. But we also need the kind of psychological and spiritual insights that the Season of Creation can give us. These insights can help us to see our place in creation clearly, and give us the emotional and intellectual tools to enable a greater appreciation of nature. Then we may see ourselves as an integral part of it and not just as some life-form lying outside the web of life, which can use creation for its own ends.
In this way, perhaps we can indeed make our peace with Creation and enjoy the beauty around us and in the words of Wendell Berry, ‘rest in the grace of the world, and [be] free.’
