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One Step Backward

The human species, as just about any thoughtful soul who keeps up with the daily news will have recognized by now, is currently facing a global environmental and justice emergency of unprecedented magnitude, signaled above all by the threat of human-induced climate change. Some prefer to call this the threat of climate destruction.

In recent years, leaders of the ecumenical Church have been at the forefront of those who have been calling all citizens of the Earth to address this global emergency. His Holiness, Pope Francis, may only be the most famous of those Christian leaders who have responded to the onslaught of the global crisis, with his powerful and widely hailed 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’: On Care of Our Common Home.1

With many other Christians around the globe, I, for one, as a matter of course enthusiastically welcome the current ecumenical response to our global crisis. But I also recognize that sometimes it is wise, at least for some, to take one step backward, in order to make it easier for others to take two steps forward.

1.

As a matter of fact, the Holy Father himself has already highlighted the strategy of taking one step backward in order to take two steps forward in his aforementioned encyclical and, all the more so, by his decision to take the name of St. Francis. The Pope has stepped back to reclaim the witness of that venerable thirteenth-century celebrant of nature—along with other historic Catholic figures—in order to help the whole Church move forward to address the global ecojustice challenges of our own day.

Catholic theologians of the Vatican II era thought of this kind of process as a return to the sources, ad fontes, a return driven by a passion to then step forward into more promising theological worlds, under the guidance of the Spirit of Truth. Pope Francis is an heir of that kind of thinking.

In this book, much more modestly, I am proposing to take one theological step backward, in behalf of the two theological steps forward that I believe that the whole ecumenical Church is being called upon to undertake today, following the example of Pope Francis. Here I propose to take the reader back—ad fontes—to some critically important existential places in the thought and practice of the traditions of the Protestant Reformation. My purpose is to make it possible for those who join me in these retrospective explorations, especially heirs of that sixteenth-century theological movement, but also, I would hope, heirs of the Catholic Reformation later in the same century (Council of Trent), to enrich their theological responses to the global emergency we all are facing today.

To facilitate the discussion, I want to begin with some terminological observations. Many of the key constructs I will be employing in these studies I will understand in terms of ordinary speech. Thus I will typically take “nature” to mean what we commonly think of as the natural world. The only place where I will attempt to define “nature” in specific theological terms will be in my discussion of Luther’s thought, for reasons that I will explain at that point . And “ecology” I will take to refer the now widely-attested scientific approach to nature as a world of interrelated subsystems. Further, the context in which “nature” or “ecology” and related words or expressions occur will, I believe, generally disclose the nuances I have in mind for a term’s meaning in each instance and thereby, hopefully, avoid any serious confusion.

2.

This book itself will unfold in the following manner. I propose to take the reader first to the heart of the Reformation experience: pondering the Scriptures anew (Chapter 1). Whatever else the Reformation slogan sola scriptura might have meant in the sixteenth century, today it surely means that the theological heirs of the Protestant Reformation will continue to be passionately preoccupied with the Scriptures, to be in love with them, as it were. So I will ask, first thing: how are we humans to live with nature, according to the Scriptures?

Drawing on work of my own over several decades, I will suggest in this chapter that the time is at hand for the ecumenical Church to move beyond the immensely popular theological construct of stewardship of nature to a fresh and more comprehensive construct of partnership with nature. Why? Because this is how I believe that the Scriptures mandate us to celebrate nature by faith in these times.

This chapter will also serve another important purpose. It will outline what I take to be the main lines of a biblical understanding of nature, with a strong emphasis on the Old Testament. I will go into considerable detail along the way, highlighting the findings of biblical scholars across the ecumenical spectrum whenever possible. For heirs of the Protestant Reformation, as for many other Christians these days, such biblical findings will be of the utmost importance, since most, if not all, of us are committed to regard the Bible as the primary sourcebook of our faith.

I will then take readers to a place that will come as no surprise to many Protestants, and probably not to anyone with theological interests who has ever encountered the world of Reformation thought: to consider the theology of Martin Luther himself and his own vibrant way of celebrating nature by faith (Chapter 2). This is ad fontes for me—as it will be for many other Lutherans and for numerous Protestant fellow-travelers, too. This is a topic that also has preoccupied me for many years.

Luther is my “Church father.” He is, as it were, my St. Athanasius or my St. Francis or my St. Thomas Aquinas or my John Calvin or my John Wesley. He is first among equals, prima inter pares, in my own theological world. For me, Luther not only lived and spoke in the past. He also speaks with a living voice today, for better, for worse. And I know that many others in the ecumenical community today, including Pope Francis himself, also take Luther seriously in some manner, as the recent global celebrations of the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation showed.

Just for this reason, I will try to identify the historic voice of Luther as carefully as I can. I will attend to Luther’s own way of thinking in its own setting as he himself celebrated nature by faith, because Luther is the hero of a thousand causes. And I would not want to appear as if I were somehow taking him captive to my own—urgently contemporary—cause.

I will next explore the pioneering achievement of that ecumenically driven American Lutheran ecotheologian of the mid-twentieth century, Joseph Sittler (Chapter 3), which began publicly with his address to the World Council of Churches Assembly in 1961. In that presentation and elsewhere in his writings, Sittler celebrated nature by faith in a variety of ways, above all by his call for renewed interest in cosmic Christology. Notwithstanding the sometimes less than enthusiastic theological responses that his proposals elicited in those days, Sittler believed that, by celebrating nature by faith the way he did, he was reclaiming the witness of the Scriptures and also the teachings of Luther in a manner that could and would forthrightly address the theological challenges of our own era of ecological crisis.

In the following chapter, I will highlight the promising contributions of several other American Lutheran theologians to the field of ecological theology as it emerged during the second half of the last century, in the aftermath of Sittler’s proposals (Chapter 4). Theirs was a multidisciplinary celebration of nature by faith: theological anthropology (Philip Hefner), systematic theology (Ted Peters), Old Testament studies (Terence Fretheim), liturgical theology (Gordon Lathrop), the history of Christian thought (myself), and ecojustice ethics (Larry Rasmussen). In this chapter, I will also discuss the consonant emergence of a range of practical theological initiatives and their influence, above all the contributions of a number of outdoor ministries in the US.

The last of the five studies in this book will be a testimonial, a personal narrative of what it can mean to celebrate nature by faith as a Reformation theologian who has aspired to be heard as a member of the ecumenical Church (Chapter 5). I believe that the time has come for me, after working with the theology of nature for more than fifty years, to own up to the strengths and weaknesses, such as they might have been and such as I might be able to discern them, of my own theological labors. What, I will ask, does the work of a single Reformation ecotheologian of longstanding look like from within?

I will leave it to others to decide how helpful my own ecotheological labors over the past fifty years might have been: to ask how any theological dead-ends that have appeared might be avoided in the future or what insights, if any, might be claimed for further reflection. In this chapter, I especially will have college students, seminarians, younger theologians, and Church environmental activists of all ages in mind, across the ecumenical spectrum. I will be saying: these were my challenges and my struggles, theologically and vocationally. I hope that you will be able learn something from the way I addressed those challenges and struggles, positively or negatively or perhaps both, as you chart your own theological and vocational courses in this time of crisis.

I am well aware that in shaping the whole book the way I have done—highlighting not only the witness of the Scriptures, but also Luther’s theology, the vision of a major Lutheran theologian, Joseph Sittler, the contributions of several other contemporary Lutheran theologians, and concluding with a single Lutheran ecotheologian’s story, my own—that the whole project I have in mind could appear to be parochial, in the narrow sense of that word. Doesn’t our world in crisis require multi-religious investigations or at least broadly based ecumenical responses? In these times, won’t the very idea of the particularistic theological project that I am proposing here suffer from what some wag once called—hardening of the categories? I don’t think so.

I don’t dispute for a moment the fact that what our world in crisis needs now is to hear the voices of many religious traditions, along with the broadly based testimony of ecumenical Christianity. But there is surely a place for—possibly profound enrichment from—the witness of particular theological traditions, even denominational variants of those traditions. But it would take me too far afield to consider that kind of question in advance. I can only say this much here, invoking an ecological image. One tree doth not a forest make, surely. But sometimes it can be very helpful to understand the life of a single tree, precisely in order better to understand how to strengthen the wellbeing and even the flourishing of the whole forest.

3.

Each of the following five studies, I hope, will stand on its own. But I also hope that readers will discover a common theme, along the way, that unites them all. In this sense, the whole of this book is greater than the sum of the parts. I want to identify that theme at the outset. It has to do with the scope of theological reflection. It also has to do with what sets the kind of Reformation theology presupposed by these particular studies apart from a number of other major Western theological trends.

Consider these questions. When you think theologically, what are you thinking about? What are the primary objects of your reflection? For numerous prominent Christian theologians in the West, especially in the modern era, the answer to that question has been emphatically clear: God and humanity. Perhaps the most important champion of this view was the theologian who has sometimes been thought of as the Thomas Aquinas of the Reformation tradition, Karl Barth (1886–1968).

Early in his professional life, Karl Barth published a book of lectures with the title The Word of God and the Word of Man.2 That title told at least as much about what Barth’s theology was to become as about any single theme in the book itself. Barth’s mature theology was to be primarily reflections about God and humanity. Of course, following the Scriptures and the theological tradition, Barth did discuss nature from time to time. But when he did, it was primarily in terms of its meanings for the two other poles of theological reflection.

Barth stated emphatically in volume three of his multi-volumned Church Dogmatics, as a matter of fact, that there can be no substantive Christian doctrine of nature—as there must be, in his view, a substantive Christian doctrine of the human creature. Barth’s mature theology was in this respect, to invoke his own terminology, theoanthropocentric. Call this Barth’s fundamental theological paradigm. He read the Scriptures and he wrote his theology, voluminously, throughout his long and distinguished theological career, with that focus.

In this respect, Barth was, in significant ways, a representative figure. Numerous Christian theologians, beginning in the earliest era of Christian thought, likewise focused their theology, chiefly if not totally, on God and humanity.3 This was particularly true of Christian theologians in the modern era, especially those who identified with Reformation traditions, as we shall see at various points along the way in this book. But Barth carried through his theoanthropocentric program with a self-conscious rigor that is likely unequalled in Western Christian thought.

This was a fateful development. If theology is fundamentally theoanthropocentric, then the natural world will have its ultimate meaning, its raison d’etre, only in terms of God and humanity, as a kind of appendix. Nature will be allotted no integrity of its own in the greater scheme of things. Nature, at best, will have instrumental meanings. This was illustrated sharply by Barth’s sometime theological opponent, Emil Brunner, who, in this respect, was Barth’s compatriot. “The cosmic element in the Bible,” Brunner once observed, “is never anything more than the ‘scenery’ in which the history of mankind takes place.”4

The studies in this book presuppose a different theological paradigm. Since I completed my doctoral dissertation on Karl Barth’s theology of nature in 1966, I have explored, in a variety of ways, the promise of thinking theologically in terms of God, humanity, and nature together. Call this an integral view of nature. In response to Barth’s theology, I have chosen to work with what I like to call, reconfiguring Barth’s own terminology, a theocosmocentric paradigm. This way of thinking takes God’s purposes with the whole natural world just as seriously as God’s purposes with humanity in particular. But I was not alone, in this respect, by any means. As we will see, Joseph Sittler (Chapter 3) and a range of other Reformation theologians also took the theocosmocentric paradigm for granted (Chapter 4).

I hope, then, that the following five studies will show, each in its own way, the fruitfulness of thinking theologically, most fundamentally, in terms of God, humanity, and nature, not just in terms of God and humanity alone—with nature then subordinated to the first two or even neglected altogether. Each of these studies illustrates the promise of thinking theologically in terms of the theocosmocentric paradigm—according to which nature has its own meanings in the greater scheme of things.

In a manner of speaking, therefore, the underlying theme of this book is that nature itself cries out to be celebrated by faith. This is the single most important learning that I hope that readers will carry forward with them, once they have taken the one step backward that I will be describing in the following pages.

I am well aware that the terminology here—theoanthropocentrism and theocosmocentrism—is not felicitous. But I do believe that it can nevertheless be fundamentally instructive, especially for explorations in the theology of nature, such as the ones that are to follow.

4.

Then some comments about the tonality of this book. Those with ears to hear will already have detected that the following explorations will be consistently predicated on the assumption that the human species is facing a life-or-death planetary emergency today: due to what human abuse, especially by the powerful, has done and continues to do to this, God’s good Earth and to the poor of the Earth. Call this a tonality of emergency.

At the end of Chapter 4, indeed, I will raise the question whether this Earth-crisis, driven as it is by climate destruction perpetrated by the principalities and powers of this world, has become so extreme that the Church Catholic, in all its formations, must not now enter into what was called by resisting Christians in Germany during the Nazi era a “state of confession,” a status confessionis.

Indeed, must not the very word martyr, which originally meant “witness,” once again be deeply and self-sacrificially claimed for themselves by all faithful members of the Church of Jesus Christ? Has not the time arrived for all Christians, not just a few, to stand ready to put our livelihoods and even our very lives on the line?

I highlight this matter at this preliminary point so that no reader will conclude anywhere along the way that this book takes for granted some kind of human business-as-usual on planet Earth today. It does not. On the other hand, I have long been convinced that we who think of ourselves as Christians, together, must always try to do everything at once.

But all cannot stand in the halls of government or out on the streets all the time. Some must take their stands in those places, for sure, but others are needed to search the Scriptures, for example, or to work at constantly renewing the Liturgy, for the sake of more resolutely celebrating the presence of the God of hope in these times of pervasive ecological crisis and widespread cultural despair.

To invoke a few traditional liturgical words, which were familiar to me in my earliest years: it is “truly meet, right, and salutary” for those of us who think of ourselves as Christians today, and for the seekers in our midst as well, to write or to read books like this, as long as we understand that we are living in an era of global emergency and as long as all of us are always poised to take public stands at any time or at any place in behalf of the Earth’s future and in behalf of the poor of the Earth.

With that sense of urgency, I look forward to conversing both with scholarly and general readers in this book. For the former I have provided notes so that you can more explicitly understand the theological milieu that informs this book, as you ponder your own theological pilgrimage. For the latter, feel free to skip the footnotes and then to dream dreams and see visions immediately, each step along the way, about how you yourself might enrich your own celebration of nature by faith.

5.

I enthusiastically dedicate this book to all the ecojustice activists associated with Lutherans Restoring Creation (LRC)—online at LutheransRestoringCreation.org/—who are hard at work in concert with their peers in the ecumenical community in behalf of an ecological reformation of Christianity at the grassroots, where this urgent challenge may matter the most. In the same breath, this book is also dedicated to Dr. David M. Rhoads, Professor of New Testament emeritus at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago and founder of LRC. David has been the heart of theologically informed American Lutheran ecojustice initiatives for decades, and for that, as well as for his personal friendship, I am most grateful.

Finally, I want to thank the distinguished Finnish American artist Eric Aho for permitting me to reproduce his striking gouache and watercolor painting as the cover of this book. For me, Aho's creativity discloses both the dark ambiguity and the luminous promise of nature charged by the presence and the power and the mystery of God. I take that dark ambiguity with utmost seriousness, especially in these times. As this book was going to press, all hell was breaking loose. The chaotic epoch of the corona virus was upon us all. But the eruption of that plague of nature just happened to coincide, in my own world, with celebrations of Easter, in whose light I also see the luminous promise of nature, notwithstanding all the darkness. As I contemplate Aho's painting, therefore, I am overwhelmed by this contradictory but captivating vision of nature, which all the explorations of this book presuppose: the struggles between the powers of death and the powers of life.

H. P. S.

Easter 2020

1. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’.

2. Barth, Word of God and the Word of Man.

3. I have traced this history in my study of Christian attitudes toward nature: Santmire, Travail of Nature.

4. Brunner, Revelation and Reason. 33n.