I got to hear a talk the other day by Lester Brown, head of the Earth Policy Institute. He talked, among other things, about the relationship between global warming, food scarcity, and the geo-political instability that could result. Scary stuff. This article provides a summary of his ideas.
Category: Environment
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“it’s hard, if not impossible, to be a meat-eating environmentalist”
Via John Schwenkler, Rod Dreher interviews James McWilliams, who Dreher calls a “contrarian agrarian.” He is a fierce critic of our system of industrial agriculture, but he also slaughters some sacred cows (pardon the expression) of the organic food and locavore movements. He has some kind words for GMOs and particularly questions the sustainability of even “free range” meat operations. Overall, though, he’s suspicious of any silver bullet for food sustainability:
The future of food production must achieve a balance between high yields and high sustainability. The only way I see this happening is if we stop polarizing our discussions of food into big industrial and small organic, and start seeking common ground over compromises that split differences. We’ll have to eat much less meat, many more whole grains, fruits, vegetables and legumes; tolerate the judicious use of chemicals in the production of our food; keep an open mind to the potential benefits of biotechnology; and worry less about the distance our food traveled than the overall energy it took to produce it.
McWilliams book, Just Food: How Locavores Are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, comes out in August.
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The ecological promise of an orthodox theology
I was flipping through H. Paul Santmire’s excellent book Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology, and discovered that he takes Matthew Fox’s (no, not that one) “creation spirituality” to task on many of the same grounds that I criticized J. Philip Newell. Like Newell, Fox embraces a form of nature mysticism, disdains talk of original sin in favor of “original blessing,” and embraces a “Christus exemplar” account of the atonement, wherein the “Cosmic Christ” reveals to each of us that we are already one with the divine.
Santmire has some sharp words for Fox’s view:
His approach resonates all too disquietingly with the anti-urban, romantic individualism of the Thoreauvian tradition. When all is said and done, Fox leaves us in the sweat lodge. His thought is not fundamentally at home in urban America. We can see this deficiency from the vantage point of any inner-city neighborhood. (p. 21)
Santmire goes on to consider, as an example, an inner-city neighborhood called Asylum Hill in Hartford, Connecticut and wonders what Foxian creation spirituality would have to say to a welfare mother, a pregnant teenage girl, or an unemployed veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
The message of Fox may speak to an elite, largely affluent few. What does it have to say to the impoverished urban masses around the globe, who must struggle every day for their sustenance, often against overwhelming odds? What does it say to a global society that is increasingly urban, for better or for worse? (p. 21)
He points out that the vast majority of people in the world are well aware of the reality of radical evil–a reality that Fox downplays; what they need is a message of hope and liberation. And the “Christian masses” throughout the ages have been quite aware of their own bondage to sin and evil, which is the experiential ground of the power of other atonement images: the Christus victor and Christus victim motifs. Christ the victor defeats the powers of darkness and death; Christ the victim reconciles us to God:
…the faithful in the Asylum Hills of this world are all too aware of their own mortality and their own sinfulness to make any sense at all out of the claim that they themselves, not just the Christ of their salvation, are somehow divine. They do not want to be told that they are divine. They do want to hear that they have been delivered and that they have been forgiven, so that they can then engage in the struggles for justice in this world, liberated from hopelessness and freed from the burdens of their own alienation. (p. 23)
Santmire agrees with Fox that “Cosmic Christology must be an urgent theme for contemporary theology” (p. 23), but “creation spirituality” glosses over the profoundly ambiguous nature of the created world and fails to do justice to Christian eschatological hope. The vision of the Bible is not a protological one, calling for the return to some primeval paradisical state, but an eschatological one, looking toward a future consummation and redemption:
Original blessing is not the ending, but the beginning for the Bible. Eschatology as a yet-to-be-fully realized dawning of a New Heaven and a New Earth, in the midst of which the New Jerusalem is to be situated–this is the driving biblical vision. But there is always what Ernst Käsemann called the “eschatological reservation,” the witness to the “crucified God” (Jurgen Moltmann), as the sign of “God with us” in our struggle to hope and to love in the midst of this oppressed and alienated world God creates and blesses as good. (p. 24)
In a neat turnabout, Santmire argues that it’s actually the often-demonized Augustine who can provide some resources for an adequate theology of nature and creation. The mature Augustine, he maintains, abandoned his Manichean roots and attendant distrust of the material world, and situated his narrative of fall and redemption within the context of a story of an unfolding and yet-to-be-consummated creation. For Augustine, creation is good and overflowing with blessings from its Creator, and yet the cosmos waits for its fulfillment in the end times. Within this process, human beings act out the drama of alienation from and reconciliation with God, the latter achieved by the incarnate Son. Augustine provides resources for a theology that does more justice to the goodness and ambiguity of both creation and humanity than Fox’s creation spirituality or the popularizers of an idealized Celtic spirituality.
Also, be sure to check out Marvin’s posts on the topic of Celtic Christianity and Pelagianism (this one and an older one here.)
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The use and abuse of Celtic Christianity
Last night–somewhat against my better judgment–I went to hear a talk given by “Celtic Christianity” guru J. Philip Newell at a “faith forum” sponsored by a group of Capitol Hill churches, including ours. Though I didn’t know too much about Newell going in, my fears that it would be fuzzy feel-good New Ageism were, alas, mostly confirmed.
In Newell’s telling, we’re living at the birth of a “new consciousness.” This involves something like overcoming the dualities of earth/heaven, matter/spirit, male/female, nature/grace, the One/the many, etc. and realizing the essential oneness of all things.
Christianity’s contribution to this new consciousness will best be served, according to Newell, by rehabilitating the Celtic tradition and rejecting much of the standard-issue Western tradition. The most interesting part of Newell’s talk was an attempted rehabilitation of the much-maligned Pelagius. According to Newell, Pelagius was a gender egalitarian, appreciated the wisdom of the pre-Christian Druid tradition, and rejected the Augustinian view of original sin. (Confusingly, Newell seems to think that the Augustinian view holds that we are evil by nature, and that the Pelagian view rejects this; but Augustine certainly didn’t think that, which is not to say that his view of original sin doesn’t have problems.) Newell said that we have had the doctrine of original sin beaten into us and need to recover a doctrine of our essential goodness, as well as a sense that grace perfects nature rather than being in opposition to it (he didn’t use the exact phrase “grace perfects nature,” which might’ve given away the error that the evil Western tradition is uniformly anti-nature).
Although the talk (and Newell’s most recent book) was called “Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation,” there was actually very little talk about Jesus. Christ, he said, reveals the “heartbeat of God” which is also found in every person, and in all nature. But we didn’t hear much about the specific shape of Jesus’ life, much less his death and resurrection. In his scheme, Jesus seems to serve as an exemplar of a kind of nature mysticism, and this can lead Christians to embrace the “new consciousness.”
To some extent, I’m sympathetic to an attempt to rehabilitate Pelagius. I have no doubt the historical Pelagius probably got something of a raw deal at the hands of his theological opponents. And I don’t accept a full-throated Augustinian doctrine of original sin/guilt. But Newell’s view just doesn’t seem to have the resources to grapple with the reality of evil. I guess if you spend most of your time leading workshops at idyllic retreat locations like the Isle of Iona, off Scotland, and Casa del Sol in New Mexico, you might have a benign view of the world as good through-and-through. But, beyond those surroundings, we have a world that is full of a lot of brutality, violence, cruelty, suffering, and frustration. It calls for a more radical solution than attaining a new consciousness.
This is the truth contained in the traditional doctrine of original sin, however much we might need to re-think some of its cruder explications. Sin isn’t just a matter of limited knowledge or faulty perception, but a profound distortion of the will. The good that we want to do, we don’t do, and the evil we don’t want to do–that we do (to paraphrase St. Paul). This is why a New Age nature-mystic Jesus isn’t the solution to our problems, emphatically including the problem of our despoiling of the earth. Our ignorance isn’t the only–or even the major–reason that we take more than our share of the earth’s goods, crush the poor under our heels, and drop bombs on villages in faraway places. Rather, “we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves,” in the words of the Lutheran Church’s confession of sin. A Christ who can’t liberate us from the principalities and powers that hold us in thrall isn’t going to be much help.
The problem with appeals to “Celtic Christianity” is that the history of the Celtic church is shrouded enough that it enables modern liberals to project onto it pretty much everything good in opposition to everything they find bad about the “Western Church” (this is the term Newell used – why the Celts are not part of “the West” wasn’t clear to me). Such a construct is rarely going to be more than a reflection of whatever values we happen to hold, like the image of the “historical Jesus” at the bottom of the well of history, who simply reflects the image of the scholar peering down into it. Only the living Christ can actually stand outside of us to both judge us for and liberate us from our sin.
ADDENDUM: My wife tells me that saying “if you spend most of your time leading workshops at idyllic retreat locations like the Isle of Iona, off Scotland, and Casa del Sol in New Mexico, you might have a benign view of the world as good through-and-through” was a low blow. And she’s right. I have no idea how Newell spends the rest of his time and it was unfair of me to suggest otherwise. I think the point stands, though: I really don’t see how Newell’s brand of benign nature mysticism can account for radical evil in the world and in the human heart. -
You too can be a right-wing hack!
This piece at Reason.com is really kind of embarrassingly bad, but it does serve a useful purpose in collecting many of the right-wing anti-environment tropes in one place for easy reference:
Point out that environmentalists want to run your life and take away your money (they’re basically communists in other words).
Feign(?) misunderstanding of scientific claims (e.g., Those crazy greens think CO2 is a “pollutant” – but we exhale CO2, so obviously that can’t be right!).
Explain that environmentalists are Luddites who hate modern life and the blessings of capitalism.
Compare environmentalism to religion (n.b.: this is a bad thing).
Quote dubious figures from a corporate-backed “nonpartisan” think-tank about the catastrophic cost of addressing global warming.
Pretend to be for “sensible” and “common sense” (preferably “market-based”!) solutions to (nonexistent) environmental problems.
Optional: make disparaging reference to Al Gore.
You might want to print this out for easy reference in case you’re called upon to a) write an angry letter to the editor of your local newspaper about some positive coverage of Earth Day they ran, b) argue with someone in a blog comment thread, or c) write an op-ed for a major conservative or libertarian magazine/think-tank.
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Greening the Bible?
Ben Myers at Faith & Theology has a post that may be trying a bit too hard to be contrarian, poking fun at the “Green Bible” recently published by Harper Collins. This version of the NRSV is printed on recycled paper with a cotton/linen cover and features green-lettered passages that deal with themes of the earth or creation and contains essays on environmental topics from Christian figures like N.T. Wright, Pope John Paul II, and others.
I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, I deplore both niche Bible marketing and “green” consumerism. On the other hand, too many American Christians still have a very individualistic and anthropocentric understanding of the Bible’s message. So, if this version inculcates some awareness of “green” themes in the Bible, is that so bad? For example, a Bible study organized around “green” passages could be a fruitful thing for a congregation to pursue.
Myers quotes a piece from First Things by Alan Jacobs (not online) that suggests the Green Bible is trying to force the message of Scripture to serve a pre-approved secular agenda. But I think a better way of looking at it is as using something akin to Paul Tillich’s method of “correlation” in theology. To oversimplify greatly, this involves bringing our deepest questions into contact and conversation with the gospel message. It’s only now that we see ecological devastation being wreaked around us that we’re beginning to realize that this is something the Bible speaks to. This isn’t imposing an alien secular perspective on the Bible, but allowing the Bible to illuminate issues that weren’t as relevant to our forbears (largely because the human capacity for wrecking the environment was constrained by technological limitations). That doesn’t mean that the biblical message will line up neatly with the agenda of modern environmentalists, but the current focus on the environment can allow us to see aspects of that message that we may have overlooked.
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BSG and green anarchy
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Beyond “organic”
Mark Bittman makes a couple of good points here: food labeled “organic” is not necessarily true to the spirit of organic food (i.e., is sustainable, treats animals and the land well, etc.); and you don’t necessarily have to buy “organic” food to eat better. An easier place to start is simply with eating real food instead of processed food, eating more fruits and vegetables, etc. This is largely the lesson of Michael Pollan’s books, too, and both Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Singer and Mason in The Ethics of What We Eat spend time examining the image and the reality of “big organic” producers.
A Thinking Reed 