|
||||
|
|
||||
|
|
How the Environment Can Assist Us to Deconstruct and Reconstruct Theology and Religion By Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox When one considers the intimate relationship between Creator and Creation one is struck by how late and how reluctantly the church has come to the environmental table. There must be reasons for this and exploring these reasons may help us not only to unleash religion’s pent up power for action vis a vis the environment but also to renew religion itself. It would be a happy irony indeed if the ecological crisis were the stepping stone to a spiritual and religious renaissance. Following are some issues that come to mind that are forced upon theology and religion by the current state of eco-crisis. 1. The reduction of a Trinitarian Godhead to a single Person of the Trinity. What I would call Jesusolatry has so overtaken much of mainline (and all of fundamentalist) Christianity that, in historical terms, we can ask: Isn’t this heresy, the loss of God the Creator and God the Spirit, to the extreme situation of God the Redeemer? There is no question that we have not been exploring God the Creator in seminaries and in theology to the extent that we lack scientists on our faculties. For scientists tell us about creation, as Aquinas said: “A mistake about creation results in a mistake about God.” Why do we swamp ourselves with Biblical scholars—as if all revelation is in a 4500 year old book—and not in creation itself? We are flooded with examples of mistakes about creation still alive and well in theology and church circles of which only the latest is the homosexual conflagration. The question is a scientific one, not a Biblical one: Does Creation and therefore the Creator make homosexuals homosexuals? All indications are positive. And homosexual populations are found not only among two-legged ones but among many other species as well (74 the last count I have seen). 2. It is not only God the Creator who has been shortchanged in modern theology but also God the Spirit and that includes the mysticism of religion. Mysticism is our experience of the Divine as in the psalmist’s song: “Taste and see the Lord is good.” Mysticism is about tasting but neither our seminaries nor our church structures have mined our mystics for their rich, rich teachings about humans and nature. From Julian of Norwich to Thomas Traherne, from Hildegard of Bingen to George Herbert, from Meister Eckhart to Walt Whitman, from Thomas Aquinas to Annie Dillard, from Nicolas of Cusa to Rachel Carson, From Dante to Wordsworth and William Blake, we are gifted with poets of the soul who speak the truth of the sacredness of our lives, bodies and the rest of creation. But without a Theology of the Spirit and without a Wisdom theology—so banished by the patriarchal mentality of the modern era—we don’t have a clue about the theology of ongoing creation and ongoing Incarnation and ongoing resurrection that lies behind all intuition about the sacredness of being. 3. In Christianity the archetype for mysticism is the “Cosmic Christ.” While the quest for the historical Jesus has preoccupied modern scholarship for two hundred years and has reached a fruitful climax in our time, where oh where is the research on the Cosmic Christ? Is the Cosmic Christ studied in our seminaries and theological literature? One cannot study it if one is working exclusively from a left-brain perspective, for the Cosmic Christ, like its Eastern counterpart, the Buddha Nature, is the Divine Image (Imago Dei) found in all beings. It is the image and likeness of the Divine in all things. It requires heart work to encounter it. 4. The anthropocentrism of ecclesial titles like “People of God” is appalling. The “People of God” nomenclature is not only excessively tribal (“my tribe is God’s people and yours is not”) but is equally ugly in its anthropocentrism. What about the four-legged people? The cloud people? The tree people? The winged and finned people? Are they not also integral to the love of the Creator? Western religion has so much to learn in this regard from indigenous peoples as well as pre-modern thinkers who understood Spirit to operate in the whole of creation and not just as an element of anthropology. Spirit is about cosmology more than psychology—as Aquinas testified when he said: “Spirit means our capacity to relate to the totality of things”. 5. But are we teaching cosmology? The new cosmology teaches us that all matter in the universe is frozen or very slowly moving light and that therefore we do not have to create any longer a competition between matter and spirit. But have we drawn conclusions from this important teaching? One is this: All flesh is holy including the flesh of the universe, the flesh of the earth and its systems and human flesh—for they are one flesh deriving from the very same origin in the original fireball. (See my “Blessings of the Flesh” litanies in my book, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh.) Flesh can no longer be a scapegoat for our sins of greed and inattentiveness to other species and to generations of humans yet to be born. If, as Thomas Berry asserts, “ecology is functional cosmology,” then surely we need to be learning and teaching the new cosmology. Are we doing this? Are adults learning it and teaching it in our schools, homes, media, churches, synagogues and mosques? Are we worshipping in the context of cosmology? If not, why not? 6. What do we mean by “salvation?” Salvation from what? From the earth? From this life? From our in-laws? From fear? From guilt? From whom? Thomas Aquinas offers a meaning of the term “salvation” that is truly appropriate for an ecological era when he says: “Salvation means first and foremost preserving things in the good.” Notice how this-worldly this meaning of salvation is. “Preserving things in the good”—since blessing is the theological word for goodness, salvation means passing blessings on to other generations. The blessings of healthy water, air, soil, species, bodies, minds, spirits. How are we doing on this score? How is religion interfering (the prophetic task) in the wrongdoing? 7. The return of Wisdom literature and the feminist mind-set that comes with it ought to contribute significantly to a resurrection of a creation-centered consciousness. The fact that the historical Jesus came from this tradition, a fact finally being recognized by Scripture scholars who have often chased down the trees at the expense of the forest, ought to help to inspire us all to look more deeply at the Spirit’s work in on-going creation and creativity (yes, in evolution). Wisdom after all “plays with God before the formation of the world” and it is this play that is the substrate for creativity of all kinds, ours and the rest of creation. Much of evolution is about play and with it, trial and error. These are a few of the ecclesial and theological issues that must be deconstructed and reconstructed if religion is to be part of the solution to the ecological disaster our species faces along with the rest of the earth community. The disaster we face is in many respects a human-driven disaster. It is we who are mostly responsible for wiping out rainforests, decimating oceans and rendering species extinct to the tune of 25,000 yearly. It is we who must put a stop to it. Ecology remains the most pressing moral issue of our time. Forces of persuasion would like to put it on a back burner especially during presidential election time. But we do so at our own peril and that of the sacred and God-given beauty of this planet. © 2004 Matthew Fox |
|
||