A Theology of Ecology

There they go, brandishing Bible verses, preaching of doomsday, urging man to repent. A new fundamentalist sect? No, a small but growing band of church scholars on an "eco-trip"--seeking theological underpinning for the ecology crusade.

The eco-theologians argue that man's despoliation of nature has drawn encouragement in part from mistaken or misapplied Christian concepts. By correcting those concepts, they hope to bolster environmental concern with something that goes beyond moral fervor or social awareness. The God of Genesis, say these thinkers, did not give man a blank check when he said: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion . . . over every living thing." Too often this has been used as a text for exploitation, reducing nature to a collection of useful objects.

Sanctified Fabric. The Bible, points out Old Testament Scholar Loren Fisher, tells of a "God of nature" as well as the more frequently emphasized "God of history." This God abhors pagan nature worship, but he decrees that all creation is good and holds his servant, man, accountable for what happens to it. Scripture even urges the practice of soil conservation (Leviticus 25: 2-5), kindness to animals (Exodus 23: 12) and preservation of trees (Deuteronomy 20: 19-20).

Christians must recognize, says Dean L. Harold DeWolf of Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, D.C., that when God became man in Jesus Christ, "he sanctified not only humanity but the whole fabric of life," as symbolized by the grain and fruit offered in Holy Communion.

Like any topical issue, eco-theology has yielded its share of trendy superficiality. Sometimes the discussions are so earthy that the name of God hardly comes up. But the movement also has produced at least one substantial event: the recent conference in the School of Theology at Claremont, Calif., at which 20 scholars, including Fisher and DeWolf, strove to promulgate "a theology of survival." One of the papers delivered there--by Claremont Theologian John B. Cobb Jr., originator of the conference--amounts to the most cogent statement yet of where philosophical and religious thought has gone wrong in abetting bad ecological practices.

Madly Christian. Cobb faults modern philosophy for drawing too sharp a metaphysical distinction between man and his environment. Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Emerson, Sartre--none has granted the subhuman world "a reality such that it can be the object of man's concern," he writes. Theology has followed suit. A weak faith in the value of creation tends to undermine belief in the Creator, and vice versa. Man is left only with his self-interest, which, however enlightened, will not provide sufficient motivation for ecological survival.

Man, Cobb maintains, must somehow come to believe once again that nature has "some claim upon him, some intrinsic right to exist and to prosper." As one path to such a belief, Cobb proposes a kind of ecological asceticism, a stripping away of the cocoon of contemporary affluence that dulls man's sensitivity to the processes and problems of his environment. "We might even be so madly Christian one day," he says, "as to ask to have our salaries cut by 25% so as not to be tempted to acquire material things."

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