Veni, Creator Spiritus!

An Ecological Reformation

Veni, Creator Spiritus! Once a World Council of Churches program theme, “Come,

Holy Spirit, renew your whole creation!” surfaced again in an ecumenical gathering

in Greece in March 2016, this time as a “Manifesto for an Ecological Reformation of

Christianity.” The authors note the Reformation Jubilee of 2017 as the opportune

moment for the manifesto. The backstory is the urgent call of Christians from areas

most vulnerable to the constellations of economic power, whether in the Pacific,

Africa, Asia, Latin America, or from minority populations in Europe and North

America. Add the Pope’s ringing encyclical, Laudato Si’ , and Protestant countries in

the North keenly aware of the environmental degradation of their consumerist life

style,1 and we have an ecological cry that is as clear, strong and emphatic as

Beethoven’s Ninth.

But that an ecological reformation must take place in order to spare calamity does

not mean it will. Like Luther’s own movement, a reformation requires a certain

constellation of events and powers together with critical technology (for Luther, the

printing press) at a certain burning point in history.

So are we there yet? I feel like answering the Psalmist’s “How long, o Lord, how

long?2 with “Not long, not long.” But I say that with my fingers crossed. That the Trump

1 From p. 1 of “Manifesto for an Ecological Reformation of Christianity: the Volos Call March 2016.” 2 Psalm 13:1.

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administration is narcissistic nationalistic white male billionaire fossil-fueled rule

barreling full-steam ahead into the 19th c. is a direct body blow to any eco-reformation.3

Nonetheless, we are there already in that hard planetary reality is our daily fare

and prophetic voices are clear. I turn to three such voices—from science, ethics, and

theology—to make the case. That Dietrich Bonhoeffer anticipated most of it is the

wonder I’ll note later.

Science. “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a

desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”4 If you thought E. B. White

was right, that torn between a desire to fix the universe and a desire to kick back and

enjoy it makes it hard to plan the day, try taking the geologist’s perspective, or the

astrophysicist’s. In geological perspective, we are not a whole lot more than “fossils in

the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of

later eras.”5

The astrophysicist dismisses even the geologist’s grand field of view as quaint.

Okay, accommodate the geologist, skip the first 10 billion years of the universe, and fast-

forward to Earth’s appearing. Then conceive Earth’s history as a 10-volume set in the

Burke Library, with 500 pages per volume. If we do that, each page tells the tale of 1

million years. Life, any life, first makes its appearance in Vol. 8. That volume is mostly 3 Within hours after Donald Trump took the oath of office, his White House scrubbed all references to climate change from the White House website.4 Cited from James Elder’s review of Douglas E. Christie, Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology (Oxford University Press, 2012), published in the Fall 2013 issue of Parabola.5 Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (New York: the Modern Library, Paperback Edition, 2002), 4. The citation continues: “Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don’t warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn’t differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs. …[E]verything returns upon itself, repeats and renews itself, and present can hardly be told from past.”

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about plants, but on p. 440, reptiles have a good run, only to be superseded by birds and

warm-blooded animals 5 pages on, i.e., about 5 million years later. On p. 499 of the very

last volume, no. 10, hominids appear, the homo sapiens among them probably making

claims to “dominion” and surmising that the drama of the previous 13.8 billion years of

cosmic history is, in the end, all about us. Never mind that the story of human civilization

is only the last two or three words of the last page of the last volume. In Big History all of

human history is a late case of spontaneous combustion.6 Who are we? We are fossils in

the making, afloat on a miniscule “mote of matter”7 in God’s creation, living a puny

moment. That makes it hard to plan the day.

Don’t get me wrong. The astrophysicist will also leave you lost in wonder. She’ll

explain that the calcium in your teeth and the iron in your blood are detritus of exploded

stars from a galaxy long ago and far away. Like everything else, you are immortal

stardust. Relish it. Hear a portion of Maya Angelou’s poem, “A Brave and Startling

Truth”:

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet

Traveling through casual space

Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns

To a destination where all signs tell us

It is possible and imperative that we learn

A brave and startling truth.

…………

When we come to it

6 Taken from my Earth Community, Earth Ethics (Orbis Books, 2016), p. 27, using a device of Robert Overman’s.7 From the poem of Maya Angelou cited just below.

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Then we will confess that not the Pyramids

With their stones set in mysterious perfection

Nor the Gardens of Babylon

Hanging as eternal beauty

In our collective memory

Nor the Grand Canyon

Kindled into delicious color

By Western sunsets

Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi

who, without favor,

Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the

shores,

These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it

We, this people on this miniscule and kithless

globe

Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the

dagger

Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace

We, this people, on this mote of matter

In whose mouths abide cankerous words

Which challenge our very existence

Yet out of those same mouths

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Come songs of such exquisite sweetness

That the heart falters in its labor

And the body is quieted into awe

Out of such chaos, of such contradiction

We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it

We, this people, on this wayward, floating body

Created on this earth, of this earth

Have the power to fashion for this earth

A climate where every man and every woman

Can live freely without sanctimonious piety

Without crippling fear

When we come to it

We must confess that we are the possible

We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this

world

That is when, and only when

We come to it.8

I love the comment of Robin Nagle, an anthropologist at the New York City

Department of Sanitation. (Where but New York does the Dept. of Sanitation have a

house anthropologist?) Robin says, “Everything is garbage and everything is sacred.”

Think about it. It is all garbage—everything we know about this “miniscule and kithless

8 A portion of Maya Angelou’s A Brave and Startling Truth (New York: Random House, 1995), n.p. The poem was read in San Francisco in 1995 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations.

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globe” (Angelou) and its life is recycled stardust. And if you pass your days in a sacred

universe, then all this garbage is sacred. Pure wonder.

But the astrophysicist’s and geologist’s perspective, Maya Angelou’s and Robin

Nagle’s, does make it hard to plan the day.9

The current message of science doesn’t make it easier. It’s another “brave and

startling truth.” Namely, that we humans—we the possible, the miraculous, the true

wonder of this world—are, for the first time ever, a geological force, creators of an epoch

already dubbed “the Anthropocene,” so-named because collective human activity now

dominates the workings of the planet.

But because this colossal domination has never before happened on our watch—

our three-word tenure in Vol. 10 is strictly late Holocene—we need to know what

happens when Planet Home wanders from one geological epoch into another.

Two things occur. Both need a note on language, language about “law” and

about “climate.”

I live in Santa Fe, bumper sticker capital of the world. One reads: “Gravity is

not only a good idea. It’s the law.” This kind of law cannot be repealed. It’s the kind

Naomi Klein refers to in the stand-off she describes: “[O]ur economic system and

our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war

with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to 9 The perspective of famed biologist E. O. Wilson could be added: “Pride and humility in better balance, we’ll also take a more serious look at our place in nature. Exalted as we are, risen to be the mind of the biosphere without a doubt, our spirits uniquely capable of awe and ever more breathtaking leaps of imagination. But we are still part of Earth’s fauna and flora, bound to it by emotion, physiology, and, not least, deep history. It is folly to think of this planet as a way station to a better world. Equally, Earth would be unsustainable if converted into a literal, human-engineered spaceship.” From E. O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 25-26.

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avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic

model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of

rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.”10 So if you raise the

temperature to a certain fixed point, water as ice becomes liquid, whatever your

intention or means. It’s not just a good—or bad—idea. It’s the law, a law not subject

to amendment by the EPA or repeal by climate and science skeptics.

“Climate change” also needs a note. As a phrase it’s misleading. Science is

more precise. It’s not changes in climate per se. With variations in weather and its

long-term trends, climate change is always happening. It’s “changes in the climate

system”11 that science records and underscores. For example, “the rate of CO2

growth over the last decade is 100 to 200 times faster than what the Earth

experienced during the transition from the last Ice Age,” and the present 405.1 parts

per million is the highest its been in more than 10,000 years.12 Or, if we look from

that “elegant creature,” the atmosphere (Wendell Berry), to another elegant

creature, the oceans, we find that roughly half the coral reefs are bleaching and/or

dying. Coral reefs are only 0.2 percent of the ocean floor but they are its nurseries

and they support one-quarter of all marine life. They are victims of more rapid

10 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 21.11 From Section B, Observed Changes in the Climate System, of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, Summary for Policy Makers, p. 4, in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group 1 to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes [Stocker, T. F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.12 These are 2016 figures as reported from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), available online at http://www.ecowatch.com/noaa-carbon-dioxide-levels-2321635970.html. Accessed April 1, 2017.

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acidification than has transpired in 8 million years. Weep for the reefs or, as Jesus

tells the daughters of Jerusalem in Luke 12: 28, “Weep not for me, but weep for

yourselves and your children.”

The point of this and more—record warming, record drop in Arctic and

Antarctic sea ice, record high sea levels, severe drought and deluge, etc.—is Earth-

shaking climate system change. Climate system change is the first reality that nudges

one geologic epoch into another. It’s the law.

The second transforming reality is drastic change in the community of life.

The diversity of life forms—biodiversity—is the repertoire that allows eventual

adaptation to different conditions, including the upended conditions that yield mass

extinctions. Speaking of which, mass extinctions, like new geological epochs, are

very rare. There have been but five in the 3.5 billion years Earth has known life.

Until now. We are apparently logging in the Sixth Great Extinction, this the first one

brought on by human powers destructive of natural habitat and fined-tuned

environments. Life can fall from its perch—or be pushed. We are pushing.

In sum, a new geological epoch turns on dramatic climate system change and

dramatic change in biodiversity. For us this means that the long-standing natural

chemical balance beneficial to human life in the late Holocene, with its tattoo of

climate stability, has been altered by an exploding human population and by an

exploding extractive economy driven by fossil fuels. So altered that the

Anthropocene’s tattoo is apparently climate volatility, mass eco-social uncertainty,

and a die-off some scientists fear will exceed 50% of known species. A single

species, ours truly, is a disaster for planetary systems.

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You can state the conclusion the way the World Meterorological Organization

does: “Earth is a planet in upheaval” with humanity “now in truly uncharted

territory.”13 Hold on to that for our discussion of ethics and theology.

Here’s the next “brave and startling truth.” We do need to plan our day, and

we need to do it in changing geological time, “in truly uncharted territory.” How do

we live within unprecedented geological, chemical and biological processes when all life,

ours included, depends upon them?14 How do we live when we are the single most

decisive force of nature itself and nature has changed course as a consequence?

Such power flows from the daily choices and actions of our way of life. That

makes those choices, actions and way of life ipso facto ethical matters. You may not

think of your breakfast, your shower, your commute, your job, and shopping as

leading moral issues.15 But on a human-dominated planet, diet and agriculture,

13 Cited from the World Meterorological Organization’s “State of the Global Climate in 2016” as summarized by Dr. Joe Romm and available online at https://thinkprogress.org/climate-change-truly-uncharted-territory-3ea4de17b01#.jip0bc293. Accessed April 1, 2017.14 From Daniel Spencer’s discussion in “Sustaining Light, Sustaining Energy: Geo-Theological Reflection on Light and Advent Journeys,” Holden Village Voice, Winter 2016-2017: 10-11.15 This example is inspired by a passage in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Christmas Sermon on Peace, December 24, 1967,” in James M. Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 254. King preached this: “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world? You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the sponge, and that’s handed to you by a Pacific Islander. You reach for a bar of soap, and that’s given to you at the hands of Frenchman. And then you go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning, and that’s poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you want tea; that’s poured into your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you’re desirous of having cocoa for breakfast, and that’s poured into your cup by a West African. And then you reach over your toast, and

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water, energy, work, and consumerism are macro moral issues, even justice issues,

whether breakfast and bananas register with you as one of them or not.

We have the numbers. Dirk Notz and Julienne Stroeve have the calculations

that show how much Arctic sea ice melts for every ton of CO2 sent into the

atmosphere. About three square meters. So the last 1000 miles you drove a car, or

the round trip flight you took from Kennedy (New York) to Heathrow (London),

caused 32 square feet of sea ice to vanish from the Arctic. And that’s only the drive

or the flight, not breakfast, lunch or dinner. The Arctic pays extra for those.16 In the

Anthropocene there is no such thing as a free lunch. It’s the law.

Decades ago a British newspaper invited readers to write in their answer to

the question, “What’s wrong with the world today?” Here’s one reply: “Dear sir, I am.

Yours, G. K. Chesterton.”

Ethics. We already hear the second voice—the ethicist’s.

Of utmost import for ethics is that climate system change, mass extinction,

and sour oceans is anthropogenic geophysical change that goes where human agency

and responsibility have never before gone. Namely, to cite Willis Jenkins,

“cumulatively across generational time, aggregately through ecological systems, and

that’s given to you at the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured; this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.” 16 ‘What you do could melt ice in Arctic,” an article by Brady Dennis in The Washington Post on the paper by Dirk Notz and Julienne Stroeve published in Science, 3 November, 2016. The Post article ran in The Santa Fe New Mexican Friday, 4 November, 2016 and is cited from p. 4 there.

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nonintentionally over evolutionary futures.”17 This is a seismic shift in human

impact for which we have little ethics on the books or in common moral practice,

with the important exception of some indigenous peoples. Cumulative human

consequences far exceed the time and space dimensions of past and present

accountability. That is the moral novelty of the Anthropocene.

Jenkins himself wonders whether this novel reach outstrips even our

capacity to “do” ethics, i.e., to meaningfully assign responsibility for the powers we

wield. He writes: “This is the greatest peril of climate change: that the accidental

powers of humanity generate problems that exceed our moral imagination and

defeat our abilities to take responsibility.”18

Let me illustrate. Every full-bodied ethic attends to three matters. To

character—the kinds of persons and societies we are (virtue); to the consequences

of how we live; and to our moral bottom lines—the fundamental obligations that

structure our moral universe.

Take only the second of these. When the consequences of how we live match

the boundaries of the ecosphere (the full community of life and its abiotic envelope)

and stretch into futures we heavily determine, but cannot know, or even imagine,

how do we take those futures into account as we make present decisions? If, to

recall Jenkins again, our on-the-ground agency works its way “cumulatively across

generational time, aggregately through ecological systems, and nonintentionally

over evolutionary futures,”19 how do we organize breakfast, the kids’ education, or

17 Willis Jenkins, The Future of Ethics: Sustainability Social Justice, and Religious Creativity (Georgetown University Press, 2013), 1.18 Jenkins, The Future of Ethics, 17.19 Jenkins, The Future of Ethics, 1.

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the global economy so as to account for eventual consequences in what are vast,

complex, non-linear systems? An ethic of consequences has no way to measure and

assign responsibility when our reach exceeds our horizons and a stable planet can

no longer be assumed.

Assigning responsibility was already difficult enough for our most significant

actions, channeled as they are through large interacting systems. It borders on

impossible to trace these to individuals. Instead they involve many persons who are

not in conscious touch with one another and who are unaware of the collective

impact of their coordinated actions. (We mentioned breakfast and commuting to

work above, affecting agriculture, energy and the atmosphere.) The global supply

line of responsibility is effectively invisible. And if there is structural violence along

the way to workers and environment, say, it is rarely criminalized.20

While we could talk about the novelty for anthropocene ethics of virtue and

obligation as well, for now I move to a vital factor that stands apart from novel

conditions.

The landmark Brundtland report of 1987, Our Common Future, says “the

Earth is one but the world is not.”21 Any eco-Reformation can only begin, like Luther,

with realities as they are on the ground. “The Earth is one.” This is true as a

statement of both scientific and biblical truth. “[B]ut the world is not.” This, too, tells

the truth. So how do we respond to the histories that brought us to the present, and

20 This draws on the discussion of Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda, “Climate Change asClimate Debt: Forging a Just Future,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 36.1 [Spring/Summer 2016]: 11–12. 21 Our Common Future: World Commission on Environment and Development (Oxford University Press, 1987), 27. This is commonly referred to as the Brundtland Report: Gro Brundtland of Norway headed the commission that authored the report.

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how do we do so in view of our anthropocene powers? Two matters command

attention.

The first is the narrative that yields the planetary emergency. It’s the grand

narrative of mastery. Climate system change and climate injustice are chapters in

the epic story of oppression—oppression of people and oppression of the rest of

nature, together (inevitably). The sources are not with ignorant peoples or

conquered peoples. This oppression is largely the result of work by people with BAs,

BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs.22 It’s the result of mastery based in a highly

sophisticated “combination of scientific knowledge, technological control, and

narratives that position Western societies as the rightful stewards of natural and

social progress.”23 It results from the way so-called advanced industrial civilization

organizes and feeds itself. It issues as well from the illusion that what we create we

also control. Climate system change mocks that premise.

The seeds of the mastery now geo-engineering Earth are in European and neo-

European cosmology, conquest, colonization, commerce, and Christianity, trumpeted

together as superior civilization with a mission, a mission to bring others to salvation and

into modernity. Baptized “the march of progress” in the 19th and 20th centuries, in the 20th

century it was re-named “development.” Now it’s morphed into “sustainable

development.” Sustainable development is the economy of green consumerism based in

22 The sources of what David Orr calls “the long planetary emergency” are well presented through a survey of literature in his Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford University Press, 2008).23 Cited from p. 3 of Jeremy J Schmidt, Peter G Brown and Christopher J Orr, “Ethics in the Anthropocene: A research agenda,” from The Anthropocene Review, 1 – 13, 2016. Available online at sagepub.co.us/journals.

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the scientific and technical expertise of the Global North over the Global South. Globe-

spanning corporations fuel this consumerism.

Let me say this differently. Morality and ethics in our time has “not been

cooperatively produced,”24 however much we tout democracy as we practice plutocracy

and kleptocracy. Yes, huge strides have been made—the abolition of legal slavery,

universal human rights, and social justice victories in recurring battles with the barons of

industry and finance. But present institutions remain deeply embedded in the continuing

power of their origins in white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. The people in the

back offices and on the global supply lines may not be white and paternal—they probably

are not—but their institutions and practices are. Yes, the mastery model now threatens

destruction on every side, blandly called “unsustainability.” And yes the stage has been

set for the politics of resentment, anger, backlash and fear of the threatening “other,” all

of it wrapped in the normative stories and desperate hopes of American exceptionalism

and greatness. People don’t act on the basis of data sets and facts; they act on stories. And

we are reaping the whirlwind of a story that presently yields a triple crisis, the crisis of

morality, of democracy, and of the planetary environment.

So how do we plan our day? The best way to address anthropocene injustices is

by dismantling white privilege, male privilege, and wealth, or class, privilege as these

drive a human economy destructive of nature’s economy and the well-being of billions of

people.

I’m sorry this agenda is old and tired rather than new and invigorating. The way

forward, at least for most white people, is repentance, renewal, and repair (reparations).24 Schmidt, Brown and Orr, “Ethics in the Anthropocene: A research agenda,” from The Anthropocene Review, 5.

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James Baldwin is the guide. In The Price of the Ticket he writes of “do[ing] our

first works over”:

In the church I come from—which is not at all the same church to which white

Americans belong—we were counseled, from time to time, to do our first works

over. Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it,

travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it

to yourself but know whence you came.6

To do white “first works over” means to reexamine everything from its onset,

speak the truth as best one can, change the normative gaze and controlling narrative of

this way of life, and re-do and re-purpose its institutions.

Yet this daunting agenda is new in a critical way. It is new because our

cumulative powers range across the whole ecosphere and into the homelands of distant

generations. The eco-Reformation task, then, is to connect “multiple social worlds to a

shared view of human and Earth histories” and to find alliances for the long haul good of

both people and the planet.

So what is left of conventional ethics? How do we start with what we have and

move from there into viable moral imagination and practice?

We start with social justice, now more urgent than ever. But if it is not enhanced

as creation justice, even social justice cannot be sustained. Human health on a degraded

planet is oxymoronic. The Salish wisdom, “We are as alive as the Earth is alive,” has as

its counterpoint that, for a big human world on a small planet, we are as injured, ill, or

dead as Earth is.

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That means changes in basic obligations. Commitments to family and democracy

remain. But we can’t keep even these if we don’t invert the assumptions of industrial

civilization. Thomas Berry has the relationship right: “Planetary health is primary; human

well-being is derivative.” Because human well-being is derivative, planetary health is

primary.

Likewise, the first law of economics is preservation of nature’s economy. The

human economy is, and always has been, derivative.

The same holds for energy. Most justice attention to energy asks questions such

as: Do we have enough to grow the economy to meet human needs? Are we energy-

independent? How will energy be distributed fairly? These discussions all go on without

first asking what sources and uses are mandated by the planet’s climate-energy system,

the way in which it regulates the incoming solar heat that makes life possible and keeps

Earth from being a frigid rock and no more. Our common questions assume that human

energy use is primary. This is exactly backwards. The first law of energy is preservation

of the planet’s climate-energy system as conducive to life; human energy use is

derivative of the planet’s. It’s the law.

Or consider the ethics of virtue. Standard virtues remain indispensible—honesty,

trustworthiness, solidarity, love, empathy and compassion. But if they are not joined to

Maya Angelou’s, Thomas Berry’s, Wendell Berry’s, and Martin Luther’s sense of

wonder, awakening awe, humility and what Martin Luther King called “cosmic

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companionship,”25 and “the sacredness of all human life”26 and we will not exit the

deadly arrogance of ourselves as master, with the rest of nature slave.

Theology. I finish with the witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In his theological

letters of 1944, Bonhoeffer traces the arrival of a new epoch. Naming it the “world-

coming-of-age,” it is the rise of unprecedented human powers. These powers compel a

new ethic of responsibility.

This novel historical development solidifies Bonhoeffer’s resolve to finish his

magnum opus, Ethics. He had already tried several approaches. None, however, was

completed to his satisfaction. Then, landing on our time as unprecedented human

knowledge and power in all domains, he realizes he will need to rethink it all, taking

stock of everything. He knows that the world-come-of-age powers we’re calling

anthropocene powers lack a viable faith and ethic to guide them. He also knows the

deadly past cannot be the future. He had located the fatal flaw in 1932, even before

Hitler. Namely, an aggressive “war-and-industry” identity that has its sources in the

West’s battles “to master nature, fight against it, to force it to its service.” This assertive

mastery, he says, is “the fundamental theme of European-American history.”

But this is not only a battle against non-human nature. It is also a battle “against

other human beings.” “In the most essential sense his life means ‘killing,’” Bonhoeffer

says of the European.

25 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Christmas Sermon on Peace, December 24, 1967,” in James M. Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 257.26 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Christmas Sermon on Peace, December 24, 1967,” in Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope, 255.

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In sum, Euro-Western civilization, fragmented from the rest of nature in its core

consciousness and practices, destroys natural and human communities together in an

exercise of collective power with few spiritual and moral constraints. This is mastery that

knows no limits as undertaken by autonomous humans in the name of freedom without

constraint.

All this Bonhoeffer knew in 1932. Now jump to 1944 and connect it to the

new book he needs to write before he can return to Ethics. Here is part of his

outline:

…[The West’s] goal is to be independent of nature. Nature used

to be conquered by the soul; with us it is conquered through

technological organization of all kinds. What is unmediated for us, what is given,

is no longer nature but organization. But with

this protection from the menace of nature, a new threat to life

is created in turn, namely, through organization itself. Now the

power of the soul is lacking! The human being is thrown back on

his own resources. He has learned to cope with everything except himself. He can

insure himself against everything but other human beings. In the end it all comes

down to the human being.27

The reach of this human knowledge and power across all earthly life,

throwing everything back upon ourselves, has strained standard ethical concepts to

the breaking point, Bonhoeffer says. Moral imagination and responsibility require

redoing. And while that is the subject of Ethics, no way forward is possible that

27 “Outline for a Book,” Letters and Papers from Prison, DBWE 8: 500.

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would bypass theo-ethical foundations and their imposing historical context. To

start with, there is no dialing back of history to some previous age, including the age

of a human religious a priori and the God of religion. For Christians, this means that

any constructive work interrogates faith’s most essential base points. Who is God,

Bonhoeffer asks, and what do we really believe such that we would stake our lives

on it? What do the key base points—“creation, fall, reconciliation, repentance, faith,

vita nova, last things,”28 mean now? Who is Jesus Christ for us today when “today” is

a different epoch, even a non-analogous one?

The greatly expanded knowledge and power is epistemological as well as

theological and moral. It need not posit God as necessary to advancing either knowledge

or power, and does not turn to a parental God for a bail-out when that knowledge and

those powers fail, as they do and will. Here resides Bonhoeffer’s critique of religion. The

God of this new moment will not be God as a working hypothesis, the God-of-the-gaps.

To do what humans do, science doesn’t need this God, and neither do we. Nor will this be

the rescuer God, God as deus ex machina. Not only can responsible persons get along

quite well without these particular “Gods,” but turning to them in a time of greatly

expanded powers is a moral cop-out. The God-of-the-gaps and the rescuer God belong to

the religion of an earlier consciousness and era. It may well have been the consciousness

of nineteen hundred years of Christianity, Bonhoeffer says, but as practiced now, that

religion is dysfunctional as genuine discipleship. In an epoch we now recognize as an era

of planet-changing human power, “claiming Christ” for “a world-come-of-age,” or

answering the question, “Who is Jesus Christ, for us, today,” requires another course, one

that will confront human power and knowledge so as to find God in what we do know, 28 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, DBWE 8: 502.

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rather than in what we don’t, and in problems that are solved, rather than only when and

where we are vexed. Moral accountability and confession of sins will address the sins of

our strengths and powers, rather than our weaknesses only. If God and standing before

God in the Anthropocene cannot be located at the heart of human power, accountability,

accomplishment and failure, then God and morality are pushed to the margins of all that

truly counts for the life of the world. They are beyond the “pale” in the literal sense of

that word; namely, beyond the “bounds” or “region” or “tract” of lived human life and

accountability.

Bonhoeffer has already provided the contrast: “Before God and with God we live

without God.” Or, in another formulation: We live etsi deus non daretur (as though God

does not exist). I.e., before the God of world-come-of-age powers and with this God, we

live without the God of religion. We live with the God who empowers humans to take

full responsibility for their unprecedented powers. God does not win space in the

Anthropocene by virtue of omnipotence and rescue, but by entering into suffering in the

way of Jesus, bringing life to the wounded and broken places, nature’s included. So, too,

is the exercise of our responsibility in a world where all turns on humanity.29 Before and

with this God we live without the God of religion and without our pre-world-come-of-age

consciousness.

To close I cut to the chase. Having heard the voices of science, ethics, and

theology, what does a “Manifesto for an Ecological Reformation of Christianity”

29 The secular, alternative theological view emerges in the view that we are the gods now and better get used to it and good at it. Yuval Noah Harari even names us homo deus in his book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (New York: Harper Collins, 2017). Humans who once worshipped gods as homo pre-deus now have become gods—homo deus—as technology displaces religion and the fear of nature is transmuted into the confidence to control it. Debates on geo-engineering sometimes assume this secular theology and morality.

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include, at least if you want a life where collateral beauty surpasses collateral

damage?

It includes chutzpah of a particular kind, the sort articulated by Joan

Chittister: “Life comes out of death. The present rises from the ashes of the past. The

future is always possible for those who are willing to re-create it.”30 If you’re not

ready for death and resurrection, don’t sign up.

At least for those of us formed by industrial civilization, it includes a new

relationship to the planet and its peoples. While we will always be tribal because of

human limitations—our horizons are inherently limited and our close connections

always numbered—the planet is “getting too small for both an Us and a Them.” “We

have no separate fates”…We are “fixed to one another.”31 It’s the law; get used to it.

So while we cannot avoid being tribal, neither can we afford being tribal only. There

will always be others; but they need not be enemies. Apartheid “othering” is out.

As part of a new relationship to the planet and its peoples, “an Ecological

Reformation” is far more than recycling bins, “green” prayers, a call for responsible

stewardship, and a recovered theology of creation. This reformation “calls for a

rereading of the canonical biblical texts, a critique of the environmental impact of

specific Christian traditions and practices, a retrieval of historical insights, figures

and practices, a reinvestigation of the content and significance of the Christian faith,

a reconsideration of influential symbols, a renewal of Christian communities and a

transformation of the ministries and missions of the church. The ecological

reformation of Christianity therefore is comprehensive in its scope and needs to

30 Joan Chittister, The Gift of Years (BlueBridge Books, 2008), 19. 31 Sam Killerman, from the cover of Orion magazine, November/December 2016.

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extend to Bible study, catechism, teaching, liturgies, hymns, Christian art, pastoral

care, ministry and mission alike,”32 including public witness and practice.33

It will include resistance and polemics. If you don’t like either, ditch Luther,

Calvin, Zwingli, Simons, Fox, Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells-Barnett, Dorothy Day,

Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Pope Francis. Reformation means theological

32 From p. 2 of “Manifesto for an Ecological Reformation of Christianity: the Volos Call March 2016.” 33 The Lutheran theologian who first understood the scope and depth required to address ecological reality and the exercise of human power adequately was Joseph Sittler. Already in 1970 he drew a distinction between a theology for ecology and a theology of ecology. The former “will try to manufacture out of uncriticized theological categories consequent moralistic efforts stretched to enclose new and crucial facts.” The “new and crucial facts” are those provided by the science of ecology. Ecology and ecological degradation at human hands then becomes another issue in the long list addressed by unreconstructed theology. But that is no more than “an extension of traditional ethics in the presence of crisis,” (p. 172) says Sittler, and it will not suffice: “No surface tinkering with theological categories or no every-so-petulant or patient tugging with ethical categories will really do.” (p. 174) The “God-question” itself needs to be re-located. This is Sittler’s version of Bonhoeffer’s discussion about the error of retaining the God of religion and an assumed religious a priori in a world-come-of-age. By contrast with a theology for ecology is Sittler’s theology of ecology. This is a new theological departure: “To open the mind toward these aspects which now stand before us with terrible necessity calls for fresh theological reflection as we behold and think and feel the world. Observe, I do not say behold and think about the world, but behold and think and feel the world!” (p.173) In different words, a new theological relationship to the world is required in light of the revelations of ecology. The scope of this relationship will be cosmic. “I have never been able to entertain a God-idea which was not integrally related to the fact of chipmunks, squirrels, hippopotamuses, galaxies, and light years!”Sittler says. He goes on to claim this same cosmic frame as the frame of meaning for all its members, quoting with approval the student who interrupted one of his lectures to ask, “But look, how can anything mean if everything doesn’t?” (p. 173) Sittler then argues that “reality itself must be spoken of ecologically.” “Reality is known only in relations.” (p. 174) He knows this metaphysic conflicts “with the very structure of a good deal of post-Enlightenment thought in the Western world.” But now “we must think if possible that there is no ontology of isolated entities, or instances, of forms, of processes, whether we are reflecting about God or man or Society or the cosmos. The only adequate ontological structure we may utilize for thinking things Chrisitianly is an ontology of community, communion, ecology—and all three words point

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and moral resistance and polemics against white supremacy, patriarchy, our kind of

economy and their underpinning cosmology, theology and morality.

At the same time, resistance must be matched to reconstruction. For that,

collaboration with civic and governmental entities is essential, even when tense.

Learn the hard lesson from Bonhoeffer that, in a world of wicked problems,

everyone who acts responsibly will become guilty. Learn from Niebuhr that the

question is not the purity of our motives, but the integrity of our compromises.

Learn from Black Lives Matter that while the content of our character matters, the

character and content of our institutions matters even more. And may we all honor

the Great Commandment by learning to love ourselves so fiercely that we change.

The ecological reformation also includes communal joy. It’s “life together”

(Bonhoeffer). You may not appreciate Luther’s coarse humor: “From a depressed

ass, can come no happy fart.” But with or without Luther’s humor, you will need

parties, song, companions and celebration. It’s the law of reformations.

conceptually to thought of a common kind. ‘Being itself’ may be a relation, not an entitative thing.” (p. 174) While there is much more in Sittler’s address, this suffices to show the parallel insistence of Sittler and Bonhoeffer that a thorough stock-taking of Christian fundamentals is demanded by the impact of human power in a new era and that a theology and metaphysic of comprehensive relationality will be its center. Sittler’s distinctiveness is that, two generations after Bonhoeffer, he, unlike Bonhoeffer, can draw profoundly upon ecology as the core re-conceptualizing notion for reality and responsibility. Ecology is, for Sittler, “the actuality of the relational as constitutive of all that live.” (p. 180) Thus he speaks not only of a theology of ecology, but a politics, economics and esthetics of ecology as well as a biology, botany and chemistry of ecology. (p. 172) It need only be added that Bonhoeffer affirms the same constitutive relationality, albeit with a different vocabulary. The page numbers cited in this footnote are those in “Ecological Commitment as Theological Responsibility,” an address by Joseph Sittler on January 31, 1970, at Saint Xavier College, Chicago, published in Zygon, vol. 5, no. 2, June, 1970.

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Finally, this reformation headlines the prayer Veni, Creator Spiritus! “Come,

Holy Spirit, renew your whole creation!” You can plan your day around that prayer.

Larry Rasmussen

lras1939@gmail.com

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