Building tomorrow’s idols: Christians in Communion with Creation

Religious groups which lobby for population control rarely do so in explicitly theological terms. To claim that the same God who, from the Christian perspective, breathed life into human beings now supports efforts to choke off that life seems illogical, if not grotesque. Yet in an age which subsumes truth to merely human objectives, such illogic is not unknown.

The gospel preached by Christians in Communion with Creation (CCC) [http://www.ecr.anglican.org/wm/] is an excellent example of the ways such thinking has infiltrated even Christian churches of long standing and noble tradition. The group’s site laid out simply and larger than it first appears, including as it does a collection of classical nature poetry, a publications catalog and a smattering of other materials which supporters are encouraged to use in their church programs and the media.

What the site lacks, however, is understanding of our relationship to God’s creation. Traditional Christianity understands that mankind is to act as stewards of God’s creation (both on behalf of ourselves and our children) without idolizing that creation itself. The first recognizes that human beings have a responsibility before God for how they use or misuse all the gifts God has given us. Yet CCC asserts that creation is, in fact, a part of the Creator, deifying it.

We must, the site asserts, re-examine “scripture, tradition, liturgy, and theology in light of the current ecological understanding of the earth as our island home.” Such re-examination should be done not under the premise that the transcendent God is merely present in creation, but that the creation is a part of God and thus, ontologically, is God, according to this theologically confused site.

Eisegesis over exegesis

The theological justification for this view lies well outside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy. In his essay “Biblical Nature Wisdom,” Roger Wharton, founder of Christians in Communion with Creation, offers a new doctrine of salvation — “there is no salvation without ecological wholeness” — based on an idiosyncratic reading of the story of Noah (Genesis 6:5 — 9:17):

“No matter how righteous Noah feels in his selection by God, he soon discovers that he is to take his family with him on the ark. In this, Noah and humankind should see that there is no salvation or wholeness without community. Next, Noah is instructed to load pairs of all the living animals on board. The lesson here is that there is no salvation without ecological wholeness …”

Now this is not traditional biblical exegesis, but eisegesis — the reading into scripture of something that is clearly not there. Consider the verses immediately following in which God says:

“Dread fear of you [Noah] shall come upon all the animals of the earth and all the birds of the air: upon all the creatures that move about on the ground and all the fishes of the sea; into your power they are delivered. Every creature that is alive shall be yours to eat; I give them all to you as I did the green plants … Be fertile, then, and multiply; abound on the earth and subdue it.” (Genesis 9:2–3, 7 NAB).

Indeed a full exegesis of this passage argues not for linking salvation to creation but for an unmistakable emphasis on mankind’s stewardship over creation.

This kind of ‘creation theology’ pervades the whole site. Even the web pages which recount the animal imagery common to Christianity makes the animals into something they are not. “It seems animals have always been teachers of humans .…” the page begins, ignoring completely the reality that animals have never taught human beings anything. Rather, human beings have used animals to illustrate pious lessons, and learned from observing animals going about their instinctive tasks.

The Consequences

Blurring the distinction between God and His creation might remain a controversy merely among liturgists, theologians and philosophers if it were not for the consequences the error brings.

One of the site’s early pages highlights the remarks of the Rt. Reverend William E. Swing, Bishop of California for the Episcopal Church of the United States, which were delivered at the ordination of ECUSA priests in San Francisco. In his remarks Bp. Swing noted with optimism the way today’s “youthful voices” speak of the environment in “more reverential tones, as if somehow the environment is an arena for the sacred.” He also went on to predict that in 50 years the world’s population will “soar from 5.5 billion to more than 9 billion. Soaring populations and shrinking materials [resources] will move us from a casual, romantic appreciation of nature to a profound ethical and sacred regard.”1

But if nature is to be sacred and human life profane, what fate will befall humanity at the hands of the new god? In his essay “The Challenge of Biocentrism,” Thomas Sieger Derr, noted author of articles on both religion and the environment, worries about the consequences of divinizing Creation and the corollary belief that, for the good of the planet, many human beings must die:

Should this ecological ‘wisdom’ [the necessity of large-scale death] be applied to Homo sapiens? Because the whole direction of biocentric thought is to answer this question affirmatively, and because the consequences are so fearsome for most people’s sensitivities, it is hard to find candid replies. When they do come out, ordinary ethical opinion, unenlightened by this new environmental realism, is apt to be appalled. Should we curtail medicine so that more of us may die “naturally” and earlier? Yes. Should we refrain from feeding the hungry, so that population will not exceed its boundaries? Yes, said the “life-boat school” and especially its helmsman Garrett Hardin, whose bluntness is plainly an embarrassment to the current generation of biocentrists. Or consider J. Baird Callicott’s rendering of William Aiken’s questions as direct statements: ‘Massive human diebacks would be good. It is our duty to cause them. It is our species duty relative to the whole, to eliminate 90 percent of our numbers.’2

This, of course, is not only monstrous from an ethical point of view but wrongheaded from the perspective of simple logic. If human beings are to be simply another species among the masses of species which, together, constitute God, why are we to be held to any other standard in regard to other species? If nature, as the axiom goes, is ‘red in tooth and claw’ why shouldn’t human beings seek to further their own existence at the expense of the rest?

Traditional Christianity, of course, teaches no such responsibility to either destructive self-preservation or mindless self-sacrifice. We human beings, in the orthodox Christian view, are able to use nature for our own ends because we bear the responsibility for how we do so. There was a time when most Christian churches understood this. Christians in Communion with Creation clearly does not.

Endnotes

1 William E. Swing, “A Call to Ordinands, Clergy and all Christians,” 4 June 1995, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco as appearing on the Wilderness Manna web site (http://www.ecr.angliean.org/wm/call.html) on 15 July 1996.

2 Thomas S. Derr in Creation at Risk, (Ethics and Public Policy Center), p 100.

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