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New House Rules: Christianity, Economics and Planetary Living

Reprinted from Carol Adams (ed.) Ecofeminism and the Sacred (Continuum, 1999), pp. 84-98.

I teach a survey course in contemporary theology that covers the 20th century. When I took a similar course as a divinity student at Yale in the late ‘50s, it had considerable unity. We studied the great German theologians whose names began with ‘B’ (seemingly a prerequisite for theological luminosity) Barth, Bultmann, Brunner, Bonhoeffer – and, of course, Tillich. They were all concerned with the same issues, notably reason and revelation, faith and history, issues of methodology and especially, epistemology: how can we know God?

More recent theology has no such unity. The first major shift came in the late ‘60s, with the arrival of the various liberation theologies which are still growing and changing as more and different voices from the underside of history insist on being heard. While what separates these various theologies is great (much greater than what separated German theology and its American counterparts), one issue, at least, unites them: they ask not how we can know God but how we can change the world. We are now at the threshold of a second major shift in theological reflection during this century, a shift in which the main issue will be not only how we can change the world but how we can save it from deterioration and its species from extinction.

The extraordinary events of the past few years, with the simultaneous lessening of cold-war tension and worldwide awakening to the consequences of human destruction of the flora and fauna and the ecosystem that supports them, signal a major change in focus. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the focus of the liberation theologies widened to include, in addition to all oppressed human beings, all oppressed creatures as well as planet earth.

Liberation theologies insist rightly that all theologies are written from particular contexts. The one context which has been neglected and is now emerging is the broadest as well as the most basic: the context of the planet, a context which we all share and without which we cannot survive. It seems to me that this latest shift in 20th-century theology is not to a different issue from that of liberation theologies, but to a deepening of it, a recognition that the fate of the oppressed and the fate of the earth are inextricably interrelated, for we all live on one planet – a planet vulnerable to our destructive behaviour.

The link between justice and ecological issues becomes especially evident in light of the dualistic, hierarchical mode of Western thought in which a superior and an inferior are correlated: male/ female, white people/people of colour, heterosexual/homosexual, able-bodied/physically challenged, culture/ nature, mind/body, human/nonhuman. These correlated terms – most often normatively ranked – reveal clearly that domination and destruction of the natural world is inexorably linked with the domination and oppression of the poor, people of colour, and all others that fall on the ‘inferior’ side of the correlation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ancient and deep identification of women and nature, an identification so profound that it touches the very marrow of our being: our birth from the bodies of our mothers and our nourishment from the body of the earth. The power of nature – and of women – to give and withhold life epitomizes the inescapable connection between the two and thus the necessary relationship of justice and ecological issues. As many have noted, the status of women and the status of nature have been historically commensurate: as goes one, so goes the other.

A similar correlation can be seen between other forms of human oppression and a disregard for the natural world. Unless ecological health is maintained, for instance, the poor and others with limited access to scarce goods (due to race, class, gender, or physical capability) cannot be fed. Grain must be grown for all to have bread. The characteristic Western mind-set has accorded intrinsic value, and hence duties of justice, principally to the upper half of the dualism and has considered it appropriate for those on the lower half to be used for the benefit of those on the upper. Western multinational corporations, for example, regard it as ‘reasonable’ and ‘normal’ to use Third World people and natural resources for their own financial benefit, at whatever cost to the indigenous peoples and the health of their lands.

The connection among the various forms of oppression is increasingly becoming clear to many, as evidenced by the World Council of Churches’ inclusion of ‘the integrity of creation’ in its rallying cry of ‘peace and justice.’ In the closing years of the 20th century we are being called to do something unprecedented: to think wholistically, to think about ‘everything that is,’ because everything on this planet is interrelated and interdependent and hence the fate of each is tied to the fate of the whole.

This state of affairs brought about a major ‘conversion’ in my own theological journey. I began as an Earthian in the ‘50s, finding Earth’s heady divine transcendence and ‘otherness’ to be as invigorating as cold mountain air to my conventional religious upbringing. Like many of my generation, I found in Earth what appeared to be a refreshing and needed alternative to liberalism. But after years of work on the poetic, metaphorical nature of religious language land hence its relative, constructive, and necessarily changing character), and in view of feminism’s critique of the hierarchical, dualistic nature of the language of the Jewish and Christian traditions, my bonds to biblicism and the Barthian God loosened. Those years were the ‘deconstructive’ phase of my development as a theologian.

My constructive phase began upon reading Gordon Kaufman’s 1983 Presidential Address to the American Academy of Religion. Kaufman called for a paradigm shift, given the exigencies of our time – the possibility of nuclear war. He called theologians to deconstruct and reconstruct the basic symbols of the Jewish and Christian traditions – God, Christ, and Torah – so as to be on the side of life rather than against it, as was the central symbol of God with its traditional patriarchal, hierarchical, militaristic imagery. I answered this call, and my subsequent work has been concerned with contributing to that task.

While the nuclear threat has lessened somewhat, the threat of ecological deterioration has increased: they are related as ‘quick kill’ to ‘slow death.’ In other words, we have been given some time. We need to use it well, for we may not have much of it. The agenda this shift sets for theologians is multifaceted, given the many different tasks that need to be done. This paradigm shift, if accepted, suggests a new mode of theological production, one characterized by advocacy, collegiality, and the appreciation of differences.

Until the rise of liberation theologies, theology was more concerned with having intellectual respectability in the academy than with forging an alliance with the oppressed or particular political or social attitudes and practices. There was a convenient division between theology (concerned with the knowledge of God) and ethics (a lesser enterprise for action-oriented types). Theologians were also usually ‘solo’ players, each concerned to write his (the ‘hers’ were in short supply) magnum opus, a complete systematic theology. As the deconstructionists have underscored, these theologians also strove to assert, against different voices, the one voice (their own – or at least the voice of their own kind) as the truth, the ‘universal’ truth.

Our situation calls for a different way of conducting ourselves as theologians. Like all people we need, in both our personal and professional lives, to work for the well-being of our planet and all its creatures. We need to work in a collegial fashion, realizing that we contribute only a tiny fragment. Feminists have often suggested a ‘quilt’ metaphor as an appropriate methodology: each of us can contribute only a small ‘square’ to the whole. Such a view of scholarship may appear alien to an academy that rewards works ‘totalizing’ others in the field and insisting on one view.

The times are too perilous and it is too late in the day for such games. We need to work together, each in his or her own small way, to create a planetary situation that is more viable and less vulnerable. A collegial theology explicitly supports difference. One of the principal insights of both feminism and post-modern science is that while everything is interrelated and interdependent, everything (maple leaves, stars, deer, dirt – and not just human beings) is different from everything else. Individuality and interrelatedness are features of the universe hence; no one voice or single species is the only one that counts.

If advocacy, collegiality, and difference characterized theological reflection and if the agenda of theology widened to include the context of our planet, some significant changes would occur. I will suggest three.

First, it would mean a more or less common agenda for theological reflection, though one with an almost infinite number of different tasks. The encompassing agenda would be to deconstruct and reconstruct the central symbols of the Jewish and Christian tradition in favour of life and its fulfilment, keeping the liberation the oppressed, including the earth and all its creatures, in central focus. That is so broad, so inclusive an agenda that it allows for myriad ways to construe it and carry it out. It does, however, turn the eyes of theologians away from heaven and toward the earth; or, more accurately, it causes us to connect the starry heavens with the earth, as the ‘common’ creation story claims, telling us that everything in the universe, including stars, dirt, robins, black holes, sunsets, plants, and human beings, is the product of an enormous explosion billions of years ago. In whatever ways we might reconstruct the symbols of God, human being and earth, this can no longer be done in a dualistic fashion, for the heavens and the earth are one phenomenon, albeit an incredibly ancient, rich, and varied one.

If theology is going to reflect wholistically, that is, in terms of the picture of Current reality, then it must do so in ways consonant with the new story of creation. One clear directive that this story gives theology is to understand human beings as earthlings (not aliens or tourists on the planet) and God, as immanently present in the processes of the universe, including those of our planet. Such a focus has important implications for the contribution of theologians to ‘saving the planet,’ for theologies emerging from a coming together of God and humans in and on the earth imply a cosmocentric rather than anthropocentric focus. This does not, by the way, mean that theology should reject theocentrism; rather, it means that the divine concern includes all of creation. Nor does it imply the substitution of a creation focus for the tradition’s concern with redemption; rather, it insists that redemption should include all dimensions of creation, not just human beings.

A second implication of accepting this paradigm shift is a focus on praxis. As Juan Segundo has said, theology is not one of the ‘liberal arts,’ for it contains an element of the prophetic, making it at the very least an unpopular enterprise and at times a dangerous one. The academy has been suspicious of it with good reason, willing to accept religious studies but aware that theology contains an element of commitment foreign to the canons of scholarly objectivity. (Marxist or Freudian commitments, curiously, have been acceptable in the academy, but not theological ones.) Increasingly, however, the hermeneutics of suspicion and deconstruction are helping to unmask simplistic, absolutist notions of objectivity, revealing a variety of perspectives, interpretations, commitments, and contexts. Moreover, this variety is being viewed as not only enriching but also necessary. Hence the emphasis on praxis and commitment, on a concerned theology, need in no way imply a lack of scholarly rigor or a retreat to fideism. Rather, it insists that one of the criteria of constructive theological reflection – thinking about our place in the earth and the earth’s relation to its source – is a concern with the consequences of proposed constructions for those who live within them.

Theological constructs are no more benign than scientific ones. With the marriage of science and technology beginning in the 17th century, the commitments and concerns of the scientific community have increasingly been determined by the military-industrial-government complex that funds basic research. The ethical consequences of scientific research – which projects get funded and the consequences of the funded projects – are or ought to be scientific issues and not issues merely for the victims of the fall – out of these projects. Likewise, theological reflection is a concerned affair, concerned that this constructive thinking be on the side of the well-being of the planet and al its creatures. For centuries people have lived within the constructs of Christian reflection and interpretation, unknowingly as well as knowingly. Some of these constructs have been liberating, but many others have been oppressive, patriarchal, and provincial. Indeed, theology is not a ‘liberal art,’ but a prophetic activity, announcing and interpreting the salvific love of God to all of creation.

A third implication of this paradigm shift is that the theological task is not only diverse in itself (there are many theologies), but also contributes to the planetary agenda of the 21st century, an agenda that beckons and challenges us to move beyond nationalism, militarism, limitless economic growth, consumerism, uncontrollable population growth, and ecological deterioration. In wars that have never before been so clear and stark, we have met the enemy and know it is ourselves. While the wholistic, planetary perspective leads some to insist that all will be well if a ‘creation spirituality’ were to replace the traditional ‘redemption spirituality’ of the Christian tradition, the issue is not that simple. It is surely the case that the overemphasis on redemption to the neglect of creation needs to be redressed; moreover, there is much in the common creation story that calls us to a profound appreciation of the wonders of our being and the being of all other creatures. Nonetheless, it is doubtful that such knowledge and appreciation will be sufficient to deal with the exigencies of our situation.

The enemy – indifferent, selfish, short-sighted, xenophobic, anthropocentric, greedy human beings – calls, at the very least, for a renewed emphasis on sin as the cause of much of the planet’s woes and an emphasis on a broad and profound repentance. Theology, along with other institutions, fields of study, and expertise, can deepen our sense of complicity in the earth’s decay. In addition to turning our eyes and hearts to an appreciation of the beauty, richness, and singularity of our planet through a renewed theology of creation and nature, theology ought also to underscore and elaborate on the myriad ways that we personally and corporately have ruined and continue to ruin God's splendid creation – acts which we and no other creature can knowingly commit. The present dire situation calls for radicalizing the Christian understanding of sin and evil. Human responsibility for the fate of the earth is a recent and terrible knowledge; our loss of innocence is total, for we know what we have done. If theologians were to accept this context and agenda of their work, they would see themselves in dialogue with all those in other areas and fields similarly engaged: those who feed the homeless and fight for animal rights; the cosmologists who tell us of the common origins land hence interrelatedness) of all forms of matter and life; economists who examine how we must change if the earth is to support its population; the legislators and judges who work to advance civil rights for those discriminated against in our society; the Greenham women who picket nuclear plants, and the women of northern India who literally ‘hug’ trees to protect them from destruction, and so on and on.

Theology is an ‘earthy’ affair in the best sense of that word: it helps people to live rightly, appropriately, on the earth, in our home. It is, as the Jewish and Christian traditions have always insisted, concerned with ‘right relations,’ relations with God, neighbour, and self, but now the context has broadened to include what has dropped out of the picture in the past few hundred years– the oppressed neighbours, the other creatures, and the earth that supports us all. This shift could be seen as a return to the roots of a tradition that has insisted on the creator, redeemer God as the source and salvation of all that is. We now know that ‘all that is’ is vaster, more complex, more awesome, more interdependent, than any other people have ever known. The new theologies that emerge from such a context have the opportunity to view divine transcendence in deeper, more awesome, and more intimate ways than ever before. They also have the obligation to understand human beings and all other forms of life as radically interrelated and interdependent as well as to understand our special responsibility for the planet’s well-being.

My own work takes place within this context and attempts to add a small square to the growing planetary quilt. I would like to become very specific now. What is my – little ‘square’ that I offer to the common quilt? What can I as a theologian in the Christian tradition do constructively so that our planet can continue to support life in community? I emphasise ‘as a theologian,’ because I believe that the planetary agenda cannot be an avocation, something one does in addition to one’s everyday work – a pastime or hobby, as it were – but needs to be one’s vocation one’s central calling. It is perhaps obvious how raising children, gardening, teaching, nursing, or caring for animals might contribute to the planet’s agenda, but how does theology (let alone business, law, housekeeping, plumbing, or car manufacturing)? I leave it to each of those areas to imagine how they might fit, for I believe they, in fact, must fit (if not, their legitimacy is in question). But those who practice these arts and skills ought to be the ones who say in what ways they do fit or ought to change in order to do so.

There are many different theological tasks relevant to planetary well-being. One of central importance is learning to think differently about ourselves, others, and our planet, because learning to think differently usually precedes being willing and able to act differently. Much of one’s thinking at the basic level of worldview and one’s place in it is derived from the dominant images in the religious traditions of one’s culture. This ‘thinking’ is not primarily conscious, nor is it limited to active members of a religious tradition. Western culture was and still is profoundly formed by the Hebrew and Christian religions and their stories, images, and concepts regarding the place of human beings, history, and nature in the scheme of things. Moreover, I believe it is the major images or metaphors of a tradition that influence behaviour more powerfully than its central concepts or ideas. For instance, it is the image of God as king and lord rather than the idea of God as transcendent that has entered deeply into Western consciousness.

Let me suggest briefly some ways in which the modern worldview that is widely held in our culture has been deeply influenced by Christianity, and especially by Protestant Christianity. As many have pointed out, the Christian tradition is and has been not only deeply androcentric (centred on males and male imagery for the divine), but also deeply anthropocentric (focused on human well-being) to the almost total neglect of other species and the natural world, especially during the last few hundred years. It is also focused on redemption narrowly conceived, on human salvation, often understood in individualistic and otherworldly terms. The creation and health of all, of the earth and its creatures, has seldom been a central concern of the tradition. Moreover, the dominant imagery of this tradition has been monarchical. God is imaged as king, lord, and patriarch of a kingdom that he rules, a kingdom hierarchically ordered. God has all the power in this picture, with human beings seen as rebellious, prideful sinners against the divine right.

Needless to say, this picture is not what thoughtful Christians or other thoughtful people influenced by Christian culture hold consciously, but its main tenets have seeped into the Western worldview to the extent that most Westerners, quite unselfconsciously, believe in the sacredness of every individual human being (while scarcely protesting the extinction of all the members of other species); believe males to be ‘naturally’ superior to females; find human fulfilment (however one defines it) more important than the well-being of the planet; and picture God (whether or not one is a believer) as a distant, almighty super-person. Moreover, this dualistic, hierarchical picture supports another form of dangerous behaviour: the superiority of one’s own nation over others and hence the validation of a nationalistic, militaristic, xenophobic horizon. Christianity is surely not alone responsible for this worldview, but to the extent it has contributed to and supported it, the deconstruction of some of its major metaphors and the construction of others is in order.

The portrayal of God as monarch ruling over his kingdom is the dominant model in Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant thinking and is so widely accepted that it often is not recognized as a picture, that is, a construction of the divine/ human relationship. To many, God b the lord and king of the universe.¹ Yet the monarchical model has been thoroughly and roundly criticised not only by feminists but by a host of other theologians as well. It is not necessary to review the criticism of the model here, except for a few points. In the monarchical model, God is distant from the world, relates only to the human world, and controls that world through domination and benevolence.²

On the first point: the relationship of a king to his subjects is necessarily a distant one, for royalty is ‘untouchable.’ God as king is in his kingdom, which is not of this earth, and we remain in another place, far from his dwelling. In this picture, God is worldless and the world is Godless – the world is empty of God’s presence. Whatever one does for the world is finally not important in this model, for its ruler does not inhabit it as his primary residence and his subjects are well advised not to become too enamoured of it either. At most, the king is benevolent, but this benevolence extends only to human subjects.

And this is the second point: as a political model focused on governing human beings, it leaves out the entire rest of the earth and its many creatures. It is simply blank as to the natural world and hence has encouraged a similar indifference in human beings. God’s kingdom is composed exclusively of human beings.

Finally, in this model, God rules either through domination or benevolence, thus undercutting human responsibility for the earth. It is simplistic to blame the Hebrew and Christian traditions for the ecological crisis, as some have done, on the grounds that Genesis instructs human beings to have ‘dominion’ over nature; nevertheless, the imagery of sovereignty supports attitudes of control and use toward the non-human world. Whatever might have been nature’s superiority in the past, the balance of power has shifted to us. Extinction of species by nature, for instance, is in a different dimension from extinction by design, which only we can bring about. The model is lacking, even if God’s power is seen as benevolent rather than as domineering. Then it is assumed that all will be well, that God will care for the world with no help from us. The heavenly father will take care of his children; we can leave it up to him.

The images in this model are constructions, and as such they are partial, relative, and inadequate. They are metaphors abstracted from human relations (relations with kings, lords, masters) and applied to God. Hence, they are in no sense ‘descriptions’ of God; yet their power is deep and old, their influence inscribed into our being from our earliest years. They are, therefore, difficult to discard. Yet, as we have seen, the monarchical model is dangerous in our time, for it encourages a sense of distance from the world, is concerned only with human beings, and supports attitudes of either domination of the world or passivity toward it. This chilling realization adds a new importance to the images we use to characterize our relationship to God, to others, and to the non-human world. No matter how ancient a metaphorical tradition may be, and regardless of its credentials in scripture, liturgy, and creedal statements, it still must be discarded if it threatens the continuation and fulfilment of life. If, as I believe, the heart of the Christian gospel is the salvific power of God for all of creation, triumphalistic metaphors cannot express that reality in our time whatever their appropriateness may have been in the past.

What are other possibilities for imaging God’s relationship to the world and our place within it? The first question one must ask is: what world? Probably the single most important thing that theologians can do for the planetary agenda is to insist that the ‘world’ in question, the world in which to understand both God and human beings, is the contemporary scientific picture of the earth, its history, and our place in it that is emerging from cosmology, astrophysics, and biology. Neither the world of the Bible, nor of Newtonian dualistic mechanism, nor of present-day creationism is the world to which we must respond as theologians. I am not suggesting in any sense that science dictate to theology or that the two fields be integrated, but making a much more modest, though critically important, proposal. Contemporary theology, if it is to help people to think and act wholistically, must make its understanding of the God/world relationship consonant with contemporary views of reality. A theology that is not commensurate with reality as culturally understood is not credible. Moreover, the contemporary view coming from the sciences is so awesome, rich, and provocative for imaging both divine and human relationships that the political models seem pale and narrow in comparison.

In broad strokes, the common creation story emerging from the various sciences claims that some fifteen or so billion years ago the universe began with a big bang, exploding matter, which was intensely hot and infinitely concentrated, outward to create some hundred billion galaxies of which our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one, housing our sun and its planets. From this beginning came all that followed, so that everything that is is related, woven into a seamless network, with life gradually emerging after billions of years on this planet land probably on others as well), and evolving into the incredibly complex and beautiful earth that is our home. All things living and all things not living are the products of the same primal explosion and evolutionary history, and hence are interrelated in (an internal way from the very beginning. We are distant cousins to the stars and near relations to the oceans, plants, and all other living creatures on our planet.

The characteristics of this picture suggest radically different possibilities for understanding both God and human existence than we found in the monarch/realm worldview. The ‘world’ here is, first of all, the universe, beside which the traditional range of divine concern mainly with human subjects dwindles, to put it mildly. In this view, God relates to the entire fifteen-billion-year history of the universe and all its entities, living and nonliving. On the ‘clock’ of the universe, human existence appears a few seconds before midnight. This suggests, surely, that the whole show could scarcely have been put on for our benefit; our natural anthropocentrism is, indeed, sobered. Nevertheless, it took fifteen billion years to evolve creatures as complex as human beings; hence, the question arises of our peculiar role in this story, especially in relation to our own planet.

A second feature of the common creation story is the radical interrelatedness and interdependence of all aspects of it, a feature of utmost importance to the development of an ecological sensibility. It is one story, a common story, so that everything that is traces its ancestral roots within it, and the closer in time and space entities are, the closer they are related. Thus, while we may rightly feel some distance from such ‘relatives’ as exploding stars, we are ‘kissing cousins’ with everything on planet earth and literally brothers and sisters to all other human beings. Such intimacy does not, however, undercut difference; in fact, one of the outstanding features of post-modern science’s view of reality is that individuality and interdependence characterize everything. It is not just human beings that have individuality, for the veins on every maple leaf, the configuration of every sunset, and the composition of every pile of dirt is different from every other one. This portrayal of reality undercuts notions of human existence as separate from the natural, physical world; or of human individuality as the only form of individuality; or of human beings existing apart from radical interdependence and interrelatedness with others of our own species, with other species, and with the ecosystem. The continuity of nonliving and living matter displays another crucial feature: the inverse dependency of the most complex entities on the less complex. Thus, the plants can do very nicely without us, but we would perish quickly without them. The higher and more complex the level, the more vulnerable it is and the more dependent upon the levels that support it. Again, we see implications for reconceiving the ‘place’ of human beings in the scheme of things.

Another feature of the common creation story is its public character; it is available to all who wish to learn about it. Other creation stories, the cosmogonies of the various world religions, are sectarian, limited to the adherents of different religions. Our present one is not so limited, for any person on the planet has potential access to it and simply as a human being is included in it. This common story is available to be remythologized by any and every religious tradition and hence is a place of meeting for the religions, whose conflicts in the past and present have often been the cause of immense suffering and bloodshed. What this common story suggests is that our primary loyalty should not be to nation or religion, but to the Earth and its Creator (albeit that Creator may be understood in different ways). We are members of the universe and citizens of planet earth. Were that reality to sink into human consciousness all over the world, not only war among human beings but ecological destruction would have little support in reality. This is not to say they would disappear, but those who continued in such practices would be living a lie, that is, living in a way that is out of keeping with reality as currently understood.

Finally, the common creation story is a story: it is an historical narrative with a beginning, middle, and presumed end, unlike the Newtonian universe which was static and deterministic. It is not a ‘realm’ belonging to a king, but a changing, living, evolving event (with billions of smaller events making up its history). In our new cosmic story, time is irreversible, genuine novelty results from the interplay of chance and necessity, and the future is open. This is an unfinished universe, a dynamic universe, still in process. Other cosmologies, including mythic ones such as Genesis and even early scientific ones, have not been historical, for in them creation was ‘finished.’ Rather than viewing God as an external, separate being ruling over the world, it is appropriate to see God as in, with, and under the entire evolutionary process. Paul’s statement that God is the one ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’ takes on new and profound significance. In this picture God would be understood as a continuing creator, but of equal importance, we human beings might be seen as partners, as the self-conscious, reflexive part of the creation that can participate in furthering the process.

To summarise: the characteristics of the common creation story suggest a decentering and recentering of human beings. We are radically interrelated with and dependent on everything else in the universe and especially on our planet. We exist as individuals in a vast community of individuals within the ecosystem, each of which is related in intricate ways to all others in the community of life. We exist, with all other human beings from other nations and religions, within a common creation story that each of us can know about and identify with. The creation of which we are a part is an ongoing, dynamic story which we alone (so we believe) understand, and hence, we have the potential to help it continue and thrive, or to let it deteriorate through our destructive, greedy ways.

Our position in this story is radically different than in the king/realm picture. We are decentered as the only subjects of the king and recentered as those responsible for both knowing the common creation story and being able to help it flourish. In this story we feel profoundly connected with all other forms of life, not in a romantic way, but in a realistic way. We are so connected, and hence, we had better live as if we were. We feel deeply related, especially, to all other human beings, our closest relatives, and realize that together we need to learn to live responsibly and appropriately in our common home.

If this kind of thinking became widespread – thinking of ourselves as citizens of the planet, breaking down all forms of parochialism – some of the things that must happen if we and the earth are to survive and flourish, might be able to. Once the scales have fallen from one’s eyes, once one has seen and believed that reality is put together in such a fashion that one is profoundly united to and interdependent with all other beings, everything is changed. One sees the world differently: not anthropocentrically, not in a utilitarian way, not in terms of dualistic hierarchies, not in parochial terms. One has a sense of belonging to the earth, having a place in it along with all other creatures, and loving it more than one ever thought possible.

But, interestingly, such a perspective does not diminish either human beings or God; in fact, both are enlarged. Human beings have been decentered as the point and goal of creation, and recentered as partners in its continuing creation. God has been decentered as king of human beings and recentered as the source, power, and goal of the fifteen-billion-year history of the universe. As ethicist James Gustafson puts it, while we are not the ‘measure’ of creation, we are its ‘measurer’ (Gustafson 1981, 82). We are not the centre or the point of creation, but we are the only ones, to our knowledge, who know the story of creation. In fact, we human beings presently alive are the first human beings who really know this story, because it is only in the last fifty years or less that it has gradually emerged from the scientific community. We alone know this awesome fact, and the more one knows about this story– the micro and macro worlds that surround our middle world, the worlds of the very tiny and the unimaginable immense and ancient– the more filled with wonder one becomes. This is not to suggest that an aesthetic response is the principal one. Wonder and awe at the immensity and age of the universe can generate a sense of indifference toward puny earthly problems. A genuine aesthetic response is necessarily accompanied by an ethical one; that is, our responsibility for preserving the beauty, diversity, and well-being of our tiny corner of the universe, planet earth. As those responsible for helping the creative process to continue and thrive on our planet, we can scarcely imagine a higher calling. We have been recentered as co-creators.

In this picture of God and the world, God is certainly not diminished. To think of God as creator and continuing creator of this massive, breathtaking cosmic history makes all other traditional images of divine transcendence, whether political or metaphysical, seem small, indeed. The model of God as king is, by comparison, ‘domesticated transcendence,’ for a king only rules over human beings. A genuinely transcendent model would insist that God is the source, power, and goal of the total universe, but a source, power, and goal that works within its natural processes; hence, the model, while genuinely transcendent, is also profoundly immanental. The king/realm model is neither genuinely transcendent (God is king over one species recently arrived on a minor planet in an ordinary galaxy) nor genuinely immanent (God as king is an external super person, not the source, power, and goal of the entire universe).

The model that comes to mind as we think about God and the world in the new creation story is not ‘the king and his realm’ but the ‘universe as God’s body.’ The ancient organic metaphor which, in one form or another, was central to the Western sensibility for thousands of years until it was replaced by the mechanistic model in the seventeenth century, is emerging again in post-modern science, in ecology, and in feminism. It has, of course, ah4ays been present in Goddess religions and in Native American traditions.

The universe as God’s body is an immensely attractive, powerful model. To think of the entire evolutionary process, with all the billions of galaxies of stars and planets from the beginning of time, some fifteen billion years ago, as the ‘body’ of God, the visible ‘sacrament’ as it were of the invisible God, is a model of profound immanence and overwhelming transcendence. God is immanent in all – the processes of reality, expressing the divine intentions and purposes through those processes, and at the same time God, as the agent of the process, is transcendent over it, though as its internal source, power, and goal rather than as an external controller.

As a physical image stressing divine embodiment, it underscores what our tradition has seldom allowed: that matter is of God and is good, that, indeed, if God is embodied, then matter, the natural world, is not only ‘good’ but in some sense sacred – a place where God is present. It is a model that could be a rival to the monarchical language, for the base, or conventional meaning of the model, is of profound and radical importance to us: our bodies and the bodies of other human beings whom wt love, as well as the bodies of life forms we rely on and are now coming to appreciate (other animals, trees, plants, rocks, sky, and sail); It is a model with great religious potential, for it opens up the entire universe and especially our planet as a way of making God sacramentally present to us – God does not meet us only in the despair of personal crises nor only in the political battles for the liberation of oppressed human beings, but also in the beauty as well as the increasing deterioration of the natural world. Moreover, this model suggests a decentering and recentering for human being, a new sense of our proper place in the scheme of things – a place not as God’s darling but as God’s partner, as the ones, at least on our planet, who can and must take care of the body of God.

With the common creation story we now have a resource for re-imaging and radicalizing God as creator and redeemer of all that is, with human well-being as one important though by no means the only focus of divine concern. Within this story we human beings find, once again, our proper place within the whole, a place that, with the rise of modern science and its wedding to technology, seemingly giving us control over the natural world, we have forgotten. Yet now our place is more responsible than ever before, because we know that we have power, not the power to create but the power to destroy. We realize that it is only by living appropriately, in proper relations with all other beings, that wt can fulfil our responsibilities to the well-being of creation. Within this story, God is, once again, the source, power, and goal of all that is, the creator and redeemer of the cosmos, and not merely king of human beings. Yet, now God is giver and renewer of a universe so vast, so old, so diverse, so complex that all earlier and other images of divine glory and transcendence are dwarfed by comparison. And yet, this transcendence is one immanental to the universe, for God is not a super-person, a king, external to cosmic processes, but the source, power, and goal immanent in these processes.

One of the rallying cries of the Protestant Reformation was ‘let God be God.’ That is precisely what the common creation story, as a resource for theology, suggests. It is God and not we who crer8tes and makes whole. We, at the most, are helpers, whose proper place within the whole on which we depend is to acknowledge who we are in reality and where we ht The common creation story tells us that the earth is our home; we belong here; and we have responsibilities to our home.

It is precisely this sense of belonging, of being at home, that is the heart of the matter. It is the heart of the matter because it is the case: we do belong. As philosopher Mary Midgley writes, ‘We are not tourists here ... We are at home in this world because we were made for it. We have developed here, on: this planet, and we are adapted to life here ... We are not fit to live anywhere else’ (Midgley 1978, 194-95). Post-modern science allows us to regain what late medieval culture lost at the Reformation and during the rise of dualistic mechanism in the 17th century; a sense of the whole and where we fit in it. Medieval culture was organic, at least to the extent that it saw human beings, while still central, as embedded in nature and dependent upon God. For the last several centuries, for a variety of complex reasons, we have lost that sense of belonging. Protestant focus on the individual and otherworldly salvation, as well as Cartesian dualism of mind and body, divided what we are now trying to bring back together and what must be reintegrated if we and other being are to survive and prosper. But now, once again, we know that we belong to the earth, and we know it more deeply and thoroughly than any other human beings have ever known it. The common creation story is more than a scientific affair; it is implicitly – deeply moral, for it raises the question of the place of human beings in nature and calls for a kind of praxis in which we are ourselves in proportion, in harmony, and in a fitting manner relating to all others that live and all systems that support life.

To feel that we belong to the earth and to accept our proper place within it is the beginning of a natural piety, what Jonathan Edwards called ‘consent to being,’ consent to what is. It is the sense that we and all others belong together in a cosmos, related in an orderly fashion, one to the other. It is the sense that each and every being is valuable in and for itself, and that the whole forms a unity in which each being, including oneself, has a place. It involves an ethical response, for the sense of belonging, of being at home, only comes when we accept our proper place and live in a fitting, appropriate way with all other beings. It is, finally, a religious sense, a response of wonder at and appreciation for the unbelievably vast, old, rich, diverse, and surprising cosmos, of which one’s self is an infinitesimal but conscious part, the part able to sing its praises.

To summarize: one square in the quilt, one contribution to the planetary agenda, is the deconstruction of models and metaphors oppressive and dangerous to our planet as well as the suggestion of alternatives. Since the Christian tradition has contributed a number of problematic images, it is incumbent upon its theologians to analyze and criticize such models and metaphors. It is also the responsibility of theologians to suggest, from current resources, alternative models and metaphors to express the relation of God to the cosmos as well as the place of human beings in the cosmos. The common creation story is one such rich resource to re-image both divine and human reality in relation to the universe, and especially to our planet.

In conclusion, the planetary agenda is the most serious, most awesome fact facing us; it is concerned with whether we live or die and how well we live, if we do live – questions usually reserved for religions and their solutions to issues of mortality and salvation. We see now, however, that health and well-being are profoundly ‘earthy’ affairs – while still being religious ones, with all the urgency of religious questions. It is no exaggeration to say that the planetary agenda is a life-and-death matter. We now know this, and we know that our time is limited to do what needs to be done. The planetary agenda is everyone’s agenda. Each of us is called upon to contribute one square to the quilt. As time is short, we had better get about the business of doing so.

Notes
1. ‘The monarchical model of God as King was developed systematically, both in Jewish thought (God as Lord and King of the Universe), in medieval Christian thought (with its emphasis on divine omnipotence), and in the Reformation (especially in Calvin’s insistence on God’s sovereignty). In the portrayal of God’s relation to the world, the dominant western historical model has been that of the absolute monarch ruling over his kingdom’ (Barbour 1974, 156).
2. For a more complete critique of the monarchical model, see McFague 1987, ch. 3).

References
Barbour, Ian. Myths, Models and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion (Harper and Rowe, 1974).
Gustafson, James. Ethics from aTheocentric Position (University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 81.
McFague, Sallie. Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Fortress Press, 1987).
Midgley, Mary. Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Cornell University Press, 1978), pp194-195.

Sallie McFague is the former Carpenter Professor of Theology at Vanderbilt University. She teaches and writes in the area of religious language, especially as that language affects our behaviour toward others, including other life-forms and the ecosystem that supports all life. Her most recent book, (McFague, 1987) criticizes the monarchical language for God (God as king and the world as ‘realm’), suggesting instead that we consider the models of God as mother, lover, and friend of the world. She is presently working with materials from ‘the common creation story,’ the so-called Big Bang billions of years ago and the subsequent evolutionary history, as a resource for re-imagining both the transcendence and immanence of God as well as the proper place of human beings in the scheme of things.