Sustainability and Sacrifice: An Eco-Theology of the Cross
On any given evening in any urban neighborhood in the United States, it is possible to forage through grocery store dumpsters for an array of food worthy of the tables in Solomon’s Temple. Thousands of pounds of fresh bread, fruit, vegetables, and even the occasional gourmet dessert make their way from the store shelves to the curb to garbage trucks to landfill nightly. Meanwhile, within walking distance of such trash treasures, it is also easy to find someone who is, in bureaucratic terms, “food insecure.” The word demonic comes to mind. We live in a world of demonic unsustainability. As a veteran dumpster diver, I can report that my most memorable garbage find came on a January night while I was vacationing in London: delicate asparagus (grown in South Africa), a dozen French baguettes, several dark chocolate candy bars, a five pack of ale (the sixth can had sprung a leak), and bags of mostly perfect tangerines stacked haphazardly in a large green metal box behind the Waitrose supermarket in New Malden. I still think of the absurd carbon footprint of all the parties involved, and of the meeting between me and the discarded asparagus made possible by tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel.
It could be argued that most people in the Western world do not even know what sustainability is. Why is it so hard for us to find a balance of give and take? Why do human communities so often drift into disequilibrium or bring disequilibrium to our fellow species? These are not just twenty-first century questions. The Bible gives testimony to humanity’s mixed record in co-existing with neighbors, managing resources, and stewarding creation. Yahweh oversees a world where a hierarchical great chain of being is often the template for intraspecies and interspecies interactions. Pigeons and doves were yanked apart by the wings and their blood poured upon the altars of the Temple, Job’s family of twelve owned seven thousand sheep (by today’s standards, a factory farming operation!), and Jesus plucked thousands of fish out of the sea to the delight of his disciples. As a rabbi friend once reminded me, the Bible does provide gold standard rules for the management of land and animals, but those ancestral ideas are a lot less compelling than the convenience of Styrofoam plates.
Theologians and biblical scholars often try to soften the language of dominion. Near Eastern Studies specialist Ronald Simkins points out that “many of the concerns of the biblical writers were simply not the concerns of contemporary environmentally minded people,” and that “the Bible may be used to challenge the pervasive anthropocentrism of so much of Western Christianity.”[i] Simpkins frames it politely, that “the Bible may be used” to save us from ourselves. While many contemporary eco-theologians take this optimistic approach, it is hard to reconcile the stark reality of climate change with the hope of redemption through Earth Day tree planting events and church recycling projects.
In 2015, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a comprehensive report addressing the topic of global warming in the twenty-first century. The research findings were compiled collaboratively by fifty-one scientists from around the globe, and the message was blunt: “Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.”[ii] The hundreds of pages of data presented (and updated yearly since 2015) can be distilled into two major points: humans as a keystone species have had a devastating effect on ecosystems around the globe, and the flora and fauna of the earth are now locked into a major extinction event that could eradicate most of the planet’s life forms. Climate change has become the theological question of the twenty-first century, the kairos event from which we will sink or swim. While it is tempting to continue a conversation about “creation stewardship” or “ecclesial responsibility,” it is also time to consider the meeting place between theology and a mass extinction event. As the planet’s ecosystems recalibrate themselves, suffering and sustainability go hand-in-hand.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. As Christians, we embrace these very cycles of life and death every Easter. The previous year’s crops give rise to the spring’s new shoots. New life emerges over eons, built from the organic detritus of previous earthly inhabitants. In our personal lives, there are things we inevitably need to let go of to begin again. While eco-theological discussions can tilt their focus toward God’s grandeur and the Spirit’s mystery, just as important is an eco-theology of the cross. Luther reads as an unlikely bedfellow for Saint Francis or John Cobb, but it is well worth bringing the Heidelberg Disputation into conversation with climate change: He deserves to be called a theologian…who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross. The cross speaks to us about sustainability. It is also a vital symbol in the devastation of the unfolding climate catastrophe: animals burned alive in wildfires, Inuit hunters falling through thinning Arctic ice, the homeless dying of heat exposure on the streets of Phoenix, Arizona. The cross is actively entwined in all these tragedies. And the cross is also the ultimate symbol of the transformation of suffering into sustainability. Jesus “cycles out” of human life to redeem the creation. All of life follows this path.
Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard in a recent interview in Emergence Magazine talks about her research into cycles of give-and-take and suffering-and-sustainability among communities of trees. One of the discoveries of her research is that “when a tree is dying, it passes on most of its carbon through its networks to the neighboring trees, even different species” an act that contributes “to the vitality of the new forest.”[iii] Trees, like the Christ, serve all creation.
The prophetic reality of our kairos moment is clear. Humanity can heed Jesus’s advice to the rich man and sell all that we own (including our attachment to cars, planes, spacious apartments, steak, bacon, and South African asparagus), or we reconcile with the fact that homo sapiens as a species is about to sacrifice itself into extinction, hopefully for the good of the next round of creatures in God’s creation. Sadly, there is not a lot of wiggle room; sadder still is that there is not a lot of consciousness on the part of humans that without a new radical ethos of sustainability, the human experiment is likely to end with bad reviews. Biologist Lynn Margulis has already narrated one such review of our place in the earth’s history. In a 2011 interview with Discover magazine, she gave this stark analysis of the story of evolution:
The species of some of the protoctists [bacteria] are 542 million years old. Mammal species have a mean lifetime in the fossil record of about 3 million years. And humans? You know what the index fossil of Homo sapiens in the recent fossil record is going to be? The squashed remains of the automobile. There will be a layer in the fossil record where you’re going to know people were here because of the automobiles. It will be a very thin layer.[iv]
Margulis’s statement is not simply a bleak, nihilistic view of reality. Embedded in it is a potential celebration of what-is. Bacteria and other forms of life belong to time and space as much as we do. A return to an earlier paganism or a secular theological relinquishment of the divine are not necessary requirements of such thinking. Judeo-Christian tradition emerged for a reason, and for the two thousand years since the life of Jesus, a feeling for the Christ has haunted every crevice of the earth. Yet somewhere along the line we deprived ourselves of an understanding of the Christ’s message as it pertains to our immediate creaturely lives: we are earth’s sacred compost.
An honest twenty-first century eco-theology might remind us that we are out of sync with our bacterial beginnings and the forces of the divine that hover there. It might also offer us the option to celebrate a world that goes on with or without us. There is nothing wrong with eco-theological writing that champions the responsibilities of humans for stewardship of other creatures and creation, though it is worthwhile to question the impulse behind such thinking. Is it, as Paul Tillich might say, an anxiety about our own finitude that mobilizes us to consider creation as a worthy partner at all? We take pride in the kingdom of God being within us, but are not awake to the extent to which it will also still exist, regardless of our presence on the face of the earth. Just as death and resurrection are not one event, but many events, and just as the Christ is an eternal phenomenon rather than a specific historical event, so too are beginnings and ends within the context of the universe as a whole. Theologian John Culp, in his essay “Coming to Salvation: A Process Understanding,” suggests that we think of humans as “a unity of a chain of events” that are remembered through time. For him “God provides salvation by preserving the value achieved by each person and actuality”[v] across the realms of living and dying. While Culp frets that the statement is abstract, he speaks to a very concrete notion of ancestral (and geologic) remembrance, and even invokes our limited understanding of the way past, present, and future may not even be the linear phenomenons we think they are. Our Christian (and secular) hopes for the future, like our picture of God, emerge from our limited understanding of the time-space continuum.
What we know from the geologic record is that there have already been five major extinction events in the earth’s complex narrative. What we intuit from our Christian belief system is that there is no death where there has been life. What we theorize via physics is that matter and energy may change forms, but they are never removed from the universe. An Anthropocene eco-theology might bring all these threads together. As all of life on earth hangs in the balance, coming to terms with the reality of the Bible’s messages about humans and their place in creation is crucial. There are deep reckonings to be had with our embedded theologies. We are not just “wannabe stewards.” At our best, we are co-conspirators with the rest of life, at least for the time we are here. The question is what we will do with it. How do we want to approach the concept of sustainability?
Sustainability originates from a system in balance, from a give and take, not from a take and take and take. In this, Jesus gives us a clear and simple route. Yes, his call to poverty is literal, or Pope Francis frames it, “How can I become a little poorer in order to be more like Jesus?” There is no metaphor at work here, especially for those of us who live in the first world with first world luxuries. The future of most species on this planet is dependent upon a literal poverty, which is not a poverty at all. Sustainability is relational. Its code is embedded in Paul’s church: meals are shared, widows are fed, one’s church is in one’s home with one’s neighbors. The gratifications and conveniences of the world (the bling of the Royal Consciousness, as Walter Brueggemann might say) are nothing but a distraction. It is a poverty that means sharing the earth’s resources equally. The Anthropocene extinction event allows for, and demands, the most radical (and perhaps final) reconsideration of our theological assumptions about the relationship between humans, creation, and the divine.
In the hope for progress, in the promise of seven thousand sheep, we can feel giddy. We can dream of a world where our immediate desires are met. We can even be lured into hopes of a sustainable future where fleets of electric cars jam the highways of America. The reason that this kind of thinking fails us in both spiritual and secular realms is that it views sustainability as possible without sacrifice or suffering. It forgets the message of the cross: that we give over parts of ourselves to keep systems in balance, that we grow and are transformed not by clinging to the objects of our desire, but through kenotic activities on a par with Suzanne Simard’s dying trees. In Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, he speaks of a ministry that resembles “a nurse tenderly caring for her own children.” (1 Thessalonians 2:7). There are currently nineteen million people in Bangladesh whose homes are disappearing into the Bay of Bengal as a direct result of the decisions we make daily that are devoid of tender care. Both Paul and Jesus present us with a truth about sustainability: that it is not a catch phrase so much as it is a road to the cross. We risk settling into a cheap grace when we deny ourselves the experience of going down that road, of being open to living in a world where we are all a little bit more poor.
[i] Ronald A. Simkins, “The Bible and Anthropocentrism: Putting Humans in Their Place,” Dialectical Anthropology38, no. 4 (2014): 411.
[ii] Rajendra K. Pachauri and Leo Meyer, Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report, (Geneva: IPCC, 2015), 2, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/
SYR_AR5_FINAL _full.pdf (accessed August 21, 2020).
[iii] Emmanuel Lee-Vaughn. “Interview with Suzanne Simard,” May 3, 2021, Emergence Magazine, https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/finding-the-mother-tree/(accessed June 19, 2021).
[iv] Dick Teresi, “Discover Interview: Lynn Margulis Says She’s Not Controversial, She’s Right,” Discover, June 16, 2011, https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/discover-
interview-lynn-margulis-says-shes-not-controversial-shes-right (accessed September 1, 2020).
[v] John Culp, “Coming to Salvation: A Process Understanding,” in Donna Bowman and Jay McDaniel, eds., Handbook of Process Theology (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2006), 47.
