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Human creativity and immaturity
Q: The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a widening environmental, economic and political crisis. Is it also a moral crisis? How does religion influence our use and abuse of the natural world? Does religion help or harm the environment?
Christian faith has within it the resources for a robust ecological ethic, rooted in our belief that God is the creator of the world, that human beings are responsible to God for good stewardship of the creation, and that both love of God and love of all our earthly neighbors requires such stewardship.
However, Christianity can be and often has been understood in a way that also renders it vulnerable to a disregard for the well-being of the creation. God's relationship to creation can be understood as distant and largely indifferent. Human stewardship responsibilities can be understood more like domination and exploitation rather than care. And our focus on the divine to human "vertical" drama can leave us tone-deaf to the Bible's own references to our "horizontal" responsibilities to human beings and other environmental neighbors.
The Bible also teaches that human beings are sinners. This is a very rich doctrine that means not just or even mainly that we do wrong intentionally, but that our pride, greed, ignorance, and general fallibility leave us often blundering into disaster without any intent to do wrong.
Behold the oil spill, which may become the worst ever, anywhere. The fact that human beings have a willingness to find oil that far under the surface of the sea and to use it for our energy-dependent civilization reveals our great creativity but also a dominative and objectified relationship to creation. The fact we have now discovered--that humans were smart enough to figure out how to drill such a hole underwater but not smart enough to figure out how to plug it--makes for a great and terrible case study in human sinfulness.
By
David Gushee
|
June 2, 2010; 4:36 PM ET
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Posted by: mono1 | June 4, 2010 11:26 AM
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Depends on your view of Christianity. Many of the Pentecostal/Evangelical types could care less about the Earth. They feel that 1) they're going to be raptured, so why should they not use it all before they go; 2) God gave it to us to use, so why not? or 3) Environmentalism leads to the evils of Earth Worship and (gasp!) Paganism. Fortunately, most mainstream Christians don't believe this rot.
We're all praying for a resolution - Christian and Pagan alike. Unfortunately, we have to trust the corporations who are the ONLY ones that have this expertise to actually fix the problem that they solved. In the meantime, we can only watch helplessly as more oil washes up onto beaches and wetlands, and help the fishermen and others impacted by the spill. We need the Deity to inspire those individuals who have the knowledge to fix this problem to come up with a solution.
Posted by: Athena4 | June 3, 2010 3:33 PM
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