A reply to a comment that told me that I was “running further and further away from Christ”, as I share ecotheological insights from my reading.
Funny how any focus at all on the severity and seriousness of the Ecological Crisis elicits such cries of “heresy” from some of our more “fundamentalist” Christians in the fellowship.
Such hostility and fear of facing the reality of our predicament!
It’s actually “siding” with the ideology that got us here: the hubris of humankind, which goes all the way back to the Garden, and was instrumental — at the heart, it seems — in the “original sin”. “Eating of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” is what the Creation narrative writers in Genesis clearly identify. The snake told Eve that “surely you won’t die”. This hubris of humankind carried forward, again and again in the story of God’s efforts to redeem the world. The Bible is “Heilsgeschichte” (“Salvation History”); God’s ever-active “hovering” (Genesis 1:2) over the “face of the deep”; that primal chaos that God introduced , “In the beginning”, when the “Logos” was also with God, and “without him not one thing was made” (John 1:1-3).
[So, to one who thinks ] I’ve “run from Christ”. On the contrary . This Ecological Crisis, and its dawning upon my journey, has done much to clarify for me the All-Embracing love of God who created, and the Son who was and is Incarnate, as Jesus of Nazareth, and onward in the Holy Spirit to empower his people, the church. That’s a deepening, and I think [there is] need to re-assess [propensities] to pronounce such judgement. It actually blocks [one] from seeing more of Jesus, and recognizing the activity of the Spirit who constantly broods over us (another translation for that active verb in Genesis 1:2 that shows God’s presence, the Ruah, hovering/brooding/sweeping-over the face of the deep/waters).
Centuries of Christian theology testify to the “Book of Creation” , which is revelation , and the ONLY revelation prior to Scripture to which the people had access without mediation (unless, [perhaps, if we can say that Creation itself is that mediator of God’s activity and presence. We being the Conscious creatures of Creation that we are (Some have said “The Universe, conscious of itself”) , are in touch with God through our communion with Creation, which has come to us as our assigned Home and Ground on which we attend to life.
No, you’ve got it completely backwards to say I am “running from Christ in this turn toward a more robust Creation Theology”. Sorry.
