7. See in this connection Reintegrating God’s Creation: A Paper for Discussion. Church and Society Document 3 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1987). This booklet (62 pages) is the documentary remains of one of the most interesting ecumenical meetings in which I have ever participated. It was part of that seven-year process undertaken by the World Council at its sixth assembly (in Vancouver in 1983) and known by the phrase, “Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation.”
In May of 1987 I was one of a small group of ten or twelve persons—scientists, theologians, journalists—who were called together by the WCC to meet for several days in a small Franciscan convent in Amsterdam. One of the other senior participants was a scientist of whom, at the time, I had never heard. His name was James Lovelock, and he had just made public what at the suggestion of his friend William Golding, the English novelist, he had named the Gaia Theory. In its briefest form, the Gaia Theory states that the planet Earth is a living reality, and not merely a collective of inanimate substances and processes; and that therefore our human attitude toward and relationship with the planet needs to avoid the kind of objectification or “thingification” that has in fact characterized the whole modern scientific approach to nature.
Perhaps because we were the two eldest participants in the group, James Lovelock and I quickly recognized a certain commonality in our approaches to the world—though his was of course scientific and mine theological—and we found ourselves being turned to by the others for some procedural guidance; for it was a rather amorphous group, without previous acquaintance, and we had had no briefing by the organizers.
From the start, I found Lovelock’s thinking both compatible and stimulating, as, e.g., Rosemary Radford Ruether has done since: see Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992). To look upon the planet as though it were alive, even if one had to use that term somewhat metaphorically, seemed an important breakthrough in the human attempt to find a better way of understanding both the world and ourselves in it. Yet I wondered how such a bold thesis would fare under the gaze of the more objective or hard sciences.
As it happened, our little conference was occurring at the same time as a large professional gathering of scientists under the auspices of the Institute for Environmental Studies of the Free University of Amsterdam; and one day it was arranged that our group should visit that consultation. I was astonished at the respect and interest with which James Lovelock was received by the international scientists on that occasion. I believe that his Gaia Theory is still regarded with some skepticism among scientists, but that is not so significant as is the fact that it has stimulated the thinking of many within the scientific community as well as a great many others who reflect deeply on the future of the planet under the impact of human demand, neglect, and contempt.
The above-named booklet did not achieve a wide circulation, but it deserves to be studied at least for its exemplification of profitable dialogue between science and theology today.
8. See, e.g., Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
9. Reluctantly I find myself in some disagreement with what my colleague and friend of many years, the Catholic theologian Gregory Baum, has recently written on this subject:
“Let me first say a few words about the internal pluralism of religious traditions. At one time, scholars believed that it was possible to gain a deep insight into a religion and define its essential characteristics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Adolf von Harnack, the famous Protestant theologian and historian, published The Essence of Christianity; Leo Beck, the learned German rabbi, published The Essence of Judaism. Today scholars no longer suppose that religions have an essence. What is recognized today is that religions are produced by communities of interpretation whose faith is based on sacred texts or sacred persons, sources that summon them to worship and guide them in their daily life. Religions are constituted by faith communities that read and reread their sacred texts in the ever-changing circumstances of history. In the search for fidelity to the originating texts or persons, the hermeneutic communities are involved in internal debates and in conversation with the culture in which they dwell. Religions thus have no permanent essence: their identity is created by their effort to remain faithful to the sacred texts. Religions are therefore inevitably marked by an internal pluralism. Each religion has many faces.” (Baum, Signs of the Times: Religious Pluralism and Economic Injustice[Toronto: Novalis, 2007], 20–21.)
This may be true enough as a description of the religious situation, but apart from its reference to “sacred texts,” it does not address the knotty question of authenticity, nor does it leave us with any criteria for recognizing great distortions of given religious traditions. One can readily agree that the concept of an essence of a religion evokes the language of another time; nevertheless, the basic inquiry in which Harnack and Beck and others of that age were involved is hardly one that can be abandoned by serious faith and theology. Whether we call it the ongoing quest for the core or kernel or inwardness (Innerlichkeit) of the faith, or for contemporary expression of our common heritage, or for a way of articulating the apostolic tradition today, or whatever else, theology—certainly theology in the Christian mode—must constantly attempt to say what belongs to this faith centrally and profoundly, what is peripheral, and what is simply wrongheaded and misleading. The whole task of theology, Christianly conceived, is precisely about that. Without it, Christian intellectual discourse is reduced to history and sociology.
1 / Not a Culture-Religion
“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,
and to God the things that are God’s”1
Christianity is not a culture-religion. By that I mean that Christianity is not a religion so inextricably bound up with the history, art, lifestyle, and shared values (culture) of a particular people that it is virtually inseparable from these, and therefore accessible to other cultures only as a total package—e.g., Christianity plus Western culture.2 I propose that this should be first in our reflections on what Christianity is not, because in this Euro-American context of ours there is a very strong temptation to merge Christianity and our way of life, our culture. All around us there are Christian groupings and Christian voices that regard Christianity as being virtually inseparable from the mores, pursuits, and values that we have come to associate with America. Many of these same voices herald America as the great beacon of Christianity in a dangerously diverse and darkening world. Even those of us who try to convey a more nuanced view of the relation between Christianity and our particular culture are tempted often to gauge the course of Christianity in the world by its status within own society, to the point of our being—in our churches—constantly at work amassing statistics and number crunching.
This tendency of North American Christians to meld Christianity and our culture is not new. Sidney Mead, who was widely regarded as the dean of American church historians, wrote of the Americanization of Christianity—especially Protestantism. He maintained that from the middle of the nineteenth century the practice of using the terms Protestantism and Americanism almost synonymously became very common.3 In some circles, one might argue, this practice is still more pronounced today, or at least it is pursued more aggressively. For with the advent of widespread multiculturalism and religious pluralism, as well as our society’s post-9/11 apprehension of militant Islam, the mindset that finds an indelible association between the Christian religion and America has become increasingly insistent and defensive. A narrative has emerged in which the actual variety of religious influences that characterized America’s beginnings, including not only Unitarianism and Deism but also secular humanism, tends to be forgotten, and is replaced by an ultra-evangelicalism and biblicism that would hardly have been applauded by Jefferson, Franklin, John A. MacDonald (the first prime minister of Canada), and other architects