a comment that grew into a post

This started out as a comment on Anthony's post.

About Berry's essay: it came from an address he gave at a Baptist seminary. Obviously, he tailors his comments for a very specific audience. I've never seen another of his essays where he uses biblical text as much as he does here. It does seem practical (in the cause of preserving the world) to speak to people in a language they understand. This essay won't persuade everybody, but it resonated with me.

Anyway, I linked to it in light of Kev's original question:

"How should our communities or faith communities embrace the present and the natural world?"

My faith community is rather amorphous at the moment, and those I'm most connected with now don't need to be convinced that the world and the life in it are worth protecting. However, a few years ago I was in a conversation with my brother- in-law, who could fairly be called a religious "fanatic" who thought “it will all be fixed when Jesus returns”. I gave him Berry's essay to read, and at the time, he wasn't too impressed. The bible teaches that this world is passing away and that ushering souls into heaven is all that matters. More recently he lost his job as a mega-church pastor and has been talking about consuming less, conservation, and service to the poor. I don't know how much this development is related to Wendell Berry, but I'm sure the essay hasn't had negative consequences in his life.

Like the Terpstras and Nicki, I'm the kid of a pastor, and while I have issues with my religious upbringing, Christianity still informs my life--it's the way I can make sense of the world. I haven't dealt with anything as huge as the suicide of a family member, but I talked with Kev and Nicki about this recently--Do we live with the resentment/bitterness that Reece does, having grown up in pretty conservative Christian families? How did we individually work through those issues as we more or less broke away from our religious past? I wonder if people would like to talk about their experience with this.

For me, it was my introduction at age 18 to the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, who opened up the possibility of creativeness (rather than obedience only) in the Christian life. To be made in God's image is to be a creator. Those were ideas that sort of threw on lights for me, when my experience had been that being a Christian was mainly about having the right theology. Berdyaev was recognizably Christian, but he greatly enlarged my concept of what being a Christian could mean. From there I started to deal with the problems of biblical interpretation that Anthony brings up.

It became pretty obvious to me that interpretation is subjective, but I never got to the point where I thought that interpretation is useless or that all interpretations are equal. I don't think sustainable farming and the crusades are morally equivalent. Sure, my judgment about that is subject to my experience and is culturally constructed. But that's what I've got to work with. So, I vote for interpretations that move us in the direction of love for our neighbors and reverence for life.

The Biblical Theology of Creation and Creator

It may (or may not, depending on how well you know me) come as a surprise that the one who is most outwardly pursuing topics in biblical interpretation is also the one most actively skeptical about it. That is, contrary to Berry, I do not see the need to reconcile the so-called Christian worldview with the sustainable management of this holy creation. Nor do I see the need to appeal to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Thoreau, or Heraclitus in order to advocate the same. For me, both of these essays deal with something that is very concrete and practical through abstracted notions such as Logos, poetry, or biblical theology. And I think the appeal to these notions has negative consequences.

Is it not sufficient to make the argument on the grounds that we are slowly making the Earth uninhabitable for carbon based life forms? And even if there are some religious fanatics who disregard this notion because “it will all be fixed when Jesus returns”, making a theological argument completely outside of their established tradition is probably not going to be very effective.

Additionally problematic is that there is really no such entity called biblical theology or ideology to which we can appeal. What is the biblical ideology of the Creator or creation? It really depends on who is driving the hermeneutical steering wheel. The reason is that ideology is not an inherent property of any given text, but it is rather how the text is used. To speak of the ideology of a text is really to speak of how a text has been used in the past and present. The text itself, I believe, is quite neutral. This is evidenced in the vast ways in which the biblical text has been used over the centuries, both positive and negative. We can use the same document to preserve the status quo or flip the establishment on its head! We are simply living in a time and place where we need the bible to have a biblical theology of the Creator and creation that promotes are own understanding of the world around us. Just as the knights of the Crusades needed their biblical theology to promote their conquests, so we need our biblical theology in order to promote sustainable farming. In both cases, the theology/ideology is socially constructed by the interpretive community more than it is an inherent property of the text. It seems as though Berry himself alludes to this when he writes: “[The Bible] is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it.” Our biblical interpretation is very much subject to our own experiences.

So what is the point? My point is simply that I think we should let the argument of not destroying the Earth as we know it stand on its own merit, without abstracting it to what is surely a dubious interpretive enterprise. I feel that we need to be liberated from the confines of biblical interpretation on these issues. Writers like Berry seem to perpetuate the Christian myth that we cannot act (or at least should be ashamed to do so) according to our own common sense and reason unless there is a biblical precedent for such behavior. Suppose the bible does or does not promote the concept of caring for creation as our holy equals. Does it really matter as far as your responsibility is concerned? Suppose the bible does or does not promote the condemnation of homosexual behavior. We could debate about the biblical interpretation of homosexual behavior in some academic seminar, but then we are bound to the conclusion of the expert exegetes.

I agree with Reece’s conclusion to simply affirm the world, but his understanding of the Logos of John is oversimplified and shaky at best. But what do we gain from arguing this point as it relates to experiencing nature? What does he gain, aside from a paycheck, in arguing for the Logos of Heraclitus over John? Although it may seem that Reece is challenging the conventional wisdom and standing up to the oppression of religious conviction, he is still operating under the same the oppressive system, a system which binds human conviction and reason to abstract concepts created by academics.

Thoughts on a Very Small Island

Thanks, Kortney and Andy, for the poetry and Wendell Berry references.  Wendell Berry was also on my mind when I was reading this for what he's written regarding Christianity and earth stewardship.  

There's a book that David Malda gave me for Christmas called "Forests" by Robert Pogue Harrison, or I think that's his name (I can't find the book; which one of you took it?).  Harrison gives a history of Western literature in how we've conceived forests from biblical mythology to the present.  (He uses mythology to mean stories whose purpose is to illustrate some sort of truth, as opposed to recalling a historical event).  Harrison looks at the story of the Garden of Eden, and describes that as mythology for understanding the beginning of man's consciousness.  After many thousands of years of evolution, humans came to a point where we no longer fit into an ecological niche.  At some point, we didn't just "belong" as other animals naturally do; we no longer had a place in the ecological balance.  Our relationship to the natural world was forever changed by this new level of consciousness.  I'm not going to try to recall the literary history Harrison lays out after that.  His main point is that, for a couple thousand years, Western literature and religion have tried to make sense of that shattered relationship with the natural world.  How do we relate to the world as beings with a capacity and a tendency to destroy that which sustains us?  Much of futuristic science fiction depicts humans living in an artificial, homogenous, unnatural environment.  Much of our religious thinking is fixated on leaving this world behind for a better place, as Reece writes about here.  This kind of religion may have even contributed to his father's suicide.  But these responses to our condition do not speak for all of Western literature or religion.  

For example, the Eastern Orthodox Church (which is part of the Western tradition) is centered around a present community.  Orthodox Christians pray to icons because they are asking those saints to intercede for them, much the same way we would ask a friend to pray for us.  They conceive of all Christians, past and present, to be living simultaneously in the same community. The need for Jesus to die on the cross is not explained away as some sort of ransom, but embraced as mystery.  That mystery leaves a lot less room for the certainty of there being an evil entity that requires blood for salvation - and by extension, an evil world that will burn in its own sin.  The Christian's job is to remain present and belong in the world with this community.  For another example, Wendell Berry notes time and again of the gospel's call for earth stewardship, which is only possible through intimate knowledge of one's community (land and people).   

We all experience moments of belonging to this world and each other.  The act of giving ourselves to another person, hiking the Ptarmigan traverse, holding an injured downy owl, singing Silent Night in church, remembering Kevin with all of you, sitting by a wood stove on a stormy night looking at the Oregon Coast, climbing Castleton Tower, Sella Tower, Longs Peak all help me feel a sense of belonging.  And I don't think we have to discard our religion to grow in that belonging, simply because many of our traditions have missed and continue to miss the mark.  If our religions didn't leave room for growing in our belonging, trying to find poetry in life, then they would need to be discarded.  I think that Elder Zosima's homilies in the Brothers Karamazov are some of the most eloquent writings on the topic of Christianity and living presently.  I need to read those again.    

What are your thoughts?

how you can be a christian and give a rat's ass about the world, all at the same time

While we patiently await Kev's insights, here's a WB essay that maybe a lot of us have read already...but which has several points of intersection with the Reece piece, e.g. :

the "catastrophic discrepancies between biblical instruction and Christian behavior"

"the continuous, constant participation of all creatures in the being of God"

the Bible as an "outdoor book"

and a bunch of other good stuff.

a few poems...

"Song (4)" by Wendell Berry
for Guy Davenport

Within the circles of our lives
we dance the circles of the years,
the circles of the seasons
within the circles of the years,
the cycles of the moon
within the circles of the seasons,
the cycles of our reasons
within the cycles of the moon.

Again, again we come and go,
changed, changing. Hands
join, unjoin in love and fear,
grief and joy. The circles turn,
each giving into each, into all,
Only music keeps us here,

each by all the others held.
In the hold of hands and eyes
we turn in pairs, that joining
joining each to all again.

and then we turn aside, alone,
out of the sunlight gone

into the darker circles of return.


"Let Us Go Laughing" by Bruce Cockburn

My canoe lies on the water
evening holds the bones of day
the sun like gold dust slips away

One by one antique stars
herald the arrival of
their pale protectress moon

Ragged branches vibrate
strummed by winds from over the hill
singing tales of ancient days

Far and silent lightning
stirs the cauldron of the sky
i turn my bow toward the shore

Discussion One: A Very Small Island

So I'm the big booty this week.   OOOOOHH Shit!  I have some reactions to this article, but I'm going to save them until everyone at least has a chance to read it.  As the facilitator of the cherry article for the Group that Discusses things, here are a few questions that might frame our discussion:

It's easy to have our minds somewhere else instead of where we are.  How do you live in a state of being, or how do you feel poetry?

What's your reaction to this article in how it relates to your faith community or traditions?

How should our communities or faith communities embrace the present and the natural world?  What can we do to get there?

Very small questions, all answerable and solvable in a few short paragraphs I'm sure.  (Anthony, that's a joke).  Of course, feel free to write whatever you want.  If anyone's looking for a Christmas gift for me, my Orion subscription ran out.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3644