‘The Earth is the Lord’s’, the title of Modern Church’s annual conference this year, doesn’t stipulate who was responsible for the sun – which made its presence felt more than usual. We baked!
Our Conference Chair, Margaret Barker, introduced us to her Temple Theology and explained how ancient Jewish worship was much more focused on the natural environment than Christians have usually allowed. We were given many illustrations of biblical texts translated in ways that hide the environmental implications.
Other speakers then described today’s pressing environmental issues in the light of their expertise. Time and again they made the point that the scientific facts – about climate change, extinction of species, pollution, deforestation, etc – are not enough to bring about the change in behaviour we need if we are to bequeath a habitable planet to our grandchildren. In addition we need a change of spiritual perception. We heard about environmental scientists, even atheist ones, emphasising this point: only the faith communities have the moral resources to drive forward a change of values.
Then on Thursday the conference ended, we returned home, and we heard that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is changing the tax system to encourage fracking. Yes, we face a head-on collision of values in a society so wedded to short-term pragmatism that we have virtually forgotten about relating our current activities to our long-term hopes for a better world.
Margaret suggested that Christianity has interpreted the Bible too narrowly, to focus on humans and our relationship with God while treating the natural world as a mere backdrop. Indeed, since the 1960s many environmental philosophers have accused Christianity of this crime, each pinpointing their own preferred moment in church history when the rot set in. My own view is that one doctrine has dominated Christian anthropocentrism: the threat of eternal hell. If your eternal future is in the balance, a mere seventy years on this earth hardly matters.
If, in this way, bad spirituality encourages people to wreck the planet (and there is plenty of evidence, especially from the USA, of Christian ideas doing this) then we need good spirituality to put it right. A mere absence of spirituality won’t make things better; if it has any effect at all it will only encourage our anthropocentrism by presenting human minds and values as the only minds and values.
In this context, good spirituality is spirituality which draws our attention to the beauty and glory of the natural order; which evokes awe in the presence of it, and gratitude for it; which reminds us that our lives, with all their complexity and potential, function as part of it and cannot function without it; which encourages us to use it, but to be careful not to mess it up.