In my Ecofeminist Theology and Philosophy Class, we were asked to write a short essay on the following question: what resources exist in your religious and/or spiritual tradition for thinking about ecological crises like climate change, pollution, scarce resources like water and food, and species loss?  There are obviously a multitude of ways this could be answered, but here is how I worked with it:

I come from the Christian faith tradition, whose dominant stream partnered with Greek philosophy to devalue the material world and later industrial capitalism to destroy it. Christianity has often supplied the ideological cover for economic interests, arguing that ‘man’ has been given dominion over nature and is thus free to exploit it, or the eschaton will soon come and therefore there is no need for conservation. Such Christian collusion with the forces of empire and industry to plunder the earth is not simply an unfortunate byproduct of the faith’s proper historical development but a failure of theological imagination and ultimately a denial of its originating impulses.

Although the present scale of ecological destruction and overshoot is unprecedented and its effects unavoidable, our era is not the first in which earth-keeping questions have been raised by representatives of the Jewish and Christian faith traditions. Both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament contain seeds of resistance to the destructive ecological and economic practices of their time. Biblical scholar Ched Myers suggests that the Fall story of Genesis 1-11 is not only a story of origins but a reflection on the rupture of tradition clan-based hunter-gatherer culture through the rise of agriculture, city-states, and violence.[1] For another example of this we can turn to Exodus 16.  When the Israelites were wandering in the desert grumbling about their hunger, Yahweh gave them the gift of Manna.  It came to them as a sign of the earth’s abundance; sustenance for which they didn’t have to strive and toil as slaves of empire. And if they took more than their fair share, the manna began to rot; they were given only enough for the time being. The necessities of rest for both land and humans and for the leveling of inequality illustrated in this story were codified in the Sabbath and Jubilee traditions of early Israel.[2] Later, Hebrew prophets decried the spoliation of the land and the exploitation of those who worked it.[3]

Turning to the New Testament, Jesus’ ministry was fundamentally concerned with a renewal and radicalization of these aforementioned covenantal and prophetic streams within Judaism.  The coming Reign of God which he announced was a this-worldly reality whose marks would have included ecological balance. His reflection that even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed in the lilies’ splendor was not a romanticization of nature but a contention that economic wealth and political power have less intrinsic worth than the natural world.[4] The Apostle Paul wrote of the creation which groans in decay yearning to be free and urged his communities to practice economic redistribution with one another in direct contrast to the Roman Empire’s top-down extractive economics.

These themes of resistance to dominant ecological and economic practices within the Bible must be brought into the mix as Christians begin to reflect on our contemporary many-headed ecological crisis.  Listening deeply to these stories and paying attention to the dynamics in which they were formed I think we will find more radical conversation partners than we might have first imagined.  Our present lives in the first world are supported by structures of empire similar to those which our foremothers and fathers in the faith strove to leave or subvert from within. The rapacious practices of consumer capitalism need to be stopped; Sabbath can point towards alternatives which honor the earth and workers through the recognition of natural limits. A whole-earth Jubilee is necessary now more than ever, one which not only brings greater equality between humans but recognizes the inherent worth, beauty, and necessity of non-human species and the ecosystem.  This is perhaps the most important thing which the Christian (and Jewish) tradition at its best can bring to the table: an uncompromising moral vision which can go beneath green washing and eco-capitalist hype to re-present to us the truth which we already know: our lives in the first world need to change drastically for life on this planet to be sustained.

[2] See chapter three of Ross and Gloria Kinsler, The Biblical Jubilee and the Struggle for Life (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1999).

[3] See chapter 7 of Ellen Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, (New York: Cambridge, 2009).

[4] I heard Ched Myers offer this reading of Luke 12 at the Forum on Faith, Economy, and Ecology which was sponsored by the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns in Washington, DC and held on May 2-3, 2009.