Unsettling Settled Stories

One of the great coups of the modern world is its success in convincing us that we have no stories except the stories we chose when we had no stories. Beyond the fact that this is itself a story, the amount of storied infrastructure necessary to sustain this story is quite remarkable. Today, I want to unsettle one of the many stories that is largely a matter of settled "fact" in contemporary discourse. My purpose here is not simply to overturn the story, but rather to complicate it sufficiently in order that we can at least begin to question its settled nature and see just how silly some of our unquestioned assumptions can be.

Today's story began, as near as I can tell, with the 1967 essay by Lynn White Jr., in the journal Science "The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis." This essay is widely cited as a short-hand for blaming Christian anthropocentrism for our current environmental and ecological woes. Often, it seems that the people who cite this essay in this way have not actually read the essay, but just know that it is supposed to have definitively argued that we can blame Christianity for the mess our ecology is in. Once White's essay has been thus deployed, Genesis 1:28 is generally cited (in the KJV) and the obvious conclusion becomes that Christians believe that they are to rule and subdue the earth and that everything non-human is given by God as material objects for exploitation.

Re-read the above paragraph. It's an absurdly simple story, almost to the point of incredulity. But it has been told so often that it is widely accepted across every level of our society. I even recently came across a version of this story in the doctoral dissertation of my local Member of Parliament. It is a settled story of our modern life.

White's essay is highly problematic, but it is not nearly such a neat story as it has come to be deployed in eco-rhetoric. White, as a historian of technology, begins his account by locating the turning point of ecological history with the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions, with important precursors emerging in agricultural innovations of plough technology in medieval Europe. These technological and scientific advancements were the instrumental causes of the damage that has been wrought on our planet. But White does not stop here, acknowledging as he does the contributions of these scientific and technological changes, he argues that these instrumental causes could never have gotten off the ground without a Christian anthropocentric dominion ideology.

Here White's argument becomes a bit confused. On the one hand, he recognizes that there is a distinct shift in medieval theology toward voluntarism and nominalism (Radical Orthodoxy has become famous in recent years for defending a much more robust version of this "Scotus thesis"). This shift will go on to destroy the sacramental unity of the cosmos, laying the grounds for the immanent materialism of modernity, thus allowing for the kind of technological domination he laments is characteristic of our current crisis. He also recognizes that this development is highly contingent - it emerges in the Latin West, but not in the Greek East, and is not a "necessary" development in the Christian tradition. Nevertheless, while admitting all of this, he still insists that Christian anthropocentrism is the mainstream position of Christian doctrine which stems from Genesis 1:28, and has been received in a largely consistent way for the whole 2000 year history of the church. This anthropocentric essentialism is on full display when White writes, 

"To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West. For nearly 2 millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature." (1206). 

This nominalist and colonialist Christianity is characteristic of much of modern Christianity to be sure, but the claim that it is the central tendency of two millenia of the church betrays a lack of familiarity with the breadth and nuance of the tradition. Oddly, he acknowledges the role of nature stories in Celtic Christianity, but reads these stories as depictions in basic continuity with his anthropocentric thesis. Finally, he turns to St. Francis as an example of a deviant/heretic in the tradition as a possible "patron saint" for the ecological movement going forward. Again, his reading here of Francis as an essentially deviant figure in the tradition betrays more about White's lack of comprehension of the tradition than anything else.

Christianity is to blame for our current ecological crisis because, according to White, the Christian axiom "that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man" continues to be operative even in our post-Christian age. I agree with White - this attitude is nearly axiomatic in much of (especially white-Protestant) Christian and post-Christian society. My argument is simply that this is a contingent modern development within Christian discourse and is not a necessary reading of the biblical narrative, nor can it account for the lasting sacramental character of much of Christian theology down through the ages.

First, let me expand on the above-mentioned sacramental character of Christian theology. Contrary to modern nominalism, and to the eternal stupefaction of my father, "a cup is not just a cup," so-to-speak. That is to say, that the material world is always chock-full of an abundant "more." A cup is not simply a cup, but is also a sign that points to a potential more, beyond its own immediacy. This pointing-beyondness waxes stronger across places and objects of importance, but in everything, there lies the possibility of both misunderstanding and the divine opportunity of true apprehension. Catherine Pickstock has argued, that this is why all of our language is consummated in worship, for it is in the holy Eucharist that sign and signified perfectly coincide. The creaturely materials of bread and wine are more than they are and yet, uniquely, fully are, in the Eucharistic celebration.

What does the above have to do with a Christian understanding of creation? Too many things to mention here, but importantly for our purposes today, it helps us to see that White's alleged essential nominalism is not characteristic of a sacramental view of the world that always sees the possibility of a divine "more" in all of creation.

Second, and more central to undermining White's confident assertion in Christian anthropocentrism is his use of Genesis 1:28 as the definitive proof-text for his thesis. Again, it is true that this text has been deployed in precisely the ways that White alleges, but to say that it is characteristic of the biblical view cannot stand up to scrutiny.

Norman C. Habel has written an important book on this subject entitled, The Land is Mine: Six Biblical Land Ideologies. In this book, Habel demonstrates that in the Old Testament alone, there are six distinct ideologies regarding the relationship between God, God's people, and the Land. For White's "anthropocentric dominion" model to succeed, it at least needs to address this high degree of diversity in the biblical tradition. Habel's work is inspired by Walter Brueggemann's classic text (recently revised and updated), The Land, which persuasively traces the way in which the Land is an active covenant partner in the life of Israel - a far cry from the anthropocentric dominion narrative White espouses. Finally, Ellen F. Davis has recently demonstrated an innovative agrarian reading of scripture in her, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. Davis' work is an incredibly interesting read, as she adopts an explicitly agrarian hermeneutic that would feel familiar to many indigenous and agrarian peoples down through the ages. People who live close to and from the land will find her work a much needed corrective against some of the spiritualizing and transcendental readings of land texts that so much European and urban scholarship has been guilty of over the years.

I offer the work of these three contemporary scholars as examples of valid alternative ways of reading the bible in its broader context that do not necessarily collapse into an anthropocentric dominion reading. Crucially, this is not to say that the Bible cannot be read this way, it is merely to say that to read it in such a way is just one of a variety of options available to the reader of this text. Therefore it does not suffice to simply point to Genesis 1:28 as the definitive proof-text on the Bible's land ideology.

Finally, John Walton has also recently demonstrated that the creation myths of Genesis are best read as temple texts. Thus, the creation of the earth is in fact a creation of the temple. On this reading, creation is theo-centric, not anthropocentric. The privileged place of humanity in the cosmos is in relation to our dual function as priests and images of the divine. In these roles, humanity is to care for and bring forth the worship of all of creation to the glory of God - not the glory of humanity. Humanity's priviliged position is functional, not ontological, we are creatures too. Our role is to do the careful work of learning how each creature might be brought forth in glory toward its proper end to the glory of the creator God. This is a fraught role, to be sure, but is not necessarily nor essentially bent toward the anthropocentric domination of creation.

White ends his famous essay with the following paragraph:

The greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history, Saint Francis, proposed what he thought was an alternative Christian view of nature and man's relation to it: he tried to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man's limitless rule of creation. He failed. Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny. The profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point a direction. I propose Francis as a patron saint for ecologists. (1207) 

I agree with White that Francis points us to a way forward for modern ecologists, not because Francis was a heretic, but because Francis points us toward the diversity of contingent ecological options that the Christian tradition offers, as I have tried to highlight above. Ultimately, White's essay is not the simple defeater of Christian ecological thinking, as it is so often rhetorically deployed. Rather, White calls us to re-examine our tradition, and to find within it the resources necessary to unsettle the settled story that modernity has drawn forth from the Christian tradition. White reminds of the essential contingency inherent in the interpretation of a tradition - helping us to be skeptical of dismissive claims about Christianity in modern ecological discourse. White's essay will and should continue to be read, but not as short-hand for the settled story of the insufficiency of the Christian tradition to imagine a holistic ecology. White's essay reminds us that our current ecological crisis is a product of deep theological questions that our post-Christian modernity is ill-equipped to address. Let's follow him in re-examining our traditions to discover some new stories as we learn to go on.