Earth
Day 2020:
Ecological Trusteeship in the Psalms and Baptism
An
excerpt from
Olds, Douglas B.
(2020) “Praxis for Care of the Atmosphere in Times of Climate Change:
Analysis, Quantitative Methods, and Ecclesial Development.” Dissertation. San Francisco
Theological Seminary/Graduate School of Theology at the University of Redlands,
2020.
The fiduciary principle (derived from a harmonization of Gen. 1.28 and 2.15) directs an agent of the state to “preserve and enhance the assets of [a] trust”—in this case, the natural environment (for humanity specifically, its resource base) as God’s Creation—"keeping always in mind the good of the beneficiaries” (Brown 1994, 71). Beneficiaries include future generations of all species.
“The general duties of
trustees are to act out of loyalty in the best interests of the beneficiary,
not those of the trustee…to make the trust property productive” (ibid.). The
fiduciary principle recognizes the “direct duty” of the trustee to “serve and
enhance the well-being of all” not limited to the current generation.
Additionally,
the fiduciary principle for trustees requires the public governor or
administrator of the natural estate to be impartial and deliberative, to
respect human rights and be accountable to those rights, and to apply the
Golden Rule for structuring its obligations (Brown 1994, 73-4). God
entrusts humanity to act as God’s representative in administering our natural
estate on behalf of all conceivable generations--the perpetuity
condition—treating all beneficiaries as we ourselves would want to
be treated.
The
fiduciary principle of trusteeship imposes two duties on each generation. One
is the duty of “conserving options so that future generations can survive and
pursue their own visions of the good life [sustainability principle]…so that we
leave our descendants as many choices with respect to resources [and
opportunities, ecosystem richness, and beauty] as we have had…The second duty
is the conservation of quality, an obligation we discharge by conserving
natural resources and investing in substitutes [like renewable sources so that
they neither rise in price nor become depleted] (Brown 1994, 74-5).
We may recognize the
principle of trusteeship in other Near Eastern monotheistic religions. Rabbi
David Gordis (2001, 1369) derives the principle of human trusteeship for the
natural world from Torah without (as I have done) an excursion into the New Testament.
Additionally, the Koran (II:29-30) links Creation with human trusteeship of the
earth:
29. He made for you all
that lies within the earth, then turning to the firmament He proportioned
several skies: He has knowledge of everything.
30. Remember, when your
Lord said to the angels: "I have to place a trustee on the earth"
(Al-Qur'an 2001).
As in Genesis 1 and 2, God’s creating activity is linked by
the Koran with the need for designating and deriving a trustee in the Creation.
In all three religions, humanity is designated the trustee by decree founded in
the Creation account itself.
Human trusteeship of God’s created natural estate implies a
respect for the beneficiary: the people of God and the Lord Jesus Christ as
well as other elements lifted up by Scripture. Jesus instructed, “Let the
children come to me.” By our appreciation of this message, we understand that
Jesus has an interest in future generations and their opportunities to thrive
and live meaningful lives within the renewing covenant of creation. Moreover,
Psalm 104 (cf. Deut. 5. 14; Prov. 12.10a) incorporates other species into God’s
provident care and commonwealth:
Psalm 104:
1Bless the LORD, O my soul.
O LORD my
God, you are very great.
You are
clothed with honor and majesty…
10You
make springs gush forth in the valleys;
they flow
between the hills,
11giving
drink to every wild animal;
the wild
asses quench their thirst.
12By the
streams the birds of the air have their habitation;
they sing
among the branches.
13From your
lofty abode you water the mountains;
the earth is
satisfied with the fruit of your work.
14 You cause
the grass to grow for the cattle,
and plants
for people to use,
to bring
forth food from the earth,
15and wine
to gladden the human heart,
oil
to make the face shine,
and bread to
strengthen the human heart.
16The trees
of the LORD are watered abundantly,
the cedars
of Lebanon that he planted.
17In them
the birds build their nests;
the stork
has its home in the fir trees.
18The high
mountains are for the wild goats;
the rocks
are a refuge for the coneys….
27These
all look to you
to give them
their food in due season;
28when you
give to them, they gather it up;
when you
open your hand, they are filled with good things.
Psalm 104 envisions the intentional
and interdependent ecosystem—with the non-human species participants
in the gracious provision of nature. Psalm 148 incorporates non-human species
into the worshiping community, recognizing their
intrinsic—non-instrumental--value. Yet humanity has likely caused a massed
extinction event of wildlife since 1970 as 60% of fauna, fish, reptile, and
bird species have been entirely extinguished. Moreover, human idolatry—greed
and failure of trusteeship—has disrupted authentic and covenanted worship of
God by the full community of Creation detailed in Psalm 148:
Psalm 148:1
Praise the LORD!
Praise the
LORD from the heavens;
praise him
in the heights!
2Praise him,
all his angels;
praise him,
all his host!
3Praise him,
sun and moon;
praise him,
all you shining stars!
4Praise him,
you highest heavens,
and you
waters above the heavens!
5Let them
praise the name of the LORD,
for he
commanded and they were created.
6He
established them forever and ever;
he fixed
their bounds, which cannot be passed.
7Praise the
LORD from the earth,
you sea
monsters and all deeps,
8fire and
hail, snow and frost,
stormy wind
fulfilling his command!
9Mountains
and all hills,
fruit trees
and all cedars!
10Wild
animals and all cattle,
creeping
things and flying birds!
11Kings of
the earth and all peoples,
princes and
all rulers of the earth!
12Young men
and women alike,
old and
young together!
13Let them
praise the name of the LORD,
for his name
alone is exalted;
his glory is
above earth and heaven.
14He has
raised up a horn for his people,
praise for
all his faithful,
for the
people of Israel who are close to him.
Praise the LORD!
The totality of the created community is tasked by these two
Psalms with praising God.[3] Trusteeship
not only involves managing the resource
base, it involves preserving the opportunities for a good life
for all created beings, including non-human species. The Biblical texts that we
have used to determine a narrative of human “dominion” also tell us that
animals were also drawn from the soil and filled with the breath of life in
common with humanity.[4] Ensouled
flesh, they are companions to humanity in the atmospheric
processes and similarly endowed with usufruct rights to the garden.
Animals are existentially beloved of God and integral to God’s proper worship
as citizens of God’s ecosystem and natural commonwealth. To
the extent humanity has failed its trusteeship of
the natural, created estate, it disrupts the intrinsic value
of worship for and by those species gone extinct or are under
environmental stress. Humanity brings about a vitiated and debased
worship of the Creator when it reduces the biodiversity and integrity of
ecosystems for its own self-centered needs. Such self-centeredness is
humanity’s idolatrous, contravention of the call to trusteeship.
Baptismal Praxis of
Ecological Trusteeship
The awareness of
atmospheric trusteeship may be promoted by ritual or in a prayerful attitude of
the sacred. Dahill (2015) proposes moving church rituals and sacraments
outdoors from the confines of the built sanctuary into the cathedral of the
sky.
Human alienation from nature may be countered by a Christian
spirituality of biocentric re-immersion into reality, cultivating loyalty to
the genius of place and planet. “Rewilding” is a Christian spiritual practice
for the Anthropocene. Perceiving the disconnection of contemporary human life
from its ecological foundation reveals the link between spiritless consumerism
and hasty, combustion-fueled materialism on the horizontal plane. Human
obsession with the horizontal plane of the ephemeral obstructs the awareness of
eternity which integrates verticality and horizontality in the living rhythms
and harmonious inclinations of the animated world inside well-ordered nature.
Perpendicularity recognizes the Sky’s punctuated sustenance of nature in rain,
air, storm, the intimacy of plant and animal respiration—and our own--inside
landscaped moieties of human artifice and wild naturalness. As a corrective of
human alienation from nature, Dahill (2005) proposes the liturgical renewal of
and venue shift for baptism:
Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate
reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate
earth—our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears
are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of
geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our
lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction,
is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their
coherence…Out in contact and conviviality [with open-aired nature is] an
astonishing fullness of the baptismal life, a much wilder immersion.
Christian practice has moved from the early
understanding which involved relishing, drowning in, and enjoying the water of
life. The baptismal river became a pool; [then a] cistern; [then] a barrel;
[then] a font; [then] a birdbath; [then a] bowl; [then a] fingerbowl…[losing
experience with] the transforming symbolic power of full immersion in baptism,
and construction of fonts with the sounds of running water and immersive
capacity [now] in indoor rituals more or less fully cut off from the actual
biological life of the larger watersheds in which such communities are located.
I want to…restore the practice of Christian
baptism into the uncontrolled, dangerous, transforming waters of a community’s
watershed . . .[to] shape belief, habitus, worldview…powerfully [by] the form
of baptismal experience—shap[ing] in formative ways participants’ spontaneous,
untutored articulation of what their baptism means[---A] radical
spiritual/ecological immersion into the actual local [open-air] watershed and
the largest life of Earth that we need today.
It is after immersion in water that Jesus re-emerges into air to
meet the Spirit “coming as a dove” (Mt. 3:16). These processive images through
water and air recapitulate the sequence of Gen. 1:1-4, with the immersion of
God’s incarnate Son at the historical point of border entry by the people into
the promised Land, a people sent within the covenantal dispensation of
obedience as agents of conquest in the land suffering the cosmic effects of the
fall. Jesus emerges by biological necessity to meet with the sent Spirit in the
Sky, for the restoration of the ontology of shalom, beauty, and
freedom.
Baptism liturgically incarnates the wild death-in-birth and
birth-in-death experience of a liminal, refugee mother in labor suffocating
under the threat of social eviction and extinction (cf. Romans 8) and released
by joy. Rather than inert backdrops of a solely spiritualized drama, the water
(cf. Hab. 2:14) and atmosphere have agency in the transmission of the energies
of the Trinity manifested by the voice from heaven, the airborne kinematics of
the dove, and the baptismal washing and anointing that returns forth (in an
extension of divine missio) a new family into the wider cosmos of
land and nature. Just as social outsiders and animals were participants in the
messiah’s birthing into the land that was promised, all of intended Creation
becomes incorporated into the promised renewal dramatized in baptism, intimate
agents in the salvific renewal of Eden on this earth. The cosmos is reaffirmed
in both its materiality and infused spiritual essence flowing from both the
Godhead (in union) and now the presence of the new family of anointed trustees
(in communion). God’s new superintendence of gracious love manifests as maternal
and not dominating, ever steadfast in loyalty and care (hesed).
The wails of the newly delivered give way at the mother’s joy—her shouting and
singing at the astounding punctuation of being and history—to become the
beneficiary of a new earth. Christ becomes all-in-all, the
Spirit diffuses forth through Creation as the Creator intended, bringing what
is elected in the cosmos home in adoption and purification, the glorious
summation of physical quickening revealed in ringing eternal praise and
shining, theophoric bliss.
For you shall go out in joy,
and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field shall
clap their hands
(--Isa. 55:12; cf. Ps. 65:13; Zech. 2:14).
CITATIONS
Ali, Ahmed, trans. 2001. Al-Qur’an (The Koran): A Contemporary Translation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ali, Ahmed, trans. 2001. Al-Qur’an (The Koran): A Contemporary Translation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Brown, Peter G.
1994. Restoring the Public Trust: A Fresh Vision for Progressive Government
in America. Boston: Beacon Press.
Dahill, Lisa E. 2015. “Into Local Waters: Rewilding the Study of
Christian Spirituality.” Presidential Address (Fall) to the Society for the
Study of Christian Spirituality. Manuscript.
Gordis, David M. 2001. “Ecology.” In Etz Hayim: Torah and
Commentary, 1369–72. New York: The Rabbinical Assembly.
[3] Cf. Isa. 43:
19–20b:
19 I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I
will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.
20The wild animals will honor me,
the jackals and the ostriches;
for I give water in the wilderness,
rivers in the desert.
[4] Cf. esp. Eccl.
3.19:
“For the fate of humans and the fate of
animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other.
They all have the same breath (רוּ×—ַ rûaḥ),
and humans have no advantage over the
animals; for all is vanity (×”ֶבֶל hebhel)).”
