Books Read in 2021

Douglas Olds

December 30, 2021

 

NON-FICTION:

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020) by Kristin Kobes du Mez. 

Well-researched history of White American Conservative Evangelicalism’s obsession with non-Christian gender tropes and martial stereotypes. Convincingly demonstrates that these tropes are cultural and not theological.

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Joseph Henrich. 2020.

Deeply empirical presentation of how the Protestant Reformation's changes in literacy and marriage patterns restructured both culture and cognition in  positive feedback loops. Family householding, faith, and prosperity evolved.

How to Destroy Western Civilization and Other Ideas from the Cultural Abyss, Peter Kreeft. 2021.

Assigns invidiously simplistic contradictions to the liberal world view. It does contain an interesting and important discussion of how metaphoric and narrative human cognitive and moral structures are being superannuated by the computer age’s institutions of symbolic logic.

I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux. 2018. 

Intellectual and personal biography of everybody’s favorite atheist.  Accentuates the man’s predelictions and literary strangeness and the role of his sister in mismanaging his legacy.

Collateral Damage, by Mark Shaw. 2021.

 Mark Shaw is an experienced legal practitioner, communicator, and tireless researcher whose body of work and journalistic papers have been solicited by and archived at his alma mater, Purdue University. His latest book on the deaths of JFK, Marilyn Monroe, and Dorothy Kilgallen is, as always, a very well-written presentation of a large amount of primary source synthesis and new information offered in a coherent and compelling report. I am convinced by the author that Marilyn Monroe did not commit suicide and that there were several motives and opportunities for the murder of Dorothy Kilgallen. Tying RFK to L.A. and the company of her doctor when Marilyn died is both new reporting and strong support for the author’s theory and narrative of RFK being the motive focus of these events. Shaw explicitly recognizes that the narrative is circumstantial so that I am quite intrigued, but I understand there could be another circumstantial structure to these events. Yet Shaw has articulated his most compelling of narrative theories regarding mob involvement to date, beginning with the author’s work in “The Poison Patriarch” that introduced so much new and essential reporting on Jack Ruby and his lawyer Melvin Belli.

Based on the author’s work, I am increasingly aware how J. Edgar Hoover originated and publicized the lone gunman theory of JFK’s assassination to evade responsibility for failing both to stop a prior conspiracy and investigate it ex post facto. He is also implicated in a coverup of Kilgallen’s death and the disappearance of her files researching the Ruby/JFK shootings. Shaw presents a convincing logic to events that Kilgallen was preparing to expose the Warren Commission Report as fallacy with her own in-depth reporting on Ruby. Shaw does, at times, introduce questions and speculation for context, but he is diligent and responsible in flagging them as unresolved. These speculations do not serve as the foundation for his historical conclusions but are offered as avenues for further research and his openness to potential contradiction.

Art and Faith: A Theology of Making, Makoto Fujimura. 2021. 

Lucidly written theology of artistic making. Sparkling illustrations of author’s artistic philosophy illustrated by numerous Biblical citations and discursions into traditional Japanese techniques. Well done.

A World After Liberalism, Matthew Rose. 2021.

How underappreciated mid-20th Century polemical writers led the way toward current right-wing populisms.

Orthodox yet Modern: Herman Bavinck’s Use of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Brock, Corey C. 2020

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Holland, Tom. 2019.

The balance of Non-fiction titles read as part of a ministry project I am undertaking:

God, Marriage, and Family: Rebuilding the Biblical Foundation. Köstenberger, Andreas J., and David W. Jones. 2010. Lightweight and predictable.

Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism. Piper, John, and Wayne A Grudem, eds. 1991. 

Group of essays purporting to ground gender tropes in the Bible. Some of the essays border on the preposterous, such as Ortland’s (pp. 95-97) eisegetical importation that finds a “devil’s plan” in the Garden to prey upon the woman’s purportedly essential susceptibility to temptation and self-promotion.

Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Aimee Byrd, 2020. Addresses the shoddiness of the previous two items.

A Theology of Christian Counseling, Jay Adams. 1986.

A Theology of Biblical Counseling, Heath Lambert. 2016.

Spiritual Depression by David Martyn Lloyd-Jones. 1998.

Overcoming Fear, Worry, and Anxiety, Elyse Fitzpatrick. 2001.

Will Medicine Stop the Pain? Finding God’s Healing for Depression, Anxiety & Other Troubling Emotions. Fitzpatrick, Elyse, and Laura Hendrickson. 2006

Counseling by the Book by John Babler and Nicholas Ellen. 2014.

Created in God’s Image. Hoekema, Anthony A. 1986

Marriage as a Covenant: Biblical Law and Ethics as Developed from Malachi. Hugenberger, G. P. (2014).

The Heart of Addiction: A Biblical Perspective. Shaw, Mark E. 2008.

Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues. Roberts, Robert Campbell. 2007.

The Peacemaker: A Biblical Guide to Resolving Personal Conflict. Sande, Ken. 2004.

 

FICTION:

Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald.

Poldark, Winston Graham.

The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis

All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr.

Intricate plot across eras of two protagonists, an antagonist, and their family members set in WWII era France and Germany. Author delves deeply into the society and technologies of their times.

Seize the Day, More Die of Heartbreak, Ravelstein, The Dean’s December, Saul Bellow. 

I most enjoyed Ravelstein’s portrait of epic pedantry, recalling what Nabokov does better in “Pale Fire.”

Remembering Laughter, Big Rock Candy Mountain, Recapitulation, Angle of Repose, The Spectator Bird, All the Little Live Things, by Wallace Stegner.

My favorite was “Mountain’s” psychologically rich portrayal of Great War-era family dysfunction and dispossession set in the western prairies and mountains, and then in 1979's "Recapitulation" Stegner revisits the tragic climax of the earlier novel in a dense, time-shifting recollection of jejune sexuality from the perspective of frozen and repudiating middle-age.  Stegner is a premier novelist of the sinuous and fragile male psyche in the 20th C Euro-settler American west.

Fatelessness, Imre Kertész.

An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro

The Comedians and The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

Judas, Amos Oz

Demian, Narcissus and Goldmund, Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse

Rendering deep spiritual insights by characters pursuing early 20^th C sexual ephemera. Steppenwolf contains the best novelistic treatments of partner dancing I’ve encountered in literature.

The Aviator, Solovyov and Larionov, and Laurus, Eugene Vodolazkin. 

While I found Laurus spiritually shallow, I am anticipating with excitement the April release of “Brisbane.”

Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, The Double, Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Top-rate psychological characterization. My third time through Crime. Brothers has a deep sense of religiosity’s uses and abuses.

War and Peace, The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy. 

My second reading of both. My favorite ancillary figure in War was "Uncle" in Part 7 and the hugely charming "old Russia" winter hearth scene in his rural lodge--where he played that artifact guitar for Natasha--which served as the anti-type of the urban society balls that prominently figure earlier in the book.

 I was a bit let down by War’s penultimate "First epilogue," which linked an unsatisfying disquisition on the philosophy of history with an unsatisfying resolution to the Sonia-Nikolay-Maria triangle. In both, the role of love seemed short-changed. However such a resolution may have been intended by Tolstoy to raise the question of love. His "Second Epilogue" contained a masterful metaphysics regarding causation and human necessity.  It was a most suitable conclusion.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark

Inferno, Dante.

Vipers' Tangle, Francois Mauriac.

While I am no devotee, this is the finest example of Roman Catholic sensibility of its time I’ve read.

North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell.

The Violent Bear It Away, Wise Blood, Flannery O’ Connor.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Jamie Ford.

Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen

Austen is a fine craftsman of language. The topic of arriviste women seeking rich husbands will get done to death by the end of the 19^th C but seems fresh enough in Austen.

Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov.

A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov.

Mildred Pierce, James M. Cain.

Bleak House, Charles Dickens.

Silas Marner, Adam Bede, Middlemarch, George Eliot

Middlemarch has surprising and pleasing depth for a novel concerning the bourgeoisie.

 A Laodicean, Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Return of the Native, Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy.

Hardy has the keenest eye for environmental detail which he links with natural and theological applications.

Of Human Bondage and The Painted Veil, W. Somerset Maugham.

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy.

House of Meetings, Martin Amis.

Life and Fate and Stalingrad, Vasily Grossman.

Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  

 

ABANDONED:

Love's Executioner, Irvin D. Yalom. Suggests out of the box how psychotherapy can be applied to atheism’s despair at life’s meaninglessness. Better: great literature, to which I turned quickly.

New York Trilogy, Paul Auster. Multiple layers of protagonist alter egos engaging a wild child antagonist is a great setup for a novel but realized in excruciatingly tedious dialogue and hackneyed plot turns in the first 5 chapters, at which point I gave up.

Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow. I read 4 other Bellow novels, and this one assaults woke sensibilities about Africa through the eyes of a banal protagonist.

Siddartha, Herman Hesse. I love Hesse but couldn’t get into the flat spirituality of this portrayal.

Wuthering Heights. Psychological potboiler without philosophical interest.

Demelza. After reading the first, this second in the Poldark series by Graham Winston delivers plot developments but relatively fewer new insights as to its times or characters.

 

 Ray Mortimer Olds, Jr. (April 13, 1933-September 28, 2021)

Mort Olds was a man after the heart of the Book of Ecclesiastes: affluent, hard to impress, stoic, quiet, yet with gentleness, steadfastness, and unassuming wisdom. When I was kid, a friend of his told me that she had never heard him speak negatively about anyone, which she considered a high mark of modesty and character and hoped I would, too. From then on, I did, carrying that insight forward to discern any violation.  He never did. 

In high school, he took a career aptitude test in which he tested in the high 90^th percentiles in all fields except a 34^th percentile for nursing. The test result sheet had a space for him to enter what field this test was leading him to consider. His handwritten response was simply, “Nursing.”  I tell that story to my sons, and they say, “That is SO papa!” referring to his ever-present dry wit.

A sixth-generation native of Michigan, Mort was the son of Ray M. Olds, Sr. and Mary Belle Vinkemulder and sister of Marjorie Olds Leenhouts.  He was a motivated sportsman: a 9-varsity letter winner at East Grand Rapids High School, a 1950 state champion high school basketball guard, and the quarterback of the Grand Valley Conference runner up who received the offer of a football scholarship from Biggie Munn at Michigan State College. He was an “old goat” veteran of 25 Chicago-Mackinac sailboat races and had 4 golf holes-in-one over his lifetime. He was also an accomplished skier, tennis player, and fisherman.  

A Navy enlist right after Korea, he was discharged from basic training by action of Grand Rapids congressman Gerald Ford to run his family’s wholesale business after the death of his own father. He later took a turn on the Board of Governors of Fountain Street Church and mentored jailed youth as part of the Grand Rapids Optimist Club. He later taught high school science and math to adolescents with severe behavioral challenges. He also endowed a need-based scholarship at the Duke University School of Engineering from which he had received his undergraduate degree (Phi Beta Kappa junior year).

Mort retired to Spanish Wells, Eleuthera, Bahamas; Boca Grande, FL; and finally Sarasota, FL. Until the year before his death, he had a summer residence for 45 years in Macatawa, MI where he had  hunted ducks with his father in the 1940s and in the 1970s became a long-term active member of the Macatawa Bay Yacht Club. 

He is preceded by 3 months in death by his wife of 46 years, Sandra (Reynalds). He is survived by his first wife of 20 years whom he met at Duke, Sarah Suzanne (Glassmire) Olds, and by 3 sons (Rev. Douglas B. Olds of Mill Valley, CA; Todd R. Olds of Annapolis, MD, and Michael D. Olds of Sarasota, FL), 3 stepsons (John, Robert, and Ronald "Gus" Wilson), 4 grandsons (Nicholas, Connor, Rowan, and Evan Olds), 1 granddaughter (Julia Olds), 4 step-grandchildren and 5 step-great-grandchildren.

Cruciform suffering is a fact of life. One CAN and should take it relationally as well as personally. By the mutually charismatic embrace of tight companioning, grief jagged and isolating can be transformed into mourning’s loving and tear-soaked recollection like lump coal a diamond. We hope this will be the case for those who loved Mort, one of creation's gems.

 

“Quieting the Roaring Heat”

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

St. Luke Presbyterian Church, San Rafael CA

August 29, 2021

The video of this sermon delivered is at http://www.stlukepres.org/worship/sermons/quieting-the-roaring-heat/

Scripture Reading: Isaiah 25: 1-10

Precis: The planet is on fire and our hope is not (and cannot be) grounded in technology. Hope comes from the adoption of the atmospheric virtues derived from the values of the Sermon on the Mount.

Preaching ancient scripture “must fade away centuries.” It must announce one decisive thing—“the very deep & essential relationship of the human being to God … the strivings of the living God with the human being, who is ever rebelling, & always creeping away.”

Reading the Bible is very different than musing through a museum or archeological dig. The writings of prophets like Isaiah present humanity’s relationship to God—what the human “does with God & what God does with him, what place he takes in God's plan.”

Dragged through history, the human has made a “home for himself in all sorts of cultural forms, but in his deepest core within which the Bible addresses him, he is always the same. He still follows the same sneaking paths, he still has the same refined methods to push God away from himself quietly, under the pretense of seeking Him. The whole drama of God's coming to the human being & the human's acting towards God” is reflected in stories of suffering and redemption.

“As soon as I have really listened to what God said centuries ago in that [prophetic] word, all the centuries really fade away, & the same God immediately stands before me. I must only [carefully] listen.”[1]

A dramatic loop pictures the sequence of of the human story within the Biblical Prophets:

Human developments start with decline, accelerate, & then bottom out in a retrograde moment of death or displacement.[5] Isaiah’s prophetic writings detail the decline & decadence of Judah’s society & prophesies the brutal siege & forced exile of God’s people to Babylon. Yet characteristic of a prophet of the True God, Isaiah concludes the story with the people of God anchored in God’s loving character & steadfast promises. The pit of death, exile, & despair is not the last word in this loop, but is escaped by God’s redeeming re-reversal, the upward trajectory that sets us right into eternity. Death will be swallowed up by joy.

The end of the Book of Isaiah has the Judahite exiles returning to the promised land accompanied by the Whole Creation’s song:  they return forth in peace accompanied by the exultations of nature:  the fields & the hills will clap their hands in fellowship with the people’s enduring joy.  Amen, &: Thanks be to God.

Yet now, present civilization seems beset by its own dramatic and accelerating decline, threatening the displacement and destruction of vast numbers of vulnerable people and other species. Devastating us are the current invisible pandemic of COVID & materialism’s psychic epidemic of global climate breakdown & injustice.

When I began studying Global Warming in 1992, I quickly became convinced society couldn't simply wait for a technological solution to arise from business as usual. I began proposing a substantial carbon tax on consumption, progressively applied, to reduce combustion and incentivize faster technological substitution of fossil fuels to transition to renewable energy sources. Yet no regulatory price was put on carbon fuels to internalize their social costs, and the technological solutions haven't delivered.

If society had acted prudently in 1990, the trajectory for keeping global heating within 1.5 degrees could have been accomplished over 100 years with far less drastic intervention. But now: “The brutal logic of this cumulative problem [is that] after 30 years of failure [to meaningfully act], global CO2 emissions must now get to 0 within 20 years.”[2]

By 1992, society had entered its “Calgon, Take me Away!” era. Staring into the abyss of the advancing disasters of global heating, without any urgency of action,betrays a luxuriating and heedless culture caught in the snares of death.

Yet contrary to many claims, the Bible is NOT silent on the issue of global heating, nor should we expect it to be. My doctoral work found dozens of applicable texts referring to God’s displaced prerogatives to give shade & cooling--& of the misuse of combustible resources in human consumerism’s pursuit of self-definition and material pleasures. Global heating is Biblically attested as an injustice against God & God’s favored who need rest & comfort—the agricultural and environmental workers in these heating climes. Consider also God’s preferential interest in the poor who live along rising coastlines, children affected by changing vectors of climate-aggravated diseases, & women in rural communities who bear the brunt of carrying water longer distances because of increasing droughts.

In Isaiah chapter 44, the people’s idolatry is explicitly linked with misapplied combustion of fuel.  At the very least, high-consuming Christians are called to exercise virtue and repentant self-denial in their material lifestyles—to put forth a parachute to protect those most immediately vulnerable. Rather than holding on to creature comforts, Jesus gave his life away. Simply wearing a mask protects those most vulnerable to Coronavirus. Aren’t we called to do something about our combustion-intensive lifestyles?

Our Scripture reading from Isaiah this morning makes 3 crucial points: first, that God is a refuge for the poor in shade & quietness that contrast with those Isaiah calls the “ruthless” whose songs are noisy roars. 

Second, heat & noise are linked as similes in English, but the Hebrew preposition intends a more focused correspondence than the English preposition “like.” Heat & noise are consequences of the same human decadence.

Third, in verses 7 & 8, Isaiah announces the end times promises of God—the ascending phase of the dramatic prophetic loop—in the context of removing a covering—a mask, a “shroud or sheet”—that suggests, like the eternal new dawn, the sky surrounding and above us: The refuge for the poor will be realized in the shade & stillness that covers & protects them. 

We can either align ourselves with this plan of God or continue rebelliously and heedlessly treating the atmosphere as a cost-free carbon dump.

To return to the image of the parachute mask, I want to extend that to a sea anchor.  Some sea anchors look like a parachute, so I hope to link in your mind’s eye the pandemic masks we wear for the protection of others with that of a sea anchor we set out  to slow our material appetites and stabilize our collective journey.  As the Church, our souls have a winch anchor deeply secured in the rock of Ages: Which is the character & the promises of God.  Yet I am calling for setting out the addition of a sea anchor in our household living as history declines & storms take over—not only prudently reducing consumption of fossil fuels for ourselves, but in neighbor-love for those most vulnerable. 

Both when we wear a mask & when we reduce fossil fuel combustion, we act in neighbor love & work for the Creator’s enduring and resilient earth.  Both the Book of Ecclesiastes & the Psalms speak of the earth remaining “forever,”(Pss. 148.6; 37.29; Eccl. 1.4) so that humanity has not been granted “dominion” to deplete & degrade its life-sustaining properties. Instead, humans are trustees for permanence and justice. 

Human trustees of the atmosphere exist in a spirit of perpendicularity—parachuting within God’s transcendent power above & prudently dragging a horizontal sea anchor to stabilize the community’s journey towards shalom and health amidst the storms of historical decline.  Perpendicularity of aspect is loving God above and neighbors alongside which is realized in the awareness and practice of what I call the “atmospheric virtues.” 

As an atmospheric virtue, combustion-avoiding quietness practices peace, rest, & anchoring oneself in certain practices & rhythms that help us to connect meaningfully with others & the Spirit of God: Reading Scripture, embracing stillness & trust in the slow work of God. Quietness is a way of perceiving, receiving, and absorbing God’s strengthening presence.  Quietness prepares us to participate in God’s kingdom life.

Other virtues for the care of the atmosphere include patience & “loyalty to place.”  Patience counters our culture of combustion-fueled speed and heat-generating haste.[3] Patience is moral courage and constancy that preserves love and charity in the face of discouragement during the long journey of faithful life. Loyalty to place means that humanity recognizes the false promises of a destiny on another planet. Loyalty to planet refuses to support the manned space program of atmosphere-degrading billionaires singing of ruthlessness in roaring rocket temples to airless gods.

I’ve studied the irreversible effects of aerospace travel on justice & ecological resilience, & as a result, I’ve chosen to reimagine my retirement without exotic jet travel & its combustion-intensive, noisy affectations. Like others, I have given up capitalism’s fantasy of the travel bucket list. And So Now, I fly only for family. 

Loyalty to place is the deep contemplation of God’s will for the earthly situation in which God has placed us—what the prophet Micah (4.4) details as the human goal of “living under our own fig tree,”-- so that we find spiritual peace, provisions, & quiet close to home.  Isaiah’s passage this morning concludes that living with God is quiet rest.

Pursuing quiet, living patiently and loyally, & committing politically as events devolve can be the most poignant of human pursuits.  As spiritual disciplines, quietness, loyalty, & patience reveal to us the character of our needs, our values, & our God-intended selves & make us receptive to God’s healing presence. Quietness & patience combine moral courage with gentleness & humility loyal to where God has placed us. These Sermon on the Mount values are atmospheric virtues. They support community, the sustainability of the atmosphere, & spread a great ‘Christ-like’ dignity over all.

Humanity is going over the climate brink—it has already entered the vortex of global calamities. Intense heat exposes our heart—when we are stressed, our true thoughts & character leak out.

Time is short for human civilization to turn back ecosystem and social collapse from Global Heating and Climate Disruption, as well as diligently and sharply to focus its attention, in light of God’s judgment, on the social injustices from destructive political-economic systems. Perhaps it is too late for civilization, which does not in any way negate the need to continue on living faithfully, for virtue will be tested and refined in the crucible of an increasingly fevered planet:

The pursuit and embodiment of goodness and virtue knows no expiration.

We’re not all in the same boat, but we’re all in the same storm. No individual can turn back the Storm, but we can align our lives with God’s purposes even inside the storm. Christians are called to take real responsibility for the social order in light of the prophetic & historical logic of God,  including our accountability for our failed accommodations with destructive and unjust practices and systems.

Waiting for the light is not simply sitting out the heat.

Instead let us wisely and fruitfully align ourselves with the ascending trajectory of God’s historical plan by our atmospheric virtues of conservation, prudence, & gentle living.  If we find ourselves fallen into the historical pits of descent, let us repent & look to the author & perfecter of our faithful living— our Lord Jesus Christ.

The time to commit to his presence in life renewed & sustaining is always now.

            Yet “As long as our future drives other people to despair, as long as our prosperity means poverty for others, as long as our 'growth' destroys nature –

anxiety, not hope, will be our daily companion.” [4] By our practices no less than our beliefs, Christians are hope’s guides for society’s return to earth’s heavenward track.

May it be so for you & me. 

---

[1] Johan Herman Bavinck

[2] Lasse Kummer @LasseClimate 8/25/2021 tweet.

[3] Pacific cultures have the idea of “coconut time” since the coconut comes to fruition without hurry or concern for haste. In this,” the coconut symbolizes Christ, since it gives life to human beings, and when it is broken new life springs forth” in the slow and patient work of God.”--Talia, Maina, “Give us the right to dance: towards fatele theology in the context of a sinking mother land." Theologies and Cultures 6 no. 2, 2009, 203-230 (207).

[4] Juergen Moltmann

[5] "Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself in a dark wilderness,

for I had wandered from the straight and true." 

(Dante Alighieri, trans. Anthony Esolen) 

 Billionaire Blast Off: A Sunday Sermon

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

July 11, 2021

The Earth is God's intended vessel for humanity to sail the living cosmos.  

Billionaire Richard Branson launched himself into space today, immersed in a vanity competition with fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to commercialize space flight.  The Bible lifts up the virtues (esp. loyalty, patience, and quietness) subject to contempt by these atmosphere-assaulting blast offs of private spectacle and vice.

    Eccl 1.4 is a key text for directing conscience toward loyalty to the earth and our given place on it. The claim that the earth remains לְעוֹלָ֥ם (leʿôlām: “forever”) may signify either an eternal status for this aeon’s terra firma, or it may involve the vestiges of recollection of a terrain’s material agency in an individual’s existence that is networked into soul. Human loyalty accommodates, communes with, and commits to the terrain and atmosphere encountered during its earthly walk. There is no evidence that such a sustaining terrain and atmosphere exist for humanity in outer space so that we can trash this planet’s sustaining processes to get there. The lure of outer space is a deadly illusion tailored for our idolatrous age. Contrary to Elon Musk's assertion, outer space doesn't represent humanity's hope. Outer Space wants our death. Mars wants our death. Those devoted to and swallowed up by mammon demonstrate the idolatrous lure of self-exaltation that brings death.

      Isa. 30.15: “in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” (Cf. the command to silence in Hab. 2:20 and Zech. 1:7). Silence and patience are aligned and life-giving virtues that counter the political economy of combustion-fueled haste and its ubiquitous, roaring din of engines. In quietness is not so much the absence of activity as the overflowing and healing presence of the Divine.

    Planet busting, death-dealing noise and heat (from aerospace combustion) are linked, in contrast with stillness and shade:

Isa. 25.5: The noise of aliens like heat in a dry place, 

    you subdued the heat with the shade of clouds; 

    the song of the ruthless was stilled. 

    Loyalty to planet and place is an eschatological (restoration) virtue, the shalom in re-localization.The latter loyalty counters the commercialized promotion of exoticism, escapism, long-distance travel, and (the putative stabilization of global society by) the expansion of economic integration and scale through combustion-fueled long-distance, “free” trade in goods and services.  

Mic. 4:3–4 (cf. 1 Ki. 5.5) speaks of this restoration virtue embedded in place:

  3He shall judge between many peoples, 

  and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; 

  they shall beat their swords into plowshares, 

  and their spears into pruning hooks; 

  nation shall not lift up sword against nation, 

  neither shall they learn war any more; 

  4but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees.

Loyalty to place is distinguished from and excludes nationalism which tends to idolatry and suspicion of outsiders, to militarism, and to loss of recollection of relationship and the operations of reciprocity, mutuality and shalom situated in the local. Loyalty to place is based, like all virtues, on charity and hospitality fostered by proximity, familiarity, and intimacy. Cf. Prov. 27.10b.

    Loyalty to place functions teleologically to solidify treasured relationships and the communion of natural and social features. Loyalty to place recollects the spiritual marks of material agency in our eternal destinies. Time and duration of proximity cement the meaning, significance, and value and outlook of permanence for what was prior considered impermanent, mortal, or evanescent. Christians serve eternity in the here and now for the “new earth” by loyalty to planet and place, with local terrains and biomes becoming foci for bioregionalism that integrates and incorporates nature’s neglected agencies—animate as well as inanimate.

    The virtues of loyalty, patience, and quietness counter the haste and noise of our inner life (and their projection by us onto social and ambient reality). Virtue develops both character/soul and neighborhoods. Virtue is simultaneously concerned both with moral consequence and with the development of self-initiated direction and growth. In the best case, these atmospheric virtues can roll back the specter of the planet’s (or humanity’s) death. They provide the praxis for self-direction and continuation to live morally and ethically under an outlook of existential despair occasioned by inexorable environmental and political decay exemplified in these vain and vicious billionaires. By virtue we demonstrate our awareness that God does not die even if creatures do. And a Christian’s commitment to demonstrating to God that she will until the end implement goodness and strength of Christian character *on earth* as the result of God’s bringing faith, joy and neighborhood into her individual and social locations. Christian demonstration of this commitment strengthens religious systems and testifies to others in the church’s social location—its neighbors and society—that faith, purity, and freedom shape the understanding of God’s ongoing reality and presence in Christian lives.

    Whereas nature is endowed with resources and environmental capacities that could deliver material sufficiency to all, post-reformation Western Civilization has grounded its political economy on satisfying unmediated appetites for consumption and accumulation by those most willing and able to pay--luxuriating appetites that neither limit themselves to the Creator’s intent for nature nor for the needs for sharing by marginalized peoples and future generations including those of other species. The result is rampant injustices: gender injustice, racial injustice, class injustice, and intergenerational injustice in the contemporary distribution of benefits and costs of the carbon-intensive economy. The Western economy of promoting combustion-fueled material growth to satisfy the private preferences of vanity weighted by the wealthy's ability to pay has created a society in conflict with Jesus’s gospel of the Kingdom of God and the New Earth. 

    The “whole Creation is groaning” (Ro. 8.22) under the weight of intensive combustion's injustices and environmental imbalances derived from an economy of ashes organized to satisfy insatiable desires by Western wealthy and the satisfaction of their unjustified, private, and autonomous preferences.

    Time is short for human civilization to turn back ecosystem collapse from Global Heating and Climate Disruption, as well as diligently and sharply to focus its attention, in light of God’s judgment, on the social injustices and environmental degradation from and idolatry of transgressive political-economic systems. Perhaps it is too late for civilization, which does not in any way vitiate the need to live faithfully, for virtue will be tested and refined in the crucible of an increasingly fevered planet. The pursuit and embodiment of goodness knows no expiration.

The existential implications of human trusteeship inside nature and specifically of the atmosphere—and the imperatives to avoid (economic) idolatry--impel both the cultivation of the virtues and recognition of individual accountability. Accountability may be structured inside the divine immanent (as in the moral assessment of peers or the recollection of history) or transcendent (in one’s final destiny inside God’s eternal being assigned by the transcendent Christ). As the ethics of freedom, virtue brings individuals into alignment with divine reality and excellence, while accountability to the deep moral topography of processive revelation enlists the people of God into the applied work of maintaining the life-sustaining balances and cycles of the atmosphere and water-sustained biomes. Both in directive to virtue and trusteeship and in the teleological pursuit of well-ordered humanity and nature-based aesthetics, inscripturated morality for the aggregated people of God guides both individual lifestyle and social praxis for the fulfillment of the incarnate, sanctified cosmos as Christ becomes all-in-all (Col. 3.11).

  

 

 Principles of Biblical Trusteeship Applied to Nature 

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

May 2020

Gen. 2:15 transcendentalizes (focused on love of God) the existential imperative (applied to love of human neighbor in the land) decreed in 1.28.  Gen. 2.15 is God’s directive to God’s chosen people to עָבַד ʿāḇaḏ and שָׁמַר šāmar --to “serve” and “guard/preserve” the garden. In this verse, we may contrast the object of Gen. 1.28-- אֶרֶץ ʾerets “the land”--as a political, historical, and cultural construct against “the garden” as a construct for humanity’s foundation inside created nature for its subsistence householding. This distinction alone strongly suggests that seeking an environmental ethic in Gen. 1:28 must process with Gen. 2: 15. Gen. 1.28 supports an existential directive to humanity’s “trusteeship” of the land, it follows that the stronger environmental ethical imperative in Gen. 2:15 supports no less, and likely more so, this ethic. Linking “serve” (עָבַד āḇaḏ) to “guard” (שָׁמַר šāmar) as humanity’s role and inside its natural surroundings involves a transcendental fiduciary principle for the long-term, productive sustainability of nature’s deposits and yearly harvests. 

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" (Ahmed, 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 a decree founded in the Creation account itself. 

The fiduciary principle of trusteeship 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 in perpetuity.  “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.

Perpetuity, though, is conditioned by sufficiency, not infinity. Daly (forthcoming, 84) notes: 

[U]nderstanding of the value of longevity (“sustainability”) is to maximize cumulative lives ever to be lived, subject to a per capita consumption level sufficient for a good life, [so] we must limit the load we place on the Earth at any one time to avoid degrading the regenerative and absorptive capacities of nature. Fewer people, and lower per capita resource consumption, facilitated by more equitable distribution today, mean more, and more abundant lives for a longer, but not infinite, future. There is no point in maximizing the cumulative number of lives lived in misery, so the qualification ‘sufficient for a good life’ is important, and requires deep rethinking of economics, a shift of focus from consumerist growthism to an ethic of sufficiency, which is explicitly called for by Francis [in his encyclical Laudato Si].

Nature changes climate, but public administrators plan infrastructure and deliver services to those for whom safety and adaptation is prioritized. Trustees must foresee and augment the ‘adaptive capacity’ of most vulnerable. Thus, a consideration for Trusteeship is the incorporation of God’s preference for the poor and vulnerable as an application of the Golden Rule (cf. Rawls 1971). In addition, trusteeship is actualized by solving problems as they occur, in order to link historical responsibility with resources and solutions instead of postponing problem remediation to future generations under the “gnostic” expectation of future technological solutions to clean up after us. 

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 [the 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 so that vital [ecosystem services neither rise in price nor become depleted] (Brown 1994, 74-5).

An objection to this vision of political obligation by the trustee is that not everything in nature is useful to humanity, nor should it be. Linking God’s Creation with an expansion of the community that has been created beyond humanity (as in Psalms 104 and 148) “broadens the scope of the trust, enlisting obligations of trusteeship of other species and even ecosystems” (Brown 1994, 79). As we have seen, God’s directive to Adam in Gen. 2:15 includes the whole “garden,” so that the fiduciary principle of derived from the imperatives “Serve” (עָבַד āḇaḏ) and “Guard” ( שָׁמַר šāmar ) stipulates that Adam/humanity manage and harvest sustainably and without waste, enhancing the natural estate given by God at the Creation.

I discern that this fiduciary principle of managing the natural estate for the long-term benefit of the Creation has a transactional or fiduciary structure. The outlines of this structure include the directive of the sovereign aligned with an implicit reward for performance and penalty for non-performance. In the case of failing Trusteeship of natural systems, the penalty is formalized in Rev. 11.18b (cf. Jer. 51). Moreover, even the plague of locusts in Rev. 9.4 are directed not to despoil nature—its grass and trees.

The trustee has the incentive to act for the trust’s beneficiaries in view of receiving God’s Final Judgment, which from the perspective of faith will grant an eternal destiny that coheres with the values undertaken in freedom by the trustee in this life. If the trustee has acted faithfully in the fiduciary sense for the benefit of Creation and humanity’s future, then I suspect that the final destiny of such a trustee would include the values of a diverse human community and productive and uncorrupted natural estate. On the other hand, if humans as trustees of the natural estate live wastefully and focused less on values of biodiversity and more on taking care of its own personal hedonic desires, humanity’s final destiny may reflect those values. God’s final judgment will be absolutely just and will reflect an individual’s efforts and values in this current life, with Rev. 11.18 explicitly incorporating responsible earth care into that time of judgment, linked by Rev. 11.1 with an individual’s destiny inside the eternal, earthly temple. 

Eccl. 1.4: “A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth [ אֶרֶץ ʾerets] remains forever [עוֹלָםלְ leʿôlām].”

Psalm 37:29: “The righteous shall inherit the land [אֶרֶץ ʾerets], and live in it forever.” 

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 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 (cf. Isa. 43: 19–20b).  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.  As flesh in relationship with air, 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.  

Job 38: 41–39:6:

  38:41 Who provides for the raven its prey, 

  when its young ones cry to God, 

  and wander about for lack of food? 

  39:1 “Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? 

  Do you observe the calving of the deer? 

  2Can you number the months that they fulfill, 

  and do you know the time when they give birth, 

  3when they crouch to give birth to their offspring, 

  and are delivered of their young? 

  4Their young ones become strong, they grow up in the open; 

  they go forth, and do not return to them. 

  5“Who has let the wild ass go free? 

  Who has loosed the bonds of the swift ass, 

  6to which I have given the steppe for its home, 

  the salt land for its dwelling place? 

Even the animals repent (שׁוּב šûb) in Nineveh per Jonah 3:7-8. God expresses compassion and care for Nineveh’s animals (Jonah 4: 11).

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 first, idolatrous, contravention of the call to trusteeship.  

“Trusteeship” as an environmental directive re-images the unreliable and tired doctrinal use of the word “stewardship.” “Trusteeship" can help harmonize the Creation ethic in Gen. 1 with that of Gen. 2’s  placement of humanity in nature subject to the divine will. (As noted above, Gen. 1:28 refers to the land as a socio-historical human construct, while Gen. 2.15 refers to Adam's management of the garden.) Going beyond “Stewardship,” Trusteeship adds the following implications for framing the political theology of earth and atmosphere care:

1) It emphasizes the directive to humanity to manage nature for perpetuity while allowing for usufruct.

2) A Trustee is accountable to the beneficiary: future generations and probably other species.

3) Trusteeship involves the application of the Golden Rule in a way that Stewardship does not imply.

4) Stewardship as a term is vitiated by trite overuse while stewards in both OT and NT stories can be ambiguous moral figures, as in Luke 16 and Isa. 22.15-19.

5) Trusteeship has a legal or juridical structure that is not as readily recognized in or applied to stewards outside its employment contract with a temporal household. This legal structure is indicated in Paul’s use of ΠΊΣΤΙΣ in various letters—especially the Letter to the Galatians—that derives trust(-eeship) from the classical Roman juridical doctrine of fidei commissum (Taylor 1966, 58). “Pistis” is Paul’s conceptualization of how Abraham’s inheritance is conveyed to the beneficiary: the people of God (ibid.). Because Paul understands that the conveyance of benefits and consequent duties are accomplished by an analogy with the fidei commissum, it follows that there is a fiduciary principle involved in the election of the people of God whereby Trustees are endowed with both rights of appropriation of some income of the trust subject to preservation of the trust’s assets (ecological stocks and the capacity of the atmosphere to recycle GHGs) for beneficiaries.

6) The eschatological Trustee is as the ultimate executor (commissioner) of a legal, documented “testament.” Cf. Rev. 5 of the theology of revelation of testamentary beneficiaries. A steward is commissioned for private and nepotistic householding and not duties in the temple of God.

A question this section addresses by other scriptural witnesses is whether such a testament includes beneficiaries drawn from non-human elements and whether its establishment (ex nihilo materialis et causae) and beneficiaries involve non-human agents and images. Cf. the important text of Gen. 15.10 where God confirms the covenant with Abraham by the sacrifice of 5th and 6th Day Creatures (save of humans) to demonstrate and confirm the reliability of that covenant based on the valorized hierarchies of Creation that Abraham would likely recognize from natural revelation. By this, the Days of Material Creation have revealed the testamentum provisionis et provisionibus subject to God’s sovereign rights and energies.

An objection to the idea that humans are fiduciaries or “trustees” of nature is that it implies a separateness of humanity from the rest of creation—its allocation of a privileged position. In Gen. 2:15 “service” ʿāḇaḏ is tied to שָׁמַר šāmar "guarding." The directive to Adam and the woman to "serve and guard" the object of the sentence—the garden--recognizes and situates humanity's place in the Creation in a manner distinct from other species. 

“Trusteeship” conveys various dimensions of accountability from the fiduciary principle discerned from various OT and NT texts (cf. esp. Taylor 1966). However, humanity has a separated and distinct position of sorts in Creation by virtue of its cognitive powers (it moral conscience as imaging God) and its associated, characteristic susceptibility to sin. Elsewhere, the Psalms note that humanity was created "a little lower than the angels" (Ps. 8:5) which implies that God has endowed humanity with positional access to the divine, but with that privilege comes heightened responsibility and duties that inorganic landforms and other species do not seem to have.

CITATIONS

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. 

Daly, Herman E. Forthcoming. “Laudato Si’ and Population.” In Laudato Si and the Environment: Pope Francis’ Green Encyclical, Ed. by Robert McKim., 76–94. New York: Routledge

Gordis, David M. 2001. “Ecology.” In Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary, 1369–72. New York: The Rabbinical Assembly.

Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Taylor, Greer. 1966. “The Function of ΠΊΣΤΙΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΟϒ in Galatians.” Journal of Biblical Literature 85.1: 58–76.