Righteous Gentile: A Personal Recollection of Jan Karski

Righteous Gentile: A Personal Recollection of Jan Karski

Rev. Douglas Olds

Jan Karski Statue at the Warsaw Museum of Jewish History
(photo credit: Thomas Kennelly)

[This post has been reprinted with permission by the Jan Karski Educational Foundation: https://www.jankarski.net/.../stories-about-karski.html]



I met Jan Karski in the early 1980s.

He was a neighbor of mine, an old-world, courtly figure who taught history at Georgetown University.

In middle age, he had married the renowned modern dancer Pola Niresnka, a Polish Jew who had escaped the Holocaust spending the war years in London, yet whose entire family disappeared in the concentration and extermination camps. They met after the war. Pola told me she married Jan because "He is a good man."

Now an older man, Jan told me over the course of a dinner of his and Pola’s past. 

He was one of the officers targeted for killing at the Katyn forest massacre in early 1940 "if not for him changing to a non-officer's uniform and participating in a prisoner exchange, later escaping from a moving train." [3]

In…1940 Karski[, a Pole], began [as] a courier … [between] … the Polish underground [and] the Polish Government in Exile. During one such mission in July 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo in Slovakia [and s]everely tortured. He managed to escape.

In 1942 Karski was…twice smuggled by Jewish underground leaders into the Warsaw Ghetto for the purpose of directly observing what was happening to Polish Jews. Also, disguised as an Estonian camp guard, he visited a sorting and transit point for the Bełżec death camp. Karski then met with Polish politicians in exile and the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, giving a detailed statement on what he had seen in Warsaw and Bełżec. In 1943 he traveled to the United States, meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Oval Office, telling him about the situation in Poland and becoming the first eyewitness to tell him about the Jewish Holocaust. He also described the Holocaust to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Frankfurter, [a Jew himself, sat politely through] Karski's report. [1]

Recollecting, Karski told me that Frankfurter had told him, "I cannot believe you of what’s happening to the Jews in Poland. I do not say that you are lying, I am saying that I CAN NOT believe you.”[2] 

If FDR had acted immediately to stem the atrocity by bombing the gas and incineration complexes in the death camps, perhaps 2 Million Jews could have been saved from destruction.  By the time Allies did act against the camps, Karski’s efforts were estimated to have saved ¼ million Jews, making Karski the most effective savior of European Jewry during the war. Yet Karski lived with the knowledge that perhaps 10 times more could have been saved, IF ONLY. If only FDR had acted immediately.

While he acknowledged that perhaps deeper levels of military strategy may have prevailed upon FDR, Karski told me that he regretted that he had failed to find the right words in his efforts to convince FDR and the other Allied leaders of the necessity to act. Karski, who had trained for the diplomatic corps, strained every diplomatic muscle he had in trying to persuade the Brits and Americans. In his appeal, he even extravagantly addressed FDR as, “Lord of Humanity.”

Karski also struggled with words around the prisoners: their condition almost rendered him silent. He recognized he was in the midst of the struggle of good and evil.  In that struggle, there were moments of irrepressible holiness by the prisoners straining every sinew of their being to help each other stay alive. Karski recognized these were stories of struggle, stories of fierce love inside inexpressible trauma and horror.

Later, Karski volunteered to sneak into the darkness of the Warsaw ghetto and the transit point of the Bełżec death camp to bring the news of Allied efforts to the prisoners. He brought hope. He was an example of the volunteering saint, representing the Prophet Isaiah's "send me" attitude.  Karski felt the call of his Christian upbringing to make a prophetic difference to people who were enslaved, oppressed, and daily murdered.
  

In 1985, the French Film Director Claude Lanzmann released a 9-1/2 hour documentary series Shoah which documented the living witnesses of the Holocaust.  I committed 4 afternoons of a winter week in early 1986 to seeing Shoah at the Key Theater in Georgetown of Washington, DC. During the second installment, Jan Karski appeared on-screen discussing the conditions he had found of the Jews confined in the Warsaw Ghetto, and he wept. Then I was moved to tears in the dark and flickering theater by his descriptions of what he saw and what he experienced in the conditions at Bełżec.  

I left the theater that gloomy Tuesday emotionally spent and got on the bus. It was raining. I sat down and focused internally on my memories of the moving witness to the Holocaust in the documentary. I then became aware of a disturbance at the front of the bus.

It was my friend Jan Karski, whom I had just seen on screen, off from his shift as a professor at Georgetown University. He was having difficulty putting away his umbrella while trying, in flustered English, to secure his senior citizen bus discount. The bus passengers were surly at the delay and, hearing his accent, cast their anger frontward at him: some shouted, “Down in Front!” and “Go Back to where you came from!”

Carried by instinct, I got up from my seat and went to the front and embraced Karski, giving him my arm for support as I almost carried him to a seat. At our seat, I told him of my emotion at having just then seen him in Shoah.

“Yes,” he said, “Lanzmann has made a necessary document of the time. Pola can’t watch it, it’s too painful for her.” 

Since that bus ride, I’ve often wondered if I should have addressed the surly passengers on the bus—shamed them, perhaps with the words, “this is a great man, people!” 

But in the presence of holiness, I was silenced. 

I sat a mostly silent vigil with Karski during the bus ride back to the Maryland suburbs. I had nothing profound to say, and the moment seemed to require something moving and deep and profound that I couldn’t utter.

For me, like Zechariah, Nicodemus, and the prophet Isaiah, there is the season of speaking out—a time of moral revival and assertion. There may also come a season when we can find no words. In those times, connection isn’t in the thundering eloquence of the pulpit or in the rebukes of the crowd we offer, but in the soft companionship of standing firm next to someone until they are ready to go their own way.

There may be in our recollections times when we were silenced—when our common human inheritance for communication was brought up short.  These times should be approached with great tenderness and discernment of recollection because I believe our souls have at those times been confronted with something intended and sent from God. Something of holiness. 

Practicing the virtue of recollection, we might gather a spiritual truth from these times when our voices failed. For at the risk of his life Karski took forth into history’s deepest darkness a message of hope, compassion, and concern. Risk is the price for the companionship with the Holy and the vigil with the Divine that we all crave.

My silence on that bus, I later recollected, inadvertently had discovered that holiness—that common, unobtrusive love-- is not found in rebuking the mob, but rather in companionship and chaplaincy with an elderly and disoriented man on a rainy evening as he struggled with his umbrella and the hostility of the crowd.

Sometimes, we are not called for the glamour positions—the shiny speaking positions, the apostleships, and prophecies—but rather to fulfill our role companionably in the local milieu in which we are called—to a witness of presence—a witness of presence for righteousness and compassion through silent accompaniment.

We may often experience ourselves as bursting with expression which threatens to overwhelm others’ capacity for listening.  Especially when events and personalities make a mockery of our deepest, shared morality. At those times, being given to silent companionship can provide the ailing and the onlookers a sign of our trust in goodness when the world is hostile and collapsing. 

Twenty-five years after these encounters with Jan Karski I became an ordained Presbyterian minister. I have come to regret not asking Karski, a Catholic, how his personal theology was impacted by his experience of the events of the Holocaust and their horrors. Of course, the Holocaust has exerted a major influence on later 20th C theology. There was great wisdom in the man I came to know, and now some of that is lost to God's keeping.

But the small wisdom I derived from encountering Jan Karski on that bus ride was that our human task is to companion and bring stories of enduring wonder with the mystery of God and the enigma of faith, speaking and living life to the fullest.  In this, we risk that even our words and stories will for a season fail.  Holiness—God’s humble love--demands it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Karski accessed on 6 August 2015.

[2] Pers. Comm.

[3]  "On 1 September 1939 Nazi Germany launched the Second World War by invading Poland from the West. On 17 September the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the East. The two totalitarian powers split Poland between them. Approximately 250,000 Polish soldiers were captured by the Red Army. About 15,000 military officers, police officers and border guards were segregated and interned in three camps: Starobelsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov.

"On March 5, 1940 NKVD Chief Beria provided Stalin with a written proposal to execute the Poles at the three camps as well as thousands of other Polish prisoners in the jails of Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine. Beria described the Polish prisoners as “sworn enemies of Soviet power, filled with hatred for the Soviet system of government”. He proposed to “apply to them the supreme punishment, shooting”. In the operation that followed in April and May 1940, 21,857 Poles were shot by the NKVD and buried in hidden mass graves."Cf. Andrew Kavchak, 2020. The Katyn Forest Massacre: An Annotated Bibliography of Books in English.".

Biblical Witness to the "End of Ice"

Biblical Witness to the "End of Ice"

Rev. Douglas Olds

July 9, 2019 (revised October 1, 2019, January 2021)
all rights reserved

Dahr Jamail's The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption (2019) proposes a vision of the Earth nearing its ecological end.  He gives a firsthand report how ice, frost, and cold are disappearing as a result of runaway global heating from a combustion economy. Without situating these theologically, he accounts how the Earth's ecosystems that support human civilizations are nearing culimination and destruction manifested by the “end of ice.”  

The Anthropocene era’s defining features--its positive feedback loops that are heating the earth-- are disrupting the frost cycle. These feedbacks manifest the confluence of Anthropocene decadence: economic idolatry; global heating; evasion of responsibility not just to the Creator but even to basic contingencies and adaptation to environmental limits; and the seeking of personal agency that evades every moral scheme of accountability. The anthropogenic disruption of the cryosphere seems the keystone indicator of culpable society’s direct challenge to the prerogatives of God—that direct humanity to ecological trusteeship and soothe swelter and heat primarily afflicting God’s favored, the agricultural workers addressed by many of Jesus’ parables. 

The Book of Job locates with God the power and prerogative to give ice:

Job 38:29 From whose womb did the ice come forth,

    and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven? (Implied: NO ONE BUT GOD)

Elihu in Job 37.10:

By the breath of God ice is given, and the broad waters are frozen fast. 

Also:  Psalm 147:16-17 He gives snow like wool;

          he scatters frost like ashes. He hurls down hail like crumbs— 

  who can stand before his cold? 

Cold is likened to faith for the servant of Israel's God:

Proverbs 25:13 Like the cold of snow in the time of harvest

    are faithful messengers to those who send them;

    they refresh the spirit of their masters.

Cold immobilizes agricultural pests, and heat invigorates them:

Nahum 3:17 Your guards are like grasshoppers,

    your scribes like swarms of locusts

    settling on the fences

    on a cold day—

    when the sun rises, they fly away;

    no one knows where they have gone.

And heat comes after human treachery to wither foes away,; the virtue of of loyalty is like the melting of ice:

Job 6: 14 Those who withhold kindness from a friend

    forsake the fear of the Almighty.

    15 My companions are treacherous like a torrent-bed,

    like freshets that pass away,

    16 that run dark with ice,

    turbid with melting snow.

    17 In time of heat they disappear;

    when it is hot, they vanish from their place.

Job likens the death of the treacherous like heat that steals away the snow:

   24.19Drought and heat snatch away the snow waters; 

    so does Sheol those who have sinned. 

Snow follows God’s vanquishing the violent:

Psalm 68:11 The Lord gives the command;

          great is the company of those who bore the tidings

12 “The kings of the armies, they flee, they flee!”

     The women at home divide the spoil,

13       though they stay among the sheepfolds —

     the wings of a dove covered with silver,

          its pinions with green gold.

14 When the Almighty scattered kings there,

          snow fell on Zalmon.

Heat is associated with God’s anger and coming judgment: 

  Isa. 30.27 See, the name of the LORD comes from far away, 

  burning with his anger, and in thick rising smoke;

.

Heat--and the lack of cold, frost, and ice--is also associated with God's future day of judgment:

Zechariah 14 See, a day is coming for the LORD, when the plunder taken from you will be divided in your midst. 2 For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle, and the city shall be taken and the houses looted and the women raped; half the city shall go into exile, but the rest of the people shall not be cut off from the city. 3 Then the LORD will go forth and fight against those nations as when he fights on a day of battle. 4 On that day his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives, which lies before Jerusalem on the east; and the Mount of Olives shall be split in two from east to west by a very wide valley; so that one half of the Mount shall withdraw northward, and the other half southward. 5 And you shall flee by the valley of the LORD’s mountain, for the valley between the mountains shall reach to Azal; and you shall flee as you fled from the earthquake in the days of King Uzziah of Judah. Then the LORD my God will come, and all the holy ones with him.

6 On that day there shall not be either cold or frost. 7 And there shall be continuous day (it is known to the LORD), not day and not night, for at evening time there shall be light.

(Cf. The heat of combustion signals judgment in Isa. 33.11-12)

Humanity might ritualize lament to address God’s judgment and power over destiny in a way that recognizes individual grief while celebrating the dawn of God’s new age.  For those who lack the anticipatory confidence of faith, despair from the current crisis of Climate Disruption and Injustice is rational.  For those of faith who wonder at God’s seeming absence from the current crisis, we may alternatively continue in confidence that even if human extinction plays out, that will not be humanity’s or God’s final word.  Our actions and virtues during collapse will partly determine our individual destiny inside God’s eternal being.  Even if it becomes apparent that all is lost, God-pleasing faith actualizes in continued good works and confidence in God’s loving power. Allegiance to justice will be tested and virtue refined in the crucible of an increasingly fevered planet. (Jer. 17:7-8). The pursuit and embodiment of goodness knows no expiration. 

Grazing on Ashes

Grazing on Ashes

Sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds

First Presbyterian Church of San Anselmo

June 16, 2019

Sermon Texts: Galatians 5: 13-18,
                         Isaiah 44: 9-20

audio:  http://www.buzzsprout.com/5748

A few weeks ago, my mother returned some shoes she purchased to the mall.  She asked for a receipt, and the clerk then asked her for her email address. My mother said, “I really don’t want to give that out. Why do you need my email?’  The clerk retorted, “Ma’am, we want to email you the receipt:  we’re trying to save the planet!"

My mother gets home, and there are two emails from the shoe company.  Neither is the receipt. Both are trying to sell her more shoes.

Welcome to America, where saving the planet always involves some renewed plan to sell you.  If only we make smarter purchases, or switch to more efficient products, then we will indeed save the planet. Consumer capitalism figures out the angles to get you to purchase more and more in order to change the world.  This is the capitalist ideology.  Their world is driven primarily by business and consumerism.

Yet the quote from Einstein on today’s bulletin suggests that business as usual is not the remedy to solving the problems that are coming about from business as usual. I am very skeptical that the profit motive can cure the mess that heedlessly seeking a profit regardless of environmental impact has caused.

Our reading from the Prophet Isaiah this morning is the Bible’s signal and unique message regarding the scale and misuse of fuel combustion.  In this passage from Isaiah, the idol maker is charged with diverting combustible resources away from personal warming and cooking toward the creation of idols.

 

14 He cuts down cedars …. He plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it. 15 Then it can be used as fuel. Part of it he takes and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it, makes it a carved image and bows down before it. 16 Half of it he burns in the fire; over this half he roasts meat, eats it and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, “Ah, I am warm, I can feel the fire!” 17 The rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, bows down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says, “Save me, for you are my god!”…

20 He feeds on ashes; a deluded mind has led him astray, and he cannot save himself or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a fraud?”

In contemporary terms, that fraud in his right hand is our economy’s idol of luxuries produced by the diversion of combustible fuels away from God’s intended provision for subsistence needs.

The Prophet Isaiah in this centrally marked text is to my reading condemning an idolatrous carbon combustion economy.

Some of you may be following the  ‘Juliana’ lawsuit  “Trial of the Century” that began last week in Portland.  21 children are suing the government for violating their Constitutional rights to life by subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.  My children know that their elders in prior generations have created the climate crisis while they display continuing moral inertia neglecting to change our ways.  Older generations are providing the young with unassailable grounds for moral grievance, not just the foundation for an innovative lawsuit against the government.

Not only is grievance culture toxic to community, it brings down the church and the Kingdom of God in four ways. First, grievance by the young delegitimates institutions, like the church, promoted by earlier generations. Second, grievance interferes with a healthy appreciation for Creation’s goodness, running down the idea and our message of a Creator. Add to this the environmental destruction resulting in mass extinctions, where the totality of God’s worshiping community is disrupted. I refer you to the vision of the assembly of animals praising God in Psalms 104 and 148.   Finally, Is. 44 specifically condemns the combustion-fueled economy that diverts from subsistence as idolatrous and thus is counter to God’s intended Kingdom.

Isaiah’s message to us is to consider our profligate combustion-fueled economy as both idolatrous and an immoral wrecking of God’s Kingdom purpose.   Our heat-trapping pollution is a source of grievance by God as felt in God’s favored future, today’s children. As Christians, we must take this prophetic challenge seriously.  Not as a moral scolding (prophets like preachers can be moral scolds), but as a message to align your lives to be Saints with the direction God intends.

And I believe that God’s intention for the planet involves humanity developing the virtues that preserve the atmosphere, specifically the virtues of thrift, self-denial, and loyalty. 

The virtue of carbon thrift takes stock of daily decisions to consume and pursues the path of least combustion. After worship this morning, in our Sunday Seminar, Marin Interfaith Climate Action will present some steps we can take to pursue carbon thrift in our living situations and lifestyle.  I hope you all will attend. The virtue of carbon thrift is the most compelling of our calls to reduce carbon emissions.  Individual thrift in combusting carbon compounds is the foundation for directing society toward sustainability and Atmospheric Care.

The virtue of asceticism, or self-denial, is not taking that jet vacation to exotic, long-distance locations even though we can afford it. We Christians are not part of today’s culture of self-creation, where diverse and flashy experience determines or fleshes out our identity.  We are people created anew in God’s love. We are people of the Holy Spirit, not of the jet. Our identity is not self-created but realized in the love we’ve experienced of God and that we reflect outward.  The selling of capitalism’s idea of a jet-travel bucket list is pure consumerist propaganda. Christians are meant to be counter-cultural.  At my stage of life, exotic travel is not essential to my growth in character or in effectiveness. The bucket list is capitalism’s implant into our desires. I have given up the goal of worldwide travel in retirement for the sake of the atmosphere.  As I’ve learned to testify from my good friend, Royce: I will only fly for family.

The next virtue, loyalty, applies to planet and place.  Loyalty to the planet is not falling for the Hollywood, NASA fairy tale that humanity has a destiny on another planet so that we can trash this one getting there. Loyalty to place encompasses people vacationing far closer to home and purchasing food from local farmer’s markets.  Two people driving a car to Los Angeles emits about ¼ of the carbon compounds and its equivalents than those two people flying to L.A. 

Loyalty to place displays to neighbors the changes in personal lifestyles one is making for the benefit of the atmosphere.

I’ve brought to you this morning the message that profligate consumerism founded on a carbon-combustion economy negates the Kingdom of God in many ways, and that the solution is found in our commitments to pursue the virtues that commit ourselves to the care and stability of the atmosphere.  I mentioned that the prophets were moral scolds when they called ancient Israel’s attention to God’s intention for society.  I want to try to suggest how this prophetic scolding for the sake of the atmosphere and reduced carbon-combustion consumerism is actually pastoral.  In other words, my message this morning is intended to stimulate saintliness and the rewards of virtue brought about by carbon thrift, loyal, and consumer self-denial.

I mentioned at the outset of my reading from Isaiah that the passage Is. 44.9-20 is not in the Protestant lectionary.  That is, it is not part of the usual cycle of worship readings in the Church.  I have come across only one person who has heard this passage preached before in the Presbyterian Church, and that was 40 years ago. But I want to point out that this passage is integral to the yearly cycle of Bible readings in the Jewish synagogue.

Reform Judaism employs Isaiah 44 (including 44.9-20) in its annual sequence of parashah and haftarah readings.[1] That sequence of Isaiah’s condemnation of fuel idolatry is particularly linked in its readings with God’s Final Judgment. In the year 2020, the Va-yikra service of 5 Nisan 5780 (March 28) has as its haftarah reading Is. 44.6-23, with the description, “God’s greatness contrasted with the sin of idolatry.”  The following week (Tzav) has a haftarah reading of Malachi 3.4-24, described as “Approach of the Day of Judgment.” This sequence of haftarot that follows the betrayal of God through idolatry with the Approach of the Day of Judgment is repeated in the year 2021.  This sequence is instructive regarding how seriously Judaism takes the sin of idolatry described by this morning’s reading of Is. 44. 9-20: It is to be followed by God’s Judgment.

So as a preacher with a pastoral intent for his call to virtue this morning, I intend to direct your path to saintliness in your economic and carbon-consuming life. God’s final judgment awaits us all.  And here’s why I believe that matters existentially beyond solely the legitimate fear of a powerful and demanding God holding us accountable.  I believe God’s final judgment will assign us to our eternal destiny.   While no one knows what happens after death, our Reformed predecessors thought long and hard on our final destiny as Christians.  They believed, and it makes sense to me, that our final destiny with God will reflect the values, virtues, and commitments that we display in our current life of freedom.  If our values, practices, and virtues pursued in freedom in this life support God’s natural creation (including atmospheric care and thrift in carbon combustion), then I believe that our final destiny at God’s assignment will include God’s ongoing richness of natural creation.

On the other hand, if our values and commitments in the freedom of this life focus solely or mainly on technology and material consumption, I believe it is possible that our final destiny would involve an environment of primarily human-derived features. I don’t know about you, but I choose the destiny of Saints who rely on God’s ongoing creative, infinite goodness more than the limited and flaw-infected creations of humanity no matter how seemingly spectacular and impressive. If we pursue the values of self-creation through consumerism, it’s possible that will be our final destiny. If instead, we pursue the values and virtues that serve God and God’s creation, then I believe that we will receive the exceeding overflow of benefits in the eternal destiny of God’s goodness and creativity.

Scientists have their ear to the tracks: they can hear the massive vehicle of climate change off in the distance, but the enormity of the signal they pick up complicates their prediction as to the timing of arrival and magnitude of the effects:

The refugees, the droughts, the famines, the extinctions.

The problems loom catastrophic, and many of the effects of climate change have already begun arriving.

In addition to the cultivation of the virtues of carbon thrift, self-denial, and loyalty to planet and place, I suggest a visualization exercise for atmospheric trusteeship. Of course, carbon dioxide and its gaseous equivalents are not visible, which is part of the problem. However, I’ve begun to visualize products and processes as the “ashes” that result from their production.  

When I look at my unconsidered purchases of two gadgets for my kitchen, I wince as I visualize the ashes embedded in their production and operation and the dust of rust from their obsolescence. 

When I see a plane’s contrail (which scientists are still studying as a potential, significant source of global warming), I visualize it as a train of ashes. 

The Prophet Isaiah is warning us: Is. 44’s image for the modern combustion-fueled economy is feeding upon ashes.

The vision I want to leave you with is the picture of ashes as the material goods and services one consumes. Ashes of injustice against the poor and other species, ashes of the futility for material consumption to enable happiness and satisfaction.

Try visualizing ashes yourself, and you may find your resistance to the carbon combustion-intensive tragedy increasing and your participation in it abating.

Radical political and social change is necessary, but even more so is rapid change in personal lifestyle practices and responsibility.

 

Our children and grandchildren are begging, poignantly begging, that we panic over global warming, but panic with purpose. Let’s turn aside their basis for grievance against us.

We can have vast carbon-fueled luxuries, or we can give our children and their children a decent life. We can’t have both.

Let us stop grazing on society’s consumer ashes.

Let us learn instead to embrace and Kiss the Sky. AMEN.

---

[1] Assembly of Reform Rabbis UK. “Calendar of Torah and Haftarah Readings: 5779 – 5781/2018 – 2021.” The Movement for Reform Judaism, 2017. Accessed April 13, 2019. https://www.reformjudaism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Calendar-of-Torah-and-Haftarah-Readings-5779-5781.pdf.

Transactional Failure: The Negative Ethic of (Stipulation Against) Idolatry

Transactional Failure: 

The Negative Ethic of (Stipulation Against) Idolatry

Rev. Douglas Olds

May 2019

     It is sometimes implied (Moe-Lobeda [2013; 2017]; Jenkins [2013, 8; 2014], Jenkins, et al. [2018]) that there is no direct Biblical message or historical analogy to apply to the issue of Global Warming and Climate Change so that secular ethical foundations must be developed.  A canonical approach to the theological condemnation of idolatry in Deutero-Isaiah may offer a productive pastoral and proclamatory approach.  Isaiah 44.9-20 is centrally occupied with the use of combustible resources--the unbounded and unsustainable scale of exploitation of which is at the root of the Greenhouse Effect. In my research, I have yet to find this passage linked with Global Climate Change. Yet, in the parodic account of Deutero-Isaiah (Watts 2005, Holter 1995, Baltzer 2001), the idol maker is charged with diverting combustible resources away from their stated, intended function--instrumental sufficiency for personal warming and cooking--toward the creation of idols. 

Isaiah 44.9 All who make idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit; their witnesses neither see nor know. And so they will be put to shame. 10 Who would fashion a god or cast an image that can do no good? 11 Look, all its devotees shall be put to shame; the artisans too are merely human. Let them all assemble, let them stand up; they shall be terrified, they shall all be put to shame.

12 The ironsmith fashions it and works it over the coals, shaping it with hammers, and forging it with his strong arm; he becomes hungry and his strength fails, he drinks no water and is faint. 13 The carpenter stretches a line, marks it out with a stylus, fashions it with planes, and marks it with a compass; he makes it in human form, with human beauty, to be set up in a shrine. 14 He cuts down cedars or chooses a holm tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest. He plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it. 15 Then it can be used as fuel. Part of it he takes and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it, makes it a carved image and bows down before it. 16 Half of it he burns in the fire; over this half he roasts meat, eats it and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, “Ah, I am warm, I can feel the fire!” 17 The rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, bows down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says, “Save me, for you are my god!”

18 They do not know, nor do they comprehend; for their eyes are shut, so that they cannot see, and their minds as well, so that they cannot understand. 19 No one considers, nor is there knowledge or discernment to say, “Half of it I burned in the fire; I also baked bread on its coals, I roasted meat and have eaten. Now shall I make the rest of it an abomination? Shall I fall down before a block of wood?” 20 He feeds on ashes; a deluded mind has led him astray, and he cannot save himself or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a fraud?”

A. Centrality of Message: Form and Rhetorical Criticism of Is. 44. 9-20

Is. 44.9-20 is the conclusion to dramatic center of the Deutero-Isaianic corpus of Is. 40-55 (Sweeney 2016, 19-20) concerned with YHWH’s redemption of Israel. Specifically, Is. 42.14-44.23 concludes the third of five successive arguments for God’s agency in determining Israel’s prospects (Sweeney 2016, 20).  Is. 44. 9-20 is thus marked as a climax to this central motif.

Moreover, Is. 44. 9-20 is noted by Matheus (1987, 324) as the thematic center of a chiasm, or ring-structure, concerning the incomparability of God against the abomination of idol fabrication:

A Is. 40.18ff. Introduction: with whom can one compare God? 

Β 41. 6-7 the intent for creating idols

C 42.17 who trusts in idols will be confounded 

D 44. 9-20 process of idol fabrication

C' 45.16-17 who trusts in idols will be ashamed

B' 45.20 the ineffectuality of created idols

A' 46. 5-8 concluding query: with whom can one compare God?

The centrality of Is. 44. 9-20 in this chiastic structure rhetorically marks and emphasizes the human failure to recognize God for who God is: The Creator and redeemer of the people of Israel.

Not only is Is. 44. 9-22 recognized literarily as the rhetorical center in Matheus’ (1987) and Sweeney’s (2016) formal structuring of the Deutero-Isaianic account, Holter (1995) and Spykerboer (1976) note that Is. 44. 9-20 makes up the third and far most important of the polemical presentations against idolatry in Deutero-Isaiah.

Both Matheus (1987) and Spykerboer (1976) note the marked literary form of Is. 44. 9-22: it is poetic in meter and structure, but “it is more descriptive than most other parts of [Deutero-Isaiah]” (Spykerboer 1976, 117).  The meter and descriptive poetry of Is. 44. 9-22 markedly changes that of the meter and rhetoric of the poetry of the rest of Is. 40-48 in which it is embedded.  The language and flow of this passage is so marked that many scholars have taken the passage to be an interpolation (Watt 2005, Baltzer 2001).  However, Goldingay and Payne (2006, I, 303) discern that both thematically and linguistically the passage forms part of a “spiral” within the more characteristic versification and poesy beginning in 42.14. Matheus (1987) agrees that poetic form characterizes this passage, and Spykerboer (1976, 117) sees no argument for this passage’s lack of originality or genuineness despite its “markedly prose form.”

The sum of these illustrations of poetic, rhetorical markedness and thematic centrality serve to demonstrate the importance of Is 44. 9-22 as a Biblical message.  The passage demonstrates the process of idol fabrication forward and backward (Goldingay and Payne 2006, I, 356) which compares with Wisdom13.10–13.[1] Verse 19 recapitulates verse 17, doubly emphasizing its condemnation of the diversion of carbon combustible resources from subsistence heating and cooking to that upon which the idol fabricator makes his abomination. I conclude that this repetition of the framing of the diversion of combustible resources as idolatry to be the most highly marked passage of this demonstrably thematic and literarily central hinge sequence.  The diversion of carbon combustible resources from subsistence needs into an idol-making process is thus germane to the ethical and Biblical evaluation of the carbon combustion-intensive political economy.

Because God’s primary commandment (Exod. 20.3) and protological curse (Deut. 27.15) concern idolatry, and because Deutero-Isaiah 45 involves a creation account set inside a critique of empire, a theological foundation of concern for nature affected by the misuse of carbon combustible resources may be derived from the Trinitarian ethic of trusteeship as promoted earlier.  If the charge of idolatry holds, a society heedless of the misuse of combustible fuels might be recognized as engaging in a foundational, covenantal sin against the Creator, one that assaults God’s atmospheric mover (Gen. 1.2), the Holy ruach.

Trusteeship of nature by humanity requires something to motivate the execution of its covenantal duties.  To that end, we turn to God’s final judgment flowing from the negative principle of idolatry. It may be noted how modern Judaism employs Isaiah 44 (including 44.9-20) in its regular sequence of parashah and haftarah readings. That sequence implies the covenantal structure suggested above: idolatry in contravention of the covenant of trusteeship is followed by God’s Final Judgment. In the year 2020, the Va-yikra service of 5 Nisan 5780 (March 28) has as its haftarah reading Is. 44.6-23, with the liturgical description, “God’s greatness contrasted with the sin of idolatry.”  The following week (Tzav) has a haftarah reading of Malachi 3.4-24, described as “Approach of the Day of Judgment” (Assembly of Reform Rabbis 2017). This sequence of haftarot that follows the betrayal of God through idolatry by the Approach of the Day of Judgment is repeated in the year 2021, on 7 and 14 Nisan 5781.  This sequence is instructive as to Judaism’s seriousness with which it makes of idolatry described by Is. 44. 9-20: It is to be followed by God’s Judgment.

      B.  Canonical Arc of Condemnation of Idolatry from the Prophets to Revelation 18

Coote (2004) locates the impetus for Deutero-Isaiah’s condemnation of idolatry during the Persian period; it was applied, in part, to calling for the return to Jerusalem of the offspring of exiled Judahites who were continuing to find employment and residence in Babylon. Many of these were craftsmen employed in the Babylon religious establishment.  Yet the context of (Deutero-) Isaiah 40-55 may be more general than particular in its condemnation of Babylonian society.  Read intertextually with Rev. 17-19, the entire Babylonian economy may have been seen by early Christian readers as by “Persian Isaiah” (Coote 2004): as idolatrous, and the prophet’s charge of idol fabrication might be applied to all exiled Judahites participating in the Babylonian economy, whatever their occupation or sector. 

        Other prophets condemn Israel’s idolatry, which they characterize as “adultery,” the fundamental disloyalty of Israel to its partner YHWH. Hosea (4.12-13), Jeremiah (9.2), and Ezekiel (16.36) join Isaiah (57.7-8) in naming idolatry as adultery. This characterization is significant because the charge of adultery is applied to encompass Babylon’s society in Rev. 18.  That charge of adultery is linked to and envisions a political economy idolatrous in the production of luxuries, a diversion of resources from subsistence needs to the vanities of the rich.

Rev. 18.1 After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority; and the earth was made bright with his splendor. 2 He called out with a mighty voice,

    “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!

    It has become a dwelling place of demons,

    a haunt of every foul spirit,

    a haunt of every foul bird,

    a haunt of every foul and hateful beast.

    3For all the nations have drunk

    of the wine of the wrath of her fornication,

    and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her,

    and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxury.”

…

9 And the kings of the earth, who committed fornication and lived in luxury with her, will weep and wail over her when they see the smoke of her burning; 10 they will stand far off, in fear of her torment, and say,

    “Alas, alas, the great city,

    Babylon, the mighty city!

    For in one hour your judgment has come.”

11 And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo anymore, 12 cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron, and marble, 13 cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, olive oil, choice flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, slaves—and human lives.

    14“The fruit for which your soul longed

    has gone from you,

    and all your dainties and your splendor

    are lost to you,

    never to be found again!”

15 The merchants of these wares, who gained wealth from her, will stand far off, in fear of her torment, weeping and mourning aloud,

    16“Alas, alas, the great city,

    clothed in fine linen,

    in purple and scarlet,

    adorned with gold,

    with jewels, and with pearls!

    17For in one hour all this wealth has been laid waste!”

And all shipmasters and seafarers, sailors and all whose trade is on the sea, stood far off 18 and cried out as they saw the smoke of her burning,

    “What city was like the great city?”

    19And they threw dust on their heads, as they wept and mourned, crying out,

    “Alas, alas, the great city,

    where all who had ships at sea

    grew rich by her wealth!

    For in one hour she has been laid waste.

    20Rejoice over her, O heaven,

    you saints and apostles and prophets!

    For God has given judgment for you against her.”

Adultery is linked in this passage with the luxury production by idol fabricators. This vision, which is meant to be applied to Rome of New Testament times, picks up on the Old Testament’s condemnation of Babylon’s society during the exile of Judah there during the time of Deutero-Isaiah.  This condemnation of the resource-diverting—especially combustible resource-diverting—economic society has ready application to this day and age when a carbon-intensive economy degrades the atmosphere and does not provide sufficient subsistence opportunities to the poor, future generations, and other species.

II.          Covenant Performance of Atmospheric Trusteeship

 Alienation may be humankind’s greatest existential problem--alienation from God, from nature, from society, of the human soul from the human body.  Because of alienation, humankind struggles with feelings of insecurity and insufficiency.  In their idolatrous desire to become like gods, Adam and Eve as the mythological representatives of fallen human nature misapply their freedom in what they misconstrue as capricious and chaotic nature—nature perceived at times graciously fecund or punitively hostile.  This psychological dualism leads humanity through history to fantasize looming, recurrent scarcities and consequently to build stores of hoarded goods and commodities to serve as material security. Alienation stimulates Adam and Eve’s modern human heirs to pursue a destructive environmental ethic of hoarding and extractive exploitation of resources relatively unbounded by concerns of future generations, marginalized groups, indigenous peoples with historical land tenure, and other species.

To describe and repair this alienation, the Bible structures the environmental surroundings of humanity on a Trinitarian basis.  Ontogenetically primary is nature as a “garden,” the realm of humanity’s creation by God the Father and therefore an average child’s first experience of his or her surroundings.  It stands to reason that God’s directive to Adam to serve and preserve the garden in Gen. 2.15 is directed at this fecund household inside a parenting and sustaining nature.  The environmental ethic that results is “usufruct,” the non-exploitative culling of nature’s yearly harvest without depletion of its productive capacity. This trustee’s task derives from the Creator’s blessing. Leithart (2018) illustrates this blessing by inverting the curse of Cain:

The Lord curses Cain in Genesis 4:12: ‘When you serve [abad] the ground (adamah), it will not give (natan) its strength (koach) to you.’

Invert that, and we have a fair summary of God’s blessing, and a mini theology of the natural environment. Humanity’s stance toward the earth: Service, not exploitation, pillage, or rape.

When the adamah is well served, she gives.

The relation of humanity to creation is not master-servant. Humanity doesn’t dominate but serves; and the exchange that results is an exchange of gifts.

The adamah gives strength, which means that the adamah has power to give. It also implies that the adamah shares power.

Humanity’s task inside the Creator’s garden is to respect, tend, and serve.  Humanity is to recognize its fellowship with other created natural entities.

The second conceptualization of humanity’s ambient surroundings is the Bible’s consideration of אֶרֶץ ʾerets “the land” as a political, historical, and cultural construct. This is the realm of the Logos—God the Son.  It is in adulthood that the denizen of the garden of creation goes forth to encounter the world in its historical and cultural complexity and risk.  It is within this latter, blended milieu of terrestrial substrate and human sociological forces that an individual created being learns how to function and what existential choices to make.  It is within adulthood in the land that a person learns whether to pursue violence and Machiavellian stratagems to survive, or whether to take up the challenge of the moral lifestyle of God the Son to extend the garden for others, not only to embody and exploit it solipsistically.  In such a case, the directive toward trusteeship of nature’s garden continues.  If, however, the alternative is pursued for a reckless individualism and selfish self-centeredness, an exploitative ethic of economic intensification and depletion results.

The third Trinitarian state of nature is dichotomous: the landing of the Holy Spirit or its absence.  It is the bifurcate exit either to grave—dead earth—or renewal: Paradise/new earth.

To illustrate, Robb (2010) contrasts the “Kingdom of Oil” with the Kingdom of God. After establishing a moral foundation in liberation and the insurrectionist Jesus, she demonstrates the necessity to collectively deliberate over the vision of the good society, which in Church circles involves the Gospel kerygma (proclamation) of the Kingdom. I (not Robb) argue that if a person’s values in this life are the extensions of life to others in the form of trusteeship of nature and the Kingdom ethics of God the Son, then those values will be realized anew in the Creator’s Final Judgment that brings the individual’s final destiny inside an ambient and productive paradise that instantiate those values.  If self-centeredness and exploitation were the core of an individual’s lifetime in both garden and land, then the prospect from God’s judgment is a destiny in a cold grave and the self-created, non-productive values that represents. 

The Holy Spirit’s absence or presence in the environmental surroundings of land and garden leads to the “double exit” of life and death within the Creator.  In death, there is no ruach’s breath of air, only its cessation.  By this prospect, we again return to the necessity in this life to promote the sustaining fellowship with the atmosphere as a value that demonstrates to the Creator our seriousness with which we take life in the garden and life in the land. We demonstrate our respect for life by fellowshipping with and acting as a trustee of the atmosphere while living the Kingdom ethics of God the Son.  We receive fellowship in return by pneumatic companionship with God’s breath, the ruach of Creation, and the love poured out into our hearts by the Son. The Gospel of our receiving redemption by grace may be existentially primary, but the Gospel announced by the Son of the Kingdom of God surely includes our awakening to the covenantal requirements that focus on the life-sustaining surroundings of our neighbors no less than ourselves.

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[1]   Wis 13. 10 But miserable, with their hopes set on dead things, are those

    who give the name “gods” to the works of human hands,

    gold and silver fashioned with skill,

    and likenesses of animals,

    or a useless stone, the work of an ancient hand.

    11A skilled woodcutter may saw down a tree easy to handle

    and skillfully strip off all its bark,

    and then with pleasing workmanship

    make a useful vessel that serves life’s needs,

    12and burn the cast-off pieces of his work

    to prepare his food, and eat his fill.

    13But a cast-off piece from among them, useful for nothing,

    a stick crooked and full of knots,

    he takes and carves with care in his leisure,

    and shapes it with skill gained in idleness;

    he forms it in the likeness of a human being,