Consider the Turtles of the Field

The surface causes of environmental carelessness among conservative Protestants are legion, including subcontracting the evangelical mind out to right-wing politicians and greedy business interests…putting the gospel of Jesus through the strainer of consumerist-capitalism and retaining only the thin broth that this modern-day Caesar lets pass through...a tendency to be against whatever "liberals" are for. Even more important, though, are the deeper theological roots of environmental disinterest - and the emerging theological values that many of us are embracing instead.
People who are sensitive to creation know that creation is in constant flux. Continents drift, climates change, magnetic poles flip-flop, and bogs like this one gradually give way to wet meadows and then various kinds of forests. There's a natural succession out here under the sun, and I think there's a kind of natural succession going on theologically for many Christians as well. Let me mention three of these elements.
FIRST, INCREASED CONCERN for the poor and oppressed leads to increased concern for all of creation. The same forces that hurt widows and orphans, minorities and women, children and the elderly also hurt the songbirds and trout, the ferns and old growth forests: greed, impatience, selfishness, arrogance, hurry, anger, competition, irreverence - plus a spirituality that cares for souls but neglects bodies, that prepares for eternity in heaven but abandons history on earth.
When greed and consumerism are exposed, when arrogance and irreverence are unplugged, when hurry and selfishness are named and repented of, the world and all it contains (widows, orphans, trees, soil) are revalued (or re-deemed) and made sacred again. No, in this emerging view, these little bog turtles we're looking for today are a priceless treasure, an original creation of the greatest Artist in (and beyond) history - even though they are deemed precisely worthless to someone who would want to build a interstate highway through this bog.
Second, the eschatology of abandonment is being replaced by an engaging gospel of the kingdom. The phenomenon of evangelical-dispensational eschatology (doctrine of last things or end times) makes perfect sense in the modern world. Understandably, Christians in the power centers of modernity (England in the 1800s, the United States in the 1900s) saw nothing ahead in the story of modernity - nothing but destruction. Their only hope? A skyhook Second Coming, wrapping up the whole of creation like an empty candy wrapper and throwing it in the trash can, and the sooner the better, so God could bring us all to heaven, beyond time, beyond matter, beyond this creation entirely. In this model, virtually no continuity exists between this creation and the new heavenly creation; this creation is discarded like a non-recyclable milk carton. Why get sentimental about a cheap container destined for the cosmic dumpster of nothingness?
This pop-evangelical eschatology made one understandable but serious mistake: It assumed that modernity was all there was or ever would be. Just as the early Christians could not imagine the gospel outlasting the Roman Empire (unless they got the point of the Apocalypse of John), 19th and 20th century evangelicals couldn't imagine the gospel outlasting modernity, the empire of reason, consumerism, and individualism. For pop-evangelical eschatology to proliferate and maintain hegemony, it had to reinterpret the Hebrew prophets. Their prophetic visions of reconciliation and shalom within history (metaphorically conveyed via lions and lambs, children and serpents, swords and plowshares, spears and pruning hooks) had to be pushed beyond history, either into a spiritualized heaven or a millennial middle ground - between history and eternity, so to speak.

The eschatology of abandonment also had to marginalize Jesus (which they did, to a degree, by letting Jesus remain as savior but promoting Paul to master-teacher). But now, as more and more of us rediscover Jesus as master-teacher, we are struck by the centrality of "the kingdom of God" in Jesus' message (and Paul's too). And it is clear to us that this kingdom is not just about heaven after we die: It's about God's will (or wish) being "done on earth" now, in history.

posted by Jordon | 9:01 AM | |