When my children hear that I am working on another book, they ask, “Same old, same old?” And they are right. My publishing persona for the past four decades has been focused, not to say fixated, on the theology of nature or on what I have usually preferred to call “ecological theology.” This was in large measure, I think, because I could do no other. I was a full-time pastor all those years, preoccupied with officiating at the liturgy and preaching, and with the care of souls and the public witness—not a great deal of time for a broad scope of publishing adventures. This practical bent of my professional life may also explain, in part, why I have for many years felt such a theological affinity with towering classical practitioners like Irenaeus, Augustine, Luther, and Bonhoeffer. Writing works in systematic theology has never been my métier, although I have had a longstanding intellectual passion for that kind of enterprise—witness the six years of courses that I took with Paul Tillich, beginning as an undergraduate.
Whence then my theological focus or fixation on ecological theology? This is something of a puzzle, since, in my formative theological years in the late fifties and early sixties, biblical theology was dominated by a heady and self-conscious anthropocentrism—the “God-who-acts” theology of G. Ernest Wright (with whom I took a number of courses), who pitted what he thought of as historicized biblical faith over against what Wright also called the nature religion of the Canaanites. New Testament studies were then dominated by the existential analysis of Rudolf Bultmann, a favorite of college chaplains and religion teachers. Bultmann argued, revealingly, that the groaning of the whole creation that Paul talked about in Romans 8 referred to the groaning of the human creation only. Like his neo-Kantian mentors and Kant himself, Bultmann handed nature, which he tended to view in mechanistic terms, over to the natural scientists. In systematic theology in those years the anthropocentric theology of “salvation history” (Heilsgeschichte) was much in vogue (I started reading Oscar Cullmann and Karl Barth virtually my first day in seminary in 1957). Indeed, I was told a few years later by Gordon Kaufman, the American Kantian theologian who later became my dissertation advisor at Harvard Divinity School, that “theologians need not concern themselves with nature” (or words to that effect). That I learned other things about nature in the course of my studies, above all from Luther and Tillich, is another story. That I began to see that there was another, non-anthropocentric way to approach the scriptures, especially when I read what was to become an epochal 1963 article by Krister Stendahl (who had already become a kind of role model for me), “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” is also another story. More about these things in a moment.
Nor was there much public theological discussion in the late fifties and early sixties of what was already in those years becoming a major challenge for our species, the environmental crisis. This public ecological indifference only began to give way somewhat in the wake of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. I myself had no idea in those years that signs of the crisis were already apparent. I did not read the Carson book until the late sixties. I was too busy with my dissertation and a year of study in Germany.
Yet already in the earliest years of my theological study, I found myself fascinated with the theology of nature. Why? I think it was because of the milieu in which I grew up—call it a subculture of sacramental Lutheranism. In my case, that Lutheranism was more particularly shaped by a mostly humanizing ethnic German earthiness. That subculture extended all the way from a profound reverence for the eucharist to a lighthearted indulgence in the mundane joys of this life (I learned to drink beer at church picnics). That subculture also included, at least in my parents’ case, a kind of matter-of-fact reverence for the earth. When I was young, my family lived in an exurban setting in upstate New York, near Buffalo—prosperous, yes (my father was a dentist), but it was not yet suburbia, which was just then beginning to happen. My family lived in a somewhat isolated but elegant stone house that was surrounded by woods and fields and streams. I once looked at the deed to our home for a high school history project, and found what to me were exciting references to Indian (as we said in those days) ownership of our land around 1880, which I thought of now and again as I wandered through the nearby fields and woods in solitude, contemplating redwing blackbirds, discovering pheasant nests, and overturning stones in the stream in order to observe crayfish. My father spent much of his discretionary time caring for our land, which for him especially meant planting a variety of specimen trees. The family also had a sizeable “victory garden” as many did in that World War II era, and all of us worked that garden together. I warmly remember harvesting bushels of tomatoes and helping my mother can them.
But this early experience with the earth wasn’t only local. As soon as gasoline rationing ended after World War II, my parents packed my brother and sister and me into a station wagon, and we spent several weeks exploring a number of national parks in the West, among them Yellowstone, Glacier, and the Black Hills. We tented almost every evening. I still recall those awe-inspiring experiences, both driving and also taking numerous “sightseeing” walks surrounded by vast wilderness vistas. My family made several such summer trips, also to the Pacific Northwest and the Southwest. Later, as a graduate student, when I was able to turn myself loose in many intellectual directions, I suppose it was no accident that I fell in love with the writings of the nineteenth-century American naturalist and national parks advocate (and disciple of Calvin in his heart of hearts), John Muir, whose collected works I read cover to cover.
But there was a dark side to this sacramental Lutheranism and its ethnicity, too, which I only discovered after I had entered into a quite different cultural world as an undergraduate at Harvard College in 1953. There a crisis of faith was thrust upon me, from which, I think, I have never fully recovered. I discovered the Holocaust, existentially. Or, better, the Holocaust discovered me. At the end of the war, I had seen some newsreel films about the liberation of some of the camps. The photos of the piles of bodies and the emaciated survivors horrified me. But I must have repressed those experiences entirely. As I recall, I never talked about them with anyone, nor was I ever called upon at home or in school or at my church to discuss what I had seen in those films. I am not sure when the very expression, the Holocaust, gained currency in my social and religious world. Remarkably, I remained consciously oblivious to the Holocaust through the end of my high school years.
All this changed one day, as I sat in a German history class when I was a sophomore. The instructor began to review the story of the Holocaust and then narrate how many “good Germans” turned the other way when the Jews were carted off to the camps. He talked, too, about Lutheranism’s long tradition of hostility to the Jews in Germany, beginning in a most ugly fashion with Luther himself. He also described the Lutheran traditions of unquestioning obedience to the state, predicated on a reading of Romans 13. Those were my people! That was the church that had so powerfully nourished me since I had been a child! Not a few Lutherans became “German Christians,” said the instructor. Me? World War II had long been over, but I had never even thought about the meaning of the Holocaust before! Why hadn’t we discussed it at my church? Why hadn’t synodical bodies addressed this issue, or speakers at youth rallies or Bible camps? In that class that day, I found myself at the edge of tears. I still feel those tears.
Providentially, in due time, I was befriended by a pastor during this crisis of faith: Henry E. Horn, of University Lutheran Church, Cambridge. He was later to become my senior colleague and lifetime mentor in the ministry. He introduced me to Bonhoeffer, among others, who opened my mind and heart to encounter the theology of the Confessing Church in Germany of that era. In the midst of a certain intellectual incoherence about such matters for a couple of years, I was subsequently assigned to a wonderful history tutor who took me under his wing, notwithstanding the fact that he was an agnostic and that his reading of Lutheran history in Germany was much more critical than even mine had come to be. In due course, I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on the German resistance to Hitler, which focused on a number of leading lights of the resistance movement, among them Bonhoeffer. In those studies, I also learned that the Nazis themselves were champions, in their own way, of the theology of nature! A heroic Nordic wilderness-ethos of “blood and soil” (Blut und Boden) permeated much of their propaganda.
That undergraduate experience bequeathed to me two of the themes that have been at the forefront of my theological mind and heart ever since, although in different ways: the theology of nature, and the theology of justice. In light of the National Socialist celebration of nature, never again would I be able to be, if indeed I had ever been, simply a nature romantic. Nature, I had learned (although I did not know this language at that time), was in significant measure a social construction, for better or for worse. As the scales fell from my eyes when I looked at my own beloved Lutheran tradition, I would never again be able to think of the church, or anything else for that matter, without also thinking of the claims of justice for the despised and the oppressed.
This commitment to each of these themes—ecology and social justice—left me in what I perceived to be a remarkably lonely position, especially in the early years of my theological career.[1] In that era, both within and beyond the church, numerous advocates spoke up defending nature. The American scene did not lack people who championed the cause of “the land” or “the wilderness,” those venerable themes from American history. Numerous advocates, again, both within and beyond the church, also dedicated themselves to fighting for social justice, as the struggles against racism and the war in Vietnam moved more and more to the front page. But few were inclined to speak and act on behalf of both nature and social justice. Often, therefore, I found myself talking justice with the ecology people and ecology with the justice people. This has been a struggle for me ever since. There is, in fact, a deep-seated tension between the concerns of the ecology party and the social justice party, a tension, indeed, that cannot merely be talked away or resolved by some higher intellectual synthesis. But I am getting ahead of myself.
By 1963, the time had come for me to settle on a dissertation topic, in the field I had chosen—“systematic and historical theology.” I might have opted to work on Tillich, whose writings I thoroughly knew by then (I was a member of what I think was Tillich’s last graduate colloquium at Harvard, which focused on his Systematic Theology). But my theological excitement in those days—and to this very day—was not first with a Tillichian “apologetic theology” that followed a “method of correlation,” however important that was and is. Instead, it was first and foremost with the theology of the Word. Tillich had made a place for what he called “kerygmatic theology” and I found myself eagerly exploring that place. This was no doubt because of my existential engagement with the story of the Confessing Church, and with the figure of Bonhoeffer in particular. For these reasons, I gravitated as a matter of course toward a dissertation on Barth, who had been so deeply involved in launching the Confessing Church. Along the way, I also thoroughly immersed myself in Luther studies, under the tutelage of Heiko Oberman. I previously had worked on Luther during a year’s study at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia with that institution’s dogmatician at the time, Martin Heinecken. He interpreted Luther both historically and existentially, and was particularly helpful to me in opening up Luther’s rich theology of nature. Those Luther studies formed a kind of bridge for me to Barth, who himself constantly engaged the theology of Luther (especially in Barth’s long, historical footnotes in his Church Dogmatics). So it was the theology of the Word of God, rather than the theology of correlation, that most claimed my mind and heart—and still does.
But I chose to come at Barth (brashly perhaps) not on his own terms, but on mine. I decided that I wanted to study his theology of nature, notwithstanding the fact that Barth had announced in volume three of his Church Dogmatics that there is no such thing as a legitimate theology of nature. (“Nature” was then, and is now, notoriously difficult to define; I have regularly worked with the theological-phenomenological construct that nature is the biophysical dimension of God’s creation.) Barth self-consciously defined theology as “the-anthropology,” as a doctrine of “God and man” (as we all said in those days). I argued that by focusing his theology in such a way, Barth baptized a nontheological doctrine of nature by default—the instrumental, utilitarian, and mechanistic view championed by bourgeois society in the West. Better, I maintained, to develop a theology of nature on biblical grounds (conversant with the findings of modern science, to be sure) than to end up in that kind of theological dead end.
Although I did not deal with Barth’s sacramental theology in my dissertation, that theme was very much on my mind as well. How could Barth ever envision a theology of the real presence of Jesus Christ in Word and Sacrament, as Luther did, I wondered, if nature—the world of material existence—was something to be viewed only as a symbol, as a resource, as an instrument, or even as a machine? In this respect, my thinking had been shaped by an early and careful reading of one of Tillich’s most insightful essays, “Nature and Sacrament.” There Tillich showed that the modern Protestant theology of nature was an expression of the spirit of the victorious bourgeoisie. Was that spirit lurking deep within the monumental argument of the Church Dogmatics? I concluded that it was—notwithstanding Barth’s own laudable, but finally unconvincing efforts in the Church Dogmatics to affirm the goodness of the whole creation.
No sooner was my dissertation completed than I found myself unavoidably thrust into the sometimes silly, sometimes poignant, often passionately committed era of the late sixties and early seventies as a college chaplain, first for three years at Harvard, based at University Lutheran Church, then for thirteen years as Chaplain and Lecturer in Religion at Wellesley College. I did a lot of theology, as I thought of it in those days, on my feet. I was a mostly low-profile church activist and essayist, like many others. I stood with students who sat in on the Mallinckrodt Building at Harvard, protesting the role of Dow Chemical in the Vietnam War. I served on the steering committee of what was to become a national movement, Vietnam Summer. I walked, from time to time, with a pastoral colleague, an African American community leader, who picketed the Boston School Committee for 114 days. I stood as a wary witness in an inner-city police station once, when the call had gone out to clergy to be visibly present in such places during Boston’s “civil disturbances,” in order to help guard against police brutality. I stood in silent vigils in a suburban town square many times, gave many speeches against racism, against the war, and on behalf of the environment, all with the theology of the Confessing Church in the back of my mind.
It was a good era to be interested in both ecology and social justice, theologically, notwithstanding the inherent difficulties in holding these concerns together. People in those times, for better or for worse, looked to clergy for prophetic leadership. At Wellesley, I worked with a student leader named Hillary Rodham, who had a distinguished future before her; but in those days she was only one among many similar leaders who were morally driven by issues like peace and justice. I wish I had kept copies of my commencement prayers from those years, which became a kind of cause célèbre at the college, for reasons that I never fully understood at the time. In retrospect, it appears to me that those prayers—despite the fact that they were indeed devotionally addressed to God, or perhaps precisely because of that address—were expressions of a kind of public theology that circumstances had been calling me to develop.
In the late sixties and the seventies, I also found it relatively easy to publish op-ed pieces and other essays on the themes of ecology and social justice, in journals like Dialog and in the local press. In the same vein, the biologist Paul Lutz and I co-authored a book intended for popular consumption, Ecological Renewal.[2] Presiding over the Sunday chapel services at Wellesley also gave me the opportunity to provide a platform for, and also to meet and converse with leading lights of the late sixties and early seventies, people like William Sloane Coffin, Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, James Cone, Jane Fonda, and progressive Catholic priests like Anthony Mullaney and James Carroll.
In those years, I discovered, too, what was for me the new wave of theological feminism. I brought people like Mary Daly and Rosemary Ruether to the college campus, and became a public advocate of their right to a hearing, in a setting where, in those days, both faculty and students were not always interested in feminist thinking. I began to develop what was to become a deep interest in theological feminism, not chiefly by any prescience, I hasten to add, but mainly out of a sense of professional self-preservation. As a male chaplain and teacher at an all-women’s college, I knew I had to be out in front of the curve on that one. Thereafter, I was particularly taken with the developing thought of Rosemary Ruether, and with the emergence of “ecofeminism” as a central theme in her work. Although I have not written as a theological ecofeminist (for good reasons, I think), I always have consciously tried to ask the questions raised by thinkers like Ruether, and later, Sallie McFague, in order to be as sure as possible that I was “for them,” however implicitly, rather than “against them.” I did the same for other liberation theologians, which I read avidly in those years, above all the works of James Cone.
Such interests—the Confessing Church, the theology of liberation—have stayed with me ever since. They came to their most visible expression for me some years later, first, in an essay, “The Liberation of Nature: Lynn White’s Challenge Anew,”[3] in which I argued that the liberation of nature goes hand in hand with other forms of liberation; then in my theological narrative, South African Testament: From Personal Encounter to Theological Challenge,[4] a book based on a firsthand engagement with the South African church and with the apartheid system at the height of its power.
It was while I was at Wellesley that I produced my first book, Brother Earth: Nature, God, and Ecology in a Time of Crisis.[5] Over against what I then called the “exclusive the-anthropology” of Barth, whereby the main objects of theological reflection were God and humanity, I proposed that both Luther and Calvin, notwithstanding their own commitments to a certain kind of anthropocentrism, in fact thought in terms of an “inclusive the-anthropology.” Their theological framework was tripolar, not dipolar. They consistently thought in terms of God, humanity, and nature. More particularly, I explored Calvin’s rich theology of divine providence in nature and Luther’s profound conceptualization of God as “in, with, and under” the world of nature. (Luther once observed that there are greater miracles in a grain of wheat than there are in the Sacrament of the altar.)
I also sought to undergird my argument, necessarily so, given my commitment to a Word of God theology, by developing my own biblical interpretation throughout Brother Earth. I was encouraged in these efforts by Stendahl’s non-anthropocentric reading of Paul, particularly by Stendahl’s accent on the world-historical, even cosmic, meanings of Paul’s treatment of the controversies over Jews and Gentiles in the early church. I continued the practice of doing much of my own biblical exegesis for many years, with fear and trembling. But I had no other choice, since most biblical scholars, until relatively recently, either were not interested in the theology of nature or they uncritically assumed that the Scriptures were fundamentally anthropocentric.
Brother Earth also employed a kind of correlative method, undoubtedly a sign of Tillich’s influence on my understanding of the task of theology. Following the historian Perry Miller (I audited two of his courses as an undergraduate), I diagnosed a schizophrenia in American culture between nature and civilization. I suggested that in America, the ancient dichotomy between the country and the city had become a kind of sociopolitical obsession. Thus American culture did indeed have a historic fascination with the wilderness, as contrasted to the alleged impurities of the city, a theme articulated classically by Thoreau. But it also simultaneously championed “manifest destiny” and “progress”—witness Emerson’s celebration of the railroad—and as a result, typically showed little regard for wilderness values. I argued that Christian faith offers an answer to that schizophrenia, that split between nature and civilization. That answer, I maintained, is evident above all in the testimonies of biblical prophets like Second Isaiah, but also in traditional Christian thinking about the kingdom of God as the end (telos) of all things. Nature and civilization are kin, I maintained, insofar as both are rooted and shaped by God’s immanent providence and by the coming kingdom of God.
Brother Earth had a number of liabilities, I now realize. The title itself was problematic. It rightly suggested kinship as the normative human relationship with nature; but I resisted then (for some good reasons, but mostly for bad reasons) thinking of nature metaphorically as female. I also all too easily affirmed a kingdom of God theology, blithely unaware of the then-emerging feminist critique of such symbols. And, not unrelated, I was unaware that my theology of human dominion, at points, did not sufficiently guard against the inroads of the modern Protestant/Capitalist/Marxist understanding of dominion as domination. Still, I think that that book did make at least two significant contributions to the then-growing discussion of the theology of nature.
First, I insisted on the theme that God has a history of God’s own with the vast world of nature, apart from nature’s meaning for humans (by 1970, I was regularly talking about “the integrity of nature”). Second, I drew on the argument of one of my first published articles, “I-Thou, I-It, and I-Ens,”[6] which was a conversation with Martin Buber, to identify a human relationship with nature and with God in nature that did not turn nature into an “It.” Analogous to an I-Thou relationship, I maintained, an I-Ens relationship with a tree (Buber’s example), was not objectifying, but neither was it strictly personal (humans do not converse with trees). More particularly, I envisioned the human-nature relationship in terms of wonder and respectful reciprocity. All this I set forth, as a good American neo-Reformation thinker, in conversation with Luther and Calvin—and Muir. I am grateful that, beginning with Mary Daly’s first edition of Beyond God the Father, the conceptuality of an I-Ens relation has found a place in numerous works by ecological thinkers, and even in the works of some theologians.
Brother Earth also left me with an unfinished theological agenda. The keystone of the argument of the book was its christological center. But my description of that center was underdeveloped. Perhaps that was because I had yet to come to terms, in one way or another, with Barth’s famous “christological concentration,” which was much under discussion in theological circles in those days. Be that as it may, I began to think about such matters more and more in the ensuing years, particularly as I came under the influence of Joseph Sittler during the 1970s. I had, of course, read Sittler’s famous 1961 address to the World Council of Churches in New Delhi, where Sittler called for a new “cosmic Christology,” but in those days I was preoccupied with other things, like walking picket lines. That lack of attention to Christology changed as I developed a personal relationship with Sittler, during the time when we were the theologians selected to help write the 1973 statement and theological study guide on the environment for the Lutheran Church in America. He graciously befriended me and publicly affirmed my work. In turn, I sat at his feet and particularly benefited from reading his Essays in Nature and Grace.[7] The theme of developing a cosmic Christology has preoccupied me and challenged me to this very day.[8]
But, in the late seventies, I bracketed such constructive challenges in favor of a historical task—revisiting the classical Christian theological tradition from the perspective of ecological theology. Ironically, perhaps, I only became aware of what James Nash called “the ecological complaint against Christianity” relatively late in the day. My interests in the theology of nature had been well established by the time I first read the now ubiquitously cited 1967 article, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” by the historian Lynn White Jr., to which I have already referred. In that article, White charged that historic Christianity must bear a “huge burden of guilt” for the environmental crisis. That enormously popular expression of the ecological complaint against Christianity, along with my growing awareness of the severity of the environmental crisis itself, gave me a new sense of urgency about the theological path on which I had embarked. As a matter of course, then, I referred to the White thesis in the Preface to Brother Earth and I offered that book, in part, as an answer to White’s contention that Christianity (except for St. Francis) has always been ecologically bankrupt.
During the seventies, White’s argument had become the mantra of many academic critics of Christianity and even of some theologians, among them Christian feminists and advocates of Native American spirituality. Gordon Kaufman, who had supervised my dissertation on Barth and who, as he told me a few years ago, had begun to shift his own thought about the theology of nature in response to my study of Barth, publicly launched what was for him a new theological program in 1972. Kaufman came to believe, for his own systematic reasons, that, in effect, Lynn White was right: historic Christianity was bankrupt ecologically and it therefore must be totally reconstructed. I encountered that kind of judgment on many college campuses and, surprisingly, in some church circles, particularly in outdoor ministries of the church. I myself had been working all along with a quite different reading of the classical Christian tradition, so, in my available scholarly time, I began to devote myself to developing a fresh interpretation of classical Christian thought about nature. It was a long gestation period. There was much work to be done.
The eventual result was my study, The Travail of Nature: the Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology,[9] thankfully endorsed by a variety of scholars, including John Cobb, Langdon Gilkey, and, mirabile dictu, Lynn White himself. I originally intended that book to be a shot across the bow, as it were, a kind of public theological announcement that indeed there are hidden ecological riches in classical Christian thought, notwithstanding a whole range of sometimes profound ambiguities regarding the theology of nature. I approached the subject archeologically, as I said in the book itself, only sinking down a few trenches into the tradition, so to speak, to see what I might find as a way to encourage others to begin to excavate the whole site. I singled out the following theologians for special attention: Irenaeus and Origen; the young and the mature Augustine; Thomas, Bonaventure, and Francis; Luther and Calvin; Barth and Teilhard de Chardin. Invoking a method of metaphorical analysis, I identified two major Christian ways of thinking about nature throughout the ages, the one ecological, the other spiritualizing and anthropocentric.
Soberingly, the wave of historical studies of classical Christian thought about nature that I had hoped would emerge in the wake of The Travail of Nature never did appear. Except for a few exceptions, historic Christian thinking about nature remains a largely uncharted territory. I have a number of ideas about why this has been the case, but I am still pondering the matter. This is not to suggest that Christians today are not interested in the theology of nature. On the contrary, the church at all levels—ecumenical, denominational, synodical, and congregational—is intensely engaged with ecological and related justice issues, drawing on whatever theological resources it can muster. And the ecumenical church today does have access to a number of highly reliable ecological guides in this respect, from little-known forerunners like Joseph Sittler to highly regarded systematicians like Jürgen Moltmann. That much of this is happening, however, without benefit of substantive access to the church’s classical traditions gives me pause.
Thankfully, there has been a kind of ecological revolution in biblical studies in recent years, particularly in Old Testament theology. But even if our churches today, inspired by guides like Sittler and Moltmann, do find a way to claim that theological revolution in biblical studies as their own, it would be a practice fraught with difficulties. It surely would be foolhardy to try to leap from the current situation of a world in crisis and a church seeking to minister to that world, in order to land in the midst of biblical theology and then return, without having engaged the classical tradition that continues to so deeply shape the life and thought of the church, for better or for worse. I can understand why Elizabeth A. Johnson has forthrightly called such neglect of historic traditions by the ecumenical church today irresponsible.
Notwithstanding such difficulties, and grateful for the continuing use of The Travail of Nature in a variety of church circles, especially among Catholics, I have persevered theologically. I find that some of my best theological work happens when I am “on the circuit,” as I continue to be, well into my retirement. Should anyone wish to see a snapshot of what I say to audiences in seminary, college, synodical, and congregational settings, I invite him or her to turn to my volume Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology.[10] This little book can serve as an introduction to ecological theology in our time. I describe what I think are the theological options today: the way of the reconstructionists (Christianity is ecologically bankrupt, let us begin anew); the apologists (Christianity has all it needs in its doctrine of stewardship of creation, let us interpret it); and the revisionists, in whose ranks I number myself (Christianity has an ambiguous ecological history, let us reclaim its ecological riches wherever we can). Pursuant to my own revisionist agenda, I take issue with those who uncritically accept the ecological complaint against Christianity (with particular reference to Matthew Fox). I call attention to neglected ecological themes in biblical theology, while at the same time I argue that some major expressions of Christian theology, however relevant they might seem in this era of global crisis, are ecologically suspect (citing the exemplary case of Teilhard de Chardin). I conclude with brief discussions of the ecological dimensions of Christian ritual, spirituality, and ethics.
Nature Reborn is thus a kind of comprehensive statement of my standard “stump speech,” as I travel around the country, addressing a variety of groups. A question I often hear at the end of such addresses is this: How come we never hear things like this from the pulpit? That question could come from a college professor, or even from a professional environmentalist, who happens to be a worshipper at St. John’s Around the Corner. I suspect that the professor and the environmentalist may have heard it in their home parish, but that they might not have been prepared to take it to heart then and there. As a pastoral practitioner for many years, I am well aware of the difficulties preaching what one believes in this respect, not to speak of practicing what one preaches.
The homiletical challenges at the front lines of the church’s mission in America today are enormous, from issues of making sense out of the gospel in our era “after the death of God,” to coming to terms with the nihilism that dwells in the souls of many Americans in our times. Is war the only way? Does peace really have a chance? Is there any hope for a genuinely Christian family life? Why are so many young African American men in prison? Why are so many of our children being shot on the streets of our cities? Are we going to succumb to the ravages of global warming? How can we begin to see, never mind respond to, the suffering of the invisible and impoverished masses around the globe today? How can we genuinely lead lives of “voluntary simplicity” and also public witness? What are we to make of the coming cosmic death of the whole universe? And by the way, pastor, why aren’t you preaching so as to fill all the pews so that we can pay all the bills and also do all manner of other good things?
We preachers therefore need all the help we can get.[11] It’s not easy to preach from the church’s lectionary and, at the same time, to address both themes of ecology and social justice effectively. The sermons may be biblical, incisive, and well delivered, but the congregations’ readiness to hear and then respond may not be sufficient, given everything else that is on their minds. The “anguish of preaching” that Joseph Sittler talked about in 1966 is still with us, perhaps even more so than four decades ago.
In the last few years, therefore, I have come to this conclusion, with ever-firmer conviction: the theology of the kind that comes to expression in Nature Reborn, in my speeches on the stump, and in my preaching, while good and true and beautiful, is not enough. Lutherans like myself have invested enormously in the theology of the Word, following Luther himself. But something, at least in our time, has been missing. This brings me to consider what I now think is the culminating stage of my theological autobiography, represented by my most recent book, Ritualizing Nature: Renewing Christian Liturgy in a Time of Crisis.[12] I did have a chapter on ritual in Nature Reborn, but this new book represents a much longer immersion in those deep waters.
Throughout the forty years of my vocational trajectory, I have, as I have already indicated, always thought things through as a practitioner, not just as an author, nor just as a kind of peripatetic theological stump speaker. If, indeed, I were to call forth one image of my vocational trajectory, before all others, I would see myself preaching and officiating at the eucharist. The liturgy of the church, and my calling to preside over that liturgy, has always been at the heart of my vocational life.
It began with a very good grounding, as I have already noted, as a protégé of Henry Horn in Cambridge. At Wellesley College, I struggled to make available the deep claims of the liturgy in the midst of a sixties and late-seventies culture that made it easy for faculty and students to assume that inherited forms of worship were either irrelevant or counterrevolutionary. During my thirteen years as an inner-city pastor in the then fourth-poorest city in the country, Hartford, Connecticut, I did preside over the transformation of a congregation from a white German-ethnic community to a racially mixed neighborhood church, and I did become the “Godfather” of an Alinsky-style neighborhood organization. But I invested still more energy encouraging that congregation to be claimed by the historic liturgy of the church. Likewise for my ministry of seven years in a large, historic downtown church in Akron, Ohio, once pastored by Franklin Clark Fry (whose countenance was later to appear on the cover of Time magazine, under the rubric “Mr. Protestant”). Housed in a beautiful and spacious gothic building, blessed with one of the great pipe organs in the country, and proud of its venerable Lutheran heritage, that congregation, or at least its leaders at that time, knew what their worship should be. Call this the Gothic dream of middle American Protestantism: a beautiful dream, but, in my view, much too vulnerable to the forces of acculturation, much too predisposed to foster a church that embodied what Churchill said of the Anglican church of his day—“the Tory party at prayer.” It was a struggle, therefore, to introduce that congregation to some of the major reforms that emerged from the Movement for Liturgical Renewal a half-century before, let alone themes from liberation theology. But I relished that struggle.
Some things, I suppose, never change. I began my life in the church as a sacramental Lutheran and I am now concluding it as a sacramental Lutheran, although hopefully of a higher order. My ministry, both as a practitioner and a theologian, has always been shaped—insofar as it has been given me to do so—by Luther’s understanding of the real presence of Jesus Christ in Word and Sacrament, and in the people of Christ ministering to each other and to the world, for the sake of “the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation.” This is why I think that my book Ritualizing Nature represents the culmination of my whole vocational trajectory.
What does “ritualizing nature” mean? Consider this premise: liturgy is the church’s mode of identity formation. Not theology, as such. Not merely preaching, which is theology as personal address (the viva vox evangelii). No, the church’s ritual, its liturgy, makes all the difference. Such a premise reflects a wide range of cultural studies, which show that ritual, more generally, is the human mode of identity-formation. Erik Erikson, for example, argued that without rituals, the human infant would not develop what Erikson called basic trust and therefore would not be able to grow into psychological maturity. An example: morning after morning, a parent comes into a child’s room and smiles at the child. This ritual inculcates basic trust. Analogously, for Christian ritual: when Christians “do this,” as the Lord commanded, when they break bread and drink wine together, they are practicing, embodying, becoming habituated to the self-giving love of Christ, who “on the night in which he was betrayed” said, “do this in remembrance of me.” Christian ritual thereby forms Christian character, which in turn, shapes Christian action in the world.
In Ritualizing Nature, I argue that the whole liturgy must be right, if the church’s ecological and justice praxis is to be right. Practice will not make perfect. But practice—if it is good practice—will in all likelihood make possible. Consider the shape of the eucharistic prayer as a case in point. The tradition on the side of the Reformation churches has been to minimize the use of a full eucharistic prayer, for fear of introducing themes of sacrifice that contradict the gospel of the free grace of God. The tradition on the side of the Counter-Reformation church also has been to minimize the use of a full eucharistic prayer, in favor of the “words of institution,” spoken silently, as the consecrating moment of the eucharist. The theology of penance, inherited from the late Middle Ages—and with that theology, the emphasis on the forgiveness of sins—has thus shaped both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation traditions.
This has meant that a transaction addressing the individual believer’s interiority has moved to the center of the liturgical experience: it is all “for me” (pro me). Consider, in contrast, how the post-Vatican II reemphasis on the full eucharistic prayer, in both Protestant and Catholic circles, has broadened eucharistic horizons of meaning. Now the ecumenical church gives thanks for the fullness of God’s creative and redemptive activity. In that context, we are shaped by what is done; and that “what” is nothing less than what is being done by God in, with, and under the whole creation, and in, with, and under the ritual life of the church, in particular. The Reformation/Counter-Reformation liturgy thus tends to shape Christians mainly for their solitary spiritual struggles, while the post-Vatican II liturgy tends to shape them also for their communal involvement in God’s wondrous and sometimes alienating works with the whole creation, as well as in God’s marvelous and miraculous works within the church as a ritual community.
In this way, Ritualizing Nature brings together for me in a most gratifying and self-conscious fashion those two themes that have preoccupied me most throughout the course of my theological trajectory, ecology and social justice, each one and both together driven by the promise of the gospel, announced and formed in the church’s ritual practices. As a liturgical practitioner for more than four decades, I now realize that I have been seeking to discover and embody this kind of unified theological vision my whole vocational life, in my preaching, my teaching, my writing, my counseling, my officiating, and my public witness. But now in my seventh decade, my remaining years on this earth are few. I can only hope that all these vocational labors will not have been in vain, that there might be others in the church standing ready to learn at least from some of them.
I hope, too, that the reader will understand that I am well aware—soulfully aware—that the theological trajectory I have narrated here by no means tells the whole story. It says nothing explicitly about my personal failures or losses, my times of vocational inertia or my spiritual sloth. Nor does it disclose the dynamics of my care of souls over the years or how I tried, in many modest ways behind the scenes, to be a prophetic pastoral leader. Nor, again, does it tell how grateful I am each morning when I see the daylight, smile at my wife of forty years, contemplate photos of my children and grandchildren, and begin to think about mundane things like gardening, taking a walk, or watching the Boston Celtics on TV. Neither does it tell about the ecstatic joy and the centering peace that I experience on any given Sunday morning, as I stand with the members of the inner-city congregation to which I now belong and sing my heart out. But that is another story for another time, perhaps.
111-2. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972. ↵
111-3. Christian Century, 102, no. 18 (May 22, 1985): 530–33. ↵
111-4. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987. ↵
111-5. New York: Thomas Nelson, 1970. ↵
111-6. Journal of Religion 67, no. 3 (July 1968), 260–73. ↵
111-7. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972. ↵
111-9. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1985. ↵