Christians and the Earth

by David Shay

“The books of Sacred Scripture contain much more than what is written in them. Our soul also has depths unknown to us. On the sacred pages and in our soul, there are melodies we do not hear. In the spaces of the world there are melodies which no one catches because no one listens.”

—Eugenio Zolli

“The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.”

—Psalm 24:1

It’s 2009, and I’m at a large Christian conference. This is my senior year at a private Christian university, and I'm beaming with confidence as I start to be immersed in the Western Christian culture that is so prominent at Christian conferences in the US. I understand what attracts this sub-culture and what enrages and disgusts it. Having spent the last few years in a Christian university, I'm eager to hear the controversial hot topics of Western Christian culture discussed and debated. I also look forward to being in community with other semi-progressive Christian young adults, who want to push the communities of their faith forward.

This specific conference has a large variety of workshops to choose from. The workshops are the place to hear to tough questions answered, or at least to hear an attempt to answer the tough questions. The workshops are where a lot of the challenges of our faith come out and are tackled. Before I even know all the workshops that are on offer, I decide to go to whatever environmental workshop I can find, because I really care about the environment and want to hear what my fellow Christians are saying about it. I see that there are a few such workshops, and I go to the first one on the list, alone yet still very excited to learn. I’m not too surprised when none of my friends or fellow church members joins me.

However, I do feel a bit surprised at the small amount of people who show up for the workshop. It was a rather large ball room for such a small audience. (Technically, I’m sure now that there must have been more than two of us, but the only person I can recall is this girl with a large dreadlock—yes, singular—and bandana and then of course myself, sitting an aisle away from each other. So I have this kind of terrible mental image of the workshop being me and the single-dreadlock girl alone in a huge room listening to this topic I really care about.)

The workshop begins and I feel my excitement slowly deflating as I realize that the speakers are not touching on anything I haven't already…thought of myself? I feel bad thinking that these speakers are not very good, because they seem like great people. They are a young 30-ish-year-old couple and they talk about how having a healthy environment has made them feel better and helped them raise their children. That’s the thesis of the workshop. I get no new, fascinating knowledge to take away and share with my friends and fellow believers. No ideas to discuss with people. Nothing.

But still, I remain optimistic as I have seen that in a few days a speaker will address the issue of environmentalism and Christianity in the main conference session. This means she will be responsible to give a message on this topic for 20,000+ people to hear. Surely she will have something groundbreaking and important to say. However, when the message comes I have that same experience of excitement deflation as before. What I take away from the message is this: Trinidad is a beautiful country. And Christians should love each other.

I hear some of my fellow conference attendees talking about this message at the main session being the weakest one of the entire conference. I become even more deflated. The agenda that was so important to me is being overlooked and forgotten by my peers and fellow believers. I ask myself if my passion for the natural world is unimportant. Is the fulfillment I get from time praying in the forest preserves of suburban Chicago simply romanticized and irrelevant to the larger Christian picture? Why doesn't anyone seem to care about this?

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Ever since that conference, the more I’ve thought about it, the more compelled I’ve become to make the case for the natural world and our place within it, from a Christian perspective. I don’t think even progressive and environmentalist Christians are really grasping or communicating the full picture.

Let’s start at a material level. Our relationship with this planet is necessary for our existence to continue. Photosynthesis, the process by which plants take carbon dioxide and give off oxygen is amazing and awesome to witness. We give off a gas we do not need and in return receive oxygen.

Also, you have heard it said that money doesn't grow on trees. But I tell you the truth, that the sustenance you need to survive literally grows on trees. Money is something that we added.

The Christian environmentalist argument is usually that God created the Earth,; therefore we are obligated to love it and take care of it. But what if we changed the word “obligated” to “designed?” We have learned through the word of God that loving one another is what we were designed for. When we love one another and express that love by caring for each other, it is healthy for our spirits. What if the same could be said about our relationship with the Earth? It's not that we have to love the Earth, but that loving it and caring for it is what is good for us.

I'm not trying to use 1 John 4:12 to say that we need to love trees. If you ever have to choose between a human life and a tree, by all means choose the human. But perhaps when we hear that Yosemite is burning and ancient trees are dying, we should feel sorrow because we have a relationship with this Earth. Is it healthy for children to want to destroy ant hills instead of study them? Is it healthy for us to see the ways God's creation provides for us and exploit it? When God delivers manna, we take what we need for the day and leave it at that. Yet it's engrained in our culture to take more than we need.

At the start of this post, I placed a quote that speaks about "melodies we do not hear...because no one listens." There are unheard melodies—that is, untapped meaning and depth and beauty—both in sacred scripture and in the world around us. I feel like Christians already know that there are new meanings and beauty to be discovered in scripture, and that it is very precious to us in part because of that. Is it not also possible that our world—a place much larger, more poorly understood, and less explored than scripture, and created by the same God—is equally precious?

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Photo sources:
1. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/3650600124/
2. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/pleeker/139418540/ 
3. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/peddhapati/9703395209/
4. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/vkreay/6195960810/
5. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/80901381@N04/7950216844/

Moving Toward Christian Pacifism

Syria's Ethnic/Religious Distribution

by Dave Mantel

A few weeks back, when the U.S. was on the cusp of violent intervention in the Syrian civil war, I was reading these studies about how firmly Americans are against entering into another war. In fact, it's the most anti-war we have ever been as a nation. A Pew Research poll has the statistics at 49%-29% against a war in Syria, which I found quite staggering. I know that our country is pretty tired of war, but to have such a high anti-war percentage in the average population is still pretty shocking to me.
 
I've been a pretty staunch pacifist for a number of years, now. Growing up in a conservative Republican-Christian home, I was inundated with the Just War Theory for most of my adolescence, and so when the war in Iraq started, and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, I believed that it was God's will—that the only way for justice to be brought about was by militaristic methods. Then, in the summer of 2008, I went overseas for two months to Malawi, Africa, on a missions team.

Me, left with guitar, in Malawi

While I was on that trip I did a lot of reading, and a particular verse of scripture I read at the beginning of the summer kind of shaped my whole summer's reading agenda. It came from Isaiah: “He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.”

When I read that verse, it began my journey down a road of questions. Important questions. Did war have a place in the Kingdom of God, or was there some greater, more perfect plan that God had in place for his people on “that day?” How do I reconcile a Kingdom in which God seems to desire to end war and a western Church that seems to perpetuate the idea that American military intervention is ordained by that same God? How much of my worldview was shaped by the culture I had been raised in, and was the shaping that had taken place bring me closer to or further from the truth of scripture?

I'll start with the presupposition that when Jesus came, he was the one to give us a clear, unfiltered vision of the Father, and what the will of the Father is for us going forward. Jesus gave us, humanity, interaction with the Father that we had never had before (“If you know me, you know the Father” (John 14:7), “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30), etc). If we are to take Jesus' teaching at face value, we find things like “love your neighbor as yourself,” “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” “those who live by the sword die by the sword,” “turn the other cheek,” “love your enemies,” and “blessed are the peacemakers.”

Roman gladius, a sword from Jesus' time

Much of the larger ideas of Jesus' teaching are based in these values—that others are more important ourselves, and that we should seek to reconcile all things, just like Jesus will do in The End (Colossians 1:20). The most common New Testament rebuttals to this kind of peace-oriented Jesus come from two isolated verses: Luke 22:36, when Jesus tells his disciples to go and sell their cloaks and buy swords before they enter Jerusalem, and Matthew 10:34, where Jesus says that he hasn't come to bring peace, but a sword. Contextually, the Matthew verse can be dismissed immediately, since it is very clear that Jesus is speaking not of a physical sword, but speaking metaphorically, the sword being a metaphor for spiritual and moral division. The Luke passage, however, presents a little more trouble, because it is not as clear what is actually on Jesus' mind when he tells his disciples to procure these swords. Here is the section in context:

Then Jesus asked them, "When I sent you without purse, bag or sandals, did you lack anything?""Nothing," they answered. He said to them, "But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. It is written: 'And he was numbered with the transgressors'; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment." The disciples said, "See, Lord, here are two swords." "That is enough," he replied. (Luke 22:35-38, NIV)

This passage takes place right before Jesus is about to enter Jerusalem for the passover, right before the Last Supper, and right before he is arrested to be crucified. He quotes a passage that he is about to fulfill from Isaiah about being “numbered with the transgressors,” and then his disciples bring him two swords, to which Jesus replies that those are “enough.” We, the readers, should then be asking, “Enough for what?” Certainly not enough to overthrow the Roman empire like the Zealots were still hoping. Not enough to defend even against the high priest's guards, as we see in the garden of Gethsemane later on. It is also clear that Jesus did not mean for the swords to be physically used, because when Peter does use one (whose idea was it to give Peter one of the two swords, anyway?) to cut off the ear of the High Priest's servant in the garden, Jesus immediately rebukes Peter and undoes the violence done by Peter by healing the servant's ear.

Capture of Christ with the Malchus Episode, Dirk Van Baburen

It is likely that Jesus had his disciples carrying these two swords to help fulfill Isaiah's prophecy about being “numbered with the transgressors.” We know that Jesus was later crucified between two thieves (also read "insurrectionists"), and that political and religious insurrection was what the Pharisees feared the most from Jesus, and why they ultimately arrested and killed him. The fact that Jesus had two of his followers carrying weapons into Jerusalem no doubt expedited the process of the Pharisees in arresting Jesus, fulfilling Isaiah prophecy.

So, when viewed in context, the two biggest New Testament arguments against pacifism fall flat. Jesus' teaching, when taken as a whole, seems to overwhelmingly promote nonviolence, love, and peace over violence and war. For me, the simplest reason for becoming a pacifist was that when I read about and picture the Kingdom of God—the one in the future, after this world has passed away and we are living with a new Heaven and a new Earth—war does not exist there. Violence does not exist there. There is only peace and love toward one another. And not just putting up with one another, either. It's a true peace. That was enough for me.

P.S. The discussion of reconciling the many violent, war-filled Old Testament passages with the nonviolence of Jesus' teaching in the New Testament is a more difficult and much longer conversation than this one, but one worth having. I hope to cover that sometime in the near future as well.

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Photo sources: 
1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Syria_Ethnoreligious_Map.png 
2. Dave Mantel
3. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Uncrossed_gladius.jpg
4. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dirck_van_Baburen_-_The_Capture_of_Christ_with_the_Malchus_Episode_-_WGA01089.jpg