Ecotheology: Improvisation on a Theme

"Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development."— Alfred North Whitehead

I once heard it said in an undergraduate classroom that “the Bible is true and some of it happened.” I loved the quote immediately; it articulated a truth that many of us identifying as progressive Christians understand: that the Bible is moving, powerful, and meaningful and speaks truth to our souls, but it is not (entirely) a document whose purpose is to historically and particularly document events as they literally happened. The continuing challenge of religious communities is not to retell the stories of our faith with precision accuracy so as to recount them factually, but to improvise on a familiar melody in order to bring a message alive in a new way. The most talented of musicians know their instrument well enough to play and tinker in a way that does not become cacophonous, dissonant noise, but can communicate a melody uniquely for its moment.

This particular moment in history requires something new from us. As our planet warms, Christianity must learn to improvise. Our spiritual ancestors could not have imagined modern industrialization or internet technology. If God is real, however, God surely can. The work ahead of us is the work of tension and reconciliation, repetitions in the history of our world-- contractions in the ongoing creation of our world. Just as Jesus reimagined his tradition and critiqued the ways it had “sold out” and been used to further those in power, we must do the same. While the complicities and corruptions of our current situation are similar and dissimilar, we follow the tradition of a queer-thinking religious revolutionary who challenges us to continue flipping over tables of injustice and the ideas that sit atop it. If our work as theologians is, in many ways, counter-systemic work of resisting cultural normativity in search of the interstices where divinity lives, then we should also seek lenses of resistance by asking where resistance is in our time and place (and others) to ask how their lenses might inform our search and how that search might help us to embolden active resistance in the world. In coming posts I will discuss our current dilemma and the context from which I speak from and for. I hope to uncover ways that Christianity has contributed to this dilemma as well as develop theology conducive to transforming our relationship with the earth by exploring the Bible and the theologians who have improvised on it. It is my hope that an ecotheology of relatedness can transform hearts and minds toward ecological change.