A Common Creation Story? Interreligious Dialogue and Ecology

Abstract

PRECIS This essay explores the contemporary proposal that our scientific understanding of the earth--how It originated and how it functions--can serve as a common creation story for all religions and as the basis therefore, for interreligious dialogue. Recognizing the danger that such a proposal can become another meta-narrative Imposed by the West, the author suggests that these dangers might be avoided if the religious communities approach the earth first of all as an ethical story rather than a creation By first taking up, together, the ethical challenges of an endangered planet, the religions can determine the common ground on which they might, as a second step, each other's religious stories about the earth and develop, together, a common creation The shared praxis of ecological engagement can become the common ground for deeper ecological religious dialogue. For the first time in our history, we have empirical evidence for a common creation story. Thus declared a group of fifty representatives of various religious traditions back in the early 1990's in one of the first steps toward what eventually was to become the Earth Charter. (1) Over the past decade, that vision of a common creation story has grown in both substance and urgency, especially through the scientific research and prophetic voices of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme. (2) The proposal--and the dream--is that science, an enterprise that is available to all cultures and religions, is now providing the religious communities of the world with something that, so far, they have not been able to find on their own: a truly common ground that will enable them to talk together and work together as never before. The creation story as science tells it is delivered in a way that all religions can, and must, it. Hence, science and its understanding of our earth and universe are providing the arena for a new kind of interreligious dialogue. Swimme put it this way: Though scientific knowledge has put lethal weapons in our hands, it has also provided the Earth with the first common story of our origins and development . . . Precisely because this story of the universe comes to us through our investigations beginning with our eyes and ears and body, we can speak of a transcultural creation Members of every continent are involved in discovering and articulating this Members of every religious tradition are involved in its telling. (3) What science is telling us today about the origins of the universe (especially the creative, mysterious, still-evolving Big Bang) and how the universe works (through a pervasive, on-going net of interrelationships that make humans cousins to the stars, to the rocks and oceans, to all living creatures) (4) is a story that all religions can use to hear again and deepen their own stories of how the universe originated or how it works. As Sallie McFague has made clear, the scientific creation story is not meant to replace but to adjust and invigorate traditional myths and beliefs and relate them interreligiously: This common story is available to be remythologized by any and every religious tradition and hence is a place of meeting for the religions, whose conflicts in the past and present have often been the cause of immense suffering and bloodshed as belief is pitted against belief. What this common story suggests is that our should be not to nation or religion but to the earth and its Creator (albeit that Creator may be understood in different ways). (5) This suggestion of a primary loyalty to the new creation story has been spelled out by Berry. He announced that, unless religious communities realign their traditional creeds in view of the earth as the revelation and context of religious experience, they will not be able to respond adequately to the sensitivities and needs of our third-millennium world. We are . …