What is Eco‐Theology?

Abstract

What is Eco‐Theology? Lawrence Troster When I first began to be active in the religious environmental movement over twenty‐five years ago, I was often invited to be part of interfaith panel discussions to discuss how religious traditions viewed the environment. On these panels there was usually found a Protestant, a Catholic (Christians always seemed to get two seats), myself representing Judaism, a Muslim and sometimes a Buddhist and a Hindu. Each of us would, of course, say that our religions were “green” and quote a few teachings from our sacred texts. After all, who would want to say in a public forum that our traditions were not “green”? My own involvement with religious environmentalism had developed out of my theological interest in the science and religion dialogue and from my personal concern about climate change. After having participating in a number of these dialogues, I realized that what we were all saying was essentially nonsense. How could ancient faith communities, based on pre‐modern sacred texts, be “green,” when the modern environmental crisis was unprecedented in kind and in scale from any previous human encounter with the natural world? While Judaism, for example, has traditional sources that are concerned with consumption, local pollution and water conservation, it would be beyond my ancestors’ comprehension to understand climate change, species extinction and toxic pollution. Thus traditional religions cannot be “green,” for two important reasons. First of all, there is a qualitative difference between modern and pre‐modern technology and how it affects the environment in both spatial and temporal terms. Secondly, and more importantly, over the last several hundred years, scientific knowledge of the natural world has developed exponentially, thus creating a worldview that is radically different from that of our ancestors. For example, the development of evolutionary theory and the discovery of the genetic code have collapsed the “sacred hierarchy” of the Abrahamic faiths which saw an ontological divide between humans and the rest of life. This new scientific understanding of biology has called into question one of the most fundamental doctrines of those traditions: that humans are created “in the image of God,” an idea that lies at the heart of these communities’ ethical systems. Therefore no faith communities could truly be “green,” and traditional sources may be mostly irrelevant to developing a modern religious perspective on the environmental crisis. I was seeing in these interfaith panels what Catholic theologian John Haught called the “apologetic” religious response to environmentalism. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when environmentalism was first becoming a widespread popular movement, there was an attack on traditional religions that claimed that they were one of the main factors for humanity's destructive exploitation of the natural world. In response, Christian and Jewish theologians countered both the historical basis of this attack, but also tried to show how their traditions had many sources that could be in conformity with the modern environmental ethos. As Haught characterizes it, this approach argues, “if only we practiced the timeless religious virtues we could alleviate the crisis…If we allowed our lives to be shaped by genuinely Christian virtues, our relation to nature would have the appropriate balance, and we could avert the disaster that looms before us.” In this “apologetic” reading of Judaism and Christianity, the traditions as they already existed could be completely adequate for a response to the environmental crisis. In Judaism, for example, several traditional halakhic (legal) texts were held up to show that the Jewish tradition was already as “green” as it needed to be and that Judaism had an environmental ethic that long ago anticipated the modern environmental movement. The apologetic response usually ends up espousing a stewardship ethic in which humanity and its needs are still the central priority. Many religious communities still adhere to this kind of response but, in my own reflections of how faith traditions have responded to climate change, the most important crisis facing humanity since the development of nuclear weapons, it is completely inadequate and has had relatively little effect on how those communities have actually acted. And so I needed to dig deeper. Haught saw in 1993 the beginning of what he called “the sacramental approach...