The Ecological Bankruptcy of Christianity? (3)

The Culpability of Christianity

By the mid 1950s Joseph Sittler had recognised the paucity of Christian reflection on nature, creation and the environment, and in 1961 he presented a speech to the World Council of Churches in New Delhi calling for an expansion of the Christological vision that might encompass the whole cosmos.^[5] Sittler was, however, an overlooked theologian, and little attention was paid to questions of ecology until Lynn White's censure of Christianity was published.^[6] White begins with a call to clarify the presuppositions that underlie modern technology and science and the sudden fusion of the two, as he sees it, in the middle of the nineteenth century.^[7] White argues that the ideological basis of Enlightenment philosophy and of European science and industry was forged in the crucible of Medieval Christianity.

What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things about them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our very nature and destiny - that is, by religion.^[8]

White contends that a faith in perpetual progress was born in the Middle Ages, when humans became exploiters of nature through technological advancements in agriculture and Judeo-Christian teleology became dominant.^[9] Mediaeval readings of the Biblical creation story led to the belief that not only is man made in the divine image (with woman as an afterthought) and therefore not part of nature, but that the only purpose for physical creation is to serve man's purposes.^[10] White argues, then, that Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.^[11] The religious study of nature in Latin Christianity in particular moved beyond observing the religious symbolism within nature, as in the Greek East, to the study of nature as a religiously motivated venture.^[12] The result was that, even when Enlightenment science could dispose of the hypothesis of God, 'modern Western science was cast in a matrix of Christian theology.'^[13] If, therefore, it is the power of modern science and technology that has got out of control and led to the current environmental crisis, as White argues, then Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.^[14]

Moltmann agrees with White's argument that it is the exploitative characteristic inherent in Occidental science that is at the root of the crisis of the 'whole life system of the modern industrial world ... a crisis which human beings have brought on themselves and their natural environment, and into which they are driving both themselves and the environment more and more deeply.'^[15] But Moltmann challenges White's hypothesis that Christianity is the underlying cause. Since the anthropocentric Judeo-Christian worldview has been around for more than three thousand years but the European scientific and technological revolutions for only around four hundred years, Moltmann argues that there must have been other more important factors involved. Moltmann places the turning point later than White, at the Renaissance.^[16] Combined with nominalism, the Renaissance painted a new picture of God whose prime attribute was power, not goodness and truth, and this provided the foundation for Baconian progressivism, Cartesian duality and the consequent domination of nature by humankind.^[17] For Moltmann, then, it is not Christianity per se that is at fault, but the particular variation of Christianity that dominated in the countries in which modern industrialisation developed, and which helped to shape the prevailing systems of values. Moltmann argues with White that anthropocentric readings of passages such as, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it,' promoted for apologetic reasons, condemn Christianity in its guilt.^[18] I shall discuss below the alternative theological framework that Moltmann offers.

The legacy of White's thesis, with amendments proposed by Moltmann, is a demand for new theological reflection on nature and the interplay between God, human beings and creation.^[19] This has, of course, not been as simple as it might have.

Footnotes