Our first two responses to our pre-Consultation Paper #4 come from Lowell Bliss and Andii Bowsher. (Their bios are printed at the end of their responses.) To read the fourth paper, please click here. Lowell and Andii are addressing the fourth premise. You can add your own reflections in the comment section of this blog or email the organizers.
CONSULTATION PREMISE #4: A faithful Christianity in a darkening New Future demands more than redoubled efforts at virtue. It demands interrogation of tenets inherited from the world of the Old Future. If the positive declaration of “This” is to be meaningful, it must now be accompanied by the negative “Not That.”
Lowell Bliss: Our Path to (More Ecological) Spiritualities Must Go Through our Own Thin Traditions
Dear John,
Like many, I suspect, who are on an eco-realistic journey, I have been exploring Celtic Christianity and indigenous spirituality with more seriousness than ever in my Christian life. Of the former and latter respectively, I recommend John Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know And Healing the World (HarperOne 2021) and Steven Charleston’s We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native American on Apocalypse and Hope (Broadleaf 2023). What I like about these books is that they present their spiritualities not as they used to be, but as they currently are. And they offer a reader like me—from white North American Protestant settler society—the hope of accessing these spiritualities authentically, without the deadly pitfalls of nostalgia, sentimentality, or appropriation. You mention in your paper, John, how much of Creation Care comes across as unintegrated add-ons: “effectively building onto the edifice of optimistic Positive Christianity a garage apartment or finished basement for a recently-arrived guest.” Truth-be-told, in the past I’ve treated Celtic and indigenous spiritualities the same way: accessorizing, looking for a golden key, taking a vacation from my regular faith, sipping at a palette cleanser.
In the middle of my reflections, I happened upon a presentation by Jonathan Cordero entitled “Indigenous Sovereign Futures.” Cordero is a leader in the Ohlone and Chumash communities in the Bay Area of California. He said that white settlers will often come up to him after a talk and ask, “If native peoples have got it going on and you have some of the answers that we need, can you share your knowledge, your traditional ecological knowledge or your cultural knowledge with us to help us think ourselves out of the problem that we've created?” To which, Cordero responds, “But the problem with non-native peoples and capitalism and colonialism is that you're always taking from native peoples and so my response to you is: go get your own!”
Go get your own knowledge. And you argue, John, that non-native (and non-Celtic) peoples do have our own knowledge, though it has been “thinned out” over time by capitalism and colonialism and Positive Christianity. (I feel that you have not dropped Martin Luther’s name as much as you can when talking about the Theology of the Cross, and as much as Douglas John Hall does.) Reimagining faith for a New Future may end up primarily being a project of ressourcement. “Cruciform Christianity” is surely a load-bearing wall, though we have had hidden it behind much plaster. Are there other “thin traditions” in our faith that an eco-realistic inquiry may uncover?
Cordero admits to “being a little facetious about things,” and when he answers his settler interlocutors more compassionately, he says that he is reluctant to share indigenous knowledge about ecological care because it won’t do us any good without applying that knowledge in the context of an indigenous worldview, and without applying it to systemic change. “We can give you our knowledge,” he says, “but that’s not what you need.” He shares the example of a scientific group that returned to an indigenous tribe with the complaint that the knowledge that the tribe had shared and that the scientists had faithfully implemented, didn’t work. “Well,” the indigenous leaders explained, “you didn’t take our songs and stories with you.”
I continue to believe that indigenous and Celtic spiritualities (pre-Christian and Christian) will hold much value for us in the eco-realistic New Future, but I don’t believe that the Positive Christianity that I have inherited has given me the ears to hear their songs and stories. Foregrounding the Cross however gives me hope that one day I will be able to hear.
Meanwhile, you (and Cordero) have added a new layer to the X-axis of our Consultation graph that could just as easily be applied to the Y-axis: the difference between personal approaches as compared to systemic ones. It suggests, as we’ve discussed, that we need to construct a second graph in time for our July 26 consultation, one that explores individual changes and systemic changes on one axis, and then Jackson and Jensen’s “prophetic vs. apocalyptic” sensibilities on the other axis. (I will present that graph tomorrow in a separate post.)
Lowell Bliss
Introducing BORROWED TIME, a project of Green Christian (U.K.)
Our Consultation is delighted to connect with Andii Bowsher and his colleagues at Borrowed Time who are already ministering in the eco-realistic space and whose purpose “is to support each other in the work of opening to environmental breakdown.” Please explore their model at https://borrowedtime.earth
Andii Bowsher: The ‘between-ness’ and unknowing of Holy Saturday
Dear John,
The opening quote from Douglas John Hall resonates for many of us in Borrowed Time. In one of our sessions, someone said “Hope is hopeless”, meaning that the way we normally use the word “hope” is of no help to us because it tends to disable adaptive responses to the climate and nature crises. It can enable abdication of responsibility and disable engagement where what’s needed is a hope that enables constructive and even courageous engagement for the common good. [Re]Defining 'hope' is task for Christian theology which could unpick the unhelpful theological move in modernity, namely the slow morph of Christian hope into a faith in Progress. What might it mean to consider that “our work in the Lord is not in vain” rather than trusting Progress?
A minor question arose as I read: is it really Christus Victor that’s problematic? “Triumphalist religion” certainly, “Positive Christianity” sure. But regarding models of the atonement, I’m given pause by the thesis in Brock and Parker’s Saving Paradise[1]. They argue that the rise of Westen Christian iconography focusing on Christ’s passion on the cross correlates with the rise of world-denying oppressive Christendom. I’m less concerned about what theory of the atonement a church preferences (though I do have opinions about cultural congruency and coherence!), than how a theory can be deployed oppressively or freeingly. That said, the life-giving dimension of that iconography, arguably, might be found in the Franciscan movement and from that maybe we could learn afresh about simplicity, indeed poverty, joy in enough, and the delight in what God has made.
I’m reminded of Milton Friedman’s remark “Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” While I’m not a fan of Friedman, I do think that there is an important truth in that comment. For our purposes, —seeing that the current triumphalist theologies are themselves living on borrowed time—I think that it suggests to us that we have to make sure that the theological ideas lying around are likely to serve the common good of creation and humanity. How do we get more helpful approaches (such as enumerated towards the end of the article) into the heads of Christian influencers?
I loved being introduced to a theologian I'd not come across before! Kitamori’s pain of God theology seems a good, helpful, counterpoint and the tsurasa approach resonates with conversations in Borrowed Time. For us it has felt important to make sure that the cross and, interestingly, Holy Saturday is held close in our reflecting. One of the liturgies we use has in it the following:
We gather
In a twilight eclipse
Where Creation's integrity is pressed into disservice
where Systemic forces of wickedness bear down
Where God is found dying…
dead…
buried…
At this crossing point
We are witnesses and responders. [2]
Holy Saturday—in case it's not so named in your tradition, it's the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday—has become something of a theological motif in Borrowed Time discussions. It holds together the Death of the Crucified with the place of unknowing and lament that follows death, with also the ‘not-yet’ of the emptied tomb and the provisionality that comes with that ‘not yet’. So, I’m wondering a bit about “cruciform Christianity”. While I think it is important as a counterweight to triumphalism, the question is whether there might be not only a recognition of the suffering involved in the world and on the Cross, but whether the ‘between-ness’ and unknowing of Holy Saturday can be validated too.
Speaking personally in relation to the reimagining Christian faith, I wonder whether we should consider starting in a different place than the one that western post reformation theology cues us up for. The analogy that comes to mind is that infamous nine dots puzzle [3] where the challenge is to join all the dots but only using four lines and keeping the pencil on the paper. How about drawing the line outside of that medievally-born, Western Christian dot-square?
Might we start by narrating our faith as Missio Dei? That is: God is at work in the world reconciling the world to Godself. Christ is calling us to become part of that great Spirit-breathed Work: sustaining the earth, creating justice and peace, encouraging people to intimate and life-giving relationship with God. This call into the cosmic mission of God inplies a call to follow into hard places and even the valley of the shadow of death. “The reign of God is near, change your hearts, entrust yourself to the Good News …”
Andii Bowsher
Footnotes
[1] https://savingparadise.net/index.html and in relation to the wider point, Christus Victor is a name given to a model of the atonement, often discussed in relation to penal and substitutionary models and sometimes others.
[2] Creative Commons, non-profit, share-alike, attribution: Andii Bowsher /Borrowed Time 2021
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_dots_puzzle
Lowell Bliss is the director of the Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership at William Carey International University. He is the co-director of the Christian Climate Observers Program. He is the author of two books: Environmental Missions: Planting Churches and Trees, and People, Trees, and Poverty.
Andii Bowsher is an ordained Anglican working as the co-ordinator of Spiritual Care at Northumbria University. Andii is a trustee of Green Christian working with the Borrowed Time project which reflects a keen concern for Christian discipleship in the context of planetary ill. "I want to do what I can to make it more likely that we navigate the next decades as peacefully and with as much justice and compassion as can be wrought. Beginning to follow Christ grew out of my concern for ecology: ultimately I felt, and still do, that it is a spiritual crisis." Andii has worked in parish ministry, in Higher Education and continues also to work in ministerial formation with a focus on mission and practical theology.