Editorial and Contents of Issue 2

Ecological Theology and Education

Through the Creation to the Creator
Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia

Jesus and the Earth Community
Edward P. Echlin

Earth-Healing in South Africa: Challenges to the Church
Denise Ackerman

Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation
Elisabeth Gerle

Ecofeminism: First and Third World Women
Rosemary Radford Ruether

Eschatology, Ecology and a Green Ecumenacy
Catherine Keller

Eco-News from across the World: Ecofeminism in the Nordic Countries
Dagny Kaul

Lifestyle: Of All Good Gifts:
A Statement on the Nature of Stewardship in the Lives of American Benedictine Sisters

Book Reviews

James H Stewart
Ted Trainer, Towards a Sustainable Economy: The Need for Fundamental Change

Celia Deane-Drummond
John Kirby, Phil O'Keefe and Lloyd Timberlake (eds.), The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Development

Andrew Dawson
Leonardo Boff and Virgil Elizondo (eds.), Ecology and Poverty

Lucy Larkin
Ccelia Deane-Drummond, A Handbook on Theology and Ecology

Editorial

The theme of this, the second issue of Ecotheology—‘Ecological Theology and Education’—is both all-comprehending as well as all-elusive. A straightforward approach would have been to survey the methods and programmes of our theological institutions—in all their regional diversity—for reflecting on ecological issues. So we do include—as ‘Eco-News from across the World’—Dagny Kaul’s reflection on ecofeminist research in the Scandinavian countries, as well as Denise Ackermann’s account of post-apartheid South Africa’s burgeoning attempts to come to terms with the enormous environmental degradation of the country for the first time.

But there is a far more ancient tradition to draw on in respect of theological education in ecology. The Hebrew scriptures are redolent with images of the wisdom of creation itself and of earth’s creatures. The wisdom of creation is our first educator. As Job in all his anguish cried out,

Even birds and animals have much they could teach you;
Ask the creatures of earth and sea for their wisdom (Job 11.7-8).

Yet Job is in no doubt that God is the original source of all this wisdom:

It is God who directs the lives of his creatures... (Job 11.9)

Where, then, is the source of wisdom?
Where can we learn to understand?
God alone knows the way
Knows the place where wisdom is found... (Job 28.23)

So, Nature is Teacher, since all living things flow from the Divine energy itself, as Bishop Kallistos shows us here in his impressive article ‘Through Creation to the Creator’. The book of Wisdom itself warns against the idolizing of creation without recognizing God as creation’s source:

For all who are ignorant of God were foolish by nature;
and they were unable from the good things that are seen to know him who exists,
nor did they recognize the craftsman while paying heed to his works;
but they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air,
or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water,
or the luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world (Wis. 13.1-2).

The theme of the wisdom of the creatures is one to which poets have been faithful, when theologians have moved to the level of abstraction.

For Christian theology, Jesus seen as the cosmic Christ represents the high point of creation. Matthew Fox began to interpret this ecologically by calling the cosmic Christ ‘the pattern which connects’. Here we take another approach: surely Jesus is the first Christian ecological teacher? In a fascinating article Edward Echlin explores the ecological understanding of Jesus as glimpsed in the Gospels. Whereas up till now this has been approached through the ecological framework of Jesus’ parables by, for example, Sallie McFague, Edward Echlin now asks down-to-earth questions about foxes, fishes and the ecology of trees which Jesus would have known.

Jesus may have lived in organic symbiosis with his bioregion: our challenge today is to identify resources from our religious traditions which teach and enable healthy ecological practice today. To draw on mystical and sacramental traditions and creation spiritualities is important: but where are these to be found both in continuity with the past and as lived experience today? In ‘Lifestyle’ we give one example from the Benedictine monastic tradition as lived out by American Benedictine sisters. And in Rosemary Radford Ruether’s article on ecofeminism we are challenged to make the connections between right relation with the land and the very survival of poor women of the southern hemisphere. Both these examples are teaching us that those who work with the land, who produce the food, are well aware of the deep connections between living sustainably with the earth and human flourishing, and the wisdom which this generates. It is those who only consume earth’s gifts who miss the point.

Perhaps this is why there has been a lukewarm ecumenical response to the churches’ attempts at ecological education through the Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation programme (JPIC), as the Swedish scholar Elisabeth Gerle argues. The urgency then is for our faith communities to become learning communities which rediscover the full rootedness of eucharistic meaning in earth’s grace, which proclaim an ethics and an ecumenism of ecological responsibility with respect to our home, the planet, and which begin to understand that the authentic meaning of Christian humility is that we are made of humus, soil: and in the soil of our connectedness with earth, each other and our rootedness in God, lie the seeds of any real educational programme.

Mary Grey