In 1967, in a now famous article in Science, University of California history professor Lynn White wrote, ‘Christianity in absolute contrast to ancient paganism…has …insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends’. He was referring, of course, to the biblical story of creation in which God created humankind, blessed them, and said, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’.

These words are clearly in conflict with our modern need to stabilize population growth, to husband the earth’s natural resources, and to acknowledge the interdependence of all planetary species. Not only is this supposedly divine command no longer appropriate, it is positively dangerous now that we humans have filled the earth to overflowing and find it difficult to stop multiplying further. Furthermore, coming as they do from an ancient cultural context very different from our own, these words no longer command uncritical acceptance. Rather, they warrant moral condemnation in that they give humans unlimited power over all other creatures.

A sharp indictment, a flawed defence

And Lynn White went further. ‘Christianity’, he said, ‘bears a huge burden of guilt for the human attitude that we are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim...We shall continue to have a worsening ecological crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man’.

This is the first instance I know of in which Christianity, far from being simply rebuked for not taking sufficient interest in the growing ecological crisis, is actually accused of being the cause of it. This serious, and to many Christians, ridiculous charge does not come from an atheistic opponent of Christianity. White was in fact a practising Presbyterian, yet he felt it incumbent upon himself to draw attention to the dangers he found inherent in traditional Christianity.

Many theologians, of course, came to the defence of Christianity against White's charges. In a short essay in Man and Nature, A.R.Peacocke pointed out that ‘the exploitative, rapacious, attitude to nature’, which White quite rightly condemned, was by no means uniformly encouraged in Christian society. Christianity had also produced both a St. Francis and a St. Benedict. Peacocke conceded that nature had been de-sacralized by the Old Testament prophets, but he contended that in the biblical view ‘man is a trustee, steward and manager for that which is not his own and which is of value for its own sake to God’.

To be sure, the Bible does refer to stewardship. We find it mentioned, for example, in the well-known parable of the Talents. But nowhere does the Bible teach that the human relationship to the world of nature is one of stewardship. This sort of Christian teaching, commendable though it is, has emerged only very recently, and in direct response to our growing awareness of the ecological crisis. Thus a number of books written from a Christian perspective now expound the stewardship of the earth’s resources as a Christian duty.

But is a call to stewardship sufficient as the Christian response to the ecological crisis? Anne Primavesi, for example, has pointed out that even the idea of stewardship can be exploitative and unecological, for it is commonly the task of stewards to maximise the profits both for themselves and for their employers. Such an approach takes little or no account of the inherent rights or worth of the earth’s resources, particularly its livestock. Stewardship, in short, still assumes an anthropocentric attitude towards nature and shows no appreciation of the fact that we humans are ourselves part of nature.

Simply learning to be better stewards, then, is not enough. Christianity must make more radical changes in its understanding of our place and role in nature. In 1973 the celebrated historian Arnold Toynbee put his finger on the problem when he wrote, ‘Some of the major maladies of the present day world – in particular the recklessly extravagant consumption of nature's irreplaceable treasures, and the pollution of those of them that man has not already devoured – can be traced back to a religious cause, and this cause is the rise of monotheism’.

The origin of monotheism

To understand why Toynbee made such a serious and alarming charge against the monotheistic traditions we need to understand how monotheism arose. This is no frivolous proviso, for only in very recent times have we been in a position to conceive of what Karen Armstrong has brilliantly outlined in her recent best seller, A History of God. Throughout most of Christian history the reality of God as the Creator and controller of the universe appeared to be so self-evidently true that it was not open to question. Only since the time of Darwin, has it become clear that all languages, all cultures and all religions are of human origin. Since the very concept ‘god’ is the creation of human imagination, ‘the history of God’ catalogues the wide variety of ways in which this idea has been understood. It is not a little ironic that the Bible proved to be an important documentary source for writing such a history.

Let me briefly sketch the rise of monotheism. All people of primal societies – take for example the pre-European Maori – saw themselves dependent upon the forces of nature. They personified these forces as unseen gods and spirits who controlled all the changing phenomena of the natural world. These gods must be obeyed if humans were to continue to enjoy the necessities of life provided by them. Chief among the gods were the Sky-Father and the Earth-Mother. The Sky-Father presided over the heavenly bodies, and controlled thunder, lightning and storms. The Earth-Mother provided for humankind the fruits she produced from her bountiful vegetation.

In our tradition, the beginning of true monotheism is to be found in the Israelite prophets, who over a period of some five hundred years weaned the people of Israel from their dependence upon the gods of nature – first by denying they had any reality and then by replacing them with the one God Yahweh. Henceforth, the prophets declared, the whole of humankind was to worship and obey only Him. This was the very first commandment: ‘I am Yahweh your God. You shall acknowledge no other gods before me’. This God was not only the Creator and the Provider; he was also the Lord of history. Thus came to birth the kind of monotheism that has been the foundation of faith for Jew, Christian and Muslim ever since.

From the Many to the One

This transition from polytheism to monotheism took some centuries and was more complex than the simplistic summary I shall now sketch, but in effect what happened was this. Yahweh, the national god of the Israelites who delivered them from slavery in Egypt, had originated both as the God of war who led people to victory, and also as the Sky-God, who manifested his wrath against misdeeds in storms and droughts. The well-known biblical term, ‘Lord of hosts’ can be translated, both as ‘God of the armies’ and as ‘God of the stars’. It is this Israelite Sky-God, Yahweh, who eventually became transformed into the monotheistic deity of Jew, Christian and Muslim. That is why we continue to address him, as we do in the Lord’s Prayer, with the familiar words ‘Our Father who art in heaven’. In this transition Yahweh became universalised and all other gods were banished from existence.

At the time, this movement from polytheism to monotheism was a great intellectual and spiritual advance. Its replacement of multiplicity with a simple unity provides an interesting example of Ockham’s razor, the philosophical principle that simple theories are to be preferred to complex ones. The transition to monotheism had the potential to unify all humankind by means a common faith. The capacity of monotheism to win universal conviction is shown by the fact that despite its fragmentation into three often antagonistic subdivisions, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic, it has lasted more than two and a half thousand years.

Monotheism flawed

But as we have only recently begun to recognize, monotheism brought with it several unfortunate corollaries. The first is that God, having originated as the Sky Father, has always been spoken of in male terms. This has had the effect of nurturing and authorising patriarchal societies in which women were demeaned. As Mary Daly, the most outspoken exponent of feminist theology so trenchantly said, ‘Where God is male, the male reigns supreme’. Women came to be considered too carnal to perform holy and priestly functions, and lest they deflect males from the path of humble obedience to God, their fleshly charms needed to be hidden. Even such recent theologians as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were still defending the supremacy of men over women on theological grounds. As the women’s liberation movement rightly contended, it has now become necessary to take our cue from the title of Mary Daly’s book and move Beyond God the Father.

Second, the advent of monotheism annihilated the goddesses of nature so successfully that the Hebrew Bible does not contain a single word meaning ‘goddess’. One or two personal names of ancient Canaanite goddesses have survived; we find Ashtoreth, goddess of fertility, but only after her name had been deliberately disfigured by replacing its vowels with those of the Hebrew word for ‘shame’ – an ancient example of what we might term ‘theological correctness’.

Thus the original gender balance existing in polytheism disappeared in monotheism, and women were left at a spiritual disadvantage, as they had no feminine figure or icon with which they could identify. To fill this spiritual vacuum is probably the reason for the development of the cult of the Virgin Mary in the Christian tradition, and for her acclamation as the Queen of Heaven.

Third, because the Earth-Mother was one of the gods of nature to be annihilated, the earth itself became desacralized. All of the sacred power it once possessed was effectively transferred to another world – the heavenly dwelling place of God the Father – and the forces of nature now became impersonal phenomena that God could control by way of reward and punishment. Even worse, Christians came to regard the earth as a fallen world and found evidence of this in the way species preyed on one another, in what but recently was proverbially called ‘nature red in tooth and claw’.

Fourth, monotheism led to the dualistic view of reality that so dominated traditional Christianity up until modern times. It helped to deepen the contrast between the earthly and the heavenly, the material and spiritual, the human and the divine, the temporal and the eternal. And thus the natural world, previously venerated as the source of the necessities of life, came to be seen as degraded, under divine judgment, and destined for destruction.

Fifth, monotheism preserved in this one God such personal qualities and virtues as had been found in the gods of nature. Although capable of being angry and vengeful, he came to be seen primarily as all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving. God was the infinite mind who planned the universe, provided it with its order and wonder, and continued to control its affairs. All the gratitude, fear and wonder which the original polytheists had felt towards the gods of nature were now to be directed to ‘Our Father who art in heaven’

Dangerous ambivalences

Humankind’s pious worship of the gods of nature had previously been held in check its greedy impulse to exploit nature. But the rise of mono-theism, as Toynbee observed, ‘removed this age-old restraint’, freed humankind to do what it wished with the natural world, and even encouraged it to exert domination over all living creatures. This is why he declared monotheism to be responsible for the coming ecological crisis.

We should note in passing, however, that the desacralization of the earth did produce some positive results. Most important, it permitted and even fostered the rise of empirical science, for only after the earth had lost its presumed sacred power did the first scientists feel free to experiment with natural phenomena. The German physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker suggested in his 1959 Gifford lectures on The Relevance of Science that except for Christian monotheism, modern science would not have evolved as it did. ‘The concept of strict and generally valid laws of nature could hardly have arisen without the Christian concept of creation. In this sense I call modern science a legacy of Christianity’.

The enterprise of empirical science has undoubtedly been of great benefit to humankind, particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But now, science itself is beginning to set off alarm bells, first with nuclear weapons and now with genetic modification. We are coming to recognize that our ability to control and even modify nature has become so powerful as to threaten devastating effects on the future. Jürgen Moltmann, one of today’s leading German theologians, has said much the same as Toynbee: ‘It was the Western “religion of modern times” that freed the way for the secularisation of nature. The ancient view about the harmony between the forces of nature has been destroyed – destroyed by modern monotheism on the one hand, and by scientific mechanism on the other. Modern monotheism has robbed nature of its divine mystery and has broken its spell.’

A necessary step

Because of the ecological crisis now looming, it has become necessary to move beyond monotheism – beyond the idea of ‘Our Father in heaven, omnipotent creator and controller of the earth’. As Jürgen Moltmann explains, ‘If modern society is to have any future, what we need above all is a new respect for nature, and a new reverence for the life of all created things’.

But how can Christianity move beyond monotheism? Does not that belief underlie all Christian teaching? The answer to this question, strangely enough, is ‘Yes!’ and ‘No!’ Yes, because most Christians, including most clergy and theologians still defend monotheism and focus on the heavenly Father as if He alone were God. No, because they too conveniently forget that by the fifth century Christianity had abandoned true monotheism and replaced it with trinitarianism. Indeed, Christianity’s innovative modification of the doctrine helped Islam spread as rapidly as it did among Eastern Christians, for in this regard Islam saw itself as a movement commissioned by Allah to restore a pure monotheism.

Christianity’s new image of God, the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, was made necessary to do justice to its unique new doctrine of the Incarnation – the declaration that God had enfleshed himself in the man Jesus. This doctrine, which shocked Jews and Muslims into reinforcing their pure monotheism, implied that there no longer exists an impassable gulf between heaven and earth, between the divine and the human, between the supernatural and the natural worlds. The gap has been bridged; God has come down to earth.

The doctrine of the incarnation was the first step in reconnecting the divine Creator with creation, or what we call nature. This radically new departure from strict monotheism would lead at last to the modern secular world. That it should have taken so long should not surprise us. Just as the transition from polytheism to monotheism was a slow and complex process that took some centuries, so the movement beyond monotheism has been gradual and multi-faceted.

The twin doctrines of the Incarnation and of the Holy Trinity proved too revolutionary even for most Christians to cope with, let alone Jews and Muslims. The human Jesus became lost from view behind the wholly divine Christ, who was proclaimed a kind of Hindu-style ‘avatar’ of God the Father. The radical significance of the incarnation was thus obliterated and the gulf between heaven and earth reappeared. The doctrine of the incarnation had been hi-jacked by the increasingly dualistic view of reality that dominated the Middle Ages.

Nature finds a voice

Yet even in that theologically reactionary climate there arose a brave attempt to reconnect God with the world of nature. St. Francis exhorted Christians to value nature for its own sake. He saluted all earthly creatures as his brothers and sisters and, in the well-known hymn he bequeathed to us he even speaks of ‘Dear Mother Earth’. He founded the order of the Franciscan Friars, from which came Roger Bacon, the man who took the first practical steps towards empirical science. Then followed another Franciscan, William of Ockham, whose philosophy spelled the end of metaphysical speculation and helped to promote the Renaissance, whose humanist scholars and artists affirmed the inherent value and creative potential in the human condition. People began to look with new eyes at the natural world and the universe itself. Artists found beauty and wonder not hitherto experienced in craggy mountains and natural landscapes untouched by humans.

The Renaissance led to the Protestant Reformation, which in turn precipitated the closure of the monastic institutions and forced thousands of nuns and monks out into the secular world. Then came Galileo, whose scientific exploration of the heavens demonstrated that the heavenly bodies were of the same physical order as the earth.

All of these events occurring in fairly rapid succession propelled Western Christianity into a period of accelerating cultural change – one marked by an ever-increasing focus on the physical universe. The inevitable result was the dissolution of the dualistic world-view and its replacement by today’s monistic view of the space-time continuum as the only reality. We now commonly refer to this process of cultural change as secularisation, seldom recalling that it is the long term result of the doctrine of the incarnation. Although Christians have been all too slow to realise this, it was acknowledged by the Anglican theologian J. R. Illingworth, who as long ago as 1891 wrote in his essay on the Incarnation, ‘Secular civilization has co-operated with Christianity to produce the modern world. It is nothing less than the providential correlative and counterpart of the incarnation’.

What does ‘God’ mean?

But in this process what has happened to the God of monotheism? What does it mean to speak of God if we go beyond ‘Our Father who art in heaven’? What is now to be our image of God? Ever more anxiously in the last 400 years the Western world has been wrestling with such questions and propounding a variety of answers. Those who suggested new answers did not receive much help from the church; indeed they often found themselves ostracized, for as a rule the church forbade such questions to be asked.

One proposed answer was that God is to be found everywhere in the world of nature. Known as pantheism, this view was pioneered in the seventeenth century by the Jewish philosopher Spinoza. He began to treat the terms ‘God’ and ‘Nature’ as interchangeable. I doubt whether he realized how close he was to the attitude of the ancient Israelite sages. They had largely ignored the kind of monotheism promoted by the prophets. They did not expect to receive any direct messages from God, nor did they look to God to solve their problems for them. When they spoke of God, as they occasionally did, they used the word as if it were a symbolic name for the way things work in the natural world. (The Hebrew language then had no word meaning ‘nature’.)

Even Jesus of Nazareth seems to have been such a sage; what else can one make of his insistence that ‘God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust’? Thus already in the biblical tradition there is a stream of thought that identifies God with nature and in such a way as to acknowledge the amoral character of natural forces. The recent disastrous tsunami affords a useful illustration. Pure monotheists felt themselves obliged to interpret this as an act of divine judgment, as the Anglican Dean of Sydney is said to have done. But the Israelite sages would have said, ‘That is the way that nature operates and one must learn to respond accordingly’. That was the attitude of Jesus in his famous parable commending the wisdom of the man who in anticipation of storm and flood built his house on a firm foundation.

But the pantheistic answer of equating God with nature has not proved to be wholly satisfactory. First, it soon makes all reference to God redundant and hence leads to atheism. This may be illustrated by the famous reply of the French scientist Laplace to Napoleon. When Laplace presented his astronomical explanation of the movement of the heavenly bodies, Napoleon asked him about the role of God in his theory and Laplace replied, ‘I have no need of that hypothesis’. Here is Ockham’s razor with a vengeance: our growing understanding of the way nature works obviates the need to postulate an infinite divine mind controlling its operation. The heavenly bodies, wind and rain, earthquakes and tsunamis operate according to nature’s fixed laws, which in turn are quite amoral and completely disinterested with respect to how they affect earthly life.

Pantheism also leaves unanswered other questions which monotheism appeared to answer: Why is nature here at all? Why is there something and not nothing? To respond to these, the answer known as deism was formulated. It retained sufficient of the monotheistic God to affirm him as the creator of the universe, the first cause, and the designer of the laws of nature. But having set everything in orderly motion, the deist God played no further active role in the world, either in physics (so miracles did not occur) or in human history (he did not answer prayer or direct human history).

The glaring omission in pantheism, atheism and deism was any reference to the supreme moral values of justice, compassion, and love – that have long been claimed as attributes of God. How were they to be accounted for?

A Daniel come to judgment

The first person to bring them into the equation was Ludwig Feuerbach. In 1841 his epoch-making book, The Essence of Christianity, shocked contemporary readers by asserting that ‘God’ is a humanly created concept. Although the Bible tells us God made human beings in his image, the truth (said Feuerbach) is that humans have made God in their image. Using the psychological technique of projection (widely understood today but unknown in Feuerbach’s time) he argued that our ancient forbears had unconsciously projected onto this humanly created concept such moral qualities as justice, love, compassion, and forgiveness – which all humans revere and to which they aspire. Thus reassigned, they became greatly magnified and were judged to be the divine attributes. ‘The personality of God,’ he said, ‘is nothing else than the projected personality of man.’ Today some people find that conclusion almost a truism, while others reject it as fiercely as they did in Feuerbach’s day. ‘God is our highest idea’, said Feuer¬bach; and curiously enough that is how Anselm, 800 years earlier, began his famous ‘proof’ of the existence of God.

What is often overlooked, however, is that Feuerbach’s deconstruction of God did not stop there. First he showed that the very essence of Christianity was its doctrine of the incarnation. Making the human Jesus the new basis of religion and treating him as divine meant that the heavenly throne was now empty. As Paul said, Jesus Christ represented the new humanity that had to accept responsibility for functions and goals previously projected on to the Father in heaven.

Unfortunately, Feuerbach’s subsequent book, The Essence of Religion, never received the public attention of the first one. In it he pointed out that since his first book had dealt only with the moral and personal attributes of God, more remained to be said. When viewed as the creator and controller of the natural world, God had taken over the functions of the earlier gods of nature; accordingly, the monotheistic image of God also embodied what Feuerbach called the ‘personified essence of nature’.

It is important to see what Feuerbach had thus done. He had deconstructed the God concept into two quite different orders of reality: the world of nature (as emphasized by the pantheists and deists) and the collection of supreme human values (as emphasized by the theists). As Feuerbach saw it, God was the projection of both the essence of nature and the essence of humanity – and therefore the monotheistic God had long served as the way to understand both the natural world and the human condition.

The Resolution of theology into two areas

Now if theology means the study of God, then Feuerbach’s deconstruction of God has effectively resolved theology into two complementary areas – the study of nature on the one hand and the study of humanity and its values on the other. An interesting way of illustrating this is to observe what has happened to Western institutions of higher learning in the last 800 years. At the time they were founded it was thought that all knowledge could be understood as a manageable unity: hence the name ‘university’. But the mediaeval university was based on, and revolved round, the Faculty of Theology, the discipline then known as the Queen of the sciences.

Perhaps the last person to attempt to expound all knowledge as a unity was Thomas Aquinas, when he set out to reconcile Aristotle’s philosophy of nature with what was assumed to be the truth received by divine revelation. This he did in his renowned Summa Theologica, which he did not live to finish. But his synthesis was never universally accepted and eventually broke down, opening the way for the explosion of academic disciplines in modern times.

They fall into two main groups: the physical sciences study the natural world, while the social sciences and the arts study humanity and culture. These two groups have now replaced the theology faculty that by itself sufficed in the twelfth century, when simple monotheism was universally accepted. What is more, by the middle of the twentieth century there was such an evident rift between these two groups that the scientist C. P. Snow wrote some widely read novels deploring what he judged to be the bifurcation of society into ‘two cultures’ that no longer understood each other. By the end of the century the rift was being partially healed by a growing mutual respect among scholars of different fields. Let us look briefly in turn at these two areas, which both began as provinces of theology.

I was thinking of that foundational discipline when I said earlier that this series could well have been entitled ‘From theo-logy to eco-logy’. I meant that we have moved far beyond focusing our attention on an unseen personal God who designed and controls the world in which we live. We now focus our attention on the physical universe itself. This we have found to be almost infinite in space and time and to operate according to its own internal laws. And even though our mind’s eye catches occasional glimpses of a greater dimension, we acknowledge ourselves to be a part of the natural world – physical organisms who live and die like all the simpler forms of life in this complex web we call the ecosphere. If we are to live life to its full potential, we need to understand the ecosphere and respond to it appropriately.

One of the most important lessons we learn from ecology is that the forces of nature do not operate according to any moral plan or ultimate purpose. Rather, nature operates according to what Jacques Monod has called a process of ‘chance and necessity’. Ecology leaves us with no assurance like that of monotheism that we live in a moral world, where everything will work out for the best in the end. Since nature shows no special interest in the human race, when we move beyond monotheism we have no divine deliverer to turn to. Rather, we must now treat the forces of nature with the respect they deserve, for our life and well-being depend on them, and we know not when or how they may bring life to an end. (Witness the sudden end of the age of dinosaurs!) Such a view of nature, incidentally, is not wholly foreign to the biblical tradition. We find it, as we have seen, in the sages. More than two thousand years ago Ecclesiastes observed that we humans are all subject to ‘time and chance’.

Our search for value and meaning

Now let us turn to the second branch of learning, that concerned with human culture and values – and the one to which traditional academic theology retreated. When our ancient ancestors began to ask basic questions about human existence, their answers became the world’s many cultures and religions. This why the concept of God came more and more to embody our highest values and satisfy our search for meaning and purpose. And though the concept of God has been deconstructed and can no longer be taken to be the name of a supernatural, thinking and acting being, the term ‘God’ may still remain useful as both the symbolic embodiment of our desire to find meaning in life and the metaphoric equivalent of such values as love, justice, truth, and compassion, which continue to lay powerful claims upon us.

The theologian Gordon Kaufman, for example, thinks we need this traditional word ‘God’ if only as a symbol, because it provides us with ‘an ultimate point of reference’ and thereby enables us to unify and order our experience of reality in the mental world we construct for ourselves. The image of God that remains, therefore, is the sum total of the very values once described as his attributes. God is the symbolic name for the aggregate of our highest values.

This process had begun by New Testament times for that text already affirms that ‘God is love’. In modern times the symbolization has gone much further. Mahatma Ghandi, for example said that ‘God is truth’. Leo Tolstoy (in War and Peace) says ‘Life is God and to love life is to love God.’ Don Cupitt, in making a study of how our daily language is changing, found a large collection of phrases now coming into common usage that include the term ‘life’. ‘How’s life treating you?’ ‘That’s what life is all about!’ ‘I need to move on in life’. ‘Get a life!’ It is as if in daily secular speech we are now unconsciously turning to the word ‘life’ as the natural replacement for the once common term ‘God’.

Gordon Kaufman’s book In Face of Mystery comes to this conclusion: ‘To believe in God is to commit oneself to a particular way of ordering one’s life and action. It is to devote oneself to working towards a fully humane world within the ecological restraints here on planet Earth, while standing in piety and awe before the profound mysteries of existence.’

Clearly, the Greening of Christianity stands in strong contrast to much of the historical tradition. In the latter we humans saw ourselves as helpless creatures, passively dependent on the grace and power of an external supernatural being. In Green Christianity we find that the responsibility for our future and that of the ecosphere has been placed upon us. By our chosen actions we must enflesh the values we once regarded as the attributes of God. That is what the incarnation means. We are required to be perfect in the way God symbolized perfection. Of course, as you no doubt recognize, I am simply quoting what Jesus the sage said in the Sermon on the Mount.

Are we really up to that? The impending ecological crisis gives us no option but to try. In the next lecture we shall explore what that attempt will entail.