When I was a theological student, one of the chief textbooks on Christian Ethics was The Divine Imperative, written by the celebrated Swiss theologian Emil Brunner. This 700-page tome, published in English in 1937, is not only laborious to study but strikes today’s reader as rather odd. It discussed divorce and contraception, but never once mentioned homosexuality – a topic that in our time so divides Christians. Written in the aftermath of World War I, it declared war to have outlived its purpose, but made no reference to peacemaking. These points strikingly exemplify how much our ethical problems have changed in seventy years. I refer to the book because I have half borrowed its title by way of recalling that Christian ethics was long assumed to be an exposition of the human behaviour that God has commanded – hence The Divine Imperative.

But the disintegration of monotheism that was outlined in the last lecture means that ethics can no longer be based on divine commandments supposedly revealed in the distant past. Some have interpreted this to mean we are now free to do whatever we like. Nietzsche thought the death of God would cause the collapse of the whole system of Christian thought. Dostoevsky complained that the absence of God meant that everything is permissible. Not so!

A new dispensation

As long ago as the end of the Enlightenment, the great modern philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) had shifted the base of ethics from divine revelation to what he called ‘the moral law within’. He was referring to the experience of a sense of moral duty, and called it ‘the categorical imperative’. Of course, this radical shift has made ethical decision-making a great deal more difficult than it used to be. It is no longer simply a matter of debating how to interpret a divine commandment. Now we must first decide why it is that some actions are to be judged right and others wrong. This has led to what is known as ‘Situation Ethics’, a process by which one must examine all the factors in the situation that impinge on the ethical dilemma and then decide which course of action will promote the maximum well-being for all concerned.

The global crisis outlined in the first lecture is alerting us to the radically new situation in which the human race finds itself, one that calls for making ethical decisions of a kind it has never had to face before. Unfortunately, we are ill-prepared for this task, partly because our Christian past has left us unskilled in the new mode of ethical decision-making, and partly because too few are even aware of the critical situation in which we now live.

To contrast this new situation with the old, we need only recall that until 200 years ago the whole of the Western world lived by the story of human origins as told by the Bible. Nearly everyone accepted as fundamental to ethics the idea that the earth and all within it was created by God, who still holds it in his control; that He made us to be like him and, to guide us, he revealed his Divine will; and that since this has been permanently recorded in Holy Writ, our duty is simply to obey. It is by this formula that traditional Christianity still struggles to decide such contemporary issues as birth control, homosexual behaviour, and the ordination of women.

But for all reasonably well-informed and thoughtful people, the biblical story of origins has now been replaced by an entirely new story; this scenario sketches the changing universe from the ‘big bang’ onwards, through the evolution of life on this planet, followed more recently by the evolution of human culture. The new story of origins not only leaves us with an entirely different picture of the vast universe we live in, but escribes our relationship with the earth in strikingly different terms.

Reading from a new page

This modern understanding of the source of our being indicates that while we rightly value what we may call the spiritual dimension of the human condition, there is no absolute gulf between us and the other living creatures. As Teilhard de Chardin so wonderfully put it, all physical matter has the potential for spirituality. Therefore, the spiritual dimension of human experience can never be divorced from the physical, and the supposed dichotomy between spiritual and material is spurious. We humans are psycho-physical organisms. We must abandon the widespread but false notion that we are spiritual beings only temporarily encased in physical bodies – a notion that derives, after all, not from the Bible but from the Greek philosopher Plato.

Furthermore, the new story of origins returns us humans to our proper place among the many and diverse life forms on this planet. As the American Catholic priest Thomas Berry has said, everything on earth is cousin to everything else. This has now been scientifically demonstrated by the genetic code, the mechanism that determines the physiological structure of every creature and that shows how we are related to all other forms of planetary life. We humans have no special rights of ownership and dominion over the others.

Our problem, says Berry, is that we are living between the two stories. While we are still trying to accept the implications of the new story, much that belonged to the old story still lingers on in our thinking – even though it has become not only obsolete but positively dysfunctional.

“I set before you today fact and fiction …”

In the old story we were subject to the dictates of the Heavenly Father, and believed ourselves to have been given dominion over the earth. In the new story we have lost our privileged place in the web of planetary life and we are subject to the same forces of nature as are all other living organisms.

In the old story storms, droughts and earthquakes were ‘acts of God’ and were thought to have moral significance. In the new story the forces of nature have no personal interest in us at all. Yet although totally amoral, they can determine whether we live or die, and we ignore them at our peril.

These forces constitute the parameters within which all planetary life has evolved. Humans have evolved within limits set by the earth’s conditions. Our physique, for example, is suited to the mass of the planet earth; we could not survive on a planet with Jupiter’s gravity. Fascinating though it may be to imagine future space travel to distant stars, it will almost certainly be never more than a delightful fantasy. We are earth creatures, who can live only within the delicately balanced natural forces, geographical conditions, and interdependence of species that constitute the ecology of our planetary home. Because of our new understanding of our origins and of the nature of our ecological home, the ethic that concerns us today is no longer the divine imperative but what may be called the Ecological Imperative.

But no one should conclude that the shift from the divine imperative to the ecological imperative represents an ominous new heresy, for it involves not rejection, but reorientation. ‘The Greening of Christianity’ means that Christian thinking must now incorporate all that we have learned about the human species from the human sciences – including, of course, the relatively new science of anthropology. (Few today are aware that the term ‘anthropology’ originated as a theological term; it referred to the Christian doctrine of the human condition.) In the last two hundred years our understanding of the human species and of its relationship to the natural world has changed so drastically that, as Feuerbach showed, theology has been turned upside down – or more appropriately, inside out.

Common ground

That being the case, one might expect to find little or nothing in common with the earlier Christian doctrine of humankind. Surprisingly, this is not so. The biblical myth of origins declared with striking boldness that we humans are formed of the dust of the ground, and when our lives come to an end we return to dust. Three thousand years later we still use the words of that ancient story at our funeraTake a breath …l services – ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. The biblical proposition that we are made of earth remains basically unchallenged, though of course we are now more sophisticated and know that the ‘dust’ we are made of consists chiefly of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen. And whereas the biblical myth pictured God forming us much as a child makes mudpies, we are now aware of the complex nature of human physiology. The lifeless atoms of which we are composed are united in the most intricate designs to form the myriads of living cells and the many internal organs that constitute the human organism.

But common ground with the ancient myth does not stop there. We are becoming increasingly aware of how fundamentally our amazing internal systems depend upon an appropriate environment. And in its quaint but profound way, the biblical myth acknowledges this new ecological insight as well. After the fashioning of the human body from dust, says the Bible, God breathed his breath into it. Since Hebrew uses the same word to mean breath, spirit, wind, and air, we can translate the ancient myth into modern terminology by saying that though we humans are made of the same elements as are found in the ground beneath our feet, we come alive and stay alive only if we supported by the correct atmosphere. Indeed, we cannot live more than about two minutes without breathing it.

What in ancient times was understood simply as our dependence on the breath of God has in modern times become expanded into the highly sophisticated study of ecology. The ecosphere has now become, to use Paul’s quoted phrase, the God ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’. In 1993 Sallie McFague wrote The Body of God, in which she proposed an ecological theology centered on this striking new image: ‘The body of God is not a body but all the different, peculiar, particular bodies about us’. She called this an incarnational theology, for it points out what our forbears understood and treated as the divine is to be found all around us and within us in the ecosphere. This being so, we must respect every ‘body’, animate and inanimate, in the natural world, and value it for its own sake and not as a means to an end. We are immediately reminded of words attributed to Jesus: ‘Whatever you do for the least of these my brothers, you do for me’.

Thus worship directed to the Heavenly Father is to be replaced by our grateful acknowledgment of the ecosphere’s all-surpassing worth to us, and dutiful obedience to the God of heaven changed to devotion to the ecological imperative of doing what he ecosphere requires of us. Even the doctrine of sin, so prominent in traditional Christianity, has its new counterpart. The belief that Adam’s disobedience condemned all humans to a tragic state of alienation from the God is superseded by our alarming awareness that humanity is currently at war with the very planet that has given it birth and sustenance.

Take a breath …

To discuss the ecological imperative further, let us start with the atmosphere, for it is the most critical parameter set by the ecosphere for planetary creatures. From time immemorial our ancestors simply took the atmosphere for granted. It is only in recent times that we have been forced to realise how dependent we are upon it and how we have evolved to fit its particular mixture of gases – one that consists chiefly of nitrogen and oxygen and has been stable for some millions of years. If we travel to the moon we must take our supply with us. Even climbing high mountains often requires extra supplies of oxygen. Every time we board a plane we are solemnly reminded by the cabin attendant how to use the oxygen supply in an emergency.

Some gases, even in small quantities, are highly toxic to us. One of these is carbon monoxide; yet since the introduction of the internal combustion engine we have been releasing this substance into the atmosphere in ever-greater quantities. The air in some heavily populated cities is now so polluted as to be unhealthy, and in some cases positively dangerous. One of the most basic ecological imperatives, then, is to control every practice that pollutes our most basic requirement for life and thus to keep the composition of the atmosphere stable.

This task points to the mysterious and wonderful character of the earth’s ecology. We humans, along with all other breathing creatures on the planet, have for millions of years been unknowingly co-operating with the vegetation in keeping the right balance of the gases in the atmosphere. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Plants and trees absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen. This balancing act, which has long kept the composition of the atmosphere stable, is only one of many of the earth’s phenomena which led the scientist James Lovelock to liken the earth itself to an organism whose living skin is the biosphere in the same way as bark is the living skin of the tree. For this reason he referred to the earth as Gaia, reviving the name for Mother Earth found in ancient Greek mythology.

… and be inspired

Of course Lovelock did not mean that the earth is a thinking, planning being, but that it has many characteristics of a living system. The earth’s outer layer is made up of all forms of life from the viruses to the great whales, from tiny ocean algae to the giant redwoods, all living within their own special eco-systems and yet integrated with the atmosphere, the ocean, and the surface rocks and soils. But all of these have evolved in such a complex network of delicate balances with one another that the earth appears to have fashioned for itself an all encompassing and self-regulatory system. Just as our own bodies have immune systems that protect us from disease and thermostats to keep us at a constant temperature, so the earth seems to regulate itself, keeping the climate constant and comfortable, and preserving just the right amount of oxygen in the air and the right amount of salt in the oceans.

When we humans upset these balances – say by increasing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – we are attacking the earth’s regulatory system in a manner analogous to the way AIDS ravages an individual. But as participants in this amazing ecosphere, we are obliged by the ecological imperative to understand it, respect it, and take appropriate actions to nurture it and preserve all its balances.

The earth has been a living, evolving system for some three and a half billion years. We humans are very late comers on the scene. If we threaten the ecosphere too severely, it will eliminate us from its system – though no more by conscious decision than one’s personal immune system eliminates invading bacteria. Just as individuals can cause their own death by foolishly defying the law of gravity, so the human species can effect its own extinction along with that of many other species by wilful and thoughtless interference with the ecological conditions on which our survival depends.

Our growing knowledge of how life has evolved, and of the earthly parameters within which all creatures live, has amounted to a new revelation that supplements but largely replaces the supposed revelations of the past. Unfortunately, those who focus their attention too closely on the divine epiphanies of the past tend to be blind to present secular manifestations. That is why, as we noted in the first lecture, it has been left largely to prophets outside of the churches to read the signs of the times in our day.

This should not surprise us. The periods of new growth and development in the Judeo-Christian tradition have always started on the margins rather than at the centre of the tradition. Jesus himself was neither a priest nor one schooled in the rabbinic academies, but a wandering sage. Similarly, the pioneers of the modern secular world lived on the margins of Christian orthodoxy. It is only to have been expected, then, that the first to become aware of the new revelations would be found on the fringes of Christian society rather than at the centre.

Secular prophets

These prophets from the secular branches of Western culture are now loudly proclaiming the ecological imperative through books, lectures and protests. They are calling us all to be active in stabilizing population, in halting our wasteful and destructive ways, in avoiding pollution of air and water, in conserving the earth’s non-renewable resources, and in changing to renewable sources of energy. The good news is that these ecological imperatives are being adopted by many individuals and voluntary groups, as well as by local, national, and international forms of government; conservation and environmentalism are now being acknowledged as highly desirable social aims.

Thomas Berry welcomes these moves as the beginning of a vast sea change in human consciousness, one that will take us forward to a new understanding of what it means to be human. He believes that such a radical re-evaluation of life and the resulting new sense of values will not only lead us out of our self-centred worlds, but even come to transcend our national loyalties. We may call it the rise of Green Consciousness.

It is manifesting itself world wide in a great variety of ways. At both national and international level, there are now ministries and commissions devoted to the care of the environment. A number of major international conferences have been convened and such new organizations as Greenpeace and the Bird and Forest Society have been founded. We also see the emergence of many one-issue movements, positive responses that have ironically revived some of our most basic religious words. We hear ‘salvation’ echoed in slogans like ‘Save Manapouri’; ‘Save the black robin’; ‘Save the blue-eyed penguin’. ‘Sanctuary’ is another religious term to return in secular garb. It once referred to holy places where the divine presence was thought to offer protection to the weak and vulnerable; now when we set out to save endangered fauna, we establish ‘bird sanctuaries’, ‘fish sanctuaries’, or ‘wild life sanctuaries’.

Once again these point to the earthy, fleshly nature of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. The more that Christianity’s belief and practice came to emphasize the saving of souls, the more it lost sight of its most unique and central doctrine.

For the same reason Christians long held themselves aloof from the earthy world of politics, yet it was inevitable that Green consciousness would find political expression. New Zealand can justifiably claim to have been one of the first countries to see the rise of such a political party. In the 70’s it was called the Values Party. Since that time Green Parties have been springing up throughout the Western world, seeking to bring Green Consciousness to bear on all government decisions.

A wider horizon

But the ecological imperative calls for more than even governments have the power to achieve. Multi-national corporate bodies, for example, are not only beyond the control of any one national government, but often influence national policy. Unfortunately, they tend to dismiss Green Consciousness as a passing fad, based on false evidence and dangerously alarmist. Their resistance to environmental issues is quite understandable because it is built into the economic principles underlying capitalism itself, principles which, since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, have been widely adopted around the globe.

A primary axiom of capitalism is that a nation’s well-being depends upon the wealth produced by its industry, technology and economic development, the aggregate of which can be measured by its per capita Gross National Product (GNP). The natural corollary is that to achieve maximum well-being a nation must maximise its economic growth. Thus annual economic growth is commonly being used as a criterion to measure the success or failure of political policies. Modern economic orthodoxy regards these precepts to be not only basic to capitalism but also normative for the way humans relate to the natural world.

But will western-style capitalism respond to the ecological imperative? Some are already prophesying quite the contrary, fearing that capitalism is leading the world to the edge of an abyss because its fundamental principles are ultimately destructive of the ecology of the earth. In 1989 Herman Daly published For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future. In writing this book, the former economist with the World Bank collaborated with theologian John Cobb, well known in the theological world as an exponent of process theology – a system that moved beyond the concept of God as heavenly Father to find the divine reality in the process of evolution itself. These two argued that the standard system of profit-and-loss accounting used by economists is deeply flawed. For example, many solar-powered energy systems seem uneconomical when compared with those dependent on coal, oil or uranium; but when the full cost – including production, consumption of a non-renewable resource, waste disposal, and damage to environment – is taken into account, they could prove to be relatively inexpensive.

Similarly, they argue, the accounting system used for the calculation of GNP can produce seriously misleading results. However useful GNP may be for short-term planning, it gives false expectations about the long term. The trouble is, such a calculation regards a national economy as a self-contained system that can be divorced from its surroundings, whereas in reality it should be treated as a sub-system of the larger eco-system on which it is dependent. Since all economic activity draws upon raw materials (some of which are irreplaceable), produces waste products (which have to be deposited somewhere), and may well cause damage to the eco-system, any calculation of GNP that ignores the negative impact caused by these other factors is false. When these subtractions are made, ‘positive’ economic growth may well turn out to be negative in fact.

Using ‘real’ numbers

Daly and Cobb argued that producing a balanced picture of the current state of human well-being on the planet requires an assessment in terms of the whole eco-system, not just one of its sub-systems. They set about constructing an alternative benchmark for economic growth, one that took account of the whole system. They called it the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW). Then they applied it to the American economy. Judged by the standard GNP statistics, the US per capita income had increased in real value by 25 per cent since 1976; but the ISEW indicated that over the same period the economic well-being of Americans had actually declined by 10 per cent.

Thus, widespread as Green consciousness has now become, it is far from certain that political endeavour and planning at national and international levels is going to achieve the necessary outcomes. The Kyoto protocols have not been adopted by some of the most powerful nations. Even here in New Zealand there is much resistance to carbon taxes. We face the question of how far Green consciousness can, or should be, promoted by coercion. China has put drastic measures in place to deal with the population explosion; parenthood is there restricted to one child per couple. Elsewhere such heavy-handed legislation is likely to be flatly rejected as totalitarian. Does this mean that the limited power of democratic governments may not be sufficient to arrest the ecological crisis? What is needed is a groundswell of Green consciousness at the grassroots of society. What can provide the motivation for that?

Motives and motifs

Motivation is normally heightened by appeal to self-interest. But is not self-interest at the root of our current problems? Of course it is! But there are different kinds of self-interest. We need to distinguish between individual self-interest and corporate self-interest. The latter has for aeons provided the strength of family and tribal units, in which individuals frequently sacrifice their personal interests for the sake of the group. Where corporate self-interest reigns, the good name of the family and the survival of the tribe take precedence over the desires of the individual.

Unfortunately, such beneficial group cohesion often led to long histories of inter-tribal strife and inter-ethnic war that must now be superseded by global unity. But we are ill prepared for this; tribalism at the national level is still very powerful and is preventing us from meeting the ecological crisis. As individual self-interest gave way to tribal self-interest, so tribal self-interest must now give way to ecological self-interest. We all have a basic interest in preserving the ecology of the planet, both for ourselves and for our descendants. The whole of humanity must pull together.

Christianity began as a movement aimed at uniting all humans in one body, the body of Christ, with ‘neither Jew nor Gentile, neither freeman nor slave, neither male nor female’. After the fall of Rome, Christianity even began to exhibit something of the Empire’s Pax Romana, but it gradually lost this vision of a united humanity as it became increasingly focused on a spiritual life after death. From that time onwards, corporate self-interest waned, and individual self-interest re-asserted itself as people were urged to embrace Christianity in order to be saved from Hell and guaranteed a place in heaven. By offering to save people’s souls for life in another world, Christianity lost its own soul in this world, thus meriting the dismissive words of the cynic who said ‘the church has become so heavenly minded as to be of no earthly use’.

. The hope of personal immortality in a world beyond death goes back only to the second and third centuries. It developed at a time when Christianity was competing with and being influenced by various salvation cults and other mystery religions. This belief must now be judged an aberration – a concession to personal self-centredness. To provide motivation for Green consciousness, Christianity must rediscover its real roots.

A new and better hope

Already in Old Testament times our spiritual forbears were learning to accept their mortality. This was a great spiritual advance, for in the ancient pagan world some sort of belief in an after-life was almost universal. In contrast, the Israelite sages urged their people ‘to number their days that they might apply their hearts to wisdom’. Any intimations of immortality were to be seen in their children and what they bequeathed to them and to society generally. That this acceptance of mortality continued in the early church is evident in the earliest Christian epitaph: Requiescat In Pace, ‘May he/she rest in peace’. In the grave one would sleep quietly until the end of time, when all would be raised for the mythical Last Judgment.

This earliest form of Christian belief is our clue to the kind of immortality that is still to be prized most highly. It is not the immortality of the individual, but of the species. It is the species and not the individual that has the capacity to live on from generation to generation. And it is further true of all living species that they are dependent on one another and the earth itself. This is the kind of immortality that ecology is concerned with. Ecological immortality calls for a much greater degree of selflessness than we find in the traditional Christian concept of immortality – a self-serving hope that by a tragic irony became the very opposite of the Christian definition of love found in the Fourth Gospel: ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends’.

Immortality, then, is a quality that pertains to the species rather than to the individual, and above all to the evolving web of life on this planet. We human individuals remain as mortal as all earthly creatures. It is our great privilege even to have been born into this awe-inspiring web of life and to have inherited the evolving human culture created by our forbears. And it is our responsibility to transmit this rich culture to our descendants and to hand on to them the earth itself in the best possible state. That is our only proper role and destiny. This is the ecological version of loving God with all one’s heart and of loving one’s neighbour as oneself. We must respond to the ecological imperative not primarily for our own personal benefit, but for that of our children, our grandchildren, and countless generations beyond.

Now that I have sketched some of the radical changes in Christian belief and moral behaviour that ecology requires, we must finally turn to a consideration of what rites and festivals will be most appropriate to foster and celebrate Green Christianity.