During the twentieth century three words all linked to the same Greek root began to capture our attention. The Greek word was oikos, meaning ‘household’, ‘dwelling’, ‘home’. The rise to prominence of these three words reflects how we humans are becoming increasingly conscious of the global home we share.

• ‘Ecumenical’ came from oikos by way of the Greek word oikumene, which means ‘the whole world that humankind inhabits as its home’.

• ‘Economic’ came from oikos by way of the Greek word oikonomia, which means ‘the law of the household’ or ‘household management.’

• ‘Ecological’ also came from oikos, but more indirectly.

The word ecology was coined by a German zoologist, Ernst Haeckel, who used the term oekologie to mean the relation of an animal to both its organic and inorganic environment. Thus ecology deals with organisms and their home environments, and has been defined variously as ‘the study of the interrelationships of organisms with their environment and each other’ and as ‘the biology of ecosystems’.

In the course of the twentieth century we became increasingly familiar with these three words. In the first half of the century the word ‘ecumenical’ became widely used to describe the attempt by many Christians to re-establish the essential unity of the world-wide Christian church after it had been increasingly fragmented following the Protestant Reformation.

Then, as the cultural phenomenon of globalisation began to gather force after World War II, economics grew in importance as the study of understanding and managing material affairs, first those of our national household and, more recently, in what is called macro-economics, those of our global household.

In the last third of the twentieth century our growing awareness of the ecological character of all life on earth awakened us to impending planetary crises, disruptions for which we humans are largely responsible, whether out of ignorance or wilful self-centredness.

Since St. Andrew’s trust was established to study the interaction between religion and society, this series of lectures has been planned to explore what impact our new understanding of ecology will have on the Judaeo-Christian tradition. To what extent, if any, does it require Christian thought and practice to undergo change? As we shall find, that impact is so far-reaching that these lectures could well have been titled ‘The Transition from Theo-logy to Eco-logy’. We start now with ‘The Global Crisis.’

A gathering storm

Today, scientists, historians, and other commentators warn us of a global ecological crisis. This has the potential to be even more devastating and long-lasting than a thermo-nuclear war, for it could mean the end of all life as we know it. The crisis they point to has been growing for some time; at first it was quite unobtrusive, but recently its accelerating effects have become alarming.

The first hint of it that I recall came when I was a rural parish minister in North Otago in the early 1940’s. Farmers were being warned that improper use of their land was causing soil erosion of such serious degree that it could lead to disastrous results. I remember how some farmers took strong objection to being told what they could or could not do with their own land. That was an early indication of how many people react today, as more and more information comes to light about the irreversible damage that we humans are inflicting on the very earth we depend upon for life.

A first clear cry – and recent echoes …

1962 saw the publication of a prophetic book. Its author, Rachel Carson, was an aquatic biologist who had already established a worldwide reputation for her books on the sea, but today she is chiefly remembered for Silent Spring. Although it became a best seller and is credited with creating a worldwide awareness of the dangers of environmental pollution, her suggestion that synthetic pesticides were doing more harm than good caused many to dismiss her book as ‘so much hogwash’. Her death in 1964 prevented her from seeing her allegations confirmed, the banning of many pesticides, and the rapid spread of organic farming.

The last three decades have seen an ever-increasing number of books warning that a frightening nemesis is now appearing on the horizon as a result of our changing relationship with the earth. Their titles commonly proclaim the gravity of the problem: The Fate of the Earth (Jonathan Schell, 1982); The Dream of the Earth (Thomas Berry, 1988); The Crisis of Life on Earth (Tim Radford, 1990); Earth in the Balance (Al Gore, 1993); The Sacred Balance (David Suzuki, 1997); and Five Holocausts (Derek Wilson, 2001).

These modern secular prophets are alerting us to the early warning signals coming from a planet now feeling dire pressure from the activities of the human species. What may be called the humanisation of the earth is leading to an imminent global crisis. Our species is now in the process of destroying in a few decades a life-support system that took millions of years to evolve. Some of these prophets are so pessimistic that they question whether it is possible for some six to eight billion people to change the direction of our global life sufficiently in the relatively short time left in which to do it.

Others are more hopeful and see no reason why, with human ingenuity and the latest technology, we should not be able to reverse the dangerous trends we have already set in motion. Jonathan Schell ends The Fate of the Earth by pointing out that humankind must make a choice between the path that leads to death and the path that leads to life. His words are reminiscent of the ancient challenge of Moses: ‘I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil . . . therefore choose life.’

…falling on deaf ears

But how many today understand that we face a choice between life and death on a global scale? The large masses of the earth’s population are almost completely ignorant of the larger picture. They are so caught up with what goes on in their own little worlds that they are as yet unaware of what the prophets are saying, let alone able or concerned to judge or act upon their prophecies. A significant proportion of these inhabit the third-world countries of Africa, India, and South America, and can be excused for their ignorance on the grounds that all of their energy and thinking is taken up with the need to scratch out a living.

Much more serious is the ignorance or apathy to be found among those in the first and second worlds whose affluent life styles are chiefly responsible for the crisis. There too, most people are so taken up with personal and local affairs of the moment that they either remain largely unaware of the crisis or feel helpless to make any difference. It is there also that we find the vigorous critics who dismiss the prophetic voices as ‘doom merchants’, purveyors of unrest who grossly exaggerate the warning signs and ignore the capacity of human ingenuity to respond positively to them. These critics are people whose wealth, business interests and economic policies are dependent upon the very technology currently doing the damage. Largely driven by acquisitiveness, they appear to have shut their eyes to the consequences of their own self-interest.

A muffled detonation …

What is it we should all be more aware of? First and perhaps foremost is the population explosion. It has been estimated that at the beginning of the Christian era the human population of the earth was some 300 million. Population growth remained relatively slow, so that by 1750 it had reached only about 800 million. Disease, epidemics, famine and high mortality among children always took their toll. But that has now been drastically changed by such otherwise beneficial developments as medical science, education in personal hygiene, better sanitation, and improved economic conditions.

Population growth has steadily accelerated since 1750. By 1800 the world population had reached one billion, and it had taken some two million years to do so. But by 1930 it had doubled to two billion. A third billion was added by 1960, a fourth by 1974, the fifth before 1990 and the sixth by 1998. During the twentieth century the human population of the earth quadrupled, and this in spite of the tens of millions who died from world wars or epidemics.

… becomes a super-bomb

Present projections estimate that the global population will have reached eight billion people by 2025. We currently add the equivalent of another London every month and another China every fifteen years. We see this expansion only from the human point of view, but relative to all the other animals, the human species has suddenly expanded like a plague of locusts, and is eating them out of house and home.

Since the size of the planet remains the same, the increase in human population forces people to live more closely together. In 1800 only 3 per cent of the world’s population lived in urban areas. By 1900 it had grown to 13 per cent and this had reached 50 per cent by 2000. This trend not only produces slums but means that many fewer people have first-hand experience of the earth and the way it produces our food. This fact, coupled with the rapid process of modern globalization, means that humans are becoming increasingly dependent upon one another for their well-being and basic sustenance, so that any upset has increasingly disastrous ramifications.

Until the 1950s the debate about human numbers remained largely academic. When artificial forms of contraception were coming into common use in the first half of the twentieth century, some people vigorously opposed them on religious grounds, regarding it purely as a matter of personal morality. Now that the global population is reaching the limits of sustainability on the earth, contraception has become a social concern as well as a personal one. The Roman Catholic rejection of all artificial forms of contraception and the still widespread moral condemnation of clinical abortion show that traditional morality is sadly out of touch with today’s moral problems.

Collateral damage

The population explosion is also drastically altering the racial composition of the world’s population. For example, in 1950 the population of Africa was only half that of Europe, but by 2025 it could be three times that of Europe. By the year 2025 Nigeria’s population could jump from 113 to 301 million, Kenya’s from 25 to 77 million, Tanzania’s from 27 to 84 million and Zaire’s from 36 to 99 million. This means that nations already economically depressed, and in many cases saddled with massive international debt, will bear the burden of feeding between two and three times as many more mouths than they do at present. This predicament is setting the scene for a pandemic of unthinkable proportions.

A massive rise in population means a gigantic increase in the demands being made on the earth to provide the necessities of life – water, food, clothing, housing. Modern agricultural science and new technologies have made possible a great increase in food production. That is the positive side. Indeed the affluent countries have never been so well fed. But the radical imbalance in global wealth has meant increasing hunger in third world countries, most of them the very countries where the population is expanding fastest. Perhaps with more willingness to share the fruits of the earth, and more efficient means of distributing food, we could feed the global population adequately. But while this sanguine hope is continually promoted, it shows no signs of fulfilment. And even this argument will soon become invalid if we do not find a means of stabilizing the population of the globe.

The best-laid plans …

But increasing food production to meet the needs of an expanding population has had some dangerous ancillary effects that may cumulatively spell disaster on the grand scale. To make the point quickly, I shall present the chain of cause and effect in a somewhat simplistic manner.

• To meet the basic needs of an expanding population we must increase the food supply.

• To achieve this, agricultural science has come to depend on artificial fertilizers and pesticides, some of which have negative side effects.

• To house more people we must build more cities.

• To build more cities we must gobble up valuable agricultural land.

• To replace the land thus lost, as well as breaking in even more agricultural land to meet the increased food requirements, we destroy the forests. (The earth’s forests are shrinking by 17 million hectares per year, the rain forest of the Amazon valley being the prime example.)

• By destroying the rainforests and other surface vegetation we are losing productive land by washing vast amounts of topsoil into the sea. The United States alone is reported to be losing four to six billion tonnes annually.

• But the rainforests, by absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen, have been instrumental in keeping in balance the atmospheric gases necessary for life.

• The increased level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of the greatly increased burning of fossil fuels is now causing the phenomenon of global warming.

• Global warming is changing our weather patterns, bringing extremes of both storms and droughts, and thus seriously reducing food production.

• Global warming will soon cause the ice-caps to melt and the sea levels to rise, endangering the homes of hundreds of millions who live close to sea level.

• A number of our inventions and activities have had the effect of depleting the ozone layer, which protects us from the harmful effects of the sun's radiation. This not only increases the incidence of malignant cancers but can also bring about unforeseen genetic changes.

…can go astray

It was not until the twentieth century that the effects of such human factors as the population expansion and human technology began to rival natural forces. Together they are now sufficient to compromise the natural conditions of the surface of the planet. We are not only causing the extinction of many other species by destroying their natural habitats; we are endangering our own habitat by polluting air and water, the two most basic elements on which our existence depends.

The chain of causes linking these unfortunate phenomena is an example of the interconnectedness of all life on this planet. It vividly illustrates the reason why we had to create the new term ‘ecology’. We are coming to have such a radically new understanding of all life on this planet that the term ‘biosphere’, coined less than a century ago, is now being replaced by ‘ecosphere’.

Just as we have come to understand each organism internally as a complex living system, so also each species of organism constitutes with its natural environment a larger living system, which could be called a ‘life field’. Thus all forms of planetary life are involved in, and dependent on, systems. The ecosphere is a complex system of systems within systems, and is itself dependent on the energy of the sun.

Wanted: equilibrium

The continuing life of each species depends upon the preservation of the delicate balance that has evolved between the organism and the environment that supports it. Each organism contains self-regulating mechanisms that help to preserve that balance. We can understand this better by thinking of the organism we know best – the human being. We have long been accustomed to think of ourselves as wholes, rather than as aggregations of parts. Indeed, it is only modern physiology that has fully identified the various organs, glands and immune systems that exist within the human body and promote its well-being. When one or more of those systems has its balance disturbed and can no longer function (as, say, in diabetes) our health (literally, our ‘wholeness’) suffers. We become ill and, if the balance cannot be restored, we die.

The earth both provides certain basic necessities and imposes certain requirements for the survival of all its creatures. Humans have evolved within those parameters. Our respiratory system is suited to both the nature and the proportions of the gases found in the atmosphere. Our bodies, which are 80 per cent water, reflect the earth’s abundant supply of that vital liquid. The ozone layer protects us from the sun’s harmful radioactivity. Our muscles and bone structure have evolved to meet the conditions of the earth’s gravitational pull. For humans to be healthy they must be able to breathe fresh air, drink clean water, eat adequate food, and live in an environment not too different from that in which they became human. They must even keep to a diet not too different from that of their ancestors going back tens of thousands of years. The more the environment changes from that in which a species has evolved, the more the health and behaviour of that species will show maladjustment. If the change is great enough, the health of the species will deteriorate to the point of extinction. We humans will always be earthlings, and like all other earthly creatures our existence depends upon our mother earth.

The fast-increasing human population has not only put added strain on the natural resources of the earth; more seriously, it has upset the ecological balance between various species and their sources of sustenance. By our sudden expansion in numbers, we humans are interfering with the food chains that have evolved over time, and are depriving many other creatures of sustenance to the point where first, they become extinct, and later, we face a similar fate. All food for human consumption, as well as that for many other species, comes either directly or indirectly from four ecological systems: croplands, grasslands, forests and fisheries. And each of these is being seriously depleted by a rapidly growing human population.

More than a dozen years ago 1575 distinguished scientists, including more than half of all living Nobel Laureates, signed a document that warned of the dire threat to western civilisation in the foreseeable future and appealed for help from industries, businesses, and religions. During the last four years 1300 scientists from 95 countries have produced a report entitled Millennium Ecosystems Assessment, which concludes that the human race has so ruinously squandered the earth’s natural resources during the last fifty years that the planet has been overdrawn, thereby saddling our descendants with an environmental debt of staggering proportions.

Christianity and crisis

How shall Christianity – which has always claimed to be concerned with the salvation of humankind – respond to this global ecological crisis? This is a question we must now explore.

In the light of what was said earlier it may seem odd that the idea of an imminent global catastrophe is not at all new for Christianity. On the contrary, such an expectation permeates the New Testament. In his earliest letters Paul referred to the imminent coming of wide and sudden destruction that would arrive without warning like a thief in the night. Early Christians believed the end of the world would come in their own lifetime – they referred to it as the eschaton, or end-time – and preached the Gospel as the answer to that dire threat. Paul and others declared that when in the last days the global catastrophe struck, Jesus Christ would return in glory and establish his everlasting kingdom. Only those who responded to the Gospel would be saved.

Many current New Testament scholars have cast doubt on whether this concern with the end-time was a part of the original teaching of Jesus; but, if not, it certainly played a prominent role in Christianity from the time of Paul onwards. It may well have been one of the factors contributing to the rapid spread of Christianity in the latter half of the first century. In any case, the first three Gospels, written some twenty to fifty years after Paul, placed warnings of the coming eschaton very prominently in the mouth of Jesus. In Mark we find Jesus warning of the tribulation shortly to come, on a scale such as had never been known since the beginning of time: the sun would be darkened, the moon would lose its light, the stars would fall from the sky and heaven and earth would pass away. In Luke, Jesus is said to have likened the imminent crisis to the Great Flood that wiped out nearly all of planetary life in the time of Noah.

Once this expectation of a world crisis became incorporated into Gospels that were later raised to the status of Holy Writ, it gained a permanent role in the Christian tradition. Of course Christian interest in it has waxed and waned through the centuries. A striking example is the fact that St. John’s Gospel, written at the end of the first century, seems to have ignored it. Indeed, some scholarly interpreters have regarded this last Gospel as a fresh interpretation of the Christian message especially written for the time after the first wave of expectation had passed. One such scholar called it ‘realized eschatology’, a term by which he indicated the Gospel’s assumption that the eschaton had already come, that Jesus had already returned, but not in the way originally expected; rather he was now present spiritually in the life of the church.

But even if that were the Fourth Gospel’s intention, it could hardly erase the early convictions about an imminent end-time and the hope for the return of Jesus Christ, since these remained in the earlier Gospels and were subsequently spelt out in the Creeds. This fact in itself was enough to ensure that, from time to time throughout Christian history, there has been a resurgence of this eschatological expectation among Christians. In the nineteenth century the many Protestant sects that arose on the basis of biblical literalism nearly all focused on the imminent end of the world and the return of Jesus. The Jehovah’s Witnesses still make much of it and the Seventh Day Adventists even included this hope of the Second Coming in their name.

Curiously enough, when modern methods of studying the Bible began to emerge a little over 200 years ago, scholars at first took little notice of this element in the New Testament. It was not until just over a century ago that Johannes Weiss, followed by Albert Schweitzer, alerted biblical scholars to what then became known as the eschatological strand in the New Testament. Awareness of it came as a severe jolt to the liberal theologians of the day, for they found it difficult to reconcile these end-time expectations with much traditional theology, to say nothing of modern religious thought. The division of academic theology known as ‘eschatology’ has long focused its attention exclusively on the eternal destiny of the individual after death, rather than on the destiny of the earth. Generally speaking therefore, theologians at the beginning of the twentieth century concluded that the eschatological expectations embedded in the New Testament were simply part of the mythical thinking of the ancient world that had now become outmoded.

The rise of a dangerous counter-current

Such an interpretation does not satisfy those who read the Bible literally. They take the New Testament references to the ‘last days’ very seriously. This is why, as fundamentalism has spread during the twentieth century, and is even moving into some mainline churches, we encounter the most widespread manifestation of end-of-world thinking to be found among Christians since the religion’s earliest days. A Time-CNN poll taken in 2002 found 59 percent of Americans to believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelation are about to come true – and nearly one-quarter to think the Bible actually predicted the 9/11 attacks. This explains why the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the ‘Left Behind’ series, written by the Christian fundamentalist Timothy LaHaye. By relating the words of the Bible to current events in the Middle East, he has prophesied a scenario of the future that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

Here is a sketch. Israel will shortly occupy the rest of the lands long ago given to it by God. It will then be attacked by the legions of the antichrist - presumably the Arab nations and Russia. This will lead to the final showdown, biblically known as the battle of Armageddon. The messiah will return for the ‘rapture’, the process by which true believers will be lifted up from the earth and transported to Heaven. From their grandstand seat they will watch the fate of those ‘left behind’. The latter will suffer years of tribulation after which the righteous will enter Heaven with the Son of God and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

To all reasonably thoughtful people living in the modern world this whole scenario is so preposterous as to be quite laughable. We could afford to ignore it were not the people buying these books the very ones who put George Bush back into the White House. They also lend strong moral support to Israel and the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and back it up with money. Far from fearing war with Islam, they welcome any future Christian-Islamic conflict as a necessary step on the road that will bring them final redemption. They see the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as warm-up acts. Iran may be next. This is a message that can be heard regularly in the United States over 1600 Christian radio stations and 250 Christian TV stations.

An ominous concurrence

The two very different apocalyptic pictures I have outlined constitute a tragic irony. At the very time when the Christian community is being challenged to direct its energies to the ecological crisis now looming as a present reality, its fundamentalist wing is giving its attention to a mythical global crisis expected two thousand years ago. It is alarming enough that fundamentalist Christians in the world’s most powerful nation have become such a significant force that they now endanger international peace, but far worse, their vision of a coming Armageddon is blinding them and others to the real problem we face – the ecological crisis.

It is their misuse of the Bible that has led fundamentalists astray. Certainly the Bible records numerous warnings issued by the ancient prophets; however, they were speaking not to us, but to the people of their own times. It is salutary to recall that Jesus rebuked the religious people of his day for failing ‘to interpret the signs of the times’. It has been left largely to prophets outside of the churches to read the signs of the times in our day. Christian fundamentalists completely reject and even despise today’s secular prophets. They show no interest at all in the many environmental initiatives now being launched in an attempt to respond positively to the ecological crisis. Since the great majority of Christian fundamentalists live in the United States, it is no accident that this most powerful nation not only rejects such international protocols as the Kyoto agreements, but undertakes actions that directly endanger world peace.

Perhaps the most striking example of the fundamentalist mind-set is James Gaius Watt, who rose to be Secretary of the Interior in the Reagan administration. He advocated giving developers access to national parks and natural resources. His argument was as transparent as it was chilling: ‘The earth is merely a temporary way station on the road to eternal life. It is unimportant except as a place of testing to get into heaven. The earth was put here by the Lord for his people to subdue and to use for profitable purposes on the way to the hereafter.’

This line of reasoning did not end with the Reagan administration. The present administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s office on the environment recently declared that the re-election of President Bush now provides a mandate to relax pollution limits for ozone, to eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections, to ease pollution standards for cars, to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public, and to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

To the degree that it reflects the administration’s fundamentalist supporters, such an attitude shows Christianity at its very worst and in its most dangerous form. This form of traditional Christianity, however much it may still bring comfort to individuals, shows no concern for the salvation of the planet and is becoming a threat to the future of humankind. Clearly, the two threatened global catastrophes described above are fundamentally different from each another. That envisaged by the fundamentalists is solely in the hands of God; all that humans can do is to passively accept the salvation being offered by God in the Christian Gospel. The ecological crisis, on the other hand, is the result of human action and only humans can do something positive about it.

God helps those who help themselves

If Christianity is to respond to the challenge contained in the manifesto issued by the ecological scientists, it must put its own house in order. It must first reject completely the ancient expectation of a final Armageddon and the literal return of Jesus Christ. Then it must replace this by an appreciative understanding of the real crisis facing humankind – the ecological crisis – and initiate a positive response to it. How can it do that? An American Catholic priest, Thomas Berry, has said ‘we must move beyond a spirituality focused simply on the divine and the human to a spirituality concerned with survival of the natural world in its full splendour, its fertility, and its integral well-being’.

In the lectures that follow I shall try to sketch what this new spirituality may entail. It could appropriately be called the Greening of Christianity.