Such criticism does not stem from hostility, but from the belief that religions are ongoing, human-made traditions that require continual revision to remain vital and spiritually authentic. Even the most profound of revelations must be interpreted, made sense of, and applied to the concrete realities of our own situation.
This was true of every religion at its origins and has been true ever since. As “theologians,” which is ultimately just a fancy word for people who try to say what a religious tradition should mean, we are continuing the work begun by others, and we fully expect others to revise, perhaps very deeply, what we do now. We are able to criticize respectfully because we employ resources we have learned from our forbears. If we see farther than they, it is often because we stand on their shoulders. It is given to each generation to push the work of religion further, always acknowledging that we did not begin it and will not end it.
In the present context, the absolute necessity for criticism and change stems from the fact that what was once “nature” or “creation” has become, in a sense that is often bleak, “the environment.” Even if age-old religious traditions do have wonderful resources for dealing with the former, they really can have little sense of the latter. The basic intuition that the earth exceeds our understanding and our power, as Bill McKibben decisively showed in The End of Nature, has been lost forever.
Whatever may be true about the rest of the universe, it is now clear that humans can decisively alter the web of life on earth. Changing the climate and atmosphere, eliminating species, creating new life by combining genes from wildly different organisms—these and many other activities indicate that the nature that we used to face with awe and fear has become something we can now treat with disdain. The biblical injunction to “tend and serve” the garden was never as salient as it is right now—and never as ignored. And it is in that spirit of care that ecotheologians take a critical stance toward their own traditions.
For Western religions, perhaps the most important of these criticisms focuses on a fundamental mind-body or soul-body dualism that has haunted Christianity in particular, but can be found in other traditions as well. Such dualism means that in Western traditions, the differences between humanity and nature, even when accompanied by a stewardship ideal, can slide all too easily toward an unthinking and unprincipled anthropocentrism in which only human beings have any moral value.
“Ongoing repentance,” writes Protestant theologian and social activist James Nash, “is warranted. . . . For most theologians . . . the theological focus has been on sin and salvation, the fall and redemption, the divine-human relationship over against the biophysical world as a whole. The focus has been overwhelmingly on human history to the neglect of natural history.”
Islamic Environmental Vision
