As a response to this change, monotheistic traditions will ask about God, creation, and moral values. Faiths not centered on a single divine Being must rethink their use of nature as a symbol of enlightenment or source of refuge, and about the possibilities of any kind of personal illumination at a time of collective destruction. The pressure to change may affect even the most familiar and comforting of religious rituals. Can communion wine really be the blood of Christ if it contains poisonous pesticide residues? Is the age-old Buddhist meditation practice of attending to the breath rendered suspect when we are breathing polluted air?
The new ecotheologies—accounts of God, ultimate meaning, human responsibility, and ethical life—typically begin with the pained recognition of just how bad things have become. Ecotheologians write about our situation with a passion born of grief, fear, and at times profound anger. These feelings are tied to an understanding of the basic features of the crisis that ecotheologians share with scientists, secular environmentalists, and informed members of the public. Thus, Catholic ethicist Daniel Maguire expresses a widely held sentiment when he grieves that “for the first time, our power to destroy outstrips the earth’s power to restore.” Overviews of the bleak facts typically follow such dire generalizations, as in the beginning of a book by a contemporary Protestant theologian: “Global warming, holes in the ozone layer, toxic wastes, oil spills, acid rain, drinking water contamination, overflowing landfills, top-soil erosion, species extinction, destruction of the rain forests, leakage of nuclear waste, lead poisoning, desertification, smog [are the] bald-faced reality of contemporary life in the world today.” It is quite interesting and not a little ironic that the new ecotheologies often start not by discussing God, faith, tradition, or the holy, but with references to information provided by biologists, chemists, and ecologists. The findings of science are leading theologians to reexamine some of the most fundamental tenets of their faith.
Alongside recognition of the severity of the crisis there is a passionate concern that religion help stop it or, at the very least, cease causing it. In 1988 Catholic priest Thomas Berry lamented, “After dealing with suicide, homicide, and genocide, our Western Christian moral code collapses completely: it cannot deal with biocide. . . . Nor have church authorities made any sustained protest against the violence being done to the planet.” Some commentators have even suggested that the particular attitude of Protestantism toward the Bible—that it is the literal word of God—removed the symbolic meanings that had previously infused the natural world and paved the way for science’s disenchantment of the world and for environmental excess: “Those who believed that the Deity had imposed a particular order on the cosmos moved their attention away from the symbolic function of objects and focused instead on the ways in which the things of nature might play some practical role in human welfare.” Thus, Protestantism, the common faith of the leading figures and nations of the Industrial Revolution and the growth of modern economies, may have had a particular affinity for environmental unconcern.
Monasticism, Spirituality and Sense of Peace in Christianity
