Re: [asa] a thought for earth day (tomorrow)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ted Davis" <TDavis@messiah.edu>
To: "ASA list" <asa@calvin.edu>; "George Murphy" <gmurphy@raex.com>
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2007 12:14 PM
Subject: Re: [asa] a thought for earth day (tomorrow)

> Concerning the history of Christian ideas about "dominion," including a
> very
> thoughtful and accurate refutation of Lynn White's famous claim that Xty
> caused the environmental crisis, I recommend reading Cameron Wybrow's
> excellent book, "The Bible, Baconianism, and Mastery of Nature." Here is
> my
> review:
> http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1994/PSCF6-94Davis.html
>
> This is one of the very finest books on this topic, IMO, and ought to be
> much better known.

I've always thought that some Christians leaped much too quickly to "refute"
White. While it would certainly be an overstatement to say that
Christianity necessarily leads to our "ecologic crisis," it's true that
empirical Christianity - i.e., the way most Christians have read the Bible &
behaved toward the natural world in accord with what they think it says -
has contributed significantly to environmental problems. With some
exceptions (White noted St. Francis in particular), humanity's relationship
with the non-human world has been considered to have relatively little
religious significance. & the problem goes back well before the time of
Bacon. I suggest H. Paul Santmire's _The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous
Ecological Promise of Christian Theology_ (Fortress, 1985) as a good survey
of Christian attitudes toward nature from the earliest times to the
twentieth century.

Christians ought to make it clear, over against non-Christian criticisms,
that there are ways of reading scripture & doing Christian theology that
give a proper role to the natural world. But we also need to respond
properly - & sometimes sternly - to conservative Christians, & especially
those with political influence, who think that any kind of Christians
environmentalism is New Age stuff, Gaia worship &c. An article of mine at
http://www.elca.org/scriptlib/dcs/jle/article.asp?aid=97 deals briefly with
this.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/

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Received on Mon Apr 23 16:58:32 2007