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

It's also worth noting that Lynn White was a Presbyterian and was on the board of director's of one of their seminaries in California. His presentation in his famous Science article was thus that of an "insider" of the church, not someone pushing an anti-Christian polemic.
 
Karl
************
Karl V. Evans
cmekve@aol.com
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: gmurphy@raex.com
To: TDavis@messiah.edu; asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 2:57 PM
Subject: 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/
To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
________________________________________________________________________
AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com.

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Mon Apr 23 18:17:27 2007