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New House Rules:
Christianity, Economics, and Planetary Living
Sallie
McFague
INTRODUCTION
 S
THE ENVIRONMENT A RELIGIOUS ISSUE? Many do not think so. For most Americans,
the problems with our deteriorating planet can be fixed by science, managed
with new technology.1
Let us hope that this is so, that
science and technology can solve the looming environmental crisis. But
it may not be that simple. Lynn White’s oft-quoted 1967 essay laid the blame
for environmental deterioration at the feet of religion, specifically
Christianity.2
If Christianity has been capable of doing such immense damage, then surely the
restoration of nature must also lie, at least in part, with Christianity. I
believe it does, but also with other world religions as well as with education,
government, economics—and science. The environmental crisis is a “planetary
agenda,” involving all people, all areas of expertise—and all religions.
This is the case because the
environmental crisis is not a “problem” that any specialization can solve.
Rather, it is about how we—all of us human beings and all other creatures—can
live justly and sustainably on our planet. It is about the “house rules” that
will enable us to do so. These house rules include attitudes as well as
technologies, behaviors as well as science. They are what the oikos,
the house we all share, demands that we think and do so there will be enough
for everyone. The words for these house rules are “derivatives” of oikos—ecumenicity,
ecology, and economics—facilitating the management of the resources of planet
Earth so that all may thrive indefinitely.
How does religion, and
specifically Christianity, fit into this picture? Christianity fits where all
religions do: as a worldview supporting the house rules. It fits at the level
of the deeply held and often largely unconscious assumptions about who we are
in the scheme of things, and how we should act.3
While “anthropology” is not the only concern of religions, it is a central one
and, for the purposes of the ecological crisis, the one that may count the
most.
This essay will make the case
that Christianity—at least since the Protestant Reformation, and especially
since the Enlightenment—has, through its individualistic view of human life,
implicitly and sometimes explicitly, supported a neoclassical economic paradigm
and a consumer culture that has devastated the planet and widened the gap
between the rich and the poor.4
It will also suggest that Christianity, given its oldest and deepest
anthropology, should support an alternative ecological model, one in which our
well-being is seen as interrelated and interdependent with the well-being of
all other living things and earth processes.5
Religions, and especially
Christianity in Western culture, have a central role in forming who we think we
are and what we have the right to do. It is the claim of this author that an
individualistic anthropology is presently supported in the West not only by
Christianity but also by government and the contemporary economic system.6
When these three major institutions—religion, government, and the economic
system—present a united front, a “sacred canopy” is cast over a society,
validating the behavior of its people. It is difficult to believe that science
and technology alone can solve an ecological crisis supported by this
triumvirate, for these institutions as presently constituted legitimate human
beings continuing to feel, think, and act in ways that are basically contrary
to the conservation and just distribution of the world’s resources.
NEOCLASSICAL AND ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS
Neoclassical and ecological economics offer two
dramatically different anthropologies, with different “house rules.” The first
model sees human beings on the planet as a collection of individuals drawn
together to benefit each other by fully exploiting natural resources. The
second model sees the planet as a community that survives and prospers only
through the interdependence of all its parts, human and nonhuman. The first
model rests on assumptions from the eighteenth century: it sees human beings as
individuals with rights and responsibilities, and the world as a machine, a
collection of individual parts that are only externally related to one another.
The second model rests on assumptions from postmodern science: it sees human
beings as conscious and radically dependent parts of a larger whole, and the
world as an organism, internally related in all its parts.
Both are models,
interpretations, of the world and our place in it: neither is a description.
This point must be underscored because the first model seems “natural”—indeed,
“inevitable” and “true”—to most middle-class Westerners, while the second model
seems novel, perhaps even utopian or fanciful. In fact, both come from the
assumptions of different historical periods; both are world-pictures built on
these assumptions, and each vies for our agreement and loyalty.
We need to assess the “economy”
of both models, their notions of the allocation of scarce resources to family
members, to determine which view of the “good life” is better. In this essay, I
suggest that the machine model is injurious to nature and to poor people, while
the organic model is healthier for the planet and all its inhabitants.
The reason economics is so
important, why it is a religious and ecological issue, is that it is not just a
“matter of money”; rather, it is a matter of survival and flourishing.
Economics is an issue of values. In making economic decisions, the “bottom
line” is not the only consideration. Many other values come into play, from the
health of a community to its recreational opportunities; from the beauty of
other life-forms to our concern for their well-being; from a desire to see our
children fed and clothed to a sense of responsibility for the welfare of future
generations.
Contemporary neoclassicists
generally deny that economics is about values.7
But this denial is questionable. The key feature of market capitalism is the
allocation of scarce resources by means of decentralized markets: allocation
occurs as the result of individual market transactions, each of which is guided
by self-interest.8
At the base of neoclassical economics is an anthropology: human beings are
individuals motivated by self-interest. The value by which scarce resources are
allocated, then, is the fulfillment of the self-interest of human beings. The
assumption is that each will act to maximize his or her own interest, and by so
doing will eventually benefit all—the so-called invisible hand of Adam Smith’s
classical theory.
But what of other values? Two key
ones, if we have the economics of the entire planet in mind, are the just
distribution of the earth’s resources, and the capacity of the planet to
sustain our use of its resources. However, these matters—distributive justice
to the world’s inhabitants, and the optimal scale of the human economy within
the planet’s economy—are considered “externalities” by neoclassical economics.9
In other words, the issues of who benefits from an economic system and whether
the planet can bear the system’s burden are not part of neoclassical economics.
In sum, the worldview or basic
assumption of neoclassical economics is surprisingly simple and
straightforward: the crucial assumption is that human beings are
self-interested individuals who, acting on this basis, will create a syndicate
or corporation, even a global one, capable of benefiting all eventually. Hence,
as long as the economy grows, individuals in a society will sooner or later
participate in prosperity. These assumptions about human nature are scarcely
value-neutral. They indicate a preference for a certain view of who we are and
what the goal of human effort should be: the view of human nature is
individualism and our goal is growth.
When we turn to the alternative
ecological economic paradigm we see a different set of values. Ecological
economics claims we cannot survive unless we acknowledge our profound
dependence on one another and the earth. Human need is more basic than human
greed: we are relational beings from the moment of our conception to our last
breath. The well-being of the individual is inextricably connected to the
well-being of the whole.
These two interpretations of who
we are and where we fit in the world are almost opposites of each other.
Neoclassical economics begins with the unconstrained allocation of resources to
competing individuals, on the assumption that if everyone acts in this way,
issues of fair distribution and sustainability will eventually work themselves
out. Ecological economics begins with the health of the whole planet, on the
assumption that only as it thrives now and in the future will its various
parts, including human beings, thrive as well. In other words, ecological
economics begins with sustainability and distributive justice, not with
the allocation of resources among competing individuals. Before all else, the
community must be able to survive (sustainability), which it can do only if all
members have the use of resources (distributive justice). Then, within these
parameters, the allocation of scarce resources among competing users can take
place.
Ecological economics does not
pretend to be value-free; its preference is evident—the well-being and
sustainability of our household, planet Earth. Ecological economics is the
management of a community’s physical necessities for the benefit of all, a
human enterprise that seeks to maximize the optimal functioning of the planet’s
gifts and services for all users. Ecological economics, then, is first of all a
vision of how human beings ought to live on planet Earth in light of the
perceived reality of where and how we live. We live in, with, and
from the earth. This story of who we are is based on contemporary science, not
on an eighteenth-century story about social reality.
NEOCLASSICAL OR ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS: WHICH IS GOOD FOR
PLANET EARTH?
Can neoclassical economics as currently understood
sustain the planet? In the neoclassical economic view the “world” is a machine;
presumably, then, when some parts give out they can be replaced with
substitutes. If, for instance, our main ecological problem is nonrenewable
resources (oil, coal, minerals, etc.), then human ingenuity might well fill in
the gaps when they occur. Since the earth is considered an “externality” by
neoclassical economics, then “good for the planet” can only mean good for human
beings to use. Sustainability is not the major
priority.
At the beginning of the new
millennium, however, our planet faces more than the loss of nonrenewable
resources. It also faces an accelerating loss of renewable resources,
such as water, trees, fertile soil, clean air, fisheries, and biodiversity. If
our planet is more like an organism than a machine, with all its parts
interrelated and interdependent, then as its various parts lose vitality, it
will, like any “body,” become sick to the point of not functioning any longer.
Unable to sustain itself, it will die.
This is called the synergism of
planetary operation. When the various members of an ecosystem are healthy, they
work together to provide innumerable “free services” that none could provide
alone, and that we take for granted: materials production (food, fisheries,
timber, genetic resources, medicines), biological control of pests and
diseases, habitat and refuge, water supply and regulation, waste recycling and
pollution control, educational and scientific resources, recreation.10
These services are essential to our survival and well-being; they can continue
only if we sustain them. This “list” of services should be seen as a “web”:
none of them can function alone; each of them depends on the others. These
services are the “commons” that we hold in trust for future generations.
The most important services are
not necessarily the most visible ones. For instance, in a forest it is not only
the standing trees that are valuable, but also the fallen ones (the “nurse
logs” on which new trees grow), the habitat the forest provides for birds and
insects that pollinate crops and fight diseases, the plants that provide
biodiversity for food and medicines, the forest canopy that breaks the force of
winds, the roots that reduce soil erosion, and the photosynthesis of plants
that helps stabilize the climate. The smallest providers—the insects, worms,
spiders, fungi, algae, and bacteria—are critically important in creating a
stable, sustainable home for humans and other creatures. If such a forest is
clear-cut to harvest the tress, everything else goes as well. All these
services disappear. A healthy ecosystem—complex and diverse in all its
features, both large and small—is resilient, like a well-functioning body. A
simplified, degraded nature, supporting single-species crops in ruined soil
with inadequate water and violent weather events, results in a diminished
environment for human beings as well. “The bottom line is that for humans to be
healthy and resilient, nature must be too.”11
As we have seen, nature becomes
unhealthy gradually and in particular parts and places. But when particular
aspects are degraded beyond a certain point, the destructive effects on the
whole can be dramatic.
An excellent example of such
negative synergism is global warming. I choose this example not only because it
is among the top three planetary problems (the other two being loss of
biodiversity and uncontrolled growth in human population and consumption), but
also because it illustrates how these problems interact.
Global warming is the result of
emissions from the burning of fossil fuels; this has occurred because of the
size of the human population and also the high energy consumption of
industrialized societies. Global warming affects not only human beings, but
also plants and other animals. Since the weather is the largest and most
sensitive system influencing the planet, its state is a barometer of the
earth’s health.
Middle-class Westerners produce
three to five times more of the carbon dioxide largely responsible for global
warming than do people living in developing countries.12
Automobiles are the single greatest producer of carbon dioxide emissions, but a
consumer lifestyle in general is the culprit. While other countries such as
China and India may equal or surpass the West in greenhouse gas emissions in
the future, Westerners have been the preachers of consumerism as the good life.
We have not only produced the vast majority of emissions to date, but we export
the ideology of consumerism around the world as the heartbeat of every nation’s
prosperity. Neoclassical economics, with its twin values of individual
insatiability and economic growth, is the engine behind global warming.
It is the growing consensus among
the world’s weather experts that by the year 2050 we can expect a
2.5ºC
increase in the worldwide temperature, and that this increase will be due
largely to human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels.13
The results are predicted to be devastating from a human point of view:
desertification of the chief grain-producing lands, a growing scarcity of fresh
water, loss of trees, flooding of coastal areas and islands, the spread of
tropical diseases, an increase in violent weather events, a likely shortage of
food, and so on. Global warming will change life as we know it and has already
begun to do so. Through our consumer lifestyle we have triggered fearful,
though still largely unknown, consequences for the most important and sensitive
system within which we and everything else exist.
The prospect of global warming is
not science fiction. According to projections made by our best scientists, the
question is no longer “What if global warming comes?” but “How bad will it be?”
At both the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio
in 1992 and at the follow-up conferences since, the industrial countries agreed
in principle to stabilize and eventually cut back carbon dioxide emissions.
However, little if any practical progress has been made, in large part because
the neoclassical economic worldview is so dominant. In countries like the
United States, there has been little public discussion of the consequences of
consumerism. All of us are collaborators in this silence. We enjoy the
consumer lifestyle; in fact, most of us are addicted to it, and, like addicts,
we cheerfully live in a state of denial. But we need to overcome our denial.
The prospect of global warming should disturb our complacency. Unless we change
our ways, the future will be very grim. Global warming is the canary in the
mine, whose death is a clue that our lifestyle goes outside the planet’s house
rules.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE ECOLOGICAL ECONOMIC MODEL
One way to change our ways is to begin to think
differently about economics. In metaphorical terms, ecological economics
invites us to picture ourselves not as isolated individuals but as housemates.
The ecological model claims that housemates must abide by three main rules:
take only your share, clean up after yourselves, and keep the house in good
repair for future occupants. We do not own the house; we do not even rent it.
It is loaned to us for our lifetime, with the proviso that we obey the above
rules so that the house can feed, shelter, nurture, and delight those who move
in after us. These rules are not laws that we can circumvent or disobey; they
are the conditions of our harmonious coexistence, and they are constitutive of
our happiness.
If we were to follow these rules,
we would be living within a different vision of the good life, the abundant
life, than the one that is current in our consumer culture and that is
destroying the planet. We would begin to accept what ecological economist
Robert Costanza calls our greatest calling:
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Probably the most challenging task facing
humanity today is the creation of a shared vision of a sustainable and
desirable society, one that can provide permanent prosperity within the
biophysical constraints of the real world in a way that is fair and equitable
to all of humanity, to other species, and to future generations.14
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Now, given these two economic worldviews—the neoclassical and the
ecological—which should Christianity support? Presently, Christianity is
supporting the neoclassical economic paradigm to the degree that it does not
speak against it and side publicly with the ecological view. Does this evident
indifference matter? Yes, it does, if one accepts the assumption of this essay
that worldviews matter. While there is no direct connection between believing
and acting, thinking and doing, there is an implicit, deeper, and more
insidious one: when a worldview seems “natural” and “inevitable,” it becomes a
secret source of our decisions and actions.
Moreover, a persuasive case can
be made that there is an intrinsic connection between the ecological economic
model and Christianity. Distributive justice and sustainability, as goals for
planetary living, are pale reflections, but reflections nonetheless, of what
Jesus meant by the kingdom of God.15
Let us look at the vivid portrait of Jesus by New Testament scholar John
Dominic Crossan.16“
The open commensality [i.e., table] and radical egalitarianism of Jesus’
Kingdom of God are more terrifying than anything we have ever imagined, and
even if we can never accept it, we should not explain it away as something
else.”17
For Jesus, the kingdom of God was epitomized by everyone being invited
to the table; the kingdom is radically egalitarian at the level of satisfying
bodily needs. Crossan regards the Parable of the Feast as central to
understanding what Jesus means by the kingdom of God. This is a shocking story,
trespassing society’s boundaries of class, gender, status, and ethnicity—as its
end result is inviting all to the feast. There are several versions of
the story (Matt. 22:1–13; Luke 14:15–24; Gospel of Thomas, 64), but in each one
a prominent person invites a number of other people to a banquet, only to have
them decline the invitation. One chooses instead to survey a land purchase,
another to try out some new oxen, a third to attend a wedding. The frustrated
host then tells his servants to go out into the streets of the city and bring
whomever they can find to dinner: the poor, the maimed, the blind, the lame,
the good, and the bad (the list varies in the three versions). The shocking
implication is that everyone—anyone—is invited to share in God’s bounty.
As Crossan remarks, if beggars come to your door, you might give them food or
even invite them into the kitchen for a meal, but you do not ask them to join
the family in the dining room or invite them back on Saturday night for supper
with your friends.18
But that is exactly what happens in this story. The kingdom of God, according
to this portrait of Jesus, is “more terrifying than anything we have imagined”
because it demolishes all our carefully constructed boundaries between the
worthy and the unworthy, and it does so at the most physical, bodily level.
For first-century Jews, the key
boundary was purity laws: an observant Jewish man did not eat with the poor,
with women, with the diseased, or with the “unrighteous.” For us, the critical
barrier is economic laws: we are not called to sustainable and just sharing of
resources with the poor, the disadvantaged, the “lazy.” To cross these barriers
in both cultures is improper, not expected—in fact, shocking. And yet, in both
cultures, the issue is the most basic bodily one: who is invited to share the
food—in other words, who lives and who dies? In both cases, the answer is the
same: everyone, regardless of status, is invited. This vision of God’s will for
the world does not specifically mention just, sustainable planetary living—but
it is surely more in line with that worldview than it is with the blind
satisfaction of individual consumer desires.
Unlike our first-century
Mediterranean counterparts, North American middle-class Christians are not
terrified by the unclean; but we are terrified by the poor. There are so many
of them—billions! Surely we cannot be expected to share the planet’s resources
justly and sustainably with all of them. Yet the Jesus of the parable appears
to disagree: he is not, it seems, interested so much in “religion,” including
his own, as in human well-being, beginning with the body: feeding the hungry
and healing the suffering. Moreover, his message, according to Crossan, had
less to do with what he did for others than with what others might do for their
neighbors:
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The Kingdom of God was not, for Jesus, a
divine monopoly exclusively bound to his own person. It began at the level of
the body and appeared as a shared community of healing and eating—that is to
say, of spiritual and physical resources available to each and all without
distinctions, discrimination, or hierarchies. One entered the Kingdom as a way
of life and anyone who could live it could bring it to others. It was not just
words alone, or deeds alone, but both together as life-style.19 |
The body is the locus: how we
treat needy bodies gives the clue to how a just society will be organized. It
suggests that correct “table manners” are a sign of a just society, the kingdom
of God. If one accepts this interpretation, then the “table” becomes not just
the bread and wine of communion, but also the public meals of bread and fishes
that one finds throughout Jesus’ ministry.20
At these events, all are invited to share in the food, whether it be meager or
sumptuous. Were such an understanding of the Eucharist to infiltrate Christian
churches today, it could be mind-changing—and maybe world-changing, too.
Is it also absurd, foolish, and
utopian? Perhaps, but, as I have suggested, there appears to be a solid link, a
degree of continuity, between this reconstruction of society—the kingdom of
God—and what I have described as the ecological economic worldview. Perhaps
just, sustainable planetary living is a foretaste, a glimmer, an inkling of the
kingdom of God.
If this is the case, then for
middle-class North American Christians it may well be that sin is
refusing to acknowledge the link between the kingdom and the ecological
economic worldview, explaining it away because of the consequences for our
privileged lifestyle. Sustainability and the just distribution of resources are
concerned with human and planetary well-being for all. This, I
suggest, is the responsible interpretation of the Parable of the Feast for
North American Christians today. By paying attention to those invited to the
feast and those excluded, this interpretation demands that we look at the
systemic structures separating the haves and the have-nots in our time. And it
demands that we name these structures for what they are: evil. They are the
collective forms of our “sin.” They are the institutions, laws, and
international bodies of market capitalism (often aided by the silence of the
church) that allow a few to get richer while most become poorer.
NEXT STEPS: A CHRISTIAN RESPONSE TO THE ENVIRONMENTAL
CRISIS
In order to dislodge the neoclassical economic worldview
and Christianity’s complicity with it, three steps are needed.
The first step is to become
conscious of neoclassical economics as a model—not a description—of how to
allocate scarce resources. There are other ways to live, other ways to divide
things up, other goals for human beings to pursue. “Economics” is always
necessary, but not necessarily neoclassical economics: ecological economics is
an alternative.
The second step is to suggest
some visions of the good life that are not consumer-dominated, visions that are
just and sustainable. The good life is not necessarily the consumer life;
rather, it could include providing the basic necessities for all, universal
medical care and education, opportunities for creativity and meaningful work,
time for family and friends, green spaces in cities, and wilderness for other
creatures. We need to ask what really makes people happy, and which of
these visions are most just to the world’s inhabitants and most sustainable for
the planet.
The third step is to rethink what
a different worldview—the ecological economic one—would mean for the basic
doctrines of Christianity: God and the world, Christ and salvation, human life
and discipleship. While this last task is beyond the scope of this essay, I
would like to end with a few brief comments about God and the world, because
this is at the heart of who we think we are and what we should do. Since our
interpretive context, the ecological economic model, is about the just and
sustainable allocation of resources among all planetary users, the framework
for speaking of God and the world becomes worldly well-being. To phrase it in
terms of a gloss on Irenaeus of Lyons: “The glory of God is every creature
fully alive.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it “worldly Christianity”: he said
that God is neither a metaphysical abstraction nor the answer to gaps in our
knowledge—God is neither in the sky nor on the fringes, but at “the center of
the village,” in the midst of life, both its pains and its joys.21
An ecological economic model means an earthly God, an incarnate God, an
immanental God.
The general outline of this
theology is basically different from the theology implied by the neoclassical
model of economics. A “worldly Christianity” entails a movement toward the
earth: from the otherworldly to this world; from above to below; from a
distant, external God to a near, immanental God; from soul to body; from
individualism to community; from mechanistic to organic thinking; from
spiritual salvation to holistic well-being; from anthropocentrism to
cosmocentrism. The ecological model means a shift not from God to the world,
but from a distant God related externally to the world to an embodied God who
is the source of the world’s life and fulfillment. The neoclassical economic
model assumes that God, like the human being, is an individual—in fact, the
superindividual who controls the world through laws of nature. This God is like
a good mechanic who has produced a well-designed machine that operates
efficiently. This God is present at the beginning (creation) and intervenes
from time to time to influence personal and public history, but is otherwise
absent from the world. An ecological theology, on the contrary, claims that God
is radically present in the world, as close as the breath, the joy, and the
suffering of every creature. The two views of God and the world, then, are very
different: in the one, God’s power is evident in God’s distant control of the
world; in the other, God’s glory is manifest in God’s total self-giving to the
world.
In closing, I will note that
these two pictures of God and the world suggest two different answers to the
questions of who we are and what we should do. In the first, we are individuals
responsible to a transcendent God who rewards or punishes according to our
merits and God’s mercy. In the second, we are beings in community living in the
presence of God who is the power and love in everything that exists. In the
first, we should do what is fair to other individuals while taking care of our
own well-being. In the second, we should do what is necessary to work with God
to create a just and sustainable planet, for only in that way will all
flourish. This is the great work of the twenty-first century. Never before have
we had to think of everyone and everything all together. We now know that if we
are to survive and if our planet is to flourish, we will do so as a whole or
not at all. But we do not have to do this alone: “the earth is the Lord’s and
all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.”22
ENDNOTES
| 1 |
In a special issue of Dædalus entitled
“The Liberation of the Environment,” the lead essay, by Jesse Ausubel, opens
with the claim that the liberator of the environment will be human culture,
whose “most powerful tools are science and technology.” Dædalus 125 (3)
(Summer 1996): 1. The tone throughout the essay as well as others in the issue
is optimistic, as Ausubel notes in closing by quoting the epitaph inscribed on
the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.: “To science, pilot
of industry, conqueror of diseases, multiplier of the harvest, explorer of the
universe, revealer of nature’s laws, eternal guide to truth.” Ibid., 15. Back
to Text |
| 2 |
Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our
Ecological Crisis,” Science 155 (10 March 1967): 1203–1207. Back
to Text |
| 3 |
Marcus J. Borg describes this well: “A root
image is a fundamental ‘picture’ of reality. Perhaps most often called a
‘world-view,’ it consists of our most taken-for-granted assumptions about what
is possible. . . . Very importantly, a root image not only provides a model of
reality, but also shapes our perception and our thinking, operating almost
unconsciously within us as a dim background affecting all of our seeing and
thinking. A root image thus functions as both an image and a lens: it is a
picture of reality which becomes a lens through which we see reality.” Marcus
J. Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley
Forge, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 1994), 127. Back
to Text |
| 4 |
The literature on the neoclassical economic
model and its alternative—what I am calling the ecological economic model—is
large and growing. Some of the works I found most helpful are as follows:
Lester R. Brown et al., State of the World annual
reports (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984– ); Robert Costanza et al., An Introduction
to Ecological Economics (Boca Raton, Fla.: St. Lucie
Press, 1997); David A. Crocker and Toby Linden, eds., Ethics of Consumption:
The Good Life, Justice, and
Global Stewardship (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998);
Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good:
Redirecting the Economy Toward Community,
the Environment, and a Sustainable Future,
2d ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994); Herman E. Daly, Beyond Growth:
The Economics of Sustainable Development
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); Neva R. Goodwin, Frank Ackerman, and David
Kirion, eds., The Consumer Society (Washington, D.C.:
Island Press, 1997); Steven C. Hackett, Environmental and Natural
Resources Economics: Theory, Policy and
the Sustainable Society (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe,
1998); Larry L. Rasmussen, Earth Community Earth Ethics
(Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996); Joerg Rieger, ed., Liberating the
Future: God, Mammon, and Theology
(Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1998); United Nations, Human Development
Report, issued annually (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990– ); Michael Zweig, ed., Religion and Economic Justice
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). Back
to Text |
| 5 |
By the oldest and deepest anthropology, I am
referring to what George Hendry calls the “cosmological” and “political”
understandings of God and the world rather than the more recent and narrow
“psychological” view. George Stuart Hendry, Theology of Nature
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980), chap. 1. The latter, which supports
individualism, has arisen in the last several hundred years; but the other two,
one emphasizing the whole creation and the other the community of all human
beings, are grounded in the Hebrew Scriptures as well as in the New Testament
and early theology (especially Irenaeus and Augustine).
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| 6 |
The evidence supporting this claim would take
considerable space to lay out. Suffice it to say here that both the born-again
and New Age versions of popular religion do so; the Declaration of
Independence’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” does; and Adam
Smith’s description of the human being as a creature of insatiable greed makes
a significant contribution. All focus on the rights, desires, and needs of
individuals. Back
to Text |
| 7 |
Milton Friedman’s distinction between
“positive” and “normative” economics is typical: “Normative economics is
speculative and personal, a matter of values and preferences that are beyond
science. Economics as a science, as a tool for understanding and prediction,
must be based solely on positive economics which ‘is in principle independent
of any particular ethical position or normative judgments.’” Milton Friedman, Essays
in Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1953), 4. Back
to Text |
| 8 |
Hackett, Environmental and Natural
Resources Economics, 33. Back
to Text |
| 10 |
Janet N. Abramowitz, “Valuing Nature’s
Services,” State of the World 1997, ed.
Lester R. Brown et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977). Back
to Text |
| 12 |
Bangladesh, a country that may well be flooded
through global warming, produces a yearly average of 183 kg of carbon dioxide
per capita versus an average of 11,389 kg per capita in the industrialized
countries. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development
Report 1998 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 57. Back
to Text |
| 13 |
Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change: Second Assessment—Climate
Change 1995, published by the world Meteorological
Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme. It should be noted
that this report was the consensus of 2,500 weather scientists and was
published without a dissenting minority report. Since that time, its results
have been confirmed by recent studies. Back
to Text |
| 14 |
Costanza et al., An Introduction to
Ecological Economics, 179. Back
to Text |
| 15 |
If all contemporary understandings of Christ
should be grounded in historical judgments about Jesus of Nazareth—if there
should be continuity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith—then
we need to see if the ecological economic context is an appropriate one for
interpreting Christ and Christian discipleship for the twenty-first century. I
am not suggesting that a Christian’s faith is based on the state of historical
Jesus research at any particular time; nonetheless, Christianity has always
claimed continuity with its founder. Recent research, which has moved out of
narrow church contexts of interpretation to sociological, cultural, and
political ones of first-century Mediterranean society, has reached a remarkable
consensus on some broad outlines of Jesus’ life: most notably, that he was a
social revolutionary opposed to the structures of domination and domestication
of his day. This consensus is expressed in different ways by New Testament
scholars such as E. P Sanders, Burton Mack, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,
Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Richard Horsley. For an overview of the
scholarship, see Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship.
Back
to Text |
| 16 |
John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A
Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarpersSanFrancisco,
1994). Back
to Text |
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See letter of 30 April 1944 in Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (London:
Collins, 1960), 90ff. Back
to Text |
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©
2001 by The American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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