Celebrating Nature by Faith. H. Paul Santmire

nature by faith, because Luther is the hero of a thousand causes. And I would not want to appear as if I were somehow taking him captive to my own—urgently contemporary—cause.

      I will next explore the pioneering achievement of that ecumenically driven American Lutheran ecotheologian of the mid-twentieth century, Joseph Sittler (Chapter 3), which began publicly with his address to the World Council of Churches Assembly in 1961. In that presentation and elsewhere in his writings, Sittler celebrated nature by faith in a variety of ways, above all by his call for renewed interest in cosmic Christology. Notwithstanding the sometimes less than enthusiastic theological responses that his proposals elicited in those days, Sittler believed that, by celebrating nature by faith the way he did, he was reclaiming the witness of the Scriptures and also the teachings of Luther in a manner that could and would forthrightly address the theological challenges of our own era of ecological crisis.

      In the following chapter, I will highlight the promising contributions of several other American Lutheran theologians to the field of ecological theology as it emerged during the second half of the last century, in the aftermath of Sittler’s proposals (Chapter 4). Theirs was a multidisciplinary celebration of nature by faith: theological anthropology (Philip Hefner), systematic theology (Ted Peters), Old Testament studies (Terence Fretheim), liturgical theology (Gordon Lathrop), the history of Christian thought (myself), and ecojustice ethics (Larry Rasmussen). In this chapter, I will also discuss the consonant emergence of a range of practical theological initiatives and their influence, above all the contributions of a number of outdoor ministries in the US.

      The last of the five studies in this book will be a testimonial, a personal narrative of what it can mean to celebrate nature by faith as a Reformation theologian who has aspired to be heard as a member of the ecumenical Church (Chapter 5). I believe that the time has come for me, after working with the theology of nature for more than fifty years, to own up to the strengths and weaknesses, such as they might have been and such as I might be able to discern them, of my own theological labors. What, I will ask, does the work of a single Reformation ecotheologian of longstanding look like from within?

      I will leave it to others to decide how helpful my own ecotheological labors over the past fifty years might have been: to ask how any theological dead-ends that have appeared might be avoided in the future or what insights, if any, might be claimed for further reflection. In this chapter, I especially will have college students, seminarians, younger theologians, and Church environmental activists of all ages in mind, across the ecumenical spectrum. I will be saying: these were my challenges and my struggles, theologically and vocationally. I hope that you will be able learn something from the way I addressed those challenges and struggles, positively or negatively or perhaps both, as you chart your own theological and vocational courses in this time of crisis.

      I am well aware that in shaping the whole book the way I have done—highlighting not only the witness of the Scriptures, but also Luther’s theology, the vision of a major Lutheran theologian, Joseph Sittler, the contributions of several other contemporary Lutheran theologians, and concluding with a single Lutheran ecotheologian’s story, my own—that the whole project I have in mind could appear to be parochial, in the narrow sense of that word. Doesn’t our world in crisis require multi-religious investigations or at least broadly based ecumenical responses? In these times, won’t the very idea of the particularistic theological project that I am proposing here suffer from what some wag once called—hardening of the categories? I don’t think so.

      I don’t dispute for a moment the fact that what our world in crisis needs now is to hear the voices of many religious traditions, along with the broadly based testimony of ecumenical Christianity. But there is surely a place for—possibly profound enrichment from—the witness of particular theological traditions, even denominational variants of those traditions. But it would take me too far afield to consider that kind of question in advance. I can only say this much here, invoking an ecological image. One tree doth not a forest make, surely. But sometimes it can be very helpful to understand the life of a single tree, precisely in order better to understand how to strengthen the wellbeing and even the flourishing of the whole forest.

      3.

      Each of the following five studies, I hope, will stand on its own. But I also hope that readers will discover a common theme, along the way, that unites them all. In this sense, the whole of this book is greater than the sum of the parts. I want to identify that theme at the outset. It has to do with the scope of theological reflection. It also has to do with what sets the kind of Reformation theology presupposed by these particular studies apart from a number of other major Western theological trends.

      Consider these questions. When you think theologically, what are you thinking about? What are the primary objects of your reflection? For numerous prominent Christian theologians in the West, especially in the modern era, the answer to that question has been emphatically clear: God and humanity. Perhaps the most important champion of this view was the theologian who has sometimes been thought of as the Thomas Aquinas of the Reformation tradition, Karl Barth (1886–1968).

Early in his professional life, Karl Barth published a book of lectures with the title The Word of God and the Word of Man.2 That title told at least as much about what Barth’s theology was to become as about any single theme in the book itself. Barth’s mature theology was to be primarily reflections about God and humanity. Of course, following the Scriptures and the theological tradition, Barth did discuss nature from time to time. But when he did, it was primarily in terms of its meanings for the two other poles of theological reflection.

      Barth stated emphatically in volume three of his multi-volumned Church Dogmatics, as a matter of fact, that there can be no substantive Christian doctrine of nature—as there must be, in his view, a substantive Christian doctrine of the human creature. Barth’s mature theology was in this respect, to invoke his own terminology, theoanthropocentric. Call this Barth’s fundamental theological paradigm. He read the Scriptures and he wrote his theology, voluminously, throughout his long and distinguished theological career, with that focus.

In this respect, Barth was, in significant ways, a representative figure. Numerous Christian theologians, beginning in the earliest era of Christian thought, likewise focused their theology, chiefly if not totally, on God and humanity.3 This was particularly true of Christian theologians in the modern era, especially those who identified with Reformation traditions, as we shall see at various points along the way in this book. But Barth carried through his theoanthropocentric program with a self-conscious rigor that is likely unequalled in Western Christian thought.

This was a fateful development. If theology is fundamentally theoanthropocentric, then the natural world will have its ultimate meaning, its raison d’etre, only in terms of God and humanity, as a kind of appendix. Nature will be allotted no integrity of its own in the greater scheme of things. Nature, at best, will have instrumental meanings. This was illustrated sharply by Barth’s sometime theological opponent, Emil Brunner, who, in this respect, was Barth’s compatriot. “The cosmic element in the Bible,” Brunner once observed, “is never anything more than the ‘scenery’ in which the history of mankind takes place.”4

      The studies in this book presuppose a different theological paradigm. Since I completed my doctoral dissertation on Karl Barth’s theology of nature in 1966, I have explored, in a variety of ways, the promise of thinking theologically in terms of God, humanity, and nature together. Call this an integral view of nature. In response to Barth’s theology, I have chosen to work with what I like to call, reconfiguring Barth’s own terminology, a theocosmocentric paradigm. This way of thinking takes God’s purposes with the whole natural world just as seriously as God’s purposes with humanity in particular. But I was not alone, in this respect, by any means. As we will see, Joseph Sittler (Chapter 3) and a range of other Reformation theologians also took the theocosmocentric paradigm for granted (Chapter 4).

      I hope, then, that the following five studies will show, each in its own way, the fruitfulness of thinking theologically, most fundamentally, in terms of God, humanity, and nature, not just in terms of God and humanity alone—with nature then subordinated to the first two or even neglected altogether. Each of these studies illustrates the promise of thinking theologically in terms of the theocosmocentric