We Must Turn Away From a False Gospel
Humanity’s exploitation of the world, and most of its people, is a sin which requires repentance and reform, argues Sr Angelika Laub OP.
For too long have we listened to a false gospel, one which we continue to live out in our daily habits. Many Christians falsely proclaim that God cares for the salvation of humans only and that our human calling is to dominate and exploit earth for our own needs only. The secular counterpart to this gospel rests in a ruthless mastery over the earth and all its forms of life.
Christian theology of the last centuries has failed to draw Creation into the reflection of the total revelation of God. The neglect of the cosmos in our theology has diminished our urgently-needed contribution to a practice of justice and mercy towards our threatened earth. It has also diminished the moral integrity of our theology.
As successive popes have pointed out, our present economic system — neoliberal capitalism — fosters greed and wealth for a few, while a growing proportion of the earth’s population dies of hunger and disease. This greed will use the earth and her people but not respect them (see 1 Timothy 6:10). Unless we can control this system and the mode of living it recommends, it will lead humanity into catastrophe and possibly even extinction.
A destructive path of sin
Nature can and will continue its evolution without the human species. Now is the time for all religions to work together for the saving of Creation. To continue to walk the current path of ecological destruction is a sin.
The Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew shares this concern with Pope Francis. He writes: “To commit a crime against the natural world is a sin. For humans to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation, for humans to degrade the integrity of the earth, causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests, or destroying its wetlands…for humans to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air and its genes and chromosomes with poisonous substances…these are sins.”
We have become un-creators.
Colonial and patriarchal relationships are deeply entrenched in our relationships to ourselves, to God, to other people, especially women and to nature. The ecological crisis is indeed to a large extent marked by colonial relationships to nature, where people assume the right to be rulers over what isn’t theirs to rule, in this case God’s Creation.
To cope with this trend, we Christians and our theologians need to think deeply about the immanence and the transcendence of God in relation to the whole of Creation. Similarly, humans needs to rethink their relationships among themselves and between themselves and nature.
Give up futile hopes
We must move away from the hope that we — with the help of our politics, science, technology — are able to control the ecological crisis, and instead learn a new kind of relationship that is not marked by control but by a humble kind of friendship that is respectful and sustainable. In this transformation, religions and mysticism need to help humanity.
God respects our freedom, but we need to remember that we are partners with God in the present creative event. We need to repent and repudiate our social and ecological sins in the presence of God and one another. With trust in God and his love for the world, we need to pursue a new way of being part of God’s sacred earth.
Addressing the degradation of God’s earth is the moral task of our time. As Christians, we believe that the created world is a sacred revelation of God’s power and presence filling all things. This sacred quality of creation demands moderation and sharing, reducing our excess in consumption and production of waste. As well, there cannot be ecological integrity without economic justice.
We now long for and work towards the day when Christian Churches, as embodiments of Christ on earth, will respond to the “groaning of creation” (Romans 8:22) and to God’s passionate desire to “renew the face of the earth” (Psalm 104:30).
Christianity will need to learn from the cultures of the indigenous people on the different continents and from the Asian religions’ attitudes and beliefs that empowered people to live for millennia sustainably on their lands.
Sr Angelika Laub is a Dominican living in Johannesburg. She writes in her personal capacity.
Published in the February 2023 issue of The Southern Cross magazine
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