Greetings in the name of the Creator, the Most High JaH RasTafari.
Greetings in the name of the Holy Trinity of Life:
the Almighty Father, the Divine Mother and the Sacred Child, who is Love.
I greet the earth that sustains life, the sky that covers us,
the hapu of Te Whanganui a Tara as mana whenua.
And I greet all of our ancestors, those who went before us

One of the panellists earlier stated that wealth is not to be condemned but welcomed as a sign of God’s blessing. I don’t disagree, but with a note of caution. It is easy to slide into judgementalism and victim blaming, to see poverty as a result of immoral conduct or some lack on the part of the poor. It was for that very error that the companions of Job were reprimanded.

But it is correct that the Bible does not condemn wealth per se, so long as we remember that wealth is a tool, not a goal of itself. The Bible makes much of the distinctions between the righteous wealthy, such as Boaz or Nicodemus, and the wicked, and Yesus reminded us that wealth brings with it its own challenge – a more difficult path to God.

Because Biblical values are not primarily materialist. They are ethical. They acknowledge the totality of humankind – the intellectual, the emotional, the social and the spiritual. Those values, and true wealth, are founded on the richness of the relationships that we maintain, with other humans, with the other beings that we share the planet with, and with the transcendent.

Western Christianity has not always recognised that. I find it interesting to observe that in Christianity, salvation is primarily individual. The Old Testament is much more concerned with collective salvation, the fate of nations rather than of individuals, and the relationship to land itself. Individual stories are only important to the degree that they impact on the life of the nation as a whole.

The salvation we need to pursue in the world today is more akin to that represented in the Old Testament. Like Jeremiah from his well, environmentalists today warm us of the bitter fruit that we will collectively reap as a result of our human collective activity. Our response must be collective if it is to have any hope of averting catastrophe.

Christian traditions also contain a strong element that sees us as somehow alien here, sojourners on a brief visit before returning to a more perfect place. This is derived from Greek rather than Hebrew philosophy, which tends to the earthy, and comes via gnostic Christian threads.

With that tradition comes a contempt for the earth. The millinarian fantasies of the Christian fundamentalism that has such a hold over the government of the United States are typical of that view. It is an easy and tempting cop-out in my view.

I am actually confused by this ‘sojourner’ narrative. The Bible is a story about sojourners, at least for a good part of the first bit. But as ‘strangers in a strange land’ the people are still bounds by codes of behaviour. Hospitality codes are a strong thread within Old Testament stories, as in Semitic cultures generally and many others as well. The reverse of that coin is the responsibility that attaches to a guest. Sojourners do not have the right to pollute wells, destroy pastures and groves of trees or slaughter wild herds. So why should a sense of 'otherness' lead us to such acts of vandalism?

In any case the view of us as sojourners on earth is Biblically unsustainable. We are made from red earth – Adamah, and from wind, ruah, the breath of God. There is no separation between us and the life of this planet.

We are formed from the earth, according to the book of Genesis, and the earth belongs to God. Our use of land is at the pleasure of the divine. The challenge for Christianity, in my view, is to move beyond the duality inherent in Christian theology, that sees the sacred as elsewhere than this dusty world, and to return to a more authentic biblical tradition that recognises the presence of God in the world.

That dualistic view has been enormously destructive to our sense of place in the world, and is intrinsically tied to the notion that the earth is ours to dominate. I personally think that the statement in Genesis that we are given ‘dominion’ over the earth is descriptive rather than prescriptive. We have dominion in the sense that our faculties give us power to understand and manipulate natural law. That does not mean we have a right to subject all of life to the tyranny of our whim.

I have been reading Lloyd Geering, in particular his recent work ‘The Greening of Christianity’. He relates the view that it is monotheism itself that is the cause of our disjointed relationship with the planet, because it desacralises nature, and makes us passive in the face of the divine will. He asserts the Trinitarian traditions of Christianity as a counter to that, because it elevates female and nature centred traditions under the guise of Marianism.

In opening I made reference to the Trinity: masculine, feminine and child. Orthodox Christianity talks about the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, which conjures up a peculiarly and exclusively male pantheon. It seems both counter-intuitive and theologically suspect. Genesis says that people were made in the image of God – male and female. In the book of Proverbs, Wisdom – she says – “I was there when the world was formed...I was beside him helping plan and build it”. What is she, what is the “Holy Ghost” of the Christian traditions, other than the divine Mother, the Shekinah, She who comes as the Sabbath, the glory of God revealed in the world.

I’m not sure that I entirely agree with Geering on all his points, although I always have a bit of a soft spot for heretics. But I do think that he is absolutely correct that we face enormous danger if we fail to see divinity in the physical world.

Geering also notes that the idea of humans as stewards is gaining favour among some Christians, but he notes that this view also contains dangers. Stewards were often charged with maximising income for landowners and could be as exploitative as the next person.

What seems apparent to me is that we need to move the debate beyond the proper exercise of our power to the proper nature of our relationship. We have to recognise our connection to all of life on earth. We are essentially made from the same substance and we respire in the same way as all aerobic life. Our relationship is one of kinship.

What does that mean? That ecological integrity and ecological sustainability must be at the forefront of our thinking. That economic gain must not be allowed to trump more fundamental values. That we value life in all its diversity and abundance, rather than simply focussing on how far we can degrade ecosystems without destroying them entirely.

No awakening will come from government or other institutions of power. It is a more spontaneous revelation and it will, and does, challenge power. I believe that the Church bears much responsibility for our impoverished view of ourselves and our place in the world, and also that it has a potentially useful role in restoring us to reality.

Address to FOCaL Conference, Wellington, July 2006