465 - Ecobible: The Bible and Ecojustice

Ecobible: The Bible and Ecojustice
By Walter Wink

"So why not just throw out the Bible, and Christianity along with it? Because it is not the commandments, but the tenor, the thrust, the spirit of Jesus that drives us toward God's future.... The Bible is not a repository of politically correct opinions, but an ongoing struggle to overcome domination right in our own tradition, in our own Scripture, in our own homes. Just so, it is only in our time of ecodisaster that we are driven to think about ecojustice."

WE CHRISTIANS have a real problem when it comes to the environment. We are a people of the book, yet the Bible scarcely touches on the issue of environmental justice. It is difficult to find even a few proof texts that support ecological ethics. The Psalms and Job extol the glory of God in the created order but say next to nothing about how humans should behave toward nature.

Worse, people have used Genesis 1:26, with its statement about human dominion over nature, to justify treating nature instrumentally as something to be used, even used up, before the second coming. That brilliant "theologian" of the Reagan administration, James Watt, certainly interpreted it so.

The ecology problem was not even recognized until this century, though there were a few prophetic voices raised earlier, like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. The book that launched the environmental movement, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, was published only thirty years ago. The most serious pollutants were not only nonexistent in biblical times, they were not even invented before most people living today were born. The Israelites were told to be fruitful and multiply-good advice for a tiny race struggling to hold on to the most hotly-contested piece of turf in the world, but catastrophic if followed by people today. But the problem of pollution is not simply the cumulative result of too many people relieving themselves. The real polluters are new chemicals and elements that never before existed and for which nature has been unable to provide any resistance or antidotes.

Walter Wink is a biblical scholar at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. His books include Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament(1984), Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence(1986), and his latest book, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Dominatio (1992), from which this essay is adapted. Used by permission of Augsburg Fortress Press.

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So we can scarcely fault the Bible for not providing us with clear moral guidance about the environment. On the other hand, why should we need it? Anyone who needs scriptural guidance to decide that destroying the ecosystem is wrong is a moral idiot. Even the most crass reckoning of our human self-interest should lead any marginally intelligent person to realize that if we keep on poisoning the earth, water, and atmosphere at the current rate, we will soon be unable to survive at all. Survival is built into our beings. We all want to live. So why should we need the Bible to tell us what any child can recognize-that we had better clean up our act or we will perish from the face of the earth?

Furthermore, the Bible fails to give us clear advice on many of the most vexing questions we face today. On the role of women, on homosexuality, on abortion, Christians are sharply divided, and the Bible is either no help or a positive hindrance. Since Christians are so at odds on these contemporary moral issues, let me step back a century to the question of slavery, an issue that not only split the nation but whose legacy left denominations like the Presbyterians divided until only a few years ago.

The Bible clearly sanctions slavery. Nowhere does it provide a clear command to free slaves. There is, to be sure, a principle articulated: In Christ there is neither slave nor free (Galatians 3:28). In one place, Paul does encourage slaves to seek their freedom (1 Corinthians 7:21, though not in the NRSV), but he ends by advising them to remain in whatever condition they were in when called by God (7:24). Paul apparently attempts to win freedom for Onesimus (Philemon 16). But elsewhere, slaves are commanded to obey their masters (Ephesians 6:5-8; Colossians 3:22-4:1; 1 Timothy 6:1-2; Titus 2:9-10).

When the debate began over slavery, it was spurred not by a lucid exegesis of Scripture but by Quakers like John Woolman, who felt Christ saying directly to their hearts that enslaving any person was wrong. Other Christians were not pleased by this appeal to direct revelation. Southern slave holders naturally turned to the Bible for support of their position. An objective observer can only conclude that the Southerners had Scripture on their side. The exodus portrayed God liberating the Hebrew slaves, but Israel nevertheless established slavery as an institution. Not even Jesus denounced slavery. Yet today, a hundred and thirty years after the war over slavery, virtually everyone, North and South, agrees that slavery was not only morally wrong, but insupportable from Scripture. How can we account for that?

Because there is a tenor to Scripture that transcends any of its words, however clear and unequivocal. Perhaps we cannot always put it into words. Perhaps it is felt only as a hunch, an intuition. Let me try to name that tenor, that overriding spirit, that biblical gestalt.

I will summarize it in a pithy sentence: The gospel is the message of the coming of God's domination-free order. Jesus' teaching and being are at the core of Scripture, and Jesus is against domination. His

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preaching of the Reign of God is directed precisely at the overcoming of dominations. A critique of domination is, I believe, the tenor, or central theme, or gist, of the gospel.

We tend to treat Jesus' message as timeless truth applicable in any context. But there is a very precise context against which he preached: the Domination System that began in earnest some 5000 years ago.

I

Civilization as we know it arose in the Neolithic villages that began to be established around 9000-8000 B.C.E. with the discovery of agriculture. Yet, remarkably, there are few indications that these early people knew war. Occasional skirmishes, yes; theft, yes. But warfare, no. War is a fairly late human invention, dating from around 4000-3000 B.C.E. There is very little evidence of warfare between 9000 and 4000 B.C.E., and not a great deal until after 3000 B.C.E., when it proliferates dramatically. It was then that the Domination System began.

Prior to the Domination System, stone tools were used for scraping vegetable matter or for the hunt; they were not fashioned for warfare.¹ Thorkild Jacobsen cautiously concludes, "As far as we can judge, the fourth millennium and the ages before it had been moderately peaceful. Wars and raids were not unknown; but they were not constant and they did not dominate existence."² Such domination as existed was not systemic and institutionalized and so was unable to assert in full its life-negating character.

Excavations at Catal Huyuk and Hacilar in Turkey and at numerous sites in Minoan Crete, Old Europe, and early pre-Columbian America reveal societies in which there were not glaring inequalities in the size of houses or in the apparent status of persons. Religion was characterized by domestic, household cults rather than organized priesthoods or state religions. Earlier theories traced the origin of warfare to the rise of agriculture and the capacity to store surplus goods that marauding tribes might covet. We now know, from carbon-dating techniques and dendrochronology, that the domestication of wild plants and animals

¹ Elise Boulding, The Underside of History: A New of Women Through Time(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1976), p. 40. There is evidence of destruction of enemies among the Pithecanthropic and Neanderthal, and one or two instances of flint points found lodged in human skeletons of Upper Paleolithic age. At the cave of Ofnet in Bavaria, thirty-three skulls were found, apparently from victims of headhunters (judging from the number of women and children represented). But "the general absence of weapons of war among the grave furniture of Neolithic burials provides even more convincing proof of the absence of martial ideals in the hearts of the new peasantry" (Jacquetta Hawkes, "Prehistory," in Hawkes and Sir Leonard Woolley, History of Mankind, Vol. 1, Prehistory and the Beginnings of Civilization[New York: Harper & Row, 1963], pp. 127, 265, 321).
² Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness. A History of Mesopotamia(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 77. Anthropologists disagree on whether primitive hunting and gathering tribes were warlike or not. Probably some were and some were not. But virtually all are agreed that, if and when societies fought, it was to meet immediate physiological needs and that their fighting was at most brief and sporadic.

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goes back as far as 9000 to 8000 B.C.E. Civilization began four to five thousand years before the first evidences of war.³

What is most startling is what archaeologists have not found. As Riane Eisler notes in The Chalice and the Blade, some cities that existed for hundreds of years, undisturbed, unplundered, not razed to the ground, were unwalled and located in choice valleys rather than on fortifiable crags. Equally astonishing, there are no evidences in Neolithic paintings of "noble warriors," heroic conquerors, captives or slaves; nor are there any indications of thrusting weapons, battle-axes, or swords (though mace heads have been found). Burial grounds show no trace of lavish "chieftain" burials or of mighty rulers who take with them into the afterlife less powerful human beings sacrificed at their death (wives, concubines, children, slaves). And in Neolithic art, neither the Goddess nor her son-consort carry the emblems we have learned to associate with might-spears, swords, or thunderbolts, the symbols of an earthly sovereign or deity who exacts obedience by maiming or killing.⁴

The evidence is not unambiguous. A few cities were fortified.⁵ If warfare was infrequent and tended to cease with the first letting of blood or the first killing, ⁶ hunting weapons or maces (normally used to finish off wounded game) would have sufficed. Some societies were probably more warlike than others, but at first insularity would have prevented much contact. Clashing warriors were probably completely unorganized militarily, and suffered more from hoarseness caused by shouting threats than from wounding. Most of the time these early peoples seem to have dwelt in peace.⁷

In short, the evidence suggests that at least some early societies were unstratified and basically egalitarian. It appears that these communi-

³ Anne Barstow, "The Uses of Archaeology for Women's History: James Mellaart's Work on the Neolithic Goddess at Catal Huyuk," Feminist Studies 4 (1978): pp. 7-18; Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 7-12; and Elinor W. Gadon, Once and Future Goddess (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 24.
⁴ Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, pp. 7-18.
⁵ Jericho had huge walls and a watch tower from 8350-7350 B.C.E., apparently to protect the oasis from marauding bands of hunter-gatherers, and Hacilar (Anatolia) was walled, but these were exceptional. Early Sumerian cities were not fortified. Not until the Early Dynastic II era did fortifications become general, indicating that inter-state warfare began there around 2600 B.C.E. [H. W. F. Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1962), p. 40]. There were a few Neolithic settlements on hilltops (Windmill Hill in England, for example); but this was also rare. In the Sahara, between 5500-3500 B.C.E., thousands of rock pictures were painted depicting "a gentler, less frightened world, in which the peaceful scenes of cattle herding, which form the vast majority of the paintings, are occasionally interrupted by cattle raids leading to fights between bowmen of various groups" (James Mellaart, The Neolithic of the Near East [New York: Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1975], p. 51). See also Hawkes, "Prehistory," pp. 269, 298; Boulding, The Underside of History, p. 125; and Ruby Rohrlich-Leavitt, "Women in Transition: Crete and Sumer," in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, edited by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1977), p. 40.
⁶ Sue Mansfield, The Gestalts of War(New York: Dial Press, 1982), pp. 20-30.
⁷ Morton Fried, The Evolution of Political Society(New York: Random House, 1967), p. 101.

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ties existed, not to conquer, pillage, and loot, but to cultivate the earth and provide the material and spiritual means for a satisfying life. Nor were such societies limited to Old Europe and the Near East. Some Native American peoples apparently lived in relative peace over a span of more than nine thousand years without any sign of cataclysm or replacement of local inhabitants through annihilation-five hundred generations unmarred by violent calamity.⁸ Many of these early societies appear to have been matrilineal (with descent through the mother) and matrilocal (where the husband comes to live with the wife's family, a situation still reflected in Genesis 2:24), but they were not matriarchal (ruled by women).⁹ So far as we know, matriarchy has never existed anywhere. No doubt men fear that women liberated from patriarchy would revenge themselves by treating men the way men have treated women. But the archaeological evidence and the sexual equality evident in contemporary primitive groups indicate, rather, that at least some prehistoric societies were what Eisler calls "partnership societies," characterized not by "power over" but "power with," by cooperation more than by competition and by actualization hierarchies (where leaders serve the community) rather than domination hierarchies (where communities must serve the leaders).¹⁰ They lived on the web of life with a tolerable degree of harmony and ecological civility.

⁸ Stuart Struever and Felicia Antonelli Holton, Koster: Americans in Search of Their Prehistoric Past (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1979), p. 258; L. S. Cressman, Prehistory of the Far West (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1977), pp. 125-26; Michael N. Nagler, America Without Violence (Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1982), pp. 51-69. C. W. Ceram writes, ". . . the pre-Columbian peoples of North America probably (in sharp contrast to the 'highly civilized' peoples of middle America, such as the Aztecs) were unacquainted with war, that 'continuation of politics by other means' which makes its appearance only after agricultural communities become real states." Native North Americans knew violence: tribal feuds, predatory expeditions, struggles for watering places and pastures, an occasional slaying or vengeful killing; but these are a far cry, he says, from that permanent militarism that humanity has developed only since the rise of the state in Mesopotamia. Militarism was introduced into North America by the Spaniards. "Our pueblo peoples seem to have been peaceable; they took up weapons only in emergencies, for self-defense-and were usually defeated." The Hohokam pueblo people dwelt without wars for a thousand years (The First American [New York: New American Library, 1971], pp. 125-26, 220).
⁹ Matrilineal and matrilocal arrangements still prevail among many societies of North America and Africa, the Dravidians of India, and some Australian aboriginals; relics of it persist in Melanesia, Micronesia, and Indonesia; and vestiges point to an earlier practice of these arrangements in Egyptian, Homeric, and even early Hebraic societies (Genesis 2:24) (Jacquetta Hawkes, Prehistory, p. 122). At Catal Huyuk, deceased children were buried near their mothers, suggesting descent through the mother (compare the Hebrew expression, "he slept with his fathers," I Kings 14:20). Men's sleeping platforms were also smaller than the women's and not in any fixed place (Gadon, Once and Future Goddess, p. 28). But even in matrilineal and matrilocal societies, males (often the wife's brother) generally were dominant.
¹⁰ Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, p. 105; Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 7000-3500 B. C (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); and The Language of the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989). Actualization hierarchies are manifest in the increasingly complex structures that progress from cells to organs to living organisms, or in the revolving leadership of functioning democratic organizations (Eisler, p. 205 n. 5).

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In a society in which a surplus is nonexistent or only temporary, observes Gerhard Lenski, no one, however greedy, can rise to a position of economic dominance. People in such societies will, of necessity, tend to be relatively equal, at least with respect to the distribution of goods and services. In such societies, rule must be by persuasion. One strong person is no match for three others. Democratic councils seem to have been virtually universal in primitive societies as a result.¹¹ Earliest Sumer apparently practiced democracy,¹² and most Native Americans have maintained participatory democratic forms right up to the present.

Virtually all ancient peoples embraced a myth of the golden age. Western anthropologists, convinced that modern societies represent the acme of evolution, have dismissed these myths as mere nostalgia for the mother's womb. But contemporary primitive societies in Malaysia, Borneo, the Philippines, and Africa tend to confirm the picture emerging from archaeology.¹³

Indeed, some such story seems to be preserved in the racial memory of the Israelites. Despite flagrantly patriarchal motifs in the Yahwist creation accounts (creation of the male first, and creation of the female from the male), in many ways Genesis 2-3 depicts a society in which the woman took the initiative in making decisions. The woman is the product of a special creative act in the Yahwist version, filling a gap in creation and a need in the male without which the original creation would have been incomplete. The first couple are depicted as agriculturalists, not hunters or herders-and women played a more central role in agricultural societies. The "fall" involved the loss of female freedom and submission to males in a patriarchal society: in short, the rise of androcracy, or rule by men. Genesis 1, by contrast, is

¹¹ Gerhard Lenski, Power and Privilege: A Theory of Social Stratification (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), pp. 102-106.
¹² H. W. F. Saggs, The Greatness that was Babylon, p. 160. When Greek society shifted to descent traced through the father rather than the mother, Athenian women lost the right to vote, according to Augustine. The imposition of androcracy meant the attenuation of democracy (Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, p. 114).
¹³ Ashley Montague has gathered detailed reports by experts on primitive societies in Learning Non-Aggression: The Experience of Non-Literate Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). See also the excellent comparative study by Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance: The Origins of Sexual Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 16-34; Stephen Braun, "Jungle Nonviolence," in Robert L. Holmes, Nonviolence in Theory and Practice (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publ. Co., 1990), pp. 181-84; and Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin, People of the Lake (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978), pp. 96-125. A very broad consensus seems to exist that the earliest human societies were, on the whole, egalitarian; so Fried, The Evolution of Human Society, p. x; C. R. Hallpike, The Principles of Social Evolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 226; Ronald Cohen, "State Origins: A Reappraisal," in The Early State, edited by Henri J.M. Claessen and Peter Skalnik (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1978), p. 67; and Cohen, in The Origins of the State: The Anthropology of Political Evolution, edited by Cohen and Elman R. Service (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human issues, 1978), pp. 7-8 and 141-60.

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explicitly egalitarian. The image of God is male and female, and the first couple are created together as a reflection of the divine nature.¹⁴

The idea that humanity once experienced more just social arrangements is useful, even if it cannot be proven, because people are already mired in a counter-narrative they endow with indubitable historicity: the belief that domination by males, by the powerful, and by the rich is given in the nature of things, from time immemorial, from the very mind of God. Male supremacy is uncritically assumed to be normative, natural, inevitable, as are racial supremacy and rule by elites. The very idea of supremacy as the prerogative of a few is challenged by our new account of prehistory. It is possible that broad sectors of humanity once existed together in greater tranquility than today. But even if this cannot be demonstrated with certainty, neither can anyone assert with confidence that human societies have been autocratic from the beginning. And if the Domination System is a relatively late social invention that only achieved hegemony five thousand years ago, perhaps it is not ineradicable.

II

When we reach the time of the massive city-states of Mesopotamia around 3000 B.C.E., we are on fairly firm historical footing. Autocracy was now the accepted order of things.¹⁵ Warfare flourished. Soldiers in standing armies fought with new bronze weapons, and sometimes from horseback. Their social system was rigidly hierarchical, authoritarian, and patriarchal. Some of these warrior peoples worshiped their weapons.¹⁶ 0thers revered divinities of war, whose will decreed the massacre of their male victims and the sexual subjugation of their female victims.¹⁷ Women were deprived of the right both to speak their minds and to control their bodies.

No matter how high in the patriarchal social order a woman might rise, she was always controlled by men sexually and reproductively. Every class had two tiers, one for men and a lower one for women. Power lost by men through submission to a ruling elite was compensated for by power gained over women, children, hired workers, slaves, and the land. In the increased violence and brutality of the new order, it was in the interest of women to seek out a male protector and economic supporter. But the price they paid was sexual servitude, unsalaried domestic labor, and subordination to their husbands in all

¹⁴ John Howard Yoder, "Salvation Through Mothering?" unpublished paper, courtesy of the author.
¹⁵ Despotic rule was a new phenomenon, requiring divine authorization. The Sumerian King List states, "When kingship was lowered from heaven the kingship was in Eridu (Sumer)" (Saggs, The Greatness That Was Babylon, p. 35). On the rise of patriarchy, see Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Bertrand de Jouvenel, Power- The Natural History of Its Growth (London: Balchworth Press, 1945), p. 67.
¹⁶ The Scythians made sacrifices to an ancient iron scimitar, the image of their god of war, according to Herodotus (iv. 62).
¹⁷ Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, pp. 47-49, 84.

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matters, often those once theirs by gender specialization. As a fringe benefit, women were permitted to exploit men and women in classes lower than their own.¹⁸

As Andrew Bard Schmookler observes, human destiny was being driven in a direction that people did not intend and most would not have consciously chosen. The new capacity for expansion and enrichment through conquest created a situation of anarchy in which no one could choose to end the struggle for dominance. As violence between groups increased, humanity inadvertently stumbled into a chaos that had never before existed. "The relations among societies were uncontrolled and virtually uncontrollable. Such an ungoverned system imposes unchosen necessities: civilized people were compelled to enter a struggle for power."¹⁹

The irony is that successful defense against a power-maximizing aggressor requires a society to become more like the society that threatens it. Thus domination is a contaminant, a disease which, once introduced, will inexorably spread throughout the system of societies. It is, says Schmookler, as if the process of natural selection had come to favor behavior characterized by those who dominated others. This does not imply that striving for domination is intrinsic to human social existence. It is not. Nor does it imply that everything that emerges from dominator societies is evil; much is good and beautiful. A great deal of effort was devoted to formulating laws that would limit violence and secure justice for the weak-though always in a framework that preserved advantage for the strong. Women found ways to assert power, through or around existing conventions, and occasionally a woman would achieve genuine power, like Urukagina's queen or, much later, Cleopatra. But they were only able to wield power on terms already laid down by the Domination System itself.

Fleeing refugees and fast-pursuing predators spread this culturally regressive new society widely. Few peoples were remote enough or sufficiently isolated to escape the new pattern of conquest, sack, and domination.

Neither Judaism nor Christianity avoided this ethos of domination. The early Hebrews all too often behaved in a manner indistinguishable from the predators of an earlier time. I have already referred to the word "dominion" in Genesis 1:26. It means "to tread, trample, subdue, rule over, dominate." Try as exegetes may to clean it up, it is an unfortunate choice of words that did, however, express the current attitude toward nature. Agriculturists have often felt this way. One struggles against nature to grow a crop: against plagues of bugs, invasions of weeds, incursions of rodents. Though many of the teachings of Isaiah and other prophets call for a partnership society rather than a dominator one, much of Hebrew Scripture, as Riane

¹⁸ Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, pp. 215-18.
¹⁹ Andrew Bard Schmookler, The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 20.

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Eisler sees it, is "a network of myths and laws designed to impose, maintain, and perpetuate a dominator system of social and economic organization."²⁰

Eisler, who with her family barely escaped Austria after the Nazi takeover, assesses her own heritage severely. She sees in ancient Israel a rigidly male-dominated system in which God willed that women be subjugated to men and treated as property or chattel. Daughters were sold to prospective husbands, or into slavery, and were stoned if their commercial value was destroyed by losing their virginity (Deuteronomy 22:13-29; Exodus 21: 1-1 1; Numbers 31:18). They could be given up to murderous crowds to be gang raped until they perished, in order to protect the lives of male visitors or a husband (Genesis 19; Judges 19). New wives for the defeated Benjamites could be had by simply seizing them in Shiloh vineyards (Judges 21). In all this, no law was violated; the law actually protected these male prerogatives. Yet, comments Eisler, millions of people today can still read these passages without a twinge of horror at the moral bankruptcy of an androcratic system that could countenance such treatment.²¹

Religious people have long been accustomed to passing such criticisms off by a theory of progressive revelation: these poor, benighted primitives knew no better, and ascribed to God attitudes that later generations would sharply condemn. But if these were not "primitives," but the brutal successors of a more egalitarian society, the picture has to be reversed. This is not so much "progressive revelation" as a cultural regression that in many ways only worsened over the thousand years of Old Testament history. Prior to the rise of the monarchy, five women had been Israelite prophets; for the next one thousand years, not one woman prophet is mentioned. The freedom of a Rachel to move among men and speak to them in the second millennium B.C.E. (Genesis 29:9-12) had been sharply circumscribed a thousand years later, so that by the time of Jesus, respectable women were being sequestered in their homes and could speak to no man but their husbands and kin, and then not in public.²² Women were not full members of the covenant, but were saved through their fathers and husbands and through childbearing.

Killing in war is divinely sanctioned in Scripture. Over a thousand verses depict God engaging in violent acts of punishment, and another hundred show God expressly commanding others to kill. Violence,

²⁰ Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, p. 94.
²¹ Ibid., pp. 98-100.
²² Saggs reports the same for Sumerian society several thousand years earlier: at its beginning, women had a much higher status than in the heyday of Sumerian culture. He associates this change with the virtual disappearance over the same period of the goddesses who had held such a prominent position earlier and which later, with the sole exception of Ishtar, merely survived as consorts to male gods (The Greatness That Was Babylon, p. 62).

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according to Raymund Schwager, is easily the most often mentioned activity and central theme of the Hebrew Bible.²³

This negative judgment on the Hebrew Bible is not the whole story, however. There are also powerful prophetic denunciations of domination, and the longing for a different dispensation where peace, justice, and equality would reign,²⁴ most notably in the servant song of Isaiah 53. Daniel represents the attitude of a wing of Judaism that rejected the militarism of the Maccabees and trusted in divine intervention and governance in public life (167 B.C.E.). By Jesus' day, many Jews, especially those of the Pharisaic party, were, practically speaking, nonviolent.

But it was Jesus who revealed to the world, for the first time since the rise of conquest-states, God's domination-free order of nonviolent love. His message was not wholly new; much of it was already contained or foreshadowed in those portions of the Hebrew Bible congruent with a partnership society. But, says Eisler, that new order "was obviously most forcefully-indeed, in the eyes of the religious elites of his time, heretically-articulated by this young carpenter from Galilee." If we look at what Jesus preached from the perspective of a critique of domination, we see a single unifying theme: a vision of the liberation of life through the replacement of androcratic with partnership values.²⁵ As Eisler puts it:

Even more striking-and all-pervasive-are Jesus' teachings that we must elevate "feminine virtues" from a secondary or supportive to a primary and central position. We must not be violent but instead turn the other cheek; we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us; we must love our neighbors and even our enemies. Instead of the "masculine virtues" of toughness, aggressiveness, and dominance, what we must value

²³ Raymund Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats? (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 46-67, 119.
²⁴ There are statements in the prophets rejecting sacrifice (Isaiah 1:11-17; 17:7-8; 66:1-4; Jeremiah 6:20; 7:21-23, 31; 14:12; Hosea 6:6; 9:4; Amos 5:21-27; Micah 6:6-8), and demanding justice in its stead (Isaiah 1: 16-17, 23, 27; 5:16-17; 25:4; 28:17; 56:1-2; Jeremiah 17:11; 22:3, 13-17; Amos 5:11-15; 6:12; Micah 2:1-2). The prophets denounced violence (Isaiah 1:21; 2:4, 15; 9:5; 26:21; 60:18; Amos 3:10; 6:3; Micah 6:12); Second Isaiah exposed the scapegoating mechanism (Isaiah 53). The prophets criticized kingship (I Samuel 8; Isaiah 1:26; Hosea 8:4; 13:1 1), though some longed for a new kind of king who would bring justice without domination (Isaiah 11:1-5; 16:5; 32:1; Jeremiah 23:5-6; Zechariah 9:9-10). They condemned domination (Isaiah 30:12), championed the cause of the poor (Isaiah 41:17; Zechariah 7:9-10) and women (Joel 2:28-29; Malachi 2:16), and looked forward to an era of peace, justice, and physical healing (Isaiah 2:4; 9:6-7; 11:6-9; 19:23-25; 35:5-6; 52:7; 60:18; Ezekiel 47:12; Micah 5:5; Malachi 4:2). War and weaponry will be abolished from the land, and the people will lie down in safety (Isaiah 2:4; Hosea 2:18; 14:3; Micah 4:3-4; Zechariah 4:6). Jerusalem will be unwalled, because Yahweh will be a wall of fire to protect it (Zechariah 2:4-5). And Daniel features civil disobedience (Daniel 3; 6). But this material appears alongside calls for violence. Jeremiah 48:10 calls bloodshed "the work of the Lord," and God's judgment is visited upon nations by means of warfare. It is only on the basis of Jesus' person and message that we are able to discern fully the domination-free strains in the Old Testament.
²⁵ Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, p. 121.

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above all else are mutual responsibility, compassion, gentleness, and love.... What he was preaching was the gospel of a partnership society.²⁶

In his beatitudes, in his extraordinary concern for the outcasts and marginalized, in his wholly unconventional treatment of women (speaking to them in public, touching them, eating with them, even with harlots, above all, teaching them), in the seriousness with which he took children, in his rejection of the dogma that high-ranking men are the favorites of God, in his subversive proclamation of a new order in which domination would give way to compassion and communion, Jesus overturned the most rigidly upheld mores of his time. He rejected hierarchies. He called for equality. He denounced class arrangements that favored the wealthy over the poor.

But the Domination System proved too strong. Soon sinners were being excluded from the church, women were being squeezed out of leadership, and the wealthier, educated males were taking over authority from the poor and unschooled. The Roman Empire joined the Jewish leadership in attempting to crush this nonviolent movement of compassion and equality. From within and without, enormous pressures forced the church ineluctably toward precisely the kind of hierarchical and violence-based system that Jesus had rejected. The rest is all too painfully evident: heretics and "witches" hunted down and burned, inquisitions, crusades, emperors and kings settling doctrinal disputes with armies, wars of Christians against Christians, pogroms against Jews. Jesus' dream of the New Reality has long since turned into the nightmare, first of Christendom, then of our more recent secular totalitarianisms. In all this, the conquest of women went hand in hand with the exploitation of the poor, the conquest of weaker nations, and indifference to the environment.

Throughout the era of domination, egalitarian resurgences have appeared-the troubadours, St. Francis, the abolitionist movement, women ' s suffrage, feminism, the environmental movement. Rebellions by burghers, workers, peasants, black slaves, colonials, and women - all were and are against a system in which ranking is the primary principle of social organization. But none of them has been able to overturn belief in the fundamental right of some people to dominate others or of humans to dominate nature.

III

So why not just throw out the Bible, and Christianity along with it? Because it is not the commandments, but the tenor, the thrust, the spirit of Jesus that drives us toward God's future. Paradoxically, it was in the most violently contested corridor of real estate in the world that the issue of violence was finally perceived as a problem and dealt with by Jesus' teaching about nonviolence, a teaching he lived down to his last breath on the cross. It had to be an enslaved people who

²⁶ Ibid., p. 121.

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formulated, for the first time in human history, a critique of domination: the narrative of the Exodus. It was their experience of oppression that enabled the Hebrews to tell, for the first time, a story of reality from the point of view of the victims, not the victors. The Bible is not a repository of politically correct opinions, but an ongoing struggle to overcome domination right in our own tradition, in our own Scripture, in our own homes. Just so, it is only in our time of ecodisaster that we are driven to think about ecojustice.

This then is the context in which we must seek to understand the gospel. Without a clear idea of the contrast between God's dominationfree order and the Domination System, the gospel is proclaimed in a socio-political vacuum, a timeless, placeless, non-contextual, eternal nowhere. Gospel truths are handled like everlasting principles entirely unrelated to the specificity of any real world. Consequently we come to view the Powers as structural constants that must prevail everywhere and in every time.

In fact, as we have seen, the gospel has a very specific context, even if it has been essentially the same context for five thousand years: the Domination System. And it has a specific response to that system: the liberating message of Jesus. The gospel is a context-specific remedy for the evils of the Domination System. This means that the overthrow of any particular manifestation of oppression can never satisfy the demands of the gospel if what replaces one form of domination is simply another. The gospel is thus permanently critical of every political program, reform, and revolution.

The distinction between a partnership society and a domination society, between the Reign of God and the Domination System, provides just the sharp contrast we need for distinguishing between the way of God and the way of the world. The gospel's struggle against domination in all its forms supplies a framework for comprehending dozens of lesser struggles as parts of a single overarching conflict between two fundamentally incompatible human systems. Here at last we are able to see the links between efforts toward nuclear disarmament and feminism, struggles of campesinos for land and attempts to save whales, campaigns to counter fundamentalist book censorship and nonviolent efforts to topple dictatorships of the right and of the left. That is why the early Quakers and abolitionists, and even Southerners today, can see that the gospel condemns slavery, even though the Bible nowhere denounces it. Slavery is domination, and the whole tenor of the gospel is the end of domination.

This brings us full circle to the issue of the environment. All domination, of whatever sort, is a manifestation of the Domination System and its values. And domination in one sector inevitably breeds domination in others. We must begin to see the linkage between class exploitation and environmental exploitation. It is almost invariably through ghettos and poorer housing areas that interstate highways are routed. Poverty and smog are linked.

It is communities of color that are systematically targeted for the

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disposal of toxic wastes and the placement of this country's most hazardous industries. Race is, some argue, the strongest determining factor (among all variables) in the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities.²⁷ Race and waste are linked.

We speak of both women and of nature as subject to being ravished, plundered, plowed, and raped. Nature has been anthropomorphized as a woman in a dominator society and treated accordingly. Feminism and ecojustice are linked.

The gospel is not one message for one injustice and another message for another. It is a single message directed against domination in all its forms. Hence the inspired coining of the term "ecojustice": here in a single word the connection is made between social justice and justice to life in all its forms. All justice is now ecological. All species have rights. All life is sacred.

So we unite to struggle together for ecojustice. But we are motivated to do so, not just because we are terrified of the consequences of ecodisaster, though that does indeed terrify and motivate us. Nor are we motivated solely by the demand of the gospel, with its challenge to all domination. Nor are we motivated simply by a hunger and thirst after justice for all God's creatures, though all these are factors.

More deeply, we are motivated by our hunger for God. For as Thomas Berry puts it, when we destroy the living forms of this planet, the first consequence is that we destroy modes of Divine presence. "If we have a wonderful sense of the divine, it is because we live amid such awesome magnificence. If we have refinement of emotion and sensitivity, it is because of the delicacy, the fragrance, and the indescribable beauty of soul and music and rhythmic movement in the world about us."²⁸ Our very gusto for living, the joy that satisfies us and blesses our days, are largely a function of the sheer beauty and abundance of nature. We are already beginning to feel the loss as fewer songbirds greet us with the dawn. When we degrade the environment, we deprive ourselves of the most powerful and constant revelation of the Divine itself. When we diminish nature, we diminish the ecstasy and sheer happiness of dwelling on this solitary and incomparable earth. When we damage this intricate and vulnerable creation, we must reckon with a consequent loss in the thrill of being a creature.

It appears that God is not a remote deity external to the universe, but is present in every energy-event of spirit-matter. In the final analysis, then, we struggle for ecojustice because we are deliriously in love with God's body, this greening and vivid earth.

²⁷ Dana Alston, "Transforming a Movement," Sojourners 21 (January 1992), pp. 30,32. Some observers argue that poverty rather than race is the determining factor; but no one can deny that race and waste are linked, even if not causally.
²⁸ Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), p. 11. This book is justly described on its cover as one of the ten most important books of the twentieth century. Al Gore's remarkable Earth in the Balance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1992) provides a thorough survey of the ecological crisis and creative solutions and gives us an intimation of what political leadership could be like.