332 - An Unexpected Tribute to the Theologian

An Unexpected Tribute to the Theologian
By Rosemary Ruether

Rosemary Ruether is a professor of history and theology at the School of Religion at Howard University, Washington, D. C. She is the author of The Church Against Itself (1967) and The Radical Kingdom (1970).

IN the fall of 1969, I was chapel lecturer at a university in Pennsylvania. The spectrum of opinions brought together for discussion of a talk formally billed as "religious" was intriguing. The assembly cut across a wide range from radical youth to social and physical scientists, religion faculty, and college chaplains. The old barriers and sets of opinions which used to distinguish the religious from the secular, the young from the old, had undergone a transformation. The more a person represented the religious establishment, the more "secular" his views appeared-that is, antivisionary and satisfied with the material present. Especially the traditional religious types appeared to find the deep ethical commitment and mystical spirituality that characterized the youth quite incomprehensible.

Two "New Left" students represented the voice of mystical contemplation. They appealed to a need for the spiritualization of man, and expressed the hope for a coming "Age of Aquarius" without the slightest trace of embarrassment. Their apocalyptic and utopian hopefulness contrasted strangely with the apocalyptic despair of the scientists. Yet, unlike a decade ago, such heights and depths did not appear at all out of place in the same conversation. Indeed, it was the scientists who seemed to have taken on the role of the Calvinist preachers of doom, dourly proclaiming an impending judgment upon man's sinfulness. They expected an almost irreversible doom to descend upon modern man because of his misuse of the resources of the earth. The fathers had sinned and the very earth itself was turned into dust and ashes in the mouths of the sons.

Consider, for example, one biologist who gave a panoramic view of man's existence on earth, covering three phases. Man had

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originally existed in his natural environment in a harmony or parity with nature. He had been one with its evolutionary cycle and movement. Then, at a certain point at the dawn of civilization, he had stepped out of parity with nature and had begun his own social evolution independently from the natural world. At that point, evolution in the vegetable and mineral kingdoms virtually came to a halt, and man mounted upon an independent cycle of growth without intrinsic relation to the development of nature. But today there is evidence that man has finally stepped into a negative parity with nature. Man's technological innovations move now in an irreversible fashion in a negative and destructive relationship to the natural environment. This is happening at such a rapid pace that man is fast destroying the very basis of human and organic life. He is literally eating up the very foundations upon which his own life is based. At this point the biologist pleaded, almost with tears in his eyes, for a new dialogue between science and religion. This was not to be a resurrection of the old stand-off between an arrogant science and a defensive religion, but a dialogue with a science humbled and chastened by the disasterous record of its own technological accomplishments. It was a science which recognized the fallacy of the belief that it is "value-free." It was a science that looked to religion to provide the critical human values that could be a framework for the technological application of scientific truths. This was the framework of values which science knew now that it needed, but which science itself could not provide.

What an unexpected tribute to the theologian! Here he was again being asked to represent the unifying discipline which could provide a framework for knowledge and a plumb line for daily living. Yet how unequipped both the theologians and the chaplains seemed to be to respond to this challenge. The liberal theologians had gotten along quite well in a pluralistic and uncritical relationship to science and seemed quite unprepared to be drawn back into a questioning relationship towards it. They had been burned too badly in this department in the past. The conservatives took this as simply a vindication of an earlier notion of theology as "queen of sciences," as though science had been simply a naughty child now returning to its mother. Neither seemed prepared for a quite new kind of critical relationship which the biologist was suggesting. I don't believe that he thought Christianity should provide the world view, in the sense

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of any surrogate science that would intrude on proper scientific knowledge itself, but rather that it must provide the framework of values for the application of science to human life. Without this, science is unleashed into an unchecked experimentalism without any ethical restraints upon it other than the limits of its own successes. If it is possible to reform men's thoughts with plastic brains or grow them four arms to make them faster workers, why not? Where was a really authoritative voice that could explain "why not"-not out of reactionary conservatism, but in authentic discernment of the line between the more human and the dehumanized life? Religion, either in its conservative or its liberal voices, has conspicuously failed to speak convincingly in that role.

If religion were really to take up the challenge of the biologist, theologians would have to reconsider many problems which they thought they had either solved in the past or else had left behind as a false and illegitimate quest. A crucial one is the question of an authentic concept of natural law which embraces man and nature in a single system of harmonies and which dictates a coherence between the natural and the normative realms. Religion would have to open itself not only to the range of modern knowledge, but to a world-wide ecumenicity such as it has scarcely even begun to conceive. Both a conservativism, stuck in the rightness of past syntheses, and a liberalism, brought up on dogmas that reject the quest for universal world views and that demarcate rigid lines between the realms of existential and scientific truth, would have found this challenge unwelcome. Perhaps the scientist himself will be forced to become a theologian in the quest for a new coherence in a world where the theologians have lately become comfortable with pluralism and incoherence.

The issue of ecology is the "natural" meeting ground for a new dialogue between science and religion. Ecology not only unites theologian and scientist on the ground of a common concern for ongoing human life, but it also reveals that scientist and theologian share an equal guilt for the ecological crisis which now threatens to engulf us. The scientist is not the only sinner to be chastized in this discussion; for the theologian also must discover that he is the one who originally prompted, far back in the Middle Ages, a concept of man's transcendence and domination of nature and, on this basis, recommended a ruthless destruction of the pagan sense of the sanctity

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of nature. The lumberers who hewed down the forests of Europe and America had behind them the theological destruction of all sanctity of forest groves and the banishing of all woodland nymphs and spirits of lake and stream to hell. The scientist, in turn, must discover that he is more the heir of Christian presuppositions than he realized, translating into secular, technological terms this Western Christian tradition of man's desacralization and domination of nature.¹

On the basis of common human concern, theologians and scientists can unite around the ecological crisis. But they are thereby forced to examine not only the immediate technological causes of this, but also the socio-economic organization of our society that upholds it and, ultimately, the image of man in his relation to nature that has served as its implicit rationale. The ultimate implication of this discussion, then, is nothing less than the development of a new concept of man in relation to both nature and transcendence that can promote a relationship of care, guardianship, and fellowship with nature, rather than one of exploitation and domination.

The theological model of man's relationship to his environment which is to be challenged here is not simply an antiquated world view which all good secularists can righteously agree has been superseded by the "modern world," but rather the theological view of man which has been and continues to be the foundation of the modern world. It is also the theological view of man expounded by that secular theology which traces its lineage from Barth's rejection of religion and natural theology to Gogarten's secularization, and to Bultmarnn's eschatological encounter, radical historicity, and demythologizing program. It is the theology of those who have been in the front line of the accommodation of Christianity to technological society and who have even traced the process of secularization and the development of technology to Christianity itself. Christianity's desacralizing of the world is the presupposition of modern secular, technological society, they said. Now, by a strange turn of events this self-justification has become an accusation, as the ecological disaster turns the tables on them both.

The theology which was popularized by the secular theologians is a theology which sees man as a strangely insubstantial being who is

¹ The catalytic work on this relationship has been Lynn White's "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis," Science, March 10, 1967, pp. 1203-1207.

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to remain ever ready to be re-created from above ex nihilo, and who need observe no sanctity, either of nature or his history, to limit him in his continual search for self-creation. Man is not only capable of constant radical transcendence (through grace) of his own past world, but his historicity is stressed to the point where he becomes a-historical, ever discontinuous with what he has been in a quest for radical newness. His freedom from the world is also a limitless freedom to dominate and re-make the world as he pleases. The world is both his enemy, insofar as it would seek to constrain him, and the plastic arena of his domination. The God who underlies this theology is a being radically transcendent to the world, having no analogy of being with it. This God is not the God who was or is, but only the God who will be. He is the God of the future alone, whose reality lies in the transcendence of unfulfilled possibilities.

Not surprisingly, radical Christian theologians have found a common ground with Marxists in this doctrine of the transcendent as radical futurity. This means that God is no longer related to the past of the world or man. He is not at the origins of things, but only in their future possibilities which are achieved by ever negating their origins. He is the God of the resurrection of the dead, but not of the origins of present life. He is not the God who created the world we have known, but rather he is the God ever ready to dissolve all that is and has been in the fiery apocalypse in order to resurrect something radically new in a future world which is wholly discontinuous with the past. The inability to deal with the category of creation is typical of modern Protestant theology from Barth onward, and this failure is only radicalized in the theology of hope which has more ties with the existentialist left-wing of crisis theology than it wishes to acknowledge. The striking characteristic of Moltmann's theology of hope is the total annihilation of the pole of creation in the doctrine of God and the exclusive reliance on the eschatological pole.

The roots of this anthropology, however, are very old and traditional in Western Christianity. We can trace it to Augustine's emphasis on man's sinful, fallen nature, whereby the church father gradually purged Western Christianity of some earlier, Platonic ideas of man's continuity with divine being. Man "as he is" is defined as radically depraved; salvation, then, is understood as radically discontinuous with man's nature. It was the difference between their understanding of grace and nature which was the cause of the irresolv-

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able misunderstanding between Augustine and Pelagius. Pelagius was a follower of the Eastern Christian doctrine of man. Eastern Christianity, moreover, has never to this day been greatly impressed by Augustine's standing as a father of the church, nor accepted the Augustinian doctrine of man which emerged from the Western Councils.

The Eastern church, by contrast, defines man not from the perspective of his fall into sin, but from the perspective of his original, created nature which is a true and authentic image of God. Sin, or the Fall, is basically a "denaturing" of man, a falling away from his true nature into dehumanization. This denaturing of man is also reflected in the denaturing of the cosmos which shares in man's bondage to sin and groans for release from captivity. The salvation of man, from this perspective, is not a repudiation of nature, but a restoration of man and the whole cosmos to its true nature. It is the renewal of the whole cosmos within the universe of God's original, creative intent. It is God's Kingdom come, in terms of God's will done on earth as it is in heaven. Man is restored to harmony with God's will; and he is thereby restored to harmony with himself, with the community of his fellow man, and with the fellowship of nature. The whole created world, then, forms a harmonious chorus of praise to the Creator. Obedience to God here has no savor of domination and submission, but is that spontaneous hearing and responding that expresses the harmony between God's will and one's own true self.

Indeed, in Augustine's own anthropology, there was so much of this same Eastern view of man, that his vehemence towards Pelagius also measured the extent to which Pelagius' concept of "natural grace" touched vital aspects of his own view. But Augustine's stress on man's depravity tipped the balance of this Eastern view in the direction of an identification of man with his depravity. This disrupted the sense of man's continuing grounding in the grace of the original creation. The underlying continuity between the original creation and God's saving grace was disrupted, and grace became discontinuous and antithetical to nature. Man mounted up to God by cutting his ties with what was below and behind him. The ultimate direction of this concept of man could only end in a final rejection of that view of nature in which nature was seen as the gracious icon of God's face; and it could only result in a substitute view which made nature an enemy to be ruthlessly put under man's feet.

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Yet it is equally true that Western man's sense of his transcendence to nature has also been the source of his greatest accomplishments, in contrast to other cultures (including that of Eastern Christianity, where man's enclosure in nature has dictated a passivity and a sanctification of the status quo of both nature and, society as a static reflection of the divine nature and will). Is it possible to find, on the basis of the Christian tradition, a synthesis which combines both Eastern sacramental naturalism and Western rebellion and transcendentalism? The Eastern view tends to err on the other side in collapsing the tension between God and the world by simply identifying present existence with the reflection of the transcendent divine Word. But the reality of the Fall should be understood as meaning that God's original creation has become obscured and overlaid with a denatured world which man, not God, has created. This denatured world springs from a relationship between man, nature, and society defined by exploitive relationships, alienation, and domination, rather than communion. The "world" which needs to be overcome is not the gracious world of God's will; for this doing of God's will on earth is indeed not the present world, but "God's Kingdom come." Rather, the world which needs to be overcome is the world which man has created and which has denatured and disfigured God's intention. The new world, which appears in grace, is also a restoration of man to his original and true nature and community with the human and natural universe. Salvation is not a groundless disruption of all continuity, but rather the reclamation of all that is authentic in man's past and the world around him for a new future.

In the mind of early Christian theology of the Patristic period, creation and mankind are neither divine nor secular. They are characterized precisely by that peculiar relationship to God summed up by the word "image." Creation is characterized by both a contingency and a freedom. It can realize itself only by not enclosing itself on some spurious foundation of its own, but rather by opening its being more and more to its divine foundation whereby it also becomes itself to a greater extent by bodying forth more and more fully the self-manifestation of God. This doctrine precludes static deification of things as they are, for creation realizes itself only by continually repenting of its pretense to be self-grounded. Its true foundation in transcendent Being is not a static, but a dynamic, teleological one. But this doctrine also precludes a self-enclosed secularity which can treat nature as a "thing" to be exploited at will

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by autonomous man. Instead, man stands in such an intrinsic solidarity with nature that we can speak of it as his "cosmic body," sharing both in his fallenness and in his quest for redemption. Man can ruin nature, as the extension of his own inner ruin; or he can, in loving communion, make it into a garden of paradise. This, I believe, is the foundation of every radical revolution.

The radical, then, must be a conservative in depth whose rebellion grasps the authentic roots of the tradition which have been distorted to false uses. This kind of dynamic, transformational relationship between past and future, between the original and the eschatological, can give us a basis for a concept of struggle and self-transcendence which is restorational and reconciling rather than nihilistic. But such a view also means a rather dramatic rethinking of our Western (as well as our Eastern) models of salvation. Salvation as self-absolutization may have to be re-thought in terms of salvation as humanization. We are called to manifest the transcendent in a framework of mortality and finitude.

Salvation as revolt against the denaturing of man will also have to be discovered as the acceptance of limit. The limit appears to us at that point where the rebel against injustice rejects the instrumentality of murder as a means of creating change; for to express rebellion through murder is to destroy the common nature upon which the rebellion itself must take its stand. Rebellion is a revolt against the denaturing of human and cosmic community into alienated, exploitive relationships, and so it also must restore us to community by setting a limit to our own self-aggrandizement. Not all means are permissible to achieve goals or to express indignation. Rather, we must embrace the earth as our finite mother who arbitrates the extent to which one child of earth can raise itself up at the expense of the others, including our brothers of the plant and animal kingdom. This embrace of our land, of our finite spaceship earth, must dictate for us a new asceticism, born not of hatred, but of respect for the flesh. We are brought back from our heaven-storming which rejects all real, present possibilities that fall short of the infinite in restless dissatisfaction. We are given instead a new persistence to struggle faithfully against the denaturing of creation which can, at the same time, rejoice in the daily cup of wine and earthly bread as a nourishment neither empty nor omnipotent, but suited to the measure of a man.