C4CC(23): Therefore the land mourns (3)
I have just noticed that we have gone through the two-thirds stage of these extracts! I am looking forward to finishing them. Posting the extracts has gotten me back into the habit of publishing, which was the aim, but I have so many other things bubbling away in me…
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A further rule about idolatry is that idols always collapse in the end. We can be fairly specific about it in the context of peak oil and the other limits to growth: physical growth will cease because we cannot continue to expand the physical process when we have a significantly contracting energy base. However, one of the things we can hope for is that human growth, human development, does not have to cease. There are lots of ways in which the economy can shift away from one which is so dominated by the physical to a situation which emphasises the exchange of creativity. The increase in value does not have to be generated by an unsustainable use of resources. These things are not directly affected by the problems with oil and energy, so there is no reason why human civilisation cannot be rich in a cultural sense, even if we have not got quite so much stuff. When growth is taken away – and physical growth in the way we have experienced it will never come back – then suddenly we will see the ways in which our society needs to change. We will see the truth and the truth will set us free. There are things which we as individuals can do, and there are even more important things which we can do corporately, together as a community. Yet we cannot solve these problems; nor should we weigh ourselves down with the expectation that we can, because God is in charge, not us. Much of what is coming we can view as God acting to dismantle the structures of oppression.
So what might a wiser economic system look like? Consider the charge against ancient Israel from Hosea Chapter 4:
“Hear the Word of the Lord you Israelites because the Lord has a charge to bring against you who live in the land. There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgement of God in the land, there is only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery, they break all bounds and bloodshed follows bloodshed. Because of this the land mourns and all who live in it waste away. The beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying.”
For a Christian, there is a principle which is incontestable: God is our Creator, we are his creatures, and this makes a difference to how we are to live on the earth. The earth belongs to God and therefore we do not have final charge over the earth, we are God’s stewards. God is the first gardener; God is the one who plants us in the land. Following on from this is a second Christian principle: in Christ the creation is renewed. Genesis 2 describes the fall, when humanity is expelled from the garden. Adam and Eve bite of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and it is a knowledge which sets humans apart from God, expelling them from Eden. The world now becomes disordered: Adam is cursed and he has to extract his living from the soil and Eve suffers great pain in childbirth. This is a profound environmental parable. In Christian understandings that fall is matched up and overcome in the incarnation of Christ. That which goes wrong in Genesis 2 we have the opportunity to put right through Jesus. God gives a vision to us of flourishing within a flourishing environment, the land flowing with milk and honey. The vision held out to us in scripture is not about an abstract state of our souls, it is something very concrete, real and physical and it is within a particular sort of environment. God is concerned with the environment.
A common language within the prophetic tradition establishes a link between the sin which God sees in the people and the suffering of the land around the people – the land expresses the symptoms of the sin: “therefore the land mourns.” This principle is clear in the punishment of Adam: “cursed is the ground because of your sin.” There is a direct link between the state of the environment and our sinful nature: there is no hard and fast division between humanity and the creation within which humanity is planted. One of the aspects of an incarnational faith is precisely in embracing and giving value to the physical world. Gnosticism sees the physical world as the realm of the devil, the realm of wickedness to be escaped from – we are souls trapped within this terrible flesh and these sparks need to be set free from the physical flesh. Christianity is profoundly opposed to this, for Christianity embraces and gives value to the created world.
This concern for the created world is manifest in Scripture. The Bible does not talk about global warming or the ethics of car ownership, but the Bible does talk in detail about how to farm. Leviticus 19 talks about the principles: you are not to farm right up to the edge of the field, nor are you to go back and harvest a second time. If you plant fruit trees, you are not to take the harvest from the fruit trees for the first three years after planting and the fourth year after planting the harvest from the fruit trees is to be given to God. For four years after planting a fruit tree you are not to harvest it for your own consumption. Most crucial is the teaching about the Jubilee – the land itself is not to be farmed every seventh year, the land itself is to have a Sabbath and after seven Sabbaths is the year of Jubilee when there is to be no farming anywhere at all. You are only to go out and pick the food that is naturally growing. We might ask “how are we going to eat?” The answer is that in the sixth year God will send such an abundant harvest that it gives enough food for the two years following, not just for the year of the Sabbath, but for the year following when farming is resumed.
This teaching can be summarised in two ways. First, a radical trust in God’s provision: 'The Lord will provide'; second, that we are forbidden from extracting from the land the maximum amount that can be gained. Think of the Israelites in the desert, grumbling because they are hungry and God sending manna and quail. The same principle is being applied in the promised land and the principle is that we must not extract the maximum from the land for our own benefit, rather we leave some for the aliens, the widows, the orphans, all those who are weakest and most vulnerable. These commands cannot be separated from God's extreme concern with social justice. When we come up against these sorts of commands we consider that they are crazy and impractical – which they are. They are indeed crazy when seen in secular terms. Yet what are our concerns? What is driving us? Is it that we are afraid we are going to go hungry, that there is going to be famine in the land? Or is it simply a question of greed – wanting to make the most produce, make the most money and get a larger market share than our competitors?
The fundamental battle again comes down to discerning the right path, seeking to find wisdom, which means describing and rejecting idolatry…