August 26 2023
God, the earth and humanity belong together.
There is a new Trinity, more easily comprehended than the theological construct of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Why? Because we daily experience this concept, its failure causing calamitous Climate Change, because God, the earth and humanity belong together.
My thoughts are the fruit of life-long reflections, shaped by such insightful people as Johan Herman Bavinck, three of whose books I have translated, published by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids. I have also been deeply influenced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
I am engaging in a sort of reverse theology, my invented term. Customary theology examines God from our point of view. In reverse theology, it’s the other way around: how God speaks to us and about us, fully realizing that theology is a very dangerous enterprise, in which we deal with something unique, something unnameable, something beyond knowing. Just think: We cannot even start to understand ourselves, our spouses, our children, let alone dealing with God, who is beyond all knowledge and understanding.
I read somewhere that any Christian Creed should be whispered, not shouted, and that includes any ecclesiastical confessional standard. Paul, who knew a bit about the gospel, having shaped what we now call ‘the Christian church’, at that famous encounter with the intellectual elite of his days on the Areopagus, called God “the unknown” (Acts 17: 16-17). Even the word ‘theology’ borders on blasphemy: theo- meaning ‘God’; logy – from ‘ogos’, word or science. How, possibly, can God be a subject of investigation?
Yet, impossible as it is, we have to deal with theology, thinking, venturing, probing, evaluating, the concept of ‘God’. We all have to be ‘theologians’, trying and exploring and examining the ultimate reasons for life. When we do that, we end up with God, or our concept of God.
Frankly I am fascinated by a sentence in Dr. Sabine Dramm’s book on Bonhoeffer, where she writes: “What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one”. She adds, and I paraphrase, ”Life has its wellspring, its origin, in God, and bounces back from there to God.”
I know, I know, I have quoted these lines before, still trying to understand their implications. Today we are discovering that without God we are losing the earth and ourselves: God, humanity and the earth belong together: eliminate one and we lose it all. The fall in paradise affected us and the entire earth. That’s what we see today!
Aware observers realize that the extreme weather conditions around the world are interconnected and insidiously self-accelerating. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world, altering the fast-flowing air currents high above the planet known as jet streams, which then cause wild fluctuations of temperature and precipitation. As temperatures rise, conditions are increasingly occurring that make it hard, if not impossible for many species (including humans) to survive, even at relatively high latitudes.
What has gone wrong?
We don’t want to acknowledge that God, the planet and humanity form a trinity, unbreakably connected, welcoming Dr. Barry Commoner who formulated the four laws of ecology.
Everything Is Connected to Everything Else
It reflects the existence of the elaborate network of interconnections in the ecosphere: among different living organisms, and between populations, species, and individual organisms and their physicochemical surroundings.
Everything Must go Somewhere
This is, of course, simply a somewhat informal restatement of a basic law of physics—that matter is indestructible. Applied to ecology, the law emphasizes that in nature there is no such thing as “waste.”
Nature Knows Best
The third law of ecology holds that any major man-made change in a natural system is detrimental to that system.
There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
Today the bills are due, apparent in Global Heating.
These laws are so important that we must memorize them and sing them everywhere: yes, even in church:
A song celebrating the laws of Ecology.
(Everything is connected)
All people that on earth do dwell,
sing to the Lord, his ways foretell.
Remember God, earth stars and sea
Are all a part of you and me.
(Creation knows best)
Creation knows the ways to go
God bred it in its natural know
We therefore must inquire of her
To see where we go right or err.
(Nothing disappears)
Nothing will ever disappear
It lingers on, it is now clear
The oil we burn creates much ill
And causes universal kill.
(No free lunch)
There is no free lunch to be had
The bills are due: they will be bad
We now must pay this immense debt
Which robbed us of our safety net.
God, the earth and humanity belong together. Leave out one of this Trinity, and collapse is assured.