Environment and Christian Ethics

Lyle Brecht 13-Sep-05
CEMT - Tuesday Page 1 of 19

Michael S. Northcott, The Environment and Christian Ethics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical
agriculture – C.S. Lewis1
In our dreams, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart; and in our despair,
against our will, comes wisdom by the awful grace of God – Aschylus’ Agamemnon 2
Northcott’s Thesis
A new non-Christian, humanocentric theology of ‘utilitarianism’ (‘the more human
desires that can be met, the more moral good that has been created’ or ‘the greatest good
for the greatest number’) presently serves as the “primary moral framework for decision
making in modern societies” (70). Utilitarianism is legitimized and sustained due to two
factors: (a) a central myth of modernity that equates the telos of history as human
progress brought about by goods resulting from economic development and technological
innovation; and (b) the goods of human progress can be justified as moral exclusively
through self-reflective interiority and determined by human happiness measured in
economic terms. Thus, “God is superfluous to the order of the material world” (57) as
self-identity is defined primarily by the consumption of the goods of human progress and
the State3 “is but a false copy of the Body of Christ.”4 Yet, without a truly Christian
environmental ethics where Nature has a non-instrumentalist value, “the basis for the
common good, for collective action, civic virtue and the very consent to common social
goals on which [modern] societies depend” (76) is undermined.
Context: Frogs, Floods and Famines
The context for Northcott’s thesis is ecocide5 – the destruction of basic life-support
systems of this earth we inhabit and causation of widespread human suffering:
1
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), 43 in Northcott, 36.
2
Quoted in Joseph Blenkinsopp, Treasures Old & New: Essays in the Theology of the Pentateuch (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 140.
3
‘State’ is being used here as a construct to connote a totalizing socio-political space comprised of various
levels of government, supporting media and consultants, and the constellation of rules, regulations and
laws, and the administrative policies, practices, and procedures that comprise a cadre of self-interested
agents (a sort of ‘priesthood’) for institutional hegemony over and in opposition to the well-being of and
the being-in-relationship of individual humans to other humans and their environment.
4
William T. Cavenaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 46.
5
As used here, “ecocide” means the inattention to environmental issues that can singly or when combined
cause collapse of natural and man-made systems that humans depend upon to sustain life and culture.
• We are releasing toxins into the earth’s atmosphere that act as poisons of the
earth’s life-support systems. Through the chemicals we discharge into the air, we
have torn a hole in the earth’s ozone layer that protects us from the ultraviolet
radiation from the sun and caused global warming;
• At an accelerating rate we are destroying natural, existing habitats – the forests,

grasslands, wetlands, and deserts or converting them to man-made habitats (cities,
villages, farmlands, pastures, roads, golf courses);
• Through unsustainable land use practices we are causing soil erosion at rates 10-
40X the rates of soil formation, salinization of once productive cropland, loss of
soil fertility, and soil acidification and alkalinization;
• We are rapidly decreasing a significant fraction of wild species and populations of

the world’s flora and fauna and loosing their genetic information through habitat
destruction, the introduction of toxins into the environment, and unsustainable
land management practices. Once a species is extinct, we cannot bring them back;
• The world’s freshwater resources are finite and rapidly shrinking as more crops
need to be irrigated and world’s population increases;
• The per capita impact for the world’s population is continuing to rise; it is not
decreasing. For example, a First World citizen presently consumes ~30X more
resources than a Third World citizen and produces ~30X more waste than do
Third World citizens.
• While two billion of today’s population currently depend on the world’s fisheries
for protein, the majority of the world’s fisheries have been seriously degraded or
have already collapsed;
• All these environmental stresses are creating the conditions for outbreaks of new
disease organisms and pandemics in certain areas of the world.6
6
See Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005). For
example, the First World exports its toxins to the Third World (e.g. The Inuit have the highest
concentration of neurotoxins and gender shifters such as toxaphene, mercury and PCPs of any human
population on earth. These toxic chemicals have been migrating from the tropics to Arctic food chains and
into the diets of northern peoples for decades, far exceeding levels considered safe for humans in the First
Detailed Analysis: The Origins of the Environmental Crisis or How did

Utilitarianism Come to Displace the Christian Doctrine of Creation?
It all began in Europe of the 14th century. Beginning in 1348, successive waves of the
bubonic plague wiped out half the population of Europe, causing an unprecedented
demographic catastrophe and economic depression that caused the complete collapse of
traditional medieval civilization between 1450 – 1640, and with it traditional political-
religious relationships and theological understandings. Three factors combined in
“complex and multifactorial” (41) ways during the high middle ages to produce the
environmental crisis of the 21st century: (a) the commoditization of nature; (b) the
agricultural revolution; and (c) the modern economic system.
In the Middle Ages “there was no absolute right of property in medieval ethics, and
wealth and money making were regarded until the end of the Middle Ages with great
suspicion” (54). Traditionally, “work and nature as land were connected in a relational
manner…mediated through kinship and manorial structures, churches, monasteries and
guilds” (48) who held land in common for the common good of all. “As the result of the
conjunction of a number of factors, including climate change, new agricultural
techniques…and competing demands of the aristocracy, royalty, church, and emergent
nation states for wealth and agricultural surplus” (49) necessitated by the increasing costs
of warfare, common lands were confiscated and enclosed.7 A consequence was the
“disembedding of human social structures” from the sacred nature of the land “and the
loss of a widespread awareness of the relationship between nature and human life” (50).
Land became valuable solely on the basis of its value to its private owner.
Another of the forces that supported this new view of the value of land was the Protestant
Reformation that “sought to purge the landscape of the sacred and locate the site of God’s
activity entirely in the individual self” (53). Nature became a resource created entirely for
human purposes where “‘all things’ were made ‘principally for the benefit and pleasure
of man’” (53). Money became “‘the primary mode of relationship between person, and
between persons and nature’” (79). “The coming of the money economy involved the
World.) and the Third World exports its diseases and problems to the First World (e.g. AIDS, SARS,
cholera, West Nile virus, illegal immigrants, terrorists, debt, etc.) [Diamond, 517].
7
“Property owners of the modern world are the inheritors of those who violently stole the commons from
the common people in the practice of enclosure” of the public commons. See Alisdair MacIntyre, After
Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981), 234 in Northcott, 52.
abandonment of moral, ethical and religious controls over agriculture, economics, trade
and relations between humans and nature” (55).
This combination of an instrumentalist and secular doctrine of creation, emergence of

private property, and modern money economy ended the Middle Ages’ traditional
deification of nature. However, “the turn to nature [‘environmentalism’] is also incapable
of providing a resolution for our contemporary moral and ecological dilemmas” (85).
Synthesis & Reflection
A utilitarian ‘environment’ devoid of God with only instrumentalist value is a

theopolitical construct8, an imaginative invention of post-Enlightenment modernity.9
From post-Reformation Christianity’s “removal of God from the human vision of the
cosmos” (77), the modern concept of ‘the environment’ inherits the central myth of
modernity: reclaiming a utilitarian Garden of Eden that is a new space of timeless
convenience and unbounded personal happiness created through the self-interested
pursuit of and consumption of industrially manufactured and marketed goods and
services.10
8
The term ‘theopolitical’ recognizes that supposedly secular political discourse “is really theology in
disguise” providing “an alternative soteriology to that of a marginalized and privatized [meaningfully
absent from public discourse concerning the common good and focused on individualistic spiritual
interiority] Church.” As Christians, our objective must be to look to resurrect a Church as a Christian
“community of freedom; a community of people acting together in reciprocal respect for one another’s
dignity” and God’s good creation. A community where the ethics of the common good confronts the
“destruction of people and nature [that] amounts to a celebration of collective suicide.” See Cavenaugh
2002, 2, 5, 9, 31; William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist (Challenges in Contemporary Theology;
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 66; David Hollenbach, S.J., The Common Good and Christian
Ethics (New Studies in Christian Ethics; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 83, 102; Franz J.
Hinkelammert, Cultura de la Esperanza y Sociedad sin Exclusion (San Jose: DEI, 1995), 127, 195, 303
quoted in Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Liberation Theology after the End of History (London: Routledge, 2001), 12.
9
“Until the Enlightenment, the Christian tradition sustained the belief that God and not humans is the
principal locus of consciousness and moral purposiveness in the cosmos. Similarly, the creation is first and
foremost God’s possession, not humanity’s.” Essentially, as Karl Barth suggests, “a loan from God to
humans.” See Michael S. Northcott, “Ecology and Christian Ethics” in Robin Gill, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 223.
10
“Nature’s fate and humanity’s fate are closely intertwined.” See Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden:
The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 2-3, 246.
Who will care for God’s good creation? Christianity has timidly consigned the
environment to a pietistic (spiritual) reclaiming of a manufactured and commoditized
Garden of privatized interiority. The Church has enabled modernity’s separation of God
from nature, the bodily self from spirit, and religion from politics. Nature has become a
space where a fragmented human agency “quest[s] for nourishment and welfare” (183).
The Church relinquishes power over the physical body of the earth to the State for
privatized utilitarian purposes.11 The State exercises its dominion over the environment
by supporting primarily temporal, short-term economic, utilitarian uses of the
environment. Individualistic, economically-determined autonomy conveniently defines
the ‘common good.’12 Thus, the care of the environment falls between the cracks.
The result of this dualism of State control of the physical body of the earth and Church
control over the spiritual well-being of creation has produced a number of seemingly
intractable and ever-worsening local and global environmental issues.
A massive paradigm shift happened from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment that is
affecting our vision in the Church today.13 What Northcott is attempting to open our eyes
to is the network of causalities and effects that altered the Christian theological landscape
of what it means to be human in the world, how we determine the value of this world,
what constitutes the common good, and the telos of history. The Church needs to find its
voice and contribute to a critical discourse of the common good that challenges this
11
State agency over the body of the earth seeks recourse in a depoliticized citizenry that are “making do
with fragments of moral insight” and because these fragments “are frequently in unacknowledged conflicts
with other fragments, or not recognized in the way the system or institution is run”, the State is able to
coalesce its power and continue to do what it wishes without adequate constraint. See Duncan B. Forrester,
“Social Justice and Welfare,” in Gill, 204.
12
“Modern societies’ privatized view [based on utilitarian individualism] of the good life essentially
situates the common good as irrelevant to living well” (Hollenbach, 28). For example, Hollenbach suggests
that, “The choice today is not between freedom and community, but between a society based on reciprocal
respect and solidarity and a society that leaves many people behind” and destroys the very life-support
systems that it depends on for its well-being (Hollenbach, 244).
13
MacIntrye dubs this paradigm shift ‘the Enlightenment Project’ whose aim was “to provide a purely
rational justification” for human morality and in the process “invented the idea of humans as ‘autonomous
individuals’ [selves], thus the concept of telos, so very central to morality, was lost.” Without a telos to
answer ‘What human life is for?’, the State substitutes utilitarianism which posits a morality operating
according to the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number. See Brad J. Kallenberg, “The
Master Argument of MacIntrye’s After Virtue” in Nancey Murphy, Brad J. Kallenberg & Mark Thiessen
Nation, eds., Virtues & Practices in the Christian Tradition: Christian Ethics after MacIntryre (Harrisburg,
PA: Trinity Press, 1997), 9-13.
embedded non-Christian utilitarian theology and its fruits of environmental degradation

and widespread human suffering.
As Northcott thoroughly documents regarding the environmental crisis, the fruits of

present-day pluralism and tolerance of modern societies’ non-Christian theology of
utilitarianism are unconscionable suffering of the body of the earth and its resident
human bodies. “If identification with a current world view is one of the deadly errors of
the Church, the other is that the gospel becomes perverted ‘into an impartation of general,
timeless and irrelevant Christian truth.’”14 Rowan Williams points out that “the
questioning involved here is not our interrogation of the data, but its interrogation of
us….”15 We may no longer may be able to exist in situations “where one group of human
beings announces, effectually, that in the long run its welfare and its survival will depend
on the destruction of others. [For] In these circumstances, the Church is bound, by its
mere existence, to be a startling and challenging fact.”16
14
Karl Barth quoted in Timothy J. Gorringe, Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (Christian Theology in
Context; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 18. The most egregious example of the Church’s
acquiescence to and complicatedness in a State’s hegemony of power and secular utilitarian theology is that
“between the years 1900 and 1987, governments and government-like organizations murdered 169 million
civilians, apart from the 34 million fallen soldiers.” And of this staggering total, “National Socialist
Germany, mainly for ideological reasons, cost the lives of about 49 million people, most of whom were
civilians” under a democratically elected totalitarian government with full support of the majority of
existing Churches in Germany. See Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001), 262.
15
Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of
the Cross (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1990), 11.
16
Rowan Williams, The Truce of God (New York: Pilgrim, 1983, 32 quoted in Joseph Monti, “Orthodoxy
and ‘The Wound of Knowledge’: A Rowan Williams Sampler,” Sewanee Theological Review 46:2 (Easter
2003) 282.
Hear this, O foolish and senseless people,

who have eyes, but do not see,
who have ears, but do not hear.
Do you not fear me? says the LORD;
Do you not tremble before me?
I placed the sand as a boundary for the sea,
a perpetual barrier that it cannot pass;
though the waves toss, they cannot prevail,
though they roar, they cannot pass over it.
But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart;
they have turned aside and gone away. (Jer. 5:21-23, NRSV)
Thesis:
The environmental crisis we presently face “requires a new ethic of human and social
relations which addresses human injustice and the self-interested pursuit of material gain
at the expense of traditional communities of place” (109-10). Today’s present, dominant
“anti-relational ethic of the pursuit of self-interest and the anti-rationalist ethic of
utilitarian individualism both ignore this relationality in the structure of life on earth”
(121). However, the theology of both the Hebrew Bible and Christian virtue ethics
demonstrate a relational “ethic of connectivity and care” (118) and “support a relational
account of the nature of the human self and of the interaction of divine, human and non-
human life” (121). This is in stark contrast to utilitarian individualism where the self is
defined purely as a self-determined, self-motivated, autonomous agent independent of a
relationship to God, other, or the environment.
Context: “The Turn to Nature & The Flowering of Ecotheology” –

Limited and Heterodox Environmentalisms
A major part of the “business of modern bureaucracies, legal systems and economic
markets” is to arbitrate between utilities and disutilities of moral goods (92). However,
“in practice these institutions have not been effective in moderating interests of groups
that are disparate in levels of wealth or power, or disparate in space or time, nor in giving
due place to non-human environmental goods” (92). One of the reasons for this
ineffectiveness is that these institutions use “aggregate human utility as the arbiter of
moral decisions, which provides an inadequate framework for the protection of the
dignity of particular human persons, commodities or environmental goods” (92).
If “it is because we no longer regard the world as morally ordered that we treat it the way
we do” (161), then the question is if traditional Christian doctrines of God and Creation
are adequate to produce a “framework for the protection of the dignity of particular
human persons, commodities [and] environmental goods” (92). Any Christian
environmental ethics will need to address contextual issues of: theodicy (“will good
triumph over evil?”); philosophy (“is modern philosophy too humanocentric to be of
much use?”); politics (“can the Church resist the totalizing of the State’s claims to
hegemony over modern life?”); and economics (“is an economics based solely on
utilitarian measures of value capable of calculating the true costs of environmental
degradation?”). Will the world “be redeemed and restored in the good purposes of God?”
(153-4).
A variety of frameworks using nature as the ultimate value and the guide to moral virtue
(87) have been proposed including: consequentialism;17 deontological based18 rights19
and intrinsic value20 ethics; ecocentric ethics21 such as land ethics,22 the Gaia
hypothesis,23 and ecosophy (‘deep ecology’);24 and ecotheologies25 of three flavors:
humanocentric,26 theocentric,27 and ecocentric.28
17
In this framework, an estimation of the rightness or wrongness of a particular action [is determined] from
the consequences which follow from the action” (90). The problem is that it approaches environmental
decision-making from a humanocentric and utilitarian perspective to subjugate individual interests to those
of the group on the grounds of cost-benefit analyses.
18
The moral value or good is independent of its consequences (Immanuel Kant, 97).
19
“The basis for the assertion that all persons have rights is said to be that all individuals have inherent
value” (99). This notion of inherent value is then broadened to include non-human creatures and the natural
world. However, “if the sate is the guarantor of rights, then those rights must be abrogated as soon as they
interfere with the security of the state.” See William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist (Challenges in
Contemporary Theology; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 192.
20
“Value resides in the [action or good] entirely independently of human perception or value conferred”
(Holmes Rolston, 103).
21
Movement from anthropocentrism (man-centered) to ecocentrism (nature or creation centered).
22
The two most revolutionary features of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic are: (1) the shift in emphasis from the
individual to the community of life, and (2) the shift in emphasis from human beings to nature. See J. Baird
Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1989), 8.
23
The earth itself is a living organism, a self-organizing, “self-regulatory system manifesting qualities of
intelligence which maintain a homeostatic state favorable to the development and maintenance of a
biosphere suitable for complex life” (110).
24
“Human self-interest would be better served by the maximization of all possible relationships which each
individual experiences both with other humans and with the diversity of ecological life” (Arne Naess, Val
However, each of these suggested environmentalist frameworks are either heterodox or

possess serious limitations for actually producing on the ground changes to how humans
care for and treat the environment. Instead, Northcott proposes, “to indicate how we
might arrive at a more precise ordering of human and non-human goods and values from
moral resources within an orthodox Christian tradition – and particularly the natural law
tradition” (163).
Detailed Analysis: “The Order of Creation” – The Orthodox

Environmentalism of the Hebrew Bible
“The Hebrew Bible offers [an]…account of the relations between the human self, the
social order and natural ecological order, and between all of these and God” (164) that
provides a foundation for an orthodox environmental ethics. For example, the Israelites
believed that “the land did not belong to them, but to God” (191). Humankind are merely
caretakers of this gift, this “common inheritance…for generations past, present and
future” (191) which is “not to be harshly used and manipulated but to be tended and even
loved” (187).
Plumwood). Rather than environmental decision-making to pursue happiness and avoid pain, “individuals
and societies should pursue the positive qualities of personal engagement and mutual dependence” (114).
25
Positions on environmental themes “taken up by Christian theologians” (124). Unfortunately, “the
characterization of Christianity as an anti-ecological religion is often exemplified in the putative weakness
of the Christian response to environmental crisis” (124).
26
Humanocentric ecotheologies range from Teilhard de Chardin celebration of humanity “changing the
face of the earth” as a “precondition for the final eschatological establishment of the Kingdom of God on
earth” (125) to Rosemary Radford Ruether’s ecofeminist theology and the Vatican’s pronouncements on
the environment and the destiny of man. The criticism is that “even if humans are truly the meaningful and
purposive center of the universe, it may be argued that the degree of self-totalization which [humans] are
currently visiting on the planet may be as bad for future humans as it is for non-human life” (126).
27
The pneumatological cosmology of Jürgen Moltmann (God in Creation; The Spirit of Life) is a good
example: “the world of God can be said both to express the mind of God and be the means God achieves
his redemptive purposes for both humanity and nature” (145).
28
For example, the process theologian, John B. Cobb, Mathew Fox (Original Blessing), Sally McFague
(The Body of God): “God is in every event” and all that is (148). The problems are that “such an immanent
suffering God” is also in all that is evil, as well as human suffering (150).
For the Israelites “neither the creation, nor any of her creatures belong to human beings,
but to their Creator,”29 who “cherishes the cosmos, he loves it, and so it is valued, loved,
even before we humans encounter it. Respect for life [‘nephesh’] is…a fundamental
ethical principle in the Hebrew Bible” (182). For this creation and its creatures, who have
the “breath of the creator spirit,” (185) reflects “the being, wisdom and goodness of God”
(165, 196).30 “The moral responsibility to worship the Lord and reflect his glory may be
said to be inherent in the beauty, fecundity and order of the natural world” (181).
As humans are created in the imago Dei (‘image of God’), this establishes the “moral
obligations and responsibilities: to procreate and nurture children, to care for the poor,
sick, widows, orphans and aliens, to treat all humans with justice (182-3). The Hebrew
Bible “also issues a range of prohibitions: not to kill or maim humans, not to covet their
possessions, not to expose of sacrifice children, not to deny the essentials of life – food,
clothing, shelter – to the poor or the alien” (183).
“The sufficiency of the land [and all of God’s creation] is related to the justice of God
and to the justice of the society of God’s people” (190). Because humankind is part of
God’s creation, we do not stand apart and separate from ‘the environment’ but are part of
God’s wholeness. However, if we fail to “respect the integrity of the created order…. we
betray the earth, and we will reap the flood, the drought or the whirlwind” (197). For
“human injustice, the quest for material security by the rich at the expense of the poor, is
inextricably related to human and cosmic moral disorder and ecological crisis” (192).
The covenant between God and the Israelites is actually a ‘cosmic covenant’ as it
includes the “ordering of time and seasons, of oceans and rivers, of deserts and fertile
plains, all may be said to belong to the…. covenant, and to the divine blessing on king
David and the society he ruled” (167-8). All of heaven and earth and all of history
depends on God, is directed by Her, and owes Her obedience. Creation provides the
setting for doing God’s will. Thus, “human welfare depends on a recognition of the
29
Calvin B. Dewitt, “Behemoth and Batrachians in the Eye of God: Responsibility to Other Kinds in
Biblical Perspective” in Christianity and Ecology, edited by Dieter T. Hessel and Rosemary Radford
Ruether (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 306.
30
The whole creation gives testimony to God’s divinity and everlasting power (Ps. 19) and “The primary
moral value of life relates to [this] belief that all life, human and non-human, is in some way related to the
life-giving spirit of God and is therefore worthy of respect” (183).
goodness and relatedness of all orders of life on earth from the weakest to the strongest”
(196).31
This covenantal relationship “identifies the basic moral responsibilities of all life,
including human life, with the calling of all life forms to respond to God in praise and
worship. This response of gratitude is a fundamental feature of creaturely being which is
shared by all creatures of the earth, humans and animals, landscapes, seas and mountains,
earth, wind, fire, and rain” (180). True freedom for humankind is the joy in God’s good
creation and “faith in the natural providence” of God and “trust in nature’s abundance”
which is “a gift from God” (196-7).
“That which is moral in human life is that which tends to preserve the harmony of the
natural world and to follow the wisdom of the natural systems” (197). “The moral and
religious aspects of human life tend to the same end, which is to preserve and restore the
stability, harmony and relationality of all” parts of God’s good creation (197). For “the
telos of the cosmos is the restoration of paradise, of the natural relationality between
humans and God” (193).
An important means for restoring this relationality between humans and God is through
sacrifice, “the offering back to God as gift that which comes from God” (187).
“Sacrificial practices involve both the restoration of created order – divine and human –
in relation to human actions or natural disasters which threaten that order and its inherent
relationality, and the celebration of the fundamental goodness and giftedness of this
order” (186).32 For example, “in Christianity the sacrifice of God in Christ on the cross is
the supreme instance of restoration and expiation, or redemption” (187). In the sacrificial
liturgy (leitourgia)33 of the Eucharist we participate in “the continuing performance of the
31
Has mankind become an embodiment of “The Destroyer” and the earth a new Abaddon? In the Hebrew
Bible and LXX, the agency of ‘The Destroyer’ was usually reserved for God or God’s avenging angel(s)
(Exod. 12:23) but was also used to designate a human agent of destruction (e.g. an individual, group, or
nation; Job 15:21; Isa 21:2; 49:17; Jer 48:8, 15, 18; Rev 11:18). Abaddon (Heb. }a∑baddo®n) was used as a
poetic synonym for the abode of the dead (the ‘bottomless pit’) or place of destruction (ABD).
32
Ritual sacrifice (1) “achieves the expiation of pollution, guilt, death and disease;” (2) “involves the re-
establishment and affirmation of communion, between God and humans, and between persons – especially
when particular persons are alienated by some sinful act, and;” (3) represents a fundamental attitude of
thanksgiving to God…for the gifts of nature or the created order” (186).
33
“An action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had no been as a mere
collection of individuals” See Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 25.
drama of reconciliation through Jesus Christ…. the public act of remembrance, or

anamnesis, of the history of salvation, from the creation of the world to its fall and
redemption in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ…. we enact a politics of
reconciliation that makes the Church a counter-performance to the politics of the
world.”34
Synthesis & Reflection
Northcott is imagining a recovery of the Doctrine of Creation that avoids the trap of
environmentalism, which both limits God’s freedom and does not address the primary
need to heal man’s relationship to God. Instead, Northcott is suggesting that we
remember (anamnesis) the distinction between man and God and reconstitute our
relationship to this ‘wholly other’ God as the basis for human hope.
This relationship to a ‘wholly other’ God that allows God the freedom to be God is
political. For the Church is really the community of remembrance whose task it is to
remember for I am with you – declares YHWH – to deliver you (Jer. 1:19b, NJPS). Thus,
the political task of Christian theology today is “to bring to public expression those very
hopes and yearnings [for God’s creation and the liberation of all humankind] that have
been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know that they are
there.” Most importantly, it is in the Church’s “public expression of hope as a way of
subverting the dominant royal embrace of despair” that our human community will find
the imagination to ensure the survival of the planet Earth.35 For there is no way in which
God’s project to bring the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth can succeed if the Earth
project fails.36 “[The] urgency is to save the beauty and wonder of a gracious world
designed as a place suitable for the Divine indwelling, a place where the meeting of the
Divine and the human”37are open to transformation – the in-breaking of “cosmological
moments of grace”; of “God’s sacramental offering” that includes not only humankind,
but all of life, the Earth itself, and all of God’s good creation.
34
Cavanaugh 1998, 202.
35
Walter Brueggemann, Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1986), 65.
36
Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), 127.
37
Thomas Berry, “Christianity’s Role in the Earth Project,” in Hessel and Ruether, 131, 133, 134.
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us. For
creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God; for creation was made subject to futility,
not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery
to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that all creation is groaning in labor
pains even until now; (Romans 8:18-22, NAB)
Northcott’s Thesis:
In the absence of reclaiming the Christian tradition contained in the Hebrew Bible, the
New Testament, and Thomistic natural law,38 moral debate concerning the environment
“is out of joint and becomes a theatre of illusions” as we wrestle with fragmented speech
among autonomous selves who have become disembodied from traditions of shared
understandings of “rights and justice and telos.” So we continue to face “insoluble
problems [that] will remain insoluble until” we recover a telos for ‘what human life is
for?’39 Thus, in order to recover from ecocide (see Frogs, floods and famines; chapter
one), our churches need to re-embody in their own practices a Christian theology and
environmental ethics where “the fundamental good is the orientation of life towards God
as the giver of life, an orientation which is expressed in the first commandment of the
Decalogue…to worship God and God alone, and not to idolize – and hence abuse – any
other feature of created reality” (313-4). To begin, the Church needs to repent and give
up its own individualistic materialism, utilitarianism theology, nationalistic obeisance and
passivity toward forms of industrial capitalism that are not only forces “which are
destroying nature [but] are also destroying moral virtue” (317) and the religious and
spiritual communities that sustain modern civilization. Instead, the Church needs an
“ecological repristination of the natural law tradition” for revisioning “a fundamental
connection between the reorientation of society towards the common good of humanity
and the cosmos” (312-3) – and the relationality between humans, God, and the world.
Context: Creation, Redemption and Natural Law Ethics – How New

Doctrines of Creation Altered the Conception of Self
Utilitarian individualism equates “material wealth and economic growth with human
good” and denies “the common good in preference for individual wealth maximization”
(242). “the highest human good in…natural law ethics…is located in the orientation of
38
Northcott believes that “natural law ethics as we encounter it in Aquinas, and…in the first two chapters
of Romans, provide the strongest conceptual base within the Christian tradition for an ecological
ethics”(232).
39
Brad J. Kallenberg, “The Master Argument of MacIntrye’s After Virtue” in Nancey Murphy, Brad J.
Kallenberg & Mark Thiessen Nation, eds., Virtues & Practices in the Christian Tradition: Christian Ethics
after MacIntyre (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 1997), 13.
the human self towards love of God and of other persons in human communities of
nurture, place, work and religion” (242).
“The recovery of an ecological ethic in the modern world requires the recovery of a
doctrine of creation redeemed. The worship of a creator who is also a redeemer” (222).
Due to the “privileging by Christian theologians of interiority over exteriority, of the
inner over the outer, of the soul over the body, of the individual over the community, and
of reason over nature,” (209) the location of “moral purposiveness and meaning” (205)
has become centered “exclusively in individual human self-consciousness” (209). Thus,
‘the environment’ “is essentially available for humans to use and transform at their
behest” (220). This utilitarianism of the created order “has its origins in the gradual
dissolution of the early Christian idea of the unity of God’s creative and redemptive
purposes for the created order and for embodied human life, and to the self-in-relation as
part of that order” (209).
In the New Testament, “the orientation of creation towards its eschatological

transformation is brought nearer and anticipated in the events of reconciliation and
restoration which began in the death and resurrection of Christ” (202). “The cross is the
“central act of the world’s creation….restoring the possibilities for life and joy, gratitude
and generosity, love and grace in human history, and for fertility and harmony,
peaceableness and beauty, reciprocity and stability in the natural world” (204). “The
central good of human life is relationship to God expressed in worship and spirituality,
and relationship to other persons, expressed through an ethic of love and care and mutual
responsibility” (205).
For Irenaeus (c.130-c.200), both “nature and the material world are fundamentally good
and blessed by God” (208). “The whole creation…is designed to reflect the beauty,
harmony and perfection which is God’s” (209). “Moral value…is located in the relations
between persons, in worship and communal life by which human life together is molded
on the divine life of the Trinity, and in the relations of God and humans to the embodied
created order” (210).
Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-74) believes that “all acts-of-being manifest the being of God
for without God’s being nothing can be.” “Natural knowledge of truth is available to us
because the cosmos is a realm in which the being of God manifests itself as being-in-
action” (226-7). Thus, for Aquinas there are two sources of our knowledge of God and of
truth about which can guide us in how we are to live in the world: (a) “reasoned
reflection on the order of things, or natural theology,” and (b) “reflection of God in the
Bible which is the knowledge of faith” (228).
There are a number of parallels between the Hebrew Bible’s account of the created order
and Thomas Aquinas’ account of natural law including: (1) “nature is ordered by God for
its own purposes and these purposes are fundamentally good;” (2) humans “are guided by
nature and reason to do what is right…[and] the goods of both humans and non-humans
are goals to which created order as a whole, and in all its diversity, is directed by the
providence of the creator;” (3) “There is harmony and beauty in the diversity of things in
the natural order and these are both reflections of God’s own being….created order is
therefore also a moral order;” (4) “The transforming work of the divine grace in humans,
and in the non-human world, is directed towards the restoration” of relationship with
God; (5) the telos of human history is relationship with God, which includes “the
promotion of the common good” among human society. “The human self is constituted”
not by its autonomy and self-directedness but “by the richness of its relations with God”
its neighbors and all “created things” (6) forms of human relatedness and interactions that
are based only on self-interest and personal greed “are contrary to natural justice” in that
they separate our selves from a natural relatedness to God and our neighbor (229-30).
Richard Hooker’s (c.1554-1600) political theology “oriented around the incarnation”

draws “human society towards its true end in the relational expression of the virtues, and
towards a harmonious balance and conformity with the created order” due to the “divine
infusion” of the incarnate God in Creation (235).
Detailed Analysis: Natural Law and Ecological Society – The Ecology

of Recovering the Self-in-Relation at the Parish Level
What it means to be a moral Christian, given the exigencies of a world where non-
Christian utilitarian theology and materialism prevail and are propped up by the powers
and dominions, is to live a life “fundamentally concerned with the recovery of
relationality, to God, to other persons and to the land and all created things. This
relationality finds expression in the pursuit of those moral practices which are known as
the virtues: love and justice, temperance and prudence, fidelity and courage, hope and
peaceableness. These virtues enable us to become more fulfilled as persons, to live in
solidarity with one another and to live in harmony with the created order. They represent
a set of principles which point to the embedded character of the moral life in the structure
of human consciousness and human relationships, and in the structure of the created
order” (314).
“Self-in-relation…is central to the Christian understanding of human and created order

and natural law” (290). Only “when we do right, when we conform our actions to what is
the good according to nature and conscience, then will we experience well being and
happiness in our relations with God, with others and with the cosmos” (263).
However, the Church may be the only organization in modern society capable of
fostering “those central and determinative practices of living by which the goods of
human flourishing and the goods of the non-human world, will be sustained and
encouraged against their threatened subversion” (324-5) by an individualistic utilitarian
market economy and hegemonic State.
Such practices of living a good Christian life include: “the lively and embodied worship
of an embodied God; the nurture of children in stable families; the recovery of good work
as craft and art, as service to others; the recovery of hospitality as a central Christian
practice; the making of ritual in which the relationship of human and non-human life is
affirmed and enacted; the exchange and sharing of gifts which reflect personal creativity;
the making of music and dance, stories and drama which reconnect and remake human
communities; the inculcation of those habits of mind and morality emanate from the
traditional orientation of Christian living towards heaven” (324-5).
Such practices of living and resulting Christian virtues will enable the “flourishing of
persons-in-relation, and which enable them to resist the currents of materialism and
individualism which threaten to undermine both human community and relationality of
human life to the non-human world” (325).
“Churches are places where the divine story of salvation and hope for the human life and
cosmos is declared and experienced and anticipated in worship” (324). Indeed, “parish
churches can be a place in which a true care for the earth is recovered and mobilized”
(322).
Synthesis & Reflection – An Environmental Theology of the Cross

There are four ways in which the crucified Christ challenges the perpetrators of the
violence of ecocide:
o “The cross breaks the cycle of violence…. By suffering violence as an innocent

victim, he took upon himself the aggression of the persecutors. He broke the vicious
cycle of violence by absorbing it….and sought to overcome evil by doing good.”40
o “The cross lays bare the mechanism of scapegoating….his innocence, his truthfulness
and his justice – was reason enough for hatred.”41 How much do we hate the earth as
we engage in ecocide, the willful degrading of God’s good creation? Is the Earth
merely our latest scapegoat for something much deeper that is wrong in the heart of
humanity?
o “The cross is part of Jesus’ struggle for God’s truth and justice” against an opposing
imperial mentality attempting to preserve the status quo. “It takes the struggle against
deception and oppression to transform nonviolence from barren negativity into
creative possibility.”42 Just as Jesus did in his day, Christians today are being called to
witness to the truth concerning God’s good creation.
o “The cross is a divine embrace of the deceitful and the unjust…an act of
forgiveness…meant to…create a new world…a world without deception and
injustice….There can be no redemption unless the truth about the world is told and
justice is done.”43
40
See Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and
Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 291-2.
41
Ibid 291-2. According to René Girard, a historical anthropologist of religion, “The Gospel Revelation is
the definitive formulation of a truth already partially disclosed in the Old Testament….the truth that God
himself accepts the role of the victim…so that he can save us all….by revealing how violent contagion
[scapegoating] poisons communities.” See René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightening (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 2002), 130-1.
42
Volf, 291-2.
43
Volf, 294.
Jesus’ death on the cross is the paradigm for faithfulness to God in the world.44 To be
Jesus’ disciple is to obey his call to bear the cross; to be like him. Thus, our actions are
not to be judged in their ability to produce results the world recognizes, but in their
correspondence to Jesus’ example. The community as a whole is called to follow in the
way of Jesus’ suffering. This includes a call to those who possess power and privilege to
surrender it for the sake of the weak.45
Ultimately, to participate in the kingdom of God means accepting that God’s

compassion46 toward us is the source of our hope; consequently, compassion47 must be
the foundation of our behavior.48 Compassion will lead us to care about the least in our
community and the Earth that Jesus died on the cross to redeem.
What Northcott is advocating is not an environmental ethics and moral stance that is
abstract, generalized, or reified, but a theological framework based on traditional
Christian virtues informed by Scripture and natural law that informs on-the-ground
practices of the parish community. For example: Psalm reading as “the ritual recognition
of ecological justice in the Bible is most powerfully represented in the Book of Psalms”
(321); preaching that speaks the truth without becoming political diatribe; retrofitting
44
According to Hebrews, for example, “Faithfulness means simple things, like hospitality to strangers
(13:2), care for the prisoner ‘as though in prison with them’ (Heb. 13:3), fidelity to our spouses (13:4, and
sharing what we have (13:6…[it] may also mean suffering (5:7-9; 12:3-5).” See Linda Maloney, editor,
Education for Ministry: The New Testament, Year Two, 4th Edition, revised (Sewanee: University of the
South, 2000), 462.
45
Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996).
46
hΩesed: for example, as part of God’s response to the apostasy of worshiping the Golden Calf in Exodus
32–34, Moses hears the Lord’s self-proclamation as One who is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and
abounding in hesed and faithfulness, keeping hesed for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and
sin” (ABD).
47
}aœheœb: which connotes humankind’s willingness to walk with God. For example, in the She∑ma{ (Deut
6:4–5): “you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your
might.” “The She∑ma{ speaks of Israel’s love for God in the context of the covenant established at Sinai,
using terminology familiar from the political rhetoric of the culture. Here the love that God commands
from Israel is not primarily a matter of intimate affection, but is to be expressed by obedience to God’s
commandments, serving God, showing reverence for God, and being loyal to God alone (Deut. 10:12; 11:1,
22; 30:16)” [ABD].
48
“Living in the kingdom of heaven means changing our desires so that we willingly locate ourselves
where the poor and oppressed are.” See Ellen F. Davis, “Preserving Virtues: Renewing the Tradition of the
Sages” in William P. Brown, editor, Character & Scripture: Moral Formation, Community, and Biblical
Interpretation (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2002), 194.
church buildings to a minimum of LEED (Leading Energy Efficiency Design) Silver

Certification (as many colleges, government agencies, and corporations are doing
presently with ROIC of 25%/year or greater); and conducting land management audits of
church property to develop land-use sustainability plans.

Environment and Christian Ethics

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Environment and Christian Ethics

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Lyle Brecht 13-Sep-05

CEMT - Tuesday Page 1 of 19

Context: Frogs, Floods and Famines

• At an accelerating rate we are destroying natural, existing habitats – the forests,

• We are rapidly decreasing a significant fraction of wild species and populations of

Detailed Analysis: The Origins of the Environmental Crisis or How did

This combination of an instrumentalist and secular doctrine of creation, emergence of

Synthesis & Reflection

A utilitarian ‘environment’ devoid of God with only instrumentalist value is a

embedded non-Christian utilitarian theology and its fruits of environmental degradation

As Northcott thoroughly documents regarding the environmental crisis, the fruits of

Hear this, O foolish and senseless people,

Context: “The Turn to Nature & The Flowering of Ecotheology” –

However, each of these suggested environmentalist frameworks are either heterodox or

Detailed Analysis: “The Order of Creation” – The Orthodox

drama of reconciliation through Jesus Christ…. the public act of remembrance, or

Synthesis & Reflection

Context: Creation, Redemption and Natural Law Ethics – How New

In the New Testament, “the orientation of creation towards its eschatological

Richard Hooker’s (c.1554-1600) political theology “oriented around the incarnation”

Detailed Analysis: Natural Law and Ecological Society – The Ecology

“Self-in-relation…is central to the Christian understanding of human and created order

Synthesis & Reflection – An Environmental Theology of the Cross

o “The cross breaks the cycle of violence…. By suffering violence as an innocent

Ultimately, to participate in the kingdom of God means accepting that God’s

church buildings to a minimum of LEED (Leading Energy Efficiency Design) Silver

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