Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation This article is excerpted from chapters 2, 8 and 9 of Tom Sine's 1991 book, Wild Hope: Crises Facing the Human Community on the Threshold of the 21st Century, Word Publishing Co., Dallas 1991. Essay: Waking Up to the Captivity of the Christian Mind by Tom Sine Ascorching sun bore down on our Land Rover as we pulled into the city of Cayes in Haiti's southwest peninsula. We stopped to ask for directions. All around us, the heat was unrelenting, the poverty unbelievable, the friendly greetings of the people disarming. Our directions took us into the foothills above Cayes. The oppressive temperatures subsided. The poverty disappeared. All at once we found ourselves on a beautiful mountaintop in a community of graciously landscaped three- and four-bedroom houses. Here the people didn't wave. They didn't even look up to acknowledge our arrival. West Indies Misisons had constructed this compound in this beautiful location decades earlier as a base from which to carry the gospel into the Haitian countryside. It looked just like a typical stateside suburb <197> except for the idyllic climate and a view that would have commanded a dear price in Hawaii or Southern California. And the missionaries who lived in this American oasis also had Haitian servants who handled all domestic work and looked after the children. As we walked to the far end of the compound, our hosts showed us, with evident pride, the newest house that had been built in their "City of Light." It was a large, elegant structure that the president of the Haitian Baptist Church had built with their help. He was the first Haitian invited to live in this all-white American compound. Several months later, traveling in the back country, I saw the consequences of this missionary generosity. In at least three rural churches, Christians were struggling, at tremendous sacrifice, to build homes for their pastors. They htmlired to provide residences that were as modern and as expensive as the ones their president and the missionaries lived in on the hilltop above Cayes. Highlight "The earth is facing unprecedented catastrophies unless we act decisively to change how we live on the earth." Before this new standard had been raised, pastors had always lived in homes very much like members of their congregations. Typically, these are two- and three-room post-and-wattle residences with thatched roofs and gleaming white-washed exteriors. None of them have plumbing or electricity. When I arrived in one remote area, villagers were just putting the finishing touches on a concrete-block, metal-roofed house that towered over the more modest Haitian homes. To raise the more than ten thousand dollars needed to build this residence for their pastor, they had curtailed virtually all other church activities for a year and a half. Each church family had given sacrificially out of its very marginal income (an average of two hundred dollars per year). All of this took place in a community in which only 20 percent of the children can afford to go to school. The village cannot afford a health clinic. While the villagers willingness to sacrifice is certainly laudable, one wishes it could have been directed toward something other than affluent housing for their pastor. To this day, I seriously doubt that the missionaries who lived in this mountaintop enclave have any idea of what they had done. I have no doubt their motives were sincere. But like most of us, they lived their lives and acted on their faith from largely unexamined assumptions. Most of us are lothe to ever take a hard, critical look at the assumptions on which we premise our lives or act out our mission. It is much easier to assume that because we are Christians, the visions and values to which we give our lives are Christian as well. These missionaries came to Haiti highly motivated to advance the cause of Christ. But while they proclaimed the gospel of the kingdom of God with their mouths, they bore witness to a very different kingdom with their lives. And it looks like their witness for the American Dream may have been by far the most persuasive. These missionaries unwittingly transplanted the values of modernity and the Western Dream into Haitian society. By building their American compound and by inviting the president of the Haitian Baptist Church to join their affluent inner circle, they planted an alien growth that is still spreading across the Haitian countryside with devastating effect. As we prepare to move into a new century, environmental problems that concerned so many Americans in the early seventies have now reached crisis proportions. Dennis Hayes, the organizer of Earth Day 1970, observes: Twenty years after Earth Day, those of us who set out to change the world are poised on the threshold of utter failure. Measured on virtually any scale, the world is in worse shape than it was 20 years ago. How could we have fought so hard, and won so many battles, now to find ourselves on the verge of losing the way_ In 1989,<MI> Time<D> magazine devoted an entire issue to the "Planet of the Year." The lead article read: This year the earth spoke, like God warning Noah of the deluge. Its message was loud and clear, and suddenly people began to listen, to ponder what the portents of the message held. In the U.S. a three-month drought baked the soil from California to Georgia... raising fears that global warming... might already be underway... and on many of the country's beaches garbage, raw sewage and medical wastes washed up. The further depletion of the atmosphere's ozone layer... testified to the continued overuse of atmosphere-destroying chlorofluorocarbons... Perhaps most ominous of all, the destruction of the tropical rainforests... continued at a rate equal to one football field a second. National Geographic editor Wilbur Garret, writing in a special issue on the future of the planet, warned, "Environmental apocalypse is now. We've borrowed the earth from our children and unless we come around very quickly, we are going to give it back to them in very bad shape." Our earth is facing unprecedented catastrophies unless we act intelligently and decisively to change how we live on the earth. Never has there been such widespread and growing recognition by both leaders and those at the grassroots that we must clean up our act. A healing example in this predicament ought to be the responsibility of the Christian Church. Biblical mandates coupled with the seriousness of our predicament should be such that churches might take the lead in teaching and demonstrating a more responsible way of living. One of the major reasons that the church is likely to fail to address the escalating challenges that fill our world is that our lives, resources, and institutions have been co-opted by an alien vision. The prime seducers of the Christian young are not Eastern gurus or Marxist revolutionaries, but the sirens of the Great Consumer Society. Many of us of all ages naively thought we could embrace modernization with all its affluence and benefits without ever being tainted by its values. Belatedly a few seem to be waking up to the reality that when we welcome modernization into our lives, we unwittingly invite secularization into our souls as well. I am not arguing that we retreat to a pre-modern world or reject all forms of contemporary life and culture, including technology. I am urging that we recognize that our form of modernization is premised on a set of value assumptions that are inherently in tension with biblical values. And this type of modernization htmlires to little more than ever-expanding consumerism. Walter Brueggemann charges, "The contemporary American Church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act. This enculturation is in some way true across the spectrum of church life, both liberal and conservative." It appears we Christians of all traditions are part of a vast parade, marching lockstep toward a post-Christian era. And I fear that as Christians in the Two-thirds World increasingly embrace modernization and the Western Dream, they too will be seduced by the insidious values that go with them. A Crisis of Vision I am strongly persuaded that the number one crisis facing the church today is a crisis of vision. When I use the term vision, I am not referring to anything hyperspiritual. I simply mean the image of the preferred future we want for ourselves, those we care about, and the larger world. Kenneth Boulding, speaking at a conference on the future, declared, "No people, society or organization can long exist without some compelling vision of the future that calls us forward into tomorrow." And, of course, the scriptures insist that "without a vision the people perish" (Proverbs 29:18). Tragically, not only are we perishing; the people we are called to serve are perishing too, because we lack a biblically informed vision. The primary reason we have been seduced into becoming superconsumers is that we have bought into an image of the better future that equates happiness with acquisition. We have come to believe that the more we accumulate, the happier we will be. We all want what is best for our children, and we work long hours to provide for them. But even here we define "what is best" in largely economic terms, and we express our love by surrounding our children with all the artifacts of our consumer culture. Leslie Newbigin charges: "The effect of the post-enlightenment project for human society is that all human activity is absorbed into labor. It becomes an unending cycle of production for the sake of consumption." The powers have persuaded us that our ultimate purpose is to become successful consumers. In our American founding papers, we sanctioned, as a part of the American Dream, the individual "pursuit of happiness." But happiness had no definition except what each autonomous individual might give to it. Christians as well as non-Christians have embraced modernization, the Western Dream, and the individual pursuit of happiness as an unquestioned given. Although their approaches and concerns differ, mainline Protestants and Catholics, Evangelicals and Orthodox alike, seem also to have essentially accepted the materialistic htmlirations of the Western Dream as their primary image of the preferred future. Mainliners generally want to see the system operate more justly and with more economic opportunities for all, regardless of race, sex or age. They are intent on trying to build an escalator into the Western Dream, even changing some of the structures of society so the poor get a taste of the "good life," too. But while mainliners sometimes criticize capitalism, rarely have I heard them critique modernization, the Western Dream, or the values on which the mechanistic model is premised. Evangelical Christians, in the main, have not only enthusiastically made the Western Dream their own; they often look at their material success as evidence of God's blessing on their lives. As a result, they generally have little interest in seeing structures changed to make the American Dream operate more justly. Evangelicals even tend to confuse the progress of the Western Dream with the advancement of God's kingdom. As a result of this idolatrous elevation of the Western Dream to primacy in our lives, we have seriously undermined our capability to address the ecological degradation or the other escalating challenges of the twenty-first century. We are not only experiencing a crisis of vision. We have unthinkingly embraced secular values that are antithetical to the values of God's kingdom <197> the values of self-seeking, individualism, and materialism that are endemic to the Western Dream. Of course, to the extent that these visions and values have captured our lives, neither our time nor our money will be available to invest in the advance of God's kingdom. Therefore, the reason that neither mainline nor evangelical Christians nor their young are likely to rise to the challenges of a new century is that we have been captured by visions and values alien to the God we claim and the cause we seek. We have been seduced into following a fraudulent dream and embracing false values. And most of us are reluctant to unmask the powers or question the Western Dream. The Images of God and Creation Against this backdrop of the Western Dream, there are assumptions regarding God and the larger created order. Francis Bacon was in the forefront of developing the metaphysical basis for this model. He made a historic distinction between the "Word of God" and the "Works of God." By drawing a line between the natural and spiritual realms, Bacon fashioned a dualism that has remained with us to this day. In that one act, Bacon unwittingly evicted God and any sense of divine purpose from the natural world. This remarkable declaration has significantly contributed to the desacralization of creation. Freed from any sense of divine presence or purpose, the natural realm is reduced to nothing but passive resources, the stuff out of which we erect our technological paradise. Unlike a historic Christian view, which regards the natural realm as inherently sacred, this model views nature in starkly utilitarian terms. And in this model even God is reduced to nothing but an impotent deity <197> a cultural hangover of a forgotten era and largely irrelevant to a modern world. Bacon's primary tool for the construction of his technological paradise was objective knowledge. He saw the potential power of empirically studying the phenomena of the natural realm in order to subdue that realm and to fashion a new world of technology and affluence for the benefit of humankind. Clearly, Bacon's empiricism is still the standard window on the real world for modern society. We still seem to believe that it is possible to observe objectively and to understand empirically the world around us, even though quantum physics is beginning to challenge this bedrock assumption of the mechanistic worldview. Today, we in the West still subscribe to a profoundly dualistic view in which the natural world is freed of any real sense of divine presence or purpose. Even many believers tend to see the world this way <197> with God's activity largely confined to the spiritual realm. I believe God seems even more remote and impotent in the belief of many mainline Christians. James Turner, in his important work in American intellectual history, <MI>Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America<D>, suggests that as mainline churches increasingly adopted rationalist values, their God became increasingly powerless, and unbelief became distressingly widespread. He even suggests that mainline seminaries directly contributed to the growing attitude of disbelief in the United States. Leslie Newbigin points out that liberal theology set the boundaries of what it was possible to believe, based on axioms of the Enlightenment. For example, modern scientific worldviews were accepted as the only reliable acount of how things really are, and the Bible had to be understood only in terms of that account. This required a reconstruction of biblical history on the lines of modern historical science. It required the elimination of miracle. It dictated that while the crucifixion of Jesus could be accepted as a fact of real history, his resurrection was a psychological experience of his disciples. At any rate, the God of many ecumenicals does seem somewhat stuck in the backwash of history, unable to act in either the spiritual or the societal realm. And as a consequence, mainliners tend to assume it is their responsibility to act in God's behalf. The Creator God is no longer relevant to their lives, their society, or their future. They live in a world alienated from the God who created them <197> a world with no transcendent purpose, no meaning beyond the marketplace and the growing commercialization of our global society. Waking Up to Post-modern Chaos The mechanistic model, with its technological confidence and materialistic outlook, has clearly won the day. Despite periodic longings to return to a more organic past, mechanistic thinking still underlies the assumptions of modern culture. And yet there is increasing evidence that the mechanistic age may be drawing to a close. The scientific discoveries of the last ten years indicate that we may be on the threshold of an entirely different view of reality. The mechanistic paradigm is premised on a Newtonian worldview, a fundamentally materialist outlook which saw the world as operating according to a set of predictable laws of cause and effect. In the world of Newtonian mechanics, the paths of particles and velocities of each particle are the determining causes. Discover the initial paths and velocities of each particle and you hold the key to every subsequent action and reaction in the universe. You could in theory explain everything. While this "billiard ball" view of causality provided a theoretical foundation for technological advancement, it also robbed the world of a sense of mystery. More to the point, in the past ten years the cause-and-effect theories of Newtonian physics have been scientifically demonstrated to be invalid. The findings of quantum physics have completely shattered the Newtonian worldview on which the mechanistic paradigm is based. Samuel Schweber, a Brandeis historian of science, calls this advance of quantum physics "the deep Revolution." Schweber says the revolution is "so deep that in some sense, in having affected so many areas of thought and intellectual life, we really have not yet assessed the full impact of it." Some of the consequences of such a change are clear however. No longer can we assume that we live in a materialistic cosmos in which everything is explicable. Once again we live in a world of dawning mystery <197> a world of unimagined new possibilities. That is why we are beginning to see the emergence of some of the new organic visions. As we move into this postmodern world, there is the possibility of birthing something altogether new and creative <197> something that looks very much like the landscape of the biblical image of the City of God. "The journey begins by turning our backs on the seductions of culture and embracing a new vision." But there is also another possibility. As we move from structure of the modern world, we could see a rootless, unstructured society collapse in on itself in growing chaos and disorganization. David Harvey states, "post-modernism swims, even wallows in the fragmentary and chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is." Harvey continues, "post-modernism has a penchant for destruction bordering on nihilism, its preference for aesthetics over ethics, takes matters too far. It takes them beyond where any coherent politics are left." Undoubtedly this is one reason why the Baby Buster generation is so nihilistic. For many of the young, change is all there is. And there is a very real possibility that the alienated nihilistic young of today could become both the victims and the vandals of a chaotic tomorrow — one in which all structures and values are up for grabs. Never has it been more urgent for people of faith and people of concern to question the visions and values to which we have given our lives and to begin to dream new dreams while there is yet time. As inhabitants of this good earth, we have, I believe, ten to fifteen years at the outside to address these mounting social and environmental challenges. After that, I believe we will be in danger of losing control of the processes of environmental degradation. Learning to Live Authentically in a Changing World As we approach the twenty-first century, we are facing an unprecedented array of challenges. Our institutions in general and the church in particular are doing little either to anticipate or to mobilize resources to address the many new issues that will confront us as we enter a new century. How can the church in North America begin to engage these troubling trends_ How can we see the church of Jesus Christ captured by a new biblical vision for the future_ How can we more authentically live out the faith we claim_ How can we, out of a new vision, significantly increase our capacity to engage the escalating challenges of the twenty-first century_ The journey begins, I believe, by repenting — by turning our back on the seductions of culture and embracing a new vision. I strongly believe the Scripture affirms that the first call of the Gospel is to incarnation. Only as we attempt to flesh out the vision and values of a deeper and more comprehensive order of Christianity can we have any authentic basis on which to speak or to act. Such a call to incarnation will, in all likelihood, be difficult for both mainline Protestants and evangelical Protestants to hear since both groups are so activist in their character. It is in the Orthodox and Catholic traditions of spirituality, charism and community that this call is more fully understood. And such a call will require that we all embrace a more radically biblical form of discipleship that will reorder our entire lives. Anything less will not fit us to live authentically and effectively in a new century. Therefore, to suggest some creative ways we can begin in our personal lives, families and communities to flesh out the visions and values of the future, we must understand something of how the world is changing and something of what faith demands. A few starting points will include: Becoming liberated from our cultural captivity How do we break free of the captivity of culture_ Moving toward a biblical vision can be as fraught with difficulty as the children of Israel's journey toward the Promised Land. Even many theologians who intellectually understand a theology of the kingdom do not seem to be personally caught up in the Scripture's remarkable imagery and what it represents for our lives and our world. As a consequence church leadership seems to be doing little to communicate a vision of the kingdom of God that is both comprehensible and compelling.... I would encourage us to go back to the Bible and begin to discover a compelling picture of God's kingdom work in action. If we were to embrace the biblical image of the better future, how would our lives be altered_ How would the biblical vision change our life direction, transform our values, and reorder our priorities_ How would it alter our notion of what the "good life" is_ Following Christ into reordered lives How are we to reorder our lives so we can be actively involved in release to the captives, sight to the blind and good news to the poor_ For some it could mean changing jobs or changing living situations. There are as many possibilities as there are persons. And not only will we ask God to transform our life direction, we will also invite God to transform our values from the values of the dominant culture to the values of the kingdom of God. The journey toward a life that more fully embraces God's vision of a world made new begins with developing our spirituality and altering the rhythms of our lives. Rediscovering Whole-Life Stewardship Whole Life stewardship is premised on the biblical proposition, "the earth is the Lord's." If the earth is indeed the Lord's, then it is no longer a question of "how much of mine do I have to give up_" The question becomes, "How much of God's do I get to keep_" in a world where even Christians sometimes are struggling to survive. Whole Life stewardship begins by asking how we can give our lives and families new focus — becoming much more intentionally a part of what God is doing to give birth to a new creation. In other words, our life's mission is no longer to preserve the present order, but to intentionally be a part of what God is doing to give birth to a whole new order. Create new communities of hope The only way any of us can hope to be successful in reordering our lives is in community. In the first century of Christianity, community wasn't optional; it was normative. One could not claim to be a follower of Jesus Christ without being a part of a community in which he or she was known, loved and held accountable. Today, because of the invidious influence of our individualistic culture, it is rare to find believers who participate in any expression of Christian community. If we are to authentically incarnate something of God's order in the nineties, we must create wholly new models of what Christian community will look like. Otherwise our largely autonomous American Christianity will simply not be up to the challenges of the twenty-first century. Alvin Toffler suggested in Future Shock that we need to develop enclaves of the future. Never has that need been truer. We need a whole spectrum of new models that are clearly counterpoint to the dominant culture. As long as we simply participate in the agenda of the modern culture and become involved in the activities of a local church, we will not be a match for the new challenges coming at us from the future. I am convinced that if we North American Christians, living in the final decade of the twentieth century, are to have any hope of engaging the challenges of a new century and participating with our God to birth a new future, we must radically change our way of life. No longer will we be able to give primacy to the agenda of culture and simply work faith in around the edges. We must abandon the idolatries of our consumer society and rededicate our lives both to the God who created us and to God's agenda of a world made new. Those of us in the Church who believe we are called by God to be earthkeepers need to be in the forefront of a new movement for the protection and the restoration of the created order. We must join thousands of others in finding creative new ways to respond to this environmental ultimatum.