(Reprinted with author's permission, first printed in the Earth Letter, Special Earth Charter Issue, November 2002, published by Earth Ministry, 6512 23rd Ave. NW, Suite 317, Seattle WA 98117) IN ONE OF THE LATER LETTERS from prison [in Nazi Germany] in 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes his closest friend and alter ego, Eberhard Bethge, and gently corrects him. Bethge, responding to Bonhoeffer's thoughts on the "this-worldliness" of faith, has registered the mistaken notion that "the Bible hasn't much to say about health, fortune, vigour, etc."1 Bonhoeffer, who had earlier declared his deep love for the Old Testament and cautioned Christians about moving on to the New Testament "too soon," points out the Hebrew Bible's sturdy theme of God's blessing, "which includes in itself all earthly good." "In that blessing," he tells Bethge, "the whole of earthly life is claimed for God, and it includes all [God's] promises."2 The whole of earthly life, together with its as-yet-unrealized possibilities ["all God's promises"], was voiced by a theologian whose own life came to a premature and violent end well over fifty years ago: Isn't this an odd way to introduce the Earth Charter [see complete text of the Earth Charter in Unit 17], itself a not-yet-finished creation that Bonhoeffer might have welcomed but could not have imagined? Let me explain. The genius of the Charter is that its scope, too, is the whole of earthly life. Its subject is not, say, "the environment" only, or "society" only, in the manner of past charters. "Respect and Care for the Community of Life" is its first section, "Respect Earth and life in all its diversity" its first principle. Furthermore, unlike most charters, it invites and embodies the spiritual wisdom of diverse religious traditions, Bonhoeffer's included. Religious values suffuse the Charter, even when great care is taken in this "people's treaty" not to "establish" any one faith. At the same time the Charter, in another mark of its genius, subtly prods all traditions to undergo the same conversion-to-Earth Bonhoeffer himself did in his "this-worldly" Christianity. "Earth remains our Mother, as God remains our Father," he said in a 1928 address on "The Foundations of Christian Ethics," "and our Mother will only lay in the Father's arms those who remain true to her. Earth and its distress—that is the Christian's `Song of Songs.'"3 "Earth and its distress" is the Earth Charter's burden, blessing and song as well. This turn-to-the-earth—all of it, together, without exception—means that religious devotees don't exit the Charter and its ethos on the same terms they entered. There is, to be sure, sufficient common content, shared ethos, and "aha!" substance to confirm and anchor varied religious traditions anew, for an epoch of Earth-honoring faith. Yet the Charter is not a closed global ethic. It does not stipulate any single set of norms or endorse any particular worldview. It functions more like a moral "dome" or as moral "habitat," sheltering and nurturing the practices of plural peoples and plural values in the same moment that it confronts them in bracing ways. BUT HOW MIGHT WE FURTHER THINK about the Charter's embrace of Earth, in ways that also foster Christianity's own conversion to it? The tack taken here is to hover around the theme of "creation as community." Granted, that renders this a specifically Christian meditation, since "creation" is a theological word the Charter does not use. By contrast, "community" is the Charter's own language. "Creation as community" can thus pose the test: Can the Charter endorse our richest traditions of faith and understanding and at the same time ask more of them than we brought? Can its moral habitat form ours? "Humanity is part of a vast evolving universe. Earth, our home, is alive with a unique community of life." These sentences from the Charter's Preamble are new and old, conserving and reforming, and both at once. OLD AND CONSERVING. From time immemorial religious traditions have made an audacious claim: The cosmos itself is a community. Christianity has certainly done so. All that exists, co-exists. All that is, belongs. "All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful"—to remember a hymn—have standing in, with, and before the great God who is their Source. Creation, under God and indivisible, is one. Moreover, in some of the Christian sources—the Yahwist traditions of the Hebrew Bible and its Wisdom literature, for example, or the writings of numerous Christian mystics—no real distinction is made between the human, the socio-historical, and the natural realms. Within the vast gambit of life—all of it—are patterns that instruct and guide. Indeed, in all Christian sources creation is presented as an ordered totality that is intelligible, good, and a reflection of "the Source, Guide, and Goal of all that is" (Romans 11:36). What we nonetheless did not expect is that we ourselves would ever become unCreators in this community. With an economic and moral swagger that is remarkable, we assume we can have a world of our own making and it can be good. We reduce all things, biotic and abiotic, living and non-living, to "information" and "resources" for a world after our own image and likeness. Ironically, then, the same species that is most responsible for knitting Earth together in the modern era as a single human social, biophysical, and technical sphere is the one that most threatens the global metabolism of the Community of Life itself, and puts the biosphere in plain jeopardy. Species-pride wed to the arrogance of addictive affluence has set us on a course of uncreation. To cite only one of the Charter's descriptions: "The dominant patterns of production and consumption are causing environmental devastation, the depletion of resources, and a massive extinction of species."4 This means it is well past time to vigorously reclaim creation as comprehensive community. As noted, "creation" is not the Charter's term. It is a specifically theological signal about origin and ordering in God and not, say, a science word, or even a synonym for "nature." It is, in fact, first of all a doxological word about the Maker of Heaven and Earth who is Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of all that is, and who is as radically close and incarnate as the Breath of Life itself. It is also, from its early days in Genesis, a word that presents life as a gift, grain by grain, cup by cup, sip by sip; and a word about the One who holds us accountable for all life within our reach. In some eras the Christian doctrine of creation has been used precisely to declare that the world is not God and nature is not divine, and that neither is to be worshiped. But in the great work before us, its message is that, while the universe is not divine, it is sacred and not utter utility. And we are accountable to its Source for passing on that portion of this sacred trust that is home to the planetary Community of Life. In different words, creation as community means seeing the magnificent diversity of geological and biological formations caught up in a single existence. It means seeing ourselves as integral members of this existence, and it means seeing this in ways that reaffirm the old communitarianism: an ontological covenant binds the well-being of each member of creation to the well-being of the other members. NEW AND REFORMING. The ancient religious claim of creation as cosmic community is not a spiritual vision alone. Nor is it only the occasion for praise and the palette of artists. The great discovery of recent science, from physics to ecology to evolutionary biology, is that the material universe—"nature"—is also a community. All that exists, co-exists. All that is, belongs. All things great and small, from atoms to galaxies, share a common history and a common, if unfinished, story. It turns out that [the statement] "humanity is part of a vast evolving universe" is scientific and empirical, as well as religious, truth. Sages have long observed that human beings dream dreams of community on a grand scale because of some restive, irrepressible stirrings deep within their wee little souls. We have always wanted to belong to the same order that hurled the planets into orbit and sent the stars singing on their way. We have always wanted to align our mortal lives with a community that far surpasses them. We have, in fact, built empires and enslaved peoples and ruined lands in the wayward quest to do so, just as we have composed music and crafted masterpieces and raised children in our striving to belong and to be remembered. Now it turns out we do belong to the cosmos, not by virtue of longing or desire alone, but literally, because we are stardust. The yearning in our solar plexis that seems to tell us the universe itself is "home" is physically correct, we discover. We belong to creation in every transient cell of our bodies, in DNA and mitochondria that are millennia deep. The image of early Christian theologians that we are microcosms of the macrocosm is now underwritten by a science they did not have. What they did not know is that in its own quirky way, everything else is microcosm, too. All of them are the relatives. Creation is one. When the Charter places Homo sapiens firmly at home in the cosmos as part of the 13- to 15-billion year drama-to-date, something new is offered that exceeds most Christian imagination. Even the free-range vision of psalmists and prophets was not ready for the detail, the dynamism, and the utter strangeness of a universe infinite in all directions on a scale that we do not yet fathom. Poets and mystics, or a humble cell biologist or astrophysicist, may break through here occasionally, but only in wonder. The charming arguments of Gregory of Nazianzus and Augustine that not all species of plants and animals could have been created by God but must have evolved from other of God's creatures, since Noah's Ark could not have borne that load, are utterly quaint now, the stuff of children's stories. So even if those 4th century arguments had a sense of evolutionary development that later and long-held Christian notions (nature as balanced, harmonious, and anthropocentric) hardly allowed, they belong to cosmologies that no longer serve us well. We frankly do not yet know what the statement, "Humanity is part of a vast evolving universe" means for our daily habits. We sense that we rightly affirm the dogged communitarianism of Christian confessions and sacramental practices. But what does that mean for obligations that extend to the whole community of life within our reach for generations to come in a material community that is cosmic? When neighbors are no longer only nigh, but afar as well, in time and space, and when neighbors are not only human but other-than-human in the fifty million odd ways of creation, what is the justice due them? How ought we to live? The accountability is old. The demands are new. Yet the Earth Charter is not the Universe Charter. Earth, its wonder and distress, is the presenting subject. Creation as community now, in a humanly dominated biosphere on a planet in plain jeopardy, is the besetting issue. Here the Earth Charter embraces "the whole of earthly life" in a remarkable way and without remainder. After the Preamble, four lead principles, expressing "Respect and Care for the Community of Life," govern the subsequent sections: "Respect Earth and life in all its diversity"; "Care for the community of life with understanding, compassion, and love"; "Build democratic societies that are just, participatory, sustainable, and peaceful"; (and) "Secure Earth's bounty and beauty for present and future generations." These are concretized in gratifying detail in interlocking sections on Ecological Integrity, Social and Economic Justice, (and) Democracy, Nonviolence, and Peace. So interwoven are these with one another that Earth Charter educators find it necessary to prepare materials which display the Charter in multiple ways. The present, very charter-like linear text is vital, but it is not a form that readily captures the integral functioning of the economy of Earth. Perhaps a mandala might. In any event, how to combat as both wrong-headed and destructive the dualisms of humanity/nature, society/environment, wealth/poverty, and spirit/matter, as well as gender inequalities and a present that always trumps the future, and how to show instead the complex metabolism of "the whole of earthly life," is the demanding task. Earth is one. In 1650 Andreas Ehrenpreis, an Anabaptist Christian of Hutterite persuasion, wrote this in his "epistle on brotherly community": TRUE LOVE MEANS growth for the whole organism, whose members are all interdependent and serve each other. That is the outward form of the inner working of the Spirit, the organism of the Body governed by Christ. We see the same thing among the bees, who all work with equal zeal gathering honey.5 Whatever the validity of the bees-and-honey analogy, recent science qualifies Ehrenpreis markedly, at least if Ehrenpreis' image is community as a harmonious organism. "Evolution loves death more than it loves you and me," to remember Annie Dillard and Tinker Creek. Real-life community has never been a synonym for harmony. The worst happens there, as does the noblest. And for creation as community, it frequently happens large-scale. Yet the Earth Charter is correct that the functioning of planetary systems is incorrigibly interdependent and interactive and that the human failure to align its own designs with the rest threatens the whole. And for their part the Christian confessors of creation are correct that a fierce communion binds all God's creatures in a single, if ever-renewing, covenant. The message from both is clear: Earth's requirements for its own regeneration and renewal are foundational; ours, precisely because we belong here and are home nowhere else, are derivative. Thus the Charter can only pursue ecological integrity (Section ii) together with social and economic justice (section iii) and democracy, nonviolence, and peace (Section iv). All follow from Respect and Care for the Community of Life (Section i) in a gathering that Ehrenpreis conceived as "bodily" and "the outward form of the inner Spirit." It's very old and very new, both at once. Larry L. Rasmussen is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics, Union Theological Seminary, New York City. His volume, Earth Community, Earth Ethics (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1996) won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Religion in 1997. He received a Henry Luce Fellowship in Theology to begin the project he is presently working on: Song of Songs: Ecumenical Christianities as Earth Faiths. Questions for reflection
Form an Earthcare study/support group to help clarify the spiritual questions which may linger after reading the materials in this book. 1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Letter of 18 July, 1944," Letters and Papers from Prison, The Enlarged Edition, Eberhard Bethge, ed. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), 374. 2. Bonhoeffer, "Letter of 18 July, 1944," Letters and Papers from Prison, 374. 3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Grundfragen einer christlichen Ethik," Gesammelte Schriften (Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1966), 3:56; translation mine. 4. From the Preamble to the Earth Charter. 5. Andreas Ehrenpreis and Claus Felbinger, in Brotherly community—the highest command of love: Two Anabaptist documents of 1650, Robert Friedmann, ed. (Rifton, N.Y.: Plough Publishing Co., 1978) 11.
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