I admit it: I used to be a stewardship junkie. Soon after I learned that Christianity had something to say about the degradation of creation I was hooked on the notion. H. Scott Althouse, of Pennsylvania's Eastern College, summed up my mantra: "Environmental stewardship is an overarching, contextual call for all Christians."1 Amen, I would say, employing the phrase so often that one of my students suggested I write it across my forehead before class in order to save time and energy. In my gospel of creation-care, stewardship thus stood as the ultimate Christian response to the environmental crisis confronting our world.
When I became a Krista Colleague I was working for Target Earth, an evangelical environmental group in Belize. My job was to lead groups of North Americans in environmental and social-service projects while helping to familiarize them with the concept of stewardship as a Christian imperative. I wanted them to return to the United States with a passion for environmental issues and a profound sense of personal responsibility. Our readings and discussions in Belize were peppered with heavy doses of this stewardship language and then laced with additional spoonfuls of guilt and obligation. Therefore, I should not have been surprised when these groups responded by humoring me with their agreement while resisting any real commitment to personal change. I realized then that my failure to provoke these groups was due to my singularly emphatic way of speaking to the human creation relationship. Yet even as I realized this, I developed a sense that these failures were a result of something much deeper.
Don't get me wrong. I still believe that creation stewardship has a valuable place in our churches, political decisions and economic practices. It would be an act of sabotage to suggest that it no longer contributes to raising creation-consciousness and a sense of responsibility among Americans. I applaud the tremendous amount of work that has been put into developing and spreading a theology of stewardship, and I hope that it continues to challenge those who do not see creation-care as a Christian imperative. However, in being slowly weaned from my stewardship addiction, I have been exposed to other ways of relating to creation, ways that invoke a deeper response to the problems that face both human and non-human creation. Perhaps we who take stewardship for granted as a Christian norm should consider whether stewardship is the best way of relating to both creation and Creator. With this in mind I propose that we move beyond the position of stewardship toward an increasingly humble, contemplative, and cooperative relationship with God's creation.
But what is stewardship - and why should we push beyond it? Stewardship, broadly defined, is the careful management of property or finances belonging to someone else. This notion was first applied by Christians as a responsible use of finances and energies for God's purposes (viz. "Stewardship Sunday" in which churches try to increase congregational participation and monetary contributions for their various programs and/or commitments). It was only later broadened, as an attempt to correct the popular notion of dominion as license for unmitigated, self-profiting reign over creation, to encompass the mandate to care for natural resources. It's important to note that stewardship of creation recognizes the power humans hold over nature. As Mark Stoll, an environmental historian, writes, "Stewardship, which itself is an analogy from human managers of kingdoms, property, or dependents, thus associates itself naturally with dominion."2 Affiliated with the "dominion" language of Genesis, stewardship thus emphasizes that responsibility is ingrained in the wielding of power. The response of Christian stewardship to the environmental crisis shows this emphasis on responsibility: We have been entrusted by God to "keep" creation properly, which is incompatible with exploitation and extinction. The accent here is on the proper use of creation by humans, a concept important in mitigating the environmental crisis that we face.
Thinking in terms of the static utility of things is a fundamentally human condition. The movie About Schmidt makes this point well. In the movie, Warren Schmidt, played by Jack Nicholson, is forced into an ambiguous future after retiring from a lifetime of service as an insurance actuary and subsequently losing his wife of 42 years to a sudden heart attack. During his painful odyssey, Schmidt decides to sponsor a six-year old Tanzanian boy, Ndugu, after seeing one of those heart-wrenching latenight TV ads, eventually writing the boy a series of heartfelt letters. However, these letters largely concern Schmidt's own life and problems, and thus the viewer is struck with their painfully oblivious egocentrism and cultural insensitivity. "Charitable" motivation such as Schmidt's is, sadly, not uncommon among Christians. Knowing full well God's commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, we feel both responsibility and guilt when we hear of the poverty and misery that surround us. We then respond in ways that we think will help, but that ultimately serve to alleviate our guilt and give us a sense of having some control over the pain of the world. Yet God's call to love our neighbors as we love ourselves involves more than responsibility, obligation, and control. In fact, such love is the opposite of control. It calls us to lose control, to step outside our own narrow self-centeredness and into the skin of our neighbors. If we love in this way, in the way that God loves, we experience a compassion that makes us so vulnerable that we are willing to sacrifice our comfort and stability for others. Only when we make the bold move of relinquishing control will we begin to know how to respond to the needs of our neighbors.
In a similar way, a theology and ethic based on use and management will not provide us with the necessary paradigm shift in our view of creation. From our position of power and control, we want so desperately to take care of the earth, but only inasmuch as we can decide which parts are valuable and which are not. We want to fix the world without really understanding our own reliance on its intricate and mysterious systems. And while use and management may perhaps stave off further problems, they are what got us into this mess to begin with. As economist Paul Hawken writes, "You cannot grow out of a problem if it is embedded in the thing that is growing."3 Thus, management alone will not allow us to do what we need to do in our relationship with creation - that is, to let go.
H. Paul Santmire is one of an increasing number of theologians pushing for a new understanding - a "second wave" - of how Christians should relate to creation. His idea of partnership, or cooperation, is a helpful way of naming how we can move beyond stewardship. He encourages a more holistic consideration of the Bible, with its various implications for us as members of creation, rather than a narrow focus on the Genesis account of creation. By looking at who we understand God to be, along with the pivotal point of Christ's incarnation and redemption, Santmire develops a theology of partnership with nature,4 a concept I believe addresses the disjunctions within our understanding of stewardship.
What is it about the idea of partnership that makes it more appropriate than stewardship? I suggest that there are two important qualities in a partnered and cooperative relationship that are not present in stewardship: humility and intimacy. Both humility and intimacy are virtues that reflect what it means to be fully human. To flourish as human beings, we need to recognize that we ourselves are beings created by God. We also need to recognize that we are created by love and for love. We are created to be in intimate relationship with God, loving God above all else and loving our neighbors as ourselves. The vulnerability required for intimacy both humbles us and exalts us as we open ourselves to the presence of this love.
Most of us recognize how many people we touch indirectly all around the globe, and we know that the presence of Christ is among them. Few of us, however, realize the intimacy of our connection with creation or understand that Christ speaks to us through its nonhuman members. The sheer act of eating, for example, of ingesting something that is (or was) living, breathing, and receiving energy from the sun, is an extremely intimate act. I truly "am what I eat" as the energy and nutrients from the earth enter into the cells that make up my muscles, my skin, my brain. I believe Jesus recognized this when he gave bread and wine to his disciples and said "Eat. Drink. This is my body given for you." To eat is to commune with the thing that you are eating. Wendell Berry writes eloquently of such communion: "The world that environs us, that is around us, is also within us. We are made of it; we eat, drink, and breathe it; it is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. It is also a Creation, a holy mystery...."5
Berry also describes how such intimacy brings with it a sense of belonging, cooperation, and partnership: "This world, this Creation, belongs in a limited sense to us, for we may rightfully require certain things of it...but we also belong to it, and it makes certain rightful claims on us...."6 Whether we admit it or not, we are intimately involved with creation in a cooperative give-and-take. We must therefore know our roles as dependents and members of ecological communities in order to know how to live responsibly. Only if we deepen the knowledge of our participation in the rhythms of creation, if we understand, for example, where our water comes from and our waste goes, will we be able to respond appropriately to the malefic destruction of God's creation. And this is not just an intellectual familiarity, but an affective one as well: we will care for the land as a result of our intimacy with it, not through abstraction and sentimentality.
I learned the importance of this intimacy in the rainforests of Belize. As I was forced to share my food with king cockroaches and my outhouse with Pedro the tarantula, I gradually grew to appreciate their "useless" presence and inherent worth. Their familiarity soon overwhelmed both my desire for privacy and all unconscious impulses to rid my home of them. Likewise, my recent experience of pilgrimage and protest in the Nevada desert profoundly increased my respect for the land. As I drove through the desolate reaches of Nevada a couple years ago, the desert seemed an apt location for military testing and toxic dumping. Yet, after just a few weeks praying in the shadows of those seemingly barren mountains over this past year, I can now see, with the Shoshone people, the sacredness of the land, and I have chosen to speak out with them against the nuclear testing that has desecrated their desert. Through these experiences I have discovered that intimacy not only changes how we see the land, but how we choose to relate to it, as well. Aldo Leopold, one of the greatest 20th-century spokesmen for ecological values, knew the necessity of affective intimacy. He wrote, "We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in."7
In partnership and cooperation, humility exists alongside the vulnerability of intimacy. As creatures, we are both gifted and limited. Humility is the ability to know both our value as God's beloved children and our propensity to sin, to make mistakes, and to be limited in what we can achieve. It's interesting that humility has the same root as "humus," or soil, and "human." We, as humans, are made of the soil, and humility is the recognition that we did not create ourselves, that we are limited creatures. When we have humility, we contentedly admit to sharing our creaturehood with all other members of the earth - with moths, sagebrush, bunchgrass, and banana slugs. We become deeply aware of our own limitations. Yet this is a virtue not highly valued in American culture. Pride and achievement are considered the worthiest of qualities as we are encouraged to push beyond natural restraints through more technology and more production. We now live in a culture of hubris, overconfident in our capacities and knowledge as human beings and as Americans. As Leopold puts it, "The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important.... A land ethic changes the role of homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it."8 If we are to be truly human in the way Christ was truly human, we need to know humility in our relationships with other people and with creation. Only humility can counter the disastrous effects of hubris in the ravaging of the earth that our lives depend on.
How do we cooperate with rather than steward creation? First, we must partner with God. Only in relationship with God can we learn a true humility and loving intimacy that spills over into our relationships with people and creation. Through our spiritual practices we learn to see the entire world as pregnant with God. When we apprehend creation praising God with us, we will desire to treat it with reverence and respect, not with domination. Sheri Hostetler, a Mennonite pastor in San Francisco, suggests two ways of practicing humility that can further assist in this cooperation. Connect with the earth, she says. "Do something to remember that you are a creature-go for a hike, gaze at the waves, make mud pies, act like a cat and lie in the sun. When I have lost my humor about myself or some situation I'm in, when I'm beating myself up because I'm not perfect, I find one of the most helpful things I can do is find a patch of ground and lie on it." Second, she urges that we "be skeptical about the need to control. We are creatures. We are often not in control. Period."9
Cooperation also means acting in ways that limit our need for control. This, of course, applies not only to those who "manage resources" on a large scale, such as foresters and farmers, but to individuals as well. Cooperation on a large scale might mean a greater sensitivity to natural processes and ecosystems, ensuring that technology (a fancy word for efficiency of control) works with these processes rather than disrupting them. At the individual level, cooperation might mean knowing whether my tomato was grown in living, healthy soil and if I can be happier with a tomato that isn't as big or as flawless as I want it to be. Cooperation may also mean fighting for the last remnant of old growth or the security of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, not because they provide something for human use, but because they are worthy in and of themselves. Cooperation undoubtedly means reusing and reducing the things I consume, recognizing that the overfished snapper on my plate and the gasoline in my tank do not exist only for my use. Cooperation begins in humility, is enriched by intimacy, and ends in letting go.
When we, as Christians, move beyond thinking only in terms of stewardship, we begin to think of ourselves differently. We realize that God created us as inherently relational, interconnected to humans and nonhumans in ways that reveal God's presence among us. We can then begin to let go of our need to control, to achieve, and to be superior. We can learn about the magnificent intricacy of creation, of which we are a part. We can simplify our lifestyles and reduce our environmental impact, not out of obligation or guilt, but from our love of God, our neighbor, ourselves, and the created world. Political involvement, wise economic decisions, and personal lifestyle choices remain imperatives. But behind the wisdom required for proper environmental legislation and the courage required for personal sacrifice lies a posture of humility, an awareness that we can only "fix" a ravaged creation when we begin to fix ourselves. The poet William Everson says it well: "Correct management of natural nature. For the recovery of nature can only come through contemplation...To clean up a creek is salutary, but to keep your hands off it after you have cleaned it is more than salutary. It is holiness."10
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Karin Holsinger, Krista Colleague Class of 2000, served with Target Earth International in 2000-2001, helping North American service groups and interns conduct environmental and social projects in Belize. She just recently completed her Master's Thesis on Christian spirituality and nonviolence at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.
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1 Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 50 (December 1998), 236.
2 Mark Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 25.
3 Paul Hawkin, The Ecology of Commerce (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 208.
4 See H. Paul Santmire, "Partnership with Nature According to the Scriptures: Beyond the Theology of Stewardship," Christian Scholar's Review, 32 no. 4 (Summer 2003), 381.
5 Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Community and Freedom (San Francisco: Pantheon Books, 1992), 34.
6 Ibid.
7 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 214.
8 Ibid., 200, 204.
9 Sheri Hostetler, from a sermon on humility preached at First Mennonite Church of San Francisco.
10 William Everson, "Youth Walks For Survival," Earth Poetry: Selected Essays and Interviews of William Everson 1950 - 1977, ed. Lee Bartlett (Oyez, Berkeley: 1980), 222.
