November 18, 2010
Introduction
The Christian themes of sanctification and reconciliation and their connection to the community life of the church are so integral and interconnected that they must be examined holistically; otherwise there is a tremendous risk of losing the core of these important teachings. The individualization and spiritualization of the “holy” since the dawn of modernity, spawned by the so-called Enlightenment, has systematically purged it of its originally holistic, sacred community-centered orientation, which has led to the divorce of holy living from the so-called secular aspects of daily life.
This, in turn, has led to a mode of “ghettoized” Christian existence in North America and Europe that has sanctioned the emerging culture of consumption.
Cut off from the ability to critique the pitfalls of consumerism, the church has allowed itself to become another venue, or market of consumerism. What needs to be addressed, beyond the obvious fact that over-consumption is destructive of the environment, is that “persistent and obsessive consumption is no longer merely a habit; instead, it is an addiction which rests on a foundation which functions as the equivalent of a religion.”
As such, it should be perceived as a threat not only to the ecosystem, but also to the Christian faith; it is, in short, the idolatry of our time. Just as our toxic chemicals and industrial wastes pollute our air and water, causing sickness and death to animals and humans all over the world, so too the lies of consumerism seep into the aquifers of Christian spirituality and pollute our ways of reading and enacting the word of God. How has this crisis come to be, and what can be done to reclaim our threatened faith?
Diagnosis: An Ecological, Economic, and Ecumenical Crisis
The ecological crisis, as it pertains to Christian faith, is rooted in the tendency in Western theology to emphasize the transcendent aspects of God and neglect the immanence of God.
When carried out to its logical end, this position leads to a view of the created world as a profane secularized realm of “resources” for human use, and to an otherworldly view of God’s redemption that only concerns humans. This world, so the logic goes, is neither God’s true home, nor our own, but is merely the stage of the divine redemption of humanity and the forsaken arena from which humans will be liberated.
The industrial and technological plundering of the earth’s resources, however, “does not produce benefits for all societies but only for those that control…production, and it excludes others or grants them information by exacting heavy tribute (royalties).”
In other words, there is a direct link between the ecological exploitation that violates the earth and the economic exploitation that creates and increases the inequality between the rich and the poor. Behind the modern myth of progress and infinite economic growth lies the truth that the only thing such a system is guaranteed to “grow” is inequality.
This is why Leonardo Boff and many other Latin American liberation theologians have increasingly taken notice of the inextricable link between ecological and economic liberation, doing so within the context of the doctrine of creation. Yet the very fact that we so label theologians “Latin American” and “liberation”, among many others, elucidates the fact that the church in the West has tended to emphasize the Western view of God as all-encompassing, bracketing off other sources of theology as “contextual” theologies; in sum, the crisis can also be seen as an ecumenical one. Only recently has the need for Western Christians to hear and be challenged by the prophetic and critical voices of other Christian traditions begun to be acknowledged.
Christians in the West are only now beginning to recognize that the biblical account depicts a deity who is both transcendent and immanent, and that the need to emphasize the latter aspect is crucial if the church wishes to be able to address the evils of our time. We proclaim the trinitarian God who brought the world into being through God’s Word, who breathed life into all creatures by the Spirit which is none other than the personal presence of Godself in creation, and whose Wisdom and Word was made flesh in order to walk this earth alongside us so as to reconcile all of God’s creation—including, but certainly not limited to human beings (Col 1:20). Therefore, we affirm with the apostle Paul, that God “is actually not far from us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:27-28).
We proclaim Emmanuel, God with us, and confess that it is God’s ruach, the breath and Spirit of life that is in us, and which sustains us; for we are reduced to dust when it departs (Ps. 104).
The remedy for Christian faith in the West is to replace the doctrine of creation that ignores everything but the phrase, “fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion” (Gen 1:28) with a more holistic, and ultimately more biblical doctrine of creation. The purpose of this paper is to explore this doctrine as it plays out in the ancient metaphor of the oikos, the household of God. The story of the oikos begins with the original harmony of the Architect’s creation, and unfolds in three spheres that have oikos as their etymological root: the ecological, the economic, and ecumenical, which is the consummated, holistic reconciliation of economics and ecology. The story will correspondingly trace the human roles in the household from gardener and sustainer, to perpetrator and victim of domestic violence, to domestic servant, and finally to family member. Only with a proper understanding of the ways of human sinfulness and the nature of the relationships that have been violated can the nature of the church as God’s oikos community of reconciliation begin to be understood.
Part I: The Ecological House and the Sin of Autonomy
The word ecology was coined in 1866 by the German Darwinian Ernst Haeckel from the Greek word oikos, meaning house, to refer literally to the household of living creatures on earth and their interwoven, interdependent community existence.
Wilderness ecologist Aldo Leopold once said, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may being to use it with love and respect.”
Thus, we see that the underlying premise of the science of ecology, despite its basis in evolutionary biology rather than creation theology, is very close to the central emphasis of cosmology in the Jewish and Christian scriptures: God’s creation is fundamentally relational.
Biblically, the primeval home of the human being is characterized as an ecologically harmonious garden. We are also told that the human tenants of the garden violated its relational community and were expelled from it, and from that we infer that ecological relationships are significant and are in need of reconciliation.
All practices that dominate and exploit nature and other human beings are reenactments of taking from the Forbidden Tree (Gen 2:15-17), for “abuse and misuse of power are rooted in the desire to be like God” who is characterized in the industrial West as “a dominating, self-centered being with unlimited power.”
The need to respect the strictures of the Forbidden Tree out of reverence for life and respect for others, which seems weak and foolish to the powers of this world, reflects precisely the foolishness of the way of Christ which we profess to be God’s wisdom (1 Cor 1:21-25). According to this story, the grasp for autonomy and the emphasis on the individual over the communal are sinful and destructive acts of domestic violence.
The book of Psalms is full of imagery of God’s house depicting the created world as the place in which God dwells with and among God’s people and in which he gives and sustains life.
The Hebrew scriptures depict a God who is intimately involved in the life and redemption of all creatures. Both man and beast, we are told, “feast on the abundance of [God’s] house, and [God] give[s] them drink from the river of [God’s] delights” (Ps 35:8). The whole earth—humans, other creatures, and the land itself—is seen as the victim of human iniquity (Mic. 7:13, Joel 1) and it cries out in despair for God’s redemption and the pouring out of the life-giving Spirit upon it (Joel 2:21-29). All of creation, declares Paul in the first century, is groaning with labor pains in expectation of this consummate reconciliation (Rom. 8:22). It is thus impossible, biblically speaking, to conceive of sanctification and reconciliation that does not pertain to the entire household of ecological relationships which were ordained by God and called good, and subsequently violated and destroyed by human acts of self-indulgent autonomy.
Part II: House Economics and the Sin of Theft
We have already seen that the ecological aspect of the household implies humanity’s limitation; there is no room for autonomy in a web of interdependent relationships. Where ecology refers to these interrelationships, economics refers to the proper ordering of these relationships; it is what sustains the delicate balance of the community of creation.
Obviously, the first part of the word economy comes from the same Greek word, oikos. The second part comes from nomos which refers to laws or regulations.
To speak of God’s economy is to assert faith in the fact that God has ordered creation in such a way that all creatures can be sustained through the proper relationships of ecology. It implies that each creature has its own proper place and that the earth can provide no more and no less than what each creature needs to live. Jesus spoke of God’s economy by saying, “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (Mt. 6:26). It is important to note Jesus’ contrast between what the birds do in God’s economy and the obviously human activities of sowing, reaping and especially gathering into barns. In Luke 12, Jesus speaks of a rich man who stores a surplus of food in an extra storehouse that he built because of his perceived need for security; what this man was not prepared for was the fact of his death. This man’s sin, as Wendell Barry poignantly explicates, is theft, because “by laying up ‘much goods’ in the present…we incur a debt to the future that we cannot repay. That is, we diminish the future by deeds we call ‘use’ but which the future will call ‘theft.’”
This passage thus ties Jesus’ command to seek first the kingdom of God with our economic behavior. By taking more than our proper share we are committing theft and violating our relationships; our relationships are always both ecological and economic.
A second dimension of these passages, is that there is a difference between the human economy, as alluded to by the sowing and reaping activities, and the ecological economy in which the birds are fed by God. The human economy, however, fits inside of and is wholly dependent on the larger ecological community. When we pretend our economy is not contingent in this way, we are guilty of domestic violence, because the human economy deals with materials and forces that we did not and cannot create–the fertility of the soil, the precipitation that irrigates the soil, and even the human productivity and ingenuity that is commodified as labor.
We cannot create systems of abstract, monetary value that are not entirely dependent on and derived from the only real ecological value: life. Only God’s Spirit can breath this value into existence and it is thus a sacred value.
In Barry’s words, the problem is that the human industrial economy “sees itself as the only economy. It makes itself thus exclusive by the simple expedient of valuing only what it can use.”
However, once we acknowledge God’s economy, “we are astonished and frightened to see how much modern enterprise is the work of hubris” and that it thus “is based on invasion and pillage of the Great Economy,” Barry’s word for God’s economy.
Furthermore, the reliance on technology and industry to solve the problems they create renders it a fruitless enterprise plagued by the need to result to mechanical solutions that can only operate by oversimplifying problems. Since all of creation is God’s house, we have nowhere to dwell but in God’s economy, and thus, “whether or not we know that and act accordingly is the critical question, not about economy merely but about human life itself.”
This awareness can only be cultivated out of the recognition that we are embodied residents of the created natural world and as such we are unavoidably a part of God’s ecological economy; without such an awareness, our entire understanding of God’s house is reduced to the “environment” and the “economy” and both are confined to the sphere of other “social issues” as opposed to the spiritual issues which are the supposed concern of God and the church.
Poverty, when understood biblically, is neither solely a material condition nor simply a spiritual condition; it is both. In Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes, Jesus addresses the “poor in spirit” (Mt. 5:3), but in Luke he merely says, “Blessed are you who are poor” (Lk 6:20). Similarly, economic sinfulness is neither solely a violation of God nor merely a violation of human beings; it is both. Thus, when Jesus ‘cleanses the temple’ in Mark 11 he is committing a prophetic act that is both a religious and economic statement, and this is further evidenced by the two prophecies he quotes: the first is a statement by God about the nature of God’s house and who it is for—”a house of prayer for all nations” (Is. 56:7)—and the second deals specifically with how humans have profaned God’s house by making it “a den of thieves” (Jer. 7:11). We might ask, in what way was God’s house made a den of thieves? Of course, we only need to turn to Jeremiah 7:5-10 to discover the reason: the people do not execute justice with one another but instead they “oppress the sojourner, the fatherless, or the widow, or shed innocent blood” (vv 6-7) and God refuses to allow the doers of such domestic violence to dwell in God’s house, so God asks, “Will you…then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered!—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house…become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it” (vv 9-11). The sheer volume of prophetic writings pertaining to the indivisibility of executing justice and worshipping God make it impossible to drown out the biblical cries of the poor and oppressed.
Honoring God is inseparable from executing justice, the right ordering of relationships in God’s house (oikonomia or economy) and in the context of relationships, economic justice and ecological justice are also implicitly inseparable.
Part III: Ecological, Ecumenical and Economic Reconciliation
Now that we have begun to view the crisis holistically within the paradigm of God’s house we can begin to glimpse what is implied by the term reconciliation. Etymologically, the word reconcile comes from Latin and means “to bring back together.” It is a bringing back together that is ecological (relationships), economic (order), and also fundamentally ecumenical (holistic). We have seen the ways in which humans have engaged in domestic violence against God’s house by pillaging it and tearing it down; reconciliation, in this sense, is the Architect’s plan of restoring the house to its intended form—both its material foundation and its family relationships. It is not uncommon to hear the church called God’s house in Christian circles, but what is significant is that the imagery of God’s house in scripture is not of brick and mortar (Is. 66:1) but it is rather imagery of living flesh: the Body of Christ. It is after building this embodied image of the church that Paul goes on to mix in the imagery of God’s house:
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit (Eph. 2:19-22).
The language of Paul depicts human beings, we who commit domestic violence and theft and property destruction in God’s house, as being brought back (reconciled) into the household. More than that, these humans are now being called family members who serve as a “dwelling place for God by the Spirit.” In the reconciliation through which God is bringing us back, the relationship between humanity and God is mended mutually; we are allowed back into the house as family members, while at the very same time, we are opening up to allow the Spirit of God to dwell in us! But what can this mutual indwelling possibly mean? How can this help us to understand the nature of the church and to find our place in the midst God’s project of reconciliation? What does this have to do with the ecological, economic and ecumenical life of the church?
To understand all this, it must be remembered that the same trait is at the very core of the biblical imagery for God, creation, human beings, Jesus Christ, and the church: they are all alive. According to Jürgen Moltmann, we have failed to understand the role of the church in the missio Dei and reconciliation because we have fundamentally misunderstood the mission of Christ: “Jesus didn’t bring a new religion into the world. What he brought was new life.”
He argues that the Gospel of John quite explicitly states what God has brought into the world through Jesus Christ: life (Jn. 14:19), and in the Synoptic Gospels, he says, “Where Jesus is, there is life…sick people are healed, sad people are comforted, marginalized people are accepted, and the demons of death are driven out.”
The salvific work of the Holy Spirit in reconciliation cannot be confined merely to the spheres of religion and spirituality because it is the integrating redemption of the whole of life. Reconciliation does not mean leaving this life to enter into eternal life; it is the breaking in of eternal life for the transformation of this life.
Thus, the apostle Paul writes, “For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality…then shall come to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor. 15:53-55). Salvation is the process in which all things are reconciled through Christ which begins with the renewal of God’s people, then the renewal of all the living, and then is finally consummated with the renewal of the earth (Joel 2:21-29). According to the bible, the signal of the Spirit’s presence is vitality and the true end of history is completion of God’s ecology wherein all relationships are indwelled by the Spirit and taken into the community of the triune God.
The church fits into this process as a living community that is also a community of life. It is not insignificant that the ‘theology of life’ is now a source of ecumenical hope for the church, as it has been emphasized by Pope John Paul II, the liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, the Korean theologian Chung Hyung Kyung, the German protestant Moltmann, and many others from divergent Christian traditions.
These thinkers are calling for the church to be the community of God’s people who work to support a ‘culture of life’ and who denounce the destructive powers of death. In this sense, it is an ecological church, because the premise of ecology is that life is community. This communal character reflects the communal character of God revealed in the doctrine of the Trinity.
Biblical descriptions of the experience of the Spirit are often feminine, such as that of being ‘born anew’ or of the Paraclete who comforts as a mother comforts (Jn. 14:26). Thus, many Christians outside the clutches of patriarchal Rome (such as Syria) have come to view the Holy Spirit as the divine mother.
The benefit of this image for the context of the oikos is that it helps us to see the divine-human community of the church: our father is the Father of Christ, our mother is the life-giving Spirit of God, and the Son of the living God is our brother. As a human community, then, we are a community of brothers and sisters in fellowship with our true Mother and Father.
Finally, as a church that exists within an insatiable human economy in which there is never enough, we are called to be a community that confesses the good news of God’s economy: there is enough. Those of us who come into the church from places of privilege humbly admit that God is the liberator of the poor, oppressed, marginal, and downtrodden. Those who come into the church from a position of material poverty must also admit that spiritual poverty is also a very real affliction. For those of us who are wealthy, we must recognize that most of the wealthy people who come to Jesus in the Gospels found him to be too difficult to follow. There is, however, one counterexample which we are challenged to follow: Zacchaeus, who gave half of everything he owned to the poor and paid back everything he took fourfold (Lk. 19:1-10). Zacchaeus was committed to reconciliation and accordingly worked very hard to restore the relationships he had violated and broken.
In God’s economy, money is not in itself good or evil; what matters is justice and community. In the New Testament picture of God’s community of the church, there are both rich and poor members, but what is important is that they are nevertheless a community of equals who are dedicated to sharing with one another and meeting the needs of the community (Jm. 5, Act. 4). In fact, it is precisely this kind of diversity—the rich and poor communing together—that is essential to how God’s economy works. It is precisely by bringing the rich and the poor together into relationships that the resources of the rich can be directed to meet the needs of the poor–both spiritually and materially. That is because “the opposite of poverty is not property. The opposite of both poverty and property is community.”
Conclusion: Homecoming
The household of God is the community that is marked by the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5-7). This community’s vocation within the holistic project of God’s reconciliation is to be the people who have returned home to the house of our true Father. In this oikos, we have all been the prodigal sons and daughters who return from estrangement glad even to be readmitted into our Father’s house as domestic servants but unimaginably surprised by the grace of being accepted warmly and lovingly, though certainly undeservingly, as sons and daughters (Lk. 15:11-32).
Our challenge, however, is to remember this as we call all our other long lost siblings back into the household, lest we should be like the brother in the parable and start to hate our returning brothers and sisters out of entitlement and jealousy. We know that as the family grows, it will also change in ways that may make us uncomfortable. Where these attitudes of fear, insecurity, and self-preservation surface in the community, they will be corrected by an affirmation of the good news of God’s economy: there is enough for everyone! Then and only then will we be equipped for our role in reconciliation: to continue the homecoming by welcoming all who will enter into God’s ecological and ecumenical household.
Bibliography
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Conradie, Ernst M. “The Whole Household of God (Oikos): Some Ecclesiological Perspectives.” Scriptura 94 (2007): 1-9.
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Harper, Brad, and Paul L. Metzger. Exploring Ecclesiology: An Evangelical and Ecumenical Introduction. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009.
Jung, L. Shannon. “Grounded in God: Ecology, Consumption and the Small Church.” Anglican Theological Review 78, no. 4 (1996): 587-602.
Lee-Park, Sun Ai. “The Forbidden Tree and the Year of the Lord.” In Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion, Rosemary R. Ruether, 107-116. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996.
Moltmann, Jürgen. The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.
Park, Rohun. “Revisiting the Parable of the Prodigal Son for Decolonization: Luke’s Reconfiguration of Oikos in 15:11-32.” Biblical Interpretation 17, no. 5 (2009): 507-520.
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Heretical Rhetoric 