God’s Mission is nothing less than the sending of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son into this world, so that this world shall not perish but live…For the Holy Spirit is ‘the source of life’ and brings into the world – whole life, full life, unhindered, indestructible, everlasting life.
– Jürgen Moltmann
Introduction
Notions of Stewardship
The concept of stewardship has a long history of application to the context of Christian understandings of the relationship between human beings and the natural world. Thus, there is no singular or all-encompassing concept of what stewardship specifically means; there are many interpretations. As is the case for virtually every biblically-derived notion, proponents of stewardship have often misinterpreted or abused their scriptural sources and consequently developed unacceptable concepts. The most prevalent text for understanding human stewardship of the natural world is the second creation narrative in Genesis 2, which states that God placed the original human being in the garden “to work it and keep it” (v. 15). In the same account, God creates all of the animals to be in community with the human being and with each other, and then consummates the created community by giving ha adam (the earthling) an ezer kenegdo — a human companion and counterpart to share the task of working and keeping and sustaining God’s garden (2:18). Now the harmonious community of creation was complete and it was good, just as God intended. Though not explicitly mentioned, this passage is foundational for a concept of stewardship that entails the work of maintaining the harmony of God’s creation by working to sustain the relationships among creation in three spheres: between humans and God, between humans and each other, and between humans and the other creatures God has made (vv. 18-19). So far, this is a healthy conception of stewardship that is rooted in solid exegesis.
Problems and Critiques of Stewardship
The problem with the idea of human stewardship of the earth is not found in the text of the Bible itself, but rather in the abuse of the text in its employment for the justification of corrupt and sinful human constructs. The twin creation narratives of Genesis have been abused in such a way as to confound the proper biblical understandings of all three aforementioned spheres of relationship. In the first place, it has been forgotten that the first humans were not simply land managers for an absentee landlord-God. On the contrary, the Lord God was present, dwelling and walking with them and the other creatures in the garden (cf. Gen. 3:8). The immanent presence of God in creation cannot be neglected; it is the God’s ruach, the breath and Spirit of God, which animates and sustains all living creatures and renders them mere dust when it retreats (Ps. 104:29;146:4; Job 34:14). When God is seen as wholly transcendent and absent from creation, stewardship quickly devolves into an anthropocentric view that appropriates the charge to dominate and subdue the earth (Gen. 1:26) and ignores all of the biblical constraints on this privilege. Yet, when this critique is carried to its logical extreme, the result is a pantheistic view that ultimately also loses the fundamental basis for respecting the natural world—that it is God’s creation and we, as God’s creatures, are answerable to God for how we interact with it. Furthermore, when God is characterized and caricatured as exclusively male, the sense of domination takes on a sexist dimension and finds in Genesis 2-3 evidence for the primacy and superiority of males over females (cf. 1 Tim. 2:9-15). The only way to resolve these problems and begin answer their critiques, then, is to reclaim a panentheistic theology that realizes God is beyond gender, recognizes both God’s transcendence and immanence and which respects God’s creation, affirms God’s ownership and lordship over creation, and sees God as both the preeminent source and indwelling sustainer of all life. The benefit of panentheism is that it can hold God’s well-attested transcendence and often neglected immanence in tension, affirming the fullness of the divine nature without reducing God to one or the other extreme. After surveying the foundational scriptures for such a theology, it will become abundantly clear that the missio Dei, God’s work for the redemption of creation, is at its core a missio vitae, a mission of life.
Old Testament Foundations
Ruach: The Spirit of Life
All that exists is created through and sustained by God’s ruach, the very breath
of life. It enveloped the entire earth when God began to speak created life into being (Gen. 1:2), and still fills the world and holds all living beings together (Isa. 34:16). So dependent is all life on the immanent presence of God’s ruach in creation that Job says, “If he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust” (34:14-15). It is through the denial of God’s presence in creation that human sinfulness brings about the violation and destruction of life—both human and non-human. For if, by the breath of the Spirit, Godself is present in creation, indwelling and supporting all life, then there can be absolutely no basis for an anthropocentric worldview. If the very Creator is here, and not somewhere else, then it matters what we do and how we interact with God’s creatures. It is no accident, then, that in the very same passage in Job, the presence of God’s spirit leads him to proceed directly to talking about justice! Throughout the Old Testament the knowledge of God as Creator is inextricably bound up with God’s presence on earth, and that is precisely why justice is among God’s most fundamental concerns; in a very real sense, a violation of creation or creatures is simultaneously a violation of the Creator. More specifically, sin and injustice are essentially violations of life—all of the violence, deprivation, vulnerability, suffering and oppression that characterize human sinfulness are connected with death in that “they are all something death steals from life.”
Sin, Injustice and Death
That the Old Testament writers connect justice with God’s life giving immanence in creation becomes abundantly clear in the writings of the prophets, in which the concrete victims of human sin and injustice are depicted in the crying out of creatures both human and non-human. One clear example of this occurs in Joel, where the prophet declares that because the “fields are destroyed, the ground mourns” (1:10). He goes on to exclaim, “How the beasts groan! The herds of cattle are perplexed because there is no pasture for them; even the flocks of sheep suffer” (1:18). The ground itself, and the creatures that depend upon it are said to “pant for [the Lord] because the water brooks are dried up” (1:20). In the vulnerability of embodied suffering, non-human creatures, both plants and animals, know to cry out for the God upon whose Spirit they depend for their very life; it is the humans in this passage who are the last to realize this need, and it is they who are to blame for the suffering endured by all the creatures. The desolation of the earth is “because of its inhabitants, for the fruit of their doings,” says Micah (7:13), and the ensuing punishment is brought upon this terrestrial dwelling place because humans “fill their master’s house with violence and fraud” (Zeph. 1:9).
The Household of God and the Missio Vitae
All of God’s creatures are linked by their mutual sharing of life in God’s household, the community of creation, as we have seen in Genesis 2. The scientific word for the study of this intricate and interconnected community of creation is ecology, which comes from the Greek root oikos and refers literally to the household shared by all living organisms. 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 begin 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 a fundamentally relational community of life.
The other connection made by the prophets with regard to the injustice of human sin as a violation of God’s oikos is an economic one: the sin of slavery, oppression, and economic exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. While the first part of the word economy comes from oikos, the second part comes from another Greek word: nomos, which refers to laws or regulations. In the oikos of God, ecology and economy are inextricably linked. Thus, when Jesus ‘cleanses the temple’ in Mark 11, he quotes from two prophetic texts that speak to this connection: 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. Injustice everywhere elicits the cry of the ecological community, as we saw in Joel, as well as the cry for economic liberation from the poor and oppressed. Therefore, we do not understand the prophetic witness to God’s divine judgment at all unless we understand that “the judgment is for the cleansing of the world, not is demolition.”
These lamentations and God’s judgment, however, is not the end of the story, for God listens lovingly to the cries of creation’s suffering and detests the empty worship of those who call to him but do not practice justice; and to both parties, God offers the same solution: “Seek me and live” (Amos 5). In the fallenness of the Godforsaken world of human sin and injustice, we suffer and cry out in the feeling that there is not enough to sustain us; death is everywhere encroaching on our very existence. This is not the end of the story, as Moltmann eloquently suggests, “But if God is not far off, if God is near, if God is present among us in the Spirit, then we find a new, indescribable joy in living…we are at home.” The prophets affirm that God does indeed dwell in this very cosmos, and that God is with us, neither far off nor cordoned off in the brick and mortar of the temple (Isa. 66:1). Joel looks forward to the time when humans will join the earth and the animals in praising God, the giver of life, when God says, “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh” (2:28). For now, the “palace is forsaken,” says Isaiah, but only “until the Spirit is poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness becomes a fruitful field…then justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness abide in the fruitful field” (32:14-16). After God’s redeeming work to restore the household community of creation, when God’s missio vitae is fulfilled, God says, “My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places” (32:18). In this beautiful prophetic vision, not only is humanity liberated, but so too are the animals set free from economic bondage, for God also says, “Happy are you who sow beside all waters, who let the feet of the ox and the donkey range free” (v. 20).
New Testament Appropriations
The Immanence of God in the Incarnation
We have seen the firm Old Testament foundation for a panentheistic theology that affirms God’s life-breathing presence in creation and its implications for understanding the missio Dei as a missio vitae, a mission of redeeming and restoring life. In the New Testament, these scriptural traditions are not only affirmed; they are radically recontextualized; God not only pours the Spirit on all flesh—through the incarnation of the Jesus Christ, the Son and second person of the Christian Trinity, God has indeed become flesh! This is not seen as simply a symbol or merely a doctrinal suggestion; the only heresy explicitly described as such in the entire New Testament is not believing precisely that extreme statement: that God has become flesh in the person of Jesus Christ (1 Jn. 4:2-3). At the incarnation, the immanence of God is revealed in a new and more profound way; it is Emmanuel, God with us. The one in and through whom all of creation has come into being, according to John, “became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn. 1:14). In the same Gospel, Jesus later says, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (10:10), and after the resurrection, he tells his disciples, “Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (14:19). Thus, for Moltmann, the fourth Gospel states quite directly what it is that God has brought into the world through the incarnation—life—and this leads him to state that, “God’s mission is nothing less than the sending of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son into this world, so that this world should not perish but live.” Through Christ, then, we understand that the beginning of the pouring of God’s spirit anticipated by Joel and Isaiah has indeed entered the world, this very world, and that it is sent out to us by Christ himself.
Reconciliation in Christ
The apostle Paul connects the notion behind John’s words about Christ with the imagery of God’s nature in Isaiah 34:16 in his epistle to the Colossians: “all things were created through him and for him…and in him all things hold together” (1:15). Having brought together the Old Testament understanding of God’s creation and life-sustaining activity and the incarnation of God in Christ, Paul goes on to speak about what was accomplished in this miraculous event, “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven” (vv. 19-20). God’s reconciliation, says Paul, is not just for all humans, or all animals, or all life; it is for the entirety of creation. In his letter to the Romans, Paul strikes this chord even more eloquently, speaking of the “hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (8:21). Before speaking about our own hope, Paul speaks of the hope of creation crying out in yearning for God’s Spirit, just as the ground and the animals did in Joel 2. For the fate of the earth is not merely to be the staging ground for human salvation; with the earth, from which we were made, our own fate is inextricable bound up. Thus, Paul goes on:
For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved (vv. 22-24).
Here we get a new image of life in the redeemed household of God: family. In Jesus Christ, the firstborn, we have the hope of life and adoption into the very family of God. We do not get the idea that we will escape this world, nor our bodies; instead we are promised the “redemption of our bodies.”
The Body of Christ
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…In [Christ] you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit (Eph. 2:19-22).
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 of God’s project of reconciliation? 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. Moltmann says that we have failed to understand the role of the church in the missio Dei 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.” Thus, as we read the accounts of Jesus’ earthly mission in the Gospels, we discover that, “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.” According to the bible, the signal of the Spirit’s presence is vitality and the true end of history is completion of the missio vitae wherein all relationships are indwelled by the Spirit and taken into the community of the triune God. To us, the firstfruits of God’s redeemed household have been entrusted. It is in this sense that we, who by grace have been allowed back into the house, indeed even welcomed in as actual family members, can conceive of ourselves as oikonomoi—stewards. Such an understanding is not hierarchical, nor does it seek to dominate the household in the place of an absentee Master; it is ecumenical. For the literal sense of the word “ecumenical” is of all the inhabitants of the household living together as a family.
The Church and the Missio Vitae
Home Economics 101
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 are 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.” In this community of sharing, it becomes possible to speak, like Arias, or “evangelization by hospitality.”
Homecoming
The household of God is the community that is marked by the ethic of the
Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5-7), and its mission must reflect this ethic. This community’s vocation within the holistic project of God’s missio vitae 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. Such are the challenges to the oikonomoi, the stewards of the household. 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.
The Missio Vitae in Context
The Stewardship of Life
We have expanded our view of God and the church in order to glimpse the
missio Dei in a new lens: the life-affirming activity of God on behalf of all creation. As disciples of Jesus who are welcomed into the family life of God’s household, we are stewards of life called to participate in God’s mission, whose aim is the abundance of life (Jn. 10:10). “If we could start from that premise,” Douglas Hall argues, “The despondency that now so often clings to our discourse on mission…would be exchanged for a new sense of being needed.” It is the grounding in the missio vitae that finally enables us to get beyond stewardship as a flawed framework, dismissed by economic and environmental activists as archaic and oppressive, and shrugged off by the church as a periphery slogan and biblical euphemism for shrewdness. Instead, the stewardship of life becomes “a way of designating the very core of our faith. In a time given over to the courting of death, the gospel means: stewarding life!” Throughout the Old Testament, from Deuteronomy to the prophets, God’s people have been confronted with a choice: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life” (Deut. 30:19). In the New Testament, we learn that in Christ, God has personally brought this life into the world. On the cross, Christ took upon himself the world’s response to the charge in Deuteronomy 30, in order to transform the world’s opting for death into the possibility and promise of new life. Hall poignantly remarks, “I am interested in rediscovering the mission of that Jesus; and I suspect that it doesn’t have very much to do with getting people to say, ‘Lord, Lord.’”
Lest we should fall into a form of Christian legalism and merely solicit the empty cry of ‘Lord, Lord,’ we must remember the task to which we have been called. As Johannes Nissen reminds us, “Mission is not only about verbal proclamation but healing action as well, and it strives not just for church growth but for the wholeness of creation.” To be a community of healing, we must seek out and identify with vulnerable and suffering creation. What we need is “compassion so that we enter into the suffering of the earth…In sharing its wounds, we will become participants in the healing of the earth.”
Implications
What does it mean to be a community of sharing justice and peace in God’s household? For starters, we must recognize that the basic unit of God’s salvific mission is not the individual, or even simply humanity; it is the whole of creation. “Justice, biblically, is the rendering, amidst limited resources and the conditions of brokenness, of whatever is required for the fullest possible flourishing of creation.” The primary advantage of beginning to adopt this point of view for the concern of evangelism is that it entails truly good news for everyone. What agent for centripetal mission could be better than being known as the community that is dedicated to the fullest possible flourishing of all creation? Who could possibly find in that goal any bad news? The sheer universality of this claim identifies it with the very heart of the gospel itself and also opens up a vital starting point for dialogue. In a postmodern world in which models of authority and conquest are distrusted and abhorred (and for good reason!), the humble goal of upholding all life and identifying with the most vulnerable members of creation will open more doors than any other missionary model. Jesus did not lay down his life so that we could avoid our responsibility, and the cross that we must take up in our own time is that of affirming life in a world in which it is always and everywhere threatened. If we send missionaries to Iraq or Afghanistan alongside the troops whose bombs and bullets are killing and destroying their lands and people, what success could we possibly expect? Yet if there are Christians in those places, risking that their own lives may be caught in the crossfire, to stand alongside Iraqis and Afghans in the name of Christ, what better witness could be asked for? How can the Christian mission reach those people who are already laying down their lives for the life of the world today, but who do not know the Lord for whose mission they work? As Hall points out, “Those who are really giving their lives for the world’s life today are too altruistic to be concerned primarily for their own salvation.” But what if the message of the Gospel and the hope of salvation is not just about me? Then, I suppose, there would be a mission worth joining, a God worth serving, and a community—indeed, a household and family— truly worth participating in. Then, we might actually have some good news to proclaim to a world numbed and deafened by the ceaseless drone of bad news.
References Cited
Attfield, Robin. “Environmental Sensitivity and Critiques of Stewardship.” In Environmental Stewardship, Edited by R.J. Berry, 76-91. New York: T & T Clark International, 2006.
Boff, Leonardo. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Translated by Phillip Berryman. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997.
Conradie, Ernst M. “The Whole Household of God (Oikos): Some Ecclesiological Perspectives.” Scriptura 94 (2007): 1-9.
Dyrness, William. “Stewardship of the Earth in the Old Testament.” In Tending the Garden: Essays on the Gospel and the Earth, Edited by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, 50-65. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.
Edwards, Dennis. Jesus the Wisdom of God: An Ecological Theology. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1995.
Gottfried, Robert R. Economics, Ecology, and the Roots of Western Faith. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995.
Hall, Douglas J. The Stewardship of Life in the Kingdom of Death. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985.
Jegen, Mary E. “The Church’s Role in Healing the Earth.” In Tending the Garden: Essays on the Gospel and the Earth, Edited by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, 93-113. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.
Knights, Philip. “”The Whole Earth My Altar”: A Sacramental Trajectory for Ecological Mission.” Mission Studies 25, no. 1 (2008): 56-72.
Moltmann, Jürgen. The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.
Newbigin, Lesslie. The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978.
Nissen, Johannes. New Testament and Mission: Histonrical and Hermeneutical Perspectives. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2007.
Palmer, Clare. “Stewardship: A Case Study in Environmental Ethics.” In Environmental Stewardship, Edited by R.J. Berry, 63-75. New York: T & T Clark International, 2006.
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.
Rasmussen, Larry L. “Creation, Church, and Christian Responsibility.” In Tending the Garden: Essays on the Gospel and the Earth, Edited by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, 114-131. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.
Van Dyke, Fred, David C. Mahan, Joseph K. Sheldon, and Raymond H. Brand. Redeeming Creation: The Biblical Basis for Environmental Stewardship. Downer’s Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1996.
It would be nearly impossible to cite the biblical references to the theme of economic justice exhaustively, but here is a short list: Is.1:2-4, 56:4-8, 58:6-7, 59:13-15; Jer. 11:13-16, 22:4-5,13-17; Ezek. 9:9, 12:2-3, 14:11, 37:10-14; Hos. 4:1-3; Joel 1:9-20, 2:12-16; Amos 3:15; Mic. 7:13-17, Zep. 1:9; Hag. 1:4; Hab 2:8-20; Zec. 3:7
Heretical Rhetoric 