Healing the Protestant Mind:
Beyond the Theology of Human Domination
by H. Paul Santmire

Excerpts from the chapter by H. Paul Santmire reprinted by permission from After Nature's Revolt, copyright © 1992 Augsburg Fortress.

As the earth groans in travail, it appears that those who stand in the traditions of Luther and Calvin are ill-equipped to respond to the global environmental crisis theologically.1 It appears, indeed, that in this critical instance the Protestant mind is suffering from a severe case of hardening of the categories. The Protestant mind has become fixed, not to say fixated, on what Karl Barth called "the-anthropology," the doctrine of God and humanity. This has meant, in turn, that Protestants generally have approached the earth almost exclusively via the theology of a divinely mandated human dominion over nature.

What is required, therefore, is a certain kind of theological healing, inspired by one of the great principles of the Reformation: sola scriptura. The Bible begins with the creation narratives of Genesis and ends with the Book of Revelation's vision of a new Jerusalem established in the midst of a new heavens and a new earth. The Protestant mind needs to be made whole, so that the voice of the Reformation tradition in our day can claim the entire creation for God once again, rather than focusing almost exclusively on God's history with humanity, while the natural world is interpreted as a kind of staging area for that divine-human drama.2

That such a theological healing is required will become evident as we review the course of the Protestant theological response to the environmental crisis during the last two decades. The typical Protestant response to this crisis has been repeatedly to prescribe the theology of human dominion, in various forms. There is a better solution - a holistic solution adumbrated both in the Scriptures and in the classical Western theological tradition.

The Problematic of the Protestant Mind: From Earth Day 1970 to Earth Day 1990

As we marked Earth Day 1990 in the United States, we also witnessed a pronounced increase around the globe in environmental awareness. The churches have been a part of this international discussion. Consider the World Council of Churches' new emphasis on "Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation."3 That accent on creation is new. Justice and peace have been long-standing emphases of the WCC.4

Given the immense scope and profound urgency of our global environmental crisis, this apparent greening of the public mind in general and of the Christian mind in particular can only be welcomed. But it all sounds disquietingly familiar. We have been here before, at least in the United States, particularly within the circles of North American Protestantism. Indeed, calls for increased environmental awareness and for the development of a theology of nature or a theology of ecology or a new land ethic have been issued in this country with an almost monotonous regularity for two decades or more, at least since the first national Earth Day in 1970. But whether we have finally begun to witness the greening of the Protestant mind in America can be debated.

For those who were around for the first Earth Day and its theological aftermath, there is surely a feeling of déjà vu. A work like my Brother Earth: Nature, God, and Ecology in a Time of Crisis (1970), for example, was intended to be among the first of a wave of serious theological response to the global environmental crisis, as that crisis was perceived by many with clarity already at that time.5 But works like this were soon forgotten, and that wave of serious studies in ecological theology never emerged, as the nation and its Protestant churches quickly became preoccupied with other issues.

Notwithstanding that turn of events, during the ensuing twenty years a few theologians, most notably John Cobb, Joseph Sittler and, most recently, Jürgen Moltmann, valiantly continued to explore theological issues related to the concerns of ecology and the environment.6 Each, as it were, staked out the territory of one of the Trinitarian persons: the vision of a Creator who persuades al things and thus bestows value on all things (Cobb); the vision of a Redeemer who is the universal fountain of divine grace, the Pantokrator or Cosmic Christ (Sittler); the vision of a Sanctifier who feels with and indwells all things, nurturing them, and shepherds all things to their final Sabbath rest (Moltmann). But these thinkers have found few influential audiences of any size either within the churches or beyond. During the last two decades, Cobb, Sittler, Moltmann, and others like them tended to remain solitary explorers with small followings, as far as their ecological interests were concerned.

Other voices were also raised in the wake of that first wave of environmental awareness circa 1970, many of them speaking from the margins of the American church: feminist thinkers and exponents of Native American, Asian, or African religions.7 But these voices scarcely received any hearing within the American Protestant mainstream apart from romanticized environmental interludes, usually played out at church camps or on wilderness treks.

In light of twenty years of often fitful and largely unfruitful theological starts, are we now to begin the process all over gain in the wake of Earth Day 1990? Do we need still more calls for increased environmental awareness in our churches and for new theologies of nature or a new land ethic? Will such utterances do anything more than assuage the mounting environmental guilt among our members, providing temporary and symptomatic relief for those who issue them and for those who hear them? DO we not have to wrestle here with a deeper malaise of mind that requires a more thoroughgoing kind of therapy?

It is sobering to consider that the very Protestant mind that has sanctioned such calls for increased environmental awareness and for new theologies of nature during the last two decades has been largely preoccupied with other, sometimes antithetical interests. Thus many of the most vocal Third World spokespersons in our churches understandably have championed theologies of liberation. These theologies have been projected as historicized, humanistic theologies par excellence.8 Characteristically they have betrayed little direct concern for the earth, except insofar as they have, rightly, identified how the resources of the earth have been grossly maldistributed. Protagonists of liberation theology have also been suspicious, rightly, of those who espouse environmental concerns, since appeals to the order of nature in the past have often served to lend support to the unjust structures of the established socioeconomic order. A concern to save the whales, for example, might be just a subterfuge, consciously intended or not, to distract the public from focusing attention on the shocking numbers of children dying in our cities.

Meanwhile, back in the First World, establishment practitioners of the theological arts have addressed themselves to global issues mainly in cultural and political contexts,such as pluralism, science and technology, world peace, and democratic capitalism. Or they have found themselves, willy-nilly, swept up by more parochial ecclesiastical concerns, such as hermeneutics, the doctrine of the ministry, and church growth.

This situation almost inevitably has driven those Protestant church leaders who have cared about environmental issues to fall back on long-established and little-examined theological assumptions, most of them having to do with the theological concept of human dominion over the earth. In the process, they have also tended to ransack the Scriptures together what have appeared to them to be environmentally relevant texts, usually without the assistance of seasoned biblical scholars.9

Thus espoused as a kind of emergency solution by Protestant church leaders who have not been able to find any other readily available options in the Reformation tradition, the theology of human dominion over nature has generally taken two forms over the last twenty years.10 Those who have identified chiefly with Third World concerns sometimes have spoken of "new visions of eco-justice."11 Those who have been more at home in a First World milieu have tended to speak of "a new theology of responsible stewardship."12

Whether promulgated under the banners of eco-justice or responsible stewardship, all these theological options amounted to the traditional Protestant theology of human dominion all over again. Their long introductions describing the environmental crisis and impassioned affirmations of the need for a theological response, with a liberal sprinkling of environmental proof-texts thrown in along the way, did not challenge the underlying theological paradigm.

True, the theme "care for the earth" has emerged again and again within Protestantism during the last twenty years, and this would suggest a certain respect for what the World Council of Churches is now calling "the integrity of the creation." But that theme as almost always been emphatically attached, like an appendix, to the issues of distributing the fruits of the earth justly (an eco-justice perspective) or managing the productivity of the earth wisely (a responsible-stewardship perspective).13 The theme "the integrity of the creation," in contrast, implies contemplating nature as a world with its own life and its own value, in short, caring for nature enough to allow it to have its own history with God. But that theme, in the mind of many contemporary Protestants, has been accorded little or no standing of its own. The advocates of eco-justice or responsible stewardship may mention it, but they seem to be nervous or unsure about the whole idea.

Could it be that the venerable Protestant theme of human dominion over the earth it itself problematic? Could it be that the many environmental critics of Christian thought, beginning with Lynn White, Jr., have had a point all along?14 Could it be that the reason that Protestant responses to the environmental crisis have not converted t he church - or influenced substantial numbers outside the church - is because these responses have been part of the problem rather than the solution?

Theological Roots of the Protestant Problematic: The-Anthropology and Human Dominion Over Nature

The Protestant theology of dominion has its problems. It all began with a the-anthropological concentration in the thought of Luther and Calvin and came to its most notable modern fruition in the Christological concentration espoused by Karl Barth.

The thought of Luther and Calvin is predicated on a vision of God and humanity in dynamic interpersonal communion, through the gracious Word of God.15 God relating Godself graciously to humanity, and humanity responding to God in faith and love - that is the shape of the Reformation tradition's fundamental theological intuition.

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While the Reformers in a variety of ways also show a profound concern with the whole creation (which is highly suggested and worth careful attention today), it nevertheless remains that in accent, if not always in substance, they repeatedly direct our attention to the dynamics of God's relationship with the human creature.

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By the time of Karl Barth, the Reformers' the-anthropocentric focus had been systematized, especially by theologians who wrote in the tradition of Immanuel Kant and Albrecht Ritschl.16 Such thinkers taught that God cannot be known in nature, and they often implied that God cannot even be encountered in nature. Both Kant and Ritschl maintained, systematically, that the divinely posited purpose of nature was to provide a place in which God could create, educate, or redeem "a kingdom of spirits." Kant and Ritschl also accented the theme that the proper relationship of the human creature to nature is dominion - a concept that often was taken by their followers to mean domination.

Theirs was a pristine logic. If the raison d'être of nature is essentially instrumental, why not use nature like the instrument it is for the greater glory of the underlying divine purpose, which is the creation and exaltation of the human creature? That nineteenth- and twentieth-century theologians like Ritschl, who stood in the Kantian tradition, also were serving scientific, technological, and economic interest is also noteworthy in this context.17

Karl Barth's theology exploded in the midst of this scenario with a resounding no.18 In the name of his famous christological concentration, he took issue with what he considered to be the all-too-easy nineteenth-century identification of bourgeois progress with the coming of the kingdom of God. But he did so, as one of his most important essays states, in the name of The Humanity of God. He was chiefly concerned with God and humanity, in Christ Jesus. However much he might have distanced himself from his nineteenth-century predecessors in other respects, he essentially held firmly to their systematic subordination of nature to God and humanity. Remarkably, in the context of his extensive exegesis of the Genesis creation texts, Barth also argued that the Bible does not permit us to espouse a theology of nature at all, only a theology of God and humanity.

Nature only comes into view in Barth's thought in two respects: first, as the stage for God's covenant history with humanity; second, as the field in which the human creature exercises a limited but undeniably lordship, akin to the divine lordship over the cosmos.

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The problems of this kind of Protestant the-anthropology of nature are many. To begin with, it is intrinsically unstable. The theology of dominion too easily can become the ideology of domination. On the one hand, Barth does set limits for human dominion over nature so that it does not become domination of nature. Barth does not wan to encourage what he thinks of as mindless exploitation of nature. But notice that these are the limits of prudence, not of essence. The human creature, in this sense, must not mindlessly exploit nature lest nature be destroyed and human life thus be undercut, or likewise lest some humans be enabled to exalt themselves unjustly over others through the accumulation of natural resources as their private domain. Barth was a socialist. He believed firmly in the just distribution of the goods of creation and the preservation of the earth for future generations. But, on the other hand, nature in itself essentially amounts to very little, according to the same Barthian logic. It has only an instrumental value, at best. Then what are we to believe when we read Barth, that human manipulation of nature must be restrained or that such manipulation is an essential datum of human life, to be taken for granted and even encouraged to the point of domination for the sake of social justice?20

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The problem with an instrumental theology of eco-justice or the theology of responsible stewardship is not that these theological approaches to nature are necessarily wrong, but that they may be much too reticent; it is not that they are obviously incorrect, but that they may be too susceptible to distortion. And while it is true that the abuse of the principle should not discredit its validity, it is also true that probably abuse of the principle in a time of crisis certainly should discredit the principle's obvious utility, especially if other principles are available that may be less vulnerable to abuse.

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A New Paradigm: Constructing a Holistic Protestant Theology

There is a better theological alternative. To identify it, it is necessary to invoke a concept that has become tediously familiar, the concept of the paradigm shift. What is needed is a new paradigm for Reformation theology, not a completely new theology. The parallel with the paradigm shift in the natural sciences in this instance appears to be exact. Einsteinien physics did not abrogate Newtonian physics. In the context of the former, the latter still remains true, as a general rule, insofar as the latter refers to the forces studied by Newton, such as those operative on a billiard table.

It is possible to reclaim the thought of Karl Barth in a new context, just as Einstein's science reclaimed Newton's. The laws of the billiard table remain true in the matrix of this new way of thinking, but in this case one pauses to look out the window as well, at the garden and the mountains on the horizon. This seems to be a highly promising project because, upon completion, it will allow us to open the door to paths that lead to a variety of theological options in this context, at least a few of which seem worthy of our attention. The theologies of John Cobb, Joseph Sittler, and Jürgen Moltmann have not gained the widespread, serious hearing in the churches precisely because the views of these thinkers have been informed by the new paradigm.26 As Thomas Kuhn instructed us some years ago in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd ed., Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), the adherents of the old paradigm are simply ill-equipped to understand the insights of those who write from the context of the new paradigm. The defenders of the old, by temperament, can only reject constructions that emerge from the context of the new.

It is a question of identify that is before us here. Whatever negative responses some of Karl Barite's ideas might have elicited (Lutherans troubled by his understanding of Law and Gospel; feminists scandalized by his theology of man and woman), he remains the twentieth-century interpreter of the traditions of Luther and Calvin par excellence, in the eyes of most historically informed interpreters of the same traditions. Karl Barth is, or comes close to being, the Protestant Thomas Aquinas - for better or for worse.

Barite's thought embodies a self-conscious allegiance to the two most important principles of the Reformation: sola gratia and sola scriptura. Barite's thought does represent "the triumph of Grace," on the one hand, and a devotion to the Scriptures, on the other. This is nowhere more apparent that n in his treatment of the doctrine of creation, predicated on a theological vision of the gracious eternal election of Jesus Christ and the people of Christ.

It is appropriate and necessary to turn to Barite's thought in this instance, where the concern is with the theological paradigm more than the theological particulars. For it is a question of identity we face here, not doctrine. And Barth certainly represents the theological identity of the traditions of Luther and Calvin.

If it is possible to hold firm to the essentials of Barite's thought while broadening its scope, and to show explicitly how this twentieth-century Protestant the-anthropology can be incorporated into the matrix of a more inclusive twentieth-century Protestant holistic theology, then the requisite paradigm shift will have been clarified in a way that may enable protagonists of the old to step forward to claim the new without sensing a loss of identity. Then it might be possible for those visionary representatives of the new paradigm, such as Cobb, Sittler, and Moltmann, to gain a fresh hearing in this respect.

A New Ecological Paradigm for Protestant Theology

To identify a new ecological paradigm, in the matrix of which this holistic Protestant theology might be developed, we first take one historical step backward. We will discover that the new ecological paradigm we are seeking to identify is not so new at all, however much it has been forgotten. This paradigm has been one of the two dominant modes of thought, or motifs, that have informed even the earliest Christian theologians.27 Both motifs are related to a primordial human experience - the encounter with the overwhelming mountain. From the rites of primal religions to the intuitions of moderns such as Paul Cezanne, who passionately contemplated Mount Saint-Victoire again and again, mountain heights have universally captivated the human imagination and its religious sensibilities. This primordial experience characteristically has taken historical form in two related but distinct modes, one projected from the perspective of the mountain heights, contemplating the ethereal regions above, the other projected from the same heights, but, instead, contemplating the global vision of the manifoldness of being on every side. From these two originating experiences of the overwhelming mountain two metaphors have come to expression in many forms and various cultures. One grows out of the contemplation of the ethereal above and can be called the metaphor of ascent. The other grows out of the contemplation of the fullness of reality around and can be called the metaphor of fecundity. The itinerary of the mind, in the first instance, is upward. It moves away from the manifoldness of being below toward some exalted experience of pure and all-transcending spiritual unity above, the One. The itinerary of the mind in the second instance is outward and circuitous. It moves out toward the surrounding manifoldness of being and embraces its fullness, a vision of the Many.

The ancient Hebrew people were captivated by yet another metaphor drawn from the force of the Exodus experience: the metaphor of migration to the good land. In this instance the itinerary of the mind is forward, moving toward a holistic, earthly future - from materially deprived wilderness experience toward and experience of earthly abundance - toward a land flowing with milk and honey.

On the basis of these three metaphors, operative in many cultural contexts in the West, two motifs developed in classical theology. One, predicated on the metaphor of ascent, is the spiritual motif. The other, predicated on both the metaphor of fecundity and the metaphor of migration to the good land, is the ecological motif. This motif depicts the world at the beginning, the Alpha, in terms of a primordial fecundity; and it envisions the ending, the Omega, in terms of arrival at the earthly abundance of the promised Land. Both the spiritual and the ecological motifs are attested in the Scriptures, and both are in evidence in the classical theological tradition in the West. The "new" ecological paradigm, then, is an itinerary of the mind that begins with the experience of fecundity and moves toward a fulfilling experience of overflowing earthly blessings.

In Barth's thought the spiritual motif dominates. For Barth, theology begins when we lift up our eyes to the heights of eternal election, where we see a world constituted by mainly spiritual creatures: God and humanity, united in Jesus Christ. Only in service of that primal vision does the manifoldness of the created world come into being. The spiritual motif shapes Barth's thought from beginning to end. The ecological motif comes into view only when a place is required in the midst of which the primal spiritual story of God and humanity can unfold. Barth is not really interested in the fecundity of nature, except insofar as it offers a congenial stage for the playing out of the divine-human drama. Nor does Barth characteristically think of salvation in terms of a "land experience," akin to the one in the Hebrew Scriptures. Characteristically, when Barth is interpreting Romans 8 concerning the whole creation groaning in travail, awaiting the liberation now enjoyed by the children of God, he suggests that this expression, "the whole creation," in fact refers to human creatures alone, not to the cosmos!

Now let us begin to think theologically in terms of this paradigm shift. What happens if we appropriate the Barthian schema no longer on the basis of the spiritual motif (the metaphor of ascent), but rather on the basis of the ecological motif (the metaphors of fecundity and migration to the good land)? This paradigm shift is permissible for inheritors of the Reformation tradition, since both sola gratia and sola scriptura can be variously affirmed within the matrix of either paradigm. The difference is this. With our vision enlightened by the ecological paradigm, the grace we can see is the life of God overflowing, predicated on self-giving love, to the whole creation, not primarily to the human creature. The promise proclaimed in the Scriptures can be heard not just as the gift of human salvation, but also as the gift of a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells for the sake of all creatures.

In the context of the ecological paradigm, then, sola gratia can remain the fundamental norm of all theological reflection. But this grace will now be displayed in terms of cosmic universality, not just in terms of anthropocentric particularity. Also, this expansion of the theological horizon can be accomplished in terms of sola scriptura.

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The Cosmic Vocation of Jesus Christ and the Cosmic Ministry of the Holy Spirit

Irenaeus thought of the Word and the Spirit as the hands of God.46 We have seen that the covenant of God with all things is mediated by the Logos and energized by the Spirit. We now name the Logos and the Spirit Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, while, in the context of the ecological paradigm, we still confess the cosmic scope of their works. The cosmic vocation of Jesus Christ is depicted in Colossians 1:15-16, and the cosmic ministry of the Holy Spirit is adumbrated in the first verse of Genesis. These themes belong at the heart of this holistic theological reconstruction. Karl Barth would have nothing to do with such themes, nor will many Protestants today.

But in the triangular shape of this ecological theology the line between God and nature completes the pictures, along with the lines between God and humanity, and between humanity and nature. Jesus Christ as the Lord of life is the firstborn of creation, in whom all things cohere and to whom all things tend. Jesus Christ is the cosmic Christ, the Pantokrator, as Joseph Sittler suggested.47 The Holy Spirit is the Spiritus Creator,the lifegiver, according to the Nicene Creed, who dwells in all things and sanctifies all things, as Jürgen Moltmann wrote.48 The vocation of Jesus Christ does not only relate to human sin, as shown with pathos and power on the cross.49 But as the resurrected one who comes from the future of God, Jesus Christ is also the perfecter of the whole creation.50 His coming signals therefore the beginning of the ending (in the sense of telos) of all things, when they shall cease from their groaning in travail and also enjoy the liberty that the children of God now enjoy, on the day when the Son hands the Spirit-filled cosmos over to the Father, when God shall be all in all.

Furthermore, the advent of Jesus Christ, as the one who has come to blot out human sin, also means that he has come to restore the sinful human creature to a right relationship with God and therefore to a right relationship with nature, as well as with other human beings. Insofar as believers live in communion with Jesus Christ, therefore, believers know what was never theirs as sinners alone: the primal realities of life in the creation as the garden of God, living as homo cooperans. Insofar as they live in communion with Jesus Christ, likewise, believers also can have a foretaste of the feast to come. They can savor tastes of that great cosmic banquet, when as citizens of the new Jerusalem they will contemplate the glories of the Lord shining not only within that city, but from every creature of nature that will dwell in a new heaven and a new earth.51

Paul Santmire, M. Div., is pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Hartford, Connecticut, and the author of The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology.

"He therefore who is not illumined by such great splendor of created things is blind; he who is not awakened by such great clamor is deaf; he who does not note the first principle from such great signs is foolish.... Open up your eyes therefore; awaken your spiritual ears; open your lips and apply your heart, that you may see our God in all creatures and all creation." -- St. Bonaventure

End Notes
1. For a thorough and up-to-date description of the extent of the environmental crisis, see Keeping and Healing the Creation, a resource paper prepared by the Presbyterian Eco-Justice Task Force (Louisville: Committee on Social Witness Policy, 1989), 1-38.