Reformation Themes for the Care of Creation
Care for Creation Commentary on the
Common lectionary in Year A 2013-2014
(reprinted from 2011) By Dennis Ormseth
Reformation Sunday
Psalm 46
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Romans 3:19-28
John 8:31-37
How can Reformation Sunday be a Care for Creation Sunday?
Historical assessments of the impact of the Protestant
Reformation on the orientation to and care of creation in Western culture give
us little reason to observe Reformation Sunday with gratitude. The following
comment from Michael Northcott’s The Environment and Christian Ethics is
representative:
Protestant theologians emphasized more strongly than their
medieval forebears both the fallenness of nature, and its consequent
fearfulness, and they treated nature as a resource created entirely for human
purposes. Through its human use and transformation by Christian people, nature
might also be gradually redeemed from the effects of the Fall. Protestants
sought to remove any vestige of spiritual power in the natural world, as
represented in medieval Catholicism in pilgrimages to sacred places, or in
festivals around sacred wells or site of divine activity. They sought to purge
the landscape of the sacred, and locate the site of God’s activity entirely in
the individual self. The work of salvation involved the movement of the heart and
mind towards a state of grace by the inspiration of that gift of faith which,
as Luther taught, alone of all God’s gifts in creation, could work for a
person’s salvation. This inward and redemptionist shift in Protestant theology
produces a doctrine of creation far more instrumentalist and secular than that
of the medievals. As George Hendry argues, Luther’s doctrine of creation
‘reduced the whole world of nature to a repository of goods for the service of
man.’ (Northcott, p. 52).
We cannot begin to assess the validity of these far ranging
judgments here. As we will note below, there are themes in Luther’s theology
that run counter to these generalizations. But it is striking to note that the
texts appointed for reading on Reformation Sunday do indeed underscore the
emphasis on individual spirituality identified by Northcott as the
Reformation’s characteristic impulse.
Is Lutheran Theology too individualistic?
A new covenant is to be written “on their hearts” as opposed
to the original one “external to the people and written on tablets of stone,”
as one commentator characterizes it, making the link to the Lutheran emphasis
on law and gospel (John Paul Heil, “Reformation Day,” in New Proclamation
Year A, 2002, p. 245). Psalm 46, on which Luther’s great Reformation hymn
is based, reminds us not to fear, because “though the earth should change,
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea,” “God is our refuge and
strength, a very present help in trouble”(46:1-2). John 8:31-36 suggests that
salvation is to be understood chiefly as the freeing of an individual from the
slavery to sin. And, of course, the classic Reformation text from Romans can
easily be read in an exclusively anthropological perspective, for its emphasis
on justification by grace made “effective through faith.” Accordingly, with
these texts, Reformation Sunday will not likely be observed as a “care of
creation” Sunday.
To be sure, alternative readings of these passages are
available. The new covenant, for example, is the covenant of kenotic love that
brings about a new creation, as we discussed in the comment for last Sunday. So
also, if the slavery to sin is properly interpreted in John’s Gospel as slavery
to disbelief in God as our creator, then Jesus, the Servant of Creation, frees
the church for love of God’s beloved cosmos. And the righteousness of God
made available through the faith of Jesus in the Christian community
may be interpreted as that power of the Spirit which the Apostle Paul will
celebrate as the means to the liberation that a groaning creation waits for in
hope (Romans 8:18-23).
Sittler: Creation as the Realm of Grace has been Lost!
Nevertheless, the criticism of the Reformation tradition
made by Northcott and others rings true enough that some deliberate effort to
change direction would serve the cause of care of creation well this Sunday.
What Joseph Sittler said about the development of the Reformation tradition in
his famous “Called to Unity” address in 1961 is still largely true:
In the midst of vast changes in man’s relation to nature the
sovereignty and scope of grace was, indeed, attested and liberated by the
Reformers. But post-Reformation consolidations of their teaching permitted
their Christic recovery of all of nature as a realm of grace to slip back into
a minor theme . . . For fifteen centuries the Church has declared the power of
grace to conquer egocentricity, to expose idolatry, to inform the drama of
history with holy meaning. But in our time we have beheld the vision and
promises of the Enlightenment come to strange and awesome maturity. The
cleavage between grace and nature is complete. Man’s identity as been shrunken
to the dimensions of privatude within social determinism. The doctrine of the
creation has been made a devout datum of past time (Sittler, ‘Called to Unity,”
in Evocations of Grace, ed. by Steven Bouma-Prediger and Peter Bakken,
pp. 43, 45).
There is much in Paul that works for the redemption of
creation
For Sittler, it is the Paul of Romans 8, Ephesians 1,
Philippians 2, and Colossians 1, not Romans 3, that would point the way for
future theological reflection adequate to the ecological challenge of our
time. Recent contributions to Pauline scholarship have begun to fill out
this expectation (See David G. Horrell, Cherryl Hunt, and Christopher
Southgate, Greening Paul: Rereading the Apostle in a Time of
Ecological Crisis, especially Chapter 6, “The Construction of a Pauline
Hermeneutical Lens.”)
Rasmussen: Lutheran Themes that resound to the care of
creation?
Theological echoes of Sittler’s challenge to the Reformation
tradition sound yet, and themes other than “justification by grace through faith”
are considered more significant resources “for meeting creation’s travail,” in
the phrase of Larry Rasmussen: Luther’s theology of the cross, the theological
principle of finitum capax infiniti (the finite and material can bear the infinite
divinity of God), and the image of creation as God’s masks, these lend power to
a renewal of the tradition that undergirds an understanding of humans as imago
dei, those who “love earth fiercely, as God does” (See Rasmussen’s Earth
Community Earth Ethics, pp. 270-94, for a brief exposition of these
themes). Yet “grace through faith” nonetheless holds its central place:
Faith is the name of the strong power behind the renewal of
moral-spiritual energy. It squarely faces the fact there will never be decisive
proof beforehand that life will triumph. Yet it still acts with confidence that
the stronger powers in the universe arch in the direction of sustaining life,
as they also insist upon justice. World-weariness is combated by a surprising
force found amidst earth and its distress. Creation carries its own
hidden powers. It supports the confidence of the gospel that a steadfast order
exists that bends in the direction of life and gives it meaning (Ibid., p.
352).