Dismantling Human Centeredness

August 22, 2021 • 13th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture Reading: Genesis 1:26-31 (NRSV)
Pastor Jeff Wells

[You can view the worship video recording, including this message, at: Facebook.com/churchofthevillage/videos.]

The message today is about process theology and the ecological crisis. I am not going to talk about the Green New Deal or fossil fuels or electric cars. Instead, I argue for two high-priority moves to address the crisis: humility and love.

Last October, we were privileged to have environmental ethicist, Larry Rasmussen, as our guest preacher. I have come to deeply value Larry’s wisdom and commitment and I would like to begin with a powerful quote from his book, Earth-honoring Faith: 

“We are born to belonging, and we die into it; our lives are braided into all that is.
‘Biosocial’ is the kind of creature we are: Apart from human community implanted in an Earth community embedded in a cosmic community, we cannot, and do not, exist.” [1]

Friends, we do not merely live on the Earth, we belong to the Earth. We don’t live merely in an ecological system. We are an integral, inseparable part of it, in spite of the ways our thinking and behavior seem to deny that truth. This complex system – this ecosphere – includes both biological, or living elements, as well as a host of non-living elements. We utterly depend on this vast and complex system for the survival of our species. So, you would think we would take better care of it. Yet, with very unequal ferocity – and benefitting mainly a small fraction of the most wealthy – human societies have continued to recklessly pollute, deplete, and degrade the air, water, and soil and have fostered a mass extinction of living species. We have become not stewards, but destroyers of the Earth. 

Human economies (both capitalist and collectivized) continue to seek ever-increasing production and consumption. We use earth’s resources far beyond the rate at which they can be replenished. The size of the human population is probably already unsustainable and continues to grow rapidly. It is projected to grow from 8 billion to 10 billion in the next 30 years. 

This is where love comes into the picture. As followers of Jesus, we believe we are supposed to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Yet, we have been taught to see only our human “neighbors” as deserving of our love and respect. Meanwhile, we exclude a vast multitude of other neighbors in the evolving-creating order – other animals, plants, fungi, and microorganisms, as well as the air, water, soil, and light. We give those parts of the ecosphere no moral standing. Instead, we use and abuse nature to satisfy human purposes, desires, and needs. Actually, it is more accurate to say that forces of wealth and power in human societies have been raping the ecosphere, while the rest of us have been complacent in our human privilege. In the modern era, this way of being human was justified by scientific and philosophical systems that viewed all of nature as merely means to benefit human ends.

Yet, this distortion of humanity’s place and relationship to the rest of nature did not begin with modernity and Enlightenment thought. One of the most destructive ideas in the Bible is found in the first chapter of the first canonical book: Genesis. It is the idea that God gave humans a special status and determined that they should have “dominion over” and “subdue the earth” (NRSV). This view, whether expressed in religious or secular terms, has been a foundational ideological underpinning for human disregard of the ecosphere. The resulting destruction has progressed dramatically since about 1950, leading to the current ecological crisis.

This is where process theology can help save us. Process theology teaches that, while we are deeply and intimately loved by God, we are not the sole or even the primary focus of God’s love and attention. Also, process theology shifts the locus of meaning from “being” to “becoming.” In this understanding of reality, all of existence is about the continual becoming of the whole cosmos. In all of that “becoming,” God is intimately at work. God, too, is becoming, because God is affected by events in the universe. Process theology is, therefore, necessarily deeply relational. In fact, it is often referred to now as process-relational theology. Not only is God in constant, intimate relationship with human beings, God is in relationship with every element of the cosmos from the smallest subatomic particles to the galaxies and even to any theorized multiverses that might exist. Just as much as God loves every human person unconditionally, God loves and cares unconditionally about every atom, microorganism, insect, reptile, and wild and domesticated animal. As we learn from process theology, "God’s creative activity extends infinitely into the past and will continue into an infinite future....
God’s love and God’s plans do not begin and end with us." [2]

Especially in the modern industrial age, we have lived arrogantly with the illusion that we are a separate and self-sufficient species that can somehow thrive while ignoring the well-being of the rest of the biosphere. The delusion captured in that attitude is proven by our own bodies. Each of us is a complex ecosystem. As we heard from Alfida, each of our bodies is home to 39 trillion microorganisms. Without them, our bodily processes would shut down and we would die within hours. So, clearly, we are bound and beholden to a vast and complex ecosphere – inside and outside of us. We are able to love, create, worship, reproduce, to laugh and to cry only because the amazing interconnected ecosphere makes our lives and our so-called “civilization” possible. So, how can we – how dare we – make our own species the exclusive focus of our love?

The God described by process theology rescues us from this idolatry. God is intimately and intensively present – always and everywhere. God is not “all powerful” or “omnipotent” in the sense that most Christians have been indoctrinated to think. Yet, God is very powerful and hugely influential. As we heard from our guest preachers over the past two Sundays, God’s power is not exercised through coercion. God does not force us to choose a particular path. God loves and lures us – along with every element of the universe – to move and act in directions that offer the best possible outcomes for ourselves and for the common good, not only of humans and nor only of living beings, but of all creation. 

So you can see how process-relational theology can help us confront the ecological crisis. A crucial component in this effort is radically shifting our thinking about the place and the role of human beings in the ecosphere. We need to overthrow the ideological underpinnings of anthropocentrism – by dumping “dominion” and “subduing the earth” language in Genesis, by subverting mechanistic science and philosophy, and by the political and economic centrality of production and consumption for profit. Let’s not forget that for thousands of years, it has been the elites of society who created these justifications and have benefitted the most from them. They have used the ethos and language of “dominion” and “subduing” to create social systems – divided by class, race, and gender – in order to exercise their power. Practicing process-relational theology can help us build an alternative ethic of human collaboration, cooperation, and community – not only within humanity, but with the whole ecosphere. This is deeply contingent on creating ways of being that eliminate economic inequality and all forms of oppression.

Will we acknowledge the wisdom of process theology – that we are part of a completely interdependent system of becoming? As followers of Jesus, can we become converts to an “Earth-honoring faith,” as Larry Rasmussen calls it? It’s past time for us to regain the capacity, which most humans lost long ago, of connecting regularly and intimately with the rest of the natural world. Only then will we begin to fall in love, passionately, with the whole creating-evolving cosmos and with every element of this specific beautiful and amazing ecosphere in which we live.

Since God is love and God has been intimately involved in the creative-evolutionary process from the beginning of the universe, we can confidently say that God’s desire and intention is for the ecosphere and the wonderful variety of life to continue on this planet. Can we learn to love it? Will we choose to cooperate with God in dreaming, imagining, and building a new world in which all of life can thrive? 

This demands humility. We ought not see ourselves as saviors of the planet. Last Sunday, Catherine Keller said God cannot save us, but God may be able to lead and lure us toward participating in saving the planet. Humans have shown that we do not deserve “dominion” over the Earth, yet we bear a huge responsibility for the planet’s well-being. We are, after all, the only species with the demonstrated capacity to destroy life on Earth, as we have known it. We are also the only species with the ability to choose to reverse our course and salvage what still can be saved from the abundance of life, the water, air, and land that still exists. 

I have loved birdwatching, hiking, trees, rivers, my dog, and yet, I confess that I have not loved enough. 

We have loved our green spaces, lakes, national parks, mountain, and plains, yet we have not loved enough.

(c) 2021 Jeffry Wells
All rights reserved.

1. Larry Rasmussen, Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key (Oxford University Press, 2012)

2. C. Robert Mesle, Process Theology: A Basic Introduction (Chalice Press, 1993).