Celebrating Nature by Faith. H. Paul Santmire

that I hope that readers will carry forward with them, once they have taken the one step backward that I will be describing in the following pages.

      I am well aware that the terminology here—theoanthropocentrism and theocosmocentrism—is not felicitous. But I do believe that it can nevertheless be fundamentally instructive, especially for explorations in the theology of nature, such as the ones that are to follow.

      4.

      Then some comments about the tonality of this book. Those with ears to hear will already have detected that the following explorations will be consistently predicated on the assumption that the human species is facing a life-or-death planetary emergency today: due to what human abuse, especially by the powerful, has done and continues to do to this, God’s good Earth and to the poor of the Earth. Call this a tonality of emergency.

      At the end of Chapter 4, indeed, I will raise the question whether this Earth-crisis, driven as it is by climate destruction perpetrated by the principalities and powers of this world, has become so extreme that the Church Catholic, in all its formations, must not now enter into what was called by resisting Christians in Germany during the Nazi era a “state of confession,” a status confessionis.

      Indeed, must not the very word martyr, which originally meant “witness,” once again be deeply and self-sacrificially claimed for themselves by all faithful members of the Church of Jesus Christ? Has not the time arrived for all Christians, not just a few, to stand ready to put our livelihoods and even our very lives on the line?

      I highlight this matter at this preliminary point so that no reader will conclude anywhere along the way that this book takes for granted some kind of human business-as-usual on planet Earth today. It does not. On the other hand, I have long been convinced that we who think of ourselves as Christians, together, must always try to do everything at once.

      But all cannot stand in the halls of government or out on the streets all the time. Some must take their stands in those places, for sure, but others are needed to search the Scriptures, for example, or to work at constantly renewing the Liturgy, for the sake of more resolutely celebrating the presence of the God of hope in these times of pervasive ecological crisis and widespread cultural despair.

      To invoke a few traditional liturgical words, which were familiar to me in my earliest years: it is “truly meet, right, and salutary” for those of us who think of ourselves as Christians today, and for the seekers in our midst as well, to write or to read books like this, as long as we understand that we are living in an era of global emergency and as long as all of us are always poised to take public stands at any time or at any place in behalf of the Earth’s future and in behalf of the poor of the Earth.

      With that sense of urgency, I look forward to conversing both with scholarly and general readers in this book. For the former I have provided notes so that you can more explicitly understand the theological milieu that informs this book, as you ponder your own theological pilgrimage. For the latter, feel free to skip the footnotes and then to dream dreams and see visions immediately, each step along the way, about how you yourself might enrich your own celebration of nature by faith.

      5.

      I enthusiastically dedicate this book to all the ecojustice activists associated with Lutherans Restoring Creation (LRC)—online at LutheransRestoringCreation.org/—who are hard at work in concert with their peers in the ecumenical community in behalf of an ecological reformation of Christianity at the grassroots, where this urgent challenge may matter the most. In the same breath, this book is also dedicated to Dr. David M. Rhoads, Professor of New Testament emeritus at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago and founder of LRC. David has been the heart of theologically informed American Lutheran ecojustice initiatives for decades, and for that, as well as for his personal friendship, I am most grateful.

      Finally, I want to thank the distinguished Finnish American artist Eric Aho for permitting me to reproduce his striking gouache and watercolor painting as the cover of this book. For me, Aho's creativity discloses both the dark ambiguity and the luminous promise of nature charged by the presence and the power and the mystery of God. I take that dark ambiguity with utmost seriousness, especially in these times. As this book was going to press, all hell was breaking loose. The chaotic epoch of the corona virus was upon us all. But the eruption of that plague of nature just happened to coincide, in my own world, with celebrations of Easter, in whose light I also see the luminous promise of nature, notwithstanding all the darkness. As I contemplate Aho's painting, therefore, I am overwhelmed by this contradictory but captivating vision of nature, which all the explorations of this book presuppose: the struggles between the powers of death and the powers of life.

      H. P. S.

      Easter 2020

      1. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’.

      2. Barth, Word of God and the Word of Man.

      3. I have traced this history in my study of Christian attitudes toward nature: Santmire, Travail of Nature.

      4. Brunner, Revelation and Reason. 33n.