Kistler, R. 1996 Reflections on Stewardship of Creation ©1996

Reflections on Stewardship of Creation

Reflections I: (Natural Theology)

"Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, `Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East, and have come to worship him'" (Matt 2:1-2)

"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of may kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.....There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species)
"Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew....It made me aware of naturenot, indeed as a storehouse of forms and colors bur as something cool dewy, fresh, exuberant....As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day....there suddenly arose...the memory of... his toy garden....It was a sensation, of course of desire; but desire for what? not, certainly, for a biscuit tin filled with moss,....and before I knew what I had desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again...It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison....I call it Joy...." (C. S. Lewis, 1970 . Surprised by Joy)

Reflections II: (A Theology of Nature)

"The aim of our investigation is not what nature can contribute to our knowledge of God, but what the concept of God contributes to our knowledge of nature.."

(Jurgen Moltmann, 1985. God in Creation: A new theology of creation and the spirit of God)

"Recognition of the influence of cultural context on science might resolve the paradox of environmentalism. At present the modern narrative of utilitarian individualism rules our collective lives. Nature is no more than a standing reserve awaiting human appropriation.." (Max Oeschlaeger 1994, Caring for Creation: an ecumenical approach to the environmental crisis)

"Christianity's lack of involvement communicates the message that it is incapable of meeting one of humanity's greatest crises and therefore that it is not a credible option. Unless Christians articulate a theology of nature and resolve their dilemma whether ecological involvement is legitimate in its own right, the impact of Christianity will be severely crippled in the coming decades....A theology of...(nature)...must begin with the concept of God....., must be biblically based,.....must rely on a fresh reading of Scripture,....(and) must be developed within the contemporary matrix of interaction with and differentiation from non-biblical environmental movements.....Humans are estranged not only from the environment but from God, each other, and from themselves. Nature itself has been left in a fractured array of pieces. What is desperately needed in our age is a Christian theology that can provide a holistic framework by which all things are seen as interrelated." (Richard A. Young 1994. Healing the Earth; A theocentric perspective on environmental problems and their solutions)

"We give You thanks, O Lord God, sovereign over all, who art and who was, because you have taken your great power into your hands and entered upon your reign. The nations raged, but the day of retribution has come. Now is the time for the dead to be judged; now is the time for recompense to your servants the prophets, to your dedicated people, and all who honour your name, both great and small, the time to destroy those who destroy the earth." (Rev 11:18)

Reflections III: (Reflections from an Alaskan fisher)

Five grizzly bears shot on the Newhalen River near a popular salmon fishing spot. Cook Inlet Region Incorporated (CIRI), a native Alaskan holding company, is planning a massive logging effort to ship pulp from land adjacent to the Lake Clark Preserve to Japan. Fifty-five million red salmon return to Bristol Bay in a near record return, credited mainly to the El Nino warming. Heat wave in the Midwest kills hundreds. Land owners along the "world's most famous" salmon river (Kenai River) refuse to implement a 150 feet buffer strip to protect eroding fish habitat, pushing instead for a 25 feet buffer. Thousands of fishermen on public lands trample river bank habitat in their quest for the "great salmon". Alaska Senators, Frank Murkowskiand Ted Stevens, push Congress to pass a law allowing oil development in ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) bucking the wishes of environmental organizations. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Commercial Fisheries Division, has closed the red salmon fishing season in the Western District in Upper Cook Inlet to protect the lagging salmon run into the Crescent River. (News headlines from APR (Alaska Public Radio) station KBBI, Homer, Alaska , July, 1995)

The environment around us is a very complex system and the dichotomies involved in understanding its creation, structure, purpose, function, use, and stewardship are all equally complex. The reflections in this section were written while I, my family, and another 20 families of fishers (the preferred term used to denote a commercial fisherperson) were sitting and wondering where all the salmon had gone. All of us began fuming at the Fish and Game for closing "our fishery" to protect the salmon run mentioned in the final "headline" above . The irony was that the salmon had just started to hit our nets in what seemed to us to be normal numbers. But the real irony was that for many of the fishers around us that depend on their income from commercial fishing that another "bad season" could spell "bankruptcy". Fishers, like myself, that have spent years (27 years personally involved) in the commercial fishing industry or any other person involved directly with the harvest or management (combined to mean stewardship) of natural resources realize just how complex and "near to heart" are the environmental issues that surround us daily wherever we live.

Since 1969 we have watched the rebuilding of salmon runs in Cook Inlet from their near extinction due to over exploitation in the 1950's and early 1960's. Beginning in 1974, the efforts of our local group of fishers (at times including 3 Ph.D.'s, schoolteachers, and authors in our other lives) resulted in the recognition of a major local salmon run into the Crescent River (a fact vehemently denied by the Fish and Game prior to 1977), the establishment of a salmon management plan for the river and the connected spawning grounds in Crescent Lake, and the establishment of a three mile area around the mouth of the river that is closed to the commercial harvest of salmon. The goal of this management plan is typical of almost all management plans for renewable natural resources, specifically to achieve a maximum sustainable return of the resource, in this case red (sockeye) salmon for both escapement, the re-establishment of future populations, and harvest, the economic and food resource gain from the use of the resource.

However, despite consistent management, the return of salmon has varied from 39,000 to 314,000 between 1979 to 1995 and during the last six years the number of fishers (jobs) have significantly declined as returns of salmon into the Crescent River have declined. Why fewer fish? We do not know for certain. There has been an adequate escapement. Greater than 35,000 fish per year successfully spawn, producing on average a population of 20 million eggs, which should have resulted in a return of over 100,000 salmon for each successive four years life cycle. Why fewer fishers? The low or at least inconsistent returns of harvestable salmon result in "closures" to allow more fish to "escape" and less to be "harvested". The lower income that results from lower harvests has thus resulted in a net and consistent loss of jobs to "protect the environment".

Competing Interests in Resource Stewardship

Utilitarian Component: The moral of the above fish story and the associated headlines is that stewardship of creation is no easy task. There are at least three competing interests in any attempt to be natural resource stewards. First, there is an inherent utilitarian component of every person's thinking and life style that rebels at the thought of fish or trees being preserved just for the sake of the fish, the trees, or maybe even the oceans or forests. We want to make (individual economic) use of the resources that we (humans, personally and corporately) "own". So for a fisher to simply sit and watch the fish swim upstream with absolutely no harvest of those fish makes no sense at all. While the fish may survive, the people that depend on those fish may economically not survive on a scale much shorter than the four year life cycle of the fish.

Moral Component: There is also in each person a moral component that readily condemns the injustice of the burning of tropical forests, the overharvesting of trees or salmon, the destruction of streamside salmon habitat, or the mass murder of grizzly bears.

Limited Knowledge: Our limited knowledge as stewards rarely is adequate to predict the outcome of any management decision or strategy with even relatively high reliability. Despite the best intentions, knowledge, and conservation plans, the population of Crescent River salmon is erratic at best and seems to be on a continuing downward trend. Despite our stewardship of resources in the Midwest, floods and very hot weather have occurred in the past and will occur in the future. Of course wrong stewardship decisions can make these unpredictable phenomena have even more drastic consequences. For example if we had preserved more wetlands and channelized our river systems less then the impact of floods in a wet year and droughts in a hot year would have been greatly reduced.

Reflections IV: (Reflections by a Christian Environmental Biologist)

The real solution to environmental issues must then clearly involve aspects of each of the above competing interests, the selfish component, the moral (God oriented) component, and the usually incomplete scientific component. C. S. Lewis (1970) adequately portrays the dilemma that ultimately lies at the heart of environmental solutions.

"For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect myth and Perfect fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher." (God in the Dock, Myth Became Fact)

Again the crucial component is that every being, every relationship, even our basic faith in our Creator is not a simplistic one sided affair, but a complex interdependent interrelationship of many components that must all be considered to come to some ultimate wholeness (Note that I do not want to equate wholeness with compromise. Wholeness I feel brings all aspects to their ultimate fruition, while compromise short changes all aspects more or less equally, often failing to reach a just and adequate solution.) In turn, even the Creator's interrelationships with the creation will be just as equally complex. Jurgen Moltmann (1985) more than adequately portrays this.

"Creating the world is something different from causing it. If the Creator is present in the creation by virtue of the Sprit, then his relationship to creation must rather be viewed as an intricate web of unilateral, reciprocal, and many-sided relationships....In this network of relationships, 'making', 'preserving', maintaining', and 'perfecting' are certainly the great one-sided relationships, but 'indwelling', sympathizing', 'participating', 'accompanying', 'enduring', 'delighting', and 'glorifying' are the relationships of mutuality which describe a cosmic community of living between God the spirit and all his created beings." (God in Creation: A new theology of creation and the spirit of God)

Three Threads in the Web of Interrelationships

I see three threads of this web of interrelationships that cry out to be untangled and rewoven back into the web. We need to recover a respect for nature and the role of natural theology, we need to develop a theology of nature, and we (individually and corporately) need to develop an understanding of science, along with an understanding of its limitations. These three threads parallel or intertwine with the three competing issues mentioned above that also need to be balanced; individual, moral, and limitation and misuse of knowledge.

Thread #1: Respect natural theology and nature: The need to recover a respect for the role of natural theology and a respect for nature I think must be dealt with first, because on first examination they seem to be the most heretical and maybe even foreign to our modern way of life in the urban, technological, and scientific society. Natural theology had its beginnings largely around 1520 with the publication of some artistic pictorial works on the plants of Europe (Mayr 1982), culminated with early theologically oriented scientist students of natural history best represented by John Ray (The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, 1691) and Carl Linnaues (The Oeconomy of Nature, 1749)(Worster 1977), and the "demise of natural theology" (Wright 1989) followed shortly with Charles Darwin and the advent of evolutionary biology.

What natural theology embodied in essence was seeing God in nature. Thus the early pictorial plant books encouraged common people and of course some scientifically inclined people as well, to go out and to study nature. What they found was a beautiful and diverse array of both plants and animals that was awesome. In connection with the prevailing worldview paradigm of the day the next logical step was taken by theologians and the scientists alike as was best represented by evangelist John Wesley; "the design and will of the Creator is the only physical cause of the general economy of the world" (Worster 1977). Thus the goal of natural theology came to be to prove the existence and rule of God over nature (and thus perhaps humans over nature as well) using evidence from nature and this in turn led to its downfall as a paradigm. We, both the scientists and the theologians, could not either accept proof that denied all other alternative explanations about the structure and function of the natural world around us or that removed faith as the prime mover towards belief in God.

My contention is that natural theology needs a revival in our current world view. Increasingly we are an urbanized, service oriented society that never see nature and less still develop an understanding of and love for the Creation. This takes me back to Reflections I with which I opened this paper. The Epiphany, God's manifestation to us (the non-Jewish peoples of the world) resulted from some early star gazers truly seeing God in Nature. Charles Darwin, although driven to an agnostic faith by the "righteous" of his time also saw the hand of God in Nature, but in a much less rigid way as the designer of the "rules" of nature and not as the designer of each piece of nature. C. S. Lewis came to a faith in God by a process which included an intimate role of the natural world. We must not deny the revelation of God's World as an avenue to God. Of course if this avenue to God is to continue to exist we must see that all peoples have equal access to the non-human created order, or God will never have the opportunity to speak to them via this important route to salvation. Thus a reimbodiment of natural theology means an increased support for biodiveristy, for rain forests, for Minnesota forests, for wildlife refuges, for managed and less managed urban parks and parkways as well as an increased recognition and awareness of the importance of nature on our college campuses and in our Churches. Needless to say we need to avoid the pitfall of the early natural theologians. Nature does not prove the existence of God, nor does God speak to everyone through nature. The Creation, however, is one route to God that must be preserved.

"But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; Ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the lake will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In God's hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being."" Job 12:7-10

Thread #2: See how God contributes to our knowledge of nature: The second thread that needs to be rewoven into the web of interrelationships is a redevelopment or reemergence of what Jurgen Moltmann (1985) calls the concept of how God contributes to our knowledge of nature, of a theology of nature. Theologians like Max Oeschlaeger (1994) and Richard Young (1994) along with many others with knowledge of scriptures, theology, and history and students of ecology and history of ecology, like Cal DeWitt of the University of Wisconsin (Hope and Young 1995), Donald Worster (1977), and Susan Bratton (1992) are integrating theological and ecological perspectives which are emerging from a re-examination of scriptures and our understanding of God, the Creator and the Sustainer of all Creation and of the interrelationships between God and Creation, God and humanity, and humanity and creation.

The consensus that is emerging from serious scholars, while far from unanimous (Wright, 1995), is that Christians have a Biblically based responsibility to act as stewards of all Creation for all Creation and not just for the human components of Creation. Human stewardship of Creation for just the human component of creation draws too much on the individual, selfish component of the current cultural paradigm winning out over the moral justice component of a more scripturally based religious viewpoint. Such an imbalance leads towards a further fallen world, further breaking apart the intricate webs of interrelationships and not towards the "redemption of Creation", the restoration of right relationships, promised by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Such a properly balanced theology of nature would require (or at the least encourage) the re-emergence of Christians and the Church as stewards of Creation that would help to restore the broken or at least damaged relationships not only between God and humanity, but also between humanity and humanity, God and Creation, and humanity and Creation in what some have referred to as an era of eco-justice (Presbyterian Eco-Justice Task Force, 1989). I feel very strongly that our Christian colleges and institutions are the site where this re-evaluation, re-synthesis, and re-action must occur, not only in the writings of our scholars, but also in our classrooms and in our corporate actions.

Thread #3: Develop a greater understanding of science's contributions & limitations: Finally, the third thread that must be rewoven into the web of interrelationships is the need to develop a greater understanding of science by all peoples, along with an understanding of the limitations of science by both scientists and "laypersons". Aldo Leopold (1947) portrays this dilemma well;

"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well, and does not want to be told otherwise. One sometimes envies the ignorance of those who rhapsodize about a lovely countryside in process of losing its topsoil, or is afflicted with some degenerative disease of its water system, fauna, or flora." , ( A Sand County Almanac)

We need to realize that at all times there are three components involved in science and the formulation of scientific paradigms. Data that we collect from nature and shaping principles (world view components) that largely originate from socio-cultural perspectives form the information base for the development of theories about the way that nature works and is structured (Wright 1989). In this regard we need a greater emphasis on "user-friendly" science education, on especially environmental education in secular and Christian communities, and on respect for and enjoyment of nature as an application or result of the first two. Further, scientists (and environmentalists I would add here) need to both realize and make the public more aware of the real meaning of scientific uncertainty and to not become so blindly tied up with our own data and perspectives that we fail to adequately consider others data and their differing shaping principles. Such a re-evaluation of the role of science is currently taking place as is evidenced by the Sustainable Biosphere Initiative of the Ecological Society of America (Lubchenko et al. 1991) and the Global Stewardship Initiative of the Coalition for Christian Colleges and Universities. At the same time, we need to hear and respect the voices of scientist-prophets in our midst, that point out the consequences of our actions that cause environmental "wounds" around us.

Wholeness, interconnectedness, interrelationships, the web: These are all terms that could be used to complete this story that began with three sets of reflections. If scientists act in good faith, if nature is allowed to speak to humans of God their Creator, if fishers recognize that survival of salmon populations provides their sustenance, if we as stewards remember that stewardship is not just for humans but also for the resources which are the focus of our stewardship, if Christians develop a biblical based theology of nature minus the cultural baggage, and if prophets do not fail to profess, then we will be able to play, if not complete, our role as stewards in the redemption of Creation.

"For the whole Creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God." (Romans 8:19)

References Cited

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