My Grandmothers and the Protestant Reformation: Forging a New Reformation with Earth (Rev. Dr. Neddy Astudillo)
My Grandmothers and the Protestant Reformation[1]
Forging a new Reformation with Earth
Rev. Dr. Neddy Astudillo
My family, like almost all families in Latin America, was founded on the stories of several grandmothers. On my father’s side, a European grandmother, an immigrant, who liked to bathe in milk to preserve her white skin; and another grandmother, indigenous, from the Amazon region, who preferred to bathe in the river so as not to forget her connection to Earth. I never knew the name of the first one, but the second grandmother's name was Diosgracia[i] (God’s grace).
Even though none of them became Protestant, the history of the Church in the Western world, its power and worldview, was embedded in the culture and laws that justified doctrines such as the Discovery, the seizure of land, racial struggles, models of development and exploitation of the land, which also influenced their lives, the life of the countryside, the life of the river, the life of their children and their next generations.
Finding myself today as the result of these stories – the Protestant Reformation and the socio-environmental crisis in its various expressions – I feel called to look at the history of my grandmothers as another frame of reference from which to also find some clues and ways out of the ecological crisis. In it I see how even though the Reformation of the sixteenth century succeeded in purging the western church of its medieval abuses, restoring the promise of salvation to the poor through the doctrine of Grace and according to an exegetical study of Scripture; existing within a patriarchal and anthropocentric world, influenced by Aristotelian and Neoplatonic dualistic thought, did not allow the Reformation to transfer with equal ease the same promise of salvation to the other vulnerable communities of Earth.
Diosgracia - as her name says - represented another epistemological model that has existed for more than 500 years, which the Reformation could not completely destroy, but neither did it adopt, marginalizing it like Earth itself, leaving it on the margins, to the study and service of modernity, and the insatiable desires of industrialization and the Market.
Diosgracia, represents a way of knowing the Grace of God present also on Earth. A grace independent of biblical exegesis to be recognized, but equally sustained by Scripture, where we find calls like that of Jesus to his disciples, to observe the lilies of the field and the birds of the sky, to let ourselves be enchanted by their beauty, to find in them wisdom, and contentment to live in a way that will allow other grandmothers to also ensure the existence of their granddaughters and grandsons.
God's Grace and the Reformation
The Reformers undoubtedly brought with them seeds of the Kingdom, but as children of their time, they forgot to prune some dry branches that caused exploitation, injustice and suffering for the next 500 years, in which the church consciously or unconsciously became complicit.
On the one hand, as an example, we have the papal orders that legalized the conquest of indigenous lands a couple of decades before the Reformation. These rights were not left behind by the reformers; they were carried on after the Reformation.
Tin Tinker, in an article written for a journal on Lutheran Ethics, comments that both Catholic and later Protestant missionaries came to the indigenous communities, inviting them to pray first, but when they raised their eyes, the indigenous people had Bibles, and the others now had the land.[ii]
The papal order "was the legal principle used by every Protestant Christian group that claimed Native land in North America as their own, from the Episcopalians… to the Puritans… to the Pilgrims and the Lutheran immigrants who spread across the northern part of the continent." [iii]
The abuse of Western culture manifested itself in the mechanistic use of nature, which for many was infused by the promises and quest for infinite grace for men promoted by the Reformers.
Today, this mechanistic view manifests itself within the Church as we read Genesis 1 in favor of the domination of so-called 'natural resources' for the benefit of human development; less obviously, the mechanistic view of nature is also in the reading of climate change by the majority of evangelical Protestants in the United States. While most scientists agree that climate change is the result of greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activity since the rise of industrialization, most evangelicals believe that climate change is a sign of the apocalypse – not the result of our actions.[iv] "If God gave us the right to rule the earth, nothing bad can happen that wasn't already prescribed. Therefore, if the climate is changing and the poles are melting, it is a sign of good tidings."[v]
This way of relating to and looking at nature was not always the case. Elizabeth Johnson, in the book "Christianity and Ecology, seeking the well-being of the earth and human beings"[vi], explains how during the first 1500 years of the history of the Church, nature was seen as a kind creation[vii] (Gen 1). The Church was governed by a Trinitarian mysticism (God – Human Being – Nature), which even if it was not perfect, because it was still dualistic and hierarchical (man came first and then woman), this mysticism allowed it to see nature as a living subject, with rights and as a theological place.
Up to that time, the role of the theologian included studying nature in order to understand the mysteries of God. If we set aside some of this Trinitarian mysticism, it was known that our knowledge of God, of nature, and of ourselves would be incomplete.[viii]
This community mystique has its own expression in the indigenous communities of the American Continent, where the role of the spiritual leader also includes studying the mystery revealed in nature for the good of the community. If this community mystique is broken, illness comes. That is why the rituals of healing include the restoration of relationships with the various dimensions of human life, and as in Scripture (Rev 22:2, Ez 47:12, Jn 9:6-7), nature also comes to serve as a restorative and healing entity.
What happened then? As a Church, when did we stop discerning the mysteries of the universe to seek our return to God? When did we forgo the support of nature?
For the Catholic and Reformed Church, this happened when its worldview was confronted or enchanted by the discoveries of modernity and the new science. Until that point, the universe had revolved around Earth, and from this vision we had organized church and society, creating order and static hierarchies. But the new science discovered that this vision was man-made. The world was not hierarchically ordered, nor did the universe revolve around us.
For others, this Trinitarian mystique seems to have faded as the allure of Modernity and its new opportunities also merged with the promises of salvation and divine grace promoted by the Reformers. Today, the theology of progress can serve as a reference for us.
As with today's ecological crisis and its great challenges to the people of God, the Church had the opportunity to embrace the new knowledge and make itself relevant to its historical moment without having to deny its own faith.
Unlike what we hope to accomplish today with this analysis of history, the Reformed (and Roman Catholic) Church decided to abandon its vocation of discerning the universe for the good of God's people. Fearing the sinking of the boat, and without taking time to ask Christ for help (Mk 4:35-41), the church threw nature overboard, as if it were the problem, to let science and modernity now take charge of studying, analyzing and using nature, for the good of modernity, within a dominant, Eurocentric, anthropo-centric culture. The work of the theologian from then until today concentrated on discerning the issues of God with respect to the human being.[ix] The important thing now was our vertical relationship with God. Theologians who wanted to dialogue with the modern sciences were censured and forced to retract.[x]
Diosgracia and Martin Luther
Just as Diosgracia recognized a mystical connection to the river, which drew her to it every day, Martin Luther recognized the spiritual value of Earth. Luther believed that God dwelled in nature – even in the smallest leaf. He said we should "listen to the healing, liberating, transforming Word of God, even in the creatures and elements of Earth."[xi]
"God is substantially present everywhere, in and through all creatures, in all their parts and places, such that the world is full of God and fills everything, but without Him being surrounded and encircled by it"... "the Divine Majesty is so small that He can be substantially present in a grain, on a grain, through a grain, within and without. His own divine essence can be in all creatures collectively and in each one individually more deeply, more intimately, more present than the creature is in itself. Yet it can be encompassed nowhere and by no one. "[xii]
While the theme of human salvation, and the struggle of the poor were Luther's main inspirations, Diosgracia – from the river threatened by mining, the river that no longer flows, or the river that flows with polluted waters –today calls us to consider the need for a new reformation that recognizes the salvation also promised to Earth (Mk 16:15, Col 1:20, Rev 11:18), through Christ.
Understanding that human sin against Earth is intimately linked with sin against other human beings, to seek the salvation of Earth we have to find the point of contact between economic violence, racial violence and ecological violence; and concentrate our greatest efforts there. This is the kind of 'salvation' that God also offers us as God the Creator, of Heaven and Earth. A salvation that goes beyond eschatological salvation. It is understood as health and as restoration of life in abundance (Jn 10:10), promised to the cosmos through Jesus Christ (Jn 3:16), here and now for all creatures on earth.
Earth is alive
"Climate change may be the most far-reaching manifestation of white privilege and class privilege that humanity has yet to face." Climate change is overwhelmingly caused by the world's high consumers who are disproportionately descended from Europe."[xiii]
My unnamed grandmother also represents hope, the human need for well-being, and health. She represents the story of every immigrant, forced to search in distant lands for what she needs to survive. She is a symbol of courage and the right of every creature to find its place in the land and to enjoy its fruits (Gen 9:8-17). My European grandmother also represents what can happen when this divine impulse loses its primary aim of serving Earth as we seek our peace (Jer 29:4-7); or what can happen when we fail to recognize ourselves as strangers in a land that is, after all, God's (Lev 25:23).
To help the Church overcome this inherited anthropocentric model – in our efforts to see, judge and act with Earth in mind – we need to incorporate the feeling of Earth, reconciling the essential relationships of every human being living on this planet.
Two years after my husband and I had left the city and moved to the countryside with our three sons to start a learning center on an organic farm north of Chicago, our 9-year-old son came home one day from his rural school with a disturbing question: "Mommy!” - He said to me - "Is Earth alive?"
His question was strange, because ever since we moved to the countryside, he had heard my husband and I say over and over again, to every group we received on the farm, how in one handful of fertile soil, live trillions of microorganisms; more organisms in one handful than there are human beings on the face of Earth.
Then I said to him: "Son, of course Earth is alive! Why do you ask me?” He replied, "The teacher asked us to give her examples of objects in nature that are alive and objects that are dead. And when I raised my hand to give her the example of a living object, I said: Earth (soil). And she said to me, "No, the earth is dead."
A faith based on the knowledge of a dead Earth cannot bear fruit, nor can it respond to the challenges that the ecological crisis puts before us today. Therefore, I believe that we urgently need to nurture and protect the intuitions that our sons and daughters inherited from their grandmothers. We are in a unique historical moment, where we need every practical and intuitive experience, every institutional resource, every community and ancestral wisdom, oriented in unison towards the healing of our planet.
To feel Earth is not to idolize it; it is to fulfill our divine vocation to care for it and serve it[xiv] (Gen 2: 15).
While Scripture has always invited us to know the wisdom of God in the creatures of Earth (Job 12:7, Prov 6:6), and to know the truths of God in heaven (Ps 19:1-6, Matt 2:1-2), concern about human depravity and sin led some Reformers to conclude that because of sin, we need Scripture to see nature clearly[xv]. This new requirement, coupled with the efforts of science to master nature,[xvi] closed the doors of the temple to it, andmade Earth "the platform where the drama of the history of salvation is played out; and even… symbolic of that from which we need to be saved."[xvii]
Good or fallen, our life depends on Earth.[xviii]
A couple of years ago, a digital newspaper article showed the handprint of an 8-year-old boy in a petri dish. The bacteria from his hand that were left in the petri dish had had a chance to multiply and create a colorful forest of bacteria.
His mother, a microbiologist, had done this experiment to show people that we are all covered in bacteria and this is not necessarily a bad thing. The article explained how bacteria live inside and outside our bodies; they help us maintain a healthy immune system. The bacteria in our guts help us to digest food and absorb vitamins. We have 100 trillion bacteria living in our bodies that have evolved with us. In the mouth alone, there are up to 5000 species of bacteria. Bacteria on the skin moisturize the skin and prevent cracks where pathogens can enter. The milk from our mothers' breasts, unpasteurized, has more than 600 species of bacteria.
When we think about the need to reconcile ourselves with Earth, and incorporate this kind of essential human reality – where we cannot exist, nor be healthy, without the support of other living beings such as bacteria – we realize that the path to universal reconciliation in Christ is through discovering ourselves.
"Who are we really? What kind of world did God create?" a world where we cannot be ourselves without the many other creatures that provide us with health; a world where there are more creatures living in me and you, while there is only one "I". In this divine reality, we see that the concept of 'individuality' as an 'independent' being does not exist in creation. Just as God exists in community or acts in community (Gen 1:16), I cannot be me, nor can I exist, without the many other creatures with whom God created me to find my salvation.
We exist as part of a web of relationships, and the more we study this natural world that we are a part of and depend on, the more we realize that this web of relationships connects us to the much larger web called planet Earth – our common home, where we exist and know God.
Looking at Earth from an eco-theological point of view:
One of the theological proposals that seems to me to be the most pertinent for repairing the damage done to Earth and its creatures, respecting our Latin-American cultural diversity and based on the roots of our Judeo-Christian tradition, is Eco-Spirituality. [xix]
Eco-Spirituality proposes to see God in a Pneumatic way: God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, living in and among us, as the Ruah who not only sustains the human being but gives life to all creatures (Job 34:14-15; Psalm 104:29-30); and at the same time, inspires the daughters and sons of God to be the Church, to manifest themselves and to liberate creation from the oppression to which it has been subjected (Rom 8:19-23a).
Through this eco-spirituality, we can continue to participate in a universal reconciliation founded on Jesus Christ (Col 1:15-20). Its end is not only the salvation of human souls, but the whole universe (Jn 3:16). Nothing exists apart from God, just as we do not exist independently of the rest of creation. The Christic presence in the world, from a pneumatic point of view, is what makes it possible for us to find life and salvation,[xx] in a moment of solidarity, in community, in tenderness, in women, in Earth itself. [xxi]
As human beings, we were made from the dust of the ground (Gen 2:7) and part of our identity is only discovered when we are in communion with it. As the image of God (Gen 1:26), we are called to reflect a God who self-limits Godself, exists and creates in community. From God’s own unity in diversity, God invites us to live in the same way, creating in union with others, as God did, with the help of Earth itself[xxii] (Gen 1:11-12). Under this spirituality we exist not only because we think, but also because we feel;[xxiii] and we accept to set limits to dominion (Gen 2:15-16), so that life can flourish.
From this spirituality nature is ourselves, with and in it we exist, live, suffer, die and receive salvation (Eccl 3:17-22; Joel 2:21-22). Nature is our neighbor and from the beginning has been "very good" (Gen 1:31). If it was ever cursed because of human sin, Christ has already delivered it from such condemnation (Gal 3:13-14). Regardless of our ability to dominate Earth, the earth is God's and all that dwells in it (Psalm 24:1); we are mere strangers (Lev 25:23).
Earth is our companion (1 King 17:2-6; Num 22:23-30; Gen 2:18-20); and sister (Gen 9:8-11), as St. Francis of Assisi recognized in medieval times. Throughout history God has chosen to reveal God’s glory also through Earth (Ex 3:1-6; 19:16-19; 20:18-21; Lk 3:21-22); and though Earth is not the same as God, God's Spirit also inspires it and enlightens us to discern in Earth God’s message, and this makes Earth our teacher (Prov 6:6-8; Job 12:7-11).
Eco-Spirituality is grounded in the Creator God and in a sensitive experience of the divine in Creation. But it can also help us to restore the damage done to God's grace, to the field, to the river, to the nameless grandmother who had to migrate in search of better opportunities. In the journey of migration, eco-spirituality can root us to the place we live and enrich our Faith. With Earth’s help, we join the work of God’s Spirit, so that the will of God our Father who art in Heaven may also be done on Earth.
Praying the Lord's Prayer with Mother Earth
"We need a new Copernican revolution: from being human-centered to being creation-centered; from focusing only on God's relationship with humans, to focusing on God's relationship with all of creation. " [xxiv]
While the Reformers, concerned about human sin, turned away from nature, focusing their gaze on the written Word of God to find eternal salvation, the ecological crisis proposes that we look again at sin, not as an individual phenomenon with eschatological consequences, but as everything that ignores the Wisdom of God and distorts the harmony of creation.
If we don’t do so, we contribute to the ecological crisis. It is time to see salvation as the reconciliation of our human relationships "at the personal, social, communal and community levels, in our relationship with God."[xxv] Earth eagerly awaits the revealing of the sons and daughters of God.
It is time to dream not only of a castle in the sky, because after all the new Jerusalem will come down from heaven to settle on earth. It is time to take care of our earthly home, protecting the water so that we can bathe with Diosgracia[1] in the river, or making goat's milk soap to take care of our skin. [xxvi]
It is time to recognize the presence and contributions of God's two books – Scripture and Nature – and God's two hands: Word and Wisdom or Christ and Spirit[xxvii] .
Perhaps if we consider them, we will realize that not only faith, not only Scripture, but also nature has a salvific capacity, because in nature, God also lives and reveals God’s Grace.
For eco-theologian Yvonne Gebara, this is possible because of the Christ-like capacity of creation[xxviii]. It is Christ, not nature itself, that makes it possible that creation can also be a channel and source of salvation for God's people. [xxix]
To understand this revelation, we need the discernment of God's Spirit, as when we sit down to write a sermon or read Scripture. It is God who chooses to reveal Godself, and it is the Holy Spirit who guides us to understand the revelation. Without a life in the Spirit, we cannot find God, not even in the most beautiful or peaceful, highest or deepest places on the planet, and not even in Scripture.
The Spirit, who helped the Jews understand that salvation also ran through the veins of the Gentiles, led Paul to recognize that salvation dissolved the boundaries between Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free; today it is also dissolving the boundaries between human beings and mother Earth.
A theology that thinks only of the call of the sons and daughters of God to liberate Earth from its captivity (Rom 8), and forgets the story of Genesis 2, where the creatures of the field are created to help Adam in his vocation (even before Eve), will remain an anthropocentric theology.
When we approach Earth as a partner in ministry, we can understand, as the Spanish Jesuit Jon Sobrino did in thinking of the salvific capacity of the poor, how even as Christ is the Mediator between God and humanity, through His Spirit who infuses all things, there are now also new mediators, mediated by Him,[xxx]and through whom salvation, understood as the restoration of all our relationships, becomes possible when we walk alongside them. [xxxi]
Earth and the Body of Christ
When my son told me that his teacher had told him that Earth was dead, I asked him, "Son, if you were an astronaut and a special ship took you high up in the sky and you looked down at Earth and couldn’t see me, your dad, or your brothers from up there: would you then say that Earth is dead?"
Opening his big eyes, and knowing that he knew the answer, he said: "No, Mom!”
"Well, me neither" - I said.
The body of Earth is one and has many parts,
And all its members, though many, form one body.
We were all given the same Spirit.
Even if the earthling human were to say: - As I am not an earthworm, a fungus, or microorganism, I don't belong to the soil! -
That would not make them any less of an earthling, nor any less part of its soil.
One part of Earth cannot say to another: "You're dead!” - or - “I don't need you!” For God has ordered Earth in such a way that there is no disagreement within the body, such that the members have the same care for one another.
If one member suffers, everyone suffers with her;
If a member is honored, everyone rejoices with him. [xxxii]
Paraphrasing Sobrino's thought:
We need to learn to walk with the land that is being deforested and extinguished before its time, a land for which existing and reproducing is difficult in the face of the burden created by commercial interests and insatiable human desires. We must allow ourselves to be radically affected by the reality of nature. It will define the Kingdom of God along with all of those marginalized, and it will reveal to us that from which we need to be de-enslaved, and that from which the Kingdom of God will liberate us.[xxxiii]
This reunion with the creatures of Earth is the most important mission of our time. We may not make it back to the Garden of Eden with our efforts, but we can walk together towards the New Jerusalem.
Notes
[i] This story was also published in PHP POST, A Hunger Justice Journal of the Presbyterian Hunger Program, PCUSA, Spring 2017.
[ii] Tink Tinker is from the Wazhazhe / Osage Nation and a professor of American Indian Religious Traditions and Cultures at Iliff School of Theology.
[iii] Tink Tinker, "The Christian Doctrine of Discovery: Lutherans and the Language of Empire," in Journal of Lutheran Ethics, accessed April 4, 2017, http://elca.org/JLE/Articles/1203.
[iv] Lisa E. Dahill, Lisa E. & Martin-Schramm, James; eds, Eco-Reformation, Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril, Eugene. Oregon: Cascade Books, 2016, 142.
[v] Every day we hear new news about the ravages of climate change: rains, droughts, epidemics, record temperatures. If we do nothing to curb greenhouse gas emissions, scientists predict that global warming could increase more than 8 degrees Fahrenheit, which would transform the planet and undermine its ability to support much of the human population.
[vi] Elizabeth Johnson, "Losing and Finding Creation in the Christian Tradition," in Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-Being of Earth and Humans, Dieter T. Hessel and Rosemary Radford Ruether, eds., Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard CSWR, 2000, 6.
[vii] The Hebrew word "tov" translated as the goodness of creation in Genesis 1:12, 18, 25 and 31, can also be translated as life-giver.
[viii] Hessel, Radford Ruether, ed., Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-being of Earth and Humans, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard CSWR, 2000, 6.
[ix] It is also said that the Calvinist doctrine of the Sovereignty of God was a reaction to the abuses of nature by the new science, as a way of warning that above everything and everyone, there is God. Today, the challenge that this doctrine proposes out of its context is to lead us to perceive God outside of everything and everyone, even outside of nature itself, where we once sought God’s glory and wisdom.
[x] Hessel, Radford Ruether, ed., 5-9.
[xi] Lisa E. Dahill, James B. Martin-Scharamm, eds., Eco-Reformation, Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016, 47.
[xii] Ibid., 9.
[xiii] Ibid., 40.
[xiv] Several Scripture scholars point out that the Hebrew word normally translated as 'cultivate' can also be translated as 'serve', which places us as human beings in a position of humility before the earth.
[xv] Hessel, Radford Ruether, ed., 9.
[xvi] The words of the scientist Francis Bacon (1561-1626) serve well to illustrate this: "Mother Nature was to be bound from her wanderings just as witches are bound. Both were to be subdued, interrogated, and conquered."
[xvii] Hessel, Radford Ruether, ed., 10.
[xviii] This brief is a revised and abridged version of an article previously published for HORIZONS Nov/Dec 2015. This brief has been reprinted with permission.
[xix] Part of this approach was published in the journal Ecumenical Presence No. 71, January-April 2011, but has been modified for the purposes of this paper.
[xx] In an article written by Ivone Gebara in 1999 for Diez Palabras Claves Sobre Jesús de Nazaret, she proposes that when Jesus invites his disciples to admire the lilies of the field and find wisdom in them, Jesus was opening new paths to salvation.
[xxi] Ivone Gebara, "¿Quién es el ‘Jesús liberador’ que buscamos?" in: Diez Palabras Claves Sobre Jesús de Nazaret. Estella, Navarr: Publisher Verbo Divino, 1999, 167.
[xxii] Professor Catherine Keller, in an Eco-theology class at Drew University proposed an alternative version of Genesis 1:9, 11, 14, 24, 26, which we normally interpret as the Trinitarian expression of God. Another equally valid view is the possibility that God in each of these moments is inviting Earth to create with God, and Earth responds in obedience.
[xxiii] In the 17th century, the philosopher René Descartes (France), became famous with his great phrase: "I think, therefore I am", locating the existence of the human being, in the mind.
[xxiv] Dahill, Martin-Schramm, 4.
[xxv] Josef Estermann, Coord., Teología Andina, El tejido diverso de la fe indígena. La Paz, Bolivia: ISEAT, Plural Editores, 2006, Volume I, 52-53.
[xxvi] At the Angelic Organics Learning Center that my husband and I founded in 1998, one of the first skills we learned and then began teaching others was milking goats and making cheese and soap from goat's milk, which is wonderful for the skin.
[xxvii] Dahill, Martin-Schramm; ed., 5, 49.
[xxviii] This pneumatic way of understanding Christ may help us to contribute more openly to the building of the Kingdom of God on Earth, especially if we understand the Kingdom of God as – to use Sobrino's words – "a place where salvation is not only an eschatologically attainable gift, but something that begins in the many mini-salvationsthat day by day allow us to overcome the evils of the present. (Jon Sobrino, "Centrality of the Kingdom of God in Liberation Theology", in Mysterium Liberationis, Vol. I, 482).
[xxix] Gebara, 1999.
[xxx] Jon Sobrino, "Centrality of the Kingdom of God in Liberation Theology," in Mysterium Liberationis, Vol. I, 495.
[xxxi] Like other liberation theologians, the Jesuit theologian Jon Sobrino proposes that salvation is present when we walk alongside the poor, for in them the Kingdom of God is made concrete.
[xxxii] Paraphrased, 1 Corinthians 12.
[xxxiii] Paraphrasing the words of Jon Sobrino inspired by the poor, but now from the perspective of a marginalized land.
This article has never been published in English.
