The Best Preaching on Earth. - Review - book reviews

The Best Preaching on Earth Sermons on Caring for Creation Stan L. LeQuire, ed. Evangelical Environmental Network and Judson Press, $16, 221 pp.

Environmental theologians now struggle to untangle themselves from the collapse of the death-of-nature rhetoric that they so eagerly joined over the last dozen years. After a long, noisy public relations crescendo and much crisis mongering and panic peddling among religious groups, political activists, and a most solicitous media culture, the environmental apocalypse has been postponed. But, in truth, the work of environmental justice has barely begun.

Two recent books collect a number of voices and point to new directions, subject matters, and methods for religious argument about the environment. The books' silence about some previous and often exaggerated concerns is as important and instructive as their overt claims.

The Evangelical Environmental Network has chosen to publish twenty-two sermons, most of them preached at churches, chapels, and regional conferences in North America, that are not directed to academic experts and policy makers. And the U.S. Catholic Conference continues its valuable teaching role with eight academic-style arguments, plus the papal message of 1990, "The Ecological Crisis," six very different bishops' conference statements, and some quite usable material for parish teaching and the critical watching of public relations events and commercial news stories about the environment. Some themes stand out in these remarkably encouraging writings.

First, justice for the environment must include, and cannot ignore, justice for the poor on whom environmental damage inflicts the harshest costs. This is preached with utter lucidity by Myron Augsburger: "For many, this gap (between haves and have-nots) is about the extent to which people share in the benefits of creation--land, clean air, fresh water." And by Bob Seiple: "Why would Christians care about the environment? Because left unattended, the environment becomes a poverty issue." Paul Brand shows by anecdote how land-use choice is a form of determinism for the poor, with one outcome in Bangladesh, another outcome in North America. And J. Alfred Smith preaches gracefully about actions against ghetto poverty in Oakland, building the virtue of tranquillity and how nature as such, enduring strains of suffering and degradation, can generate the discipline of tranquillity. These are novel and welcome arguments in environmental discourse.

The statements of the six Catholic bishops' conferences about conditions in Australia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Lombardy (Italy), the Philippines, and the United States center on the theme of complexity and pluralism. Each situation shows vast differences from every other; effective changes for the better in one region would be irrational elsewhere. Nonuniformity and a profound pluralism is the rule for environmental analysis, spiritual inclusion, and public action. The details, the evidence, the examples, the search for discipline in these papers and sermons lift into full clarity the difficulty that lies ahead of this empirical theological task.

Religious symbols built on nostalgia, or spiritual insights that generate emotional caricature, or disciplines that project Fifty Things You Can Do to Save the Earth, all vie for religious allegiance with the techniques of the TV commercial and the purposes of the media event. Kevin Erwin's very fine essay, "The Sacramentality of Creation and the Role of Creation in Liturgy and Sacraments," addresses this problem directly, from within the Catholic tradition, and with some constructive results. He examines the liturgy of the hours, the pluriform meanings of the symbols of water, technologically produced bread and wine, and their analogical meanings in relation to nature's life systems. And he admits that these practices are not well understood and need much rehearsal and development.

A third theme is fluency with Scripture. Anne Clifford's paper, "Foundations for a Catholic Theology of God," shows that, to some extent, academic theologians are still hung up on how authoritative Genesis narratives need to be for a doctrine of creation, and whether or not the clause "man shall have dominion" (Gen. 1:28) can explain the rise and now the alleged collapse of Western philosophy, theology, patriarchy, and related fragments of a civilization gone wrong.

By contrast, the evangelical preachers are learned, inspired, independent, Protestant, not hung up, and have much to teach the academic teachers about how the Bible can work in contemporary culture. Eugene Peterson shows a mastery of how biblical texts come to life in contemporary speech: "Metaphor and simile do not explain [nature]; they draw us from being outsiders into being insiders." Calvin DeWitt uses "The Price of Gopher Wood" in Noah's ark to juxtapose the value in the book of Job. While his conclusion, as a professor of environmental studies, is somewhat predictable, his hermeneutic is free-ranging. And Harold Dean Trulear weaves a spectacular verbal tapestry comparing the city of Laodicea, a location of apocalyptic projections in the book of Revelation, with Paterson, New Jersey. "[The emperor] Domitian still runs the city; he just doesn't live here any more." Trulear drops only one-and-a-half shoes in this sermon; it's not clear in his vision whether the Passaic River basin shows much environmental promise or not. But he can get to that problem another time.