Cockroaches aren't God

"Iobject to calling the universe 'God's body'; isn't this simply pantheism?" I was in the midst of another debate with a circle of women friends over ecofeminism, or the new fusion of feminism and ecology. "No, no," I am told. "This is not pantheism but panentheism."

"What! What's that?"

Panentheism, I have now learned, after looking it up at least ten times, is "the doctrine that God includes the world as part, though not the whole, of God's being."

Even after this distinction is explained to me, I am not convinced. The argument goes on. Whatever you may have read in Deborah Tannen's books about gendered speech (or "genderlect"), it's not true that women won't disagree with one other or engage in intellectual dispute. Content matters; all talk is not building relationships.

Feminists for sure understand that an erroneous belief such as "women are innately inferior" can ruin lives and corrupt cultures. I'll grant that most women are nicer than most men when they disagree with you, but women can still go at it with vigor and rigor.

In our ongoing conflict my ecofeminist friends keep asserting God's immanence in Creation, capital C, using images of Creation as God's body. I, in turn, object by bringing up viruses, plagues, genetic disease, brain tumors, breast cancer, tornadoes, cockroaches, lice, etc. (And this list leaves out the failings of the human creature.) My point is not to deny that God made the world and that it is good, or to disavow that the Holy Spirit continues to create and sustain creation; but I do believe that creation, which is somehow wounded, should not be identified with God.

Saint Paul writes to the Romans that the whole creation is enslaved to decadence, and from the beginning "has been groaning in one great act of giving birth" (8:23). Paul concludes that we must be content to hope because "our salvation is not in sight." I agree. Within the universe we know, death, diseases, and chance events wreak havoc; yes, it's a beautiful, wondrous world that "is charged with the grandeur of God"; it's also flawed.

Aha, say my opponents, you're only disturbed because you put human welfare first, taking an arrogant anthropocentric point of view. Nature doesn't distinguish a cancer or other diseases because after all, these occurrences are neutral and just part of the ongoing ecological cycle. Gaia, or earth's ecological system, simply renews itself continually.

All right, I reply, I admit I'm a "speciesist" and put humankind first and foremost. This is partly because I am human, but even more because I believe the Scriptures that proclaim humankind to be made in the image of God.

Besides, if we as humans don't believe in our specialness, how are we going to take up responsibility or plan to cooperate with the rest of our fellow creatures to preserve the world? Surely only homo sapiens has the capacity to worry about future generations or to make necessary interventions. Snail darters and spotted owls can't do much about saving the whales, or vice versa.

When ecological enthusiasts, espeially those called "deep ecologists," assert that all of life and natural processes are equal, they're basically disparaging the importance of human life. This egalitarian approach to natural processes seems like a form of mystification to me, if not fatalism. Please don't expect me to believe that infectious lethal viruses are value neutral, equal to human life, or a good part of God's plan for creation. Think of how the AIDS virus first knocks out the immune system and then proceeds to attack the brain and cause dementia.

And AIDS may not be the last plague we will have to fight against. In all future ecological debates I will cite the evidence presented in Richard Preston's The Hot Zone (Random House, 1994) and Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plagues (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1994). The hot zone is a place in Africa where deadly diseases make the leap from animals to humans. These two books scientifically explain why and how new diseases will emerge and threaten human life. Medicine may have eradicated smallpox and polio but the natural environment is at the ready to produce new and more lethal assaults. Can this dark side of creation be seen as God's body?

For me an adequate story of creation has to include its nonidentification with the divine as well as affirm its flaws and basic goodness. Hope for the transfiguration of creation is sustained by faith in the Incarnation and redemption; God is for us, forever. Now we too are enabled to work--with, through, and in God--toward the final transformation of creation. But the struggle against disorder, evil, and inertia will continue.

I'm drawn to Paul's image of creation groaning in one great act of giving birth. Maybe there are other images from childbirth that might help us in understanding creation. Perhaps creation can be seen as a child in the womb which is distinct from its mother yet intimately dependent upon maternal nurture. The nurturing placenta, also, encloses and nourishes the fetus by drawing upon the mother's resources, although it is not the mother, nor after birth is it any longer part of the child. Well, enough of this line of speculation. There's nothing like a bit of struggle with the hard questions of faith to make you understand past heresies that constantly reemerge.