God's battered body.

Our common life is enriched, entertained, and befogged, in about equal measure, by the many religious services designed to worship God and celebrate the bluegreen earth. They are often long on inspiration and short on clarity. Mutterings overheard from two such meetings are worth repeating: "Isn't this the only subject that neither Andy Greeley nor Harvey Cox has written a book about? What can that mean?" And from a weary celebrant, forty-five minutes into an impromptu prayer by a Native American chief that included an impassioned creation dialogue between the Sacred Acorn and the Great Squirrel, "Can't anybody here announce a fade-out to a station break?"

No one did. The prayers ended when the inspiration was complete, and the service dragged toward closure well into its third hour.

Likewise with many writings and teaching about religion and the environment. How long will it be before we know what we're talking about?

One of the most lucid and powerful metaphors of our time is theologian Charles Hartshorne's panentheistic claim, "The world is God's body." Hartshorne left the body side of that formulation for empirical thinkers to explore and elaborate. Scientists tell us that nature, or God's body, is littered with evolutionary failures and the energies of innovation, flagrant with symptoms of stress and quite elusive in its systeniic coherence and norms of "health," if these can be found at all.

A few years ago a very competent environmental journalist and author of the WILLIAM SIMPSON loves the environment while riding the D Train to and from the Bronx and Fordham University, where he teaches a course on religion and ecological issues. best-selling A Moment on Earth (Viking), Gregg Easterbrook, published an essay, "Everything You Know about the Environment Is Wrong," and listed thirty-seven issues that need to be reformulated for public understanding and policy deliberation. A careful tracking of research, argument, and advocacy for more than a decade in three much-respected journals--nature, Science and Environment--shows that somewhat more than thirty subject matters constitute the environment and the ecology of it. Fewer than half of those environmental issues have surfaced on the horizons of our political culture, and fewer still have ever been in the news.

Religious advocates, of course, need not jump directly into this empirical world and try to thrash a path toward a universe scientifically understood. Many essays in these volumes move from scriptural, doctrinal, or liturgical frameworks toward persuasive conclusions about environmental matters.

In Preserving the Creation, Richard Clifford presents a most useful synoptic collection of biblical cosmogenic narratives and myths about the natural world, the human status in it, and divine relatedness to both. Gabriel Daly analyzes the many different methods, in modem and contemporary thought, by which creation theologies are built, and Elizabeth Johnson replies with a sharply measured critique of the patriarchal and monarchical assumptions built into such religious thought. Daniel Cowlin projects how a possible environmental ethic can build on, and must dissent from, Catholic ethical traditions.

In Ecological Challenge, Dianne Bergant directs a programmatic reading of the prophet Hosea at the most contentious issue now being argued in environmental philosophy: "It [the Book of Hosea] resists any kind of anthropocentric imperialism and, instead, celebrates the intrinsic, not merely the instrumental, value of nature."

In Worldviews and Ecology, eight essays elaborate cosmologies and nature doctrines in traditional religions that will not easily conform to the command for a single "global ethic." Many of these essayists demonstrate how the vocabulary and drama of liturgical and contemplative theology can reconstruct the human experience of creation through symbolic structure and sacramental order.

Three ad hoc essays in Embracing Earth also deserve wide reading and comment. David Toolan argues that recent Vatican positions need to better comprehend the three-legged character of current enviromnental dilemmas: the rich nations must alter their polluting structures, the poor nations must reckon with too many people fighting over too little land and water, and the church has to deal directly and honestly with women's reproductive rights. Richard C. Haas turns the traditional Catholic work ethic toward a new look at economic productivity problems, using a richly argued set of analogies between sexual relationships and work-production-reward relationships, wherein he sees the basis for a new economic spirituality. And Albert Fritsch makes a most intelligent and discerning argument that technologies capable of liberating masses of human beings from famine, disease, and untimely death can also be appropriate for healing the damage caused by abusive technologies. These three essays exemplify the refreshing theological initiatives that can and ought to emerge from the churches and independent associations.

Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom of journalists and environmental activists is also saturated with antitechnology rhetoric. The damnation of "technological man" follows the conversion to naturalism as logically as the wearing of wilderness clothes and eating organic food. Several of these liturgical theologians, along with Fritsch, make a subtle and powerful counterclaim. Bread and wine are "manufactured symbols," made by working hands that manipulate the ancient technologies of the flour grinding stone, the oven, and that manage the vineyards and learn the techniques of fermentation. Thus the simplest, most profound symbols central to the Eucharist embody both human technology and divine grace. It makes about as much sense for a believing Christian to engage in a diatribe against technology as it does for a practicing Jew to decide that the Torah yields more wisdom when read in the dark, so therefore we should eliminate electricity and the symbols of light from public life.

Liturgy, and the reflection it inspires, should not be underestimated as a means of environmental appreciation. Two of the shorter essays deserve more extended argument.

In Worldviews and Ecology, Charlene Sprepmak makes an heroic effort to summarize in eight pages the argument, mythmaking, and spirituality practiced in more than fifty sources of ecofeminist writing and teaching. Ecofeminism argues that two kinds of dualistic thinking are the engines that impose domination and death on nature. One is the mind-body dualism that shattered the medieval synthesis, but left untouched its hierarchical patterns of rule; the other is masculine-feminine dualism that promotes rationality, spirit, culture, autonomy, assertiveness, and the public sphere as the masculine arena, and relegates the feminine to emotion, the body, nature, connectedness, receptivity, and the private sphere. One political consequence of these dualisms is that all current efforts at environmental protection, conservation, and restoration merely replicate and expand masculine domination and control, and stand condemned as false moral abstractions, ruinous to nature, and oppressive to the integrity of women.

To reconstruct an ethic of nature, ecofeminists seek "to remove the concepts of rights from the central position it currently holds and focus instead on less dualistic concepts such as respect, sympathy, care, concern, compassion, gratitude, friendship, and responsibility." Human beings can reliably comprehend the holistic totality because of "felt connections" with all levels and all regions of creaturely experience, but especially "between the person, the family, the community, the bioregion, the country, other people, other species, Earthbody, and the cosmos." Logical connections among these segments of experience are most readily avail- able in the feminine experience and the resonant harmonies of nature. And from this great communion, a new spirituality is born.

Ecofeminist teaching invites at least four kinds of reflection. First, it is a genuine attempt to develop an empirical theology, an understanding of the world's relatedness to God based on worldly experience as such. It shares this pioneer status with feminist theology more generally.

Second, it is massively reductionistic, both in the minute samples of biotic experience it attends to, and in the methods of projecting universal or "holistic" meaning from that evidence to the totality and history of God's body. Rachel Carson's graceful quote, "There is an ecology of the world in our bodies," often cited by ecofeminists, is an insight that ignores far more about the world's life systems than it can possibly reveal.

Third is the problem of how the feminist communion with nature can give birth to the elective power of moral judgment, how to make the logical turn from the appreciative "is" to the effective "ought." Among those felt connections with all creaturely experience are nature's two most effective killers, the malaria virus and the schistosoma mansonis, a parasite worm that kills vast numbers of warm-blooded creatures as well as humans. If these diseases are to be contained and destroyed, to what level of technical and divine order must we appeal for effective action? The principled move from nature's collaborator to ethical teacher and local enforcer cannot be delivered friction-free by ecofeminist interpretations of the holistic experience.

And four, the great communion, the feminist harmonic community of all creations, is in practice a pristine case of cloistered virtue. For most human beings and other sentient life forms, nature is a harsh and relentless taskmaster that offers no recess from the struggle to live, thrive, and find some happiness. The new spirituality taught by ecofeminists can transform only a very few creatures who are predisposed to practice and enjoy the rites of such a belief. It is a very good example of what Martin Luther meant by faith without works.

From ecofeminists we can expect novel, melodic, instructive myths and rituals about how the world is ordered, presided over by Madame Polyarchia, in the company of her attendants Hymnia, Calliope, Terpischore, and their ensemble, who will frolic out of the great Womb into a species-rich green meadow shaded by a climax forest, to join in treble songs, body choreography, and the feasting on ripe fruits and poetry. These myths may not promise the redemption of the whole world, but they do promise a lot more fun, and are a welcome relief from all that recycled philosophy. But one reads ecofeminist writing with a murmured benediction, that God might lead them deeper into the valleys of Darwin, and DNA, and the flight of time's arrow, for Her name's sake.

Moreover, there is the apocalyptic premise that animates a very large proportion of speech and activity about the environment. We are now locked in a countdown toward the total destruction of nature and the doomsday of humanity, to be fulfilled at some unknown but unavoidable future moment, triggered by human processes that we cannot stop or will not deter from their projected conclusion. A recent Audubon Society membership letter urged increased support because we can "project with some accuracy the eventual end of the world as we know it. That is, no trees. No wildlife." In an essay in Worldviews and Ecology, Larry Rasmussen quotes Gregory Bateson on the human situation, "...your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in Hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or simply, of overpopulation and overgrazing." He then adds, "In my judgment, Bateson is right," and adopts the summary phrase, "aiding and abetting ecocatastrophe."

This brief essay is not consistent with Rasmussen's other writings, but it is replicated many times in World Council of Churches statements, for whom Rasmussen serves as an academic consultant. And Elizabeth Johnson opens her lectures Women, Faith, Creator Spirit (Paulist Press, 1993) with the question "whether life, our own and that of future generations, as well as that of myriad living creatures, will flourish on this planet or will pathetically diminish, even disappear." Her answer to this question is the metaphor "earth is entering into its passion and death...."

Reliance on the apocalyptic premise is one of the most careless and obscurantist moves that environmental groups have made. Most especially, religious groups and theological advocates should hold this framework at arm's length, and examine its substance with the same dialectical logic and analytic detail that the doctrine of creation has received. The apocatyptic premise brings with it these difficulties.

First, the rhetorical use of eschaton seems to be borrowed from antiwar politics and nuclear disarmament analysis. In that political context, end-of-the-world imagery is commensurate with the planned exchange of thousands of nuclear weapons. However, our political life is not now driven by the military doctrine of mutually assured destruction. But environmental crisis thought is still dominated, not by obsolete images, but by a grammar designed to contain single-issue convictions that can be "proven" by data from a single source--too often a collection of photographs, or a few case studies from the Worldwatch Institute. The world's life structures are not unitarian, or trinitarian, or in conformity to chiastics or an eightfold path. Contemporary prophets who claim to know the causation of nature's imminent end are almost certainly wrong.

A second problem is bluntly political. For more than a decade the editorial opinionizers in the Wall Street Journal, along with the Heritage Foundation and numerous other sources of political conservatism, have been hammering away at environmental advocates, charging that they indulge in irrational doomsday visions. More than half the time opinionizers are correct in that claim. But in their high dudgeon these conservative magi conveniently overlook the argument of born-again former Secretary of the Interior James Watt, that Jesus will come again soon so the world doesn't need legal protection or environmental care. And they indulge in their own fantasy logic, that if freed from government restrictions, investors will get rich from "cleaning up the environment."

Environmental groups have deliberately sustained and championed the apocalyptic premise because of its rhetorical efficacy. But they preached their way into a political trap, by hiring public relations agencies who use it as a "values frame" for staging mass media events and for shaping appeals for political and financial support. So the procorporate conservatives have easily identified and condemned this reasoning as more evidence of the bizarre unreality of political liberalism as such. The consequence has been a grotesque distortion of the political geography on which environmental issues must be argued, and a serious defeat for many environmental groups in a policy contest which they mistakenly thought was about public relations. Understanding and acting to protect the environment must rely on truth, discovered through science, politics, and belief. Doomsday images obscure all three areas.

Religious communities are not strangers to apocalyptic belief nor to the rhetoric and actions inspired by it. In The Ecological Challenge, John Pawlikowski states some critical cautions that will help us avoid this swamp. And then his colleague, Paul Wadell, in the same volume, wades right into it and flails about with the strange philosophy that fear of an unknown doom can be the principle for ethical analysis and political action, so "Let the facts frighten us .... [and] fear free us...."

There are alternatives. Anne Primavesi in From Apocalypse to Genesis (Fortress Press, 1991) and Rosemary Radford Ruether in Gaia and God (Harper & Row 1989), are intelligent exceptions to giving contemporary green apocalyptics a carte blanche to assemble the vocabulary and stage-manage the future history of environmental action. Unfortunately, the theology of God's body, and a working democracy of a world filled with life, appear to be well beyond the horizon at the moment.