A place where we all stand together: The new creation story as opportunity and imperative for interreligious dialogue

‘The Journey of Doing Christian Ecotheology’ exercise explored in-depth and extensively where the journey of Christian ecotheology originated, where it is going, what its sources are and who the (co-)travellers are. I would like to contribute to this project by endeavouring to place it within the broadest ambits of an interreligious response to the ecological crisis and of an interreligious resonance with the cosmos.

A global responsibility for the earth community and a global ethics of care for humanity and the earth may indeed form the basis – or the common ground – for interreligious dialogue, as argued by Hans Küng. ¹ At the same time, Paul Knitter ² argues that a contemporary insight into and response to the wonder of the cosmos strengthens not only the common ground but also the common story that religions (may) share. A number of contemporary scientists, philosophers and theologians are suggesting that a new scientific understanding of the evolution of the earth and the universe to what it is now, and also what it will become, is not only providing us with a context for experiencing the divine in a vast arrays of ways. It is also providing a common story by which we can better understand our religious traditions, link them and give them some unified shape. All these thinkers are seeking to understand religious phenomena in relation to scientific and ecological phenomena. Knitter refers to theologians and scientists such as Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, ³ Sallie McFague, ⁴ Charlene Spretnak, ⁵ Anne Primavesi, ⁶ Larry Rasmussen, ⁷ Fritjof Capra ⁸ and others. Science, in what it tells us about how the universe originated and how it works, may provide all religions with a common creation myth. What Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme call the universe story can function as a transcultural religious story. This led a group of fifty representatives from a variety of religious traditions to the development of ‘An Earth Charter’. It was jointly prepared by the International Coordinating Committee on Religion and the Earth for the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, June 1992. The Charter declared: ‘For the first time in our history, we have empirical evidence for a common creation story.’ ⁹

In drawing on the findings of science, some theologians are not seeking to resolve the religion versus science debate or to ‘prove’ the existence of the divine. Rather they are suggesting that if religious persons from all religions will carefully listen to what is generally agreed upon among contemporary scientists (biologists, astrophysicists, cosmologists), they will find a creation story that enlightens, clarifies, expands, reforms and transforms their own religious stories of what the world is and how we live within it.

It is here that the well-known work of Thomas Berry, which also informed ‘The Journey of Doing Christian Ecotheology’, needs to be recognized for the challenge that it poses to Christianity and all the major religious traditions of the world to reorientate and to transform thenselves. ¹⁰ Berry criticizes the narrowness of Christian interpretations of its own texts and contexts, of the revelation of the Divine and its intellectual and spiritual resources. Moreover, he found that the world’s religions, as they relate to their contexts and as they function spiritually, intellectually and ethically, were not sufficiently dealing with the ecological crisis. Neither did they sufficiently grasp the grandeur and the spiritual-material significance of the natural world. Berry believed that ‘the human depends on the natural world, for it is the wonder and majesty of the universe that evokes the sense of the divine origin and sacred character of the universe’. ¹¹ Written scriptures in religious traditions limit the perception and understanding of the divine. ‘Scriptures can never replace our need for a natural world that we will esteem, by immediate experience, as the manifestation of the ultimate mysteries of existence itself. If the Earth is only a background or a collection of resources for the human, then the devastation presently taking place will continue.’ ¹² For the human race to move into an ecozoic era – an era in which humanity is consciously part of the biophysical environment – and not to destroy ourselves and the earth, we need to experience the revelation of the sacred through the evolution of the earth and the cosmos. Future generations need to awaken to the sacred within this process, and to be religious within this unfolding story.

Berry hereby challenges Christianity and most other religions to ‘turn inside out’, to turn out of their narrow self-understanding, and to reinterpret and literally to reposition themselves within the ever-expanding and changing context of the earth and the cosmos. This means that Christianity and other religions also need to reorientate themselves towards each other, so as to take joint responsibility for the suffering of human and other-than-human beings and for the humanly induced crisis which the earth faces. It is in ‘solidarity with the suffering’ that people from diverse religions and cultures may start to agree on truth, morality and joint action. ¹³

Here, the experience of revelation – a shared and meaningful experience of the sacred through the common story of ecology – which people of many religions may share when they are confronted with the wonders of the universe also becomes the basis or the common ground for a shared ethical and moral imperative. This is a commitment to the well-being of ecosystems and of humanity in the face of injustices and destruction – or, to use Paul Knitter’s words, ‘eco-human well-being’ ¹⁴ – in the face of wide-spread suffering, injustice and destruction.

Despite the prevalence of religious fundamentalism and antagonism between religions, there is today a growing awareness among diverse religious persons and groups that their (expanded) religious identity must somehow relate ethically and morally to the suffering of those that are the most vulnerable – human and other-than-human beings – and to the ecological crisis. What might be called a global ecological awareness is colouring and renewing the religious awareness of people across religious and national boundaries. ¹⁵ In this sense, the challenge that thinkers such as Thomas Berry posed to world religions did not go by unheeded. Projects such as the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology (fore.research.yale.edu) attest to this. In my view, projects such as ‘Christian Faith and the Earth’ and ‘The Journey of Christian Ecotheology’ stands on their own as a reinterpretation of the Christian tradition and Christian theology in the light of the ecological crisis. At the same time, it strengthens a larger, interreligious search for the reformation and transformation of religions in an ecological age. These efforts function to serve a diversified yet united ecological world-view from which a new global ecological ethics and practice may arise.