I was flipping through H. Paul Santmire’s excellent book Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology, and discovered that he takes Matthew Fox’s (no, not that one) “creation spirituality” to task on many of the same grounds that I criticized J. Philip Newell. Like Newell, Fox embraces a form of nature mysticism, disdains talk of original sin in favor of “original blessing,” and embraces a “Christus exemplar” account of the atonement, wherein the “Cosmic Christ” reveals to each of us that we are already one with the divine.
Santmire has some sharp words for Fox’s view:
His approach resonates all too disquietingly with the anti-urban, romantic individualism of the Thoreauvian tradition. When all is said and done, Fox leaves us in the sweat lodge. His thought is not fundamentally at home in urban America. We can see this deficiency from the vantage point of any inner-city neighborhood. (p. 21)
Santmire goes on to consider, as an example, an inner-city neighborhood called Asylum Hill in Hartford, Connecticut and wonders what Foxian creation spirituality would have to say to a welfare mother, a pregnant teenage girl, or an unemployed veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
The message of Fox may speak to an elite, largely affluent few. What does it have to say to the impoverished urban masses around the globe, who must struggle every day for their sustenance, often against overwhelming odds? What does it say to a global society that is increasingly urban, for better or for worse? (p. 21)
He points out that the vast majority of people in the world are well aware of the reality of radical evil–a reality that Fox downplays; what they need is a message of hope and liberation. And the “Christian masses” throughout the ages have been quite aware of their own bondage to sin and evil, which is the experiential ground of the power of other atonement images: the Christus victor and Christus victim motifs. Christ the victor defeats the powers of darkness and death; Christ the victim reconciles us to God:
…the faithful in the Asylum Hills of this world are all too aware of their own mortality and their own sinfulness to make any sense at all out of the claim that they themselves, not just the Christ of their salvation, are somehow divine. They do not want to be told that they are divine. They do want to hear that they have been delivered and that they have been forgiven, so that they can then engage in the struggles for justice in this world, liberated from hopelessness and freed from the burdens of their own alienation. (p. 23)
Santmire agrees with Fox that “Cosmic Christology must be an urgent theme for contemporary theology” (p. 23), but “creation spirituality” glosses over the profoundly ambiguous nature of the created world and fails to do justice to Christian eschatological hope. The vision of the Bible is not a protological one, calling for the return to some primeval paradisical state, but an eschatological one, looking toward a future consummation and redemption:
Original blessing is not the ending, but the beginning for the Bible. Eschatology as a yet-to-be-fully realized dawning of a New Heaven and a New Earth, in the midst of which the New Jerusalem is to be situated–this is the driving biblical vision. But there is always what Ernst Käsemann called the “eschatological reservation,” the witness to the “crucified God” (Jurgen Moltmann), as the sign of “God with us” in our struggle to hope and to love in the midst of this oppressed and alienated world God creates and blesses as good. (p. 24)
In a neat turnabout, Santmire argues that it’s actually the often-demonized Augustine who can provide some resources for an adequate theology of nature and creation. The mature Augustine, he maintains, abandoned his Manichean roots and attendant distrust of the material world, and situated his narrative of fall and redemption within the context of a story of an unfolding and yet-to-be-consummated creation. For Augustine, creation is good and overflowing with blessings from its Creator, and yet the cosmos waits for its fulfillment in the end times. Within this process, human beings act out the drama of alienation from and reconciliation with God, the latter achieved by the incarnate Son. Augustine provides resources for a theology that does more justice to the goodness and ambiguity of both creation and humanity than Fox’s creation spirituality or the popularizers of an idealized Celtic spirituality.
Also, be sure to check out Marvin’s posts on the topic of Celtic Christianity and Pelagianism (this one and an older one here.)
A Thinking Reed 