Response to “The Blessings of Fossil Fuels” – By Steve Bouma-Prediger
We in the church have not taken the appeal to stewardship seriously.
Mark has written a thought-provoking piece. Let me respond by offering some comments and posing some questions.
First, is Mark correct to say that the appeal to stewardship isn’t working? Perhaps, but I am inclined to think that we have not really taken such an appeal seriously. Over the past 20 years I have taught about creation care in many churches of all different denominations. Almost always when I ask who has heard a sermon on stewardship in the last year, everyone raises their hand. But when I ask if that sermon was about caring for the earth, all hands go down. Most church people still understand stewardship as giving money to the church; they do not think of it in terms of earthkeeping. So to claim that appeals to stewardship aren’t working because of our dismal record of care for the earth is to beg the question about whether people understand stewardship in terms of earth care. In other words, it is not as if we have tried stewardship of the earth and found it wanting; it is, rather, that we have yet to really try it.
Second, I agree with Mark that greater attention to theology would help greatly on this issue. And by that I mean more attention to the theology embedded in what we already sing and pray and confess. For example, what do we sing in the second line of the doxology? What do we pray about God’s will in the Lord’s Prayer? What do we confess in the opening line of the Apostles’ Creed? The answers: praise God ALL CREATURES HERE BELOW. May God’s will be done ON EARTH as it is in heaven. I believe in God THE MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. In other words, a theology of earthkeeping is embedded in much (not all) of our liturgy and practical theology, but we often do not notice it or give it the attention it deserves. So, yes, we need more (sound) theology, but we also need to properly exegete the theology we already have to highlight how it calls us to be caring and responsible earthkeepers of God’s good earth.
The blessings of fossil fuels come at a considerable cost.
Third, I agree that fossil fuels are a gift, and a gift that has made possible in the last two centuries a huge leap forward in material well-being. The material prosperity that we often take for granted in our day has been fueled (literally) by burning the fossil remains of ancient creatures. But this has come at a considerable cost. As Mark acknowledges, we have severely and in some cases permanently damaged our home planet. To use St. Paul’s metaphor, creation is groaning (Romans 8). The litany of ecological woe is all too long. I will not rehearse it here. So, yes, we have gained considerable blessings from fossil fuels, but we also have borne, and will continue to bear for generations, the consequences of this behavior.
Ambiguous blessings
Fourth, Mark champions “the vast increase in sheer knowledge, intellectual sophistication, and technical cleverness that has been achieved in the last two centuries,” presumably made possible in large part by our fossil fuel culture, but I am much less positive about these features of our culture. There is nothing inherently good about sheer knowledge, intellectual sophistication, or technical cleverness. Indeed, such things can be used for great evil, as countless historical examples demonstrate. None of them add up to wisdom, which is what we really need. So I see no compelling reason to celebrate technical cleverness. On the contrary, like David Orr and Wendell Berry, among others, I see many reasons to worry that technical cleverness is undermining our ability to think clearly and make wise decisions in all kinds of places in our culture, from agriculture to politics to religion. Furthermore, faith in technology is a huge impediment to meeting the real needs of the world. Hence I believe the vast increase Mark refers to is ambiguous and not inherently good.
Fifth and finally, I agree with Mark’s closing comment that we do not live by bread alone. We will remain poor and impoverished if we continue to live as if, to quote a bumper sticker I once saw when I lived in Los Angeles, “whoever dies with the most toys wins.” We Christians must certainly be able to see through that claim for what it is: a boldfaced lie. We will remain desperately poor amidst our material wealth if we fail to see this clearly.
So the blessings of fossil fuels, yes, but they are mixed blessings. And whatever blessings they have provided in the past, we must now envision a future in which we move beyond fossil fuels to other forms of energy. Such a response is the only proper way to say thank you to the God who creates and sustains and redeems us and all the rest of our beautiful home planet.
Hello Steve, thanks much for this thoughtful response. As I look at the possible outcomes of next week’s election, I am wondering whether energy policy will make it into the next congressional agenda; and if it does, by some miracle, what advice do you have for people of faith?
Steve, you are absolutely right that the blessing of fossil fuels has been a mixed one, at best, and that good stewardship of them has not yet been REALLY tried! Now that there is a major political party in the US that is basically committed ideologically to resisting the very idea of any need for such stewardship, our own Christian stewardship will have to have a large element of resistance in it.
The theological task, toward which my essay was a very small attempt, is to see how this huge fact can be seen as divine gift rather than as mere found plunder, which is how we humans are mostly treating it. To say that fossil fuels are a divine gift would mean at least two things: we would have to honor them and praise the Giver for them, and we would have to confess that the “mixed” character of the blessing is all ours. We are the ones who are mixed, but not God. God’s gift is great and good; we abuse it by allowing it to putrefy the global environment and also the politics of many places around the globe, including Iran and the United States.
Eventually we have to be able to include these fuels and the momentous changes they have fuelled into a larger narrative of God’s blessings to earth and humanity, our use and abuse of them, and God’s redemption of us and the earth into a still-greater future. If we can’t do that at some point then we’re not up to the real work of theology.