John Heron Project

Anne Primavesi is a feminist/ecological/radical theologian. On 23rd February this year, she presented a talk to the SCM conference. I’ve been transcribing it so that I can put bits in Movement. It was a really long talk, and very little of it is making into the magazine. But these, I thought, seem appropriate for Easter, where we remember violence and dispossession, and the act of making something good come out of the worst of things.

Very few of the people who really need to read these three excerpts will read them; those who do will not take them seriously. But then, that’s the way with all this stuff. You only preach to the converted on the internet.

Anne Primavesi
(1):

And our place in the edifice of creation has been relatively benign. We have fitted in relatively well, but now something has changed. We are now almost seven billion, the largest number of our species ever to inhabit the planet, and the impact of our living here is now part of the given-ness of our lives today. What we are calling climate change is this interaction in this process, a single process between living beings and the environment, globally. We have all the science to hand, and in fact we’re being treated as though this were purely a scientific problem, or instead as if it were an economic problem. Well, it’s an economic problem because it’s a problem for us, and science is finding some of the answers, but science contributed some of the problem.

And we cannot deal with this with the same kind of thinking that caused it in the first place. And here’s where religion, the social sciences, the humanities, the arts are failing. Our relationships – above all, our relationships – are part of the problem and must be taken into account, must be examined, until we find out what kind of input those relationships are making into what we are calling climate change. And the part I want to focus on today is summed up very neatly by an American, Kollmeyer, who says: the inconvenient truth of the troubling realities of climate change ought to alert theologians to the inconvenient truth that certain readings of sacred texts, and traditional images based on them, have both provided and sanctioned images of God that have in turn sanctioned the violence of Christians, violence against what we call the environment.

And the acknowledgement of an unwillingness to confront this fully is related to fears that doing so would undermine the authority of scripture and cause profound challenges to basic traditions. Violent images of God and violent expectations of history permeate Christian worship, theology, liturgy and song, and we deny the fact that the problems of religion and violence are all too often rooted in the violent context of the sacred texts themselves. And these problems emerge not only in relationships between Christians, Muslims and Jews or – take your pick – between Christians and Christians, but between us and all living creatures. For both failures are reflected back to us in the inconvenient truth of an unchanging, violent, punitive image of God. And it is not popular to respond creatively to a world torn apart by injustice, engulfed in this spiral of violence. So we must look at how to counter the violence of traditions that are at the heart of our sacred texts. And the problem, really, is that these images emerge out of what one could call a reasonable reading of those texts.

(2).

The truth is that our theological climate does not sustain life in the way that the Earth itself offers us, because we are consumed by the desire to possess. To possess, to have power over, to hold onto and all these other aspects that are taken for granted within our modern economy. Homo Capitalisticus. It’s the power that possessions give that we are really trying to acquire. It’s this that we shove on to God and have done so. So against that we have this process within Gaia where death gives life and life gives death and through those give-aways, beginning with the Cambrian explosion of plants, without which we would not be here today, and so on, somehow we have to change the view we have of ourselves. And this is what I mean. It sounds almost inconsequential to say we are now understanding Earth’s history and our place in it. It isn’t that the whole four, five, six billion years went on so that we could consume more and more, grow more and more, acquire more and more possessions, and yet we behave as though that were the case.

So what can we, give thanks for today? Images that would generate compassion, goodwill, generosity of mind and spirit. The connection between a non-possessive, non-violent creator god and the nakedness and powerlessness implicit in Paul’s image of the weakness of God in 1 Corinthians 1:25. And central in the Pauline messages is God’s choice of the things that are not, all those have-nots and are-nots of today. And then he says isn’t it revealed to us that God’s choice of these, that none of these are wanted by the rulers of the world – on the contrary – but by the spirit. So that we might understand the gifts bestowed on them by God. And a particular gift revealed to us in this image of a weak, naked, dispossessed God is crucial in building a theological climate that will enable us to deal positively with climate change. It offers us a choice between the naked powerlessness of God in Jesus and the firmly entrenched image of imperial Christianity, that of God cloaked in sovereign power, and almighty LORD under which every terrestrial authority is supposedly modelled. But is it not in fact the other way around? Have we not modelled God on images of imperial power?

(3).

I’ve chosen one of the sayings of Jesus that we don’t know how to handle. That shows us that the Jesus of history is really not an imperial, militant, apocalyptic figure, looking after an elect few, and indeed, these sayings stand as a record of a conspicuous moral failure. To handle what we do know Jesus said: “love your enemies and pray for those persecuting you, so that you may become children of your father, because he causes the sun to rise on the bad and the good, and rains fall on the just and the unjust. If you love those who love you, why should you be commended for that? Even the toll-collectors do as much, and if you greet only your friends, what have you done that is exceptional? Even the pagans do that. You are to be as unstinting in your generosity as your heavenly father’s generosity is unstinting.”

That is referenced in so many places. But to the extent that we can recover Jesus’ sayings, this is at the heart. And scholars have ranked this command third-highest among those sayings that almost certainly originated with Jesus. The injunction to love enemies cuts against the social grain and constitutes a paradoxical truth that those who love their enemies have no enemies.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 2:56 am and is filed under Faith, Quotations, TTDMMATBAC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.