Gary Belovsky <> Eugene Cittadino <> John Haught <> Stuart Pimm <> Elspeth Whitney

Larry Rasmussen

Ecology and Society: The Challenge to and from Christian Ethics
Abstract

     For Christian Ethics the proper subject of justice is not "society." Nor is it "the environment." It is creation as Earth-the more-than-human and human together as the community of life. This means a moral universe inclusive of the socio-communal, biophysical, even the geo-planetary. All these are presently impacted more and more by increasing, cumulative human power.
     The challenge for Christian ethics as posed by ecology and current planetary conditions is two-fold: (1) the revision of underlying assumptions and methods of ethics, and (2) the revision of long-standing traditions of Christian faith and their expression. The former refers to the challenges that ecology poses for what ethics should include and what it requires, how ethics is conceived and what its basic assumptions are. Much of this turns on challenges to the anthropocentrism of most all modern Western ethics, including Christian strains. The latter refers to the need for the varied expressions of Christianity to be consistently Earth-honoring and to judge Christian lives by their contribution to Earth's well-being. Fidelity to God lived as fidelity to the Earth is the guideline and it entails profound changes in much Christian practice, whether that is the practice of mysticism and contemplation, asceticism and sacramentalism, or prophetic and liberative action.
     The challenge posed by Christian ethics, at least in U.S. society, rests in the assumption that there are some things that are not to be determined by the market alone or, for that matter, by scientific knowledge itself, and that the vision of life and the material universe as sacred is one such. This difference of religious and inherent value from purely instrumental value offers a form of discourse that reaches beyond private interest as commonly articulated through economic discourse and institutionalized in the market. It radically challenges the ethos of consumer capitalism and pursues a line of thought that asks hard questions about the relationship of global capitalism to the global environment. At the same time, any religiously-based critique necessarily entails the issue of alternatives and the roles religious perspectives and power might play in helping craft them. ("If you don't like socialism and you don't like global capitalism, what do you want and how do you propose getting it?" is the right question posed to Christian ethics by its own criticism of global materialist culture.)
     In brief, the paper will summarize selected challenges posed to Christian ethics and by Christian ethics, in light of ecological descriptions of what is happening to the planet.