Growing Resurrection

by George Bailey.

Increasingly I am reflecting on how Christian theology connects with environmental ethics. This can be seen a simple ethical responsibility which we are called to act on as human creatures within God’s creation. However, the Easter season strains this environmental logic, with so many hymns and other aspects of Christian culture about a new world to which humans can go after they die. What about this world and this life we are living?

A common answer is realized eschatology; put briefly, the world that God is going to reign over eternally, which will be characterised by justice and peace and an environment in complete balance and harmony, is not a new world, but this current world transformed… and that transformation is beginning now. We can be part of it, and this fuels our environmental ethical actions – we are called to participate in the transformation which God has begun.

This realized eschatology can become ‘over-realized’ in several ways; we could be over-optimistic about the state of this world and relax our efforts in the light of imminent realisation of the vision, or it could be that we overestimate our ability to enact change ourselves, and proceed without God – neither of these possibilities sits well with a Christian theology developed from the good news of the resurrection, but there is a more immediate problem.

The bigger problem faced by realized eschatology at Easter is the simple question of how the risen Jesus fits into any ethics focused on this life. Having been part of the created natural world and subsequently dying, he is then raised to new life, in what is clearly a different way of existing. After appearing to a few people for forty days in ways which emphasise that he is alive but in a new way, he then ‘ascends’ into a way of existing that is separate from the environment in which we live. I find myself expressing this life-beyond-death theology in some contexts, especially around questions of death, resurrection and eternal life, most often in funeral ministry. However, I tend not to talk about this theology whilst pursuing net zero for church buildings and exploring new environmental ethics for Christian discipleship. I want to resist this separation, which at worst becomes a deliberately limited reading of the New Testament that reduces reference to the resurrection to only a source of hope, and instead to hold these two themes together as vital for a more effective and integrated environmental theology. Here are two hints towards this which I am working on at present… both regarding the image of plants growing and dying.

I am privileged to have been able to walk and run through the same stretches of woodland in suburban Leeds for some years now – 12 years for the places I know best, and others for 17 years. I notice trees grow from seeds, become features of the landscape for years, and then fall and die but continue to enhance the ecosystem in new ways, even after disappearing from our view. In the New Testament both the gospel of John and the letters of Paul use the image of a seed ‘dying’ when buried in the ground to lead to new life (John 12:24; 1 Corinthians 15:36ff). However, the life they then describe can seem to be entirely focused on an existence separated from the environment of this planet. In a complex extended discussion, Anthony Thistleton’s commentary on 1 Corinthians 15 argues persuasively that Paul is not simply contrasting life in the way we experience it now with a separate new resurrection life, but is presenting resurrection life as both encompassing life as we know it now, and also going beyond it [his bold italics indicate quotations from his own translation of 1 Cor 15: 42-44]:

‘a resurrection mode of existence characterized by the reversal of decay, splendour, power, and being constituted by (the direction, control and character of) the (Holy) Spirit would be expected not to be reduced in potential from the physical capacities which biblical traditions value, but enhanced above and beyond them in ways that both assimilate and transcend them.’[1]

The resurrection and ascension of Jesus demonstrate that life beyond death both assimilates and transcends the earthly environment. Our environmental ethics and action now can be united with the work of God in us beyond our death.

This leads to the second hint in which I am interested. Other New Testament passages use the image of a plant growing to refer to the way that followers of Christ are called to grow in faith and discipleship; the church is God’s field, planted and watered by humans, but in which God produces the growth (1 Corinthians 3: 6-9), and the people within this field are to be ‘rooted and grounded in love’ (Ephesians 3:17). We readily take these growth images and use them in our talk about faith, but we rarely connect them with the language about the seeds which must die. If we are likes trees growing in Christ, so like trees we will die and interact with the environment in new ways – perhaps our environmental ethics can focus less on growth and more on the reduction of our impact on the world around us as we progress towards death. I am hoping to explore further for ways to connect the theology of resurrection with new environmental ethics in fruitful ways – that is, fruitful both in terms of practical this-worldly results and simultaneously in the eternal perspective of the gospel of Christ’s resurrection.

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[1] Anthony C. Thistleton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text. The New International Greek Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans’s; Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2000. p.1279.