Archives For Theology, Reluctantly

Understanding the Pigs and Demons Story Through the Book of Job

Nathan Aaberg —  June 9, 2024 — Leave a comment

Print by Jan Luyken of Amsterdam in 1712. Entitled: “Christus in het land van de Gadarenen.” 

I’ve written before (here and here) about the story of the pigs, demons, and Jesus that is told in Matthew 8:28-34 and Luke 8:26-37.

If there is a story that seems to suggest that Jesus thinks little of animals and even Creation itself, this is it. And this is how most interpreters over the centuries, like St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, have understood it. They have asserted that this story tells us pigs are disposable beings, whose fate is not worth one iota of concern. We literally have license to kill.

When you come to this story with a mindset already formed by theologies dismissive of Creation, you will very likely come to those same conclusions. This is the story in general of how Christian theologians have assessed Creation’s significance in the whole Bible. Human-centric interpretations have built on earlier human-centric interpretations until readers’ minds and hearts can no longer actually directly experience what they encounter in Scripture nor in Creation.

I will admit that I first examined the story some years back with some trepidation. The story really did seem to suggest that the pigs did not matter to God.

But as I considered the actual data presented in the story, I found another possibility for how to read the story. This possibility – that the pigs actually resisted the demons and sacrificed their lives to eliminate the demons – is quite different from how the story is normally read. But in many ways I believe this reading actually fits the story and the context of Jesus’ life better than more traditional readings.

I am coming back to the story because there is a dimension to it that I didn’t address previously. That dimension is the connection of the story with the book of Job.

A number of other writers and theologians have pointed out the parallels. Specifically, in both Job and the New Testament story, supernatural forces of evil ask for permission from God to afflict a being part of Creation. In the case of Job, Satan asks permission to afflict Job to see if he will be righteous even if everything is taken away from him. In the case of the New Testament story, the demons (“Legion”) beg permission to enter into the nearby herd of pigs.

Is this parallel an accident? Not likely. As the following graphic details, the Bible is brimming with cross-references.

Visual graphic of cross references between books of the bible - with horizontal access depicting all 66 books and colored arcs connecting between cross references

This is a graphic of the 63,779 cross references in the Bible. It was created by Chris Harrison, the Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University and can be found here.  Here’s how Harrison explains the chart: “The bar chart that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible, starting with Genesis 1 on the left. Books alternate in color between light and dark gray, with the first book of the Old and New Testaments in white. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in that chapter (for instance, the longest bar is the longest chapter in the Bible, Psalm 119). Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible are depicted by a single arc – the color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect.”

Just one example of a meaningful cross reference is when Jesus says, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” while on the cross. This is the first phrase of Psalm 22. This poem initially conveys the experience of being surrounded by those hate you and feeling an overwhelming sense of abandonment. The way this psalm describes the details of that abandonment is eerily parallel to the details of Jesus’ crucifixion. This further roots Jesus and his mission in what was the Scripture of that time. Then, in a dramatic turn, the psalmist voices hope in God’s rescue and asserts that all the families of the nations shall someday worship before God. Jesus’ reference to the psalm creates deeper resonance for the pain he is suffering while also conveying his faith and certainty in an eventual triumph of God’s love. All of this, in a concise way, adds dimensional depth and meaning to that moment.

Similarly, the parallel in the pigs and demon story with the book of Job should prompt us to look for common themes in both stories. In fact, this thematic hyperlink should actually serve as a filter for correct understanding of the story. An interpretation of the pigs and demons story that is in discord with the story of Job must be missing the boat.

There are three elements I see in the book of Job that have significance for the story of the pigs, demons, and Jesus. I detail those below and then weave those elements together with my interpretation of the pigs and demons story.

 

Insight #1: Creation as Revelation and Delight of God (Job 38-41)

The most dramatic point in the book of Job is when God answers Job’s calls for God to present himself. But instead of arguing with Job about his situation and why Job is suffering, God proceeds to respond with some of the most vivid, expansive Creation poetry ever heard. Here is just a sample from Job 38: 39-41:

Can you hunt the prey for the lion,
Or satisfy the appetite of the young lions,
When they crouch in their dens
Or lie in wait in their thicket?
Who provides for the raven its prey,
When its youngest ones cry to God for help,
And wander about for lack of food?

The book of Job asserts that by paying attention to the vast scale, complexity, beauty, and pure teemingness of life on earth and in the sea one somehow gets a sense of God and God’s transcendence. In short, Creation in its full scope is a revelation of God’s power, majesty, creativity, and mystery. If one reads this and other books of the Bible, it is clear that God is not just aware of this vibrant world but is somehow sustaining of it. A verse I find especially beautiful is Psalm 145:16 –  “You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing.”

The implication is clear. For consistency with the Job-like situation, we cannot read the story of the demons and the pigs as a narrative that dismisses any part of Creation as outside of God’s concern and blessedness. In fact, I would argue this is where the demons make their fatal mistake. They may have assumed the pigs would not have their own volition and readiness to act for God’s purposes.

 

Insight #2: Creation Teaches Us (Job 12:7-10)

When I interviewed John Kempf and asked him what his favorite Bible verses were, he brought my attention to Job 12:7-10:

But ask the beasts, and they will teach you;
the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you;
or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every living thing
and the breath of all mankind.

Interestingly, the first two verses actually foreshadow how God will respond to Job later in the story. This is ironic, because these are Job’s own words to his friends. He is telling his friends to look at Creation to be better grounded in their understanding of God. Job’s words suggest that by having the humility to listen to and to be taught by Creation, we will gain wisdom about God.

How many of us really read these words? Are we really ready to allow our hearts and minds to be impacted? We are used to dictating to Creation what we need and what we will take. Our natural human instinct is to consider ourselves the crown of Creation. What can “dumb” nature teach us, we who are “superior” beings?

And what we learn in Job 12:9-10 is the humbling realization that humanity and the rest of Creation share a common identity. We all exist by the creative power and sustaining grace of God. We do not have ultimate power over ourselves.

The appropriate response to this insight is profound humility before God and a sense of existential kinship with the rest of Creation.

As we consider the story of the pigs and the demons, we must bring humble openness to learning from Creation.

 

Insight #3: Job’s Righteousness Revealed in Selfless Act (Job 42:7-10)

Reread the last chapter of Job. In our abbreviated memory of the story, we make a beeline from Job’s submission in the face of God’s overwhelming grandeur and hidden purposes to Job’s renewal and restoration.

That misses a crucial section of the story.

In the end, Job is called upon, despite having suffered in so many ways, to pray for Eliphaz and the other two friends who had made Job’s suffering worse. Those friends and  the theologies they applied to Job’s situation had not correctly discerned what was happening to Job nor why. Their mistakes and the harm those mistakes caused to Job needed some kind of atonement. Job is called upon to pray to God to forgive those three friends.

And even here we must read carefully. Job agrees to pray for his friends without knowing whether his fortunes will be restored.

Think of that. It is Job who has suffered from what God has allowed Satan to do to him. Not only that, his friends’ arguments compounded the suffering he was already experiencing.  He is still, presumably, suffering from the physical afflictions Satan unleashed on him. God has just overwhelmed him and reprimanded him. And Job is asked to act for others with no promise of his own life condition being changed.

And what does Job do? He prays for his friends.

He likely does so out of compassion. He probably does so, too, because he hears from his friends that God had dictated that Job’s prayers were necessary.

And God accepts his prayers. We can assume, I believe, that the prayer is accepted because Job has a new level of humility and faithfulness to God.

The importance of this act of praying is emphasized in Job 42:8-10 by four references to Job’s prayer.

“Now therefore take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and offer up a burnt offering for yourselves. And my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly. For you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. So Eliphiz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite went and did what the Lord has told them, and the Lord accepted Job’s prayer. And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job, when he had prayed for his friends. And the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.”

Again, Job does not know that his fortunes will be restored when he decides to pray and acts on that decision. Only after he prays does God restore Job’s fortunes.

That act of selfless prayer resolves Satan’s challenge that had launched the whole drama. Job, Satan asserts, would not stay righteous even when he has almost everything taken away. In other words, the moment when God’s grandeur overwhelms Job is not the resolution of the story question. Job’s willingness to act for his friends and for God’s purposes is the resolution.

Job’s demonstrates his resilient righteousness by the selfless compassion and obedience that God is calling upon to him to have.

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Looking Again at the Story of the Demons and Pigs

There are multiple ways in which the thematic hyperlink in the demons and pigs story to the book of Job helps us better understand the underlying meaning of the New Testament story.

Let’s start at the highest and most obvious level – the fact that the demon legion must beg permission of Jesus parallels the situation in Job where Satan needs to ask permission before he can do anything to Job. This establishes Jesus as possessing the power and position of God.

Let’s go to the next level – the drama in each of the two stories.

In Job, the wandering Satan wants permission to torment Job to discredit God by asserting that Job only is righteous because he has been richly blessed by God. This gives Job’s situation cosmic stakes. If Job will stray from righteousness, then Satan will not just have damaged Job but will have proven that God failed when he created humanity. Why? Because God’s hope of having right relationship with humanity out of humanity’s free devotion to God, even when devotion to God is not accompanied by material comfort, had failed.

In the New Testament story, the demons desperately seek to continue to exist in this world by being allowed to move into a herd of pigs. There are cosmic stakes here, too. One is whether Creation, in the form of the pigs, can be twisted and perverted away from its goodness, the goodness that God endowed it with. Another is whether Jesus will allow the demons to continue to be a threat in the region. Will Jesus allow evil to persist?

So, as we read this story and specifically this element of testing, we should read the story like we read the story of Job for the first time. As we wondered if Job’s faith will falter, we must also wonder if the pigs, as surprising representatives of sentient Creation, will falter and allow the demon legion to prevail by permitting them to stay in this plane of existence.

(Here it is important to remember, as I asserted in my earlier piece, that the goal of the demons was to continue in existence in this existence. They would have had no reason to want to cause their hosts – the pigs – to die.)

This is where the three insights from Job come to bear.

Creation in all of its grandeur, epic scale, and mystery is a revelation of God. Pigs, despite being considered unclean animals, are in their own way part of that revelation of a boundlessly creative Creator God. Just one distinctive feature of pigs is their intelligence. Another is their sensitive snout which allows them to root about in the soil, which can be either ecologically valuable or highly damaging, depending on the situation.

Joel Salatin has written this challenging and compelling book in his inimitable style about his Christian faith, his farming, and, yes, his pigs. Here is an essay of his that explores briefly some of the themes he more deeply engages with in the book.

Neither the Romans, for whom pigs were an essential part of their culinary culture, nor the Jews saw pigs in the way God sees them. As Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz writes, “Jews associated the pig with the Roman empire, and the pig was the food of the enemy.”

How deeply unsettling and provocative would it be for both Romans and Jews to consider the possibility of pigs defeating a “Legion?”

How you choose to see pigs in the story reflects how you consider God’s earth. If you see pigs as lowly, dirty, expendable creatures, then you will tend to interpret the story in a way that degrades God’s Creation. But that stance towards Creation is in complete contradiction with the book of Job. If you take the book of Job seriously, then your interpretation of the story of the demons and pigs must begin with acknowledging that pigs are distinctive parts of Creation that have God’s attention and have their own desires.

Just as Job’s selflessness and obedience to God’s purposes with no promise of restoration ultimately proved his righteousness, I would assert that the pigs acted out of selfless service to God’s goodness by refusing to allow the demons twist them and use them for their own purposes. The spirit in which the pigs chose to do what they did is in the same chord as Job’s decision to pray for his friends. And their refusal, an act of spiritual struggle, caused them to lose their lives. You could even say the pigs’ decision prefigures Jesus’ own sacrificial death..

And there is precedence in the Bible for animals acting selflessly and having a better understanding of the spiritual realities around them than humans. We see those traits in Balaam’s donkey.

Paying attention to the thematic cross reference of the pigs and demons story to the book of Job should compel us to do three things. First, see the pigs as creatures, like the wild donkeys and ravens of God’s monologue in Job, that God sustains and cares about and who reflect God in some way. Second, we must shake off the theologies that have built up around this story, like a thick layer of barnacles on a ship’s hull, so that we can see the very real possibility that the pigs were ready to sacrifice their lives to be part of the cosmos-level struggle against evil and chaos. Third, we must pray to God for hearts humble enough to learn from the pigs.

If we do those three things, our minds and hearts will be open to the true spiritual significance of the story. And that will have implications for how we live out the joys and responsibilities of taking care of God’s earth.

 

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Another Way of Thinking About Jesus, Pigs, and Demons

Nathan Aaberg —  August 31, 2022 — 2 Comments


 

My post about the Bible story involving the pigs, demons, amd Jesus has somehow ended up being the most popular article I have written.

This popularity, along with the the diversity of comments, tells me two things. First, this story from an ancient time and from three of the gospels is still profoundly provocative. In it, Jesus shows powers and a beyond-human presence. He is no mere wise man. Demons, which for 21st century readers raise all kinds of questions, also appear.

And there are the pigs.

Interestingly, we don’t see Jesus interacting with animals very much in the Gospels (although the story from Mark 1:12-13 is very significant), and even here he does not directly do so. We want to ask Jesus, “Do animals matter to you?” I want to ask him, “As someone from a Jewish agrarian society, what did you think when you saw the pigs?”

We have complicated perceptions of pigs, too. In Charlotte’s Web, we sympathize with a gentle, intelligent animal. Yet, we also associate pigs with many negative attributes. We don’t want to be called a pig.

In the story, the massive herd of pigs die suddenly and violently. Their death is clearly connected with the demons being allowed to go into them. But here it’s not clear from the story whether the pigs are passive creatures who are only acted upon in the story or whether they have volition of their own.

Even more strangely, as I have already written, we know pigs can swim. So how could they drown?

And this is where Biblical storytelling creates mystery as well. The story gives us discrete data points. It doesn’t give us a clear statement that explains how those data points fit together. It is up to the reader of the story to discern what that interpretive thread should be.

The second conclusion I gather from the interest in what I have written is that people are not convinced by the standard theological explanations of the story. Despite what many theologians and pastors have said, people with common sense and a heart for God’s Creation have a hard time accepting that Jesus would care nothing about the pigs.

All of this has made me even more curious about alternative readings of the story.

So when I came across one such interpretation in the book by Norman Wirzba entitled This Sacred Life, I wanted to share it with you.

 

Norman Wirzba is, by the way, someone I deeply admire. He is the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke University and Senior Fellow at Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. He has also written books like Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land and From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World. And I am just scratching the surface of the attention he gives to Creation in his thinking and writing.

So I was surprised to find myself disagreeing with one key element of his interpretation.

Let’s have you judge for yourself. Wirzba’s interpretation appears in a footnote that is just one large paragraph on page 171 of This Sacred Life. I’m sharing it below and have taken the liberty of dividing it into paragraphs for easier digestion:

“Readers of this story are often puzzled and dismayed that Jesus allows the demons (at their own request) to enter a large herd of swine that numbered around 2,000. Upon entering the swine, the whole herd ran down a steep bank and into the sea (or lake) where they drowned.

Why did Jesus allow this? Does Jesus really hate pigs? It is, of course, difficult to know exactly what Jesus was thinking at this moment, but one plausible interpretation would suggest that the death of the herd was Jesus’ indictment of intensive and abusive forms of ancient Roman agriculture practiced on latifundia in the provinces and around the Mediterranean that were known to degrade the land, creatures, and farm workers (many of whom were slaves). To raise a herd that size, the best that a pig can do is register as a “unit of production” (to borrow a term from today’s industrial agriculture).

It is important to note that Jesus did not send the demons into the pigs. The demons asked to be located there, sensing (perhaps) in the pigs’ abusive condition a place where their violent, demonic ways would be at home. If this interpretation is correct, then this story expands the scope of Jesus’s concern for the integrity and value of creaturely life beyond the man to include the pigs as well. Jesus, in other words, seeks to undo the powers that degrade people and pigs.”

There is much in Wirzba’s book that has enriched my understanding of the connection between God, humanity, and the rest of Creation. In particular, he highlights our “creatureliness.” We, like the rest of Creation, have been created. We are created kin. And the life we and all other creatures enjoy is sustained by God. Life, in other words, truly is a gift that we share in common with the rest of Creation.

It is out of that view of Creation that Wirzba’s theory comes.

I’m completely in alignment with that frame of thinking. I do believe that Jesus’ ultimate mission and purpose is to undo and defeat the evil in the world that degrades people and other living things. Jesus redeems people in part so they can be the stewards and humble shepherds of Creation they were meant to be.

Yet, I ultimately disagree with this interpretation of this specific story. Essentially, his interpretation asserts that by permitting the destruction of the pigs by demons Jesus was indicting the inhumane treatment of the pigs within the Roman latifundia system.

That, to borrow a phrase from the Vietnam war, is like bombing a village to save it.

Wirzba’s thinking seems to be based on the assumption that the size of the pig herd was unusually large and abusive. In fact, from what I can tell, large flocks and herds were not unusual in ancient times. As this blog post from the website The Theology of Work reminds us, Jacob made a gift of at least 550 animals to Esau in advance of them meeting again after many years of being apart (Genesis 32:13-15). From the fact that in the story the pigs did not appear to be fenced in, the pigs very likely had the ability to move about and enjoy fresh air and sunlight. This is completely unlike factory farms today.

Nor are large numbers of animals on a landscape inherently damaging to the land. An example of this is White Oak Pastures in rural Georgia, a farm run by Will Harris. View this video to get a sense of the scale of the thoughtful stewardship going on.

 

I don’t mean to be critical of Wirzba’s concerns and sensitivity to the pigs in the story at all. We have a tendency to bring our current concerns with us when we venture into the texts of the Bible. That’s not wrong. It’s entirely human. I’ll admit I do the same thing. But what we need to do is ask hard questions. Are, for example, the ancient texts and contexts of the Bible addressing those concerns in the ways we are thinking about them?

In this regard and in connection with this particular story, I have much more of a problem with the cultural blndness of Saint Augustine of Hippo than I do with Wirzba’s suggestion.

Here is a quotation I’ve found attributed to Saint Augustine in several places on the Internet (yes, I know i need to get a more specific notation) in regard to this story:

Christ himself shows that to refrain from the killing of animals and the destroying of plants is the height of superstition, for judging that there are no common rights between us and the beasts and trees, he sent the devils into a herd of swine and with a curse withered the tree on which he found no fruit.

The lack of nuance in this statement is breathtaking. The cruel callousness towards the life of God’s world is stunning.

A key nuance that Saint Augustine missed and that Norman Wirzba and others have noticed is that the demons asked to be allowed to go into the pigs. They were not driven there. How could Saint Augustine make the argument he did? I’m convinced that the forces of culture around him prejudiced his judgement against what is actually in the 66 books of the Bible and what open hearts can tell us.

This brings us back to a central theme of my past years of study and writing. Christians have demonstrated a lack of discernment in reading the whole Bible in relation to Creation for centuries now. We have also had a weak, shallow, narrow idea of what we are redeemed by Jesus for and for what role humanity was originally created. The result is that we ignore Creation or, even worse, rationalize the grinding of Creation under our heels.

This, I’m coming to believe, is why the interpretation of this puzzling, provocative story matters so much.

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Salvation is Bigger Than You and Me

Nathan Aaberg —  May 3, 2021 — Leave a comment

There was much that surprised me in N.T. Wright’s book Surprised by Hope.

In the book, the New Testament Scholar and Anglican bishop explains what, in his view, the ultimate future of life will be from a Christian understanding. This includes what our futures will be after we each die. It also includes what God’s ultimate intentions are for this world. And, counterintuitively, he details what response that understanding should prompt in us in our daily lives and in our churches.

I was surprised by, among other things, how strong of a case Wright made for a literal bodily resurrection as our future destiny. This comes from Wright close reading of the Bible. Here, as in other cases, he finds threads that are both conservative and radical at the same time.

But nothing surprised me more than several paragraphs at the end of the chapter that concludes Part II (“Future Plan”). In these paragraphs, Wright forcefully questions our traditional understanding of what salvation is all about.

These paragraphs are so significant that I have shared them below and urge you to read them.

But the most important thing to say at the end of this discussion, and of this section of the book, is that heaven and hell are not, so to speak, what the whole game is about. This is one of the central surprises in the Christian hope. The whole point of my argument so far is that the question of what happens to me after death is not the major, central, framing questions that centuries of theological traditions have supposed. The New Testament, true to its Old Testament roots, regularly insists that the major, central, framing question is that of God’s purpose of rescue and recreation for the whole world, the entire cosmos. The destiny of individual human beings must be understood within that context – not simply in the sense that we are only part of a much larger picture but also in the sense that part of the whole point of being saved in the present is so that we can play a vital role (Paul speaks of this role in the shocking terms of being “fellow workers with God”) within that larger picture and purpose.

The paragraph does not actually end here but, in my humble opinion, it should have. So I encourage you to read that first section again before going on to the second half of the paragraph below.

And that in turn makes us realize that the question of our own destiny, in terms of the alterantives of joy or woe, is probably the wrong way of looking at the whole question. The question ought to be, How will God’s new creation come? and then, How will we humans contribute to that renewal of creation and to the fresh projects that the creator God will launch in his new world? The choice before humans would then be framed differently: are you going to worship the creator God and discover whereby what it means to become fully and gloriously human, reflecting his powerful, healing, transformative love into the world? Or are you going to worship the world as it is, boosting your corruptible humanness by gaining power or pleasure from forces within the world but merely contributing thereby to your own dehumanization and the further corruption of the world?

Below you will find most of the next paragraph. I end my quoting of the paragraph at a natural stopping point.

This reflection leads to a further, and sobering, thought. If what I have suggested is anywhere near the mark, then to insist on heaven and hell as the ultimate question – to insist, in other words, that what happens eventually to individual humans is the most important thing in the world – may be to make a mistake similar to the one made by Jewish people in the first century, the mistake that both Jesus and Paul addressed. Israel believed (so Paul tells us, and he should know) that the purposes of the creator God all came down to this question: how is God going to rescure Israel? What the gospel of Jesus revealed, however, was that the purposes of God were reaching out to a different question: how is God going to rescue the world through Israel and thereby rescue Israel itself as part of the process but not as the point of it all? Maybe what we are faced with in our own day is a similar challenge: to focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all. 

There is so much power in how we frame things.

If the point of Christianity is understood to be the preservation of our individual souls in a heaven that is beyond a earth that is just a temporary place that does not matter to God, then it’s not surprising that Christians ignore or even willingly deplete God’s earth.

But what if the point is, as Wright expressed it above, to be part of God’s desire and purpose to bring everythig God made into peace and harmony?

How different our treatment of God’s earth would be. How different our evangelism would be.

This also puts human exceptionalism into its proper perspective. As I wrote here, “The point of the God-given exceptional role (of humans) is serving God’s purposes.”

We are uniquely gifted in order to uniquely serve.

I find Wright’s framing to ring true in a compelling way.

How about you?

 

I consistently find N.T. Wright’s insights to be both affirming of the coherence of the Bible itself in ways that inspire me and challenging to the ways so many Christians have come to understand God and Jesus. I highly recommend that you read his books and listen to lectures by him. 

 

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The Ecology of Whole Theology

Nathan Aaberg —  September 1, 2020 — Leave a comment

I’ve noted before that some of the most innovative, regenerative farmers and agriculturalists in the world are Christian.

Joel Salatin. Gabe Brown. Allen Williams. Ray Archuelata. John Kempf. The list goes on. It’s incredibly inspiring to see people of faith who are dynamic, inventive, entrepreneurial, generous, and full of passion for the beauty and complexity of God’s earth.

So why are they the exception?

I’ve decided there are three primary commonalities that lead Christians to live out faith-lives that include God’s earth as something that matters to God.

First, the theology people have includes the life of God’s earth in its story and fabric.

Second, people are committed to applying their faith principles to how they live individually or collectively in every single way.

The culture around us often makes it more comfortable for us to apply some values and to let other values gather dust in the “Sounds Good in Theory” room. We don’t differentiate enough between the values of the culture we’re in and the set of values that come from our faith.

Third, people’s hearts have been transformed by God’s Spirit.

This can be through the impact of other people, prayer, direct spiritual encounters, and encounters with Creation. However it happens, people’s hearts are filled and reshaped by God’s love.

The second and third factors tend derive in part from the first – theology.

I’ve highlighted (as have others) elements of the Bible narrative (like the first rule God gave, the cross, and what eschatology is all about) that clearly highlight that God’s earth is part of the whole story of God’s whole relationship with all God has created.

So why don’t more Christian theologies make God’s earth more than just a setting, more than just a treasure chest of resources for us to use, and more than just a setting from which to escape?

I believe it’s because we have failed to be ecological in the theological.

And we can actually learn something about reading the Bible from ecology, the study of the relationship between the parts of a whole and how the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts.

A great example in the natural world is fire. For a long time conservation orthodoxy taught that fires are bad. That was a simple, compelling message.

The reality is far more complex. Many ecosystems have been managed in highly nuanced ways by native peoples for centuries or more, creating vibrant, beautiful natural systems. Stopping fires out of a simplistic understanding has resulted in huge fuel loads that now erupt into horrible fires. Stopping fires has also harmed the wildlife who depended on fire-dependent vegetation.

What did it take for people to see the ecological truth?

It took humility. Lots of humility.

It also too a willingness to question dominant assumptions about how nature worked and look at things fresh.

It took listening to other people.

It took close observation.

It took attentiveness to the whole over time and space.

And it took an openness to paradox. Could a seemingly destructive force actually be positive?

Our approach to theology, the way we make sense of the Bible and God, needs those same qualities.

Our theology would be more whole and vibrant if we did.

More thoughts to come.

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Reading the Prophets Amid Climate Change

Nathan Aaberg —  February 29, 2020 — Leave a comment

My son and I are continuing our reading journey through the Bible, and we’re now deep into the words of the prophets. They wrote their words more than two millennia ago. Yet, I’m finding they resonate deeply with what we face in climate change today.

The reading, I must admit, is not easy. These are all books replete with repeated, vivid expressions of anger, desperation, grief, judgment. Calamity was going to come, the prophets declared. And then it came in the form of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.

Isn’t climate change, and all that it is bringing, very similar?

Despite many warnings for many decades, climate change is underway. And change is not even the right word. What is happening to the climate of God’s earth change is not at all similar to an oil change or changes to a baseball team’s lineup. What we are really beginning to see unfold is change bringing chaos.

The world, both the people and the earth itself, is already suffering as a result. Much worse is yet to come.

There is a great deal to write about climate chaos and what it means for God’s earth, our lives as Christians, and the future of the Church. But for now, as a way of entering the topic, I want to highlight three points of resonance for me between the prophets and the situation we face today.

The Prophets Were Ignored (and Worse)

The people of their times, as far as I can tell, largely ignored the prophets. Those who didn’t ignore them tended to persecute them. Jeremiah in particular suffered for speaking God’s judgment.

Dominique Antoine Magaud

The book of Jeremiah depicts leaders and officials defying the judgments and warnings God was providing through Jeremiah (depicted in the painting above by Dominique Antoine Magaud) in astoundingly cavalier ways. In chapter 36, for example, we read of King Johiakim calling for Jehudi to get the scroll of Jeremiah’s words and read it to him. Here’s what follows in verses 22 through 24:

The king sent Jehudi to get the scroll, and Jehudi brought it from the room of Elishama the secretary and read it to the king and all the officials standing beside him. It was the ninth month and the king was sitting in the winter apartment, with a fire burning in the firepot in front of him. Whenever Jehudi had read three or four columns of the scroll, the king cut them off with a scribe’s knife and threw them into the firepot, until the entire scroll was burned in the fire. The king and all his attendants who heard all these words showed no fear, nor did they tear their clothes.

Likewise, many people do not want to listen to the prophets of climate change and the chaos it is bringing. Online trolls harass scientists like Dr. Katharine Hayhoe and others. The Trump administration is actively hostile to climate science and to the U.S. government staff who study it and warn about it. The administration and its supporters are, in effect, modern day Johiakims.

What’s even more disturbing is that climate change has become, more than ever, a partisan issue. Republicans, many of whom are Christians, refuse to make common cause with Democrats to address it.

Why the resistance?

The kings and people of Israel, especially the people of power, enjoyed the status quo. They couldn’t imagine having to give things up or admitting they had trespassed against God’s will or had worshipped other gods.

Similarly, we don’t want to give up the many rewards of the way our economy runs today. We don’t want the rules of the game to change. And in the case of climate change, the rules we don’t want to change are, ironically, a lack of rules and restraints. Like the people of Judah, we resent constraints on how we live and do business.

Isaiah highlighted the uselessness of idols in chapter 46:5-7 in a striking way. God asks:

With whom will you compare me or count me equal?

To whom will you liken me that we may be compared?

Some pour out gold from their bags and weigh out silver on the scales;

they hire a goldsmith to make it into a god,

and they bow down and worship it.

They lift it to their shoulders and carry it;

they set it up in its place, and there it stands.

From that spot it cannot move.

Even though someone cries out to it, it cannot answer;

it cannot save them from their troubles.

It occurs to me that the idols that the Judeans worshipped at this time actually, in all probability, had a compellingly tangible appeal. The stone and woods idols were things they could see and touch. There may have even been some artistic flair to them. There was, on the other hand, no tangible representation of the true God in their culture. Worshipping an intangible God and living out a complex set of requirements took persistent faith and commitment that made them, well, weird in the world they lived in. In contrast, the concrete imagery and heft of the idols likely required less faith and were easy on the heart. The idols rewarded the desires of their worshippers.

Likewise, we can see and touch all of the tangible benefits of our current economy and technology. They meet our desires and even create new ones. We have not shown the ability to restrain ourselves from unquestioningly accepting all technologies and systems.

Our desires have become our idols. Resisting our desires out of love and duty to our invisible God is something we don’t want to do. This would require persistent faith, commitment, sacrifice, and tenacity of heart in countercultural ways.

We are, actually, not so different from the people the prophets criticized so harshly.

Face-to-Face with Shattering Realities

I encourage you to read this essay by Leonie Joubert entitled “End-of-life anxiety and finding meaning in a collapsing climate.”

Leonie writes of the similarity between the person who receives the diagnosis of an incurable cancer from their doctor and the person (like herself) who has paid attention to unfolding climate science and recognizes that:

We’ve already dumped so much carbon pollution into the atmosphere that we have a “baked in” temperature increase of 3°C, regardless of whether we shut off all emissions right now or not.

What do you do if you are the person receiving that grim diagnosis of cancer? You may well go for end-of-life therapy, whether that’s through a therapist or through a pastor or other wise person, to process all of the intense feelings that well up.

Where do you go when you come to realize our trajectory is towards ever more dramatic climate change impacts that will bring misery for the people and planet God loves?

Therapists are beginning to realize that they need to know how to respond to people with that recognition and the accompanying despair. But it’s not exactly like helping the person with a cancer diagnosis. Leonie describes how the therapy field is wrestling with these challenges:

How does it respond to people living in an unrepairable situation? Therapy’s function is to heal the individual. How does it respond when the illness is society-wide? It focuses on healing what has happened in the past. What do we do when today’s illness is because of what will unfold in our personal and collective future?

It strikes me that the prophets were also dealing with society-wide illness for which there was both personal and collective responsibility.

This takes me to a fundamental question – why were so many words of the prophets preserved and not, for example, the words of the kings of their times? The prophets were, after all, the ultimate outsider radicals of their time.

I can think of a number of reasons. One was as a warning of God’s anger towards those given a special mission by God who willfully turned away from what that mission required of them.

Another was to forcefully make the point that the natural leanings of human nature – towards comfort and tangible personal and national benefits – are not what God calls us towards. Instead, we need our hearts to be remade by God so that what matters to God matters to us above all else. Even when what God wants forces us to choose the harder path.

Yet another reason was to compel those who read the words to think twice before silencing and persecuting those who question the status quo and see doom at the end of trends unfolding in our time.

Destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonia Army by Jan Luyken. What art will be produced of the results of the chaos coming from climate change?

And I wonder if perhaps the vivid, shattering depictions of prophecies and events were meant to explode our hearts  and to resonate with what we would feel as we encounter ever more grim realities in our time. Some of the most shattering images of impending chaos and destruction can be found in the prophets.

Read, for example, Lamentations’ description of the fall of Jerusalem. Here’s just a taste of it from chapter 2:11-12 (I’ve used The Message’s translation):

My eyes are blind with tears, my stomach in a knot. My insides have turned to jelly over my people’s fate.

Babies and children are fainting all over the place, Call to their mothers, “I’m hungry! I’m thirsty!” then fainting like dying soldiers in the streets, breathing their last in their mothers’ laps.

The prophets are records of deep, collective trauma. Perhaps in some mysterious way they will be therapeutic for the deep, collective trauma that is to come.

Messages of Future Hope

Even Lamentations has words of hope for the future. Isaiah’s words of hope are incredibly beautiful and include God’s earth. The hope is generated not by expectations that people would suddenly become good and just. What generates the hope is the love and commitment of God.

I struggle with this. Is it possible to have hope for future joy and restoration when the world God loves and I love faces destruction?

It is all too easy for Christians to set up camp in the happy place of faith and hope in God. This leads to ignoring of the plight of the oppressed and the continued crushing of the vitality of the life of God’s earth. There is no sense in the Bible that future hope for tomorrow excuses us from acting out of devotion, compassion, and active love today.

Yet, the prophets and the Gospels, without question, also give us hope. We cannot camp out exclusively in the place of despair, hopelessness, and desperate urgency either.

The prophets remind us that our faith and faith-lives rest on paradoxes. They require us to have the ability to hold two different concepts in tension at the same time.

And paradox is where climate change and the prophets leave us.

Are we alarmed and active or are we hopeful? We need to be both.

Consider this scenario. What was the average devout Judean person supposed to do when they heard Isaiah or Jeremiah crying out on the streets and actually believed what the prophet was saying? What would he or she do when they got home? What would they say to their family?

I imagine them recommitting themselves to being devout by following the rules of their at that time. If they had idols, they would have destroyed them. They would have redoubled their focus on worshipping God and praying to God. I imagine them doing so even in the face of ridicule from neighbors worshipping their idols.

Their faithfulness to God would inevitably have made them compassionate to the vulnerable around them. The prophets highlighted vulnerable people, like widows and orphans. I want to believe that they would naturally have treated animals kindly as well.

To the degree that they had influence with their tribes, friends, and neighbors, I believe they would have called on them to follow God in their lives as well.

I imagine the family cherishing the Temple, knowing that it was facing destruction and would be no more. I imagine them cherishing the land they owned and farmed and the larger landscape that God had given their people. They knew they would be taken away from it, assuming they even survived. It would have been even more dear to them.

And I imagine them, paradoxically, preparing their family for chaos and disruption ahead even as they poured into their children the promises of hope that the prophets included in their warnings and promptings. “Do not forget!” they would tell their children. “And do not let your children forget!”

Alertness to the true condition of the world.

Devoutness and prayer.

Mourning.

Cherishing the beauty of what God had given them.

Active preparation for chaos to come.

Urging society, family, and friends to repent and change.

Compassionate actions for the vulnerable.

Deepening of their faith commitment.

Hope for the ultimate future mixed with grief for the immediate future.

This set of responses, seemingly contradictory at times, is what I imagine people of the prophets’ time doing out of conviction and belief.

As a Christian in a time of climate change, these responses make sense to me today as well.

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