If there were one book, in addition to the Bible, to require of every student of Christian theology, it would be Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. Rosemary Radford Ruether does not provide a complete theological program for human relations to the biosphere, but she does address the alarming crisis of our age with a prophetic vigor and an intellectual rigor reminiscent of Karl Barth's Romans, written for a world bloodied by World War I.
Her task is to help those raised in the Christian tradition to face unflinchingly the need to rescue life on this planet from imminent ecological catastrophe. "Unflinchingly" is the operative word here, not only because the dangers directly ahead of us are difficult to contemplate, but because our faith tradition is deeply implicated in the oppressive values and structures that have now led civilization and its natural environments to the brink of disaster.
Ruether does not ask us to turn away from Christian faith or Western culture. She asks something more difficult: a rigorous reappraisal of biblical foundations, Christian tradition, and contemporary society in the face of looming ecological crisis. And she offers, as a tool to shed light on the task, a matured feminist perspective.
Ruether is not only a prophetic voice, she is also a judgmental thinker with a reputation for not suffering foolish ideas gladly. Writers with such gifts often produce books that abuse rather than edify the reader. That is not so here. Of the many fine attributes of this book, perhaps the most remarkable is the thorough yet careful use of judgment. As she ranges over many fields of inquiry, Ruether's judgments are nuanced, balanced, and illuminating.
Nobody escapes criticism -- not feminists, not environmentalists -- yet the criticisms are clear, fair, and responsive to the thinker's intentions. Against this backdrop of criticism, Ruether's own ideas are chiseled with precision so the reader sees what she says. I disagreed with her in scores of places, yet in most of these she has so improved the terms of dialogue that I will want to refer back to her before I write again.
RUETHER BEGINS WITH a critical analysis of creation stories from Babylon, the Hebrew Bible, and ancient Greece. She shows how Hebrew and Greek stories influenced a Christian theology that, unfortunately, blamed human sin for the inadequacies of "fallen" nature, yet reduced the sense of human responsibility for the welfare of natural life that had once been manifest in Hebrew ethics.
Ruether then evaluates the religious significance of modern cosmology and theories of evolution. Modern religion guards values in isolation from the developing scientific understanding of the world, while modern science manipulates the world while refusing to acknowledge the values that drive its quest. The contemporary environmental crisis is at last forcing science to consider its values and forcing religion to face the facts.
The section on "Destruction" includes a brilliant analysis of Christian apocalyptic theology. "In the early [biblical] apocalypses, resurrection functions as a way to settle the accounts of past unrequited injustice and unrewarded righteousness, not to overcome mortality." Christian apocalyptic teaching, however, became increasingly preoccupied with escape from sin, death, and the world. Often the refuge of groups marginalized within the church, apocalyptic thought has encouraged dualistic analysis that brands outsiders as absolutely evil, sealing the wellsprings of compassion.
Ruether's evaluation of our environmental crisis is distinctive in two respects. First, she shows how populations "out of control" are often the consequence of political exploitation by industrial and colonial powers. Population control depends upon "how women and their bodies are socially and culturally appropriated." To stabilize human numbers, women must be empowered as moral agents.
Second, she indicts modern militarism as "the ultimate polluter of the earth." Thorough demilitarization is essential for "any genuine, ecologically sustainable, biospheric economy." Real security lies in "the acceptance of vulnerability, limits, and interdependency."
The heart of the book is a critical examination of biblical and classical myths of sin and evil, followed by an equally critical appraisal of feminist re-mythologizing of the "fall into patriarchy," concluded by Ruether's own sociological analysis of how interdependent systems of domination over women and the earth have been constructed. At the end of her biblical discussion, Ruether draws a four-page conclusion about sin that I found to be the finest theological statement I have read.
Ruether concludes by proposing that two streams of biblical and Christian reflection, the covenantal tradition and the sacramental tradition, may undergird Christian theologies to heal our relations with the earth. The Hebrew covenant was inclusive of the land and the natural life upon it and, within the covenant, Sabbath reflection developed ethical obligations to non-human creation. Her discussion here moves smoothly to the modern ethical debate among environmentalists and advocates of animal rights.
In proposing a sacramental theology of God's immanent presence in the biosphere, Ruether affirms Christian syncretism. "This role of Christianity as synthesizer of major Hebraic, Oriental, and Greco-Roman thought should be recognized as a strength, rather than a 'secret' to be denied."
"GAIA" IN THE BOOK'S title refers to the Greek goddess of the earth, an image reappropriated by the atmospheric physicist James Lovelock to suggest that the earth is a self-regulating organism, in some sense alive. This image has also been appropriated by some modern feminists to suggest the divinity of the earth.
Without fully endorsing either perspective, Ruether stresses that the earth is living and sacred: "Thou," not "it." "Although we have limited rights of use of other life forms, and also responsibilities of care and protection toward them, there is an ultimate thouness at the heart of every other living being, whether it be a great mountain lion or a swaying bacteria, that declares its otherness from us."
"God" in the title refers to "the monotheistic deity of the biblical traditions." Ruether subjects the cultural images of this God to a great deal of criticism -- appropriate, I believe, with reference to a God who insists that we must never deify any images. Nevertheless, I found her re-statement of the character of God to be inadequate. When we break through the illusion of human separateness from other life and feel compassion for all living things, "at this moment we can encounter the matrix of energy of the universe that sustains the dissolution and recomposition of matter as also the heart that knows us ... What has flowered in us as consciousness must also be reflected in ... the ongoing creative Matrix of the whole."
More than an echo of consciousness in the Matrix, the biblical God is a distinctive personality of towering rages and amazing loves, who intrusively instructs us how to behave when we would rather not listen. Rosemary Radford Ruether is somewhat like that. Indeed, she is one of Her prophets.
Richard Cartwright Austin was an environmental theologian with Appalachian Ministries Educational Resource Center, and farmed with workhorses in the mountains of Virginia when this review appeared.
Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth and Healing. By Rosemary Radford Ruether. HarperCollins Publishers, 1992, $22, cloth.
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