The Earth Awakens

WHEN WE CONSIDER the crisis of climate change, many of us swing back and forth between a narrative of despair in which “there is nothing we can do” and a narrative of hope that affirms that good futures are available when we act responsibly. Surely Laudato Si’, the encyclical released by Pope Francis last spring, has given enormous impetus to the narrative of possibility, summoning us to act intentionally and systemically about climate change.

The issue of climate change is a recent one, but the matter of revivifying the creation is a very old one in faith. In ancient Israel, as now, care for creation required a vision of an alternative economy grounded in fidelity.

The economy of ancient Israel, a small economy, was controlled and administered by the socio-political elites in the capital cities of Samaria in the north and Jerusalem in the south. Those elites clustered around the king and included the priests, the scribes, the tax collectors, and no doubt other powerful people. Those urban elites extracted wealth from the small, at-risk peasant-farmers who at best lived a precarious subsistence life. The process of extraction included taxation and high interest rates on loans. These were financial arrangements that drove many of the peasants into hopeless debt so that they were rendered helpless in the economy.

While that arrangement was exploitative, it no doubt appeared, at least from an urban perspective, to be normal, because the surplus wealth and the high standard of living it made possible seemed natural and guaranteed. The power people who operated the economy could assume surplus wealth, and the exploited peasants were impotent in the face of that power. The arrangement appeared to be safe to perpetuity.

Speeches of judgment

Except that a strange thing happened in ancient Israel in the eighth century B.C.E. (750-700 B.C.E.). There appeared in Israel, inexplicably, a series of unconnected, uncredentialed poets who by their imaginative utterance disrupted that seemingly secure economic arrangement. We characteristically list in that period of Israelite history four prophets—Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah. They came from various backgrounds, but they shared a common passion and a stylized mode of evocative speech.

The “normative” economy of the period had assumed that the economy consisted of only two participants: 1) the productive peasants, and 2) the urban elites, who did not work or produce anything but who lived well off of peasant produce. Those uncredentialed poets, however, dared to imagine and to utter that there was, inescapably, a third participant in the political economy: namely, the emancipatory God of the Exodus.

In effect, these poets spoke God into the political-economic process, and the presence of that remembered, spoken God of course changed the economic calculus for all parties. These poets invited (required!) the urban elites to reimagine and reconfigure the economy so that they had to answer to the God of covenant, whereas they had assumed prior to the prophets that they were autonomous economic players who could do what they wanted without restraint.

Specifically the prophets, with rich variation, spoke “speeches of judgment” whereby Yahweh, the God of the Exodus and covenant, uttered an indictment for the ways in which the urban elites had violated God’s intention for society. That indictment, moreover, was regularly matched to a judicial sentence that anticipated trouble for those who were not restrained by God’s commandments. These indictments regularly concerned injustice that violated the well-being of vulnerable neighbors or profanation that violated God’s sovereign intention.

The poets, in their daring imagination, were able to assert that violations of human justice or violations of divine holiness would inescapably be followed by sorry consequences enacted against the offending elites.

Summoned to durable love

Here I will consider the imaginative utterance of one of these prophets, Hosea, who was the only northern prophet of the period and who appeared sometime in the latter part of the eighth century. Hosea is perhaps best known for his report that God commanded him to “go, love...an adulteress” (3:1). This command meant that Hosea was compelled by God to step outside the approved conduct of society and to embrace a Torah-violator who could well have been executed for her conduct.

The imagery of this poem presents God as an offended husband and Israel as an offending wife. Such imagery is deeply problematic for us in our own gender-aware context. It is, nevertheless, the text we are given in Hosea. It is part of our interpretive responsibility and freedom to see how such ancient imagery might play in our own imagination when we move the poem from that ancient context to our own.

That divine command that Hosea obeyed caused him to experience, exhibit, and give voice to the pathos (suffering love) in his own life that he then discerned as well in the life of God. He came to understand by his humiliating social experience that life consists not in stern rule-keeping but in the exercise of mercy and compassion that moves well beyond rules.

Among Hosea’s utterances of this new awareness that moves beyond quid-pro-quo formal relations are these three poetic utterances: 1) “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6). 2) “Sow for yourselves righteousness; reap steadfast love; break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord, that he may come and rain righteousness upon you” (10:12). 3) “But as for you, return to your God, hold fast to love and justice, and wait continually for your God” (12:6).

These brief utterances provide a cluster of relational terms that are definitional for Hosea and for covenantal relationships in a society ordered by Yahweh. Thus in 6:6 we have “steadfast love” and “knowledge of God,” in 10:12, it is “righteousness” and “steadfast love,” and in 12:6 “steadfast love and justice.” (See also Hosea 2:19-20.) This cluster of terms altogether specifies covenantal loyalty that will sustain durable relationships of well-being in every circumstance. The recurring term in all three cases is “steadfast love”; commitment to other covenant partners overrides all other considerations. Hosea understood both that Yahweh will practice such durable love and that Israelites are summoned to such durable love of neighbor.

Disrupting the “business model”

In 4:1-3, Hosea conjured in his poetic imagination, against an assumed social reality conducted on a “business model,” that Yahweh had filed a legal suit against Israel for violating the requirement of steadfast love. Notice that everything depends upon Hosea’s utterance. Without his poetic courage, the business model of acquisitive economics would seem normal and would not be interrupted or critiqued. But now he has spoken, and the political economy can no longer proceed as before in numbed innocence.

The indictment of this poetic utterance begins with a generic charge: “There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land” (Hosea 4:1). Hosea uses the same terms as in 6:6. These terms specify that Israel has not taken neighborly solidarity seriously but has permitted the exploitative acquisition of wealth to override relational reality. They have treated the economy as though it were autonomous and without reference to neighborly reality.

The more specific charge against Israel is voiced in 4:2: “Swearing, lying, and murder, and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed.” This terse catalogue, in very strong verbal form, is clearly an allusion to the Ten Commandments given at Sinai (Exodus 20:1-17). That list of commands expresses the most elemental, nonnegotiable requirements of life with Yahweh. The commandments offer a clear alternative to the exploitative economy of Pharaoh (see Exodus 5:4-19). The commandments insist that God’s holiness must not be reduced to a commodity (Exodus 20:1-7), and that neighborly relationships must not be violated in exploitative ways (20:8-17).

And now, says Hosea, Israel in its political economy has systematically violated the commandments. The violation includes exploitation of many kinds: Swearing (cursing): invoking divinely caused misfortune on others; Lying: false witness in court; Murder: treating human life as expendable; Stealing: sharp economic practice, perhaps wage theft; Adultery: reducing human relations to commodity transactions.

This unmistakable reference to Sinai bespeaks an economic practice whereby human neighbors are regarded as dispensable commodities that may be readily exploited in the interest of profit and surplus. The intent of this “speech of judgment” is that such practice is unsustainable and is sure to evoke harsh divine response.

The next word in the poem, “therefore,” is a rhetorical wonder that recurs often in prophetic utterance. It is a term that connects the “indictment” with the “judicial sentence” to follow. It is as though the poet traces inescapable outcomes and consequences of such violations. Hosea insists that this sorry exploitative urban regime cannot operate with impunity, even if it imagines that it can. There is no such prospect, because in prophetic imagination God presides over the economic enterprise and will not permit such exploitation to go unrequited.

This “therefore” is an act of emotive imagination. It does not offer reasons or explanations or trace connections between the indictment and the sentence. Rather, it gives expression to the unrelieved abhorrence of Hosea (and of God) that someone in Israel could treat others in Israel this way.

Economic violation leads to environmental disaster

The judicial sentence that follows the “therefore” is astonishing. The poet names the usual triad of creation: “wild animals, birds, and fish.” That is, the creatures on the earth, above the earth, and the creatures in the waters around the earth. Said otherwise, the sentence voices an anticipation for “all who live in it.” All creatures of our God and king! All of them are “perishing”; they are disappearing. The reason they are disappearing is because of drought; the phrase “the land mourns” is an idiom for drought. The earth shrivels and dries up and can no longer sustain creaturely life.

But “drought” is only a hint of the total ending of creation. James Luther Mays writes: “But the description really outruns the limits of a drought or any other empirical situation; it portrays a loss of vitality by land and population that affects every creature, even the fish. The catastrophe is not merely a drought, though partially pictured by drought-vocabulary, but a terrible diminution of life forces which tends to total absence of life.”

The poetic, rhetorical sequence of indictment and judicial sentence linked by “therefore” concerns the socio-economic violation of neighborliness and the wounding of creation through an acute environmental crisis. The “therefore” is not an exact formulation, for such analysis was not available to the prophet. Nor is it a magical form of supernaturalism, for it is to be noted that no agency of God is mentioned in the sentence of verse 3.

It is rather an emotive articulation of abhorrence that assumes and affirms that creation in all it parts is deeply connected to the rule of Yahweh, so that the economic violation leads to the environmental disaster. The emotive quality of the words aims to appeal to the emotive sensibility of the listening community and so to penetrate the cynical numbness of those who wished the economy were autonomous but who, in deep ways, know better.

Reading Hosea in the age of climate change

Who would have known that violation of the Ten Commandments would lead to the failure of creation? Well, Hosea would know that! The “therefore” is an ominous recognition that human choices determine future prospects. The human choices, so Hosea attests, have not been good; for that reason the future of creation cannot be good either.

We now hear Hosea’s poetic utterance at a great chronological, cultural distance. We read it in a public context that evokes a dispute about “protecting the environment” and “maintaining a growth economy.” We read it in the context of a supposed scientific dispute about global warming, though the scientific evidence for global warming is not much disputed any more.

It is the case that our scientific knowledge fills in the prophetic “therefore” to show that economic exploitation in the interest of growth, surplus, and a higher standard of living by fracking, cutting down rain forests, and increasing fossil fuel for the urban elite and those who replicate the urban elite cannot be separated from the environmental reality.

The final word of the poem, “perishing,” may ring in our ears. We watch the environmental crisis as the Arctic ice melts, as the butterflies disappear due to chemical poisoning of their sources of food, as drought crowds out arable land, as old modes of extravagant living becomes less and less sustainable, as elephant herds are decimated because their tusks are tradable commodities. Not all of this is new; what is new is the scale of exploitation required by a new scale of predatory greed. A high standard of living based on extraction insists that all else (including cheap labor) must be regarded as dispensable commodities. Without such scientific data, Hosea already judged such community-destroying greed to be unsustainable.

We may now ponder the poetic “therefore.” We may do so with a grain of salt about “supernatural” agency. We do not believe that God would swoop in and punish. Nor did Hosea! But Hosea did believe that there is a mysterious presence of holiness that sets limits on human choices that violate God’s purposes only at great cost.

It may be inevitable that we try to adjudicate and negotiate the environmental crisis in a “reasonable fashion,” according to our best scientific and economic knowledge. All that may be to the good. But this great issue needs to be framed in recognition of this holy mystery that makes both human freedom and its offspring of acquisitive greed quite penultimate. In light of that inscrutable limit that cannot be disregarded, we are no longer permitted to imagine an acquisitive economy as choosable, as though there were no long-term payback, as though there were no “therefore.”

Hosea understood that cynical exploitation of the neighborhood, local or global, cannot finally outflank the divine “therefore.”