Eco-Congregations Ireland hold their first conference

Ireland is a very green country but the idea of churches being interested in green issues is very new. When the committee of Eco-congregations Ireland decided to have a conference they though that it would attract 30-40 people. The Dromantine conference centre in beautiful rural County Down was booked in faith for a two day residential conference from 9.30am on Friday 14th to 5pm on Saturday 15th September 2012. The conference attracted almost 150 attendees and a block booking at a local hotel had to be made to accommodate them all! There seems to be an awakening spirit of environmental awareness in the Irish churches.

Dromantine is just a few miles outside Newry, and thus just north of the Border. The participants were attracted from all the major denominations and from all parts of Ireland, North and South, and was particularly successful in attracting religious sisters and brothers. (In fact I have never been with so many nuns at one time in all my life!) Many of these religious communities have run gardens and farms as part of their vocation for many years so Christian environmentalism was for them a natural progression.

As the representative of Eco Congregations Scotland I was made very welcome and I told about some of the green achievements of Scottish churches and parishes in a workshop. ECI is in a different place to ECS. It was set up by the inter-church committee for social affairs five years ago and to date has made five awards to churches and dioceses. It still operates as a sub committee of this body. In contrast ECS is a charity in its own right and has now made 100 awards.

A range of distinguished speakers opened up the whole area of green theology and ethics.

Prof David Howell (Exeter) asked if the bible is green and how environmentalism be drawn from the text. Prof Stephen Williams (UTC Belfast) examined what a theology of creation could look like. Ann Primavasi looked at the threat to the world from Militarism. Alastair McIntosh spoke about money, consumerism and society and Peter Owen-Jones spoke about the quest for well-being in the twenty-first century. There were also workshops on weather, economics, GM crops, earth spirituality, and practical advice on what churches can do.

I enjoyed my long weekend in Northern Ireland and the great craic of the many coffee time and after hours encounters. I even ended up late on Friday night singing Irish songs with a Presbyterian couple from Belfast and four lovely nuns from Kilarney!

How do we react when others disrespect our faith?

This week there have been riots across the Muslim world and in Pakistan people have been killed following the release of an American video disrespectful to the prophet Mohammad and the Islamic faith.

Image courtesy of imagerymajestic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 But then I read the following Avaaz article reacting to the response of Newsweek (link). It seems much coverage lacks a sense of perspective and assumes all Muslims think in the same way. The report highlighted that: 

1. Participation in anti-film protests at between 0.001 and 0.007% of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims – a tiny fraction of those who marched for democracy in the Arab spring.

2. The vast majority of protesters have been peaceful. The breaches of foreign embassies were almost all organised or fuelled by elements of the Salafist movement, a radical Islamist group that is most concerned with undermining more popular moderate Islamist groups.

3. Top Libyan and US officials are divided over whether the killing of the US ambassador to Libya was likely pre-planned to coincide with 9/11, and therefore not connected to the film.

4. Apart from attacks by radical militant groups in Libya and Afghanistan, a survey of news reports on 20 September suggested that actual protesters had killed a total of zero people. The deaths cited by media were largely protesters killed by police.

5. Pretty much every major leader, Muslim and western, has condemned the film, and pretty much every leader, Muslim and western, has condemned any violence that might be committed in response.

6. The pope visited Lebanon at the height of the tension, and Hezbollah leaders attended his sermon, refrained from protesting the film until he left, and called for religious tolerance.

7. After the attack in Benghazi, ordinary people turned out on the streets in Benghazi and Tripoli with signs, many of them in English, apologising and saying the violence did not represent them or their religion.

We will all experience strong feelings when things we hold dear are treated by others in ways that are at varience with the reverence in which we traditionally hold them. 

I was at the musical drama "Tam O Shanter" last night on its tour of Scotland after its run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The play, about Burns and his poetry, showed the drunken, bawdy life of the society in which he lived.  Also several scenes parodied the strict authoritarian attitudes of the church at the time. These scenes served to highlight the hypocrisy of the parishioners who said amen to the preacher reading out comminations whilst at the same time acting in a debauched manner. A section of the bible was read out and a psalm sung as part of the performance.

But rather than wanting to burn the theatre down at such a use of the bible and church tradition I was challenged to think about the way that faith is portrayed. How different are the churches today compared to the strict Calvinism of the seventeenth century? I was challenged to think of how the church relates today to people on the fringe of society who are living lives fuelled and dominated by alcohol. And I started to wonder how the church can make its message for the world clear as a positive message about life and all its fullness. 

From the statistics above it would seem that the majority of Muslims in the world are trying to do exactly the same.

A biblical theology of creation for today

Some notes made at a lecture by Prof Stephen Williams of UTC Belfast at the Eco-congregations Ireland conference September 2012)

Before the twentieth century creation and creator were seen as completely separate. However since the beginning of the twentieth century the distinction has become less absolute and belief of all things existing in God has become widely held. (A belief often called panentheism) The theology of creation has been extended with new insights from eco-feminism and other ideas in the second half of the twentieth century.

 (Image courtesy of pixomar / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

A biblical theology will be based on the following principles:
1. creation is good which in this context means fit for purpose
2. the biblical command to have dominion will be taken to mean care
3. the covenant of Noah between God and all creation is foundational
4. all creation is sustained by God's providence
5. eschatalogical peace is holistic rather than destructive

Darwinianism ( and other theories of evolution) have problems with these principles.
The problem posed by Darwinianism is that the evolution of the world by natural selection reveals a world of waste, cruelty and meaninglessness. It will be very difficult for anyone who takes that view of the cosmos to believe in a benevolent creator.

There are five responses to that challenge:

1. evil is inexplicable - a mystery - for example from Genesis 3 the story of the serpent makes you ponder on how one of God's good creatures can be evil
2. there is a connection between moral evil (what people do) and natural evil ( earthquakes floods etc) - evil can be seen to come from that which is good
3. We have a two sided universe and the so called natural evils are not evident. So for example volcanoes are necessary and morally neutral in themselves
4. We live in an interconnected universe - you can't have the good without the evil and some evil is just shadow possibility of what is not good
 5. Possibility of meaninglessness - Leviticus states that everything is fleeting vanity - and it is not possible from the cosmos to work out the meaning of the word

Work for creation is work of love not work of HOPE
HOPE in the bible is attached to God's promises

There are many things that we cannot understand and theology cannot comprehend everything. In the Jewish traditions paradox was important as it shows us the nature of reality cannot be comprehended  because of its great depths.