[You can hear Professor Wirzba discuss the theological and ethical implications of humanity’s interdependence with the natural world, with Justine Toh, this week on Soul Search.]
We are living in a time when the world’s stability and dependability — its overall amenability — can no longer be taken for granted. The unrelenting news of fires and floods, heatwaves and droughts, pandemic and disease, and social unrest and inequity is prompting more and more people to dream of leaving earth to find a better, more hospitable, place somewhere else. Some very rich individuals, but also national governments, are investing billions of dollars to engineer a “better” home far, far away. They are building rockets and drawing plans to terraform planets millions of miles beyond our solar system, and they are designing the whole-body prosthetics to match these stellar environments.
It isn’t hard to find Christians who sympathise with these efforts, since they represent a techno-version of the spiritual quests Christians have been advocating for centuries. The logic at work in these forms of spirituality goes something like this: this earth is but a temporary, often deficient and frustrating, abode, which is why it is best to make plans to leave it all behind. Don’t get too attached to any earthly place, because our ultimate and fully satisfying destination is to be with God in a heaven that is far, far away.
Both the techno and spiritual versions of other-worldly escape are massive mistakes. They are deeply confused and practically dangerous. They deny, even despise, the creaturely conditions of human embodiment, and they go against the grain of what scripture has to say about heaven and earth. The (often understandable) desire to depart from this earth needs to be resisted because it is a desire that is the exact opposite of God’s. To appreciate why I think this way, it helps if we begin at scripture’s end.
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For a great number of Christians, the end of scripture comes as a shock. More exactly, it comes as a huge disappointment. The confounding issue has nothing to do with the strange symbolism and the violent imagery that punctuates much of the book of Revelation. It is that they don’t get to go somewhere else after they die. They don’t get to join with a God who lives somewhere far, far away in an otherworldly, ethereal heaven.
The reason John gives is simple: God is coming down to earth to make a permanent and divine home with mortals. Forget about escaping this earth and your embodied life. God wants to dwell here, in the diverse places of this world, with you, with everyone, forever, transforming sorrow into joy. If John is to be believed, the direction and the destination of many of many well-travelled spiritual quests have it exactly wrong. Forget about going “up and away”. Go “down and among”, because that is where God is and where the love of God is at work. Imagine the look of horror when people venturing up encounter the God who is venturing down.
John’s vision shouldn’t surprise us, since scripture has been saying from the beginning that one of the best names for God is Emmanuel — “God-with-us”. Starting with the Garden of Eden, when God kisses the soil and steadily (and abidingly) breathes into it the life that animates all flesh, and then continuing with God’s covenant fidelity to the land and all its creatures, God has never abandoned or left creation behind. This is why early Christians proclaimed that God’s reconciling ways were not reserved only for people, but for all things in heaven and on earth. The teaching of scripture over and over again is not that God despises and abandons creation, but that God loves and makes everything new.
From a theological point of view, God’s departure from earth would amount to a contradiction. Why? Because creatures and created places are the material expressions of God’s love. Every creature — whether a raspberry shoot, a nightingale, a bumblebee, a school teacher, or a meandering stream — is God’s love variously made visible, audible, tactile, fragrant, and nutritious. For God to abandon creatures, or worse yet, to delight in their destruction, would be for God to detest God’s own love. The crucial point to remember is that creatures are not simply the object of God’s love. They are the material means of God’s love, and the embodied sites where God’s power is revealed and made active.
A failure of incarnational nerve
Another way to frame all of this is to say that Christians have been badly served by forms of spirituality that encourage people to look “up and away”. It isn’t hard to appreciate why this kind of spirituality has been attractive for so long to so many. The lives of countless people have been miserable, if not excruciating, and often beset with numerous kinds of suffering and violation. While it is true that our (most often youthful) bodies can experience pleasures and ecstasies, these are fleeting, and eventually eclipsed by disease and debility and the many frustrations of aging. This is why Socrates still stands in our imaginations as a spiritual hero: he understood that embodiment is the site of unending pain and trouble, and so advocated for the soul’s separation from its body and its ascent to an immaterial heaven far above this earth.
The ministries of Jesus stand in the starkest contrast to the teachings of Socrates. Jesus does not tell people to hang on and endure their suffering until they die, with death being the moment when everything is made right. He does not tell them that the point of a faithful life is to escape their embodiment and this earth. Instead, he shows them how to transform this life and this world by becoming participants in God’s creative and compassionate ways. When he encounters a hungering body, he feeds it. When he touches a hurting and diseased body, he heals it. When he sees people alienated, ostracised, or lonely, he befriends them. In other words, Jesus does not tell people to look “up and away”; he tells them to look “down and around”, and then learn to extend God’s life-giving ways in the world by becoming agents of healing, feeding, reconciliation, and celebration.
One way to characterise the dysfunction of various expressions of a spiritual life is to say that they suffer from a failure of incarnational nerve. People subscribing to these forms of spirituality don’t really believe that the fullness of God dwelled bodily in Jesus (Colossians 1:15-23). They can’t fully commit themselves to the care of this earth or make the care of people’s bodies the fundamental and all-pervading priority, because they think materiality and embodiment are problems to manage, if not eradicate. The God who came to earth only came temporarily and in part, because materiality and divinity cannot fully co-exist. What these people forget is that just as Christ ascended bodily to be with the Father, he will also descend bodily to be with us upon his return (Acts 1:11). They don’t appreciate why Gnosticism and Docetism are the perennial heresies of the church.
Giving up on heaven?
Does ministering “down and around” mean that we have to give up on the idea of heaven? Not at all. What we need to give up is the terribly confused and profoundly damaging idea that heaven is closed to embodiment, and that it is a destination far, far away from this earth. To think that heaven is closed to embodiment is to reject the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth. To think that heaven is far, far away is to short-circuit the Lord’s Prayer that asks for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.
People are often confused about heaven because they think our entrance into it is primarily a matter of our transportation to another place to be with God. According to this way of thinking, heaven can’t be here because this life is so saturated with the horrors of prejudice, hatred, and violence, but also the daily sufferings of deficiency, disease, and death. This is why people have to wait until they die, because that is when their souls can separate and escape to be with God somewhere else. Heaven is the far-away, ethereal place where all the suffering associated with embodiment is gone forever.
This way of thinking, besides being un-scriptural and anti-incarnational, is conceptually confused. Why should anyone think that a person’s transport to another location will suddenly make everything better? Relocation to another place, no matter how wonderful it may be thought to be, solves nothing if people bring to their new destination all the habits of neglect, abuse, boredom, and violation. Given time, these people will eventually destroy this heavenly paradise much like they destroyed this created paradise called “earth”.
The crucial issue concerning heaven is not about the matter of a person’s transportation to another place, but about that person’s transformation in whatever place they find themselves. In other words, to experience heaven, people do not need to go somewhere else first. Nor do they have to wait until they die. Instead, they have to be transformed by the power of God’s love so that they can participate here and now in God’s life by sharing in God’s healing, feeding, reconciling, and celebrating ways. To experience heaven is to be in a place with others and know that the only power animating all our actions is the power of God’s love. That so many people experience this life to be hell on earth is not because earth is awful or even evil. Life becomes hell when the creative, life-giving, and life-nurturing love of God is degraded, despised, or thwarted.
Heaven has not ever been closed to embodiment or materiality. This is what Christ’s incarnation and ascension teaches. It is only ever closed to sin, since sin is the distorting and degrading power that violates and frustrates the good life that God desires for every creature. If you want to get to heaven, don’t pack your bags to go somewhere else. Learn instead to make your body a conduit that receives and extends God’s love wherever you are.
Removing God from earth?
It is practically inevitable that when people are confused about heaven that they will also be confused about earth. A spiritual focus “up and away” means that Christians will mistake and forsake earth by not focusing “down and among”. Historically speaking, the confusion has taken many forms. One of the most damaging happened when in the early years of modernity theologians and church leaders decided that this material world was the domain of scientists, while the spiritual realm was the domain of the church. This relatively neat, if disastrous, bifurcation rested on the mistaken assumption that this material world was little more than “extended stuff” (res extensa, as Descartes termed it) that followed its own “natural laws”. As scientists and philosophers described this world as an amoral and fundamentally dead realm, it made suitable sense to locate God in the souls of people. The idea that God is present to every creature as its intimate and animating breath (Psalm 104), simply disappeared from view. The idea that this world and its life are sacred evaporated.
This shift in understanding was momentous in its implications because the removal of God from earth gave people whatever excuse they needed to direct their spiritual energies away from the care of forests and fields, birds and animals, city neighbourhoods and markets, and transportation and energy systems. These earthly domains, rather than being intrinsic elements in God’s drama of cosmic salvation, could now be consigned to the brutalising logics of commodification and profitability. The world, now believed to be dead and without sanctity, could be opened to unending extraction and manipulation.
The science has changed. The idea that our world is valueless and dead, mere stuff bumping around in a cold universe, simply can no longer be maintained. As earth system scientists are telling us, we live in a highly dynamic, responsive, living world in which the actions of creatures, not least human creatures, can have world-altering significance. The idea that people live above and apart from soil, water, and air — and all the myriad large and small creatures that populate these domains — is a fantasy. The well-funded effort to relocate (a few very rich) people to a terra-formed planet in outer space is a destructive and evasive delusion, because everything a person needs to live, ranging from the microbiome in the soil to the oxygen-producing forests all around, is here and nowhere else. Why spend billions of dollars trying to make inhospitable planets hospitable — a project well beyond the reach of any sane engineer — when our focus should be on healing and nurturing the profoundly hospitable planet we have done so much to degrade and destroy?
For the love of this world
It is time for theologies, and the spiritual quests they inspire, to change too. Now more than ever before, Christians need to recover a love for this earth and all its creatures. This not a new ambition or a boutique concern that (some) Christians may elect to take up when they have become bored with other more pressing matters. It is, instead, a call to participate in the eternal and intimate abiding of God-with-us as the One who daily creates, nurtures, sustains, heals, and reconciles every creaturely life. Nothing can be more fundamental to a spiritual life than to love God by loving the creatures and places that God loves and where God is constantly at work.
The practical and ministry implications that follow from this commitment are enormous. Think for a moment about how earth system scientists are telling us that we live in an Anthropocene world. What they mean is that (some) human beings have developed technologies, infrastructures, and economic policies that now affect every life form on earth. There is no place you can go, whether deep in the soils or high in our atmospheres, where you will not find evidence of humanity’s prowess and power. The presence of humans on earth has, in far too many instances, been a degrading and destroying presence. Rather than being ambassadors of the good news that is to be proclaimed to every creature under heaven (Colossians 1:23), or children of God who work to free creatures from the bondage and futility to which they find themselves subjected (Romans 8:18-22), too many Christians have decided to wait it out and let the world burn.
What would happen if Christians took John’s Apocalypse seriously, and believed that God truly was descending to earth to dwell with mortals forever? What if they believed heaven was not a place to escape to after we die, but was instead this and every place transformed by God’s creative, healing, and nurturing love?
A good way to frame our thinking and action is to ask: how would people need to re-design and re-build our farms, cities, energy infrastructures, school systems, food distribution networks, healthcare facilities so that God’s life-giving ways were effective in them? If the truly great and enduring work is to participate with God in the healing of every place and every creaturely life, then a focus on built environments suddenly takes centre stage, because nothing is more important than to build a world where land, people, and fellow creatures live in peace, and in the realisation of that peace bear witness to the God who has only ever loved every aspect of this earthly life.
Norman Wirzba is the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Theology at Duke University, and Senior Fellow at Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. His most recent book is This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World, from which this piece has been adapted.