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The Distillery podcast explores what motivates the work of Christian scholars and why it matters for theology and ministry.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
There is a mountain of scientific evidence about the climate crisis, and yet Christian individuals and congregations often flounder in responding. What does Christian faith have to do with creation? In this episode, Deborah Rienstra shares how individuals and communities might rally in response, not as an agenda separate from their faith, but deeply grounded in their Christian faith. Rienstra is Professor of English at Calvin University specializing in early British literature and creative writing. She's the author of numerous published essays, poems, and academic publications. She writes about spirituality, climate change, pop culture, the church, the arts, and higher education. Her recent book is titled Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth. Rienstra was raised in Michigan, where she now lives. The soil of the state is highlighted throughout her book. You're listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. Deb, thank you so much for talking with me today.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Shari, it's great to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
What exactly is Refugia?
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Well, I can give you the official biological definition. I found this definition in a scientific paper from 2020, and the definition comes from a literature review from 2012 by a guy named Gunnar Keppel, and it goes like this. Refugia are habitats that components of biodiversity retreat to, persist in, and can potentially expand from under changing environmental conditions. It's basically places where life survives in a crisis, and they're usually little pockets of life, and it could be survival from, say, a fire. Why do some trees survive and others don't? Or maybe it's an insect infestation. Why do some plants survive it and others don't? Or maybe it's a little pocket in a warming river that stays cool so the fish can still spawn there, so many, many, many examples throughout nature. It's a resilience mechanism in nature, and eventually it just occurred to me that, wouldn’t that be a great metaphor for the church and for people of faith? Aren't we supposed to be the people who sort of find and tend to these life-giving places out of which societies or cultures or spiritual communities are renewed, even amid severe disturbance? So it just seemed like this powerful natural phenomenon that had implications for the way we think of ourselves.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, I couldn't help but thinking also of places like Hiroshima where they expected nothing to ever grow for a century, and then this kind of miracle of the first weeds taking root again. One of the beautiful things you do in your book is you situate yourself on the soil where you live. So can you situate us with you, whether that's your home in Grand Rapids or some of your experience, you talk about sand dunes a lot, so can you set the stage for us geographically?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, right. So one of the things I discovered is that I really connected once again with a childhood love of the lakeshore, which I hadn't really thought about, but I've always been really deeply connected to West Michigan and felt guilty about that because I thought, oh, you're so parochial. I mean, you should go off and see the world, which I've done a little bit of, but every time we've lived elsewhere, California, Iowa, New Jersey, London, I've missed home and I thought there was something wrong with me. And then I realized, no, actually human beings are supposed to be connected to place. And this idea of placelessness in modern life is actually an aberration. And so part of the project of Refugia Faith was purposely and intentionally connecting to place, to the Indigenous history of Michigan and the Odawa and the Potawatomi peoples and the Hopewell peoples before them who lived here, and the history of settlement and the history of logging and mining in Michigan, shipping, not things I would normally be interested in, but I found learning about that history fascinating and also rather distressing because I thought, why haven't I known any of this?
Speaker 2 (04:48):
I have a really good education, and yet none of this was being connected to where I live, was just not part of my education. And so I've had to educate myself and through that really rediscovered this love and connection to this place that I'm only third generation white settler here. But I think it's still appropriate to learn what Indigenous people teach us, which is if you're going to live someplace, you better care for it and care about it and understand it and observe it. So I've just become a beginner in that, learning the names of plants and learning to recognize invasive species. And as Aldo Leopold says, the problem with ecological awareness is you start to live alone in a world of wounds. In other words, the minute you learn about things, you start to see the damage. That too could be a path to a kind of deep sadness and sorrow, which it is. But that knowledge is also helpful because then you can start to say, all right, well what needs healing and what can I do to help? So that part has been also just kind of deeply meaningful.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Yeah, that's great. And in addition to learning the land, there's also an economic history that's connected to how things have changed ecologically, which as educated as many of us are, it's not something that you move to a different state, go to school, and learn about is the local history, the local economic history.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah, right. Economics, sociology. Right. Everything.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Yeah. So it sounds like for you, this is not just what started by reading books and learning about the climate crisis, it's also deeply a matter of faith for you. Can you talk more about that?
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Sure. So all through this, I was of course surrounded by colleagues who were working hard to connect the crises that we live with right now to faith. That's what we do at Calvin University, so that part came very naturally to me, but it was really when I learned about ecotheology, even that that was a thing. And I love theology anyway, I was sort of raised in this little Reformed tradition where we studied catechism starting in third grade. At Calvin University, we all kind of have to be theologians just to survive. So it's a good thing. I love theology because we have to. And so learning about ecotheology has been really exciting. But then to ask the question, all right, well what does this all mean for faith and faith life right now? And I began to understand and listen to people who were saying, yeah, this actually demands a somewhat different response from people of faith than our usual mode of operation.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
And started to read Pope Francis in Laudato si’ and this call to love God and neighbor. That is the fundamental call of the Christian faith: love God and neighbor. These are the two greatest commandments. But to do that in a way that's particular to this time and to the situation that we are in in this world. So I love the way that Reverend Jim Antal puts it. He's a UCC pastor who's been involved in climate work for decades. He likes to think of addressing the climate crisis as our sort of communal vocation right now, vocation of this generation. It's our way that we are called to love God and neighbor right now. And it's easy to see, I think. Well, maybe it's not easy to see.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
I was going to say it's easy to see the environmental injustices, but I don't know that that's true. But perhaps the best way into this is to recognize that if we're going to love our neighbors, we have to recognize how many of them are in distress from climate disturbance: people who live on coastlines, people whose farms are no longer productive. It's just been too dry. People whose livelihoods are threatened, people whose places have been destroyed by wildfire. These are people who are suffering and people in the future who are going to suffer more unless we address these issues. So it is a matter of loving neighbors. But I would say maybe the second easiest thing to recognize immediately is that caring for creation is a way of loving God, and that that demands something of us more than the kind of nice word stewardship, which is a lovely word, but it's inadequate because, for many reasons, but one of them is, it sort of assumes that the status quo is okay, we just have to continue stewarding the land and the water in the way we have been. And that sort of means, well, using it nicely. That's not enough when we are dealing with a damaged earth. So to recognize our communal vocation right now, as Pope Francis puts it, kind of calls for an ecological conversion. We have to recognize that the status quo is not sustainable.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
What do you think has led to, you talked about stewardship and the Beyond Stewardship project that you elbowed your way into, in your words, what do you think has led so many Christian communities and perhaps other communities of faith to avoid or ignore this crisis?
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Oh, that's such a complicated question. We actually have some sort of sociological immediate answers in two recent surveys done by the Pew Research Center and PRRI. And one of the things they discover sort of right here right now is that American people of faith and Christians in particular, they break it down into different faiths, but American people of faith are more influenced by their news source and their political commitments than they are by their faith communities. And both of those studies are very discouraging and they kind of break it down to what news sources people listen to and what is and is not going on at their churches or faith communities. And one of the problems in a lot of faith communities is that people just aren't talking about the crisis or anything having to do with the natural world. They're talking about other things.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
And unfortunately, this is especially true of white American evangelicals. So of all the faith groups, I'm sorry to say, white American evangelicals are the least realistic about what's going on and are doing the least. Now, there are very important exceptions to that, and I'm grateful for them. I'm thinking of the Evangelical Environmental Network, which is working very hard and with a lot of savvy to address fellow white evangelicals, but your mainline listeners might even be able to report that in their communities, there's just not a lot of talk about it either. It just varies from community to community. But I think there are so many deeper reasons for this. And we kind of have to go back, maybe not to the dawn of time, but to the Enlightenment. I teach an environmental literature class and we do a little bit of scripture study and we do kind of a walkthrough through theological history just a little bit. And we get to the Enlightenment, and I kind of want to go, “And this is where it all goes to crap.”
Speaker 1 (13:09):
We're about to go off the rails, folks.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Which is a terrible reduction and generalization of course. And I tell students that. But the kind of deeper theological reasons and cultural and historical and sociological reasons for, I would say American religious indifference to not just the climate crisis, but to any sort of attention to creation care, we can trace those things back to this sort of dualism that became exacerbated in the 18th century. And I'm a fan of the Enlightenment. We could all use a little more reason, that's for sure.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Right?
Speaker 2 (13:51):
We can look back to the Enlightenment with a sort of fond nostalgia. But there was this exacerbation, as I say, of separating the spiritual from the physical and material that occurred during the Enlightenment. And this is true in Christianity too. We can see it. We can see it in the literature and the theology of that period, the sense that the material world is mechanistic and inert and just this sort of temporary stage on which the spiritual drama of redemption is played out. I think we can maybe recognize that those ideas are latent in the scriptures, but I think they're countered in the scriptures by a real celebration of creation, which is foundationally orthodox, but in the Enlightenment that dualism between spirit and matter worsens. And we can ask a lot of reasons why, but I think honestly, the reasons have to do with colonialism and industrialization. And this is really upsetting to my students when they start to realize that theological ideas are historically located and influenced.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
We would like them to be more pure and abstract than that, wouldn't we?
Speaker 2 (15:14):
We would. Oh, it's so upsetting, right? Because we want to imagine that Christian orthodoxy came down from the clouds in the early church, and it's always been a matter of calibrating our purity to that first.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
It would be simpler that way.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Wouldn't it? But we are all influenced by our times. That's just the way human culture is. And that includes theology. So there's a kind of handmaiden theological business that goes on in the 18th century through the 19th and indeed into today that allows our theology to support the efforts of colonialism and industrialization. If we separate faith from the business of living in this world and faith becomes over-spiritualized and in the United States too, I think over-individualized, then we create a barrier between faith and our faith life and our faith thinking and everything that we're doing with other people and with the earth. And this is really handy if you want to be exploiting people and exploiting the earth. So I think we just have to have a literal come-to-Jesus moment here about that dualism. I hear this too, from Indigenous people who are also Christian theologians like Randy Woodley in his book, Shalom and the Community of Creation, who is just constantly saying, dualism, dualism, dualism.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
That's what we have to get rid of. And so I think that kind of dualistic theological bent has led to a lot of other problems: a truncated soteriology, that is to say, we have a very narrow idea of what salvation is, what redemption is. It's about souls, it's about human souls. We forget God's redemptive plans for all of creation, the renewal of all of creation. We don't quite know what to do with Romans 8 and the groaning of creation or Colossians 1 and the reconciliation of all things through Christ. We are focused on souls going to heaven, even if you wouldn't necessarily say on a quiz, yes, that is the sum total of Christian redemption. That's kind of how we operate in faith and practice. And that of course leads to a sort of bad eschatology too. So our view of the end of things becomes, well, we're not quite sure, like disembodied souls in heaven. How does that work? Or the sense of this creation as a kind of disposable temporary stage. The drama plays out, you strike the set and then lo and behold, God creates a new creation. What is this theater about? Things burning up? And here's another thing that horrifies students, some of those translations aren't quite right. So that whole thing about the burning of the earth in 1 Peter, maybe it's 2 Peter, sorry.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
That's all right.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Yeah, that's not quite right. It's more like the revealing of the creation, the revealing of the redeemed creation. And even in Revelation, this idea of the new creation, it's really the renewed creation, and it's kind of an issue between Greek ideas and words and English translations and the tradition of English translations. So all of these little elements have contributed to, I think, a temptation to look away from the earth and to regard it as our pantry and our sewer, as Joanna Macy says, or Sally McFague says, and to justify our Christian complicity with exploiting resources by calling it stewardship. So that was kind of a long way around back to stewardship. But we have to, I think, recognize that these notions that have led to our practices, that they sort of feed into each other, practice and theology feeds into each other. This is all coming from a long period of drift away from the concern in the scriptures for the healing of the created world alongside the healing of people.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Deb, I'm interested in thinking about this kind of truncated understanding of what salvation is or the dualism that you name, that the body is ultimately something that we get to escape, and the earth perhaps then is also something we simply get to escape. And there's going to be some kind of grand slate that gets wiped clean. And the ultimate goal is to kind of get through the physical life or the physical world. And you mentioned a lot of scripture, but of course the Incarnation also just feels like this very real starting point for thinking about this anew. Can you talk about Jesus for a bit?
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Of course. So I love the idea of the creche at Christmastime and the creche was sort of invented, I guess, by St. Francis, which makes it…
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Is this the little nativity scene?
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Yeah. Right.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
Is that the creche?
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Yeah, this makes total sense, right? The nativity scene with the animals and everything, because it reminds us that the Incarnation is a big affirmation of the material creation. This is not something that God slapped onto souls just as a kind of temporary thing. The creation is what God loves and wants to restore to the original dream for its harmony and its flourishing and surviving. So the Incarnation is a big yes to animals, to donkeys and oxen and sheep and trees and grasses and mountains and hills and valleys. And I think we lose that. We tend to think in Christian circles of the Incarnation as this kind of errand that Jesus has to run. Jesus is up in heaven sitting around the throne. And actually, I blame Milton for a lot of this. Sorry, Milton, I know you didn't mean it, but
Speaker 1 (22:20):
It's like this chore, this chore that needs to be done. If you could hop to it.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Yeah. Somebody's got to do it. It'll be me. Jesus volunteers literally in book three of Paradise Lost, which there's some good theological reasoning behind that, but so errand boy Jesus comes down, tolerates flesh for a little while and then zips up back to heaven. That's once again a kind of truncated orthodoxy. I realize that our theology is often subtle and paradoxical and hard to explain. So I get that. But the Christmas season is a really good opportunity to reflect on the Incarnation as a huge yes to the redemption of all creation. So I think I say in the book, at one point, Jesus comes for the donkeys too. And that can be a little bit upsetting to people because I don't mean by that that donkeys need to be redeemed because they're sinful or something like that. That's not what I mean. We are the ones with moral responsibility and moral accountability.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
But because we are kin with all of creation, our moral status affects all of creation. In other words, when humans are exploitative of each other, when they are violent, when they are cruel, all creation suffers. And you just have to look at, say, the war in Ukraine to see that, or any war or any extractive industry that is careless about what they're doing, any stressed place where there's environmental injustice, Cancer Alley in Louisiana, for example, where the exploitation of people and the earth has long gone hand in hand. You just have to look at that to recognize that human moral responsibility has effects on all creation. So when Jesus comes to redeem and atone for that human sin, that affects the whole creation too. And we can celebrate that. That means that Jesus coming is a mark that healing is on its way. This is the intervention of God in the created world to bring about this redemptive vision that we have in scripture and that is the source of our hope. So that of course has implications for crucifixion and resurrection as well. My friend Leah Schade has a beautiful section in her book called Creation-Crisis Preaching, where she describes the crucifixion story in a way that draws out the role of the created world in that crucifixion story. There's a beautiful passage where she talks about Jesus in the tomb as Jesus going into the earth to bring the earth into this resurrection vision. And I just think that's a marvelous insight.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
And it seems to me in reclaiming kinship with say, the donkey, you're pushing back against this very real over-centering of humans in the story, not because humans, as you've said, are unimportant, but because they've become overly important in our own imagination. Is that fair?
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah. I think human arrogance is probably one of our biggest theological problems. And once again, there's testimony in scripture that is beloved and treasured that we don't lose. We are made in the image of God. We are friends of Christ. One of my favorite passages is in John 15 where Jesus says to his disciples, “I have called you friends.” And these are precious things and they should be held to, but we are so many, 8 billion people on this earth. We are so powerful that the temptation to arrogance is almost irresistible. And I realize this is not true of every person because so many people are still struggling to live into their dignity as children of God and as being made in the image of God, because other people don't really recognize that as they should. So I understand that. But as a whole, we are so powerful that I think our call right now is to rediscover humility.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
And I think we rediscover that primarily by listening to Indigenous voices and the Indigenous wisdom of kinship with the rest of creation. We are made of soil in Genesis 2. We are kin with, we're made on the same created day in Genesis 1. So that kinship with the rest of creation is definitely there in scripture. It's there in Indigenous knowledge, and it's in science too. So one of the exciting things for me in the last five years or so is observing this kind of convergence of wisdoms that's happening right now. And Pope Francis talks about this in Laudato si’ as well, and says, listen, people, I'm writing this letter to everyone on earth. We all need to work together. We need all wisdoms, he says, and I think that's a wonderful insight. It's a very generous and wonderful insight, but it's just true. And to see the convergence of wisdoms on this idea of our kinship with the rest of creation is very exciting. Some people, Christians get worried about, well, what about distinctiveness? And I don't think we need to worry about losing that. I think that distinctiveness is kind of self-evident. I think we need to worry more about arrogance.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
It's interesting, you name drawing on Indigenous wisdom. You also point when it comes to activism at people who are working for racial justice and kind of the tenacity of a certain kind of hope. And those both seem really inspiring to you. Is that fair?
Speaker 2 (28:49):
Yeah. Yeah. I think those of us who have been able to live in privilege and indifference, if we are waking up now to this sense that actually this climate crisis thing, and actually the pandemic, actually the pandemic too, allowed us to remember that life is contingent and that our assumptions about security are maybe a little bit illusory. And it's time for those of us who are feeling that way to look to the wisdom of those for whom the world has been ending for hundreds of years, people who have learned resilience and a kind of clear-eyed, steely-eyed hope from many, many years of experience. And I see that in Indigenous thinking and writing and wisdom and in Black American thinking and wisdom. And I think we need to sit at the feet of these people and acknowledge their long, long suffering and quiet ourselves and learn. So hope to me comes from perspective.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
It comes from the perspective of recognizing that the last century or so has been a kind of odd time in human history because the myth of progress has been so real and so powerful and really delivered for a lot of people. And I'm not ungrateful for that.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
It lives large in the American Dream, in our cultural imagination.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
Yeah, I mean, I think dentistry is fabulous, and thank you for antibiotics. I am not disparaging any of that, but a perspective of the whole of human history and indeed the people in the scriptures who are often in despair and suffering and experiencing extreme disturbance and still calling out to God and putting their hope in God. So that perspective is really helpful. Clarity is I think, a source of hope, and that just means paying attention, learning more. And then from that comes determination. I think hope is more an action than a feeling.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
And that's not my wisdom. I've learned that from many other people. And then action and a feeling of agency, however small, hope comes from that, from actually doing things. I tell my students who are young and really angry about the climate crisis and feel this real sense of betrayal, particularly by their faith communities. They're the ones who are going to live on this earth through 2050 and beyond, where those of us who are older might slip out before then, but they're angry and they're very anxious. And what I tell them is learn, know things. Don't just live in this sort of vague fog of anxiety. Get involved and read stuff and learn. And then you realize there's this whole amazing, I don't want to say army, this whole amazing community of people who are doing incredible work in all fields. Everything from sculpture and visual art, to mechanical engineering, to community organization, to urban gardening.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Many of them are Christians, but so many are not. They're people of other faiths, and they're people of no faith at all through whom I believe the Holy Spirit is working toward renewal. So to get involved with those people, even if you know everything we do isn't necessarily going to work. I mean, that's the thing about refugia too. They don't always work. Sometimes they just fail. But to have this sense of, we have work to do, we have a communal vocation, and I'm going to find my lane, my skill set, my passions, and however small that is, that's what I'm going to do.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
You've been listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. I'm your host, Shari Oosting. Our editorial and production team includes LaDonna Damon, Armond Banks, Madeline Polhill, and Garrett Mostowski. Like what you're hearing? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app. Even better, share an episode with a friend. The Distillery is a production of Continuing Education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Thanks for listening.