Foreword
Beyond
Stewardship: A Theology for Nature
by Linda Marie Delloff
Joe Sittler, who died in 1987, was one of those nearly-blind people who sees everything. That is not only what he saw; it is also how he saw. He saw nothing in the world as existing by itself, apart from anything or everything else. All of life exists in ecological balance, as part of an interactive, vibrant and vibrating web of existence. Sittler even used the word ecology to apply to the spiritual life: "The Ecology of Faith" is one of his haunting titles evoking the human condition of interdependence.
In both its early and later manifestations, the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago provided a supportive community within which Joseph A. Sittler taught and thought. In turn, that community benefited tremendously from his presence and his inspiration, as the wider Lutheran community and Christian families benefited as well.
Unfortunately, because most of his writings are out of print, today's seminarians and others have less opportunity for an encounter with a mind that long ago anticipated the basic structure for the broadest sort of environmental theology. This was not, as he stressed, a "theology of nature," but a "theology for nature," or a "theology of the incarnation applied to nature."1 Thus, it is fitting to dedicate the work of this resource manual to "the Old Brooder," who sat so long in LSTC office working, or often (while he could still see) gazing out at the trees he had planted in the courtyard.
For those who "knew not Sittler" (Martin Marty), a brief history is helpful. Born in 1904 in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, Sittler was the son of a Lutheran pastor. He credited his father with his early love of the Gospel and the richness of language for which he himself became well-known. To his mother, educated only through high school but displaying a rich imagination, he attributed the breadth of his interests - which included the various sciences, literature, music and the other arts.
Sittler graduated as a biology major from Ohio's Wittenberg University in 1927, and from Hamma Divinity School (a predecessor of Trinity Seminary) in 1930. He did advanced study at Oberlin College, Case Western Reserve University, the University of Chicago and the University of Heidelberg, Germany.
Ordained in the United Lutheran Church in America, a predecessor church body of the Lutheran Church in America, Sittler was called first to the parish ministry, form which strong roots his later teaching career never diverged. In his Cleveland Heights parish, Sittler met his future wife, Jeanne, a gifted musician. They were the parents of five children.
After 13 years of parish ministry, and lecturing at Oberlin College and elsewhere, the church called him to a ministry of teaching. In 1943 he became a professor of systematic theology at the Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary, the LSTC predecessor, in Maywood, Illinois. Joining the University of Chicago Divinity School faculty in 1957, he taught there until he became emeritus in 1973. In 1979-80 he was a visiting professor at LSTC, and from 1980 until his death in 1987, he was LSTC's Distinguished Professor in Residence. He held 11 honorary doctorates, including several from non-Lutheran institutions.
Joseph Sittler did not leave a corpus of heavy tomes. He wrote eight slim books, along with many articles. Nor did each essay or book address a new topic. In succeeding works, he often readdressed issues from previous efforts. There were certain theological questions that continued to intrigue (and plague) him, and to those he kept coming back. The ecological web of existence was a theme that occupied him for more than 50 years. His first listed bibliographic entry (in 1937) was a four-part series of articles titled, "The Parable of the Soils." His last published work, Gravity & Grace (1986), opens with a chapter of thoughts on "Nature and Grace" which echo earlier work, while crafting new insights on this enduring theme.
Sittler was one of the century's few Lutheran theologians to achieve considerable recognition in the broader ecumenical world. In fact, he often joked that many in his own tradition - including other theologians - considered him too radical for their tastes. One of Sittler's early and persistent themes was an appreciation of the insights provided by theologians of the Orthodox churches. This was especially true of his reflections on the natural world.
Sittler served for many years on the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches. In 1961, he delivered a landmark address to the WCC Assembly in New Delhi, India. Reprinted many times since, that speech dropped a bombshell with its seemingly radical argument that "the way forward is from Christology expanded to its cosmic dimensions, made passionate by the pathos of this threatened earth, and made ethical by the love and the wrath of God." For years, ecumenical circles reverberated with discussions of "the New Delhi speech."
It is important to point out that in his great concern for the environment, Sittler never saw science as basically opposed to nature's best interests. It is the human choice for use of scientific knowledge that determines whether the results will be for good or ill. To the end of his life, Sittler maintained a fascination with new scientific discoveries, especially any related to the great cosmological questions.
It is equally important to mention Sittler's abiding interest in the arts. In the 1960s he chaired a National Council of Churches commission on religion and the arts. He never tired of teaching and preaching on their intrinsic relations. In describing his work with the NCC group, he wrote that "creating a commission on religion and the arts... is like having a committee to study the relation of water and fish."2 He saw the works of artists - musicians, painters, poets - as providing "data for insight into expansion of the realm of grace, and the longing to find the total meaning its bestowal promises."3 As a professor, Sittler always taught as much from the work of poets and novelists as from that of theologians. It is impossible to separate Sittler's thoughts about the environment from those on the arts. For him, they were mutually reflective spheres of epiphanic possibility.
In his latter years, one of Sittler's favorite activities was being a speaker at pastors' conferences. He was often asked to deliver a keynote; then to remain for the rest of the conference, providing comments, stimulus, and a final summing-up that he inevitably regarded as a goad. He did not want participants to leave feeling to satisfied that they had really conquered the subject. He wanted the proceedings to be fodder for many sermons over the following months. Sittler's appreciation for the job of the parish pastor never wanted amid the rarefied atmosphere of academic speculation.
These were Sittler's "positions" and "accomplishments" over the course of his professional life in the church. It is what he thought that demands more of our attention. Many recent and current environmental theologies take as their starting point the church's earlier pernicious interpretation of Gen. 1:28: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, ...and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth'" (NRSV). Sittler was one of the first to highlight the dangers of an interpretation that sanctions human despoliation of the natural environment. Most subsequent theologies are corrective in referring to "stewardship" and concerned care for the environment rather than dominion or control. Yet sittler, who himself wrote much about "care of the earth," saw even that view as insufficient.
Even more important than Sittler's early rebuke of the dominion viewpoint is the set of giant steps that he took next - steps that lead beyond stewardship. While stewardship is a crucial component of Christian theology Sittler thought it inadequate to encompass the totality of the environmental imperative. For him, the only concept sufficient to enfold and express the breadth of that exigency is grace, a truth of especial significance for Lutherans. Essays on Nature and Grace, Gravity & Grace and other Sittler titles reflect his pervasive concern with its primacy.
"The doctrine of creation is proposed as the only adequate referential context for Christology,"4 he wrote. In viewing nature as a theatre of grace, he explained that "Nature is not an entity or a process set alongside God and having its own autonomy.... It is, rather, continuous with the reality of God as Creator."5 "God is made known to human beings in the matrix of space, time and matter, which are the substance of that mortal theatre in which God deals with his people in their historical actuality," he argued.6
In other words, everything that human beings do or think takes place within a context - the incarnational context of the natural world. That world is what provides opportunities for the meaning of existence to show forth. Anything we do that distances us from the natural world, or diminishes that world, removes us from the living experience of such opportunities. By this Sittler did not mean that we should all remove to huts in the forest. He himself spent most of his life in inner cities. What he meant was that we must change our thinking about nature, and the way we treat it, regardless of where within it we make our home.
If we think of nature as nothing less than the locus of grace, it is not difficult to see the limitations of stewardship as a theological concept describing our relationships within the cosmic web. Certainly stewardship is a basic element contained within the greater scope of our relationship with nature, but it cannot fully express the profound largeness of that relationship. "The focal region of God's grace is not less than that of the whole creation," Sittler wrote.7 Grace as the "energy of love" becomes known within the matrix of daily human existence. The deeper we plunge into it, the more likely we are to recognize that vibrating energy of love. "The common life is the 'happening place' of [grace]. and man as man in nature and in history supplies its normal occasions."8 As we continue to damage the environment, we gradually obliterate the locus of our connection with God.
If we have a limited theological understanding of our environmental concerns, we can easily become content - even self-congratulatory - if we recycle our plastic,s install energy-efficient lighting, make compost piles and oppose cutting down trees and dumping waste in ground waters. All of these are important, and we must press on with such practices even when they seem tedious.
But these busy activities can make us think of ourselves, inappropriately, as "managers" of nature. Sittler reminds us that "human exuberance about the knowledge of and control of aspects of nature has really little to do within nature-as-creation."9 Benign management, no less than malign management, is still management. We must not allow the time and energy such concerns can take to keep us from confronting the full responsibility we really have as religious people. That responsibility is actually to think differently, to change "the spirit of our minds," in one of Sittler's favorite phrases. HE wants us to develop "a sense for the world."
In fact, the context of nature is necessary for human self-definition. We cannot define ourselves apart from our relations to the natural world and other humans within it. Nature is "a life-sustaining placenta of self-consciousness."10 Human beings cannot be redeemed apart from the potential for redeeming everything surrounding them.
In Gravity & Grace, where Sittler reworked and further teased out many of the central ideas of his œvre, he again needled the church's attachment to the primacy of stewardship in its environmental planning. "You can't solve the whole problem of nature's care by stewardship. That's a perfectly good word and a very powerful idea, but it's not a big enough doctrine; it's not central enough," he warned. "For nothing less than the doctrine of grace would be an adequate doctrine to shape the Christian community's mind and practice in a way appropriate to the catastrophe in the environment. God creates his creation in grace. The creation itself is a realm of grace."11 In repeating convictions he had developed earlier in his career, he reflected his sad conclusion that the church had still not gone substantially beyond the basics of environmental thinking.
We can imagine Sittler sitting in the midst of this conference, ever watchful while actually seeing nothing more than blur. Pulling people up short, plunging them down deeper, humoring them to rise above their narrow understandings of what we are doing on the earth and what we must do for it. "Not enough, not enough," he would chide. To dedicate this book to one who urged our own discomfort would be the only kind of tribute he could accept.
Linda-Marie Delloff, Ph.D., is an author and contributing editor of The Lutheran. Dr. Delloff also edited Sittler's book Gravity and Grace and several of his later works. She lives in Mahwah, New Jersey.
End Notes
1.
Joseph B. Sittler, Gravity & Grace (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1987), 67.
2. ____, Essays on Nature and Grace (1972), 72.
3. Ibid., 217.
4. Ibid., 188.
5. Ibid., 24.
6. Ibid., 5.
7. Ibid., 86.
8. Ibid., 87.
9. Ibid., 231.
10. Ibid., 236.
11. ____, Gravity & Grace, 13.