[1] The year 1950 has been described as the "crossroads of
American religious life."[1] It
was a paradoxical time of oppressive anxiety and intoxicating
prosperity. Anxiety was fed by events and situations that had
thrust Post-World War II America into a frightening new world: the
Cold War and threats of Communist espionage and subversion; atomic
weapons and the development of the hydrogen bomb; the Chinese
Revolution, and the Korean War. What the place and role of
the U.S. could and should be in that world was a topic of intense
concern. Postwar prosperity manifested itself in the profusion of
new consumer goods and household gadgetry and in unprecedented
mobility and the suburban building boom. With this prosperity
came a new wave of environmental concern, expressed in books like
William Vogt's Road to Survival and Fairfield Osborne's Our
Plundered Planet.[2]
[2] Against this backdrop, the essay by Joseph Sittler
(1904-1987) reprinted in this issue of JLE appeared in April 1951,
one of a series of "Grace Notes" that he wrote for the quarterly
bulletin of the Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary in Maywood,
Illinois. In it, Sittler ruminates on the perplexities engendered
by the contrast between America's "promise and hope" and its more
ambiguous actuality. At the time, Sittler was professor of
systematic theology at the seminary; in a few years, he would join
the faculty of the University of Chicago Divinity School. The
essay introduces what would become a major theme in Sittler's later
writing: The idea that the world of nature is a theater of God's
grace, and that our response to that grace ought to be to deal
graciously with the whole creation. He developed these themes in
numerous articles and sermons, and most fully in Essays in Nature
and Grace, earning a reputation as a pioneer in relating theology
to environmental problems.
[3] But apart from this minor interest as a footnote in the
recent history of ecological theology, what interest does this
essay have for us today? I will argue that this essay
intersects with present day concerns: care of creation, the meaning
of patriotism, and the significance of the experience of place.
More than that, it suggests that these themes are interwoven in
crucially important ways, and in so doing, can help us to reflect
on our present situation.
Attachment to Place
[4] Sittler approaches subject of "patriotism" by focusing on
the "given," general human experience of attachment to place.
As described by Sittler, the feeling of attachment to place has
several facets. It is love and affection for a place; a deep
and enduring connectedness, "a sense of belonging to place and
pattern of life," "rootedness;" "loving, personal identification"
and a "sense of identity" with one's land; a sense of continuity
with the past through stories that are kept in memory and "written
and anecdotal history." Strikingly, Sittler also includes
"pathos" as an aspect of attachment, though he does not
elaborate.
[5] But what of the object of this attachment - what is meant by
a "place," and to what sorts of places do people become
attached? Sittler is emphatic that one's love of a place is
not grounded in its conformity to an ideal standard of value.
It arises out of the concrete, particular, organic relation to the
"plain, loveable geography" of a place, its unique constellation of
persons and things, not "abstract esthetic factors." The emblematic
features that Sittler uses to evoke the variety and concreteness of
loved places (e.g., trees, rivers, streets, railroad yards, dumps)
makes it clear that "places" include both "natural" and
"artificial" environments, people as well as "things." This
is an important corrective to our tendency to define the
"environment" or "nature" in ways that omit humans and their
works.
[6] Although Sittler evidently regards attachment to one's place
as a given, universal human trait, he recognizes that the
conditions required for this affection to deepen and flourish have
been severely strained and even violated by the character of modern
life. In particular, he points to the effects of mobility,
the tendency of Americans not to stay put. (In 1955, a few years
after this essay appeared, 21 moves to a new home were made each
year per 100 Americans, including people who moved more than once a
year.)[3]
[7] Sittler also refers to physical separation from nature
through the image of pavement as a barrier between ourselves and
the earth: ". . . our feet seldom touch the earth save at its
concrete or asphalt surfaces . . . ." Sittler regarded this
uprooting from home places and detatchment from nature as a form of
spiritual impoverishment. Because of such alienation,
"something has happened to man's spirit which constitutes an actual
barrier to God's common grace." What does attachment to place have
to do with grace?
Nature and Grace
[8] Sittler's theology of place is grounded in his broader
understanding of the relationship between nature and grace, which
became a leitmotif of his theology, but which is only foreshadowed
here. As he developed it in later writings, that theology of
grace is based, in turn, on three key Christian
doctrines.[4]
[9] The first is the Incarnation of the Word of God in Jesus
Christ as the "fusion" of nature and grace in a particular
historical person in a particular time and place, the crucial point
at which grace has "invaded" nature. Nature is a notoriously
multivocal term, and difficult if not impossible to pin down to a
single definition. For present purposes, suffice it to say
that it is roughly equivalent to the creation - human and
nonhuman reality in all its dimensions and aspects as the object of
God's gracious action.
[10] The second is the symbol of the Cosmic Christ, the one
through whom all things were made and in whom all things hold
together (Colossians 1:15-17). We encounter God's grace - the
same grace as manifest in Christ - throughout creation.
Sittler often illustrated this assertion, as he does here, by
quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, "God's Grandeur" As he later
put it, the gift of the forgiveness of sins in Christ remains the
center of the Christian understanding of grace, but its
circumference can be nothing less than the whole
creation.[5]
[11]The third doctrine is that of cosmic redemption: the purpose
of the incarnation is the restoration of the relationship between
God, humanity, and nature. A few years after this "Grace
Note," Sittler wrote,
It is of the heart of the
Christian faith that this mighty, living, acting, restoring Word
actually identified himself with his cloven and frustrated creation
which groans in travail. . . . To what end? That the whole
cosmos in its brokenness . . . might be restored to wholeness, joy,
and lost love. . .God -- man -- nature! These three are meant
for each other, and restlessness will stalk our hearts and
ambiguity our world until their cleavage is
redeemed.[6]
[12] The understanding of the relationship of nature and grace
in creation that follows from these doctrines is dialectical.
Nature is not grace, and grace is not nature, but they are
inseparable. The church cannot ignore or repudiate the
world. Nor can the world be adequately understood or rightly
valued apart from its relationship to grace.
[13] But this dialectical relationship is not a static tension;
it is dynamic and transformative, but in a way that never finally
or fully resolves the paradox. As Sittler put it in a
commencement address some years later, "By grace is meant all that
God does to crack nature [including human nature] open to its God,
to restore it to his love and to its intended destiny." He
speaks to the seminary graduates of their being sent "from the
Church, through the Church -- but to the world, God's tormented
creation, that it may know all things natural to be transformable
and redeemable by grace, and all things gracious restless and
yearning until they find natural embodiment."[7] Our role is "to
tend the creation, to relate ourselves to nature in such a way that
it may become an open and proper theater for the manifestation and
the fulfillment of grace."[8] This is
not a theology of inevitable and continuing progress but one of
perpetual conversion and metanoia.[9]
[14] This paradoxical and transformative relationship of grace
and nature determines the Christian relationship to the world -
including his or her relationship to particular places.
Sittler (following G. K. Chesterton) summed up the Christian
relationship to the world as a paradox of "love and hate." In
a 1958 essay he wrote,
Because we are creatures of grace, we are not and never can
identify our being with our existence, we cannot be at final rest
within nature. But because we are creatures of nature, too, we must
incarnate, actualize, in the solid stuff of concrete decisions and
actions the powerful but unpredictable movements of God's
relentless grace. This means that God's people in the earth
must learn so to relate grace and nature as to love the world
without idolatry and hate the world without despair. One must
hate the world enough to wish to change it; but he must love it
enough to think it worth changing.[10]
[15] It would perhaps be better to follow Douglas John Hall and
speak of "love and judgement."[11]
In any case, Sittler also quotes Chesterton on the transformative
potential of such love (using a run-down area of London as an
example):
Take Pimlico, for instance,
it's not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico. In that
case, he can merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor,
certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico, for then
it will remain Pimlico which would be awful. The only way out
of this situation is for somebody to love Pimlico, to love it with
a transcendental pride and without any earthly reason . . . If men
loved Pimlico as mothers loved children, arbitrarily, simply
because they are theirs, Pimlico might be fairer than
Florence.[12]
Nature and Humankind
[16] In "The Grace Note," Sittler further claims that the mutual
responsiveness of humanity and nature is a gift of grace.
Attachment to place is one aspect of this human responsiveness to
the earth. To love a place is to be open to God's grace as it
is manifest in that "particular corner of creation." To love
a place is also to be motivated to care for that piece of creation,
to deal with it with respect for its given "integrity and
need." At times, that will mean protecting or preserving it
in its "natural" state. In other cases, it will mean
transforming it through human creativity in a way that respects its
integrity.
[17] But what of nature's loving response to humanity? The
"response" of nature may be its own flourishing which in turn
sustains and graces human life. Many have argued that the
further application of utilitarian calculus and scientific
rationality will not be enough to resolve our environmental
problems. We must learn how to respond to nature with love,
sensitivity, respect, and awe; and we must learn how to embody
those dispositions in our technologies and social institutions. And
those who bestow love, patience, respect and understanding on the
land and its creatures in turn receive from them gifts that make
for a healthier, more sustainable, and more richly satisfying
life.
[18] Any place that we experience can be seen as a particular
example of a working out of this mutual responsiveness, in a kind
of dialogue between humans and nature, persons and place. By
speaking of our interaction with the natural world as a "dialogue,"
I mean something like this: The structures human beings build and
the changes we make in the landscape express, for good or ill, the
shape and state of our values, knowledge, and beliefs. They
express our interpretation of the values and possibilities that the
landscape itself expresses. And nature responds, according to
how well or badly those creations and interventions fit into their
ecological contexts, and how well we have "read" the
landscape. It flourishes or it deteriorates; it continues to
sustain and enrich human life, or it withdraws its beneficence, as
when homes built below deforested hillsides or in floodplains are
destroyed, or when aquifers beneath too-densely settled communities
are overdrawn, or when human life is diminished by cities that
allow no meaningful contact with the natural world.[13]
Imagination, Patriotism and the Paradox of Nature and
Grace
[19] Why does Sittler develop these thoughts on place under the
rubric of "patriotism"? America is one of the "places" that
we belong to and love, but "America" is too vast for us to
experience as a whole. Thus, Sittler vividly describes
America as mosaic of places - from New England through the South,
the Midwest and the West, to the Pacific Coast.
[20] While love of place is a response to what is experienced as
present and actual, it also involves a response to what is not
immediately given to perception. Imagination, as well as love, is
integral to patriotism -- not simply as a feeling or disposition,
but as a basis for thought and action. "Before the word
America can set a man thinking or planning or resolving or
defending, it ought to set him dreaming and remembering!" Dreaming
and remembering reach beyond the immediately present to envision
the whole, the past, the future, the possible. Imagination as
perception informs our understanding and evaluation of the
realities with which we are involved, their qualities and
relationships to one another. The failure or corruption of the
imagination thus can have dire consequences. The practical import
of imagination is well captured in landscape architect Anne Whiston
Spirn's phrase, "We dwell in what began as dreams."[14]
[21] Patriotism is the application of the dialectical Christian
stance toward the world to one's own country. In fact Sittler
quotes G. K. Chesterton in saying, "My acceptance of the world is
not optimism and it is not pessimism. It is much more like
patriotism . . . . A man belongs to this world before he asks if it
is nice to belong to it . . . It is a matter of primary
loyalty."[15]
[22] Patriotism is not devotion to America as an abstract
principle or ideal, but as a concrete reality. Nor is
patriotism uncritical loyalty to America "as it is."
Imagination presents to us America as an ambiguous reality, a
problem and an object of anxiety. It discloses America as
potentiality, and poses the question of the relation of its future
to its destiny and promise. When that relation of actuality
to promise is problematic, imagination elicits the sense of falling
short, of having lost one's way: the "directionless vitality" of
the American city; the "blight of error, broken promise, lost
dream, unachieved desire" of which Thomas Wolfe speaks. The
pathos of our attachment is that we identify with and belong to
both the reality and dream of America. Our pathos is that we
long for the yet-unrealized fusion of the "given" nature of America
as it is and the gracious promise of its vocation and
destiny. Our pathos is that our patriotism must be compounded
of love and judgement, affirmation and critique, as critical love
and loving criticism. But out of the pathos of that dialectic
of nature and grace is born the patriotism that bestows both the
"passion to preserve" and the "power to change."
Place, Patriotism, and the Care of the
Earth
[23] Issues of place, patriotism, and the care of the earth are
even more urgent today than they were a half century ago, but they
are not often connected. The rhetoric of patriotism usually
expresses attachment or loyalty to national identity, values,
symbols, leaders, and policies rather than a sense of
identification with a particular community or landscape. But
the values of patriotism can only be enacted in, and for the sake
of, particular communities and places. National leadership and
policies must be judged in terms of their impacts on particular
places, both within and beyond the nation's borders. Over
against the temptation to contract one's sympathy and vision that
might arise from a focus on a particular place, one must set a
theology that both affirms the potential of every place to be a
bearer of grace, and judges the actuality of every place as falling
short of what God intends for it.
[24] "Patriotic" concerns over national security in
post-September 11 America have often eclipsed or been used as
rationales for weakening environmental protection and regulation,
but care for the earth must be seen as an integral part of
patriotism. As conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand
County Almanac (1948):
. . . Do we not already sing
our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of
the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love?
Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter
downriver. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no
function except to turn turbines, float barges, or carry off
sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate
whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the
animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest
and most beautiful species.[16]
[25] Our "patriotisms," our loyalties and attachments to
homelands and familiar, special places, are particular
instantiations of the human calling to care for the earth and of
the ongoing dialogue between God, humanity, and nature.
Recognizing our place within this dialogue as individuals,
communities, nations, and a species requires humility and an
acceptance of limits. Recognition of the diversity and scope
of grace ought to disabuse us of any pretensions to
"exceptionalism" as a nation or a species. Our species is not
the sole center of value on earth. Nor is any nation the sole
repository of virtue, or the sole object of divine calling and
blessing. A dialogical view of our nation as one among the
community of nations, and of our species as one among the community
of life on earth, stands in sharp contrast to a "monological"
approach that seeks to unilaterally impose its will on nature or
the rest of the world.
[26] To care for the earth, in turn, means to care for
particular places, including those where people live and
work. Many people may feel that exotic endangered species or
threatened wildernesses are too remote from their daily experience
to be relevant to their lives, or to distant to be affected by
their own actions. But it may be possible to engage such
people in knowing about and caring about the creatures and
landscapes in their own neighborhood or back yard, and in doing so,
to awaken them to the patterns and movements of grace that surround
them every day.
Envoi
[27] What ethical imperatives follow from such an understanding
of attachment to place as a gift of grace? Pay attention to
your surroundings, and how they shape your sense of meaning and
identity. Nurture a sense of place. Learn to read the
landscape. Cultivate, too, a "tough and true" patriotism that
includes a recognition of limits, a sense of responsibility for the
care of the earth, and an appreciation of the love and loyalty that
people in other parts of the world feel for their homelands.
[28] As we do these things, we may become more aware of how
grace is woven into the very texture of the places we inhabit, and
how our human dialogues with those places are affirmations or
repudiations of the gifts of nature, community, and culture that
are offered there, frustrations or fragmentary and ambiguous
realizations of the potentialities for grace peculiar to those
corners of creation. And we may also come to see how those
dialogues with place are also dialogues with the God who is
revealed to us in the incarnate Word who came and dwelt among us,
and in whom all things cohere.
© October 2003
Journal of Lutheran Ethics (JLE)
Volume 3, Issue 10
[1] Robert S. Ellwood, 1950: Crossroads
of American Religious Life (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox
Press, 2000).
[2] William Vogt, Road to Survival (New
York: Sloan and Associates, 1948); Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered
Planet (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948).
[3] Hal Kane, Triumph of the Mundane:
The Unseen Trends That Shape Our Lives and Environment (Washington
DC: Island Press, 2001), 57.
[4] For overviews of Sittler's
theology, see: Peter W. Bakken, "Introduction: Nature as a Theater
of Grace: The Ecological Theology of Joseph Sittler" and Steven
Bouma-Prediger, "Conclusion: Sittler the Pioneering Ecological
Theologian" in Joseph Sittler, Evocations of Grace: Writings on
Ecology, Theology and Ethics, ed. Steven Bouma-Prediger and Peter
Bakken (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 1-19, 223-233.
[5] "Excerpts from Essays in Nature and
Grace," in Evocations of Grace, 153-154.
[6] "A Theology for Earth," in
Evocations of Grace, 29, 30.
[7] "Commencement Address," in
Evocations of Grace, 37.
[8] "Commencement Address," 35.
[9] In an essay from 1958, Sittler
critiques religious and secular forms of the theology of progress.
The Calvinist drive to order society, he says, "is the reality
under our general assumption that America, in a peculiar way, is
the land and we are the people most amenable to and obedient to
God's moral purposes. This identification of the American
experiment and our religious faith is appealed to as the guarantor
of our success, the holy ground of our indestructibility. . . . The
line from Puritanism to the secular theology of progress is a
direct one . . . ." "The Wood's In Trouble," Discourse: A Review of
the Liberal Arts 1 (July 1958), 141-142. For perpetual metanoia in
history as an alternative to "progress," see Rosemary Radford
Ruether, Sexism and God Talk (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983),
252-256.
[10] "The Wood's In Trouble," 145.
Applied to human beings and societies, "judgement" clearly implies
a moral critique. But moral judgement would be inappropriate if
applied to nature: There is no indication Sittler believed in a
"cosmic fall." In relation to nonhuman nature, "judgement" would
best be seen as an awareness of limits, of unrealized values and
unfulfilled possibilities. It is not that nature is judged "bad,"
but that it was created "good" rather than "perfect." It is subject
to the "pathos of passingness," and now has been degraded by human
carelessness. Most places we experience are the products of both
human agency and natural processes, so the dialectic of love and
judgment would especially be part of a Christian evaluation of
nature as we normally encounter it, partially reshaped by human
hands.
[11] Douglas John Hall, Imaging God:
Dominion as Stewardship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 36-37.
[12] Sittler, "The Wood's In Trouble,"
146. No source for the quote is given, but it is found in G. K.
Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1924),
122.
[13] Landscape architect Anne Whiston
Spirn develops this dialogical metaphor at length in The Language
of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
[14] Spirn, 267.
[15] Sittler, "The Wood's In Trouble,"
145. Again, no source is given but it is found in Chesterton,
120-121.
[16] Aldo Leopold, A Sand County
Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), 204.