p. 19.
How is religion to be an agent of transformation if religion itself is not transformed? A recovery of creation-centered spirituality will bring an excitement back to the adventure that faith is meant to be.
It will invigorate lives of people and their institutions, awakening them to their spiritual potential. But it will not do this until and unless religion confesses its sins in having followed too one-sidedly and too dutifully the fall/redemption paradigm.
Frederick Turner, writing from the perspective of the Native American experience with Christians, observes: "With a few bright exceptions Christian mystics are characterized more by their denial of large aspects of creation than by any joyful acceptance of the same; by negative desires instead of positive; by the imagery and love of death rather than commitment to life."
Fall/redemption theology concentrates on sin - yet sin, after all, is part of the anthropomorphizing of our existence. For if the universe is twenty billion years old, human sin is only as old as humanity or at most four million years old. This means that fall/redemption theology leaves out nineteen billion, nine hundred ninety-six million years of divine/earthly history!
One result of this rather substantial lacuna is, ironically, the very trivializing of sin, the inability to grasp sins like geocide and ecocide and biocide of which the human race is fully capable.
Another consequence is the trivializing of the gospel message itself. Gandhi complained of "Christianity without Christ," a far-too-common situation in his opinion. Father Edward Schillebeeckx comments that "without creation, spirituality becomes pure projection". How much pure projection wanders about the church pieties of today? How much of the piety of "Jesus is my best friend" or "Jesus saves" comes perilously close to pure projection - when in fact Jesus, like all the prophets, taught people to heal themselves and others, to be instruments of New Creation, and to do works greater than he did? How much of the gospel, how much of the person and message and spirit of Jesus has been lost by overconcentration on fall/redemption religion in the West?
For example, following a recent lecture I received a letter that said, "I ran into the creation-centered tradition during my wanderings away from the church three years ago. To discover that it is a part of my own tradition is a true gift and shockingly exciting." A man who discovered the creation tradition told me he had two deep reactions: first, an ecstasy and profound joy; and secondly, a deep anger that all his life his religious instruction had deprived him of knowing that the creation tradition in fact existed in his own Christian faith.
p. 22.
The abysmal, theologically one-sided dominance of Augustine over Jesus and the prophets must cease. And the hegemony of salvation as deliverance over salvation as blessing must be let go of. When this happens then theology will join practice.
Many livers of spirituality within and without the churches have already moved into the living of the twenty-six theological themes discussed in this book. I realize now why so many persons, on hearing me lecture on creation spirituality over the years, have said to me, "Now you have articulated what I live and have experienced."
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