The Mystic Way of Evangelism by Elaine A. Heath

Author:Elaine A. Heath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Evangelism/Spirituality;REL030000;REL062000;Evangelistic work;Witness bearing (Christianity);Missions;Mysticism
ISBN: 9781493410323
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2017-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

Eco-evangelism and the New Atheism

Eco-evangelism must also engage “the new atheism” being preached in the name of “nature.”42 Science and religion, according to proponents of the new atheism, are mutually exclusive. Richard Dawkins’s Foundation for Reason and Science is out to debunk religion, which Dawkins calls “the God delusion.”43 His book of the same title is a best seller, and Dawkins is not alone. Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett, Victor J. Stenger, and Christopher Hitchens are only a handful of militant atheists who are convinced that Christianity is toxic to human life.44 According to them, Christians use religion to oppress people and nature, and also refuse to acknowledge the truth about the world found in science. The cause of violence, they say, is religion. They are determined to evangelize the world to atheism.

Neuroscience and biochemistry are used to demythologize religious experience, everything from mystical visions45 to altruism.46 These spiritual phenomena, we are told, are all subtle forms of genetic adaptation, in one way or another related to the survival of the fittest. Bonaventure’s perspective that God works through natural phenomena, that God is revealed in nature, is not allowed. Woolman’s belief that there is no division between natural and supranatural,47 sacred and secular, is not allowed. The solution to the world’s ills in this schema is to expose religion for the utter fraud that it is and embrace “reality,” a deterministic, materialistic worldview. Wendell Berry calls this movement the “religification and evangelization of science,”48 with science taking upon itself the stature of the church in the Middle Ages.49 The erosion of moral constraints on science-and-technology-wed-to-industry is inevitable in such a mechanistic worldview.

Eco-evangelism must respond to these challenges, articulating a robust theology of creation. The church must engage the increasingly complex ethical issues of biotechnology. But even more, we must act. We must inhabit our apologetics in an increasingly mutilated world. The unholy alliance of science, technology, and industry has given birth to monstrous offspring that threaten the very future of the planet. From factory farming to the harvesting of human eggs, commodified science and technology comes with a utilitarian ethic. Life is cheap. Forests, animals, and people are raw materials. Everyone and everything is expendable.50 Whatever brings the greatest profit is worth the violence.

God is calling the church in the night to retrieve the meaning of stewardship first and foremost as caring for the earth.51 Evangelism is not good news until it is good news for all of creation, for humanity, animals, plants, water, and soil, for the earth that God created and called good.

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