Is this a cutting-edge work of radical theology? It depends on what you are used to, I suppose. In the context of the mainstream Christian churches, much of this book looks like heresy. But to many of us outside, it reads like an extended statement of the bloody obvious.
The mainstream churches are still sufficiently large to make it possible for someone to live their whole mental and spiritual life within the sets of ideas which they provide. Even today, there is enough going on within the ecclesiastical bubble, and certainly enough history to draw on, to keep even the most intellectually hyperactive person fully occupied.
For one of that bubble's inhabitants, this new book by Lloyd Geering is likely to appear challenging, maybe irritating, perhaps exciting; an informative window looking out to some of what lies beyond mainstream Christianity. Some readers might even develop a desire to climb out of that window, but others are going to be shocked and offended by what they see.
Lloyd Geering's theology is very strongly influenced by ecology. In wording which is fairly typical of his message, he says: "… since caring for the Earth can now be seen as our supreme duty, then our traditional responsibility to God and our newly-found responsibility to the Earth have become virtually the same." And: "Because we are so dependent on the physical universe as a whole and on this planet Earth in particular, the natural world itself must be the first focus of our faith." He sees this approach as the present-day application of the principles of liberal and radical theology which have led some people beyond literal interpretations of the Bible and out into understandings based on scholarship about sources, historical context, mythic reinterpretation, Jungian and existentialist perspectives, and all the rest of it. All of that is seen by Geering as leading today to the need for the prioritisation within religion and spirituality of the ecological crisis, for an understanding of theology shaped by that crisis, and for an interpretation of the history of religion in which differing attitudes to the natural material world are centre-stage.
This book is an eloquent statement of that point of view, and I hope it will find readers who need its message. But my difficulty is that the approach to theology which Geering's argument is based on, although it was shocking and exciting at the time of Honest to God, shocks only the most shockable today.
The excitement has gradually drained away from it.
Similarly, the ecological message of the book would have been new and interesting at one time, perhaps 30 years ago, but doesn't still feel like that now.
Perhaps I am not typical of the readers the author of this book had in mind, but I want these debates to move on a little. I would like to know – given all the rejection of literalism – what remains of value in the Christian story, and why it might be seen as better than some other story. I would like to know why Lloyd Geering, and others of similar views, don't go further and just wholeheartedly become pagans or pantheists, because that is where much of his argument appears to point.
No doubt there are good reasons for being neither a pagan nor a pantheist, and the Christian tradition can supply some of those reasons, but unless these questions are addressed properly (the book dismisses pantheism in less than a page), Lloyd Geering's ecotheology speaks only to one audience, those with some connection with the churches, and not to its other potential audience, those who start from the other end of the argument, beginning from ecology and asking the sorts of questions about spirituality which often follow from taking ecology seriously.
For example, what does Lloyd Geering think of Starhawk, a leading American pagan author and thinker about green spirituality? It would be interesting to read his thoughts on engaging with her books, such as The Earth Path and The Spiral Dance. Similarly, if we can reinterpret Easter and use it to celebrate the resurrection of nature every spring, why not go the whole way and celebrate instead the eight festivals of the neopagan seasonal calendar?
Without an intelligent engagement with what, on a fairly large scale, now lies in the field of green spirituality outside and beyond Christianity, books like this feel like just part of the 'long, withdrawing roar' of the Christian faith in Matthew Arnold's famous poem.
The roar was interesting for a time, but now there should be more to say.
Victor Anderson works as an economist for an environmental campaigning organisation.
Book under review: Coming Back to Earth by Lloyd Geering, Polebridge Press (Salem, Oregon 2009), 218 pages, $12.24 from Amazon.com, ISBN: 978-1-59815-016-2.