Helianthus Press (2021). Pbk 178 pages. £10.90.
Though theology has been a significant part of the career of Dr Maynard Kaufman he does not regard himself as a professional theologian, but rather an explorer of the ‘theological possibilities appropriate for our time of environmental crisis.’ This is reflected in this selection of essays that are both diverse and profound. They also reflect the evolution of the author’s own life from its beginnings in a traditional Mennonite community in the 1930s that had become increasingly fundamentalist: he recalls that as a child his greatest fear was that he would wake up in the morning and find that his parents had been ‘raptured’ up to heaven by Jesus, leaving him behind.
His spiritual journey is one that takes him from a ‘Christocentric Unitarianism’ focused on personal salvation to a rejection of a belief in personal salvation. This reflects an alignment with the thinking of Bonhoeffer on the inadequacy of the theology of redemption in a world come of age. Rather he sees, ‘religion is no longer a process of redemption in which man is saved, but a process of creative activity in which the human spirit is in reciprocal relation to the Holy Spirit.’
For Kaufman the Holy Spirit is a cosmic power not limited to humanity or a particular religious tradition; it is a transcultural and ‘independent cosmic power quite beyond the historical particularity of Christianity’: Ruach (Hebrew), Mana (Melanesian), Wakan (Dakota Indian), Shi (Chinese), and so on. Such beliefs are an expression of the sense of the living spirit of Mother Earth, what Hildegard of Bingen called the ‘greening power in motion, making all things grow.’ Such belief provides the basis for a sense of the sanctity of nature.
Formative influences in Kaufman’s discovery of an earthbound spirituality – he no longer believes in personal salvation from this world – were the powerful eco-feminist works that began to appear in the 1970s. These not only challenged male dominance in society but the religious legitimation of this dominance that ‘made the church sacred as it desacralised nature.’ For Kaufman a significant moment in this story was the addition to the creed of Western Christianity of the word filioque – that the Spirit proceeds from the Father ‘and the Son’. This emphasised the male monopoly of divinity and ‘virtually ignored the Holy Spirit as a divine power’ distinct from Christ.
But this history had deeper biblical roots in the distinctive nature of Judaism that defined its God, unlike other religions of the Middle East, in opposition to the pagan gods of nature who were ‘merely earthly’. Earth and natural fertility were seen as something feminine and to be exploited. The ultimate expression of this mentality, for Kaufman, is the Faust legend that has given the West its defining myth: ‘Faust is the culture hero of Western civilisation, as Prometheus was for the ancient Greeks.’ It is this Faustian striving ‘that is the demonic dimension that forever denies contentment or satisfaction’ and through which ‘the biosphere is replaced by a man-made technosphere.’ This mentality is now at the core of our environmental crisis.
If we are to break free from this mind-set of destructive anthropocentricism and reconnect with the Earth, Kaufman advocates a reconsideration of paganism. Whilst recognising what a charged word this is, he argues that it takes us to a consideration of the crucial issue: the understanding of time in Judeo-Christianity. As a student he was constantly reminded that the God of Israel ‘is active in history’ and that it is within history, as a linear and teleological process, that revelation occurs. It is the secularised version of this linear process that has given us the ideology of progress, ‘which is now measured by economic growth.’
In contrast, the cyclical understanding of the cosmic and Earth rhythms implicit in the primal spiritualities of humanity grows from respect for particular places and creatures. It is this that will help us ‘to move beyond our cultural paralysis and to cope with the crisis of climate change.’ With such views it comes as no surprise to learn that much of Kaufman’s life has been spent in promoting agrarian revival and environmentalism. He also calls for a new overarching myth that binds us both together and to the Earth. Evolution seems to provide a good basis for this.
Dominic Kirkham’s first book From Monk to Modernity was published in Britain by SOF in 2015. This was followed by Our Shadowed World (2019) and Horror and Hope (2021), both published in the USA.