Debra Rienstra | The Discipline of Hope

Rienstra:

If all creatures give praise to God, then what does it mean if we are actually destroying these creatures that give praise, we are diminishing the praise of creation to God and the immense intricacy and beauty and diversity of this created world. It is an insult to God, that we are careless about it, and then avoid thinking about it. So for some reason species extinction just does it for me. And the correct response to that is both lament and repentance.

Debra Rienstra, professor of English at Calvin University.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump.

It’s not often on the podcast that I get to talk to a professor of English literature — this is, after all, a podcast dedicated to questions of science and faith. But when I read Debra Rienstra’s latest book, I found her ideas to be really important and insightful for those of us seeking to understand the relationship between scientific and faith-inspired approaches to the natural world. In this episode, we talk about that new book, Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth. There is much wisdom and even beauty in her writing about the pending climate catastrophe, though also grief and lament. The challenge that lies ahead for us is so large that it can rightly be overwhelming. But Rienstra finds solace in doing the “small work” of healing the Earth in our own backyards. She does not shy away from a critique of Christians, but she is driven to this critique by her deep love and commitment to the church, and by her hope for a better future in the community of Christ.

Let’s get to the conversation.

Stump:

Debra Rienstra, welcome to the podcast. I’m very glad to be talking to you.

Rienstra: 

Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Stump:

I don’t talk to too many literature professors on the podcast about science and faith. But after reading your new book, it makes me think that I need to talk to more people like you. We’ll do a deep dive into the book in a bit, but first, we’d like to get to know you and maybe figure out how you’d end up on a BioLogos podcast like this. Where’d you come from? What kind of child were you? When did you first think I want to be a literature professor when I grow up?

Rienstra:

I grew up in West Michigan and I was a curious child. I was interested in everything, including science and nature as a little kid, and books definitely. Even as a little kid, I was just interested in the weedy lots outside our house, the vacant lots. And my mother taught me to love Lake Michigan, so I had that as early as a child. But in school, I discovered books, and then I discovered music, and didn’t look back for a lot of years. Even though I did well in science classes, I took the college level chemistry class with all the pre-med majors, and that was great. But I knew all along that it was books and language and literature, that was my real love, and writing. For many, many years, that’s what I did.

Stump:

What became your specialty within that broader area of English and literature and words?

Rienstra:

I do early modern British literature, most interested in religious poetry of the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

Stump:

Well tell us a little about your own religious background then too if you would.

Rienstra:

My family were very devout. We were members of the Christian Reformed Church, this little Dutch enclave that’s quite common here in West Michigan. As I get older, the more I get older, the more I look back on those days and realize it was kind of this magical sweet spot of community. The faith community was all I knew really, people I went to a Christian day school. Everybody there went to different churches, we were all members of congregations, our families went every Sunday, in fact, twice every Sunday. We all went to catechism class, youth group, we were in choirs. It was this beautiful expression of the triangle we used to call church-home-school, where we all kind of understood each other in terms of religion. People in it, at least where I was, were just genuinely devout, lovely people. I mean, no one’s perfect, of course. I realize that not everywhere in my particular denomination was this lovely, and maybe I’m putting this nostalgic patina on this, but I was spared the kind of ugliness that was happening elsewhere in the denomination. I think I got the best of this love for the Bible, love for theology and this sort of genuine personal piety. It was a sweet place to grow up and it gave me a sense of identity and a lot of good biblical and theological knowledge. And just a love for worship. Not everybody came out with that same result, some people just felt stifled in the enclave and spun off into their own thing. But it was a beautiful place in my experience.

Stump:

Before we get to faith and science, let me ask you about faith and literature. How does your faith influence the literature you read and teach and write? And maybe the other direction too, how does the literature you read and teach and write influence your faith? 

Rienstra:

This is a great Calvin University interview question. 

Stump:

I’m just lobbing it up there for you to knock out of the park.

Rienstra:

It’s been a long time since I’ve interviewed at Calvin [laughs]. It’s easy in the early modern period because literature is just drenched with religion and religious questions. Which is one of the reasons I think I was attracted to the early Renaissance or the early modern period, as we call it now. I was interested and knowledgeable about the theological concerns of poets and writers in that period, so it was a natural fit for me. Certainly reading that stuff from another historical period has enriched my faith with I would say, perspective. This is the Reformation we’re talking about. People were confused, there was a lot of contention, it was a time of huge upheaval. I look around the world today and I think, oh, I recognize this. This is a time of upheaval and I am familiar with the sort of agonizing that went on in the 16th century over this, I’m talking about England in particular, but it was true on the continent as well. This is not as frightening to me as it might be for people who don’t have that same sense of other periods of history when this kind of religious upheaval was going on. As far as how literature over the decades has influenced my faith, one of the things I love about teaching at Calvin is we’re very willing to read all kinds of things. We don’t necessarily, I would suppose we center Christian literature in a way, but we certainly embrace the full literary tradition and feel like there’s pedagogical purpose to reading all kinds of things. In recent years, I’ve been involved with Calvin’s Festival of Faith and Writing. Through that, and through teaching my writing courses, I also teach creative writing at Calvin and that’s something I came to later. Just the beautiful variety of poetry and, nonfiction is my field so I’ve read so much nonfiction in the last few years. It just gives me a sense of the creative diversity that God has imbued in humanity. Even people who don’t profess Christian faith or any faith at all, there’s this kind of amazing wisdom and creative accomplishment that is true everywhere. I think that is the work of the Spirit.

Stump:

Literature can sometimes be thought to be, I don’t know what the right word is, a little rebellious maybe, and maybe threatening. There’s a lot in the news these days of book censorship in schools and such, right? Usually on this podcast, I talk to people about the tensions between science and faith? Are there similar kinds of tensions between literature and faith tendencies that good Christian people are worried about sometimes if their kids get exposed to the wrong literatures?

Rienstra:

Sure, always. I think once again, at Calvin, we have this view of common grace. All truth is God’s truth, right? That allows us to examine without fear, literary works that we might not say, that’s my worldview, too. But what can we learn from reading this? Are there critiques that in this worldview that are appropriate? Maybe as an example, I might mention Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a recent memoir, maybe 2015. Here’s a guy who’s an atheist, but his critique of easy brushing over of historical suffering, and that’s a tendency that he sees in the black church as well, in the sense of their suffering was not in vain. He critiques that and says, you can’t just brush over the suffering of people from generations before, because some other outcome happened later in history. I think that’s a really fair critique. So that’s the sort of thing that makes it very exciting to teach at Calvin, because our students are eager for that kind of discerning wisdom in what they read. They can’t be protected forever in some enclave. They’re very eager to gain those muscles of discernment and it’s just a joy to do that with them.

Stump:

This is a line of dialogue that I’m tempted to pursue further, but I think I need to pull us back to talking about science or I’m going to lose most of my audience here. And you have written this book that’s directly relevant to the kinds of things we like to talk about at BioLogos. But before we get into the content of the book itself, I want to stay just a bit longer at the personal level here to begin with and how a person like you came to write a book like this because I laughed out loud when I read the lines where you describe yourself as “an indoor cat happiest at my desk reading”, and that you’re “only minimally intimate with the dirt plants, animals, wilderness, or oceans that nature writers are always rhapsodizing about.” But as you look back at your life now, can you identify experiences that may have at least laid the groundwork for you to write about nature like this?

Rienstra:

I would look back to my childhood visiting the lake, visiting the lake shore, which I’ve always loved. It’s a beautiful, wild place of mystery. If you haven’t seen Lake Michigan before, it’s hard to describe. It’s like looking at an ocean, but it’s a freshwater sea. You cannot see across Lake Michigan, it’s a very large body of water. We have these beautiful coastal dunes in Michigan, which I just took for granted, but they’re very unusual, in terms of the whole Earth’s geography. They’re shifting and changing and beautiful. We have a lot of clouds here so our skies are very beautiful. I think that sort of aesthetic response to the natural world was just in me as a kid, even. Of course I was trained in science and math like anybody else in high school and even through college, K through 12 and even through college. I think in later years, I have just felt like something has been missing. It was really through starting to read about climate change that I realized I need to get back in touch with the natural world. I’ve lived in the world of literature and music, music is a big part of my life too. I was never raised as a kid who went camping with their parents or something, my dad was horrified by the thought of camping. No, absolutely not. We lived in a house that was like hermetically sealed from the outside. So there was just some little piece of longing in me that I think after we raised our kids, and felt like I was in a place to learn something new, reading about the climate crisis, really through the festival of faith and writing. Somehow I got in charge of inviting nature writers, so I started reading Kathleen Dean Moore and Bill McKibben, especially. Both of them came to campus, so in my preparation to host them on campus, I read several of their books and was just convicted through books — obviously, a literature professor is going to be convicted through books — convicted through books that this was a fundamental reality of our time that had to be contended with. Then I started reading eco theology and that’s where I thought, this has been a missing piece for me my whole life. I know a lot about theology, a lot about the Bible, but I have never thought about moths and waterfalls, and what’s the theology of this? This whole area of eco theology was very exciting to me as this kind of missing piece that without a theological way of contending with our materiality, and with our relationship to the more than human creation, there’s just a big piece of reality that we’re not being theological about. I started to read the Bible again through that lens and read a lot of eco theologians and have just found every minute of it fascinating and wonderful.

Stump:

So you, the professor of poetry, start writing a book about nature. I loved your description of the difference between science and poetry from your experience doing field work with an undergrad class at the Michigan dunes, you write, “the instructions that we taped into our write in the rain lab notebooks suggested that quantitative data are preferable to qualitative, but qualitative data are better than no data at all. Well, there it is, I thought. The distinction between science and poetry. In science you measure things in poetry you imagine and feel and metaphorize.” I don’t think anyone will accuse you of having written a scientific textbook here, but neither is it a poem. How do you categorize what you’ve written? Or where will the Library of Congress put it in their classification system? 

Rienstra:

I keep writing books that nobody can classify. It’s very frustrating in the marketing process, it’s really hard to know where to put it. I would call this part memoir, part theology. The fundamental metaphor of the book is based in biology, this idea of refugia, which is a biological concept, and I learned about it through Kathleen Dean Moore’s book, Great Tide Rising, and was immediately struck with how useful this metaphor is. So refugia are places where biodiversity persists and can expand from in the midst of crisis or disturbance. There’s a whole field called refugial biology where you basically study places that survive like a wildfire or maybe an insect invasion or maybe some extreme event like a volcano eruption. Refugial biology studies why some little spots survive and others don’t, because if we know more about what spots survive then we understand biological resilience better. The idea is that this can be a really useful tool in helping the more than human world adapt to climate change. It’s about climate adaptations too. I was struck with that metaphor and I thought, of course, the first thing I do is think, okay, how can I metaphorize this? But I was really struck with the idea of the church as a refugial space. Isn’t that what the church should be? Shouldn’t we always be the place where people survive in the midst of crisis and disturbance, because we’re always in the midst of crisis and disturbance. It’s really bad right now, but we’re always in the midst of some crisis and disturbance. Isn’t our job to be this welcoming space that has permeable boundaries to the rest of society or whatever? Isn’t our job to be this safe, but also brave space where deconstruction happens, and where we build resilience and capacities to survive, and then grow out of that space? It’s a shelter, but it’s only a shelter for a little while, the goal is not to stay safe and enclosed. The goal is to build capacity and grow, connect with other refugial spaces. The whole thing just struck me as this interesting metaphor for people of faith and for the church and I started going down that path. Meanwhile, learning more about biological refugia was just a way to kind of bolster what I was thinking about.

Stump:

So you say, “God’s preferred way seems to be less like walls or combat boots, more like a tray of seedlings.” Maybe explain, because I think this metaphor is really rich and really fruitful, but maybe explain those metaphors a bit there, contrasting the approach to faith that sees God’s way more like walls or combat boots, as opposed to this tray of seedlings. I’m particularly interested here in the implications of these metaphors for how we understand our role in the world in relation to God’s way, to how God intends to accomplish ultimate goals.

Rienstra:

Of course, no metaphor is perfect to its very end, that’s just the nature of metaphors. They’re always suggestive and generative at best. But I do think we are always tempted, in the church, toward either hiding, that’s the idea of walls, we’re going to find a bunker and we’re going to get the pure people here, and we’re going to be safe, and we’re going to do things the correct way, and we’re gonna avoid interaction with the pollutants of the larger society. There’s always that temptation. But then there’s also the sort of triumphalist temptation to dominate culture and sort of win over everything, not just with the gospel, but like with our cultural ways of living so that society looks exactly like how we want it, this kind of conquering metaphor. I would say the Reformed tradition has a little bit of that danger, because we have this idea of transforming culture for Christ, which is a good thing, I don’t mean to criticize that. But it can be a little bit triumphalistic. The refugial metaphor is kind of a way between those that I think is really helpful. Right now, especially in American culture, where we see both those tendencies — to become the church of empire, where we are in charge of the whole empire, or to become hiding in a bunker somewhere. But refugia is all about seeing places where life is already persisting in healthy ways. By life I mean cultural and spiritual life as well as actual biological life, finding those spaces and nurturing them, or creating them where they seem to be missing. There’s so many people who are wandering in the wilderness in this time of crisis, convergence and fear and anxiety. Can we be the place where good things grow? It’s not a closed space, the boundaries are permeable, as I say, and the idea is to kind of let it emerge and grow. But it’s all about starting with the small and the humble and letting that, as Jesus is in the parable of the mustard seed, letting that become the great bush where the birds can take shelter.

Stump:

Anything more here on the second part of my question there about the relationship of our work, our role as opposed to what God is doing? What are we doing? What is God doing? And how does this play out particularly in this refugia metaphor? Or is that not even a good question to ask about separating those things out? Can we identify what we’re doing as opposed to what God is doing? Or what God does in spite of what we do?

Rienstra:

Yeah, all of the above. It’s always a good question.

Stump:

[laughs] Is there ever a good answer to the question is the problem.

Rienstra:  

There’s the theological answer, which is, at least from my perspective, my tradition, the theological answer is, look, God is sovereign. Anything that happens is by grace, anything we do is by the work of the Holy Spirit. Yes, amen. Experientially, we feel ourselves as having choices, and the need to cooperate with God. I think that’s what God wants, I don’t think God wants robots, God wants us to be friends. Jesus says, I have called you friends. I think we are called to action. God works through people and not just people of faith. Here, again, the idea of common grace is that the Holy Spirit can work through anyone. We see that happening always. Especially in the climate movement now, I’ve just been so struck by what I see as the work of the Spirit happening in contexts that have nothing to do with the church, or very little to do with the church. Also through the church, but we have a lot to learn from people who are not part of the church in addressing climate change in ways that are just and fruitful.

Stump:

Here’s maybe another way of asking a similar question, and maybe the answer is the same. You cite theologian Thomas Berry in this a few times, who says that “the great work is for us in this generation and our children to manage a transition to a new era where we understand and behave as if we are members of a community of beings who all depend on each other.” That’s a huge goal. That’s enormous work, right? And you suggest we might more manageably identify a little work that each of us can be involved in, contrasted to the great work that’s talked about there. Much of your book, I think, is a description of the little work that you’ve identified and set yourself to doing. That’s very inspiring to the rest of us, to identify our little work. But I want to ask, is that enough? If each of us does our little work, will that be enough to bring about the big sweeping changes of the great work that needs to happen at the scale of societies and countries in order to set our world to rights again with regard to climate?

Rienstra:

Yes, scale is the really interesting question here. Once again, I would answer no, God has to do it, absolutely. But the idea of all of us finding our little work, there’s a lot of reasons for that. The usual complaint or the usual anxiety about the hugeness of the climate crisis, people saying, what can I do? I’m just one person. A lot of the big leaders in the climate movement will say, well stop just being one person. The idea is we all do this together. Even if we all are completely virtuous, and we all have solar panels, and we all stop eating meat, is that going to do it? No, it’s systemic, we have to have infrastructure changes, legal system changes. The scale is huge. But to think of it that way is just overwhelming. This is where I think the refugia metaphor is helpful, if you think about finding small spaces, right where you are, and nurturing those, the next thing you know you realize that somebody else is doing a very similar thing in the next town over and you start creating a network or a connection. Maybe the biological metaphor or the biological analogue here is wildlife corridors. One of the things we’re learning about species extinction is that places where particular endangered species live, especially if the problem is habitat destruction, if we can create small space aces that then connect, maybe for some species, it actually works okay. Like if the bear population in one little spot can’t connect with the bear population in another little spot, they’re not going to interbreed and the population is going to die out, there’s technical terms for that process. But if there’s a corridor between them, they can actually find each other and start rebuilding species, start rebuilding genetic diversity. I think the same thing is true. The problem of scale is an interesting question with this, because somehow you have to be working on both scales at once. In order to get past that feeling of being so small and helpless and overwhelmed, I think it helps to just say, alright, well, what are the refugia right where I am? Literal refugia in the natural world, but cultural and spiritual refugia too? How can I nurture those, and then how can I start making connections, corridors between what I’m doing and what other people are doing. Sooner or later, those really do have power, those small spaces connecting really do have power. It’s not the same as being the head of the UN and having power like that, it’s not the same. But all of our work together not only helps us remain hopeful, the actual action itself creates hope. Everything we do is open to the viewing of others and that inspiration is really quite powerful, as people who’ve been involved in any kind of social movement will tell you. There is a kind of snowball effect that can happen.

[musical interlude]

BioLogos:

Hey Language of God listeners. Thanks for tuning in to another conversation about the intersection of science and Christian Faith. If you’d like to hear more of these conversations you might be interested in inviting one of our speakers to your church, college, or another event near you. The BioLogos Voices speakers bureau includes some of the top scientists and scholars in the BioLogos community and they are all passionate about sharing their stories and expertise with others. Go to biologos.org/voices to learn more about how to request a speaker or find out if any of them will be coming to an event near you. Now, back to the conversation!

Stump:

In your book, your chapter titles describe transitions from typical attitudes we might find ourselves having with regard to climate change to more helpful ones. These, I assume, are parts of your own journey. From despair to preparation, from alienation to kinship from consuming to healing. I’ll say my favorite here is chapter four, avoiding to lamenting, 

Rienstra:

You like lamenting, that’s your favorite?

Stump:

[laughs] It was my favorite chapter to read. I don’t know, maybe it tapped into my own melancholia itself anyway. But we’ll be airing this conversation as the season of Lent is going on, so it’s appropriate I think that we dwell on that a bit. Avoiding might be a kind of natural coping mechanism and it’s increasingly obvious that we can’t just keep doing that. How is lament the proper transition from that and is itself an appropriate response to what we see going on in the world? 

Rienstra:

I think that the church, the Christian tradition, has the capacities we need. We don’t always practice them. The ability to ask why and to be sad is definitely there in the scriptures. The Psalms are full of lament, and lament is actually different from repentance, repentance is a different thing. Lament is feeling sad, wondering why, and bringing that to God. Why is this happening? Why must we suffer? How long oh Lord? That’s lament. Later, you might decide that well, part of the problem here is my sin, my guilt, my finitude, and there’s a role for repentance as well. So chapter four is about leveraging what you might call Christians skills, for this period of time, and especially for some reason species extinction is what really does it for me. I should feel more deeply the suffering of human beings, which I do, but for some reason species extinction just really gets me. I think it’s because, none of what’s happening in the really disturbing extinction trends that we’re seeing right now, none of that is the fault of the little frogs, or the moths, or the bats, or anything else that’s going extinct, right? It’s us, we’re doing this. We are such a huge disturbance as human beings, there’s so many of us, and we do so much to habitat and pollution that the creatures are suffering. The part that really struck me is the idea that if all creatures give praise to God, then what does it mean if we are actually destroying these creatures that give praise? We are diminishing the praise of creation to God and the immense intricacy and beauty and diversity of this created world. It is an insult to God, that we are careless about it, and then avoid thinking about it. For some reason, species extinction just does it for me. And the correct response to that is both lament and repentance. Lament in, we need to be upset about this. We know why, but we need to lament what’s being lost, lament is really a response of love. If you love what’s being lost, you will lament. Then repentance is the other thing, repentance is feeling bad about it, recognizing your own complicity, and then turning to that repentance includes contrition as well as a change of life. Those two different skills, we should know those things, we should not have to be denying this, we know how to do this. We don’t like it, but we know how to do it. For Christians, we should in no way be avoiding or denying, we should be the ones who are able to look the truth square in the eye and know how to deal with it.

Stump: 

Yet it seems like we aren’t the ones who do this the best. You bring that up in this chapter, the church comes into focus for a special kind of upbraiding. In a passage, you say “the professional scientists I know best are also Christians. And they wonder why aren’t more Christians sad or angry? Why aren’t Christians the most outraged people on the planet over the destruction we’ve caused to one another in the community of creation? They avoid looking straight on at the climate crisis, place loss, and species extinction. They should be lamenting, fuming, working, but instead they’re avoiding.” Do you have any special insight why this isn’t the case? Why Christians haven’t been leading the charge in this respect?

Rienstra:

Wow, that’s a big question. I want to say too, I critique Christians I critique the church in this book, but I do that out of love.

Stump:

And from within. You’re not taking pot-shots from outside somewhere, that comes across very clearly.

Rienstra:

For better or worse, I have this gift of love for the church. It’s not always a fun gift to have. And not only the church, of course, but Christ. I critique the church out of love and out of a sense of wanting to love what God loves. Why is it? Well, partly, I think because we are all, certainly as Americans, we are all complicit in a kind of idolization of comfort, and convenience. In terms of storytelling, our fundamental American mythos is one of progress. To imagine that we have done serious damage with our commitment to progress, toward affluence, and our commitment toward technological progress, to admit that we have done damage with that, is a fundamental denial of this kind of basic American mythos. So it’s just hard to see past those basic stories that we’ve been telling ourselves for so long. Especially if you are white and affluent and you’re pretty comfortable. Of course you don’t want to worry about this whole situation changing. Of course you want to avoid that. It’s basically fear.

Stump:

I was thinking about this a little bit more as I was looking back at chapter two, which is “From Alienation to Kinship”. There you suggest that a focus on the natural world and ecology are not just the outcome or the effect of a proper understanding and application of our faith, but might be a cause, or at least an inspiration for a proper faith. That made me wonder whether we sometimes have the direction of influence or causality going the wrong direction when we say, look, you Christians, you’re already in the church, and you’re already people of faith. Why aren’t you doing this thing that your faith suggests you ought to be doing? Where maybe the first thing we do is, hey, why don’t we go out into the natural world and look at some things and that itself might inspire us to have a more proper faith. In that regard, in this chapter, you are claiming that an ecological focus can be a remedy for the over spiritualization, the over individualization of faith. Can you give us a quick overview of what these problems of over spiritualization, over individualization of our faith are and how ecology or our presence in nature might be a remedy for those?

Rienstra:

There’s a lot of syllables in those words, right? It’s hard to spit those babies out. We need to talk about hierarchical anthropocentrism [laughs]. I think the tendency, in particularly evangelical spaces, but not exclusively evangelical spaces, is to make the faith all about my soul and my relationship to Jesus, the salvation of my soul. It’s about individual salvation. But that’s not really the whole sweep of Scripture. Scripture is, and here comes Reformed theology with the kind of covenant focus in scripture. But God calls the church as a community out of the world to be witness, and we witness together. I’m not saying God has group tickets to heaven or something, it’s not like that. But God’s act of redemption is always in Scripture, connected to our material existence. It’s part of our material existence, and it’s focused on community and on the building of communities. I think Americans are so individualistic anyway, and then American evangelicalism kind of doubles that individualism, so that you sort of lose sight of other really important and powerful strains of Scripture and of the traditional Christian witness. Over spiritualization is the idea that the Christian life and Christianity is all about beliefs and about getting one soul right with God. It’s not about our earthly life. But that’s not really the Scripture witness. I think it’s just a big fundamental denial of the Incarnation; Jesus is not just an errand boy who spun down from heaven turned up on earth for a little while, dashed back to heaven, and now exists in some kind of ethereal existence. Orthodox theology is that Jesus is eternally incarnate in some ways. So God has taken our material life into the divine self. To dismiss our earthly existence as a kind of temporary stage that we’re acting out this theme of redemption on, the story of redemption on, That’s a kind of reductive oversimplification of Orthodox theology. Our materiality is how we were created, and it’s how we are redeemed. To connect with this earth, is sort of theologically supported by the doctrine of the Incarnation. And as you implied, it’s also a way toward wholeness, and wholeness in community. As a professed indoor cat, I can testify to the fact that I’ve been getting outdoors a lot more, I’ve been gardening more, I’ve been sweating and digging in this little refugium, literal refugium behind my house where we’re translating what used to be kind of messy turf, into native plantings. That’s been a huge gift. Being more attentive to the natural world, learning more about it, this has all actually been really useful in strengthening my faith again, and feeling more whole in my faith. So that even when I’m sort of disgusted with human culture, and wondering God where are you in all of this? I can look out at the dogwood tree outside my window and think this is an exquisite creation of God, this little tree, and God is sustaining this by the Spirit, sustaining this whole creation and existence through the Spirit. That is marvelous and it dwarfs everything else that’s going on.

Stump:

When people hear conversations like this, they’re often asking, okay, so what do I do? What can I do next? Is it too simplistic to take what you’ve just said there and say, maybe for a local church, a really good way to address some of this would be to get one of the scientists in your church to take you out on a nature walk? Would that actually accomplish some bit of addressing these problems of over spiritualization, over individualization, giving people this better, more holistic view to just do something like that? Take a camping trip, go sit out at the dunes?

Rienstra:

Why not? I mean, churches do a lot of great things already. There’s quite a movement right now for churches to come up with community gardens, to create space for community gardens and then invite people in. There’s some great examples in the book, but there’s many, many more examples out there. My own church, we own, I think, four acres. It’s always been mostly native, but we are actually deliberately creating different little native ecosystems in it. That has involved a lot of planting of trees and planning and researching. I think anything a church does has to become part of regular practice. You don’t just want these one off, let’s have an Earth Day worship service. That’s great, that raises awareness, that gets people into it, but all of these things have to become regular practice. Yeah, have the scientists in the congregation take people on a walk once a month or something. I think too, what do I do? That question is very individual, it’s also very regional. That’s another thing I would just encourage people to do is learn more about where you live, learn about your watershed, learn about the history of where you live. Find the places that need healing, and get involved somehow. Everybody’s going to have different entry points and that’s great, find your joy, figure out where your entry point is, figure out what your little work is in the great work. And I think it has to be sort of hands on. At some point, you need to get outdoors in the dirt. But that’s not to diminish the importance of some kind of advocacy and the importance of people planning worship services, or writing new songs for worship. Y’all come is kind of the principle here, find your place and y’all come.

Stump:

We need to say that there certainly are people within the church, maybe it’s a minority, but there are people within the church who take these kinds of things really seriously. Words are really important to you, I can tell, and you take issue with a couple of the words that are often used by this portion of the Christian community that are engaged in environmental concerns, that are creation care and stewardship. We at BioLogos are certainly guilty of this. Give us a little critique, a little constructive criticism from the inside, like you’ve done before, for why you don’t think these are the best kind of terms to use to describe what we’re trying to do.

Rienstra: 

Well, guilty might be too strong a word. And yes, you’re right, as a person who swims in a world of words every day, I think carefully about terms and what they mean. Let me take those separately, though. I would say stewardship was a really useful word that came to the fore in the 1980s, at least in the context I’m aware of. A group of Calvin professors and Calvin adjacent scholars got together in 2018 in that summer, and we thought through what is the problem with stewardship? Why is it not working was really our question. Some people had been using it to sort of encourage a kind of care for the earth, but it didn’t seem to move the needle so to speak. We explored some of the limitations of that term and I think that, as a metaphor, being a steward is really about taking care of something somebody else owns while they’re not here. For one thing, it feels dutiful, which is not the most motivating thing, do your duty is not the most motivating thing. And I think it has this image of God as absent, like God is the absent landlord, and we’re struggling down here to be good tenants or whatever. We’re like, put in charge. So it’s that dutifulness and it’s this idea that God is absent that is subtly implicated in that term.

Stump:

That connects to our earlier conversation about what we do in relation to what God does. That sort of sounds like we have to do everything because God’s not here to do anything. Is that the problem?

Rienstra:

Right. And it’s also kind of arrogant, as if we run the planet, which we don’t. We are very powerful: we have these huge frontal lobes, we have opposable thumbs, we have technology. But the earth went along for millions of years without us. 

Stump:

And better it seems like, right?

Rienstra:

Well, maybe. The geological history of the Earth is pretty dramatic. But it kind of feeds into anthropocentrism. So stewardship, it has this dutiful thing and has this absence of God aspect to it, and it kind of feeds into a little bit of arrogance. Creation care, and here, I want to give a shout out to you folks and also to the wonderful folks at Evangelical Environmental Network, who use that term. It’s kind of their standard go-to term. And I get it, and I don’t know about you guys, probably, but they’ve come to their ways of speaking about the climate crisis through research. They are very savvy, fabulous people, you are too. So I’m not critiquing you. 

Stump:

We can take it, go ahead.

Rienstra:

Creation care is alliterative, which is awesome, right? And it’s a beautiful phrase. Who’s that who’s not going to want to engage in creation care? Like, what’s the opposite? Creation indifference? That doesn’t feel right. It is a beautiful term and I’m glad that people use it, I think it really does speak to a lot of people. I guess what bothers me is it doesn’t quite speak to the urgency and the damage. There’s something about creation care that feels ongoing, it’s a nice thing, it’s sort of what we should be doing, sure. But to recognize the urgency of getting involved in, not just caring for the world, but healing the planet. I really like the word healing and that’s why eventually, in the book, I come down to partners in earth healing. It’s not the most elegant phrase, you can’t make it into your website name, I suppose. But I like that. I like the idea of earth healing, because it suggests urgency, and it acknowledges the damage that we’ve done. I think it’s just a little bit more honest about our task. Then I like the word partners because it suggests that it’s not all down to us. We are partnering with God’s efforts here. Also we’re partnering with the beautiful powers of life that are built into this planet. I clear space in my backyard, and I plant seeds, but it’s the power of the seed itself, and the sunshine and the water that makes that grow. That idea of us partnering, I think, is a really good exercise in humility, both to the divine and to the actual Earth itself. Partners in earth healing is not as elegant as creation care, but it’s my way of thinking about how our terms allow us to be a little more complacent. I want to communicate the urgency and the kind of honest looking at the damage we’ve done.

Stump: 

Okay, so there is urgency; the earth needs healing. We have a pretty short window now — I’ve read the latest IPCC report of the next 10 years and how crucial this is. Most of my discussions at least with people about climate change end with wondering whether there is any hope. I thought it was interesting in your book where you say there’s a lazy hope and a lazy cynicism, neither of which are consistent with refugia faith. What’s the right kind of hope? And maybe the right kind of cynicism too for us to have at this moment?

Rienstra:

I don’t know if I can claim the right kind of hope. I’ve learned a lot, as I describe in the book, from the way that African Americans talk about hope, or at least the ones that I’ve read and talk to, and how climate activists talk about hope. What it comes down to is hope as a discipline. Hope not as the reassurance that everything is going to be just fine and I don’t have to worry, but hope as a kind of active discipline in the world, despite whatever is going on. I think for Christians hope is centered in the idea that no matter what the conditions on the ground are, God means us well, that’s our hope. Our faith is in a God who means us well, however grim things might be right now. So hope is really disciplined action. It’s a kind of clarity and courage that comes when you let go of your wish that everything could be a-okay and we could stop worrying about this. It’s not going to stop being bad. You read the IPCC report — talk about lament, right? That’s not to say everything is hopeless, everything we do will make a difference. Everything we do, every 1/10 of a degree of warming, that we’re able to avoid will make a huge difference. Probably on some, not direct scale, but some logarithmic scale or something. Sorry mathematicians, that’s probably not the right term. Everything we do will make a big difference. Every effort has a potential good payoff. Will it all be perfect and fine? Probably not. But that’s no reason not to act. Here, I think we can turn to virtue ethics, which a lot of people do, including Kathleen Dean Moore and Steve Bouma-Prediger. The idea there is, you act in ways that are true to your deepest values, you act out of virtues because you want to be virtuous, not because it’s necessarily going to bring about all the things you want to bring about. I think that’s just the Christian life. We don’t obey God because we expect everything to be perfect. Obedience to God has its rewards, but we obey God because it’s the right thing to do. Whatever the outcome, that’s what we do. I think the same thing is true here. We act faithfully and with hope, because that’s the right way to act. Also because we hope that it will bring about effective change. That’s certainly possible. In some ways we’re going to deal with a more volatile planet, for sure. But in other ways, we could have a lot less pollution, public health could improve, if we make some of these changes we’ve got to make, we could have much stronger communities, we could center the leadership of people who’ve been marginalized in ways that hasn’t been true in decades, or centuries, or ever. Those can all be really good and powerful changes that we should do, because they’re right, as well as bringing about good results. So I’ve come to think of hope more as a discipline and an action than a kind of reassurance that everything’s going to be fine.

Stump:  

In that sense it sounds like it’s a commitment much more than it is a feeling. It’s not just the wishful thinking, the emotional response that we may have to the circumstances around us, which admittedly are pretty dire when you read the IPCC report. But rather that I am committed to this, this is what I’m going to do, here’s how I’m going to live my life. In regards to this, you quote a line from TS Eliot in here, you had to smuggle in some poets, right?

Rienstra:

Always. 

Stump:

“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” That reminds me, you and I first met a couple of months ago at the creation care, if I can still use that term, I’m a little nervous about using it now. 

Rienstra:

Don’t be nervous. 

Stump:

You and I first met at the creation care summit at BioLogos, turned out not to be an in person event, but we were recording. Kyle Van Houtan was there as well and one of the lines he used when I was asking these same kinds of questions was that we are not called to be effective, we’re called to be faithful. On our best days our being faithful results in also being effective, but the rest is not our business, for TS Eliot.

Rienstra:

Yeah, once again, this is something we should know as Christians, this should not be an unfamiliar posture to us. I think we also know that when you approach your work in the world that way, what you discover is community and joy, even in the process of doing it. It’s easy for me to say, I’m still a comfortable white person in America with three square meals a day and a hot shower. It’s easy for me to say. But I will say that, having gone through the sort of depression stage that people go through when you first start really facing the truth about climate change, having gone through that stage, on the other end of it is a kind of joyful action and connection with other people. There’s something really exciting about that. I think everybody who’s been involved in climate mitigation would say, yeah, you go back to the depression stage sometimes too and the cynicism stage. Sure, it’s cyclical. But I don’t want to underplay the potential joys that come from setting your shoulder to the wheel on this and making connections with people like you that I maybe wouldn’t have connected with otherwise. There’s just a lot of really great people out there working on this problem, and exciting things are happening. I don’t want to pretend everything is shiny and awesome. But there is blessing in this process, too. It’s not merely decline and depression and lament, there is blessing in it, too.

Stump:

Amen, may it be so. Well, there are a lot of other things we could discuss about your book. I’d love to probe your use of story, the problem of evil, and your reading of Job I think is super interesting. You give lots of other really practical things, just hearing what you’re doing, again, is inspiring. But maybe we need to leave those so that people will actually buy your book and read the rest for themselves. The title again is Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders and the Healing of the Earth. I will say to the audience, if you like well written books and you like the created world we’ve been given and that we’re a part of, you will like this book. So thank you, Deborah, for writing it. And thanks so much for talking to me about it. 

Rienstra:

Thank you, Jim. It’s been a huge delight.

BioLogos:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation, the Fetzer Institute and by individual donors who contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Nate Mulder is our assistant producer. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. 

BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode find a link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum or visit our website, biologos.org, where you  will find articles, videos and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.