GUEST EDITORIAL: PROFESSORS AND THE HUMAN PREDICAMENT
The "breather" between semesters is a blessing! During this past one I cleared my desk, wrote, reflected--all in company of four good books. "What does it mean to be a professor in a time of societal and environmental degradation?" I asked. I reflected on attempts by some to re-deify our planet as Gaia or Mother Earth as the solution to this degradation. I thought too about what our conventional reductionism has to offer. And then I thought of "the third way" as historian of science Colin Russell calls it (The Earth, Humanity and God, London: UCL Press, University College, London, 1994).

My students have helped me in seeing the importance of finding this third way. At mid-semester I ask each of them to write the most serious environmental problem on the board as they enter the room. Then they work interactively to find the underlying cause of them all. Remarkably, they always conclude that there is nothing wrong with the way the world works, but with how people act. One semester they distilled the problem into three words: arrogance, ignorance and greed. Russell, remarkably, does the same (and, adds aggression). Both he and my students identify the human predicament--the condition that underlies societal and environmental degradation. Both Gaia and reductionism do not address it, but the Bible does. Bringing people into accord with God's economy, (John Reumann, Stewardship and the Economy of God, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992) biblical teaching respects science and addresses the human predicament. It is the biblical solution summarized, says Russell, in the keyword, stewardship. This is "the third way."

Among the first secular philosophers to see this is ethicist Max Oelschlaeger (Caring for Creation, New Haven and London: Yale University Pres, 1994) who describes his recent "conversion" from blaming Judeo-Christian belief for the ecological crisis to seeing the church as "more important in the effort to conserve life on earth than all the politicians and experts put together." Standing almost alone with such a profession, Oelschlaeger stands in contrast to most of the rest in the academy who "wave off" the Bible--this even though as Wendell Berry (Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, New York: Pantheon, 1993) reminds us, "they violate the first rule of criticsm by not reading it."

The "breather" between semesters is a blessing! This time it brought me to ask, "Is Professor Oelschlaeger a professor?" Am I a professor? What am I "professing? What does it mean to be a professor in this time of societal and environmental degradation?

Professor Cal DeWitt
University of Wisconsin-Madison
cbdewitt@facstaff.wisc.edu

KEEPING UP
In this edition of the FACULTY NEWSLETTER I want to acquaint you with a very useful, easily read but profoundly on-target work by the editorialist of this newsletter, Dr. Calvin DeWitt. I think studying it together in a small group on campus or in church would be a wonderful response to God's charge to us to be stewards of His creation. The book is Earthwise (A Biblical Response to Environmental Issues) by Calvin B. DeWitt, CRC Publications, 1994.

Dr. DeWitt's personal story, relayed in various places throughout the book, invites you into his world in an engaging and illuminating way. He uses quotations of hymns throughout the book to make his points and to direct us to the wonder of God's creation. You will also find clear but sufficient biological teaching to help us think more effectively about care of the environment.

In particular Chapters 3 and 4, titled, Creation's Care and Keeping; A Biblical Perspective and Creation's Care and Keeping; A Theological Perspective, will give you material to chew on, to do some research of your own, and perhaps to feel convicted and respond with action. These chapters are deep enough to take several readings to pursue the thought contained in them but clear enough to be grasped at one level on the first reading. There is also an excellent bibliography in the back.

One eye catching way of communicating is Cal's "Seven Degradations of Creation". The first three are: Land Conversion and Habitat Destruction, Species Extinction, and Land Abuse. All of us by simply looking out our windows at our environment can see these degradations. Cal briefly illustrates them and relates them to biblical revelation.

Another quite helpful thing is the church centeredness of this book. It was designed to be used by churches and it reflects on God's delight to work in and through the church. Chapter Six addresses some of the stumbling blocks that would keep us from responding to biblical instructions for stewardship and gives clear headed refutations to some of our excuses for apathy.

To whet your appetite for the quality of teaching: on page 40, from Principle 1 on the Biblical perspective of creation's care and keeping.

"Genesis 2:15 conveys a marvelous teaching. Here, God expects Adam to serve the garden and to keep it. The Hebrew word for serve ('abad) is translated as till, dress or work in most recent translations of the Bible. Adam and his descendants are expected to meet the needs of the garden so that it will persist and flourish. But how on earth can we serve creation? Shouldn't creation serve us instead?

"God also expects us as Adam's descendants to keep the garden. This word keep is sometimes translated tend, take care of, guard, and look after. The Hebrew word upon which these translations of keep are based is the word shamar. And sharmar indicates a loving, caring, sustaining type of keeping.

"In our worship services, we often conclude with the Aaronic blessing from Numbers 6:24: 'The Lord bless you and keep you.' The keep here is the same Hebrew word used in Genesis 2:15: shamar. When we invoke God's blessing to keep us, we are not asking that God keep us in a kind of preserved, inactive, uninteresting state. Instead we are calling on God to keep us in all of our vitality, with all of our energy and beauty. The keeping we expect of God when we invoke the Aaronic blessing is one that nurtures all of our life-sustaining and life-fulfilling relationships with our family members, with our neighbors and our friends, with the land, air, and water, and with our God. We ask God to love us, to care for us, and to sustain us in relationship to our natural and human environment."

I highly recommend Cal DeWitt's Earthwise to every Christian faculty person.

I'd like to remind you of a book which I find exceedingly illuminative of today's academic world, indeed, the whole world of education. It is C.S.Lewis's The Abolition of Man. These were the Ridell Memorial Lectures presented at the University of Durham, published first by OUP 1943. My copy of it is by Collier books, published in 1962.

Lewis saw even then that modern education tends to produce what he called "men with hollow chests"; that is, people for whom nerve endings or emotions and feelings are fully alive and real and for whom reason and rational activity are fully alive and real, but these are separated in a very non-human way. That is, there is nothing bridging thought and feeling. Where once the bridge was control by the virtues or the values.

Lewis illustrates this by examining, what would be to us, a senior high English text. On page 15 he indicates what school children will learn from this book, `that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and, secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.' He points out that whereas parents thought their students were being trained in English speaking, reading and writing, they were in effect getting brainwashed by issues in theology, ethics and politics.

Lewis' cure for all this is to teach and train young people in something which he finds in all of the ancient systems of thought: Platonic, Aristotilean, Stoic, Christian and Oriental, namely what he calls the Tao. "It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kinds of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are." (page 29)

Another way of talking about people with hollow chests is found on page 30: "On this view, the world of facts, without one trace of value, and the world of feelings without one trace of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another, and no rapprochement is possible."

The effect of this education he shows on page 35. "And all the time-such is the tragedy-comedy of our situation-we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more `drive', or `dynamism', or `self-sacrifice', or `creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise, we laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

Later on page 44 he argues against the modern assumption that instinct supplies all these things and that the instinct driving us has more fundamental reality than moral or ethical guidelines. His argument is, I think, quite unanswerable. His concluding remarks are about "Man's conquest over nature" which he shows will inevitably be in fact the conquest or the governing of all of mankind by a small elite.

In the Appendix there is a wonderful colation of very similar moral precepts or virtues taken from an amazing array of ancient documents from Egyptian, Jewish, Old Norse, Biblical Hebrew, Babylonian, Chinese, Greek and other sources. The moral absolutes or descriptions of virtues are common across all the literate cultures of the past and it is these which our contemporary culture is attempting to scoff at and destroy.

The issue, I think, for us as Christian educators, is are we going to contribute to this creation of "hollow chested" people or are we going to stand against it? There have been numbers of attempts recently to produce collections of virtues. That may be closing the barn door after the horse is out. The question is how are we dealing with freshmen and sophomores at college (and with high school students) to show them the tragic effect of denying objective moral virtues and values. I highly commend a re-reading of this brief but profound insight of C.S. Lewis.

MODELS OF MINISTRY
Dr. Ray Calloway, Professor of Biology at the University of Montana, is teaching a course (for the first time) that many of you will find interesting. It will, I hope, inspire ideas about your own next new course.

Dr. Calloway writes:

"I am currently teaching a course at the University of Montana entitled "Judeo-Christian Perspectives on Nature". A plant ecologist by profession, I have long been fascinated by the complexity of natural communities and ecosystems and the implications of such complexity for human use of natural resources. As a Christian, I have long been fascinated by biblical perspectives on the natural world in which we live. I am attempting to integrate these two interests in my course. During the first few weeks of the course we focus on cultural versus spiritual definitions of Christianity utilizing readings from C.S. Lewis and James Sire, and discuss general conflict and consensus between science and religion. This focus will narrow as the course progresses and we examine the popular impact of the science of ecology on environmental perspectives. Here we examine claims, such as promoted by Lynn White, that Christianity is the root of current ecological crises, and contrast these with biblical teachings on nature, earthkeeping, and concern for creation. We will finish by discussing the philosophical and religious implications of a theological perspective on nature, including population regulation, conservation, and stewardship. Throughout the course invited lecturers such as Susan Bratton, Cal DeWitt, Jeff Schloss, and Judith Scoville are challenging us with their views on Christianity and the envioronment. It is my hope that this course will have an important impact on the dialogue between the sciences, philosophy, and religion at public universities."

I talked with Dr. Calloway when he had finished his eighth week of the course. He had held two public lectures featuring Cal DeWitt and Judith Scoville and there was a very good attendance. The course is being taken by students from sophomores up through graduate students, mostly science majors but some others also. The material is mostly new to the students. Two things that were different from what they had known in the past were the need to differeniate Christian teaching from western culture in general and Cal DeWitt's teaching on what the Bible actually says about care for the environment.

The response from Dr. Calloway's peers were either favorable or neutral. In fact courses such as "Buddhism and Ecology" have been offered in the past so this is not a radical departure. After only three years on the faculty I think Dr. Calloway is to be congratulated for his boldness and creativity. Perhaps others of you are teaching courses like this and would like to share them with other faculty through our newsletter.