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Reconceptualizing Christian Stewardship to Combat EcologicalCrisis:

A Working Paper

Susan SpileckiEpiscopal Divinity School

“And I sought for anyone among them who would repair the walland stand in the breach before me on behalf of the land…” Ez.

22:30

Today we are facing unprecedented global ecological

devastation. Many environmentalists speak in terms of human

stewardship of the earth as one tool for ameliorating the

crisis. This image would be ideal for the Christian

community to bring God’s mission of healing to the Earth,

but unfortunately, the way this stewardship is imagined and

used in the church today makes it all but useless. In this

paper, I address several ways to augment our understanding

of Christian stewardship by bolstering the historical,

biblical, scientific, and ethical foundations of the idea. I

hope to start conversation about reconstructing the figure

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of the steward as a model of theocentric Christian mission

“rooted in God’s purposes to restore and heal creation.”1

In an Amazon.com search for the term “Christian

stewardship,” 86% of books dealt with church financial

administration—not an idea of stewardship that can help

bring God’s healing to Earth. In contrast, 14% dealt with

environmental ethics or God’s mission to reconcile the

world. These definitions of stewardship have far more

potential to direct our actions of Earth-healing. But to

implement such a deep reorientation of our concept of

stewardship, we need to create stronger foundations for the

image of the steward itself. I argue that, first, we need to

nuance our biblical understanding of the steward by adding a

historical understanding from multiple cultural contexts.

Second, we need our ecotheologians to take seriously

Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Last, we need to shift

our relationship with the material world, which underlies

our ethical choices, from that of a consumerist materialism

to that of an Incarnational materialism.1 Darrel L. Guder, ed., Missional Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 4.

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In the Gospels when Jesus spoke of a steward, he

referred to the Greek skilled slave who managed a large

household, to free his master from soiling his hands by

dealing with money, which explains why those parables refer

mainly to monetary transactions. Yet such an image of

stewardship will not help us in our task of ecological

healing and renewal: because we cannot assign monetary value

to human beings beyond the value placed upon their labor,

and we cannot assign a true monetary value to nature. In the

epistles, according to Ritva Williams, Saint Paul frequently

“used the image of the steward to buttress his authority as

an apostle.”2 This use also is inadequate, since human

claims for our authority got us into this ecological crisis

in the first place. Further, these passages offer little

about the day-to-day realities of a steward’s work. Such

sparse information needs to be augmented.

I suggest we look at historical studies of human

stewards in different cultures to see how stewardship has

been constructed, to apply these lessons to construct a 2 Rivka H. Williams, Stewards, Prophets, Keepers of the Word: Leadership in the Early Church (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2006), 90.

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theocentric idea of the stewardship of creation. Future

studies may focus on stewardship in other times and

countries; for my example here, I draw on D.R. Hainsworth’s

study of 17th century English stewards. I use the male

pronoun for historical stewards because in most cultures,

stewards were male. This drawback of historical method will

need to be addressed in future reconstructions, but it is

beyond the scope of this paper.

So what can we learn from looking at the historical steward

in general? First, stewardship entails the management of the

estate of an absentee landlord. If we follow the practice of

Jesus and assume that the landlord is God, we can take from

the roles of stewards some implications for human action on

God’s “estate”: Earth.

First, the historical steward is not managing something

that has been given to him; the estate is not a gift, and it

is not the steward’s possession. He does not manage it for

his own benefit. It does not exist—solely or even partly—for

his benefit. These facts suggest that any anthropocentric

construction of stewardship, based on the “superiority” of

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the human species, will not be a useful model for our

stewardship of the Earth. Indeed, this very “conflict of

interest” has led to the current crisis.

Now, what can we learn from looking at the 17th century

English steward in particular? First, the estate is run not

according to the steward’s values, but according to the

landlord’s values. Hainsworth says that these stewards,

anxious to be sure what their lord wanted them to do, kept a

regular correspondence: “Constantly they besought their

masters for direct orders, for decisions, for permissions to

take actions….”3 Imagine what Earth would look like if

households, companies and governments refused to act on the

“natural world” unless they had prayerfully considered

whether their actions were only in God’s interest and not

their own…

Second, stewards were not merely glorified accountants.

They worked not only with money, but also with people. Yes,

they collected rents from the landlord’s tenants. However,

3 D.R. Hainsworth, Stewards, Lords and People: The Estate Steward and HisWorld in Later Stuart England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 254.

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“Inevitably this situation of contented landlord and happy

tenants living in a harmonious relationship…was an ideal

which stewards found…extremely difficult to translate into

reality. The interests of landlord and tenant…often were

perceived to be adverse.”4 This situation required that

stewards be mediators between lord and tenants. Hainsworth

says, “many masters suspected that their stewards were too

sympathetic to the interests of the tenants, pursuing

policies which favored them rather than” their master.5 The

stewards needed to protect the lord’s land from too much

exploitation, since “their masters wanted as little land

turned to arable as they could persuade or compel tenants to

accept and the tenants wished to plough as much land as they

could get away with.”6

This negotiation occurred not only between landlord and

tenants, but also between tenants in legal or social

disputes. Negotiation was also a way that stewards were, “no

matter how unconsciously, agents of social adjustment,”

4 Ibid., 49.5 Ibid.6 Ibid., 66.

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prompting and directing their lord’s “charitable impulses.”7

By providing pensions for former servants, and gifts of

money or food to the poor, widows, or victims of local

crises, stewards administered a kind of social safety net.

They also “put into effect quite substantial examples of

their masters’ benevolence, such as almshouses, hospitals

and schools.”8 In contrast, these days, we see increasing

resistance to sharing God’s abundance with our co-tenants.

There is even more resistance to the idea of sharing

God’s abundance with our co-tenants who are not of the human

species, and of treating the home itself, which we do not

own, with respect. But humans have always had this problem,

and we can gain a clearer perspective for our own time by

looking at the ways stewards were expected to interact with

the land.

Because “estates yielded more forms of income than

those which derived from tenancies…. stewards…[had to be]

quick to perceive potential assets and eager to exploit them

7 Ibid., 159.8 Ibid., 166.

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on their master’s behalf.”9 Such assets might derive from

the mining of “coal, lead, tin or copper, or from…quarries

for slate, stone and millstones”; however, the most common

and rewarding asset was the manor’s trees.10 As in our own

time, some stewards managed such assets carefully,

replanting trees to extend the life of the estate’s forests;

other managers were less far-sighted stewards, about whom we

might use the word “exploit” quite literally.

The worldviews underlying each of these relationships

with the land find support in scripture, the difference

lying in the different writers. The first account of

creation in Genesis 1 has long been attributed to priests in

ancient Israel. The administrative power priests held in

Israelite society is reflected in their ideas about humans

and creation, show in the verbs used:

by which the human role is defined and…the divine

image given to humans alone. The verbs radâ, “have

dominion” (Gen. 1:26,28), and kabas, “subdue” (v.

28), mean to rule, to exercise power and 9 Ibid., 222.10 Ibid.

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authority…. When used of kings, radâ is used

primarily for rule over Israel’s enemies (Ps.

110:2), and it occurs in descriptions of military

conquest, where it is paired with such verbs as

“destroy” (Num. 24:19) and “strike down” (Isa.

14:16).11

Theodore Hiebert asserts that the use of such terms must be

understood in the historical context of the “particular

harshness of subsistence agriculture in the Mediterranean

highlands…viewed…in adversarial terms as overcoming the

intractable ground and subduing the earth.”12 Unfortunately,

while every century since the time of the writing of Genesis

has brought with it new tools to facilitate agriculture, in

the end, human beings can never entirely control the

environment, and so such adversarial views of nature and

creation remain operative even today.

11 Theodore Hiebert, “The Human Vocation: Origins and Transformations in Christian Traditions,” Christianity and Ecology, Ed. Dieter T. Hessel and Rosemary Radford Ruether (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000, 135-154), 136-7.12 Ibid., 137.

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Yet those views are not the only ones now, nor were

they in the 17th century or in the time when Genesis was

written. The second account of creation, in Gen. 2:4-3:24,

coming from the more agricultural Yahwist community, offers

a different view of humankind and creation, as shown through

very different language:

The view of the archetypal human as a farmer in

the Eden narrative is illustrated…by the creation

of the first human being, not in the image of God,

but out of arable soil. God makes the man/human

being, ‘adam, out of topsoil ‘apar, from arable

land, ‘adamâ (Gen. 2:7).13

If the human in the image of God is imagined to have

authority to subjugate the earth, then the human who comes

from the soil is imagined to be in intimate relationship

with the earth. This relationship “is underscored by the

task God assigns the first human: to till, or cultivate, the

garden’s soil.”14

13 Ibid., 139.14 Ibid., 140.

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By recognizing that human beings always have faced such

radically different ways of conceiving of and practicing our

relationship with the rest of creation, we can more

responsibly critique our historical practices of stewardship

and their theological underpinnings. Some critics,

disconcerted by the negative examples of stewardship, would

advise abandoning the image altogether. Yet such an attitude

ignores the value of a negative example for teaching us

precisely what sorts of actions to avoid and why. It also

ignores the moral necessity for humans to recognize and

admit to the sins we have committed—and continue daily to

commit—as a species, and to repent. The historical view of

stewardship powerfully reminds us of our obligations to our

neighbors. For overall, the historical view shows us that

stewardship is about relationships: our fundamental servant

relationship to our Lord and our co-creaturely relationship

with other humans, nonhuman animals, and the land.

A more nuanced historical understanding of stewardship

also points out the need for a more careful scientific view.

For example, we know that many English stewards had access

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to manuals like that written by William of Henley, which

urged stewards to become familiar with the basics of

husbandry so they might effectively manage the lands and

animals of the estate, while avoiding being defrauded by

dishonest tenants. Then, as now, good stewards needed

accurate knowledge of the natural world to do the job well.

Therefore, it is hard to realize that our best

theologians, constructing models of care for God’s broken

creation, may be relying on scientific information that is

not up to date. Looking at a critique by Lisa Sideris, we

can notice problems that occur when we fail to adequately

support the ecotheologies underlying our ideas of Christian

stewardship. In her book, Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology,

and Natural Selection, Sideris claims that “many ecological

theologians have not dealt adequately with the implications

of natural selection…”15 She faults their model of “nature

as a harmonious, interconnected, and interdependent

community. This ‘ecological model,’ as it is often called,

resonates more with pre-Darwinian, non-Darwinian, and 15 Sideris, Lisa. Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection (New York: Columbia UP, 2003), 1.

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Romantic views of nature than it does with evolutionary

accounts.”16 She points to such problems in the work of

several theologians; here, I sketch out only her critique of

Rosemary Radford Ruether’s and Sallie McFague’s ecofeminist

arguments as they provide clear examples of the oversights

she sees.

Reading Ruether’s 1994 book, Gaia and God, Sideris calls

Ruether’s understanding of ecology “Romantic,”17 showing the

incompleteness of her idea of evolution as a “cooperative

venture, culminating in the creation and maintenance of

community life.”18 Ruether “deemphasize[s] connotations of

competition and conflict,”19 neglecting the negative side of

natural selection: its “reliance on processes such as

predation, disease and starvation.”20 Such a one-sided

picture is fundamentally inaccurate and, for Sideris, an

example of how “some ecotheologians’ quest for liberation

and healing of the oppressed in nature reflects a persistent

16 Ibid., 2.17 Ibid., 46.18 Ibid., 49.19 Ibid.20 Ibid., 2.

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reluctance to accept the disequilibrium, moral ambiguity,

and ineradicable suffering and death that natural selection

entails.”21 By sidestepping the difficult issue of suffering

in creation, or “natural evil,” Ruether neglects a major

problem for theology in general and ecotheology in

particular.

Sideris also criticizes “arguments…incompatible with

current scientific understandings.”22 For example,

“historians of ecology generally agree that there has been a

movement away from cooperation, coevolution, harmony, and

balance as the predominant ecological themes.”23 This is a

problem, given that Ruether and others base much of their

ecotheology on precisely these ideas. Sallie McFague comes

under criticism for similar sins in her 1997 book, Super,

Natural Christians, in which she claims that “a Christian ethic

of love and care—amplified… by inferences from ecological

science—can consistently be extended to nonhuman nature.”24

Yet Sideris argues that McFague’s “account of nature bears 21 Ibid., 5.22 Ibid.23 Ibid., 35.24 Ibid., 60.

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little or no resemblance to the modern evolutionary

perspective she seeks to adopt.”25

McFague states that, in her model of humans and nature,

the “well-being of the whole is the final goal,…reached

through attending to the needs and desires of the many

subjects that make up the community.”26 Sideris sees this

model as “deeply concerned with the individual” and thus

problematic, since such a narrow focus makes it difficult to

apply.27 She asks, “[H]ow would we apply [this] model in our

encounters with nonwild lands and animals?”28 In the example

of chickens raised for human consumption in inhumane

conditions, McFague argues that vegetarianism is an option,

not a requirement; Sideris finds this answer inconsistent

with the ecological ethic that McFague herself recommends.

When Sideris applies McFague’s model to wild nature, she

shows the result of McFague’s unwillingness to tackle

natural selection. The very balance of natural communities

25 Ibid., 64.26 Sallie McFague, Super, Natural Christians (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 158.27 Sideris, 75.28 Ibid., 78.

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that McFague lauds is in part maintained by starvation,

disease and predation “at great cost to individual animal

lives…. [W]hile a human model of community may entail care

for the health and well-being of each individual.… McFague’s

endorsement of interventions in nature to feed its starving

creatures and heal their wounds would be counterproductive

and perhaps even disastrous.”29

Sideris’s critique reminds us how easy it is to ignore,

like Ruether, part of an issue that is admittedly complex

and difficult. She shows the problem of taking, like

McFague, too narrow a focus. Yet she also falls victim to

these weaknesses. In her book, Sideris looks at two

categories of nature: domesticated nature, particularly

animals; and “wild” nature, particularly on conservation

lands. Yet how much of America is conservation land? Keeping

such a narrow focus, she neglects a complex, difficult

problem facing humans who want to deal ethically with

nature: urban sprawl. As the human species’ population

continues to explode, our cities continue to expand, and

29 Ibid., 81.

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much “semi-wild” land is eaten up in the process. “Between

1960 and 1990 the amount of developed land in large urban

areas of the United States grew twice as fast as the

population in these cities…. [S]tudies indicate that

farmland is being converted to other uses at a rate of up to

2.6 million acres per year.”30

We need an ethic to help us here, to aid us in what

Katherine Tanner calls “the often messy, ambiguous and

porous character of the effort to live Christianly,”31

particularly in this environmental crisis. Such a new ethic

will be a radical reorientation that may empower us in our

work as stewards of creation. For even if we use historical

evidence to expand our ideas about the steward’s role, and

even if we are bold enough to ask the big questions and draw

on the science that makes the answers more complete, even if

more complex, we still face a more fundamental problem, to

do with the kind of creatures we are and the kind of

environment in which we move.30 James B. Martin-Schramm and Robert L. Stivers, Christian Environmental Ethics (Marykoll, NY: Orbis, 2003), 92, 93.31 Katherine Tanner, “Christian Claims,” Christian Century (23 Feb. 2010:40-45), 45.

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First, we are humans: not just homo sapiens, man who

knows, but also homo faber, man who makes. As Dorothy Sayers

writes, “Looking at man, [the priestly author of Genesis 1]

sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn…

to see what he says about the original upon which the

‘image’ of God was modeled, we find only the single

assertion, ‘God created.’”32 We humans are makers of things,

users of tools. And we don’t just use things to create other

things; we even use things to create meaning. Think about

your home. How do you use your possessions to support your

identity? This is a very human activity. All cultures have

in some way used their tools, art, furnishings and apparel

to delineate such things as clan, class and taste. And,

despite the arguments of Christian ascetics over the

centuries, this intimate relationship between humans and

things can be, like creation itself, good.

Second, here in 21st century North America, we live in

a consumerist society, fueled by a capitalist economy,

founded on mass production of material things for use, 32 Dorothy L. Sayers. The Mind of the Maker (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 22.

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disposal, and replacement. The ideology behind this system,

propagated by advertising, is part of the consumerist ethic

that underlies our choices, transactions, and lives. We need

to replace this ethic with an Incarnational materialist

ethic, one that, recognizing the import of the created world

to God and Jesus Christ, will put us in right relation with

our God, with “worldly” things, with the corporate mass

producers that prefer the old ethic, and with ourselves, who

—to be honest—also, for now, prefer the old ethic. In the

last few pages, I will propose an outline of such an ethic.

In his book, Simplicity, Mark Burch suggests that “A

truly materialistic society would love material things,

which in turn would imply their conservation and

enjoyment…”33 as opposed to wasting and replacing them at a

fast pace. He has a point. What would it mean for us to love

things for their own sake, for the sake of the materials

they are made of and the skill of their design and

production? To appreciate the patina and signs of wear? To

33 Mark A. Burch, Simplicity (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society,1995), 58.

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value quality over quantity? To acknowledge that the wood of

these walls was once a tree with a life like mine and yours?

Could we change that much? Certainly, issues of

economics are involved, since we get only what we can pay

for; more problematic is that the longer our economy is

built on the idea of infinitely available “natural

resources,” the less long it—and we—will last.

So first, we must demand a change in the production of

things. William McDonough and Michael Braungart propose that

we design and produce things Cradle-to-Cradle: designing

“things—products, packaging, and systems—from the very

beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist….

[So] the valuable nutrients contained in the materials shape

and determine the design.”34 This would mean that things be

“composed either of materials that biodegrade and become

food for biological cycles, or of…materials that…continually

circulate as valuable nutrients for industry.”35 And no

toxic materials could be used.

34 William McDonough and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle (New York: North Point Press, 2002), 104.35 Ibid.

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Second, until our whole production capacity is working

on a cradle-to-cradle basis, we must demand that

corporations take on extended producer responsibility: the

producers of waste should be responsible for its proper

disposal. Sometimes this concept is also referred to as

“producer takeback.” We are beginning to see programs of

this type among corporations that already have conservation

of the environment as part of their mission statements and

among corporations in the electronics industry. For example,

in 2005 Patagonia launched its Common Threads Garment

Recycling Program and announced its long-term intention to

make 100% of its products recyclable and to radically

decrease the environmental impact of producing and

transporting its products.36 Dell, Hewlett Packard and

Toshiba are leaders in free producer takeback programs in

the computer industry. Similar programs also exist in

36 Patagonia. “Common Threads Garment Recycling Program,” Patagonia.com, http://www.patagonia.com/web/us/patagonia.go?assetid+1956, (accessed June 26, 2010).

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Scandinavia, Switzerland, Taiwan and Japan for a wider

variety of household appliances.37

Third, we must demand, of ourselves and each other

particularly in North America, what Sallie McFague calls

“voluntary self-limitation.” In her most recent book, she

argues that, “In creation, God allowed space for others to

exist by divine limitation, not as a self-denying act but as

an affirmation….[S]elf-limitation so that others may have

place and space to grow and flourish—is the way God acts

toward the world and the way people should act toward one

another and toward creation.”38

Last, to move us along this path more speedily, we—

environmentalists, theologians, and the larger church—must

engage with experts on organizational change. Through

intentional, interdisciplinary collaboration, we must set in

motion a transformation in the way we live on Earth. As

37 McNabb, John. “Extended Producer Responsibility: Recommendations for the Massachusetts Beyond 2000 Solid Waste Master Plan,” Dec. 27, 1999, http://www.computertakeback.com/corporate/corporate_main.htm, (accessed June 26 2010).38 Sallie McFague, A New Climate for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 135, 136.

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McDonough and Braungart point out, “Popular wisdom holds

that the fittest survive, the strongest, leanest, largest,

perhaps meanest—whatever beats the competition. But in

healthy, thriving natural systems it is actually the fitting-

est who thrive. Fitting-est implies an energetic and

material engagement with place, and an interdependent

relationship to it.”39 If we believe, as Genesis tells us,

that God made not only humans, but animals and the Earth as

well, and breathed the same breath of life into us all, then

we must also believe that all of us truly belong here. Now,

it is crucial for us to start acting like it.

39 McDonough & Braungart, 120.