Good at raising questions, not good at answering them

The April issue was reasonably good at raising questions but not very good at answering them. David Harris began with a critique of the church's approach to the environment, to which I thought he gave rather short shrift. The Old Testament passages to which he refers, in Genesis and the Psalms, are in my view the ones with which he must begin. The New Testament references are not much help. John 3:16-17 does talk about God loving the world, but unless you believe that polar bears and palm trees are capable of repentance, “world” means society rather than creation as a whole.
Andrew Faiz's problems with his wardrobe and his breakfast illustrate how difficult getting society to repent has become. We have become locked into a system of production and consumption, which depends on an abundant supply of cheap oil and cheap labour. Cheap oil is on the way out and cheap labour should be. But economic systems are like the container ships on which they depend. They are hard to turn around.
The other articles, about food and faith, walking gently and eating locally are full of sensible suggestions, but these are bands-aids. I don't want to knock band-aids. If I am bleeding all over the kitchen floor I need a band-aid. But band-aids don't get at the real problem, which is hubris.
Hubris is a Greek word having to do with humanity's tendency to do more than we should. The early stories in Genesis are hubris stories. Take Adam and Eve. God told them quite specifically they were not to eat from the tree of good and evil. But when the serpent suggested that God was having them on, Eve reacted like a well brought up daughter of the Enlightenment.
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was desired to make one wise she took of its fruit and gave some to her husband.
Eve was being perfectly rational, just like the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century, the time of the Enlightenment, was the time that Europeans decided that reason was the arbiter of all things. One no longer asked what God might think, only what human beings thought. Now reason is a very useful tool, indispensable in working out how to achieve what we have already decided to do. People have always thought that getting rich was a good idea, and once Europeans had figured out how to do it, by the use of reason, they went hell bent for leather. We had nobody around to tell us, at least until the 1970s, that there were limits to growth.
We still don't believe it. Listen to the news. If the economy is not growing it is floundering, in turmoil, sputtering, or worst of all, in recession. We are rich as Croesus, but if we are not getting richer, the sky is falling. This is what our leaders tell us, and we consistently vote for parties that are committed to the old ways, for people who are determined to make us richer, even if we all die in the attempt.
We probably won't but there are lots of people around the world who will.
Andrew Faiz is right; even his muffins are evil. But they are evil because we have bought into a system of rationality that takes no account of what God thinks. Economic rationality trumps everything else. We have learned nothing since Eve. But there are alternatives. One of them is stewardship, not just of the church's budget, but of the earth itself, an idea Doug Hall developed some years ago. As David Harris rightly pointed out stewardship should not begin with the assumption that we know what God thinks. On the contrary we are better off to assume that we don't, and play it safe.
Playing it safe is a new idea. The next election will probably show we are hooked on the same old same old.