By Darryl W. Stephens
What do you know about environmental holiness? Try this quiz before reading any further. There may be more than one right answer per question.
After completing the quiz above, how do you think you did?
Methodists have proclaimed a strong environmental witness through much of our history, from stewardship and conservation to creation care and environmental holiness. Let’s explore the theology behind this witness to equip your ministry within the community of creation.
Ellen Ott Marshall coined the phrase “environmental holiness” for the Council of Bishops’ foundation document and pastoral letter, God’s Renewed Creation: Call to Hope and Action, issued November 3, 2009. Marshall, a professor at Candler School of Theology and writer of the bishops’ document, landed on the phrase while in conversation with Pat Calbeck Harper and Ted Runyon. Addressed to “the Church and people of good will,” this foundation document calls for human responsibility for God’s creation. In this document, the bishops address “three interrelated threats” facing humanity: “pandemic poverty and disease; environmental degradation and climate change; and a world awash with weapons and violence.” Could this fifteen-year-old Call be any more relevant to the human condition today?!
The bishops’ Call makes it clear that human care of the natural world, including global climate stewardship, is essential to growth in the life of faith. The bishops urge United Methodists to “practice social and environmental holiness” by conserving natural resources; partnering in defending God’s creation; and using social and political power to “change systems and structures that destroy, deplete or damage the earth.” While the bishops did not explain the meaning of the concept, the new phrase innovated on a long tradition of Methodist engagement with the environment and expanded on John Wesley’s term “social holiness.”
For John Wesley, the term “social holiness” emphasized the need for a community of support for believers seeking to be perfected in love in this life. In other words, Wesley believed and taught that you cannot be a Christian by yourself. Thus, the General Rules are designed to support growth in the life of faith through accountability and nurture. Wesley and his team of preachers experimented in the 1740s by evangelizing through proclamation only, without forming societies. The results were disastrous. Without small-group support in the form of classes and bands, people were prone to backsliding.
Holiness can be understood as the transforming work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. David Field defined holiness as “the gracious work of God in human persons, which transforms us so that our lives are characterized by love for God and our fellow human beings” (Bid Our Jarring Conflicts Cease, xv). God’s transformative work in us is co-operant, meaning that God offers the invitation, and it is up to us to respond. Furthermore, “Grace is the uncreated personal presence of the Holy Spirit” (Randy Maddox, Responsible Grace, 195). This process, in which the Holy Spirit works within us to restore the image of God as we grow in Christ-likeness, is holiness.
There is only one holiness. Personal holiness and social holiness in Wesley’s soteriology is not a dual focus. There are not two ways to experience holiness—either by oneself, through lone spiritual practices, or in a group, through shared activities. Rather, all holiness is social. Holiness, understood as the experience of co-operant participation in God’s healing grace, requires a community of faith for support and accountability.
Wesley believed in the restoration of all creation. In his 1785 sermon, “The New Creation,” he proclaimed not only a future state of paradise for humanity but also a vision of the peaceable kingdom in the animal realm, drawn from Isaiah. In fact, Wesley expressed a rare concern in his day for the humane treatment of animals and even speculated about whether animals have souls. Christ came to redeem all creation (Colossians 1:15-20; see also The Book of Resolutions 2016, 68), “For God so loved the cosmos that he gave his only son” (John 3:16). The Revised Social Principles call us to “praise God with the whole of creation (Ps 148) and recognize that we are part of complex ecosystems, all valued by God.”
Wesley’s sermon “Scripture Way of Salvation” (1965), based on Ephesians 2:8–10, explains why all the answers to question six are correct. Good works are necessary to the life of faith—given time and opportunity. We are not saved by good works but rather saved for good works. The context for sanctification is one of restored relationships into which we learn to grow and live: relationships with self, neighbor, God, and the entire creation. Environmental holiness is necessary in the same sense that other good works are necessary—not as the basis of our salvation but, given time and opportunity, requisite to the life of faith. “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” (James 2:17). Thus, discipleship should evidence itself in restored (just) relationships within the community of creation.
Dominion has caused much environmental havoc through the centuries. To quote Inigo Montoya, a character in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” In 1972, General Conference claimed it a misinterpretation to read Genesis 1:28 as a warrant to exploit nature (Resolutions 1972, 106–9). Since then, United Methodist environmental witness has repeated its corrective interpretations, including: “stewardship” (Resolutions 1980, 89); “trusteeship” and “stewardship” (Resolutions 1984, 333); “stewardship” and “ecological responsibility” (Resolutions 1992, 65); and “stewardship responsibility” (Resolutions 2012, 441). Environmental stewardship—not exploitation, extraction, or control—is the way that United Methodist social witness understands Genesis 1:28.
Environmental holiness is a new term for a central idea in traditional Wesleyan theology. The Revised Social Principles call us “to honor the role of every part of creation in healing the whole.” The community of all creation is the context for a life of holiness. Through God’s grace, we are invited to participate as God heals the cosmos. As co-workers of God in the redemption of creation, Methodists join in reconciliation and healing, participating in an eschatological vision of the new creation through lives transformed by the Holy Spirit. Discipleship demands no less.