Finding God in the Singing River
Christianity, Spirit, Nature
- Theology
- Ethics, Culture & Social Issues
- Publisher: Fortress Press (Augsburg Fortress)
- Published: 2005
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Publisher's Description
We live in an age of vast and rapid destruction of habitats and species. Yet Christianity holds great potential for healing this situation. Indeed, the Bible and Christian tradition are a treasure trove of rich images and stories about God as an "earthen" being who sustains the natural world with compassion and thereby models for humankind environmentally healthy ways of being. Mark Wallace's stimulating book retrieves a central but often neglected biblical theme — the idea of God as carnal Spirit who indwells all things — as the basis for constructing a "green spirituality" responsive to the environmental needs of our time. In the biblical tradition, he writes, God as Spirit is an ecological presence that shows itself to us daily by living in and through the earth. One message of Christianity, therefore, is celebration of the bodily, material world — ancient redwoods, vernal springs, broad-winged hawks, everyday pigweed — as the place that God indwells and cares for in order to maintain the well-being of our common planetary home. Alongside his green reading of the Bible and tradition, Wallace employs the resources of deep ecology, Neopagan spirituality, and the environmental justice movement to rethink Christianity as an earth-based, body-loving religion. He also analyzes color images reproduced in the book. Wallace's bold yet careful work reawakens our sense of the sacrality of the earth and the life that the trinitarian God creates there. It also grounds the impulses of New Age spirituality in a profoundly biblical notion of God's being and activity.
Endorsements (5)
“Finding God in the Singing River is a very courageous step into a hitherto unknown landscape of Christian thought and spirituality. Mark Wallace explores the presence of God the Spirit in earth community and in human bodies without giving up a Christ-centered and trinitarian theology. His work is postmodern but not post-Christian. I like his style, which oscillates between experiences and reflections, and I admire his passion for the creation community.”
“In the time of eco-spiritual crisis, Finding God in the Singing River arrives as a gift of startling and steadying insight. Releasing unfamiliar biblical symbols — the 'carnal Spirit' and 'mother bird God' — back into Christian discourse, Wallace draws eco-theology into conversations normally shunned, such as with Neopaganism and deconstruction. This is exciting thought, narrated with the loving clarity of a great teacher.”
“Mark Wallace's latest book, Finding God in the Singing River, represents a breakthrough in contemporary Christian theological reflection on nature. Wallace creatively maps a biocentric green Christian theology with the Holy Spirit at its center, understanding this dimension of God as the animating life-force of the universe.”
“"In this creative, ground-making (rather than ground-breaking) new book, Wallace calls for a two-pronged approach to Christian tradition. Reject its human-centered, distancing from the earth doctrines and ethics, especially where God is imaged as untouched by the physical world. Rather, embrace the passionate potential of earth wisdom of scripture in a spirit-motivated conversion of the heart. This spirit, is the Holy Spirit, no ghost-like anemic entity, but the 'enfleshed, winged Earth God of Christian heritage.'”
“This engaging and challenging book offers eloquent testimony to the suffering of God's Spirit in the cosmos and dares to rethink the relation of traditional Christianity to paganism and deep ecology. Cultivating a mystical and political pedagogy, Wallace seeks not only to change minds and hearts, but to transfigure the body politic in the interests of God's body, the earth.”
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