CREATION SPIRITUALITY AS A POST-APOCALYPTIC PARADIGM
by
Tom Baugh
I’m not sure how things are done these days
at Wisdom University, but ‘back in the day,’ when it was called The University of
Creation Spirituality (UCS), those who had completed their doctoral project
were scheduled an appointment for a chat with a couple of faculty. I was in
that first four-person graduating class (2001) and my examiners were Dr.’s Mel
Bricker and Dorsey Blake. We spent a
couple of hours together talking about UCS, my dissertation topic, and Creation
Spirituality as a paradigm or theological system. I don’t remember how we got to the question
of the application of Creation Spirituality to this day and age but I remember
clearly making the point that it was my feeling that Creation Spirituality’s
primary importance was not to this day but as a post-apocalyptic paradigm.
Nothing has happened in the intervening years to make me think otherwise.
To be post-apocalyptic there must first be
an apocalypse and to be post-apocalyptic you must have passed through the
apocalypse. Do I believe that humanity
will experience an apocalypse? Yes, I do! Do I believe that humanity will,
somehow, pass through this fire? Yes, I also believe that. In fact, a great majority of the people in
this world already live on the edge of apocalypse. Very soon the apocalypse
will engulf even those of us who have the leisure and the money to study Creation
Spirituality, the current manifestation of the ancient thread of panentheistic (1) theological thought, enriched by the
Wisdom traditions.
What will it be, this disaster that
threatens the very warp and woof of human societies? Will it be war? Oh yes! Many wars are currently burning on Earth and
there is nothing that would indicate that war will become a less popular
component of the human project. Will it be plague? Yes! We are actually anticipating it. Will it
be famine? Oh yes! We are now processing
grains, not for human food, not even for the highly questionable purpose of
feeding livestock, but rather as fuel for the tanks of our always hungry
vehicles. Will it be death? Yes, and death aplenty. None of this is new. It
simply describes major components of the human project. What is new is the disturbing juxtaposition
of three primary factors and one mitigating circumstance.
We do live in interesting and often
frightening times. We also live in
unique times. Three factors have come
together to fashion, in our time, a crisis with potentially staggering
dimensions. For the first time in
history our weapons have grown in number and capacity so that humanity is now
capable of near total destruction. The second factor of grave concern is the rapidly
changing environmental condition of Earth.
Humanity has so severely damaged natural systems that recovery is most
likely impossible. We are now only on
the outer edge of an ecocaust (2) of
staggering proportions. The Ecozoic Era (3) had a relatively gentle birth as a
concept in the latter part of the last century but it will have a very
difficult adolescence in the coming Dark Age. The third factor in this tragic
trinity is religion. In a recent journal
review, (4) I said that “The world
never seems to lack for authoritarian and totalitarian movements. Whatever the symbol on the flag, buried
somewhere deep or right up front in these movements, will be the institutions
and representatives of organized religion.”
A resurgent and increasingly evangelical Christianity with a strong
Dispensational and End Time component has been instrumental in pitting the
The mitigating circumstance lies in the
fact that apocalypse can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, when you control the
means to make it so. As John Gray (5)
points out, “Apocalyptic religion shapes the policies of American President
George W. Bush and his antagonist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in
Even if Earth was healthy and our only
weapons were swords, a militant Christianity and a militant Islam would still
surely clash with horrifying results, as they once did. But we now live in a
time when the weapons are awesome indeed, when natural resources (especially
oil) are depleting, and Earth is seriously ill. We appear to be on the edge of
the most significant via negativa in history.
I have said elsewhere (6) that we live in a time typified by the
restriction of the very democratic systems of governance that make the study of
paradigms such as Creation Spirituality possible; a time exacerbated by the
increased frequency and intensity of violence and monumental environmental
catastrophes; a time threatened by the growth of repressive theocratic systems
of governance that deny and, if given the opportunity, will crush any theology,
paradigm, and social system not their own.
Can this pending journey through the fire,
through the via negative of the human project, become a via transformative?
Could our journey through this most frightening experience of the near future
give birth to a positive distant future through spiritual transformation? With
whatever reflective time we have left before the jaws of oppression, clamp
tighter and tighter around us, it is a critically worthwhile task for the
Creation Spirituality movements to carefully investigate their roll in bringing
humanity through the fire. For what we are as we come out on the other side, is
what we will be for sometime to come.
Perhaps as the Creation Spirituality
communities develop they might focus on their role in safeguarding the
essential elements of reason, spirituality, and wisdom from our age and
preceding ages so that these might be passed on to the coming age. To some extent this was done by Catholic
Christianity and, ironically, the Islamic world during the Dark Ages of Europe.
Could it be that the true promise of Creation Spirituality will be to insure
that the gifts spoken of in the foundation works for the movement will be
passed on, thus liberating those who, in time, will exist to rebuild on the other
side of the dark and spreading chasm?
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Tom Baugh received his D.Min from the
University for Creation Spirituality in 2001. Tom is currently a Fellow in the
Initiative for Interdisciplinary Studies at the Green Institute (www.greeninstitute.net) and President of the Religion and Conservation
Biology Working Group (http://www.conbio.org/workinggroups/Religion/) of the Society for Conservation Biology
(www.conbio.org). He is a member of a
number of organizations and learned societies.
(1) Cooper,
J.W. 2006. Panentheism: The other god of the philosophers.
(2) ‘Ecocaust’ is a term reportedly coined by
author Mark Budz in his book Clade (Bantam Books).
(3) Term first used by Thomas Berry.
(4) Baugh, T. 2008. Totalitarian movements and
political religions-A journal review.
The Green Institute. http://www.greeninstitute.net/?q=node/497.
(5) Gray, J. 2007. Black Mass: Apocalyptic
religion and the death of Utopia.
(6) Baugh, T. 2007. Ecocaust and ecological wisdom. The Green Institute. http://www.greeninstitute.net/?q=node/10.
Please cite this article as follows:
Baugh, T. 2008. Creation Spirituality as a
post-apocalyptic paradigm. Creation Spirituality Communities http://www.creationspirituality.info/Articles.html.