Let us proclaim a brand new theoloev of nature

Angus Macdonald talks to Professor Colin Russell, who believes that traditional Christian notions of 'stewardship' can provide real answers to the global environmental crisis CH1U4'IIANS HAVE traditionally been sidelined in the Great Green Debate the global environmental crisis, and how to tackle it. Theological notions based around our "duty" to look after God's creation have been dismissed as naive and inadequate, at best hopelessly short on specifics, at worst positively counter-productive.
Enter Professor Colin Russell a distinguished chemist-turned-historian of science and a life-long Anglican who has placed himself squarely at the head of a growing number of impeccably well-informed scientists who believe that the Green Debate desperately needs a broader moral perspective: one that only Christian theology can provide.
Russell, a former President of Christians in Science and now a visiting research professor in the history of science and technology at the Open University, believes the traditional Christian doctrine of "stewardship of the earth" can provide some much-needed fresh insights in a debate which has tended to be dominated either by the unbridled arrogance of the "technologists" convinced that man's ingenuity and resourcefulness alone will get him out of the mess or by the woolly thinking and return to pre-scientific mysticism of the "New Agers". What is needed, he says, is a little humility and a recognition that the traditional vices of ignorance, greed and selfishness can have global, as well as personal, ramifications.
A doughty non-conformist, Russell is no stranger to controversy. In the late 1980s, he caused a minor storm with an article which argued that the traditional idea of Christian belief as fundamentally at odds with a scientific view of the world was a pernicious myth deliberately fostered at least in Britain by a cabal of Victorian scientists bent on "liberating" science from what they saw as unwarranted clerical control.
Through the propaganda of men such as Thomas Huxley, Bishop Wilberforce's adversary during the legendary Oxford debate of 1860, the Galileo and Darwin controversies were cleverly portrayed as archetypes for the encounter between religion and science enlightened experimenters and freethinkers whose noble quest for objective scientific "truth" ran up against the absurd and outdated doctrinal shibboleths of the Church.
"This is a monstrous perversion of the truth," says Russell. "Historically, science and Christian theology are in each other's mutual debt Western science originated because of the Church, not in spite of it. The amazing thing is how people came to think otherwise."
His new book, The Earth, Humanity and God based on the Templeton series of lectures which he gave last year at Cambridge University goes a step further. Packed with detail and bristling with references to academic literature, the book attempts to tackle, in a popular and accessible manner, the "big problems" of the global crisis from a thoughtful Christian perspective.
Russell believes the two "world-views" which currently dominate the debate the conventional conception of the earth as a mechanistic system which man is gradually learning to understand and control, and the return to organismic, "New Age" philosophies such as Gaia are both inadequate.
A total reliance on the illusory magic of science is a dangerous thing, in Russell's view. Humankind ought to deploy its technological and scientific knowledge to the full "faith is not a license to sit back and do nothing" but science as the new God will not do. "The transformation of science to scientism, an object of worship and ultimate authority, has done immense harm."
Russell thinks the missing element has been the divine: "To discuss the fate of the earth without reference to God is not only like playing Hamlet without the Prince, it is like acting, producing and criticising the play without reference to Shakespeare. God invites us to be cocreators with him in his continuing act of creation."
The heart of the book, and the crux of his argument, is that the familiar sins of greed, arrogance and selfishness inevitably have an environmental dimension. Self-gratification, filtered up through the human social and economic system, is still selfgratification. Intriguingly, Russell links it to the Biblical notion of the Fall: "The real problem is in the human spirit aggression, arrogance, greed these are the root of our problems. The buck stops with us."
Russell believes that proclaiming a practical theology of nature has slipped down the agenda of the Churches: "It's seen as not exciting enough, or intellectually too demanding. The only way is for lay people and theologians to get together and say, this is an important subject, we must address it.
"It could be practical things parishes recycling rubbish or Christians writing to their MPs about specific issues but ultimately it is about a living theology. It's part of the whole Good News that we are stewards, accountable to God for what we do to His Creation."
Questions of denomination, he thinks, are irrelevant "the mechanical universe was a product of Protestant thinking in England and Catholic thinking in France Boyle was English and Protestant, Descartes was Catholic .and French. Catholics and Protestants can differ on so many important things, but this isn't one of them." The Catholic position on birth control, however, "causes enormous problems".
Russell ends his book with a visionary chapter in which he proposes six straightforward Bible-based propositions which he tentatively suggests as a way forward. Hard headed secular environmentalists will have trouble swallowing them, but Russell is convinced that the hard facts of ecological disaster can find explanation and significance in a divine framework and that therein lies the hope for the future. "A new synthesis is required which throws on our shoulders immense responsibilities, but which also offers a hope for the Earth."
"The Earth, Humanity and God" is published by University College London Press at L30.00