Apr292023
Book excerpt

“Our fields speak a language, which, as the psalmist tells us, is a language of praise (see Ps 19:1–4). Instead of the language of industrialization, which is the language of efficiency and control, we should learn to speak the language of praise. And that means a move toward agricultural practices that exhibit what Liberty Hyde Bailey, in his 1915 book The Holy Earth called earth righteousness.

“I said earlier that Jesus didn’t have any explicitly agrarian advice, but perhaps there’s one exception. Jesus told his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount not to worry, then added something that provides an imaginative leaping point for much of what I wish to say below. ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow,’ he said, ‘they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these’ (Mt 6:28–29). Jesus used this example about clothing, and why his disciples shouldn’t worry about what they wear, but I take his words here also to be a kind of agrarian directive: consider the lilies, how they grow. Look at the created order God has established. You will never do better than this. So trust in this order and imitate it. Neither Solomon in all his glory — nor, we might add, Monsanto or Archer Daniels Midland or Cargill and their fertilizers or pesticides or genetically modified seeds — can out-create what God has created.

“For ten thousand years we have tried to outdo creation in our attempt to grow food, trusting in our own ingenuity. We have mostly failed. Modern agriculture is a zero-sum game in which we steadily, as Wes Jackson says, ‘contribute to the drawdown of the capital stock of the planet.’ Yet it need not be. Indeed, as Jackson and other practitioners of the consider-the-lilies approach an approach I will call regenerative agriculture tell us, we can use nature as analog rather than antagonist. Consider the lilies of the field turns out to be sound agriculture advice.

“Around the world there is a growing movement among agriculturalists to look to nature as a model for how to practice agriculture. Wes Jackson and his fellow plant breeders at The Land Institute, which Norman will describe later in the book, are some of the biggest proponents of this practice — what poet Alexander Pope called ‘consulting the genius of the place.’ But there are others. Instead of imposing our own agricultural scheme, most often monocultures of annual crops, we should look at how lilies grow. They don’t grow in monocultures, but in polycultures; that is, they grow mixed with other plants. Some of those plants fix nitrogen, fertilizing their neighbors. Lilies don’t need someone to plant them every year; they are perennial. Our monocultures of annual crops exact a heavy toll on the land; if we’re to practice agriculture in a way that conserves life rather than degrades it, we will need to depend much more on perennial polycultures for our food supply.

“Yet we still must eat annual crops, and forms of agriculture such as biointensive mini-farming use God’s creation as a model for such crops. Using conventional agricultural practices, it takes just over an acre of land to feed one person in the United States for a year, and far more energy and topsoil are wasted than are produced in food calories. Using bio-intensive methods, you can feed ten people for a whole year on that one acre, and you can build soil fertility while doing it. That same acre, by the way, would feed one cow for a whole year, or it would fill up the gas tank of your car with ethanol exactly twice.

“The list of other types of regenerative agriculture is long: permaculture, biodynamic agriculture, agroforestry, Farming God’s Way, Fukuoka no-till farming, and rotational grazing livestock systems, among others. In the sustainable agriculture world, some of these names can become mirages of their own, a territory to be policed and defended by practitioners as the answer. But we need not get too hung up on names or programs, and no one system need dominate; food growers in the abundant kingdom can learn from all of these bodies of knowledge. The underlying idea to remember is that the ecosystems in which we find ourselves — created by God and deemed ‘very good’ — are far more adept at growing things than we are. Making ourselves students of those ecosystems is what it means to serve and preserve the fertile soil God entrusted to our care (see Gen 2:15). Our role is not to outdo creation or copy it verbatim, but to use it as an analog, a controlling metaphor, for how we tend our own fields.”

— from Fred Bahnson, Making Peace with the Land: God’s Call to Reconcile with Creation (InterVarsity Press, 2012)

Fred Bahnson was a guest on Volume 116 of the Journal.

Related reading and listening

  • When myth becomes fact — In this 1976 interview, Clyde Kilby (1902–1986) discusses C. S. Lewis’s critique of scientism and rationalism, his belief in the primacy of the imagination, and his mythic vision. (37 minutes)
  • A sampling of newly published lectures — Ken Myers introduces listeners to four recently released lectures, courtesy of our Partners. The lecturers are Jennifer Frey, Gary Saul Morson, N. T. Wright, and Andrew Kern. (27 minutes)
  • The inward eye, cosmic truth, and making well — Andrew Kern takes his listeners along an “interlinear” reading of a portion of St. Augustine’s Confessions that explores the differences between how God makes and how we create. (38 minutes)
  • “Investigations of divine works” — Greg Wilbur explains how closely connected music is to the order of the cosmos and how it even reveals attributes of God. (56 minutes)
  • A letter from Ken Myers — Ken Myers examines the cultural implications of the Incarnation and the deep-seated dualism of modernity that divorces spirituality from our material experience. (22 minutes)
  • How music blesses and teaches —
    FROM VOL. 64
    Theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie explores what we learn about time, theology, and the structure of Creation from the experience of music. (28 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 166 — FEATURED GUESTS: William Cavanaugh, Kent Burreson, Beth Hoeltke, Jeffrey Barbeau, Jason Baxter, John Betz, and Bruce Herman
  • Creation, in harmony with the Logos — Rowan Williams on the Logos and the diverse logoi that mirror it
  • An icon of the whole world — Jason Baxter explains how Dante includes a panoply of characters and creatures in his Comedia, offering a prismatic view of all of Creation in its glory. (20 minutes)
  • Cosmic realities in the built world — Christopher and Christine Perrin discuss the implications of architect Christopher Alexander’s (1936–2022) discovery of patterns of building that cohere with the the created cosmos and with ourselves as human creatures. (59 minutes)
  • The “book” of Creation — Alan Noble explains why the modern world makes it profoundly difficult to experience Creation as revelation, and he encourages unmediated encounters with Creation that lead to meditation. (52 minutes)
  • Life more abundantly — Jeanne Schindler advocates for a return to an understanding and prioritizing of sensory experience — real engagement with the real world — as foundational to learning and living. (35 minutes)
  • Heaven and earth are full of His glory — Gerald R. McDermott examines the typological tradition of the Church, particularly through Jonathan Edwards’s thought, and he argues for a recovery of the Christian understanding of the universe as an “immense Trinitarian symbol.” (61 minutes)
  • An invitation to a feast — Christina Bieber Lake explains how poetry is an invitation to experience the beauty and goodness of Creation as gift. (44 minutes)
  • Stewarding God’s creation —
    FROM VOL. 116
    Fred Bahnson talks about how a Christian understanding of God’s redemptive work on the earth should influence our practices of growing and sharing food. (19 minutes)
  • “Earth-shaking” and “heart-breaking” beauty —
    FROM VOL. 151
    Junius Johnson warns that the pursuit of beauty is both perilous and an experience that points to the desire for God. (25 minutes)
  • Clips from five extended interviews — We are pleased to share clips from five interviews that we’ve recently produced as full-length Conversations. (30 minutes)
  • Breaking out of the immanent frame — Norman Wirzba on the true character of Creation and of our creatureliness
  • Good News for All Creation — Theologian Norman Wirzba helps us rethink the category of nature in terms of the Christian doctrine of creation. (66 minutes)
  • Ten, seven, and the rhythm of God’s love — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on the meaningfulness of numbers in Creation and Scripture
  • Lives of generosity — Jonathan Wilson distinguishes between two fundamental ways of viewing Creation: a true Christian account of the world and a “survival of the fittest” one. (21 minutes)
  • Creation and redemption as trinitarian projects — Colin Gunton on Christ and Spirit in creation and redemption
  • Reflecting the being of God in communion — Colin Gunton on the relationality at the heart of Creation
  • The whole world in his Hands — Colin Gunton on the trinitarian emphasis in St. Irenaeus’s doctrine of Creation
  • The recovery of an integrated ecology — In this essay, Michael Hanby unpacks the summons of Laudato si’ to an ecological way of life based on a proper understanding of creation in its fullness and integrity. (57 minutes)
  • Speaking the word in love — In this lecture, D. C. Schindler examines core insights from Ferdinand Ulrich on the central vocation of man and the meaning of being. (32 minutes)
  • A poet’s relationship to time —
    FROM VOL. 57
    Poet Wilmer Mills (1969–2011) discusses how his agricultural and cross-cultural childhood in Brazil shaped his imagination and his relationship with modernity. (11 minutes)
  • Music, silence, and the order of Creation — In this lecture, Ken Myers explains how it is that our participation in harmonic beauty in music is a kind of participation in the life of God, in Whom all order and beauty coheres and is sustained. (61 minutes)
  • The gift of liturgical time — In this lecture, Gregory Wilbur explains how liturgy and liturgical time align us to the rhythms and order of Creation, forming us as disciples. (45 minutes)
  • The confident optimism in true Christian asceticism — Philosopher Étienne Gilson on the essential goodness of Creation
  • Festivity and the goodness of Creation — Drawing on Josef Pieper’s ideas, Ken Myers explains why the spirit of festivity is the spirit of worship, and that “entertainment” is ultimately an artificial, contrived, and empty effort to achieve festivity. (25 minutes)
  • Forms as portals to reality — Ken Myers explains the ancient classical and Christian view that music embodies an order and forms that correspond to the whole of created reality, in its transcendence and materiality. (54 minutes)
  • Creation’s goodness and human faithfulness — J. Matthew Bonzo and Michael R. Stevens on Wendell Berry’s understanding of how Creation is a gift with certain givenness
  • Productivity or thrift? — Wendell Berry contrasts an economy of productivity (which invites extravagance) and an economy of thrift (which takes care of things)
  • The destructive logic of short-term thinking — Wendell Berry on the perils of ignoring the nature of Nature
  • Farming and our primal vocation — Shawn and Beth Dougherty make a theological case for biomimicry, or fulfilling our original vocation of tending the earth by working according to the nature of Nature. (68 minutes)
  • A theology of eating —
    FROM VOL. 113
    Theologian Norman Wirzba examines the relationship between food and faith. (24 minutes)
  • Honoring the pigness of pigs —
    FROM VOL. 137
    Popular innovator and speaker on farming practices Joel Salatin talks about the challenges of caring for Creation within an agricultural and food system that pays little attention to the purposes and inclinations of Creation. (25 minutes)
  • An account of God’s relatedness to time and space — Colin Gunton on the trinitarian conception of the divine economy in St. Irenaeus
  • What does it mean to be a creature? — Canon-theologian Simon Oliver explains how and why the doctrine of Creation is cardinal and must frame all theology. (62 minutes)
  • “Reading Lewis with blinders on” — Chris Armstrong explains how C. S. Lewis’s work is grounded deeply in the Christian humanist tradition. (45 minutes)
  • Creation as beauty and gift —
    FROM VOL. 67
    David Bentley Hart describes how the Christian understanding of Creation as beauty and gift, as the outward expression of the delight the Trinity has in itself, reveals a vision of reality different from the pagan or fatalist vision of reality. (12 minutes)
  • The Life was the Light of men — In a lecture from 2018, Ken Myers contrasts the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason with the Christocentric conception of reason. (57 minutes)
  • Discerning an alternative modernity — In a lecture from 2019, Simon Oliver presents a summary of the cultural consequences of the comprehensiveness of the work of Christ. (28 minutes)
  • Lessons from Leviticus — The book of Leviticus may be assumed to be irrelevant for charting a way through the challenges of modernity. Theologian Peter J. Leithart disagrees. (22 minutes)
  • A theology of active beauty — In a 2010 lecture, George Marsden examines a few ways in which the distorting effects of Enlightenment rationalism were resisted in the work of Jonathan Edwards. (64 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 161 — FEATURED GUESTS: Andrew Wilson, Kyle Edward Williams, Andrew James Spencer, Landon Loftin, Esther Lightcap Meek, Andrew Davison
  • Understanding the doctrine of participation —
    FROM VOL. 150
    Theologian and priest Andrew Davison believes that retrieving the historic doctrine of participation is vital to help Christians escape from the default philosophy of the age. (32 minutes)
  • On Earth as it is in Heaven —
    FROM VOL. 108
    Hans Boersma — author of Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry — explains why Christians should reject the modern separation of Heaven and Earth and recover a “sacramental ontology.” (26 minutes)
  • Making peace with the land — Fred Bahnson challenges us to consider how we might honor our created and redeemed relationship with the earth as God’s stewards. (48 minutes)
Tags: