Category: md-5-2

Water lies at the center of our Christian sign of baptism and our current ecological crises and, thus, deserves deeper theological treatment. This paper explores visions of “redemption as rehydration” in the prophetic literature, then it traces resonant themes into the Apocalypse’s “river of the water of life” (Rev 22:1). It next explores how water provides a “metaphorical map of God” and why hydrologic systems should be a key characteristic of how humans dwell in creation. The paper concludes with a call to watershed-based discipleship as a faithful response to Christian mission amidst our looming environmental catastrophes..

“El agua es la vida!” –New Mexican proverb

“The health of our waters is the principle measure of how we live on the land.” –Luna Leopold

The ancient Christian ritual of baptism articulates an ecological fact: without water there can be no life. We rightly speak of baptismal waters as the symbolic source of renewal in Christ—a metaphor predicated in part upon the deep biblical tradition concerning “living waters” I will explore below. Today, however, Christians can no longer responsibly invoke this venerable tradition without also acknowledging the ecological realities of our context, which include the systematic dehydration of the earth by industrial civilization.

Deepening and interlocking environmental crises stalk our history, including climate destruction, species extinction, and declining natural fertility. Among these, one of the most pressing is “peak water.” Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute describes this as the critical point, already reached in many areas of the world, where we have overtaxed the planet’s ability to absorb the consequences of our water use.1 Its global symptoms include widespread desertification, water insecurity, declining water quality, and the drift toward international water wars.2 The grim specter of peak water represents the dark opposite of baptism; it portends only death. It is a keystone “sign of our times” that reveals afresh the old gospel imperative to “turn around” as an historic ultimatum.

End-game ecological trends press Christians to re-read our tradition from the perspective of the groaning creation, as did Paul in Romans 8:21–22—including and especially our theology and practices of mission. Water is a strategic place to start. It is the resource we North Americans arguably most take for granted—a privileged and unsustainable conceit that must change. This paper will argue for re-centering faith and mission around “watershed discipleship” as a matter of social justice, ecological sustainability, and theological fidelity. This imperative proceeds both from ancient biblical visions and current realities of water scarcity.

Prophetic Visions of Redemption as Rehydration

The biblical story begins (Gen 1:2) and ends (Rev 22) in a “waterworld.” This represents a primal scriptural expression of basic ecological truth: water is the single most important component in the birth and continuation of life—we might say, the Alpha and Omega of creation. Water thus deserves more careful social, ecological, and theological attention than it has received in our churches.3

The first half of this paper will look at John the Revelator’s extraordinary eschatological vision of social and environmental restoration through a divine “rehydration” of the earth. John was clearly nurtured by a recurring strand in Hebrew prophetic literature, so let me begin by acknowledging this rich “imaginary” of an ancient desert people.4

It remains a well-kept secret in our churches that the tradition of prophetic judgment in the Hebrew Bible articulates divine salvation most often in terms of the renewal—not destruction—of the earth. In Isaiah, for example, the imperial civilizations that surrounded (and oppressed) Israel are indeed promised demolition by divine judgment; the land, however, is rehabilitated through “rewilding,” as undomesticated animals re-inhabit decaying cities (13:19–22) and wild birds roost in abandoned fortresses (34:8–15).5

One expression of redemption as the restoration of creation is found in prophetic visions of eschatological reforestation. Israel’s seers may have understood that the arid climate of their Palestinian homeland was not natural but rather the result of historic processes of desertification due to the relentless imperial economic exploitation of the land. Indeed, ecological archaeology has established that the ancient Mediterranean world was largely deforested by the time of the eighth-century prophets.6 This may explain their rage over the clear-cutting of highland hardwood forests (Zech 11:1ff.; Isa 14:3–8, 37:22–24; Solomon was also guilty: 1 Kgs 5:6ff.). They longed for Yahweh’s judgment that would save the threatened forests: “The cypresses exult over you, the cedars of Lebanon,” Isaiah inveighs against the king of Babylon, “saying, ‘Since you were laid low, no one comes to cut us down’ ” (Isa 14:8).7

The most well-known example of this motif is found in Isaiah 35, which begins with the promise that parched lands will once again host “the glory of Lebanon” (Isa 35:1ff.; i.e., the great cedar forests of the north). The poem goes on to promise not only an end to human physical disabilities (35:3–6a) but the healing of creation itself:

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,

and streams in the desert;

the burning sand shall become a pool,

and the thirsty ground springs of water;

the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp,

the grass shall become reeds and rushes. (35:6b–7)

Restored habitat brings the return of wild animals (see also Isa 43:20). And all this renewal is made possible because water is flowing again everywhere.

Second Isaiah echoes the idea that both people (especially those marginalized by empire) and forests will be restored:

When the poor and needy seek water,

and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst,

I the LORD will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them.

I will open rivers on the bare heights,

and fountains in the midst of the valleys;

I will make the wilderness a pool of water,

and the dry land springs of water.

I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive;

I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together. (Isa 41:17–19.)

Just as Pharaoh’s army was drowned in the old Exodus story (Exod 14), here the travails of empire similarly disappear under water.

The promise of rehydration recurs in the proto-apocalyptic oracles of several later Israelite prophets. Joel prophesies that “all the watercourses of Judah shall flow with water, and a spring shall issue from the House of the Lord and shall water the Wadi of the Acacias” (Joel 4:18; njps). Zechariah portends: “In that day, fresh water shall flow from Jerusalem, part of it to the Eastern Sea and part to the Western Sea, throughout the summer and winter” (Zech 14:8; njps). But the most elaborate development of this motif is found in Ezek 47:1–12, the culmination of his lengthy description of eschatological Israel, its land and temple-city (Ezek 40–48).

The first part of the oracle narrates in refrain how water is flowing out of the temple toward the four directions (47:1–2). Then comes another refrain in which the rising tide is measured, from ankle, to knee, to waist-deep, to “a river that could not be crossed” (47:3–5). Implied here is the rehabilitation of the Gihon spring that (inconsistently) supplied water to Jerusalem.8 Ezekiel then imagines Palestine “greened” all the way to the Dead Sea (47:6–12). But unlike the flood of Genesis 7, Ezekiel’s surging river is life-giving, indicated by the explosion of fecundity that occurs within and beside it: “everything will live where the river goes” (v. 9).9 The vision culminates with an ever-bearing, perennial riparian forest, providing food and medicine (v. 12). This nod to the Garden of Eden story is later re-appropriated by John the Revelator, effectively bracketing (like the waterworld image) the biblical story.

Israel during the biblical period was a dry place indeed, with only a couple of major rivers, few perennial streams, and unreliable springs. So these extraordinary visions of redemption as rehydration bear witness to the fact that in Palestine, water lay at the heart of environmental sustainability, social justice, and divine concern.10

The River of the Water of Life

John of Patmos’s “river of the water of life” (Rev 22:1ff.) is patterned in part on Ezek 47. A careful examination of this image reveals a rich theological and ecological texture. First and foremost, this eschatological river stands in stark contrast to the realities of John’s late first-century CE readers. Those living in arid Mediterranean climate were familiar chiefly with the stagnant, torpid water found in small ponds, seasonal wells, catchment tanks, ritual baths, or clay pots. Domestic water quality was often poor (hence the advice of 1 Tim 5:23). John’s river, however, “shines like crystal” (lampron hōs krustallon; Rev 22:1; cf. 4:6). This is not a supernatural assertion but a poetic observation: pure water indeed appears crystalline when it is flowing freely (think of the dancing silver strands of a mountain stream). The phrase “river of the water of life” (potamon hudatos zoēs) connotes exactly that: the running, bubbling, lively water of a spring or brook.11 Experiences of such “living water,” as the Gospel of John puts it (hudōr zōn; John 4:10; 7:38), were rare indeed for this desert people. This signals a dramatic restoration of life to the land and those dwelling on it, just as the Hebrew prophets had envisioned.

John’s river, moreover, flows through “the middle of the great street of the city” (Rev 22:2; niv). The Greek term plateia connotes the main thoroughfare (or plaza) of a Hellenistic metropolis. Poignantly, earlier in the Apocalypse this plateia was the space of political violence, where the bodies of two prophets murdered by the imperial beast lay in public view for three and a half days as a spectacle of state terror (Rev 11:8–9). But now this street has become “pure gold, transparent as glass” (Rev 21:21).12 The New Jerusalem’s main street has dissolved into a river of life that washes away the blood of empire.13

There is another way in which this river symbolizes liberation from empire. Elsewhere in Revelation the water of life is depicted as a spring (pēgē). The martyrs who live “before the throne of God . . . will not hunger or thirst anymore, nor will the sun or any heat strike them; for the Lamb who is in the center of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to springs of living water” (zoēs pēgas hudatōn; Rev 7:15–17; author’s translation). This is a pointed recontextualization of Isa 49:10, an oracle of emancipation. Moreover, this spring is a “gift” (Rev 21:6; tēs pēgēs tou hudatos tēs zoēs dōrean); “Let the one who thirsts come forward, and . . . receive the gift of living water” (22:17; hudōr zoēs dōrean; author’s translation). Here is more midrash on the subversive vision of second Isaiah—“All who are thirsty, come for water, even if you have no money” (Isa 55:1; njps)—which was a rebuke of the currency-dependent commodity markets of empire and a reassertion of the gift economy of nature.14

Yet, these living waters are not springing up from the ground, but “proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Rev 22:1; nkjv). This primal notion of Yhwh as a cosmic fount, too, is found in several places in the Hebrew Bible. “For with You is the spring of life,” sings the Psalmist (Ps 36:9; MT, mĕqôr ḥayîym; LXX, pēgē zoēs). And Jeremiah laments:

My people have committed two evils:

they have forsaken Me,

the fountain of living water (MT, mĕqôr mayim ḥayîym; LXX, pēgēn hudatos zoēs)

and dug out cisterns for themselves,

cracked cisterns that can hold no water (Jer 2:13).15

Lastly, as in Ezekiel 47, John’s freely and abundantly flowing river provides habitat for the tree of life, which yields spectacular fruits each month (Rev 22:2). Its twelve crops correspond to the central symbolic number of the Apocalypse (in which dōdeka appears 20 times). This figure also represents the restored nation of Israel, hearkening back to its roots in the tribal confederacy (a theme also explicitly addressed in Ezek 47:13–48:35). But for John of Patmos, this is an inclusive political vision. As in Ezekiel, the leaves of the tree are for healing, but here specifically for the nations, including presumably the “kings of the earth” who have been welcomed into the city (Rev 21:24). Even empire is healed in the end—but only when eclipsed by the ecology of life.

The Revelator has cosmically “transplanted” both tree and river from the primeval garden (Gen 2:9ff.) into the heart of the eschatological city. But the former has transfigured the latter: it is unrecognizable as an urban space—at least as defined by our civilization, which builds cities over and against nature. The New Jerusalem has been thoroughly “permaculturized,” a lush food forest taking the place of the hard urban jungle. And all because the world has been resaturated with the waters of life.

These prophetic visions represent profound articulations of social and environmental restorative justice from a people for whom dehydration was a daily reality. They speak equally sharply to today, in which our lands are again parched and compromised by imperial hubris. Hostage as we are to the specter of “peak water” and resource wars, we would do well to reconsider such old wisdom.

God’s Map: Theology and Geography

In a society characterized by (and dependent upon) the relentless commodification and privatization of the primary gift of life, how might we embrace the radical and compelling biblical hope that every thirst will be quenched? The task facing us is both theological and practical.

If all talk about God is necessarily metaphorical, then surely water is a primary theological trope, as suggested by the frequent biblical imagery identifying water tightly with the divine. Four essential characteristics of water certainly pertain also to the Creator.

First and foremost, as noted, there can be no life without water. It is the primary building block of creation, covering 71% of the earth’s surface and constituting on average 60% of the human body. It restores but cannot be destroyed—though if it is degraded it can lose its healing character.

Second, water is the only natural element that can exist in all three common states: liquid, solid, and gaseous. Moreover, in the hydrologic cycle it circulates from the heavens (condensation, precipitation) to earth and beneath (infiltration), to the sea and other large bodies of water (surface runoff, groundwater discharge), and finally back to the heavens (evaporation). These many forms represent a great circle of life—which one might argue also characterizes the circulation of the Spirit.16

Third, water manifests a spectrum of traits often attributed to the divine. It can be patient and accommodating, flowing around obstacles, yet also has the power to wear down the greatest physical structures (or burst them apart through expanding ice). Water makes hard things smooth over time; it is also an amazing solvent and thus is rightly used in purification. It can be still and gentle but also relentless and ferocious. Surface water has the capacity to carry but also to drown—immersion can lead either to life or to death (the Bible is full of examples of both).

Finally, water is a symbol of justice. It is most substantial and alive when fluid, but can turn morbid if stagnant. It wants to flow downward, seeking level, a poignant metaphor of divine concern for the “lowest.” Thus Amos famously appeals for “justice to flow down like a perennial stream” (Amos 5:24; author’s translation).17

Water thus provides a kind of metaphorical “map of God.” Conversely, it also figures fundamentally in God’s map of creation. To illustrate this, compare the two photographs below.

Above is an aerial photograph of the San Rafael Swell on the Colorado Plateau in Utah.18 It shows clearly that even in the most arid climate on the continent, the single most distinctive and defining feature is the way water flows. A theological reading of this universal geographical truism would conclude that water patterns are the chief design features of a creation that has not been re-engineered by human society.

In contrast, the image below is an aerial view of nearby Las Vegas, NV, whose patterns are typical of modern urban sprawl.19 What is evident from such an (over)built environment is not where water flows—that is almost impossible to discern—but rather where automobile traffic flows. It is virtually all artifice.

The profound differences between these two design patterns capture the essence of what is ecologically unsustainable about industrial civilization. If our defiance of nature (represented by the second image) has brought us to the brink of collapse, then a radical response is called for—that is, one that goes to the roots of how the earth was/is made (represented by the first image). We have lost our way as creatures of God’s biosphere, and only the map that is woven into creation can lead us home. That map is defined by water.

John Wesley Powell, the first non-native person to raft successfully down the Colorado River in the 1860s, gave us our first modern definition of a watershed:

It is that area of land, a bounded hydrologic system, within which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of the community.20

The fact is, wherever we reside—city, suburb, or rural area—our lives are deeply intertwined within such a “bounded hydrologic system.” Precipitation hits the ridges and either flows into our watershed or into a neighboring one, drained by a watercourse and its tributaries (even if buried under concrete).

The area covered in the water’s journey from its origination in the natural hydrological cycle to its end point in a particular body of water such as a pond, lake, or ocean is the watershed. Each one is made up of a unique mix of habitats that influence each other, including forests, wetlands, fields and meadows, rivers and lakes, farms and towns. The 2,110 watersheds in the continental US come in all sizes. The Mississippi Basin is the 3rd largest watershed in the world, draining 41% of the lower 48 states into the Gulf of Mexico. The Ventura River watershed where I live is a scant 227 square miles.

All life is watershed-placed without exception—and our ignorance about this fact is disastrous. Brock Dolman, a permaculturist and founder of Occidental Art and Ecology Center in Northern California, argues that “watersheds underlie all human endeavors and form the foundation for all future aspirations and survival.” Cupping his hands, he invokes the metaphor of a cradle, which he calls a “Basin of Relations,” in which every living organism is interconnected and dependent on the health of the whole. This form of “social, local, intentional community with other life forms and inanimate processes, like the fire cycle and the hydrological cycle,” he says, represents “the geographic scale of applied sustainability, which must be regenerative, because we desperately are in need of making up for lost time.”21

Watershed mapping is a practical tool for advancing our literacy in the actual landscapes that sustain us.22 It can help us re-imagine a world beyond maps that are social re-productions enshrining problematic historical legacies of colonization and exploitation, while rendering nature secondary (or altogether invisible). Kirkpatrick Sale’s definition of bioregionalism is helpful here:

Bio is from the Greek word for forms of life . . . and region is from the Latin regere, territory to be ruled. . . . They convey together a life-territory, a place defined by its life forms, its topography and its biota, rather than by human dictates; a region governed by nature, not legislature. And if the concept initially strikes us as strange, that may perhaps only be a measure of how distant we have become from the wisdom it conveys.23

Below is a recent watershed map of the US imagined by John Lavey.24 Political boundaries are often straight (no continental US state is without one), while watershed ones never are. Straight lines are the first order of abstraction, alienating us from the topographical and hydrological realities that sustain life. How might our political culture change if our most basic unit of governance was “nature rather than legislature”?

Toward Watershed Discipleship

In the environmental movement, bioregional thought and practice has spread widely and matured deeply over the last quarter century.25 Yet this school of thought has been almost entirely ignored by Christian theology and ethics until very recently.26 However, I am convinced that a watershed paradigm not only holds the key to our survival as a species; it can also inspire the next great renewal of the church—in light of, not in spite of, the looming ecological endgame.

What would it mean for Christians to center our identity in the topography of creation rather than in the political geography of dominant cultural ideation, grounding our discipleship practices in the watershed in which we reside, within which everything must be engaged in terms of environmental resiliency and social justice?

In our education and organizing at Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries we are proposing “watershed discipleship” as a framing idea, which seems to be resonating widely. The phrase is an intentional triple entendre.

1. It recognizes that we are in a watershed historical moment of crisis, which demands that environmental, social justice, and sustainability be integral to everything we do as Christians and as citizen inhabitants of specific places.
2. It acknowledges the inescapably bioregional locus of an incarnational following of Jesus: our discipleship and the life of the local church necessarily take place in a watershed context.
3. It suggests that we need to be disciples of our watersheds. In the New Testament, discipleship is a journey of learning from, following, and coming to trust the “rabbi”—which in this case is the “Book of Creation.” The challenge here, to paraphrase the argument made in 1968 by the Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum, is that
   • We won’t save places we don’t love.
   • We can’t love places we don’t know.
   • We don’t know places we haven’t learned.

From the beginning of human history, nothing was more crucial to the survival and flourishing of traditional societies than literacy in and symbiotic relationship with one’s watershed. It remains the case today—but we have a long way to go to reconstruct the intimacy required to know and save our places.

Obviously, understanding contextual Christian mission fundamentally in terms of healing our world by restoring the social and ecological health of our respective watersheds is a perspective still marginal in our churches. Yet, I believe ecclesial communities re-grounded in their watersheds can make an enormous contribution to the wider historic struggle to reverse the looming ecological catastrophe—and in the process, recover the “terrestrial soul” of a faith tradition that too often tends toward docetism.27 Christians are deeply culpable in the present crisis, but we also have ancient resources for the deep shifts needed.

Watershed discipleship is an expression of Christian mission because it seeks to partner with God’s mission of healing. The Apostle Paul claims that creation is “groaning in travail” waiting for the “children of God” to be fully “revealed,” in order that we might partner with the divine work of liberation and healing (Rom 8:19–24a).28 This suggests that our primary human vocation is not to re-engineer creation for exclusive human benefit—an impulse biblically identified with the fall in Genesis.29 Rather, the mission of the church is to help humans rediscover our proper place in, and to work for the healing and preservation of, the community of creation.30

Key to Creator’s ecological and eschatological redemption of creation is the renewing power of the water of life. This is previewed in Christian baptism, which in turn animates our mission to inhabit and incarnate that blessed hope in a thirsty world. Watershed discipleship can and should help define the shape of that mission in this historical moment of crisis.

Ched Myers is an activist theologian who has worked in social change movements for almost 40 years. His books include Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Orbis, [1988]2008) and, most recently, Our God Is Undocumented: Biblical Faith and Immigrant Justice (with Matthew Colwell; Orbis, 2012). He is a co-founder of the Watershed Discipleship Alliance (http://watersheddiscipleship.org) and works with Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries in southern California (http://bcm-net.org). His publications can be found at http://chedmyers.org.

Bibliography

Aberly, Douglas. Boundaries of Home: Mapping for Local Empowerment. Philadelphia: New Society, 1993.

Aboriginal Mapping Network. http://nativemaps.org.

Andruss, Van, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright, eds. Home! A Bioregional Reader. Philadelphia: New Society, 1990.

Barlow, Maude. Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. New York: New Press, 2008.

Bell, Alexander. Peak Water: Civilisation and the World’s Water Crisis. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Luath, 2012.

Carr, Mike. Bioregionalism and Civil Society: Democratic Challenges to Corporate Globalism. Sustainability and the Environment Series. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2004.

Chellaney, Brahma. Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.

Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Dolman, Brock. Basins of Relations: A Citizen’s Guide to Protecting and Restoring Our Watershed. 2nd ed. Occidental, CA: Water Institute, 2008.

Gleick, Peter H., ed. The World’s Water: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources. Vol. 8. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014.

Hiebert, Theodore. The Yahwist’s Landscape: Nature and Religion in Early Israel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

If Americans Knew. “Water in Palestine.” http://ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/water.html.

Loeffler, Jack, and Celestia Loeffler, eds. Thinking Like a Watershed: Voices from the West. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012.

Myers, Ched. “The Cedar Has Fallen! The Prophetic Word vs. Imperial Clear-Cutting.” In Earth and Word: Classic Sermons on Saving the Planet, edited by David Rhoads, 211–23. New York: Continuum, 2007.

________. “From ‘Creation Care’ to ‘Watershed Discipleship’: Re-Placing Ecological Theology and Practice.” Conrad Grebel Review 32, no. 3 (Fall 2014): forthcoming.

________. “From Garden to Tower: Genesis 1–11 as a Critique of Civilization and an Invitation to Indigenous Re-Visioning.” In Buffalo Shout, Salmon Cry: Conversations on Creation, Land Justice, and Life Together, edited by Steve Heinrichs, 109–21. Waterloo, ON: Herald Press, 2013.

________. Who Will Roll Away the Stone? Discipleship Queries for First World Christians. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994.

National Geographic Education. “Mapping the World’s Watersheds.” http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/activity/mapping-watersheds/?ar_a=1.

Oosthoek, K. J. W. “The Role of Wood in World History.” Environmental History Resources. http://eh-resources.org/wood.html.

Peppard, Christiana. Just Water: Theology, Ethics and the Global Water Crisis. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2014.

Powell, J. W. The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. New York: Dover, 1961.

Prandoni, Marita. “Know Your Lifeboat: An Interview with Permaculturist Brock Dolman.” Eco Zine. EcoHearth. November 10, 2011. http://ecohearth.com/eco-zine/eco-heroes/1088-know-your-lifeboat-an-interview-with-permaculturist-brock-dolman.html.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985.

Scott Cato, Mary. The Bioregional Economy: Land, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Snyder, Gary. A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics and Watersheds. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1995.

Thayer, Robert L., ed. Lifeplace: Bioregional Thought and Practice. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003.

Woodley, Randy. Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision. Prophetic Christianity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012.

A politics of the transfigured earth must pay attention to the ravens and lilies of the field, confessing the woven thread between human communities and the life and health of the earth. Jesus enacts the transfigured earth by pairing the renewal of society with a foreign leper healed in the Jordan watershed. This interpretation and numerous social movements offer ground for a bioregional imagination of reinhabitation: empowering people to live well together in places.

“Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you” –Wendell Berry1

The World and the Earth

On a July evening, I sat in a hotel outside the Damascus Gate of Jerusalem’s Old City. Mahmoud Abu Eid, a Palestinian Muslim and family friend, told his story to a group of American travelers. He talked about checkpoints and home demolitions, about color-coded ID cards that classified him as a resident alien with ephemeral rights. He talked about seven generations of his family who had lived in that city. “We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere,” lamented the poet Mahmoud Darwish. “We have a country of words. Speak Speak so we may know the end of / this travel.”2

An exasperated listener blurted out, “Why do you stay in Palestine with so much persecution?”

Mahmoud smiled and said, “Because we have no other choice. This is my place. I love this land. Jesus loved this land, even though he once cursed it. But he cursed the actions, not the land.”

Christian theologians often stumble over the contours of land and place. Like the exasperated American traveler, they struggle to understand someone like Mahmoud who expresses an intimate affection for where he is. Theologians recognize the importance of place in biblical stories, but they have invested far more intellectual energy into puzzling over the meaning of time. A teleological bias tempts Christians to denigrate the places of the world. Place is misconstrued when theologians treat all the world as if it were merely the stage for time, and perhaps even an outdated theater in this industrial world where progress waits for no one and no place. Time-obsessed narratives like historical progress, development, or Manifest Destiny justify destroying places for the sake of some predetermined future. This endless linear march fuels an insatiable desire until that next purchase, trip, or salvation, which are always in the future. As Vine Deloria says, “If time becomes our primary consideration, we never seem to arrive at the reality of our existence in places.”3 The rhythms and shapes of place are eroded, viewed as amorphous backdrops easily substituted by anywhere else.

Devaluing place—which also usually means its people—equates the world, a famous biblical motif for the powers and principalities, with the earth, the biodiversity of ecosystems and human communities. Engagement with “the world” then often assumes a devastating conflation, represented and reinforced by three prevalent political theologies: nostalgia for Christendom, baptizing the state, and resident alienation.

Nostalgia for Christendom pines for the bygone days when the church ruled the world and avows that it must once again have dominion. Radical Orthodoxy is an intellectually influential form of this trend which occasionally provides critiques of modern liberalism and capitalism but often stays silent about Christendom’s immeasurable sins, such as the endorsement of countless imperial campaigns that evicted indigenous people from their homelands. In this ideology, the cross is turned upside down and sharpened into a righteous sword.

Most political theologians are suspicious of rerouting all roads toward Rome. But their default is to baptize governments like the United States of America while ignoring or endorsing state violence to make the world safe for representative democracy and globalized capitalism. Christian realists, maintaining that right should use might and that politics are all about forceful power, acknowledge the shortcomings of modern societies, but they are the lesser evil. Institutional wealth built on slavery and ethnic cleansing, increasing economic inequity, and the wreckage of soil, forests, and water are regretted as unfortunate byproducts. The US may not have committed more crimes than other imperial nations, historian Ronald Wright notes, but “it forgets them more quickly and more thoroughly.”4 Political theologies of the state suffer from amnesia concerning its terrors and its historical alternatives.

The third major trend will have none of this. Instead, Christians are resident aliens, citizens of a heavenly colony in the world but not of it, refusing the authority and splendor of the world’s kingdoms to remain perpetual exiles among them. But its mantra to “let the church be the church” obscures that churches are located somewhere surrounded by, and dependent on, neighbors they did not choose. Resident alienation, perceived separation from where and with whom we reside, can appease displaced Europeans while subsequently relegating indigenous people and refugees to exile. One resident alienated scholar told me that he mourned for a Native American Christian friend who could not overcome his “Zionist connection to tribe and land” to see the church as an alternative, and truer, community. Identity as exiles in a land that always remains foreign preserves the devastating conflation between the world-as-power and the world-as-earth, like equating the United States of America with the ecosocial body of the continent.5 We will not care for places if we are always aliens to them.

All three theologies see coercive power as the mainstay of politics and share a distrust of diversity. And all three, in varying degrees and fashions, are anthropocentric: the world is human-constructed systems that we either control or from which we escape, effectively overlooking the dependence of these human systems on the life and health of the earth. Each accepts a dangerous reduction of the world’s places and the possibilities for living in them.

“If only people with our ideals had power,” says the revolutionary vanguard before the new dictatorship is installed.

“If only we had the right person in office,” say the political parties before their candidate escalates his predecessor’s policies.

“If only the church would be the church,” say the resident aliens as neoliberalism exploits space and time.

“If only we had a king to lead us like everyone else,” say the elders of Israel to the old prophet Samuel, who then informs them what kings, and eventually empires, do best: centralize wealth and power through militarism and economic stratification by expropriating the best lands and extracting surpluses (1 Sam 8). Empire functions through globalizing placelessness: ignoring boundaries and scale by erecting ever-expanding borders. Any place will do for empire, because all places are equally expendable.

Wendell Berry notes that many American Christians have no place to lay our heads; we are perpetual strangers to our landscapes because our only Holy Land is one we may never see.6 For many, place is apparently just dirt: static and inert, something we wipe from our shoes. We forget that place is soil: living and dying, humming with organisms and complex horizons. Perhaps political theologians can be forgiven for this oversight, considering that our lives are far removed from the people, places, and processes that sustain us. But a displaced Christian theology of dominion has too often sanctified or ignored social and ecological destruction. We cannot divorce the social and the ecological because the former is immersed in and sustained by the latter. They co-evolved, and no matter how big we get we still depend on patterns of water, light, and soil.

The three major political theologies have encouraged, or at the least not discouraged, living beyond any sense of human scale. We need a resilient and regenerative scale that confesses the bond between human powers and the life and health of the earth.7 We never live nowhere and we never live alone; even if we constantly relocate we are always somewhere and we are always related to other lives. The polyphonic biblical narrative does not suggest a uniform perspective about the earth, but it also does not pine for a heavenly afterlife for the disembodied soul. From the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem, a recurring biblical icon of salvation is not a spectral heaven but a transfigured earth. This salvation depends on people who care about where they live and those who live there. The transfigured earth also depends on politics, not as control or escape, but as practices that help us live together in common places.8

Ecological theologies have blossomed dramatically as more people awaken to the social and ecological toll of a global economic system geared to overproduce items and waste for a minority of the world’s population. Scholars have scribed sophisticated treatments of biblical visions of the land and penned philosophical treatises on anthropocentrism and creation, but these interpretations often struggle to translate generalized theory into sets of practices that enable people to dwell well together. A politics of the transfigured earth must pay attention to the ravens and the lilies of the field, to the distinctive creatures and places around us. If we do so, then we might consider bioregions as meaningful sites of action and reflection.

Reinhabiting the Transfigured Earth

Bioregions are the confluence of patterns like watersheds and landforms, soil and vegetation types, climate, and human interaction. Bioregions are places with negotiated cultural and ecological boundaries in which we know the scale of our actions, these actions are sensitive to feedback, and inhabitants can be included in making decisions. Even though these boundaries are fluid, they are more viable than arbitrary political lines.9

I currently live in the Shenandoah Valley, part of the Ridge and Valley subsection of the Great Appalachian Valley in North America. This two-hundred-mile basin is hemmed by the Allegheny Mountains to the west, the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east, and the Potomac and James Rivers to the north and south respectively. Shenandoah is carpeted with mixed hardwood forests and fertile limestone soil, evidence that the valley was once under ocean, which explains its long cultivated history. The valley’s spine is the eponymous river and its watershed. Landscape architect Robert Thayer describes bioregions as physiographically unique, geographically legitimate, and operative spatial units.10 Shenandoah might fit that portrayal.

Thayer’s depiction emphasizes the importance of scale in bioregional imaginations, founded on the premise that we create ethical relationships when our actions have consequences for others,11 which is always. Loving our neighbors as ourselves, including neighbors we did not choose and maybe are not even human, is easier done when we are close enough to see the effect our lives take through critical feedback loops, such as observing that our energy use exhausts its sources or sustains them, and then having the decision-making ability to change and reorganize the system. Clearly, bioregional boundaries will not completely supplant political precincts in the near future, but partnerships like the Appalachian Transition Initiative are forming across such arbitrary lines to address social and ecological issues.12

Appalachia is one of the most biodiverse regions in North America, but also one of the most socially fragmented and economically poor. In the late nineteenth century, Central Appalachia became the dominant source of coal and timber for the American economy, but increased mechanization, depleted mines, and deforestation forced millions to immigrate north for factory work. Thirty-six of the poorest one hundred US counties are in this region, with the greatest poverty found in rural counties with high coal production. Access to education and healthcare has been limited and the region has high rates of diabetes, cancer, mental health conditions, and widespread drug abuse. The land itself has also suffered from pervasive mining and logging. The abuse of the land is substantially correlated with absentee corporate ownership. State and federal regulations are inadequately enforced and counties are often controlled by a powerful few. People often feel compelled to choose between jobs and the health of the land and themselves. The modern industrial economy has not been the savior for Central Appalachia.

The Appalachian Transition Initiative is a network of almost sixty organizations and associations devoted to a just and sustainable Central Appalachia. They refuse to wait for outside solutions, being instead committed to creative local responses to concentrated power, poverty, and land abuse. Their network is a resource of experiments and stories for the transition of their economies and communities. They propose diverse ways forward like art and place-based education, small-scale business and community healthcare, housing and infrastructure, environmental restoration and renewable energy, and sustainable agriculture and forestry.13

The Appalachian Transition Initiative does not use explicit bioregional language, but it combines affection for place with transformative relationships that constitute the bioregional imagination. Bioregions are never insular because watersheds are part of the global hydrological cycle, climatic domains include multiple bioregions, and nutrients flow where they will like the holy ruach. The Shenandoah River includes two forks almost 100 miles each until they converge for 55 miles flowing northeast into the Potomac River and then southeast to the Chesapeake Bay and into the ocean. Simply by the flow of water, Shenandoah is related to the world. Our actions always affect our neighbors and strangers.

Places are not only connected, but they are always changing. There is no state of place, no “pristine baseline”14 to which we can return. Bioregions are grounded mosaics moving through time that reject the dichotomy between culture and nature: like every other creature, we alter and adapt to our ecosystems, which in turn adapt to and alter us. We are, as historian Dan Flores says, “endlessly recreating place.”15 Purist rejections of change and difference are inattentive to the lively unfolding of place.

Bioregional praxis recognizes that human communities always live within the ecological household. This perception shifts us from a culture of occupation to cultures of reinhabitation.16 The best hope for a sustainable future is reinhabitation, which means committing to the life and health of our places. Occupation controls, but reinhabitation converses. If we observe and interact within context, which also means recognizing that contexts are dynamic and connected, then we will find more appropriate and transformative responses to complex social and ecological patterns. Political theologies of empire, the state, and alienation can prevent diverse people from actually facing one another to address common life. Reinhabitation, dwelling well together in the world’s diverse and dynamic places, begins to envision the transfigured earth.

The River is Reconciliation

The practice of reinhabitation makes possible, and will be made possible by, imaginative interpretations of biblical stories. The stories about Jesus arose from certain places; we make important connections—such as the one Jesus makes between social transformation, care of the land, and welcoming the stranger—when we replace these tales in their social and ecological context.17 The land, which Mahmoud said Jesus loved, is part of those stories in ways that challenge the three prevailing political theologies.

Israelite practices were closely related to the land and seasonal changes. Defining regions was important because harvest times differed based on local climates.18 Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God grew from the soil, seasons, and stories of the Lower Galilee under imperial rule, a social ecotone where creation and empire overlapped.

The land between the river and the sea, like Appalachia, is a fragile place, but it is also astoundingly fertile with diverse ecological niches close together.19 Biblical scholar Ellen Davis suspects that its “liminal location gave that small corridor of land a gene flow with few parallels worldwide.”20 This funneled strip is like an ecotone, which is the overlapping edge between two ecosystems that results in greater biodiversity.21 Instead of rigid borders, bioregional boundaries are ecotones and mosaic habitats. According to Toby Hemenway, edges like ecotones

are where things happen. Where a forest meets the prairie, where a river flows into the sea, or at nearly any other boundary between two ecosystems, is a cauldron of biodiversity. All the species that thrive in each of the two environments are present, plus new species that live in the transition zone between the two. The edge is richer than what lies on either side.22

We need readings of reinhabitation, because these ancient myths about this ancient place catastrophically influence modern geopolitics. It matters that Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion hosted study groups on the Book of Joshua with scholars, politicians, and military officials.23 It matters that the United States has considered itself as both the persecuted New Israel and the triumphant New Rome.24 We should, and can, interpret these stories with a bioregional imagination that tends to the earth and its creatures. Jesus’ homecoming in the Gospel of Luke helps us imagine bioregional engagement with the land and the people in it.

As was his custom, Jesus attends synagogue service on the Sabbath while visiting his folks. He reads from Isaiah that the speaker has been anointed to preach good news to the poor, liberate the oppressed, and proclaim the Jubilee. In a dramatic afterthought, he announces, “Those words are fulfilled right now.” Everyone nods in amazed approval, and maybe the poor in attendance say, “It’s about damn time!” In those days, peasants were subject to multiple layers of colonial taxation, and those who could not pay were evicted from ancestral lands in the wake of wide estates.25 Jubilee envisions a radical social order that preserves the economic viability of agrarian peasants26 through an ethic of abundance and self-restraint.27 Moreover, jubilee suggests that the central political and moral question of land possession is not ownership of the land but care of the land.28 If possession is conditional on care and not ownership, says Davis, then Jubilee challenges not only old states and empires but also the new ones.29

Jesus announces that this ecotone belongs with the people who care for it, not to those who may own it and exploit it. As everyone nods in agreement, Jesus adds that Jubilee is not just for the chosen people, some alienated church set apart. “There were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleaned—only Naaman the Syrian,” who was not just any outsider but a major cog in the “Aramean military machine.”30 Jesus describes the kingdom of God by pairing the tale of an unclean outsider with his vision of the social renewal of Israel, which is like saying that enslaved Africans are more responsible for building America, or that indigenous people are more responsible for democracy than the Founding Fathers, or that Hispanic immigrants who do our dirty work are returning this land to its multicultural roots. Jesus’ listeners try to throw him off a cliff because of his audacious social ecology.

Jesus reminds his enraged audience that welcoming the stranger is deeply compatible with at least some of their political traditions.31 He juxtaposes Jubilee with a leprous foreigner to reinterpret how the kingdom of God rises like leaven in the land. The Jordan River flows through that interpretation in an important way.

Naaman’s Israelite slave girl recommends that her leprous master see the prophet in Samaria, highlighting “a link between invasion and illness as well as between peaceful contact and healing.”32 According to the folk wisdom of the unnamed girl, healing can only “result from a nonmilitary encounter with his Israelite rivals.”33 But the general scoffs at Elisha’s advice to wash seven times in the River Jordan because that watercourse is a trickle compared to the rushing rivers back home. Once again servants, not authoritative advisors, intervene and convince him to perform the ritual. He does not even need the prophet or any priests because the river itself is enough.34 Naaman has crossed the streams of the Jordan twice: once to attack Israel and once again to find healing. This time, Elisha tells the afflicted general to immerse himself in the river that separates, or perhaps unites, Israel and Aram. The Jordan is one of Hemenway’s edges, “places of transition and translation, where matter and energy change speed or stop or, often, change into something else.”35

When Jesus combines the healing of Naaman with the renewal of society, he recognizes that places like rivers are not sites of separation, whether between Israel and Aram, Israel and Arab countries, or Texas and Mexico. Rivers are sites of encounter, boundaries that merge rather than divide. A river is not a wall because, as Naaman found out, by its nature the river is reconciliation: drawing life back together in the watershed. The movements of rivers tell us that strangers are always among us and the familiar always appears in the foreign. The river is the local and the global, the neighbor and the stranger in our midst.

Our attention to the movement of water is related to our treatment of neighbors and strangers. According to Marianne Sawicki, the Herodians operated by a Hellenistic Mediterranean idiom of centralization and marginalization.36 They employed Roman technology in an early pave-and-pipe paradigm that erected massive visible aqueducts that conducted water from faraway streams to urban centers. Such irrigation, which provides plentiful water during droughts or off-seasons, has profound effects on watersheds: groundwater is used faster than rainfall can recharge it, which can cause land to subside and salinization near coasts. Water is borrowed from other places and from the future, and the likelihoods for nutrient leaching and soil erosion are increased.37

In contrast, Sawicki proposes an idiom of circulation and grounding to interpret the indigenous Israelites.38 For them, the heavens poured down water to the earth, where it was grounded by crops and stationary containers, such as cisterns, or circulated through mobile containers, such as channels, both of which pay close attention to the pattern of water through contours, geological features, and vegetation.39 Catching and storing rainfall represents the people’s dependence on the gifts of heaven and the earth.40 Circulation and grounding, Sawicki believes, is a better way to understand Israel’s view of holiness than the prevalent view of separation: “a place is holy when things move rightly within it and, moreover, when it can rectify the trajectory of what crosses it. Thus, what profanes is whatever moves the wrong way.”41 Naaman’s movement through the land is corrected by the circulation and grounding of the watershed. He learns to move differently, from profane control to holy conversation, through reinhabitation.

This is not a quaint comparison between two ancient views. The modern state of Israel controls the Jordan River and 80% of Palestine’s depleting groundwater sources, both of which are channeled to taps in Tel Aviv and farms in the Negev. This diversion, an idiom of centralization and marginalization, has severely diminished the ancient waterway, made essential aquifers extremely vulnerable to salinization and raw sewage, and tightened the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.42 Water, and how it is used, may determine this conflict,43 as well as many others.

Bioregionalism is the conversation between people and place, and conversations always hold open the possibility for mutual conversion. According to Daniel Kemmis, places can breed cooperation when “people who find themselves held together (perhaps against their will) in a shared place” discover that their best chance for survival is learning to work together.44 Our best chance is to enact Jesus’ blend of Jubilee and watershed transformation.

Conclusion

The good news of the kingdom of God could be interpreted as ecosynthesis, which is the evolution of native and exotic species into new ecosystems in response to novel conditions. These new ecosystems have remarkably beneficial effects by restoring devastated landscapes,45 by reinhabiting the transfigured earth. Imperial occupation from Rome and Jerusalem relentlessly disrupted Galilee, so perhaps Jesus’ particular articulation of the kingdom of God was an imaginative patchwork of observation and interaction within an endlessly recreated, and recreating, place. As Mahmoud said, Jesus loves the land and its people.

Jesus embraces the buzzing biodiversity of the land as a parable for social diversity, an ecosynthesis stitching together Jubilee and the leper in the river. The reconciling river is not just the Jordan, but also the Shenandoah, the Rio Grande, and all the watersheds of the world.46 Reinhabitation uproots nostalgia for Christendom, baptizing the state, and resident alienation. For the kingdom of God is the transfigured earth. The ground beneath our feet is the holy land.

Jonathan McRay grew up in East Tennessee (Central Appalachia) and worked in Palestine and Israel. The author of You Have Heard It Said: Events of Reconciliation, he has an MA in Conflict Transformation. Jonathan and his wife Rachelle, a physician assistant, live with friends on a small homestead in the Shenandoah Valley, where he also works with New Community Project (http://ncpharrisonburg.wordpress.com): an education and demonstration center for permaculture and regenerative gardening; a supportive home for friends recovering from addictions and homelessness (which is all of us to varying degrees); and a project incubator to hatch community building with neighbors, schools, and local associations.

Bibliography

Berry, Wendell. Citizenship Papers: Essays. Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004.

________. Foreword to Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, by Ellen F. Davis, ix–xiv. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

________. The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1981.

________. Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community: Eight Essays. New York: Pantheon, 1993.

Carr, Mike. Bioregionalism and Civil Society: Democratic Challenges to Corporate Globalism. Sustainability and the Environment. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004.

Darwish, Mahmoud. “We Travel Like Other People.” In Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forché, 563. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.

Davis, Ellen F. Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Deloria, Vine. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. 2nd ed. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1994.

El Houry, Ramzi. “Water for All: The Case for a One-State Solution.” Aljazeera. January 2012. http://aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/2012117121836414354.html.

Evanoff, Richard. Bioregionalism and Global Ethics: A Transactional Approach to Achieving Ecological Sustainability, Social Justice, and Human Well-Being. Studies in Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Falk, Ben. The Resilient Farm and Homestead: An Innovative Permaculture and Whole Systems Design Approach. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012.

Faris, Stephan. “Holy Water: A Precious Commodity in a Region of Conflict.” Orion Magazine. November/December 2011. http://orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6473.

Flores, Dan. “Place: Thinking about Bioregional History.” In Bioregionalism, edited by Michael Vincent McGinnis, 43–60. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Freyne, Sean. Jesus, a Jewish Galilean: A New Reading of the Jesus-Story. New York: T & T Clark, 2006.

Gliessman, Stephen R. Agroecology: The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems. 2nd ed. New York: CRC Press, 2007.

Habel, Norman C. The Land Is Mine: Six Biblical Land Ideologies. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.

Havrelock, Rachel. River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Hemenway, Toby. Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture. 2nd ed. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2009.

Holmgren, David. Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability. Hepburn Springs, Victoria: Holmgren Design Services, 2002.

Horsley, Richard A. Jesus and Empire: The Kingdom of God and the New World Disorder. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

Howard-Brook, Wes. “Come Out My People!”: God’s Call Out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010.

Kemmis, Daniel. Community and the Politics of Place. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

Lowery, Richard H. Sabbath and Jubilee. Understanding Biblical Themes. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2000.

Pinches, Charles R. “Stout, Hauerwas, and the Body of America.” Political Theology 8, no. 1 (January 2007): 9–31.

Renew Appalachia. http://appalachiantransition.net.

Sawicki, Marianne. Crossing Galilee: Architectures of Contact in the Occupied Land of Jesus. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 2000.

Spina, Frank Anthony. The Faith of the Outsider: Exclusion and Inclusion in the Biblical Story. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005.

Thayer, Robert. LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Wright, Ronald. What Is America? A Short History of the New World Order. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2009.

This essay extends a commissioning home into our watersheds as a way of replacement and repentance of the rootlessness affecting North American Christians today. The author traces this rootlessness to the Christendom church and certain destructive theologies that sanctioned colonialism. “Watershed discipleship,” as set forth by theologian Ched Myers, offers a constructive framework for mission within a paradigm of repentance for sins perpetuated by colonial theologies.

During a college internship program, I lived with an Ikalahan-Kalanguya host family in the Sierra Madre Mountains of northern Luzon, the Philippines. I often accompanied my host mother to tend her family’s subsistence farm, where she grew many varieties of sweet potatoes, peanuts, beans, squash, garlic, and ginger. My host father worked as a pastor and community forester, maintaining the dipterocarp, pine, and cloud forests and protecting the people’s traditional “Ancestral Domain” against illegal loggers and other intrusions.

Legal recognition of the Ancestral Domain, also called the Kalahan Forest Reserve, resulted from a secure land tenure agreement, the very first of its kind, between the government of the Philippines and the Ikalahan-Kalanguya people in the 1970s.1 A watershed centrally defines the approximately 36,000-acre Ancestral Domain.2 Flowing into the Magat River, the watershed serves as a sanctuary to more than 150 endangered species of plants and animals.3 The people have decided collectively to protect their watershed, which means that those who live near the sources of water cannot expand their farms, raise livestock intensively, or use chemical pesticides on the land. As a society, they have limited their own potential growth for the sake of the wellbeing of the whole watershed, including those who live downstream.4

My host mother, Aunti Noemi, told me that when her parent’s generation converted to Christianity in the 1960s, they decided to expand their faith instead of their gardens.5 She contrasted their decision with that of the communities outside of the Ancestral Domain who have denuded their once-forested slopes to make room for mono-crop farms for distant markets. This kind of farming has created drastic erosion and mudslides, and local people attribute an increase in cancer in those areas to the heavy use of synthetic chemical inputs.

United Church of Christ missionaries in the Philippines lived and shared a deeply incarnational gospel with the Ikalahan-Kalanguya; importantly, they affirmed and learned from indigenous cultural and ecological values. The Christian gospel resonated with certain Ikalahan-Kalanguya concepts like li-teng that led them to care for their watershed. The Hebrew word shalom is the nearest equivalent to li-teng, a deeply ecological word signifying abundant life for all.6 Because the Good News strengthened certain indigenous cultural and ecological practices, the Ikalahan-Kalanguya have become a model throughout Southeast Asia for their community-based forest management, indigenous educational programs, and their ongoing systems of restorative justice through the tongtongan, or council of elders.

During my six months living with the Ikahlan-Kalanguya, I became increasingly aware of a significant gap in my own life. By age twenty-one, I had already moved ten times, having grown up in a missionary family turned highly mobile family. I became accustomed to the intermingled pain of leaving friends and place and the tingle of excitement at traveling somewhere new. I envisioned myself working overseas someday, living the exhilarating life of a global nomad. No place held any claim over me. I had no desire to limit my life to one place until living within the Ikalahan-Kalanguya Ancestral Domain. There, the people’s love for their particular home opened my eyes and exposed the placeless dreams that scripted my own life goals.

Historically, the Spanish, Americans, and Japanese have all colonized or occupied the Philippines. Over the years, the Ikalahan-Kalanguya people have resisted—in addition to illegal logging—land grabbers, plans for exclusive golf courses set forth by wealthy politicians in Manila, cell phone company satellite towers, and most recently, Australian mining companies.7 Love for the naduntog nakayang, the high mountain forest where the clouds settle in mist around the trees, compelled their resistance.8 Their home was worth defending with their lives. I had to ask myself, what place on earth would I ever put my life on the line for? Sadly, I did not know the answer.

Before I left the Philippines, my host family held a prayer service attended by local elders and friends from my time there. The pastor stood to give me a commissioning: he prayed that I would return home to the US to apply what I had learned with them. This simple and profound “co-missioning” changed my life. It initiated my journey of recognizing my own dangerous rootlessness, and turned me toward home.

Commissioned toward Home

Returning from the Philippines, I felt disturbed by the fact that my own sense of home seemed as distant from me as a foreign land. My own condition, I believe, is not unique, but perhaps reflects the preeminent social-spiritual malady facing North American Christians today. This condition poses a real threat to the church’s cross-cultural witness and mission.

Cross-cultural mission historically has been the “life-blood of the church,” and is necessary for its ongoing transformation.9 Mission from and to all places radically de-centers Christianity from Christendom, and from any one cultural or social group instating their own form of Christianity as a totalizing gospel for all.10 Alan Kreider writes, “After Christendom, missionary sending no longer follows imperial patterns; it no longer goes from Christendom to heathendom; it is, as Samuel Escobar has put it, from everywhere to everyone.”11 However, if the missionary has no sense of belonging to any particular place, mission from everywhere becomes mission from nowhere.

Rootlessness threatens the good news of cross-cultural mission. This rootlessness, observed in the pattern of colonial cross-cultural encounters, defined not only much of Christian mission, but also political conquest, early anthropology, and international commerce to this day. Indigenous people have theorized that what drives this colonizing characteristic for either the nineteenth-century missionary or the twenty-first-century businessperson is the “original trauma” of European displacement and alienation from the land in the colonial era.12 In short, because of this colonial trauma, mission from those who have no sense of home can become a displaced and displacing mission. How can those who do not know a home ever understand or stand with other people’s struggles to defend and protect their homes?13 How can we share and embody a gospel of incarnation if we ourselves have never lived “incarnationally” in any one place?

Christian mission as missio Dei, God’s mission in the world, is not necessarily long-distance or cross-cultural. Alan Kreider writes that the word “missionary,” with its cross-cultural and long-distance connotations, “restricts and limits” our understanding of the missio Dei that sends all Christians into our own lives as witnesses to the Good News of reconciliation in Christ.14 The field of home missions has often applied the logic of long-distance, cross-cultural mission to church work domestically, seeking to share the gospel in ways ranging from short-term mission trips to forming relationships with other cultural groups in a given area. These expressions of mission have emphasized human reconciliation to God in Christ. Yet the fullness of God’s reconciliation also extends to all of creation. As Colossians 1:19–20 says, “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in [Christ], and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”15

How might the idea of home missions be expanded to encompass this biblical vision of reconciliation of all things in Christ, a vision that necessarily entails facing our own need for reconciliation with our home places? What if, in awareness of historic colonial patterns of displacement, we expanded the traditional meaning of “home missions” as also a “mission home”?

A renewed conception of home mission as a “mission home” necessitates a commitment to a geographically defined place, an understanding of the impacts of sin there, a discernment of the ways God is at work in that place, and how we may join in God’s work for the reconciliation of all things through discipleship of Jesus. For the sake of this essay, I will define home place ecologically as the watershed to which we belong and where our discipleship can be rooted. This watershed may or may not be where we were born or even have lived for most of our lives. The point is that we all live in a place, and so any place, whether in North America or abroad, can be considered a starting place for our mission home.

I believe that the geographic reality of a watershed can provide helpful boundaries for our commitment to home mission as mission home. Whether or not we know it, our lives as humans, along with the lives of all other biota, are inextricably dependent upon watersheds. Mission home into our watershed involves becoming reconciled to a home place. In order to fully commit to our watershed as home mission, however, we must face the sins of the past and present with clear sight, and take on the active work of repentance for the far-reaching devastations of the Christendom theologies that deny any place as home.

Christendom, the Doctrine of Discovery, and Watershed Conquest

Theologian Ched Myers sees Christendom as actively underwriting three harmful theological errors at the root of the crisis of placelessness:

1. A docetism that privileges spiritual matters over social and ecological ones.
2. The presumption of human domination over creation.
3. A theology and politics of presumed “divinely granted” entitlement to land and resources.16

These three main dangerous theologies undergird missionary, colonialist, anthropological, and economically driven projects of exploitation of both people and land. Below I explore the destructive outcomes of one of these theologies, specifically the theology and politics of entitlement encapsulated in what is called the “Doctrine of Discovery.”

The Doctrine of Discovery and its resulting “watershed conquest” provide an exceptionally relevant case study of the tragic outworking of Christendom theologies. Any work toward reconciliation as mission must take into account these exploitative theologies, and begin with repentance as metanoia. Metanoia, translated from Greek as repentance (e.g., Mark 1:4), carries a connotation of changing both mind and action. Thus, repenting of the theologies of placelessness that persist today means recognizing their error, and actively changing direction by seeing a place as home.

Within the Christendom paradigm, mission and colonialism were interdependent forces. David Bosch writes that the word “mission” is “historically linked indissolubly with the colonial era and with the idea of a magisterial commissioning.”17 The mission and dominion of the Christendom church accompanied, furthered, and was furthered by the dominion of Empire. The fifteenth-century church’s Doctrine of Discovery, known as the “law of Christendom,” exemplifies how political and religious conquests were sealed together.18 The Doctrine of Discovery is defined as, “The logic of fifteenth-century Christendom that endowed European conquerors with self-assumed divine title over all ‘discovered’ land and peoples.”19 Through “discovery,” then, land and people were subjugated and their resources served the church and crown.

During the fifteenth century, the Vatican issued numerous papal bulls, official religious decrees that document the “genesis of competing claims by Christian monarchies and states in Europe to a right of conquest, sovereignty, and dominance over non-Christian peoples, along with their lands, territories, and resources during the so-called Age of Discovery.”20 Two papal bulls in particular, Dum diversas (1452) and Romanus pontifex (1455), provided the legal and religious justification for the conquest and subjugation of both indigenous peoples and lands. In fact, Dum diversas explicitly declared the need to convert not only indigenous peoples but also, crucially, the need to convert the land.21 Through conquest and robbery, the forced conversion and “salvation” of people and land were bound up together.

Through the Doctrine of Discovery, the death-dealing theology of entitlement was preserved and enshrined through doctrine and law, and continues today. I will focus on its impacts in the US, though this Doctrine legally legitimated the destruction of land and peoples worldwide. Law professor Robert J. Miller has shown how the Doctrine of Discovery provided justification for the very establishment of the United States. It is directly connected to Manifest Destiny and the “principle of contiguity” that claimed major territories as if they were unoccupied or undefended. The Doctrine of Discovery appears in government documents providing legal basis for the annexation into the US territory of Texas, Colorado, Arizona, Florida, New Mexico, and other states.22 In the 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh, the US Senate actually cited the 1493 papal bull Inter caetera as justification for dominion.23 Through the Doctrine of Discovery, the US government repeatedly denied Native Americans full title to their land, making it easier for their impoverishing displacement and loss of land.24 As recently as 2005, legal cases involving Native American land loss can be traced to the Doctrine of Discovery.25 Therefore, the Doctrine of Discovery shapes not only our church history as Christians, but also what it means to be a US citizen today, since the doctrines and theologies of Christendom have been encoded in our nation’s laws.

The Doctrine of Discovery’s “principle of contiguity” is a classic case of entitlement theologies expressed politically, through which watersheds became part and parcel of the conquest of the United States. The principle of contiguity used the geographic scope of large watersheds to expand the scope of colonialism. Robert J. Miller summarizes contiguity as follows:

Under Discovery, Europeans claimed a significant amount of land contiguous to and surrounding their actual discoveries and settlements in the New World. . . . Moreover, contiguity held that the discovery of the mouth of a river gave the discovering country a claim over all the lands drained by that river; even if that was thousands of miles of territory. For example, refer to the boundaries of the Louisiana Territory and Oregon country as defined by the United States.26

Contiguity explains why Lewis and Clark raced to discover the mouth of the Columbia River. Rather than the expedition of the heroic, morally neutral explorers I learned about in public education, theirs was a race to take the Northwest.27 Through contiguity, the discovery of the mouth of a river created a claim over the entire drainage system of the river and adjacent coast.28 At the heart of the practice of the Doctrine of Discovery, then, was watershed conquest, as exemplified in the seizure of the Louisiana Territory (the entire western drainage system of the Mississippi) and also Oregon country (the drainage system of the Columbia River).29

What does the Doctrine of Discovery and its resulting watershed conquest have to do with us as North American Christians in mission today? I would argue that Christendom’s theological and legal frameworks continue to hinder our moral vision, blinding us to the importance of place. Especially for those of us who have benefitted historically from European conquest, land seizure, and settlement, it is difficult to see the value of land and primacy of home to other peoples. For cross-cultural and long-distance missionaries, we may unknowingly carry with us theologies of displacement that colonial-era Christendom grafted into Christianity, and upon which the US was founded.

I believe that the legacy and continued impacts of the theologies that sanctioned watershed conquest may be healed by watershed discipleship, a home mission into our watersheds and a way of living out the gospel of reconciliation there. The rest of this essay will set forth two hallmarks of watershed discipleship, repentance and re-placement.

Repentance as Missional Paradigm Shift

Many Christian denominations and faith groups have publically issued statements of repentance of the Doctrine of Discovery and have rightly lamented its effects on indigenous people and the land.30 These confessions of repentance and repudiation point the way forward for other denominations to see how Christendom theologies continue to hinder true reconciliation, and to practice the witness of painful truth-telling. An understanding of repentance as a paradigm for mission greatly aids this most necessary ecclesial process of metanoia.

Missiologist David J. Bosch draws from Hans Küng’s study of theological paradigm shifts to describe significant transitions in the church’s understanding of mission throughout Christian history. He describes the contemporary church in mission as facing a paradigm shift characterized by the loss of Christianity’s dominant position in the world, a “profound feeling of ambiguity” about the Enlightenment god of Progress, an emerging ecological worldview coupled with the necessity of working for peace with justice, and an ecumenical posture toward other faiths that challenges the superiority of Christianity, among other factors.31

In recent decades, the paradigm of reconciliation as mission has gained significant traction in response to the above changes listed by Bosch. The emphasis on reconciliation is certainly a crucial response to the missio Dei, and a corrective to future-oriented salvation narratives of mission. Matthew D. Lundberg writes:

William R. Burrows reminds us that reconciliation is actually an ancient paradigm for mission that is receiving much-needed renewal today since it improves significantly upon the de facto images of “conversion” and “expansion” that characterized most mission efforts during the past five centuries—centuries that overlap, significantly, with the age of conquest, colonization, and varied forms of imperialism.32

Lundberg sees reconciliation as the “ultimate” call of the church-in-mission, yet naïve and impossible without the “penultimate” thing of repentance.33 In order to move toward the fullness of reconciliation offered in Christ, the North American church must embrace a posture of repentance. Lundberg names the legacies of colonialism and racism as examples involving Christian culpability that require a paradigm of repentance:

In these kinds of situations where the church is not a neutral bystander but is in some way guilty of wrongdoing, the church certainly cannot demand or insist upon reconciliation. It can only take up the stance of honest and wholehearted repentance, albeit a repentance that flows from the church’s belief in God’s foundational act of reconciliation in Jesus… such a paradigm of repentance not only enables the broader and ultimate reconciling dynamic of the gospel to remain in view, but it does so in a way that is appropriate to the church’s responsibility for at least some of the world’s ills.34

The paradigm of repentance requires the church to seek not only confession of wrongdoing, but to work toward right relationship with the land and its peoples past and present. This is not a separatist project; full repentance entails a socio-political commitment to the kind of reconciliation that attends to reparations of what has been lost and stolen. Myers writes, “To concede that we are part of the problem is a crucial hedge against both self-righteousness and escapism. But it is not enough: We must also imagine how we can be part of the resolution, the healing and the reconstruction.”35

Repentance, then, as much as it is a turning away from the ways of death and sin promulgated by the Christendom church, must also involve a turning toward. To paraphrase Kathleen Dean Moore, every time we say no to a way of destruction, we say yes to something much more beautiful and life sustaining.36 We need a way to live out both an emphatic No! to what we turn away from, and a productive Yes! to the way of life we turn toward. I propose that the Yes! proclaimed through the framework of watershed discipleship can help to constructively shape a paradigm of repentance.

Watershed Discipleship as Home Mission

Watershed discipleship is an antidote to the deep sense of placelessness lying behind the Doctrine of Discovery and watershed conquest. Watershed discipleship, as set forth by Ched Myers and other animators of this vision, is a way of re-placement.37 Its framework invites Christians to re-place our theology, our readings of Scripture, and our spiritual practices in our bioregions, defined by their source of life in the watershed.

Watershed discipleship calls disciples of Jesus to also become disciples of our particular places. The watershed, what permaculturalist Brock Dolman calls “the basin of relations,” encompasses ecological, social and political realities and relationships. One might imagine a watershed as a bathtub holding the cities, land, people, animals, and the rest of creation where a particular body of water drains.38 This geographically-bound vision points to a way of seeing a place as home, a way to more faithfully live the gospel in a particular place while remaining integrally connected to all other places. Contrary to popular understandings, a “local” focus does not cut people off from a global vision. Wendell Berry writes:

There is no such thing as a ‘global village.’ No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. . . . We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one’s partiality.39

Living and loving within limits, then, are the narrow way toward wholeness everywhere and for everyone.

Watershed discipleship prevents Samuel Escobar’s vision of mission from everywhere from reverting to a displaced and displacing mission from nowhere. In workshops and writings on watershed discipleship, Myers often paraphrases Baba Dioum, a Senegalese environmentalist, in the following dictum:

• We won’t save places we don’t love.
• We can’t love places we don’t know.
• And we don’t know places we haven’t learned.

We cannot be part of God’s work of salvation in this world without being part of the work of learning, knowing, and loving a home place. It goes without saying that we cannot claim and be claimed by a home place without long-term presence in a particular place.

Perhaps no biblical verb has been as significant for the history of mission as that of “go” in the Great Commission of Matt 28:18–20. “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:19a). Mission has been understood in terms of this sending out and leaving home for the sake of spreading the gospel. In order to fully live into a missional paradigm of repentance, I believe watershed discipleship offers the North American church an opportunity to alternatively interpret the commission to “go” in light of our context of rootless mobility, alienation, and displacement.

Watershed discipleship provides a way of repentance through going into our own particular places, turning away from the transmission of a false gospel that denies rootedness and incarnation. Just as Jesus was immersed into his own watershed in the Jordan River (in a baptism of repentance), I believe we must go deeper into the oft-unknown land and waters of our home places, and become disciples of Jesus through learning, knowing, and loving our own watersheds.40

Conclusion

I began with a personal story of a commission home I received from indigenous brothers and sisters in the Philippines. For me, answering the question, what place would you give your life for? meant seeking home in a watershed closer to my birthplace in California. A return to one’s birthplace may not be the answer that others discern. As I was writing this essay, I received word from Ikalahan-Kalanguya friends that Pastor Delbert Rice, North American missionary and cultural anthropologist in the Philippines for over 60 years, had just passed away at his home in the Ancestral Domain.41

Pastor Rice was an example of a faithful witness who poured out his life for the li-teng— the shalom—of the Ikalahan-Kalanguya. He would often recall hikes with tribal elders, learning about the forests, wildlife, and the stories and songs about their place. His work with the elders in the 1970s led to the crucial establishment of the Kalahan Educational Foundation (KEF), which successfully challenged land-grabbers in league with the Marcos dictatorship. Even in his last years, Pastor Rice worked passionately with the KEF to strengthen organic agriculture in the region and to resist foreign mining companies that continue to take indigenous lands. He modeled watershed discipleship by re-placing himself deeply within the watershed of the Ancestral Domain. We have everything to learn about this kind of discipleship from Pastor Rice, as well as the people and place he gave his life for.

In conclusion, as I have attempted to live out my own commissioning, I have begun to realize the shared roots between my own individual lack of home place and the larger historic placeless theologies of Christendom. For Christendom’s Doctrine of Discovery, the exploitative conversions of the land and indigenous people were bound together. As church, we need a framework whose transformative potential adequately counters this understanding of conversion. We need a resurrection way more powerful than the death grip of colonialism, one that sees following Jesus into our home places as a way of liberation for all people and land.42

Could it be that watershed discipleship is the commissioning that North American Christians are called to receive and to practice today—that we are now being commissioned home in a final reversal of Christendom? For people whose history is marred by placeless theologies and the erasure of memory, is it possible to repent of the ways of watershed conquest through practicing watershed discipleship? Through the power of the One who will be with us “to the very end of the age” (Matt 28:20), I believe it is not only possible, it is our only way home.

Katerina Friesen currently lives in the St. Joseph River watershed where she is an MDiv student at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, IN.

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