Caring for God’s creation: Bishop Geoff Davies and his wife Kate started the multi-faith organisation, the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute. Photo: David Harrison
Read the Bible with green spectacles and you will know that God is green, says Bishop Geoff Davies, who is known as South Africa’s “green bishop”.
Everyone reads it from their own background and perspective, says the founder and patron of the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute (Safcei), a multi-faith environmental organisation.
“People then see a passage that often endorses their viewpoint,” says Davies. “I think we haven’t read the Bible from the perspective of the environment and of God’s creation. We’ve looked at it sometimes, maybe just from the perspective of sexual morality, social justice and human compassion.”
But what the Bible contains about God’s creation is “actually a great deal”, he points out. “And now in some of our writings, we’re quoting these biblical passages … that God is the creator who brought about this magnificent, incredible world and who told us to look after it.”
All the main world and indigenous religions talk about caring for creation. “You’ll hear many Muslims, Hindus and certainly many Buddhists, all talking about caring for this world.”
When Davies and his wife, Kate, established Safcei 17 years ago, it was from the point of view that, “we’ve got to care for this creation, that all religions have that, and that we can then unite in caring” for the planet.
And creation is under such threat, he says.
“We see this now with this horrendous war taking place in Ukraine, and of far greater consequence is climate change. We should be uniting and putting all our resources into combating climate change. All faith traditions and all religions should be saying, ‘come on, we’ve got to have peace’ so that we can care for creation. The future of our children is dependent on it.”
The present economic system driven by profit, greed and rampant consumerism is destroying the natural world, says Davies, who emphasises the pursuit of wealth is not humanity’s purpose in life.
Questions must be posed with development proposals, for example, on whether they further the well-being, good of people and the natural environment, “not will it make money for me …
“Why do we have so much plastic packaging? Because it’s convenient and it favour capitalism so the big owners can make more money … Profit and money is what’s driving our economy and it’s also driving our destruction.”
Davies says the Biblical principles of justice and equity must be applied to upholding the sanctity of all of life – not only human life. “We’re bringing about the 6th mass extinction. I always like to say that the greatest sin is causing another species to go extinct because we can never bring it back.”
Davies, who was the Bishop of the Anglican diocese of uMzimvubu for 17 years until his retirement in 2003, has been hailed as a pioneer in the church’s environmental ministry for his decades-long work, raising awareness about environmental degradation and climate change at a time when few were listening.
After his retirement, in a leap of faith and through a series of “God-incidences”, a national conference was held in 2004 to establish Safcei, which was officially launched by Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai. The nonprofit includes representatives of all the region’s major faith traditions and intertwines faith and environmentalism. “There was unity from the start for our multi-faith environmental organisation.”
In 2016, the Archbishop of Canterbury awarded Davies the Langton Award for community service for his lifelong work urging the church to embrace environmental care and seeking eco-justice — both ecological and economic justice.
“Bishop Geoff has been largely responsible for our church’s awareness of environmental issues,” Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu stated in his congratulations. “We owe him a huge debt of gratitude since he did this when it was not fashionable or popular.”
It’s crucial that faith traditions recognise the responsibility they have been given as custodians of the earth, says Davies. “We bring in the ethical principles that are needed in caring for creation.”
He tells how the leadership of Pope Francis, through his encyclical letter on ecology, Laudato Si’, has been a “rallying call” for other faith traditions in caring for nature.
But where it’s not expanding enough is among the more evangelical churches, in some cases, “who emphasise the importance of getting you to heaven instead of caring for this beautiful planet, we have around us now”.
And faith traditions, he stresses, should be following science. “We recognise evolution. That does not mean that we undermine the power of prayer and miracles, but that God has used evolution in bringing about this incredibly beautiful world.”
Rather than pantheism, which has been seen as “worshipping nature”, Davies speaks about panentheism, a concept that embraces, “the world being in God and God being in the world”.
“That means that God is everywhere and in everything. We look at these beautiful trees, mountains and animals — God is there. People so often see God as separate from the world. But the God we believe in is everything and is not just ‘God up there’, and is a God who loves this world and who loves us in the here and now.”
And God, Davies says, is “really crying” about the way that humanity is treating the world, “the fact that we are upsetting the whole process of evolution. It’s taken billions of years to achieve this state of perfection and we’re now causing it to unravel.”
Facing Day Zero in Cape Town was when people became conscious of their dependence on water, says Davies, who lives in Kalk Bay, near Cape Town.
“But it’s not only water, it’s climate change, which is driven predominantly by fossil fuels. We can already see how climate change is disrupting rainfall patterns and causing droughts, floods and other extreme weather events on the continent. This is affecting food production and disrupting local economies.
“We are all totally dependent on fertile soil to grow our crops and are largely dependent in terms of food on a healthy marine environment. But we continue both to exploit that and instead of fishing sustainably, we have overfished in a disastrous manner,” says Davies, who stresses caring for the natural resources that sustain life.
God has given South Africa “all the energy we need that’s shining on us and blowing on us every day. So we have to turn to renewable energy. It’s just gross irresponsibility to seek more and more fossil fuels that is just motivated by this lust for money … So much of these fossil fuels are going to empower machines that put people out of work.”
South Africa’s faith traditions share more in common than what divides them, including a mutual respect for the Earth. “It’s my prayer that all faiths will see it as foundational to care for creation,” he says.
“All faith traditions call on us to love — and that love includes all of creation. Our point is then to pressurise those in authority, those in government, to say ‘come on chaps you have to prioritise caring for the environment’.”
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