The philosopher and linguist Mikhail Bakhtin highlighted that when we speak (or write) we must be conscious more of how people hear what we say than of our own understanding of what we are communicating. I noticed this when I spoke of one of the marks of mission being “Strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth”.

When I spoke of “creation”, biologists (and others with a good science understanding) thought that I was affirming a USA-style fundamentalist literalism, with its 6,000-year-old universe and denial of evolution.

In my mind, I was doing no such thing. The literary genres of the early chapters of Genesis seem perfectly plain to me, with their talking snake, light (and days!) before the Sun, conflicting accounts of humans made last or first, and so forth. My first degree was in science, and I don’t see the conflicts between science and faith that others want to find there.

But we have to be mindful of the reality that the Christianity that is (markedly disproportionately) the majority presence on social media, television, the internet, and encountered in street preachers is of a biblicism that treats the scriptures as univocal, inerrant, and scientifically and historically infallible. It should be unsurprising that many people hear the word “creation” as a rejection of contemporary consensus science and history.

But when I (and many others) have been using the word “creation”, I mean all that exists, and the coming of all this into ordered existence. I’m certainly not using “creation” as if the Genesis stories are science and history accounts!

We need to be alert to how we are heard when there is talk of “Creation Sunday” or “the Feast of Christ in Creation” or the “Feast of Creation in Christ” or “Creation Season”. We may think we are pressing for ecological responsibility in partnership with all faiths and none. But the very people we think we are encouraging to be in partnership with may see us as siding with fundamentalists who think Christ will return soon and any longer-term ecological responsibility is not only unacceptable but might delay that Second Coming!

As we take care about the language we use, we may be best to drop “creation” and find a term that better reflects what we are actually saying. Even specialised terminology like ‘integrity’ of creation may be difficult for many Christians to understand. It is used in that mark of mission in the sense of the Latin integritas, meaning health or soundness.

So might we re-work that mark of mission to something like:

Strive to protect the health of global ecosystems, and sustain and renew the life of the Earth.
or Strive to safeguard the balance of our natural world, and sustain and renew the life of our planet.
or Strive to safeguard the wholeness of the web of life, and be faithful stewards of the Earth.
or Strive to treasure the Earth, and sustain and renew its life.

Each of these has its own strengths and weaknesses, but they make the ecological intention more explicit. And we might need to do similar reworking and rewording if we are going to have a “Creation Season”. The question, then, is what language would communicate that ecological and theological intention without carrying the unintended associations of ‘creation’. Of course, ‘creation’ and ‘creationism’ are not the same thing. But words acquire associations, and those associations can affect how our words are heard.

The Liturgy Facebook Page
The Liturgy Twitter Profile
The Liturgy Instagram 
and/or sign up to a not-too-often email