3 roots of Christian Agrarianism; a Rogation Day Special

How Christian Agrarianism can answer the environmental angst and help solve the identity crisis of this age.

Although now one of many forgotten holy days, Rogation days are part of what the church can use to point to the answer to our age’s environmental crises. Rogationtide is the series of four days that the church has historically set aside to petition God to bless the fields and livestock of the parish, as well as to equip His people to be good stewards of His creation. In honor of this rather forgotten holiday, I thought it would be fitting to commend this liturgical rhythm as an opportunity for the church to rejoice in our restored relationship with creation. The practice of living out this restoration is Christian Agrarianism. Christian Agrarianism is simply the hope-filled care for creation by the redeemed, lived out in community. 

These are three foundational roots from which the gospel transforms our relationship with the rest of creation: the tripartite covenant, ontological duty, and restoration hope. 

Tripartite covenant

The environmental angst that pervades our age stems from a recognition of our depravity and the fallenness of the world, but even more so from our uncertainty about how things ought to be. What is the nature of our relationship with the rest of creation, especially in light of the destruction we've wrought upon it? And even more importantly is there any hope of fixing it? To answer either of those questions, we must rediscover the proper ordering of the cosmos. 

From Genesis 1 onwards, scripture reveals an agrarian vision for the tripartite relationship between the Creator, mankind, and the rest of creation. Prior to the fall, all three existed in joyous, rightly ordered harmony.  God entrusted creation to the care of mankind for its cultivation to reflect God’s glory. Although this covenantal relationship was composed of three parties, it was never supposed to be an equal partnership. It was instituted by God, enabled through Him, and was for Him. The cosmos is rightly ordered with the Creator at the center. As dependent beings, we exist together with the rest of creation in a theocentric universe. However, with mankind’s rebellion that three-way relationship was thrown out of wack. When humanity chose to frame themselves as God -as the center point of the cosmos- we fractured our relationship with creation, other humans, and with our Creator. As a chastisement and wakeup call, just as we rebelled against God, so then did creation rebel against us. An anthropocentric cosmology motivates the selfish destruction of community and creation. Death, thorns, pestilence, famine, and murder are all the direct fruits we reap for the destruction of the original theocentric community of creation.

              However, both in ancient days and in our present times, some have sought to remedy the destruction wrought by anthropocentrism by elevating creation as the highest good. This ecocentrism today is often expressed in environmentalist rhetoric, which while rightly decrying the wickedness of humanity’s abuse of the earth, damages the human community by both ignoring our unique role as part of creation and promoting a fear-based antinatalism. But even worse, ecocentrism dismisses submission to the Creator as key to the restoration of creation. Creation itself becomes the object of man’s worship. Modern ecocentrism, like its ancient counterpart of pantheistic paganism, reveres nature as a wrathful deity, to which we owe repentance and service. But this correction to anthropocentrism ultimately falls short in the exact same way: it places something other than the creator as the center of the cosmos and is thus doomed to disorder.

Christian Agrarianism, while emphasizing the interrelationship between ourselves and creation, recognizes that true harmonious community can only be grasped when brought under the right relationship with the Orderer of the universe. Communion with the rest of humanity and creation is dependent upon communion with God. In Rogationtide we especially humble ourselves in prayer, reorienting ourselves as the humble servants of the one who owns the cattle on 1000 hills. All of the natural world is entrusted to our care only in the condition that we order it towards the glory of God. The natural world only exists as an overflow of the love of God. If he is painted out of the picture, there is no picture.

Ontological Purpose of Mudmen

So what exactly is our role in relation to the rest of creation? We are mudmen. Molded from the soil and ensouled by Divine breath, humanity was given the monumental duty to image the Creator. Mankind is ontologically bound to the soil from which we came. We are dust destined to rejoin the dust. The words for man and soil are interrelated: Adam=adamah [soil]. The moment God created man, He imbued our existence with a purpose: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth” (Gen 1:26). We are made to image God, to serve as His vice-regents. God defines what that looks like. Just as God is the gracious sovereign over all the cosmos, humans are to exercise stewardly dominion over the things of the earth. Our duty to care for the soil and things of the soil is united to our ontological purpose to reflect God.

God put us in the garden to husband it and to expand it.  We had the joyous responsibility to imitate the First Gardener by expanding Eden to the ends of the earth.  The wording of Genesis 2 implies that only Eden was fully cultivatable, and the rest of the world was a barren wilderness (Gen 2:5). The author of Genesis suggests a correlation between the destitute barrenness of the earth outside Eden, with the absence of man: “No small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for… there was no man to work the ground” (Gen 2:5-6).  We are made for the earth and the earth is made for us. Humanity is not alien to earth. We are a necessary part of the global biome. God originally made man as sub-gardeners to cultivate and grow ecosystems in imitation of Him.

As sub-gardeners, men and women are given dominion over the rest of creation in the Genesis narrative. However, dominion is far from an excuse for exploitation, but a call to regal responsibility. Our dominion is not tyranny, rather it is a vigilant duty. Similarly, the commands subdue and keep, in context, denote stewardship and care. Mankind was to order all things to God’s plan (subdue) and nurture and care for it by cultivating it (keep). We are not to have a standoff approach to nature. Our role is to exercise godly dominion by caring for what God has entrusted to us.

Eschatological Hope

            Oriented towards God's glory, and defined by a regal duty to care for creation, Christian Agrarianism is motivated by eschatological hope. We are free to banish the oppressive melancholy that comes from taking on such a task which is outside their control. Most of the rest of the environmentalist movement is plagued by an encroaching sense of hopeless doom. In the face of such destruction, we feel powerless. Some have even espoused that we've reached a point of no return, it's too late to save the earth. And that's right, we can't save the world because it's already been saved. Christ has already achieved the victory and will return to complete His work. And this is a great comfort. Faithful agrarians can instead trust in the Lord and enact their created purpose. Even if the rest of the world is fraught with despair, the Christian is equipped to carry on.

Although our vocation as stewards of creation is marred, in Christ, the perfect man, it is restored. We are once again true image bearers of God, and we are now enabled to be the stewards we are created to be. It is good and fulfilling as the restored people of God to care for creation, to protect the environment, to rejuvenate landscapes, and tend to our little imitations of the garden of Eden. But these efforts and gardens that we tend are only at their most victory gardens. Alone we cannot undo the Fall. Yet we tend to what fragments of creation are entrusted to our care with full hope that Christ will return one day and unite all our little victory gardens into His new creation. This broken world will be resurrected someday and so we should care for it as a sign of our hope. Until then, let us every year go out to our fields and gratefully and humbly pray that God would bless the creation He has entrusted us and hasten His healing of it. Blessed Rogation to you all!