On the basis of this belief, we form a community which takes from this creation certain elements (the bread and the wine) which we offer to God with the solemn declaration "Thine own of thine own we offer unto Thee", thus recognizing that creation does not belong to us but to God, who is its only "owner". By doing so we believe that creation is brought into relation with God, and not only its it treated with the reverence that befits what belongs to God, but it is also liberated from its natural limitation and is transformed into a bearer of life. We believe that in doing this "in Christ", we, like Christ, act as priests of creation. When we receive these elements back, after having referred them to God, we believe that because of this reference to God we can take them back and consume them no longer as death but as life. Creation acquires for us in this way a sacredness which is not inherent in its nature but "acquired in and through Man's free exercise of his imago Dei, his personhood. This distinguishes our attitude from all forms of paganism, and attaches to the human being an awesome responsibility for the survival of God’s creation.
All of this is a belief and practice that cannot be imposed on anyone else, and may easily be mistaken for sheer ritualism. Nevertheless we believe that this involve an ethos that the world needs badly in our time. It is not an ethics, but an ethos. It is not a programme, but an attitude and a mentality, not a legislation but a culture.
It seems that the ecological crisis is a crisis of culture. It is a crisis that has to do with the loss of the sacrality of nature in our culture. I can see only two ways of overcoming this. One would be the way of paganism. The pagan regards the world as sacred because it is permeated by the divine presence; he therefore respects it, to the point of worshipping it explicitly or implicitly, and does not do damage to it. But equally he never worries about its fate: he believes in its eternity. He is unaware of any need for the transformation of nature or transcendence of it limitations; the world is good as it stands and possesses in its nature all that is necessary for its survival.
The other way is what we have tried to describe here as the Christian way. The Christian regards the world as sacred because it stands in dialectical relationship with God; thus he respects it (without worshipping it, since it has no divine presence in its nature), but he regards the human being as the only possible link between God and creation, a link that can either bring nature to communion with God and thus sanctify it, or turn it ultimately towards Man "or nature itself" and condemn it to the state of a "thing", the meaning and purpose of which are exhausted with the satisfaction of Man.
Of these two ways it is the second one that attaches to Man a heavy responsibility for the fate of creation. The first one sees Man as part of the world; the second, by considering Man as the crucial link between the world and God, sees him as the only person in creation, that is, as the only one who would be so deeply respectful of the impersonal world as not simply to "preserve" it, but to cultivate and embody it in forms of culture which will elevate it to eternal survival. Unless we decide to return to paganism, this seems to be the only way to respect once against the sacrality of nature and face the ecological crisis. For it is now clear that the model of human domination over nature, such as we have it in our present-day technical ethos, will no longer do for the survival of God’s creation.
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