Coming Back to Earth from gods, to God, to Gaia

by Lloyd Geering

The mainline churches in the Western world are declining, concludes Lloyd Geering, because they are “all out of step” with the modern secular world. This is not so much a result of the supposed renegade behavior of the secular world as the failure of the church to take the next steps in its path of faith. In Coming Back to Earth, Geering calls upon us to complete the work of the Second Axial Age by bringing the sacred—banished to an imaginary heavenly realm in the wake of the First Axial Age—back to earth.

“A very fine, very important book. . . . You have outlined, in a quite convincing way, the kind of transformation Christian faith must make today in face of the ecological crisis—the most important problem humans have ever had to face.”
—Gordon Kaufman, Mallinckrodt Professor of Divinity, Emeritus, Harvard University

“Geering writes in simple and compelling language, conveying a complicated set of ideas in the most accessible way.” —Sofia

Genres: Religion

192 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 22, 2009

About the author

Sir Lloyd George Geering ONZ GNZM CBE is a New Zealand theologian who faced charges of heresy in 1967 for his controversial views. He considers Christian and Muslim fundamentalism to be "social evils". Geering is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. He turned 100 in February 2018.

Reviews

[Joshua · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this was an exercise both in frustration and engagement. While Geering has some legitimate and interesting points, especially regarding politics, modernism and secularism, his representation of Christian history, theology and scholarship is sub-par. But perhaps not unexpectedly so...
Never-the-less there are some insightful passages here and it's certainly worth a read if you're interested in religion & culture.

[R. Moores · Rating 4 out of 5]

I respect Sir Lloyd Geering for all he has done for Religious Studies as an academic discipline in New Zealand and for his brave and principled stand as "the last western heretic." However, this book and its arguments are dated and weak.

First the positives:
* Geering correctly identifies western secularism as a natural evolution of Christianity
* Geering is correct in that we need to return to a more earth based spirituality
* Geering is correct that European's need to learn and lean into their cultural heritage, rather than throw it all out in postmodern destruction
* Geering is correct that Jewish monotheism divorced humanity from nature and desacralised life in general, Geering sees this as a positive, I disagree... strongly.

The negatives:
* the man based creeds of the big three monotheisms have been anything but positive for the environment and the spiritual health and wellbeing of humanity (particularly in the West)
* Geering views a secularised/modern form of Christianity as being the key to it's resurrection as a powerful social force. This view has been utterly discredited. The traditional forms of Christianity (Orthodox, Catholic) are growing in response to those that have adapted to the modern world which are declining (Anglicism, liberal churches). People want stability and strength. They want to access an unchanged reality. They are tired of everything bending to the morality of the modern world.
* Geering thinks the supernatural has no place our modern world and religions. Again, he is wrong. People want the supernatural in their religion. They want angels and demons and devas and asuras and ghosts and everything in between. Above this, people want to connect to an eternal soul (and connect this soul to a Deity) and the journey to do this is the essence of faith. To paraphrase Mulder from the X-Files: "people want to believe."
* If we are to attain an earth religion then we need to repersonalise the forces of nature. All of humanity's forbears did this because it comes naturally. Geering wants us to have a nature based religion but rooted in Christian values, which are diametric to nature worship.
* a pet peeve, but Geering uses the term "Judeo-Christian" frequently and to me this places too much emphasis on the Jewish influence over western history. Yes, Judaism is the source of Christianity. However, medieval Christianity and renaissance Christianity are uniquely western. In short, the Judeo part is massively overemphasised.

To summarise, this book means well and paints a nice picture that assumes the best of humanity, coupled with a belief in the inherent superiority of secularism over supernatural-believing-traditional forms of society. The reality of the modern world has exposed the deep flaws in of a desacralised world for the health and wellbeing of people. It seems we need to believe in God/Gods/Goddesses and forces beyond our understanding and to me, Mr Geering did not acknowledge this in this book which weakens his the premise of his arguments.

[T. Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but not spell binding