Well, I’m coming up on four in the morning and I still have another four pages of my paper to write. I at first was excited about my topic and felt that I was going to be reward with the educational content, but it has not happened yet. I am writing about the life of Albert Schweitzer, a missionary in the early to mid 1900s who won a Nobel Peace Prize. In our generation, I think very few people know who he is, though he made the cover of time as a Christian missionary and is known as a great theologian in the early to mid 1900s. I am writing about his theory on the ‘reverence for life’ which is based on this statement:
I am life that wills to live in the midst of other life that wills to live. I must interpret the life about me as I interpret the life that is my own. My life is full of meaning to me. The life around me must be full of significance to itself. If I am to expect others to respect my life, then I must respect the other life I see, however strange it may be to mine. And not only other human life, but all kinds of life: life above mine, if there be such a life; life below mine, as I know it to exist. Ethics in our western world has hitherto been largely limited to the relation of man to man. But that is a limited ethics. We need a boundless ethics which will include the animals too. - Schweitzer
It is a fascinating proposition, one that Christians today tend to ignore. There is a very practical ethics within the church today, spawning from the individualized protestant theology, that has taken a boundless ethic, one that includes animals, nature, and people outside our sphere of influence, and excluded it. Our ethics are now based on our man to man relationships with our friends and aquiantences, but it no longer includes ALL of God’s creation. I want to propose that this start to be changed. We are not good stewards of the world that we are suppose to till and keep, and if we don’t start taking the role of a ruler with the earth as our loyal subjects, we may be dethroned.
