From The January 2000 St John's Eagle
“What's in a Word " - By John Harcourt
Stewardship is a word that has come a long way from its humble, if not ignoble, origins. The Anglo-Saxon steward may have meant sty-warden, keeper of the pigpen. Before too long, it was upgraded to "keeper of the hall," and, by modern times, had come to designate the business manager of a great estate. In our own day, the word has once again contracted its scope. We speak of the steward of the country club, of the wine-steward in an elegant restaurant, of the stewards (or stewardesses) on a ship or plane. The older sense of agent for a landlord has all but disappeared, so that now the term is little more than a highfalutin substitute for waiter or attendant. Only in our churches does something of the original denotation continue to resonate — partly as a euphemism for fund-raising but far more significantly in an ecological context.
The word is not prominent in the Old Testament, but we all know the parable of the Unjust Steward in Luke 16:1–9. Jesus's apparent commendation of those shady dealings has brought grief to countless generations of preachers. Whatever the meaning, the parable presents stewardship as a completely secular relationship. The only scriptural passage approximating out current ecclesiastical usage is Titus 1:7: "For a bishop, as God's steward, must be blameless." Here the image is of God as landlord of the household of faith, the bishop acting merely as His agent.
In our Prayerbooks, stewardship made its first appearance in 1928:
Almighty God, whose loving hand hath given us all that we possess; Grant us grace that we may honour thee with our substance, and remembering the account which we must one day give, may be faithful stewards of they bounty. . . . (1928 BCP, p. 599).
As Massey Shepherd notes, "It is the clearest statement in the Prayer Book of the Christian ethic regarding property: in the sight of God we are entrusted stewards, not owners, of all that we possess." Our present Prayerbooks reprints this prayer (p. 827). It also includes a variant, "For stewardship of creation," (p. 208, p. 259) hardly an ecological manifesto! The intercession on p. 329 is only slightly stronger:
Open, O Lord, the eyes of all people to behold thy gracious hand in all they works, that, rejoicing in thy whole creation, they may honor thee with their substance, and be faithful stewards of thy bounty.
Even so, this extension of the concept of the bishop as steward of God's household to one of all people as stewards of God's creation is an important development, a reflection of new sensitivies that have emerged in the last fifty years. It is certainly an improvement over the older notion of our dominion "over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth" (Genesis 1:28). No need to belabor the disastrous consequences of the concept of dominion, so closely allied with equally disastrous ideology of colonialism and Manifest Destiny (derivatives of the Biblical belief in a Chosen People).
Our present uneasiness over ruthless exploitation both of our planet and of third-world people cries out for some sort of counter-poise. We have emphasized stewardship to instill a sense of the responsible management of the natural and human resources of the world. But the image of the steward contains a built-in ambiguity: stewards look upward to God but also downward to others under their authority — slaves, serfs, servants, workers. It is an essentially hierarchical, authoritarian concept, easily serving as a cover for our aggressions. At worst, it has given us the divine right of kings, crusades, and Holy Wars. Even at best, those who bill themselves as God's business agents are likely to be unpleasantly officious types.
Perhaps stewardship cannot transcend its associations with keeping account-books and giving orders to underlings. Certainly invoking it has not served as an effective brake on our exploitiveness.
In a recent issue of Trinity News (from Trinity Church in NYC), the Reverend Doctor Frederic B. Burnham proposed a non-hierarchical way of tackling such questions as whether science takes precedence over theology or vice versa:
Let me suggest, instead, a horizontal model: the electromagnetic spectrum. . . . Spread all across a level plane is an extraordinary array of electromagnetic species varying only in wavelength— quantitative, not qualitative, distinction. At one end of the spectrum there are radio waves whose long, supple undulations transit the daily news. At the other end of the spectrum are the shorter, more intense x-rays and gamma rays which are capable of penetrating even the densest materials. Each of these invisible forces is immensely useful and important in its own right. None is superior to any of the others. in their infinite variety they manifest the incredible richness of the created order. There is no hidden hierarchy in this picture, just extraordinary diversity.
Dr. Burnham is talking specifically about "ways of knowing." But his suggestion can be extended to the problems created by "stewardship." We profess a belief in the radical equality of all members of our democracy, and we are slowly and painfully groping toward a concept of global democracy, embracing all the peoples of this earth. Equally, a non-hierarchical approach is possible for the non-human portions of our world. A theology of creation must go beyond Genesis and instead image God as filling every physical structure, every life form — divinizing each to the fullest extend of it capabilities. Nothing is created primarily for the benefit of something else, but rather for the sheer exuberant beauty of its being. To be sure, in the mutuality — of coexistence, we often do serve the needs of one another — but never in an unidirectional way. Eventually, the eaters are themselves eaten, the slayers slain. But this interdependence in the vast web of being is a interdependence of unique entities, each valuable in and of itself.
The Native Americans used to ask the buffalo's forgiveness for the needful act of killing it for sustenance. This intuitive reverence before the mystery of creation is poles apart from a stewardship that sees our relationship to the universe in terms of an economic relationship.
Long ago, St. Francis celebrated shoulder-to-shoulder images in preference to those involving over and under:
Be thou praised, my Lord, with all Thy creatures,
Above all Brother Sun. . . .
Be Thou praised, my Lord, of Sister Moon . . . .
Professor
Harcourt is the Charles A. Dana Professor of
English Emeritus at Ithaca College.
