Abstract
What sort of theology might serve as an engine for greater ecological concern and activism?
For many eco-theologians, the key insight is to see the world not as being outside the value we ascribe to God, but rather as its immanent locus. Metaphors of the world as God's body, or identifications of God with the world's becoming, reflect this intent. According to this perspective, it is by embracing this vision of God's intimacy with creation that Christians can begin to cultivate ecological virtues themselves. The secular world in turn can then identify with and share these virtues because God is the deep reality of all being.
There is no doubt that this new book by Presbyterian theologian, G. P. Wagenfuhr, is animated by the same question and by the same desire. It too seeks to identify ‘the source of value’ (p. 179) that will inspire greater ecological awareness amongst believers and to analyse potential points of connection between theology and the secular world. But its theological anthropology and its account of the God-world relation contrasts greatly with the approach described above. As a result, it provides a different justification for Christian thinking on this issue and a different rationale for Christians’ practical engagement in the world. On its own terms, and as a contrast with more mainstream eco-theological approaches, this book therefore represents a contribution to the debate that is worth considering.
Wagenfuhr begins with an account of the human imagination, understood in general terms. We are creatures who construct stories of order arising from disorder, or cosmos out of chaos, ‘an imaginary and simplified world that nevertheless makes sense’ (p. 17). Perhaps this is a necessary evolutionary strategy for navigating a complex world. But, for Wagenfuhr, it inevitably results in a governance mentality over that which is perceived to be given for our control. We have come to believe that ‘humans can manage anything in potential, that humans are right to manage, and that human management is cumulative, progressive and necessary’ (p. 37, original emphasis). Wagenfuhr traces how this mentality has become increasingly reified in the ideological structures that undergird modern existence (globalization, neoliberal economics, technicity and urban life), such that it now provides nothing less than the foundational ‘myth of our own civilisation’ (p. 33). It even informs our response to the contemporary environmental crisis, which is all-too-frequently addressed not as an invitation for humble consideration of our planetary impact, but perversely as a moment for new demonstrations of our technical ingenuity and organization to fix a problem we ourselves set in motion. For Wagenfuhr, these are nothing but ‘dreams of salvation, rooted in a broken imagination’ (p xiii).
The argument of the book, however, is that Christian theology (when properly understood) provides an alternative to this narrative, ‘a path to a renewed perception and imagination that offers hope to a dying creation’ (p. xiii). Crucially, this comes through a strong theological restatement of the attributes of divine transcendence and aseity, a more rigid differentiation of the God-world relation, and a corresponding critique of the idea that humans have warrant to consider themselves as ‘judges or creators of value’ on Earth (p. 108). For Wagenfuhr, Christian theology provides a sort of ‘subversive ethics’ (p. 183) that is needed to dismantle and replace the misplaced human ideology that he claims is preventing action to address the environmental crisis at every level of public life.
One admirable feature of this book is its willingness to test and scrutinize its own argument by means of exegetical and biblical-theological work. This allows analysis of its grounding principles and perspectives. Through in-depth study of the Genesis creation texts, for example, Wagenfuhr argues that the goodness of creation must be understood not in absolute terms, but as derivative of its origin in God: ‘creation has value because the Creator values the creation’ (p. 87). Christians therefore envisage themselves not as stewards of creation (which Wagenfuhr believes leads to faulty and hubristic notions of ecological management), but as representatives of the Creator: their mission is to ‘point to or reference real authority, which they represent’ (p. 93). Moreover, for Wagenfuhr, the Genesis texts depict a God who creates not out of chaos, but out of nothing. Unlike the broken imaginary described above, then, Christians do not need to posit a dialectic of cosmos/chaos that might require human intervention to dominate and control that which is unruly in nature. The Fall narrative and banishment from Eden represent a progressive moving-away from this creation ordinance insofar as they describe ‘the human act of cosmogeny through which all of creation is re-read as a history of conflict of civilisation vs. chaos and disorder’ (p. 112). The history of Israel and its struggle with the surrounding nations displays various sinful techniques and technologies that encourage humans to become ‘godlike through their actions’ (p. 113). But these narratives also reveal God's commitment to ‘intervene in this feedback loop and break its cycle’ (p. 124). This history is finally recapitulated and reversed in the person and work of Christ, who enacts an ‘epistemological resurrection’ (p. 134) that can overturn and repair the broken human imagination that is our inheritance. According to Wagenfuhr, then, Christian metanoia must be understood not as adjustment to behaviour leading to the cultivation of ecological virtues that can be shared by all, but rather in terms of ‘repentance’ (p. 142) and existential lament for our culpable participation in processes of cosmization that have reigned since the time of Adam. It is no surprise that he interprets the book of Revelation as offering a vision of the future that is radically discontinuous with the present; in the new heavens and the new Earth there is ‘no redemption for human urban structures or agrarian practices, because God is not and never was their author’ (p. 142).
Throughout the book, Wagenfuhr assumes the (early) Barthian perspective that ‘we cannot look at the creation to know anything about the Creator’ (p. 150). Thus, any attempt to forge a Christian eco-theology through a more familiar or familial link between God and the world will necessarily be mistaken. This understanding of the God-world relation problematizes a virtue-led approach: for Wagenfuhr, the ecological conversion that is needed for society as a whole is synonymous with the theological conversion that is proclaimed by the Gospel. Thus, ‘the challenge offered in this book will simply be this: humanity must die to itself and all that it values, in Christ, for the sake of creation. Humanity must become a new creation and in this way perceive afresh God's good creation’ (p. xviii).
There is much to be gained from considering the argument of this book. For example, it alerts us to how easily a virtue-led approach can become co-opted by the political and social structures of the world who have no interest in radical change. After all, even the idea of personal moral transformation can be assimilated into the agenda and bottom-line of major corporations and states, where it can be repurposed to serve new modes of capitalism and consumerism that will perpetuate, rather than alleviate, the environmental crisis we face. This point has been recently explored by French environmental historians such as Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (L’apocalypse joyeuse. Une histoire du risque technologique, Seuil, 2012) and Pierre Charbonnier (Abondance et liberté. Une histoire environnementale des idées politiques, La Découverte, 2019), who have argued that forces of ‘progress’ that are apparently synonymous with modernity, including industrialization, secularization and globalization, generate a ‘disinhibiting’ effect on our capacity to envisage an alternative organization of the world. By arguing that this crisis cannot be meaningfully addressed within our contemporary (western) imaginaries, at the very least Wagenfuhr draws attention to the deep political-theological structure of the contemporary environmental crisis and the need to address this if we are to understand how we got to where we are today.
And yet the argument of this book is itself vulnerable to significant critique on account of its pessimistic, even nihilistic, theological anthropology. For Wagenfuhr, human beings are nothing less than ‘cosmic parasites’ (p. xi), a term that refers not only to the way in which we drain the material resources of the Earth through our activities, but also to the violent and destructive way in which we impose our own being onto the world as a host vehicle. This leads Wagenfuhr to conclude that humans in their natural state are nothing but ‘chaos monsters, parasites, the earth's most successful invasive mammal’ (p. 186). With this vision in mind, it stands to reason that the secular world can in no way represent a partner for collaboration; it must instead be seen as ‘a civilisation that must be transcended’ (p. 186). The church becomes a sort of embassy outpost in the midst of hostile enemy territory. And, in conclusion, ‘there is no real public ethics that Christianity has to offer to the world’ (p. 181).
This negative account can be challenged on at least two fronts. First, it fails to engage with an alternative theological and philosophical tradition concerning the analogia entis, a tradition incorporating Plato, Dionysius, Augustine, Aquinas and Heidegger, one that influenced the Catholic thought of von Balthasar and Rahner, and that resonates still in Radical Orthodoxy and the writing of Jean-Luc Marion, amongst others. In particular, in the work of twentieth-century Jesuit theologian Erich Przywara, we find a strong defence of the idea of a rationally discernible similitude between God and creature that does not infringe upon dissimilitude, an insight that Przywara goes on to suggest can become the engine of an engaged practical theology that can impact the secular world in positive ways. Moreover, Wagenfuhr's reductive anthropology fails to take account of the complicated, mutually-reinforcing and even homeostatic feedback loops that have been shown to exist between human beings and the Earth System broadly understood, as described in the work of systems theorists such as Niklas Luhmann and Michel Serres, the latter of which was arguing for a wholly-different and more positive interpretation of the parasite-being of humankind more than forty years ago (Le parasite, Grasset, 1979).
But second, and perhaps more importantly, Wagenfuhr fails to recognize how the very mode of eco-theology he criticizes has made a positive impact in the public domain. This is most obviously exemplified by the papal encyclical Laudato Si’. Whilst Wagenfuhr does offer some cautious notes of welcome for this document, he ultimately dismisses it as syncretistic on account of its desire to ‘use Christian tradition to influence the world to more just structures’, a task which he believes does nothing more than ‘legitimize structures of brokenness by merging the kingdom of God with the kingdom of the world’ (p. 174). This is to ignore the theologically-subtle debates around the term ‘ecological conversion’ that have been developed within Catholic social thought since at least the time of the later years of Pope John Paul II and that are also deployed in Laudato Si’. Neither does it credit the extraordinary influence and impact of this encyclical at all levels of society within and beyond the Church since its publication in 2015. Pope Francis would agree that care for creation will, to some extent, be a symbolic anticipation of the restoration God himself will ultimately bring about. But this eschatological horizon does not have to be set in a zero-sum game with the present. A sophisticated eco-theology, I would suggest, will be defined both by the way it upholds the transcendence of God over creation and by the way it animates and inspires those down-here who are seeking to bring about meaningful change in collaboration with all those of good will. The value of Wagenfuhr's book, and its claim to represent a faithful reading of Christian Scripture and tradition, will ultimately be assessed by its capacity to inspire all people to new forms of action and engagement in the context of the political, we inhabit in the present time.