Theology on a Defiant Earth: Seeking Hope in the Anthropocene (Religious Ethics and Environmental Challenges) 9781666903225, 9781666903232, 1666903221

Table of contents :
Theology on a Defiant Earth
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Theology on a Defiant Earth
Chapter 1: The Anthropocene Epoch and Its Meaning
Chapter 2: A Rupture in the Earth: An Implicit Augustinian Theology of the Anthropocene
Chapter 3: Is It Time for a Theological Step-Change?
Chapter 4: Icarus Falling: Theological Anthropology and the Anthropocene
Chapter 5: Thy Kingdom Come: Bonhoeffer’s Earthly Christianity as Theology and Ethic
Chapter 6: Anthropocene and Ecclesia: The Church as a Political Swarm
Chapter 7: Thinking Eschatologically in the Face of the Anthropocene
Chapter 8: Apocalypse and the Anthropocene: A Biblical Resource for a New Global Epoch
Chapter 9: Redeeming Eden: Biblical Ethics in the Anthropocene
Chapter 10: The Serpent in the Garden—Sin and the Anthropocene
Chapter 11: Defiant God: The Fate of Christianity’s Holocene Ontology in the Anthropocene
Chapter 12: A Climate of Hope? Reflections on the Theology of the Anthropocene
Bibliography
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

Theology on a Defiant Earth

RELIGIOUS ETHICS AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES

Series Editors Sarah E. Fredericks, University of Chicago Kevin J. O’Brien, Pacific Lutheran University

Advisory Board Dianna Bell, Evan Berry, Willis Jenkins, James Miller, Kyle Powys White, and Whitney Sanford Religion shapes human responses to 21st century environmental challenges— discouraging some adherents from accepting scientific evidence, encouraging others to make sacrifices to preserve ecosystems, and leading still others to develop new spiritual traditions. This interdisciplinary series explores the ways diverse religious communities can, should, and do respond to contemporary environmental challenges. Many of the works will be explicitly ethical, dealing with normative commitments, applied ethics, or ethical theory; others will be theological or philosophical; still others may be social scientific descriptions. Since readers of the series will come from diverse academic contexts, all works will be explicit about methodology, enabling conversation across disciplines. We are particularly interested in works that 1) bring together distinct branches of scholarship to address practical or theoretical issues that cannot be addressed by one alone, (e.g. linking healthcare ethics and environmental ethics or comparing religious traditions); 2) explore under-researched religious communities, sub-communities, and traditions; or 3) investigate commonly studied religions in a novel way. We welcome monographs, edited volumes, and exemplary revised dissertations that take one of these approaches. While not all works in the series need to be normative or contemporary, all will help readers advance conversations about the ways religion aids or hinders responses to contemporary environmental challenges.

Titles in the series Theology on a Defiant Earth: Seeking Hope in the Anthropocene, Edited by Jonathan Cole and Peter Walker Faiths in Green: Religion, Environmental Change, and Environmental Concern in the United States, by Lukas Szrot Gratitude for the Wild: Christian Ethics in the Wilderness, by Nathaniel James Van Yperen Redeeming Sin?:Social Diagnostics amid Ecological Destruction, by Ernst M. Conradie Theological and Ethical Perspectives on Climate Engineering: Calming the Storm, Edited by Forrest Clingerman and Kevin J. O’Brien

Theology on a Defiant Earth Seeking Hope in the Anthropocene Edited by Peter Walker and Jonathan Cole

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cole, Jonathan, editor. | Cole, Jonathan (Theology, Charles Sturt     University), editor.   Title: Theology on a defiant earth : seeking hope in the anthropocene /     edited by Jonathan Cole and Peter Walker.   Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Series: Religious ethics     and environmental challenges | Includes bibliographical references and     index.  Identifiers: LCCN 2022028141 (print) | LCCN 2022028142 (ebook) | ISBN     9781666903225 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666903232 (epub)   Subjects: LCSH: Ecotheology. | Human ecology--Religious     aspects--Christianity. | Human ecology--Religious aspects.  Classification: LCC BT695.5 .T4722 2022  (print) | LCC BT695.5  (ebook) |     DDC 261.8/8--dc23/eng/20220815  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028141 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028142 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Preface ix Peter Walker and Jonathan Cole Introduction: Theology on a Defiant Earth Peter Walker and Jonathan Cole Chapter 1: The Anthropocene Epoch and Its Meaning Clive Hamilton

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Chapter 2: A Rupture in the Earth:  An Implicit Augustinian Theology of the Anthropocene Lisa H. Sideris

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Chapter 3: Is It Time for a Theological Step-Change? Clive Pearson



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Chapter 4: Icarus Falling: Theological Anthropology and the Anthropocene 59 Scott Cowdell Chapter 5: Thy Kingdom Come: Bonhoeffer’s Earthly Christianity as Theology and Ethic Dianne Rayson

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Chapter 6: Anthropocene and Ecclesia: The Church as a Political Swarm 87 Stephen Pickard Chapter 7: Thinking Eschatologically in the Face of the Anthropocene 109 Christiaan Mostert vii

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Chapter 8: Apocalypse and the Anthropocene: A Biblical Resource for a New Global Epoch David J. Neville Chapter 9: Redeeming Eden: Biblical Ethics in the Anthropocene Mark G. Brett Chapter 10: The Serpent in the Garden—Sin and the Anthropocene Peter Walker Chapter 11: Defiant God: The Fate of Christianity’s Holocene Ontology in the Anthropocene Jonathan Cole

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Chapter 12: A Climate of Hope? Reflections on the Theology of the Anthropocene 189 Clive Hamilton Bibliography Index

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About the Contributors



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Preface Peter Walker and Jonathan Cole

Scott Cowdell describes Clive Hamilton in the pages that follow as “Australia’s troubled prophet of the Anthropocene.” It was that troubled prophet, our colleague, who provoked a series of conversations, that in turn provoked a series of seminars that resulted in this volume. Clive Hamilton is Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University and an esteemed Australian public intellectual, whose work in recent years has focused mainly, although not solely, on the climate crisis and Australia-China relations. He finds his research office oddly housed among a diverse group of theologians at the Charles Sturt University’s Centre for Public and Contextual Theology (PACT) in the national capital, Canberra. Hamilton’s third book in his trilogy on climate change, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (2017), is the first book by an Australian author to make serious scientific and philosophical engagement with the emergent Anthropocene available to readers beyond the academy. In researching for his book, Hamilton’s curiosity got the better of him. Has theology anything to contribute here? What might this motley bunch of theologians, located in the offices around me, have to say about the arresting reality that humanity—a willing, decision-making force of nature—has placed life on Earth in such peril that we are now asking if we will have a future? PACT Director Stephen Pickard was similarly seized by this same question. Pickard had a personal, academic, and institutional commitment to dialogue between theology and the sciences. He had taught and written on the theology-science relationship and, in his role at Charles Sturt University, led a research center dedicated to interdisciplinary research. Pickard began to ponder what might come of a series of roundtable seminars that brought together theologians, biblical scholars, and ethicists to present, discuss, and dissect papers addressing the theme: Theology and the Anthropocene. What ix

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ideas would biblical scholars and theologians, drawing on various theological traditions and centuries of Christian thought about the relationship between humanity and creation, bring to that table? The answer lies in these pages. Seminars were held in 2017, 2018, and 2020. The Australian summer of 2019–2020 was afflicted by catastrophic fires and our seminar in early 2020 was surrounded, literally, by the ash and smoke of bushfire. That will be evident by reference to those fires in some chapters. It was a sadly fitting backdrop to our third and final gathering to discuss human-induced climate change. The biblical and theological scholars at all three seminars were enlightened, provoked, and encouraged in equal measure by Hamilton, and by Professor Lisa Sideris of the University of California, Santa Barbara, both globally recognized scholars of the Anthropocene. Hamilton’s Defiant Earth and Sideris’s Consecrating Science became essential reading for the scholars in attendance at all three seminars. Both works provided entry for a deeper engagement with the scientific, philosophical, and ethical debates surrounding the Anthropocene than theologians could manage on their own. We are most grateful to Clive and Lisa for their willingness to engage the Christian theological tradition and for helping us theologians to grapple with the defiant Earth we now inhabit. We extend a special word of thanks to Lisa for traveling from the United States to the bottom of the world to meet with us in person, not once, but three times. As with any endeavor of this kind, there are too many people to name and thank individually. We especially wish to acknowledge the Charles Sturt University Public and Contextual Theology Research Centre, which sadly ceased operations at the end of 2021, for generously funding the entire project and the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture for hosting our gatherings. David Neville and Peter Walker were there at the genesis and brought the seminars to life. Along with the authors of the chapters that follow, we also wish to thank the following scholars who, as presenters, respondents, and conversation partners, also indwell this work: Stephen Ames, Ian Barns, Denis Edwards, Jane Foulcher, Graeme Garrett, Wayne Hudson, Thorwald Lorenzen, and Emma Rush. With profound sadness, we received news of the passing of Professor Denis Edwards during the course of this threeyear project.

Introduction Theology on a Defiant Earth Peter Walker and Jonathan Cole

Clive Hamilton’s book Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene is the sun around which the contributions to this volume orbit. The book’s central thesis is summarized, sharpened, and then oriented toward theology in the volume’s first chapter: “The Anthropocene Epoch and Its Meaning.” Hamilton explains the new ontological conditions of the Anthropocene and establishes the central problematics addressed by subsequent contributors. The defining characteristic of the new geological epoch christened the Anthropocene, Hamilton observes, is that human will has come to operate like a force of nature capable of affecting the destiny of the Earth System—the broad geological history of the planet. This epochal shift profoundly alters the relationship between humankind and the Earth, presenting the conscious, thinking human animal with an unprecedented dilemma: as human power has grown over the Earth, so has the power of nature to extinguish human life. As Hamilton contends, “only when we accept both facts—humans are more powerful, nature is more powerful—can we properly grasp the new situation humans confront.” For Hamilton, the emergence of the Anthropocene has settled any question of the place of the human being in the world: humankind stands inescapably at its center. The only outstanding question, one which forms the impetus for the present volume, is: “What kind of human being stands at the center of the world, and what is the nature of that world?” This, unlike the “scientific fact” of human-centeredness, is a moral question, one which brings theology within the scope of reflection on the new realities of the Anthropocene. Christian theology, for Hamilton, is inextricably tied to, and perhaps dependent on, the Holocene conditions in which it emerged: a religion revolving around a xi

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“god at home only in a serene and friendly nature.” Too much Christian hope in the Anthropocene strikes Hamilton as vested in the “fantastic” idea that God might wind back the Geological Timescale, or perhaps that he will lead humankind to its geoengineering promised land. Hamilton suggests an alternative theological reading of the Anthropocene: The gods have abandoned humankind to its fate, having bestowed upon it a test of responsibility. The test? Reconcile their newfound geological power with the forces of nature in a moment of human maturation or reap the fruits of destruction sown by human irresponsibility. Humans have chosen the latter course, according to Hamilton, forever altering the course of theology, whether theologians know it or not, or can accept it or not. Hamilton provocatively proposes that “Gaia,” a name some use for the wakened beast that is the Earth System, has now become the “third element of the Anthropocene trinity,” alongside God and Man. He contends that “we cannot build a new conception for the future until we allow the old one to die.” It is natural to grieve as humans progressively come to terms with a future once assumed and expected, but now lost. But face the truth they must, and accept the truth they eventually will. Confronting the truth, with all of its theological implications, as well as its more widely discussed sociopolitical implications, with the “honesty and sobriety” Hamilton calls for, is precisely what the theologians and biblical scholars who have contributed to this volume attempt to do. Each contribution directly engages, or is animated, by Hamilton’s work and the challenging questions he poses of Holocene religion. In chapter 2, “A Rupture in the Earth: An Implicit Augustinian Theology of the Anthropocene,” Lisa Sideris, a scholar of religion rather than a theologian per se, explores the mix and mixture of religious and secular narratives that have arisen in response to the Anthropocene. Noting the religious resonances of secular Anthropocene storylines, Sideris seeks to draw out and make explicit “the theological nature of and antecedents to Anthropocene storytelling.” In particular, she discerns two dominant “quasi-theological” storylines in Anthropocene discourse: one Irenaean and one Augustinian. Her own stated goal is to “rehabilitate” a version of the Augustinian Anthropocene storyline (a “quasi-Augustinian perspective”), consisting of thinking of nature as “the locus or source of transforming grace, akin to the way the divine functions in an Augustinian account.” Clive Pearson, in “Is It Time for a Theological Step-Change?” (chapter 3), describes the dawn of the Anthropocene as a moment of “paradigm shift” or “rupture” for theology, one that theologians have been to slow to address, and then only inadequately. Pearson surveys a number of Christian responses—theological, ethical, and official ecclesial—to the challenge of the Anthropocene and finds them wanting. He observes that the failure of theologians to adequately attend to the new realities of the Anthropocene

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risks opening a theological vacuum that a “secular theology,” which has (re)discovered the fecundity of theological concepts, such as theodicy, providence, and eschatology, is all too willing to fill. Pearson examines some of the tensions that the Anthropocene prompts for a public theology, concluding that it is still in search of a suitable locus from which to respond to the dawn of the Anthropocene. In the volume’s fourth chapter, “Icarus Falling: Theological Anthropology and the Anthropocene,” Scott Cowdell explores the three “classical loci” of theological anthropology—humanity, sin, and grace—in relation to the Anthropocene. Using the imagery of Icarus’s fall, particularly as depicted in Pieter Breughel the Elder’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Cowdell cautions against vesting hope in the utopian optimism of technological salvation to the human predicament of the Anthropocene. Our future, he predicts, will be “less like Star Trek and more like Mad Max.” Cowdell’s pessimism stems from the realization that “human sin has attained a new capacity for alienation and destructiveness,” which, drawing on the work of René Girard, he diagnoses as humanity’s embrace of a “false transcendence”—the environment has now taken its place among the victims of our misplaced desire. Cowdell proposes that we understand grace in dramatic, rather than narrative, terms. Against the fixity of narrative, a dramatic understanding of grace holds together directionality, flexibility, and engagement. A Theo-drama of this sort, according to Cowdell, can ward against mythologized religious narratives and provide room for the “systemic dynamic” of the incarnation to transform history. Cowdell concludes that the best hope for our Earth System is to “craft a global culture of mutuality typified by gift exchange” and, moreover, that the Church has an important role to play in fostering this culture through the ethical challenge its Eucharistic life poses to contemporary habits of “liberal autonomy” and “endless political agonistics.” In chapter 5, “Thy Kingdom Come: Bonhoeffer’s Earthly Christianity as Theology and Ethic,” Dianne Rayson explores the potential of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s concept of “world Christianity” to integrate ecological and ethical insights in the Anthropocene. Bonhoeffer, Rayson notes, was conscious of the need to avoid both “otherworldliness” and secularism—too much spiritual investment in the world to come at the expense of our present embeddedness in this world, and too little spiritual investment in that world to come in which our hopes are rightly vested. Taking inspiration from Bonhoeffer’s ethical writings, Rayson concludes that what she terms “Earthly Christianity” offers “a way to incorporate a contemporary ecological understanding of the biosphere as well as the inherent human responsibility in the Anthropocene.” In “Anthropocene and Ecclesia: The Church as a Political Swarm” (Chapter 6), Stephen Pickard takes up William Connolly’s concept of “the politics of swarming” as a means of illuminating the ecclesia’s response to

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some of the challenges posed by the Anthropocene identified by Hamilton in Defiant Earth. Noting that the church, here described as an “ecclesio-political entity,” has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for adaptivity and innovation over the course of its long history, Pickard contends that something akin to Connolly’s notion of “political swarming” is already manifest in the life of the ecclesia: “a social body that has the capacity to practice alternative action, challenge entrenched prejudices, and empower ethically responsible local communities.” Pickard contends that God’s Spirit manifests in the world as a public and political power through people movements connected across many local eruptions of concern for the future of the planet and its peoples. In Defiant Earth, Hamilton suggests that human beings, newly formed in the Anthropocene, might learn to “think eschatologically.” Christiaan Mostert takes up this notion in chapter 7, “Thinking Eschatologically in the Face of the Anthropocene.” Reflecting on the Christian tradition of eschatology, Mostert proposes that thinking eschatologically in the face of the Anthropocene includes reckoning with an ultimate future transformed and renewed, applying a critical eye to the challenging realities of the present, and thinking not only about the future, but also from the future. Mostert concludes that thinking eschatologically in a theological sense “encourages us to think beyond the world as is now, but not away from it,” in anticipation of the hope promised in Jesus’s death and resurrection. In chapter 8, “Apocalypse and the Anthropocene: A Biblical Resource for a New Global Epoch,” David Neville proposes that the idea of apocalypse could prove to be a determinative biblical resource for making sense of the Anthropocene in theological terms and, moreover, one capable of engendering a certain kind of hope amid an otherwise bleak future. Neville maintains that the Christ-event’s “reconfiguration” of Jewish apocalypse constitutes a source of Christian hope “grounded in God’s creative capacity to bring to fruition what is unrealizable from natural potentialities or by human effort alone.” Neville further argues that apocalyptic hope in God’s creative capacity need not lead to passivity in the face of climate change, but ought rather to be generative of “moral initiatives” that impact the present. In a similar vein, Mark Brett examines three passages in the Hebrew canon—one each from the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings—in search of a basis for a practice of hope in a time of climate change. In this ninth chapter, “Redeeming Eden: Biblical Ethics in the Anthropocene,” Brett finds inspiration particularly in Job 28 for the idea of a humanity in “sacred attunement” with God, manifest in a non-oppressive presence in one’s own place in conjunction with respectful regard for other places. Brett also finds in the Joban prophet a basis for embracing Indigenous spiritualities, as a model for the kind of intercultural collaborations that will be essential to navigating the Anthropocene.

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Against the backdrop of the devastating bushfires that ravaged Australia in early 2020, Peter Walker, in “The Serpent in the Garden—Sin and the Anthropocene” (chapter 10), lays a challenge at the feet of churches and their leaders to name the extractive and abusive human relationship with creation for what it is, evil. Walker examines the official statements by leaders of Australia’s three largest denominations in relation to the devastating bushfires of 2020 and observes that none makes any reference to human culpability for the warming conditions that fueled the fires, notwithstanding their laudable pastoral concern for those affected by the devastation. Walker further observes that Pope Francis, in Querida Amazonia, while naming the harm to the Amazon and the failure to respect the right of its original inhabitants as “injustice” and “crime,” still falls short of using the language of sin, “the most inherently powerful language available to Christian discourse.” Identifying the Serpent in the garden of Eden in the Genesis creation story as the one who manufactures uncertainty, Walker calls upon churches and Christian leaders to go beyond their routine calls for prayer for the environment and to name the actions of latter-day “serpents” who sow doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change as acts of evil. In chapter 11, “Defiant God: The Fate of Christianity’s Holocene Ontology in the Anthropocene,” Jonathan Cole responds to Hamilton’s contention in Defiant Earth that the dawn of the Anthropocene renders Holocene ontologies obsolete. Cole attempts to show that Christianity’s Holocene ontology is potentially compatible with the defining features of Anthropocene ontology, as articulated by Hamilton, namely his observation that human will has become a force of nature. Cole maintains that human will is already assumed to be a force of nature in the book of Genesis, and on this basis Anthropocene Christians might interpret the Anthropocene as merely the latest manifestation of sinful human will. The volume concludes with Hamilton’s response to some of the aforementioned contributions and some final reflections on the attempts of theologians to respond to the implications of the Anthropocene, both for the future of theology and the future of humanity. Hamilton commends the theological contributions in these pages for attempting to come to grips with the “the tragic grandeur of humanity’s relentless destruction,” in contrast to what he sees as the all-too common tendency of secular intellectuals to indulge in escapist fantasies that deny or downplay the true enormity of the Anthropocene. However, while the theological contributions in this volume represent a welcome start, they indicate to him that theology still has a way to go before it properly comes to terms with the full ontological, theological, and ethical implications of the Anthropocene. The Christian contributors to the volume bring to bear a traditional understanding of theology, one which takes seriously the Bible’s claims about

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the divine origin, nature, and destiny of the planet, and above all the place of its preeminent animal, the human being, in that destiny—bearers of the Creator’s image and now with a godlike power to alter the geological future of the planet. Hamilton, by way of contrast, approaches the conversation in this volume from a perspective he dubs “secular theology”—a theology that rejects the mundane-transcendent dualism of Christianity, while still embracing the idea of a “sacralized Earth.” “For secular theology,” Hamilton explains, “revelation does not emanate from the transcendent, but from what we are forced to confront when we admit the scientific facts and forecasts.” Hamilton discerns a “creative tension” between his “secular theology” and what he terms the “theistic” or “transcendent theology” evident in the contributions of theologians and biblical scholars—Hamilton locates Sideris in the “secular theology” camp, with her treatment of theology as a type of religious narrative about the human story that functions much like secular narratives, albeit ones capable of illuminating the latter in interesting and surprising ways. What makes conversation between these two “theologies” possible and fecund, for Hamilton, is the fact that “there is more to the real than meets the eye,” something obscured, if not entirely lost, in many secular attempts to understand the Anthropocene. Given the implications of the Anthropocene are, in the first instance, a human problem, not merely a religious or theological problem, it is the hope of the editors and contributors that the kind of dialogue undertaken in this volume—that between traditional and nontraditional theological voices grappling with a common set of scientific facts—might be the first of many in humanity’s collective effort to respond and adapt effectively to the new geological epoch that will shape its destiny.

Chapter 1

The Anthropocene Epoch and Its Meaning Clive Hamilton

A RUPTURE IN EARTH HISTORY The Geological Time Scale divides the Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history into eons, eras, periods, epochs and ages, in descending order of significance. The great forces of nature have driven the Earth into new states. At times the transformations have been dramatic. Some new states have been hostile to existing life-forms; others have provided the conditions for new forms of life to emerge. In recent times, so profound has been the influence of humans on the Earth that geoscientists have proposed that the planet has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. The shift is defined by the fact that the “human imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active that it rivals some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system.”1 It is vital to stress that the idea of the Anthropocene was not invented as another term to describe the extent of human activity across the landscape, or the environment, or ecosystems. The term was coined (in the year 2000) to capture a very recent change in the impact of human activity on the Earth as a whole—an impact of a kind and on a scale sufficient to shift the geological evolution of the planet itself, that is, to change “the functioning of the Earth system.” The term “Earth system” is a concept first developed in the 1980s to describe the Earth as a single, integrated, dynamic whole.2 It is comprised of several “spheres”—the atmosphere, the hydrosphere (watery parts), the 1

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cryosphere (icy parts), the biosphere (life and its surrounds) and the lithosphere (the Earth’s crust)—all of which interact to make it a dynamic evolving totality. Understanding this is essential because it allows us to avoid the mistake of equating the Earth system with the distinct ideas of the environment, the landscape, or ecosystems.3 The advent of the Anthropocene epoch marks the end of the Holocene epoch, a 10,000-year interval of remarkable climatic stability and clemency. The Holocene itself was preceded by hundreds of thousands of years of climatic chaos. For almost all of Homo sapiens’ 200,000-plus years of existence, Earth’s climate has been a jagged history of ice ages, little ice ages and warming periods, with massive ice sheets at times covering most of the northern hemisphere then retreating for short periods of a few thousand years before returning to drive human populations to a precarious existence in the cold, or to epic migrations toward the equator. Although humans survived these wild swings, at times populations were decimated. But some 10,000 years ago the climate stabilized around an average temperature very close to the modern one prior to the influence of industrialization. The Holocene’s mild and unusually stable climate permitted human civilization to flourish. Settled agriculture, impossible in the climatic gyrations of previous times, emerged. Some 7,000 years ago in the “cradle of civilization”—the river valleys that drain into the Persian Gulf—the new conditions permitted not only settled communities but the development of the wheel, writing, mathematics, legal codes, centralized government and social strata. In the Holocene, humans were able to free themselves from the dictates of nature and to flourish on the Earth. Now the Earth system scientists are telling us that the Holocene’s halcyon millennia have come to an end. Humans have flourished so successfully in the sympathetic environment of the last 10,000 years that we have in very recent times shifted Earth’s geological arc. In particular, the effects of human activity on the climate system—global warming, melting ice masses, acidification of the oceans, and rising seas—are expected to last hundreds of thousands of years. In 2015, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose above 400 parts per million, up from 280 ppm at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution at the end of the eigheenth century. The last time it breached the 400 parts per million threshold was 23 million years ago. Once again, the forces of nature—now, in fact, a hybrid of natural forces under human influence—will bring not just a much warmer planet, but also perhaps wild swings in the climate. In 2019, the concentration reached 415 ppm and the prospect of limiting warming to 2ºC above preindustrial levels appears slim. By the end of the century, a world warmed by 4ºC is a distinct possibility; it would be a world on which many or even most forms of life would perish.

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BEFORE AND AFTER 1945 A range of indicators shows sharp and unambiguous human impact on the Earth System from the end of the Second World War. The postwar period stands out, writes Earth scientist Will Steffen, “as one of the most remarkable in all of human history for its rapidity and pervasiveness of change.”4 Other Earth scientists express it a little differently: “The last 60 years have without doubt seen the most profound transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind.”5 James Syvitski puts it succinctly: “By any unbiased and quantitative measure humans have affected the surface of the Earth at a magnitude that ice ages have had on our planet, but over a much shorter period of time.”6 The course of the Earth System has been changed irrevocably. A glance at charts on resource use and wastes dumped into the air, land, rivers, and seas shows immediately why the period has been dubbed “The Great Acceleration.” That is why expert opinion now dates the beginning of the new Anthropocene epoch from around 1945 to 1950 rather than the end of the eighteenth century as first proposed.7 So 1945–1950 marks the turning point in the sweep of Earth’s history at which the geological evolution of the planet switched from one driven by the blind forces of nature alone to a trajectory also influenced by a conscious, willing being, a new geological power.8 We are accustomed to the idea of humans as the agents that make history, and use the term “pre-history” for the period from the emergence of early humans to the invention of writing. Now we must concede what seemed impossible to contemplate—humans as agents changing the course of the deep history of the Earth. Although we are preoccupied with what the Anthropocene may mean for the future of humans, the present decades mark a transition in which Earth’s biogeological history itself enters a new phase, because the Earth’s history has become entangled with human history so that “the fate of one determines the fate of the other.”9 In a few short decades we have seen the entire history of the Earth—from its formation through to its eventual vaporization when the Sun finally explodes—split irrevocably into two halves—the first 4.5 billion years in which Earth history was determined by blind natural forces alone, and the remaining five billion years in which it will be influenced by a conscious power long after that power is extinct. All of this poses the most profound challenge to the modern way of thinking about the Earth and the place of humans on it. From the outset we must recognize the two essential claims of Earth System science, because failure to separate them has led to endless confusion.10 On the one hand, the science

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tells us that humans have become so powerful that we rival the great forces of nature. On the other, the forces of nature have been roused from their Holocene slumber, becoming more dangerous and more uncontrollable.11 Humans have never been more potent, have never exercised more influence over the Earth, yet we are now vulnerable to the power of nature in a way we have not known for at least 10,000 years when the last great ice sheets retreated. The climate system is becoming more “energetic,” bringing more storms, wildfires, droughts, and heatwaves. While technology allows us to divert rivers and harness the power of the atom, “Gaia has been enraged” and sends a hurricane or a drought before which our powers appear puny. There is no more decisive proof of this truth than the wildfires that ravaged Australia in the summer of 2019–2020. Human activity has altered the Earth system in a way that brought an unusually long and devastating drought to Eastern Australia together with an extreme heatwave. When the forest fires broke out, they became so vast, fast-moving, and ferocious that humans stood in awe before them or fled in terror. So, taken together, there is more power at work on Earth. A power struggle between humankind and the Earth is underway, but at a higher level than ever before. Only when we accept both facts—humans are more powerful, nature is more powerful—can we properly grasp the new situation humans confront. RETHINKING ANTHROPOCENTRISM Philosophically, modern environmentalism is characterized by a rejection of anthropocentrism, that is, the kind of human exceptionalism that assigns a special role to humans on the Earth and believes that human values can be applied to the natural world. Human exceptionalism is seen as the root cause of, and justification for, environmental exploitation and ecological damage. The arrival of the Anthropocene has reinforced the belief in the destructiveness of anthropocentrism and the urgent need to replace it with a philosophy that decenters and devalorizes human beings so that we become just one element, one form of agency, among the many that make up Earth. These attempts to cut humans down to size are well-meaning because their target is the sense of entitlement that humans, at least those among the dominant culture, have used over and over to defend environmentally destructive practices. Yet the advent of the Anthropocene in fact gives rise to the reverse of the conclusion that anthropocentrism must be discarded. The future of the entire planet, including many forms of life, is now contingent on the decisions made by humans. Every scientific study that corroborates human disturbance of the Earth System—including every new report on human-induced climate change—confirms the truth of our special place

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among life on the planet. Whatever the philosophical attractions of biocentrism, the fact that we have brought about a new geological epoch, and could have acted otherwise, instantiates humankind once and for all as the being at the center of the Earth. Unlike every other creature, we have the power to accelerate or decelerate the change in the functioning of the Earth system. It is far too late to attempt to replace a human-centered understanding with a biocentric one in the hope that the Earth will return to the Holocene. There is no going back to the Holocene—our disruption of Earth system processes is beyond the point of no return—and stepping back would absolve ourselves of the responsibility to act in a way that remediates some of the damage now set in train. As I wrote in Defiant Earth, “the question is not whether human beings stand at the center of the world, but what kind of human being stands at the center of the world, and what is the nature of that world.”12 Implicit in what I am saying, and vital to it, is the need to draw a sharp distinction between human-centeredness as a scientific fact and human-centeredness as a moral claim to dominion over the Earth, whether that moral claim be God-given or self-assigned. If human specialness is not so easy to justify in moral terms, the practical and ontological importance of human beings must be accepted if we are to respond to the rupture in human and Earth history that our disturbance of the Earth’s governing processes has brought about. Human beings are inescapably at the center of the future of Earth’s geological evolution. This power in the Earth System gives humankind greater responsibility than we have ever possessed. Once humans separated from other creatures, and we began deliberately to use our world-making powers to modify our environments, we assumed a kind of responsibility for nature. But now that responsibility has shifted to a higher level, where the fate of humans and the fate of the Earth-as-a-whole are intertwined. MODERNISM AND FREEDOM It has often been said that the European Enlightenment represented the transition of humanity from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. Philosophies of social progress (Hegelian, Marxian, liberal, and neoliberal) have seen history as freedom unfolding under its own momentum. Now it seems that the flourishing of human freedoms through economic expansion and rising living standards has been at the same time eroding the foundations on which they were built, that is, the exceptional climatic stability and clemency provided by the Holocene. Perhaps the realm of necessity was not abolished, but merely withdrew, and is now reasserting itself. In other words, if the essential motif of modernity

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has been relentless progress toward self-determination, a process posited by Enlightenment philosophies of the subject, faith in human agency becomes harder to defend in the Anthropocene, unless the modern agent was always bent on self-destruction. The shift out of the Holocene’s sympathetic environment into an epoch that promises dangerous instability can be expected to limit progressively the scope for human freedom. The reframing of modernity as the “risk society” is built on an implicit faith in our ability to use our reason to recognize how our environment is changing and respond accordingly, that is, a belief in our autonomous capacity to respond to the world as it is. Yet the most striking fact about the human response to climate change is the determination not to use our reason but instead to deploy a range of psychological protections against the warnings of the scientists and so to carry on as if nothing profound is happening. All humanisms, secular and otherwise, agree on a conception of self-determining agents whose individual and collective future lies in their hands rather than supernatural ones. Repudiating all notions of fate, humanism imagines (in Peter Gordon’s words) “a triumph of consciousness over its surroundings.”13 Yet now it seems that in its celebration of human powers something was missing from humanism—it was silent on the fate of the Earth itself. It is as if, after the Earth’s “disenchantment,” the social defeated the natural so that the Earth provided no more than the inert and passive stage on which the human drama would be played out. With the advent of the Anthropocene, we are beginning to see the limits to human spontaneity and self-making. In the 1929 Davos debate between the Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, Cassirer defended an enlightened humanism and Heidegger argued for a darker vision of humans thrown into a destiny inscribed in Being itself.14 The dispute revolved around the question of whether the human being is limited by its existence in a finite world or can break free of those constraints and create its own world; in other words, it was a debate that went to the heart of the claims of modernity. Cassirer lost the debate at Davos, but in the wider world his view prevailed. He spoke for the spirit of the times. Even the great iconoclast Nietzsche acceded to its core belief. “Inexorably, hesitantly, terrible as fate, the great task and question is approaching: how shall the earth as a whole be governed?” he wrote, as if there were no question over whether the Earth as a whole can be governed. One thing is now clear; striving for the perfectibility of humankind is a failed project. We now see that all utopias take as given the natural conditions of the Holocene and imagine that, whatever social structures may delimit utopia’s pathway, continuing material advance faces no insuperable natural barrier. Yet the ever more unsympathetic and irrepressible climate expected this century and beyond will consume a growing share of resources merely to

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defend the economic gains of the past. In the absence of self-delusion (admittedly a heroic condition to impose), a hard confrontation with the scientific warnings inevitably erodes the essentially optimistic mood of late modernity, and replaces it with a kind of existential dread. Against Cassirer’s sunny humanism, Heidegger’s grim vision seems to be vindicated with every new paper on climate science published in a scientific journal. MASTER AND VICTIM While environmental philosophers seek an alternative to anthropocentrism, one strand of “environmentalism” sees the Anthropocene not as final proof of the dangers of hubris and mastery, but as a sign of humankind’s destiny to control nature. These “ecomodernists” see a “humanized Earth” as inevitable and desirable. For them, the new geological epoch is not evidence of human shortsightedness or foolishness, but an opportunity for humans finally to come into their own. Leading advocate Erle Ellis has urged us to see the Anthropocene not as a crisis but as “the beginning of a new geological epoch ripe with human-directed opportunity” and speaks of “the good Anthropocene.”15 Humanity’s transition to a higher level of planetary significance is “an amazing opportunity” and “we will be proud of the planet we create in the Anthropocene.” The vision has been condensed into An Ecomodernist Manifesto in which signatories envisage a “great Anthropocene.”16 Not surprisingly, some of these environmentalists downplay the risks and severity of scientific warnings about global warming. They are also inclined to criticize the usual solutions to excessive carbon emissions (carbon pricing, renewable energy subsidies and so on) in favor of nuclear energy and geoengineering.17 The techno-optimism of these “luke-warmists” is oddly old-fashioned. If the modern and ecomodernist idea of the environment as a set of resources available for limitless exploitation is now exposed as a Holocene conception, then so is the ecological alternative to it, that is, the idea of a passive nature violated by humans. Both are being replaced by the conception of an inscrutable and unpredictable entity with a long history of capricious change and volatile “mood swings.” Earth System scientists have reached for rough metaphors to capture this new idea—images of “the wakened giant” and “the ornery beast” and of Gaia seeking “revenge.”18 This new conception of the Earth System is inconsistent with the understanding of a nature victimized and taken over by humans, the understanding captured in expressions of regret like “the Earth’s cry for rescue,” or expressions of triumph such as “a humanized Earth” and “it is our choice what

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happens here.”19 Whether the mood is one of lament or triumph, in all of these expressions nature is our victim or our servant. Yet Earth System science now tells us that, rather than “the death of Nature,” nature as the Earth System has in fact come alive or, perhaps a better metaphor, is waking from its slumber. It is true that wherever we look we see human influence, but at the same time we see stirring an “angry,” “ornery,” “vengeful” Earth that is more detached from us than it has been for 10,000 years. These views of the end of nature and a humanized Earth subject to our choices may have been consistent with a quiescent Holocene Earth, but Holocene thinking is being supplanted by Anthropocene thinking. This all follows from the fact that the Anthropocene is a recent rupture. Views about the death of nature and so on do not recognize that a rupture has occurred, but write as if there is a continuing process of colonization going back thousands of years, albeit one that has intensified in recent times. If on this new Earth notions of mastery have to be discarded as delusions, the benign ideas of good stewardship and a loving Mother Earth are redundant too. Nature is no longer a victim, passive and fragile, suffering in silence, “the sister who cries out to us,” in Pope Francis’s image. In the Anthropocene, it is no longer tenable to believe, in the words of Laudato Si’, that “our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us.”20 That was not what we saw when the 2019–2020 bushfires roared through the forests of eastern Australia. The beautiful mother had been supplanted by an avenging beast, a beast who will rampage across the face of the Earth with increasing frequency and ferocity. GOD IN THE ANTHROPOCENE In Defiant Earth, I tell a story about the destiny of humankind on Earth, one in which Earth and humans are still in the process of creation. When granted our freedom, our preeminent task was to achieve a reconciliation with the Earth. The task took on great urgency when we acquired an advanced understanding of the workings of the natural world and, for good or ill, the power to change its course. So, humankind was born into the world in an underdeveloped intellectual and moral state with a mission to achieve maturity by learning to live on and transform the Earth conscientiously. Maturity could only become possible once we had our freedom, once we had come of age, for whatever path we take must be freely chosen. Just as there is no good without evil, to choose to care for the Earth is possible only if we can equally choose to neglect it. I claim that our wanton neglect of the natural world has been a sublime expression of our freedom. Thus the question of how to live with the Earth could ultimately be resolved only after we

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had developed the power to destroy life on it. In such an environment alone could humanity succeed in attaining full moral development—or fail to do so, as the case may be. In modern times, theology has been concerned with the relationship between Man and God (if I can use “Man” in the nineteenth century way). Salvation, damnation, virtue, good, evil, hope, and all questions of fate were resolved between them. The Earth is merely the stage on which the two entities play out their drama. Now, in the Anthropocene, we find that the backdrop to the drama has come to life and is disrupting the old script. Powerful, uncontrollable, and now hostile to humans, the Earth System—let us call it the wakened beast Gaia—has no interest in our preoccupation with God and shakes her head at Man’s belief in his own power to regulate her. It might be argued that the Earth System is, in the end, under God’s command, and the advent of the Anthropocene is an expression of his wrath, the tribulation. To save Man and the rest of creation, he might intervene, turn back the geological clock and restore the stable and clement conditions of the Holocene, that is, the last 10,000-year era that permitted civilization (not to mention monotheism) to evolve. Is this what Christian hope means in the Anthropocene, relying on God to shift the Earth back a notch on the Geological Timescale? It sounds fantastic to put it that way, but what other way is there to put it? Now that Gaia has appeared on the scene, the third element of the Anthropocene trinity, are we caught up in a prodigious struggle between a vengeful Earth and a compassionate God? Has the created taken on the creator? Is the watch rebelling against the watchmaker? Does Christian hope now mean hoping that the watchmaker can reset the clock? If none of this seems plausible, we might begin to think that all theology is steeped in the conditions of the Holocene, because Abrahamic religions (less than 3,000 years old) are Holocene religions, and the god of the Bible is a Holocene god, a god at home only in a serene and friendly nature, a Garden of Eden. And the anthropos of those religions is not the enormously powerful, world-making “super-agent” of the Anthropocene. The anthropology of the Bible never imagined a Man with this kind of power; the power to alter the course of the Earth always rested with God. If our conception of Man must change in the new geological epoch, then we have to work out a new theological anthropology. So who are we? What kind of creature is capable of altering the course of the planet in a way that threatens our existence, not to mention the existence of innumerable other species in the sixth mass extinction event now underway, a creature that will not desist even though we are fully aware of what we are doing?

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I have speculated that perhaps, having allowed humankind free will and the opportunity to develop the technological capability to alter the course of the Earth, the gods withdrew. They left us to the task of proving we could use our power responsibly. If so, the arrival of the Anthropocene is proof that we flunked the divine test. So, what were the gods thinking when they left us with this test? Was it to allow us to become “the God species” if we succeeded in acquiring the power and exercising it in a way that could create a heaven on Earth? So that we would become God’s proxies on Earth. And what did they plan should we fail? To let us stew in our own juices? Or to mount a rescue operation, punishing those most responsible, or perhaps exercising their infinite forgiveness, regarding us as the errant teenager who had been given too much responsibility too soon? Have we entered an era of technological over-reach that, perhaps with God’s grace, will be righted by way of more technology—grand technologies that will permit us to take control of the Earth System and regulate it to suit our needs (and, if we are so inclined, the needs of other creatures too)? If so, we should invest our faith not in God but in Man, like the Promethean supporters of “geoengineering” who plan to spray sulphate particles into the upper atmosphere to regulate the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth.21 The ecomodernists tell us not to jettison our belief in human control of nature yet, for we are on the cusp of entering our most glorious time on Earth, “the good Anthropocene.”22 DE-NIHILISM In a lecture given in 1935, Martin Heidegger commented that so much darkness had come over the world and so much destruction of the Earth had occurred that “such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long become laughable.”23 After six or seven decades in which being optimistic about the future has been the foundational outlook of Western ideology, especially in the United States, so much darkness now clouds the future that optimism is best understood as an escape from the truth. Facing up to the truth has nothing to do with pessimism; despondency is a natural response to the scientific warnings. What the situation calls for is, above all, honesty and sobriety and the courage to stay with the truth as much as one can. Utopias are no longer possible; the politicians’ promises to build a new Jerusalem are now wishful thinking. In the postmodern age, the place in mass consciousness once filled by beliefs traceable to philosophy and theology is occupied by the nihilism of consumer capitalism, that is, the growth fetishism that gave us the Great

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Acceleration.24 It is no accident that the most nihilistic societies are those where climate science denialism has taken deepest root and dominated policy making. I refer to the Anglophone nations, where neoliberalism emerged and came to rule the political space, an ideology that substitutes the values and urges of the market for all others. If philosophy and theology have had nothing to say about the Anthropocene, it is perhaps only because it is too soon, and we should allow ourselves to be stranded in the pathos brought by the disappearance of the future. Before theorizing we need to allow the situation to mature so that the full reality can be absorbed. In other words, we need to allow the inner situation to develop; otherwise we will fall back on Holocene ideas now rendered redundant. That does not excuse those who will not open themselves to the new reality, which seems to be the case with Alain Badiou. A book titled The End, first published in French in 2017, records conversations between Badiou and philosopher Giovanbattista Tusa.25 In a tome devoted to the end-time, and the need to go beyond “the pathos of completion,” there is virtually no mention of the ecological crisis. How can that be? Even when asked about the relation of humans to the Earth, Badiou dismisses the notion of “Earth” as such, because it goes against his “fundamental” belief in “an infinite multiplicity of worlds.” “Earth,” he opines, is “an unfeasible totalization.”26 In words I would like to hear Badiou express to Pacific Islanders losing their homes beneath rising seas, he claims that there is no “devastation of the Earth” because “the truth is that man is typically the nomad of worlds.”27 What an abject failure of thinking this is—to dismiss the determining fact of the age, when the question of life on the planet, a mass extinction, looms before us, as an incorrect metaphor. The radicality of the new dispensation seems to have left Badiou behind and so he engages in a kind of philosophical denial buried in a narcissistic postmodern game. Let’s face it, this form of denial is common among many of the world’s intellectuals, many of whom carry on as if all of the reports and pronouncements of the climate scientists and Earth System scientists are meant for others, as if they live on a different planet to the rest of us. On the other hand, a handful of serious thinkers are facing up to the implications of the scientific warnings and are turning their minds to the prospects of human extinction on an Earth rendered uninhabitable by our disruption of the Earth System. In a different context, Nietzsche expressed the sentiment brutally some 150 years ago in a passage perhaps aimed at shattering the self-importance that always threatens when humans acquire power or believe they are God’s chosen creatures. In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented

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knowledge. . . . After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.28

Others today blithely echo Nietzsche’s indifference toward the clever animal that had to die. John Gray captured this mood: Homo rapiens [sic] is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone the Earth will recover. . . . The earth will forget mankind.29

Gray’s hostility toward humanism turns out to be a contempt for humans. In the same vein, James Lovelock’s conception of Gaia has no reverence for life and he views the mass elimination of humans with equanimity.30 As soon as one reflects on the actual process of wiping humans from the face of the planet, we see the essential cruelty of this kind of sentiment from Nietzsche, Gray, and Lovelock. Their statements are better read not literally but as an intellectual gambit aimed at turning exasperation into a more endurable apathy, or as a defense against grief. It’s a gambit often deployed on the internet, in reader comments beneath opinion articles and on social media. It’s understandable. In truth, if humans were wiped from Earth the planet would not live on, not in any meaningful sense. For is it not we who give the Earth meaning, marking it out as the unique planet in the cosmos? Is it true, as a poster in the Paris metro warned, that “nature doesn’t need humankind” or, as Claude Levi-Strauss once remarked, that the world began without man and will end without man? Of course, in a scientific sense it is a fact. Yet it is the human that defines the Earth. Modern humans appeared no more than 200,000 years ago and may disappear soon from the face of the Earth; yet our species’ direct influence will endure for hundreds of thousands of years at least and leave an indelible mark. And whatever our physical transformations of the planet, we cannot say, can we, that the glorious effusions of this exceptional creature—from the vast temples and the beautiful philosophies and mathematical theorems to the sublime works of art and music and the technological marvels—count for nothing? If in a million years’ time an extraterrestrial civilization writes the history of the Universe, the Earth will be known as the Planet of the Humans. HOPE AND DESPAIR Since the European Enlightenment, Western thought has been built on the promise of utopias of one kind or another.31 In the twenty-first century, the

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Anthropocene disruption will increasingly push all utopian visions and ideological disputes to the side, with the promise of endless growth and improving living standards already fading into the background. Today’s younger generations are said to be the first in centuries who can expect their living standards to be lower than that of their parents. The triumph of liberal capitalism, hailed prematurely in the early 1990s as the “end of history,” coincided precisely with the dawning realization that industrial progress has been transforming the physical environment so radically that it threatens the end of the world that liberal capitalism promised to create. Distracted by the triumphalism of the “end of history” there crept up on us the end of progress, so that now we are staring at a century and more of regress in the Anthropocene. If we are now led to question our faith in human advancement—the constant we have used to connect the past with the future—and the psychological stability it has provided, how do we accommodate the fact that Nature has turned against us? Due to our own actions, the Earth can no longer be relied upon to provide the conditions for the flourishing of life. Utopian sentiments and implicit faith in progress are the framework for the rosy view of how the future will unfold that is the bedrock of modern consciousness, and relinquishing them will take a long time. Our hopes for our lives and those of our children and grandchildren all depend on an expectation that the world will unfold in a certain way, as an enhanced version of the present. If the evidence is that the future will in fact be a diminished version of what we have now—that life will be harsher and more unpredictable as the climate and natural processes that govern the rhythms of daily life can no longer be relied upon—then our conception of the future and the hopes that are built on it are illusory. When we recognize that our dreams of the future are built on sand the natural human response is to despair. So in the Anthropocene, clinging to the hope that the world will become a better place looks like a means of forestalling the truth. Sooner or later we must respond and that means allowing ourselves to enter a phase of desolation and hopelessness, in short, to grieve. It is true that, in the words of one expert, healthy grieving requires a gradual “withdrawal of emotional investment in the hopes, dreams, and expectations of the future” on which our life has been constructed. Yet after facing up to the truth and detaching from the future few of us will just call a halt and remain trapped in a slough of despond or refuse to think beyond today. Humans do not behave that way, as a rule. We cannot build a new conception of the future until we allow the old one to die. Joanna Macy reminds us that we need to have the courage to allow ourselves to descend into hopelessness, resisting the temptation to rush too soon into a new future.32

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NOTES 1. Will Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Translations of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 842. 2. Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no.1 (2015). 3. Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). 4. Will Steffen, “The Anthropocene,” in The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change, ed. Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin, and Paul Warde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 487. 5. Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene,” 842. 6. James Syvitski, “Anthropocene: An Epoch of Our Making,” Global Change 78 (2012): 14. 7. Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “The New World of the Anthropocene,” Environmental Science & Technology 44, no.7 (2010). 8. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 4. 9. Zalasiewicz et al., “The New World of the Anthropocene,” 2231. 10. Clive Hamilton, “Getting the Anthropocene Wrong,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no.2 (2015). 11. This is the core argument of Defiant Earth. 12. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 43. 13. Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 21. 14. Ibid. 15. Earle Ellis, “The Planet of No Return: Human Resilience on an Artificial Earth,” The Breakthrough Institute, January 6, 2012, https:​//​thebreakthrough​.org​/ journal​/issue​-2​/the​-planet​-of​-no​-return; and Earle Ellis, “Neither Good nor Bad,” New York Times, 23 May, 2011, https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/roomfordebate​/2011​/05​/19​ /the​-age​-of​-anthropocene​-should​-we​-worry​/neither​-good​-nor​-bad. 16. John Asafu-Adjaye et al., An Ecomodernist Manifesto, ecomodernism.org, accessed August 24, 2020, http:​//​www​.ecomodernism​.org​/manifesto​-english. 17. David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering (Cambridge: Mass.: MIT Press, 2013). 18. Wallace Broeker, “Ice Cores: Cooling the Tropics,” Nature 376 (1995): 213; and James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (London: Penguin Books, 2007). 19. Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 14; and Mark Lynas, The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans (Washington D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2011 (cover). 20. Pope Francis, Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis: On Care for Our Common Home (Rome: Vatican Press, 2015), 9. 21. Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 22. Ellis, “The Planet of No Return.”

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23. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, revised and expanded translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 40–1. 24. Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish (London: Pluto Press, 2003). 25. Alain Badiou and Giovanbattista Tusa, The End: A Conversation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019). 26. Ibid., 40. 27. In a 2018 article that addresses directly the danger of climate change, Badiou displays the kind of old-fashioned Marxism that derides “messianic environmentalism” and holds out blithely for the arrival of communism which, by replacing capitalism, will solve all of our problems. Alain Badiou, “The Neolithic, Capitalism, and Communism,” trans. David Broder, Verso blog, July 30, 2018, https:​//​www​ .versobooks​.com​/blogs​/3948​-the​-neolithic​-capitalism​-and​-communism. 28. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (London: Penguin, 2015), 42. 29. John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta, 2002), 151. 30. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia. 31. Elements of this section are based on Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change (London: Earthscan, 2010). 32. Joanna Macy, “Working Through Environmental Despair,” in Ecopsychology, ed. Theodore Roszak, Mary Gomes, and Allen Kanner (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1995).

Chapter 2

A Rupture in the Earth  An Implicit Augustinian Theology of the Anthropocene Lisa H. Sideris

INTRODUCTION Narratives of the Anthropocene often fall into particular typologies, both religious and secular, or some mix of the two. To write about the history of the Earth and its inhabitants is always to construct a narrative, selecting a framework, highlighting a particular set of events, and choosing where to place emphasis. These sweeping narratives—sometimes called “geostories”—do not just narrate the past but also diagnose the present and frequently prognosticate about the future. In the case of narrating the Anthropocene, both the past and the future take on a temporal depth that is unknown to most modes of storytelling. Placing humans and human history within this narrative engages us in an exercise that is, in the broadest sense, theological, for these stories advance authoritative claims about what it means to be human and they often draw from existing mythopoetic and theological tropes, even while presenting a secular veneer. A common narrative trope of the Anthropocene involves claims about an aggregate human species having arrived at a new mode of conscious self-awareness through a dawning apprehension or awakening to the perils and promises of our present situation.1 With this emerging consciousness (made possible in part by earth-monitoring sciences) humans are assumed to have departed from the dark ages of “unconscious” impacts on the earth, 17

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and thereby arrived at newfound self-knowledge and intentional action. Going forward, human alteration of the planet will no longer be inadvertent and clumsy, but characterized by wise management. Science is “lifting the veil of past environmental blindness.”2 This Promethean framing of the Anthropocene often holds up scientists, and ever-improving scientific knowledge, as a salvific force, promoting scientists as “shepherds of humankind and of Earth and the advocacy of more science and green technologies to save the planet.”3 Other common narrations of the Anthropocene abound as well. There are post-nature narratives, often advanced by enthusiasts of ecomodernism (for example, those affiliated with the Breakthrough Institute), by pro-industry think tanks and others who promote a “good Anthropocene” vision, while rejecting romantic ideologies of pristine Nature. There are eco-catastrophists who see the Anthropocene as the (long-predicted) breaching of natural limits and planetary boundaries, predict collapse and call for degrowth. Eco-Marxist narratives focus on capitalist world systems and their consequences, and contradictions. Some of these narratives share features in common, of course, and we might identify additional narrative types that borrow from them.4 But it is the story of human consciousness awakening from an ignorant and unenlightened past that I especially want to focus on in what follows. Within these broad types of Anthropocene narratives, a rift commonly opens up between scholars who (1) embrace the Anthropocene with relish, as an interesting challenge and opportunity for human innovation and creativity (advocates of the so-called good Anthropocene and of the Promethean storyline); and (2) those who take a more jaundiced or perhaps simply realistic view, believing that, at best, humans are in for a very rough ride as we move into a future racked by climate change, mass extinctions, and other crises often associated with present Anthropocene conditions. As with any pitched battle, these two types are often overdrawn, but they differ in important ways. In terms of mapping a theology or theodicy onto these prophetic narratives, a number of thinkers have noted the resonances between Anthropocene storylines and “religious” modes of narrative, including Clive Hamilton in Defiant Earth and in his essays. To say that these stories are functioning religiously is not to dismiss or denigrate them (for example, as “mere” myths or stories we tell), but rather to broaden the definition of theology to include a set of seemingly secular questions and answers about what it means to be human. The Anthropocene goes right to the heart of such questions: What kind of creature are we? What kind of creature should we strive to be? In a draft essay on “Palaeo-ontology,” for example, Hamilton notes that the Anthropocene calls for a “new human.” “A new understanding of the natural world requires a new understanding of the creature that transformed it.” He goes on to depict humans as a kind of hybrid being: Humans are “a creature

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gifted with enormous creativity, ingenuity, and the ability to develop powerful technologies (a god), yet we often seem unable to control our own urges (a beast).”5 Pronouncements of this sort fall within the purview of theological anthropology. The Anthropocene has provoked us to think theologically on the broadest scale. The urgency of the environmental crisis demands that we do so very carefully. What I propose to do in this chapter is to sketch out how one might “do” this sort of theological anthropology and prophetic storytelling in a better way. By better, I mean in ways that avoid perpetuating the attitudes and values that have created our global environmental crisis. By better, I also mean modes of storytelling that explicitly acknowledge the theological nature of and antecedents to Anthropocene storytelling, rather than present a narrative as something new under the sun. By making these quasi-theological moves more explicit, we might get clearer on their problematic implications, and begin—I hope—to craft a different storyline. Two candidate narratives crop up frequently and in opposition to one another—the Irenaean and the Augustinian. My goal is to rehabilitate a quasi-Augustinian perspective. I begin by sketching out the Augustinian and Irenaean options (in secularized terms and as ideal types rather than historically accurate renderings of these Christian thinkers). I’ll then present some examples from contemporary discourse on the Anthropocene (including Anthropocenic prognostications coming from the field of astrobiology). I want to pick up on some particular strands of the Augustinian tradition— moral dispositions and behaviors that express confession or contrition, and apply them to the Anthropocene and Anthropocene ethics. My overall aim is to think about nature (or perhaps the Earth System) as functioning as the locus or source of transforming grace, akin to the way the divine functions in an Augustinian account. AUGUSTINIAN AND IRENAEAN OPTIONS An Augustinian account of the human condition foregrounds humans’ darker side—avarice, selfishness, self-aggrandizement, and related vices. Humanity and the world in God’s original creation were good. Adam and Eve, tempted by Satan, fell into sin owing to a culpable misuse of their freedom. For Augustine these conditions of sin are not primarily noetic—that is, they do not stem from insufficient knowledge conditions, but are rather volitional. Humans can know the good but chose evil. Evil for Augustine has no material, substantial reality, because it was not part of God’s creation; it is, rather, a privation or lack of the good. The blame for sin and evil lies with humans, not God. The remedy for sin, insofar as there is one, is spiritual and moral, not

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intellectual. To put this into the context of the Anthropocene, this means that the responses or answers to our predicament will not be found simply in new or better science, or in enhanced self-knowledge and enlightened, intentional action rooted in such knowledge. Rather, something like a moral transformation, perhaps a conversion, is required. In the face of the myriad evils humans have visited upon the planet, the evidence would seem to support the Augustinian account. As theologian Fred Simmons writes: “Although contemporary Augustinians often cite the first half of the twentieth century as regrettable verification of their anthropology, the human record thereafter also corroborates the Augustinian judgment that human beings are not so much unfortunate as culpable, not so much ignorant as in bondage to sin.”6 Augustinians typically rely upon God’s grace as mediated by communities of spiritual commitment and divine providence. This is not to say that Augustinians abjure knowledge and intellectual development, or that Irenaeans dismiss the value and importance of moral reform; but the diagnoses, and the prescriptions that attend the diagnoses, are discernibly different. Central to the Augustinian account is the idea that sin and vice involve wrongly ordered loves. Our loves—that is, the things and beings to which or whom we attach ourselves—must undergo dramatic reorientation before knowledge or ingenuity can have a transformative effect. It is through God’s grace that this reordering of loves becomes possible, for God is the proper and ultimate object of our love, and the transcendent telos toward whom humans must orient themselves. Grace is necessary for an active change of heart; humans cannot become better of their own accord. One problem that immediately emerges for those who value nature and defend an environmental agenda is that nature is not in itself a proper, ultimate object of love on this Augustinian account. On some readings of Augustine, his vision is problematically dualistic—nature is a provisional and finite good, subordinate to spiritual realities. However, Augustine affirmed the inherent goodness of all creation, praising its diversity and fecundity, even while he believed nature as a whole to have been wounded by humans’ catastrophic fall into sin. Before developing these ideas further in an “environmental” or Anthropocene vein, we need to summarize the Irenaean account as well. Here I am drawing in part of John Hick’s well-known if overdrawn typology.7 Irenaean theodicy, named after the second-century (Greek?) cleric Irenaeus, holds that humans were not created in a perfected state in paradise, but rather find themselves in the midst of an ongoing process of creation and development, from immature creatures to morally perfected beings. On this account, Adam and Eve, in their expulsion from the Garden were not so much evil as immature. Thus, perfection lies in the future rather than the past. The world is the way it is—characterized by suffering and evil—in order that it may

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serve a “soul-making” function for the human. Hick argued that “it is an ethically reasonable judgment . . . that human goodness slowly built up through personal histories of moral effort has a value in the eyes of the Creator which justifies even the long travail of the soul-making process.”8 This is a process of maturation “on the analogy of human children,” Hick writes, and specifically, we are akin to children “who are to grow into adulthood in an environment whose primary and overriding purpose is not immediate pleasure but the realizing of the most valuable potentialities of the human personality.”9 The gap between humans and God is an epistemic one. The creation of the human therefore occurs in two stages—the original state of immaturity and the movement of humans toward God, and toward greater knowledge and higher consciousness. Suffering is of value because it brings greater knowledge, as humans gradually move toward a more perfect state bearing a likeness to God, or as it is known in Eastern Orthodox traditions, a process of deification or “godmanhood.”10 Sin, on this account, is a youthful indiscretion to be rectified, not a catastrophe. Humans are “works in progress and the fall simply conveys the sense of the unfinished nature of creation—both cosmically and personally.”11 While concepts like love and faith are central to this account, powers of the human intellect, imagination, and innovation clearly come to the fore. As Hick writes, in a world without dangers and challenges, “we may assume that virtually no development of the human intellect and imagination would have taken place, and hence no development of the sciences, the arts, human civilization, or culture.”12 This Irenaean impulse is demonstrably strong among some commentators on the Anthropocene. The features of the human and the human condition that receive particular stress in this secular theology include the assumption of humans as progressing from ignorant childishness toward maturity and enhanced self-awareness and self-knowledge. I begin with a couple examples from the field of astrobiology and move toward more scholars and arguments that are more familiar within Anthropocene discourse. In Earth in Human Hands, astrobiologist David Grinspoon undertakes an examination of our new Anthropocene epoch from the standpoint of deep time and an extraplanetary perspective. How might we understand our present moment in light of contemporary knowledge about, and the search for, other planets and life in the universe? For example, do other planets go through similar evolutionary stages as Earth? How do they acquire and lose the ability to support life? Taking the long view of our species and the history of our planet, Grinspoon presents the Anthropocene as an event that beckons humans toward mature self-knowledge. Many species have the power to change and even re-create their environments—think of earthworms or beavers—but there has never before been a geological force that is conscious of its own

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impacts. Grinspoon understands the Anthropocene in aspirational terms: our present moment, with all of its dire warnings and potential for chaos, constitutes the ‘proto-Anthropocene.” The true or “mature Anthropocene” beckons from the horizon, something to strive toward (note the two-stage creation invoked here) and its achievement is largely an intellectual quest. We are not “horrible, selfish, destructive creatures” in Grinspoon’s diagnosis, “we are just confused.”13 Grinspoon’s account invokes a biblical idiom of lost innocence and knowledge acquired through adversity and struggle. This drama is scaled up to a planetary register: “We’ve tasted the fruit of science and technology,” he writes, “and now our best chance for survival lies in cultivating planetary knowledge and a planetary identity, in awakening to and embracing our part in this world.”14 What is needed is a more accurate self-perception and self-awareness, not moral reckoning or discipline. “This will not require altruism or idealism or self-sacrifice, only accurate self-perception and enlightened self-interest. Responsible global behavior is ultimately an act of self-preservation of, by, and for the global beast that modern technological humanity has become.”15 Grinspoon believes that the mature Anthropocene begins when we realize it has begun: What Grinspoon means is that until recently, human transformation of the planet occurred in an unconscious fashion; but now we have entered a stage of self-conscious global change which marks a whole new phenomenon on the planet. The human being is the “selfaware, world changing” species, the “one species that can change the world and come to see what we’re doing.”16 Note how this narrative dovetails with what Bonneuil identifies as the naturalizing narrative, where the unconscious impacts of the past give way to self-understanding and intentionality. As Grinspoon’s comments make clear, our way forward is also, at root, a matter of self-interest and survival, as it would be for any species. Appeals to sacrifice and idealism are misguided (in this respect, he echoes the “pragmatism” of the ecomoderns), and there is nothing inherently wrong with proceeding on the basis of self-interest. We need only enlarge self-interest to include the whole planet and biosphere. Central to this analysis for Grinspoon, and for others I will mention, is the idea of human creativity and innovation as having a salvific dimension—whenever and wherever in our long evolution humans have found themselves in a tight spot, we have saved ourselves by applying our smarts. Our loss of childlike innocence is actually a gain, on this view. It inaugurates a kind of fall upward. “Sin,” if we wish to call it that, is but a necessary, even predictable, prelude to progress and knowledge. The next stop is planetary wisdom: a society that “embraces space technology for wise stewardship” of this planet.17 A portion of Grinspoon’s Earth in Human Hands is devoted to describing the attraction he feels for a cadre of thinkers known as the Russian Cosmists whose early twentieth-century philosophy and

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secularized theology retains certain elements of Eastern Orthodoxy, including ideas about deification or theosis, or the notion of humans attaining “godmanhood.” Grinspoon embraces the Cosmists vision of a future in which human destiny and survival lie in spaceflight and the location of other worlds on which to perpetuate our species. The Russian father of rocketry, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, is singled out for praise for his vision of technological and spiritual progress merging into one, an ideal for the human species that is captured in Tsiolkovsky’s widely shared quote: “The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one does not stay in the cradle forever.” Human maturity—the advent of the mature Anthropocene—entails breaking the bonds of Earth and establishing ourselves, godlike, as cosmic creatures.18 Another example of this somewhat upbeat Irenaean assessment comes from astrobiologist Adam Frank, who often engages in public outreach through blogs, public radio segments, and most recently in his book Light of the Stars, written for a popular audience.19 Frank believes that any intelligent species on any planet in the universe will inevitably, given enough time, force its planet’s energy flows out of whack. Earth, he maintains, is currently transitioning through “generic” stages characteristic of any planet with life in the universe (never mind that Earth is the only such planet about which we have certain knowledge). When viewed from this objective, external, astrobiological standpoint, the Anthropocene appears as a “predictable planetary transition,”20 or as Frank puts it elsewhere, “Anthropocenes may be common.”21 What all this has to do with secular theodicies and theologies is that Frank, like Grinspoon, posits this process as one of maturation and awakening. He also regularly pronounces on the human species’ lack of culpability for climate change and other Anthropocenic developments. We are not villainous, but merely an expression of the planet.22 Climate change is akin to humanity’s “final exam”—symbolic of our having nearly completed the education process that will deliver us to full maturity. As Frank puts it, climate change signals “our coming of age as a true planetary species.”23 In an online piece provocatively titled “Climate Change is Not Our Fault” Frank invokes other Irenaean tropes. He ventures that “the story we usually tell ourselves about the world we built from fossil fuels—and the climate change it created—is that humans are evil and greedy. . . . But there is another way to tell that story.” Here it is: “We didn’t change the climate because we were greedy. We did it by mistake. We did it using the gifts evolution bequeathed to us. Human beings have been building civilizations out of whatever we could get our hands on for at least 8,000 years: stone, rope, canvas, iron. It’s just kind of how we roll.”24 Frank’s assessment here closely resembles what Clive Hamilton critiques as “deflationary” narratives of the Anthropocene, such as those of ecomodernists, that “deflate the significance of the new epoch and the threat it poses to humankind and the Earth.”25 On

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Frank’s account, humans have always transformed the planet just by doing what we have done to succeed as a species. As Hamilton describes (and critiques) this narrative, “If humans have been transforming the Earth for many thousands of years then it is in our nature to do so.”26 The Anthropocene is merely a natural occurrence, “rather than the result of certain forms of social organization and techno-industrial hubris. It does not reflect human failure, despite its dire consequences.”27 The Irenaean storyline sets us up for what Neyrat calls “firefighter” technologies like geoengineering: Instead of functioning in a preemptive manner firefighter technologies act only “after the fact.” Extrapolating from the past to the future, they assume that humans can always innovate solutions to the problems they encounter or create. The narrative thus paves the way for technologies designed to prevent societies “from transforming themselves.”28 By contrast, understanding the Anthropocene as a rupture tells a different story of our entrance into the no-analogue planetary state that marks the Anthropocene. As a remedy for our current crisis, Frank suggests that we start telling ourselves a different story, reminding ourselves (as if such reminders were necessary!) that “we human beings have done some pretty awesome things.”29 Developments like climate change are naturalized and depoliticized, in Frank’s account; glossed as predictable evolutionary processes and planetary scale phenomena. Large-scale environmental transformations of the planet generally are filed under positively valenced terms like innovation or opportunity: “Innovation is the key word here,” Frank insists. “Evolution has always been about innovation in the endless exploration of new niches.” Thus, he concludes: “Rather than seeing human beings as a nexus of greed and evil, we become part of evolution’s ongoing experimentation.”30 Similarly, with deflationary narratives, climate change is not a condition of human shortsightedness or overreach but rather “an opportunity for modern humans to prove their ingenuity . . . climate change is a trial to be met and won with technology.”31 It is our final exam. This deflationary account— which is also an Irenaean storyline—with its heavy investment in resilience, adaptability, and ingenuity, is a “misreading” of our situation. I will return to the idea of the Anthropocene as rupture shortly, and consider its possible significance for a secular quasi-Augustinian theology. Note that there is something very peculiar and paradoxical about the Irenaean storyline: Just as “we” humans achieve this state of conscious self-awareness and enlightenment, we cease to have agency in any usual sense; human agency becomes subsumed under processes—“expressions” deemed natural and inexorable to planets. Humans act as a conduit for larger cosmic patterns and purposes (Note: Eastern Orthodox antecedents to this view).32 Yet, this passive (and blameless) object dubbed “the human species”

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is somehow invested with the power to transform itself, as if by magic, into an active subject that can consciously decide to transform the Earth for the better. In The Unconstructable Earth Frederic Neyrat zeroes in on precisely this narrative move and its side-stepping of culpability. A certain storyline, he argues, is discernible in thinkers ranging from Carl Sagan to Paul Crutzen. It goes like this: 1) Previously (before our present moment of enlightenment) “humanity changed the environment in an unintentional way”; But (2) “from now on, thanks to the experts of the Anthropocene, humanity can deliberately change the environment.”33 Neyrat traces this idea to thinkers like Ulrich Beck whose work “postulates a division between a first modernity that is unconscious of its actions” and a “second, reflective [or reflexive] modernity, capable of taking into consideration the risks and ‘attachments’ . . . a modernity discovering the fragility of the biosphere.”34 This bifurcation of modernity, however, does not stand up to scrutiny, he argues, because the Anthropocene has in fact been “consciously installed”; it is the result of “decisions that could have been made different than those that were made.”35 For example, “capitalist entrepreneurs knew very well what they were doing when they began to spread contempt for any form of recycling,” just as they were well aware of the consequences of “planned obsolescence” of numerous consumer products. Instead of envisioning a temporal division between an innocent modernity and a newly reflexive and informed one, Neyrat suggests that the division be understood as political, a division of two “bodies.” One body intentionally or willfully created Anthropocene conditions through distinct economic, political and technological choices. A second has long stood in opposition to these choices, “a body of petitions and associations formed throughout the nineteenth century denouncing industrial pollution and the maladies resulting from it, a body continually sounding the alarm, having already understood to what extent progress intrinsically generated risks.”36 (In the twentieth century, figures like Rachel Carson and Bill McKibben come to mind.) As he aptly notes—though without noting similar trends in astrobiology—the first body extols the virtues of a kind of stewardship of Earth from above, as viewed from outer space, or from the perspective of an “off-planet” humanity. Indeed, astrobiologists urge us to regard earth as an “exoplanet,” a body in space to be studied objectively for its generic features, as if we humans had no particular history with or attachment to it. As if Earth were not a singular thing, but rather “simply a planet without any specific qualities, like some sort of New Continent waiting for the arrival of the geo-constructivist explorers as the new Christopher Columbus.”37 Against this view, Neyrat proposes a “terrestrial” (rather than cosmic) view of Earth in which nature retains the uniqueness and “alterity” that ecomodernists, astrobiologists, geoengineers, and others, want to deny it, in keeping with an “anaturalist” stance. I will return to Neyrat’s view of nature later.38

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There are also areas of overlap between these vaguely Irenaean accounts and Clive Hamilton’s discussion of theodicy in Defiant Earth. But one of the immediate differences is that whereas Grinspoon, Frank, and others, including ecomodernists, seem largely unaware and incurious about the ancient roots of their supposedly “new” (but in fact highly derivative) storyline, Hamilton explicitly acknowledges religion-resembling features of his narrative. In an essay that slightly predates Defiant Earth he calls out the ecomodernists for a theodicy, or anthropodicy, that he characterizes as Hegelian but that looks Irenaean in its sanguine teleology (Hick would likely concur).39 He charges that ecomoderns understand the Anthropocene to be “evidence neither of global capitalism’s essential fault nor of humankind’s shortsightedness and rapacity; instead, [the Anthropocene] arrives as an opportunity for humans finally to come into their own.”40 He continues: “Evil, here read as ecological damage, is construed as a contradiction essential to driving history forward towards the realization of the Absolute, here read as unstoppable progress towards universal prosperity.”41 In Defiant Earth Hamilton acknowledges some of the similarities between his own Irenaean storyline and that of the ecomodernists, while insisting as well on some crucial differences. He intentionally sounds a number of Irenaean notes in his “Enlightenment Fable”: “The path to realizing our destiny was . . . an intellectual and physical one, building on the epistemic distance opened up by the scientific worldview . . . humankind was born into the world in an underdeveloped intellectual and moral state with a mission to achieve maturity by learning to live on and transform the Earth conscientiously.” These developments could only occur when the “world had come of age.”42 He explicitly contrasts this narrative with a darker, Augustinian one. But he is also at pains to underscore the differences between his account and that of ecomoderns, chief among them that ecomoderns envision their mode of world-making to take place within a context of “freedom turbocharged by technology.”43 In their failure to recognize physical, planetary, or human limits, they align with a perspective that spans the political spectrum from leftist academic postnaturalists to silicon valley geo-capitalist entrepreneurs—a position Neyrat dubs the “geo-constructivists.”44 Seeing earth as something to be remade by humans, geo-constructivists privilege “technologies that consider nature as nonexistent” and reject the idea that humans need to live within “‘the framework of the natural environmental limits set by our planet.’”45 A strong theme of uncertainty surfaces in Hamilton’s account, and he draws upon it to further distinguish his view from that of ecomoderns: For Irenaeus, as for the ecomoderns, there is an abiding faith in the underlying goodness of the order: “it is always implicit that good will ultimately prevail.”46 But the fate of the planet, which will be determined not via personal salvation and

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striving, but through common responsibility for Earth, remains uncertain in Hamilton’s story. Taking this further, in his piece on “Palaeo-ontology,” he diagnoses our current “liminal state,” as a condition of “unknowing”: “It may take some decades of living in this liminal condition,” he predicts “before the picture becomes clearer and our consciousness remakes itself.”47 What humans have done to the planet is so unethical that existing ethical categories cannot accommodate it, Hamilton at times suggests. We are rapacious. Our rapacity requires a reckoning. Irenaeans like Grinspoon, by contrast, see our way forward as largely a matter of self-knowledge, self-interest and survival. Arguments about the impossibility of bypassing limits and uncertainty are linked to a key claim in Defiant Earth, the claim that while humans have grown more powerful, so has the planet. Indeed, Hamilton maintains, humanity’s power remains constrained by nature’s power. Specifically, it is the Earth System we can never dominate (we can, and do, dominate particular environments, landscapes, or animals, though not without negative consequences). Images of Earth that emerge in Defiant Earth depict it in often frightening ways—a beast, a volatile and inscrutable mother whose embrace crushes her offspring, but who is also detached and indifferent. There is something in this account that speaks to the new (and old?). The Earth System has “come alive.”48 For Hamilton, our ability to discern this new kind of earth is made possible by Earth System science itself, for what is being altered through climate change is not merely the landscape, the biosphere, the soils, “the environment,” as ecomoderns and other Anthropocene deflators might claim. Nor do all of these parts of the planet (landscape, etc.), when tallied up, equal the Earth System. Rather, with Earth System science, a “new object has come into view” as Hamilton repeatedly claims. It is this new object that exerts power over us; humans might dominate particular species or ecosystems; they might transform landscapes. But provocation of the Earth System is something novel, terrifying—and humbling.49 It is this image of the sublime totality of nature or the Earth System50 that I want to develop further, in the quest for a diagnosis that is more Augustinian than Irenaean. A SECULAR QUASI-AUGUSTINIAN THEOLOGY OF THE ANTHROPOCENE? An interesting but underdeveloped theme in Defiant Earth is its hint of nature as sublime. For all the fearful imagery that surrounds this newly wakened entity, Hamilton also addresses Earth at times as our “beautiful, shining planet.”51 Occasionally, though not often, the imagery of the beautiful and

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the terrifying merge to form an image of a “sublime Earth . . . beautiful when becalmed, terrifying when enraged,” intimate and alien, “Mother and Other.”52 Of course, nature has always been, by turns, beautiful and terrifying (and even terrifying in its beauty, and vice versa). But now nature’s terrifying sublimity is at least in part a human provocation. For this reason, as noted above, Hamilton occasionally turns to distinctly moral language of “reconciliation” with our own powers and, if possible, with Earth itself. There is also occasional language of “dependence.” Humans, for all our swagger, remain radically dependent on this strange new creature. The paradox is that “we are utterly dependent on that which we tame and domesticate.”53 Our domestication does not extend to the whole Earth System, Hamilton insists. This language of dependence and reconciliation introduces an ethical orientation that marks a contrast between Hamilton’s “theodicy” and, for example, that of astrobiologists for whom attaining planetary or species consciousness is the prelude to fulfilling our destiny to find, live on, or create other worlds (or remake this one as if it were simply some generic world).54 I want to pick up some of these proto-Augustinian dimensions of human culpability and nature’s power to limit and constrain human endeavors, and then develop them—by way of example—with reference to a particular theme in Augustinian theology: the moral significance of confession. To do this, I will have to advance some rather general claims about Augustine’s theology, constructing it as an ideal type, much as I have treated Augustinian and Irenaean theodicies. Both Augustinians and Irenaeans assume some sort of divine providence is at work, but on the Augustinian account the picture is more uncertain, and the transition to some future perfected world—a new creation—is rocky at best. Perfected creation lies beyond history. The future perfected world will not be “realized in continuity with our present reality” in the Augustinian account, but will come through a process of major ups and downs. Irenaeans on the other hand, see the transition to a perfected creation as emerging from conditions “built into the order of things.”55 A secular theology or theodicy (what I am trying to articulate here) cannot default to claims about a future world beyond history brought about by divine action. But thinking with the Anthropocene does orient humans toward the future in ways that seem unprecedented in human history and that even gesture toward a kind of immortality for us, albeit, a kind of negative immortality in which the human imprint on the planet lives on, destructively, beyond us.56 The Anthropocene inaugurates a new kind of “anticipatory geology,” in Hamilton’s phrase. For instance, behaviors of humans living today will have long lasting, irreversible impacts on the planet, throwing it out of the Holocene altogether, and into something unknown. Might we think about this

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living-on into the deep future as a kind of secular doctrine of immortality or the starting point for a secular salvation history, of sorts? How ought we to orient ourselves toward this future? How might we face this reality “without a supreme act of disavowal?”57 For those who abjure “good Anthropocene” visions, this living-on quality of the human into the deep future feels shocking and perhaps even profane. For ecomoderns and other Anthropocene boosters, however, these intimations of our species’ longevity and immortality function as a point of pride. Take for example ecopragmatist Stewart Brand’s keen interest in what he calls “the Long Now”—projects that include both de-extinction efforts and the curious creation of a “Long Now Clock.” This clock, which cost US$42 million to create, is designed to supersede the longevity of even the longest-lived organisms on earth, such as the bristlecone pine. It is one way of making our eternal mark.58 As Stefan Skrimshire argues, the Anthropocene produces a temptation to view human encounters with deep time as “expressions of transcendence of humanity’s finitude.” In this encounter with temporality and finitude the human urge is to overcome finitude by projecting the human into the distant future (thus so much fetishizing of the “Golden Spike.”59) The Anthropocene in its projection of the human into deep (future) time can seem triumphal rather than chastening, for it promises to the likes of Stewart Brand an eternal memory of our species. It might fulfill a “fantasy of the human ‘trace’ being somehow legible for millennia to come.”60 Brand’s “Long Now” project aims to inspire “confidence in the prolongation of the human species” as a step toward a form of “godmanhood” or deification.61 How might humanity’s extension into this future beyond [human] history be understood in an Augustinian rather than Irenaean vein—as a vehicle for confession and contrition rather than arrogance and self-importance? To develop a concept of confession in the anthropocene, it’s important to define confession as something other than an act of individualist, inward-looking activity, a feature of modern individualist and even narcissistic subjectivity. For anthropocene purposes, confession should be understood as a collective act, rather than an ethics of the self. We also need to understand confession along Augustinian lines, i.e., not simply as giving an account of the truth, but rather as an act of self-transformation. As Skrimshire writes, “to account ‘in truth’ . . . would require access to the future as well as to the past contexts of our actions.” This notion of confession would entail knowledge conditions that, on an Augustinian account, are not available to finite beings. Confession as an attempt to make the truth “always evades capture by some future absolution.”62 Augustinian confession is a mode of interpellation rather than dialectical fulfillment.

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Put differently, there is always an element of uncertainty, self-questioning and doubt that pervades Augustinian confession. Confession is done in the absence of any confidence about how the future may unfold, and as such, it performs the “opposite of the work of self-knowledge and of an economy of [certain] absolution.” It is more like “being haunted than absolved . . . the challenge is to live with one’s ghosts, and that would mean living with ourselves as future ghosts.”63 Augustinian confession is particularly relevant to an anthropocene theology not only because of its questioning and witnessing mode, but because (as his interpreters often note) Augustine’s ostensibly inward, personal quest is taken on behalf of humanity in a larger sense. Moreover, in Augustinian confession, the being toward whom confession is offered—God—has no need of it; the point is rather to produce a penitent heart in the confessor. This entity—the object of confession to whom one expresses contrition— resembles in some respects Hamilton’s sublime nature or Earth System.64 Nature, in other words, evokes, or ought to, our penitence without necessarily granting absolution, and certainly not within the human time span. We are haunted precisely because we cannot—either individually or collectively— achieve reconciliation in the normal temporal framework. No amount of ingenuity or resilience will reconcile us. What sort of ethics might emerge from this experience of being haunted by our pasts and of haunting our own (or Earth’s) futures? The search for a new “palaeo-ontology” seems to leave us with this same kind of question. It is this mood of contrition and state of liminality that the Irenaean commentators on the anthropocene dismiss. It is precisely the elegiac mood, the witnessing dwelling with loss and lamentation and mourning—of keeping faith with death, as Thom van Dooren and Debra Rose phrase it—that ecomoderns mock.65 “Don’t mourn” Steward Brand advises, “organize!” There is little reason to confess and to seek reconciliation if humans are merely childlike, ignorant or confused beings on the road to maturity; or cosmic teenagers newly behind the wheel, learning to pilot our planet (in Grinspoon’s analogy). The Stewart Brands of the world hold out the “bright promise of new technologies, of doing something” rather than the “genuine reflection needed to get somewhere better—not just different.”66 Brand’s philosophy—for example, his attitudes toward de-extinction technologies—offers the appearance of forward motion, of doing something positive, that merely conceals the need for reflection, reform, and reconciliation.

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EARTH AS SUBLIME OTHER? What I want to think about as the final step in this effort to develop a quasi-Augustinian diagnosis of the Anthropocene is whether nature itself—in its “sublime totality” as Hamilton calls it—is that very force, prompting in us the needed form of uncertain confession. A good model for this sublime nature can be found in the work of Protestant theologian James Gustafson’s ethics.67 Gustafson’s Calvinist-Augustinianism speaks to certain elements of Hamilton’s (not-so-Irenaean) fable in Defiant Earth (Calvin, after all, was himself an “Augustinian of sorts,” Gustafson argues.)68 Gustafson writes: “What is finally indisputable . . . is that human and other forms of life are dependent upon forces we do not create and cannot fully control, forces that bring us into being and sustain us . . . but forces that also limit and destroy us. “This dependence—a matter of fact, no matter how it is interpreted—evokes a sense of the sublime, or for some of us, a sense of the divine.”69). Our situation entails what Gustafson calls a moral stance. That is, theology is a construal of the world, in Gustafson’s account, and ethics a process of discernment. Gustafson develops a theocentric (i.e., theistic) account, but as his comments about the sublime suggest, he leaves the door open for a secular version of this moral stance. Gustafson dismisses various familiar typologies of human-nature interaction such as despotism, dominion, stewardship, and a kind of reverence for nature that utterly subordinates the human to it. He develops instead a notion of humans as participants in nature’s interdependent processes: “As intentional participants we have responsibility, and the destiny of the natural environment and our parts in it is heavily in our hands, but the ultimate destiny of all that exists is beyond human control.”70 Heavily in our hands, but beyond human control. An Earth “in human hands” as Grinspoon would say, yet still very much “defiant”—a natural entity that retains the alterity and ethical distance that Neyrat’s work calls us back to. That nature can be heavily in our hands but not within our control is central to Gustafson’s natural theology. Gustafson focuses on a few key concepts that he pulls from a cluster of Christian thinkers.71 Among these is the concept of piety as a disposition—a moral stance—that is prior to and illuminates knowledge. “The true wisdom of man is piety,” as Augustine writes. Piety is a settled disposition and attitude, an orientation on the world; awe and respect are fundamental to it. Piety is the disposition that connects the moral and natural order of life, Gustafson argues. Other key points he draws from Christian theology include (1) a sense of a powerful Other which in the Calvinist tradition might be identified as the sovereignty of God and (2) a construal of human life in relation to this Other “which requires that all of human activity

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be ordered properly in relation to what can be discerned” about the purposes of that Other. It is this powerful other that evokes piety. Gustafson’s conception of piety is hugely important here for its resonance with responses to Earth’s sublime totality. He does not mean Pietism or piousness, but “an attitude of reverence, awe, and respect which implies a sense of devotion and of duties and responsibilities.”72 He prefers the term piety to “faith,” which too often connotes “trust” and thus excludes the dimension of awe that is expressed in fear. Piety thus expresses both love and aversion toward the sovereign Other (God or nature). In Gustafson’s theology, the disposition of piety is not self-generated but a response to the powers of this Other—powers experienced by humans through the natural world. Piety stems from our radical dependence on this powerful Other, an entity that both limits and sustains human activities and which both bears down upon us, even destructively at times, while also allowing us to exist. Humans may shape these powers but always with mindfulness of the fact of our condition of being dependent upon and limited by this Other. Our relationship to and dependence on nature, then, leads to responsibility, much as Hamilton argues—the responsibility to protect and care for that which both bears down upon and sustains us. What is striking and (for some) controversial about Gustafson’s theology is his denial that the outcomes of the natural and moral ordering are “always just or beneficial to man,” or that God is even necessarily for man. These ideas lead back again to his sense of humans as participants in the natural and moral order—but not the sort of participants envisioned in the teleological cosmologies that position humans as directing future evolutionary processes (as I critique at length elsewhere).73 Rather to participate is to engage with limits and uncertainty: “the possibilities of human action are severely limited both by the kinds of person we have become as a result of natural capacities and by the particular circumstances within which choices are made.”74 As moral agents, human beings and the events in which we participate “are not providentially determined in the highly specific ways” claimed by some theologians, including some of the Reformed tradition. They are limited by a governance that confronts us.75 This governance “provides the conditions for the possibility to intervene in events but does not determine the particular interventions” or their outcomes. Far from excusing us from moral accountability, these limitations expand our accountability for the full range of interdependencies in which we find ourselves. The sciences are critically important in Gustafson’s account, so much so that he has alienated less scientifically-minded theologians. Gustafson argues forcefully that the restraints on our attempts to intervene in the natural order need to be understood as “delineated within a vision of the human species”

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as subject to this governing Other. And this process of discernment cannot be achieved without taking indicators from science seriously, for these are clues to how we participate appropriately. For Gustafson, evidence from the sciences confirms that there is an ordering upon which humans depend. But again, this ordering power in no way “ensures that all other things exist for the sake of human beings,” or that this ordering has humans “in mind.”76 THE ANTHROPOCENE AS SKY TROUBLE In rehearsing these features of Gustafson’s theology, we can recall the idea of the Anthropocene as a rupture, and the notion that Earth System science has brought into view a new, previously ungrasped or ungraspable object. In some of Hamilton’s earlier work, including Requiem for a Species, he alludes to a certain religious sensibility (derived in part from Mircea Eliade) that humans have long associated with, and expressed an affinity and awe, for the sky. For premodern humans, the sky was “powerfully symbolic,” as a place of the infinite, transcendent, and godly realm. A phenomenon like climate change would have signaled to such people a form of “sky trouble”—a sign that humans have dominated and disturbed the realm of the gods. For us moderns too, the sky “retains its divine symbolism . . . it is where the prayerful look.”77 (I would add, it is also, clearly, where the arrogant look). Climate change spells sky trouble, even for us moderns. The domain of the sky, as described by Hamilton here, seems to adumbrate some dimensions of the revelatory “new object” brought into view by Earth system science. Both demand a new (or perhaps old) religious sensibility. When we are confronted with sky trouble, the lesser divinities with which humans have surrounded themselves—what Rachel Carson would castigate as the gods of profit, convenience, and production—are “abandoned in favor of the supreme god.”78 The ecomoderns, and certain astrobiologists—despite their seeming investment in a planetary and cosmic view—still have their attention trained on these lesser deities that accompany human discoveries and developments: our creativity as expressed in endless growth and the expansion of technoscientific knowledge. “If our scientific understanding and technological control over the world allowed us to discard the [lesser] gods, will the reassertion of Nature’s power see us turn again to the sacred for protection?” Hamilton asks. Is our current hubristic moment akin to a “Homeric burst of pride before the fall?”79 This storyline suggests pride before the fall—pride that initiates a rupture—rather than (as with deflationary, Irenaean accounts) taking pride in the fall as inaugurating attainment of maturity. Coming to terms with this

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rupture should engage us in the sort of sustained reflection on (not merely fleeting, perfunctory engagement with) death and mourning—reflection that might bring a change in our priorities and the reordering of our attachments that is central to Augustinian confessional grappling with our finitude. For Augustine, as I have noted, the proper ordering of our loves and attachments flows from orienting oneself to the ultimate Good, namely God. In a secular Augustinian theodicy—augmented by Gustafson’s account of participation—this process of reordering means orienting ourselves to the sovereign and sublime Other of the natural world. But importantly, as Gustafson asserts repeatedly, this ordering can never be achieved harmoniously; conflicts of value are never eliminated. This follows from the fact that we are not omniscient—humans can never have complete knowledge and thus cannot avoid conflicts in the decisions we make.80 Morality is a process of discernment that cannot banish deep ambiguities. These ambiguities generate fear and frustration as well as love. The settled orientation on the world that reflects this range of responses—fear, anger, frustration, love, awe—is piety. Gustafson does not indicate how we are to make amends to a natural world we have provoked into wild fury—a “defiant earth.” But an account of confession as an act of moral transformation, directed at an entity that does not need to hear our confession and that may not absolve us, seems to fit. Of course, it seems wrong to say that penitence, moral reckoning, and redemption are required equally of all humans (recall Neyrat’s account, mentioned above, of modernity bifurcated not along lines of innocent and reflexive modernity, but along the lines of “two bodies”). As Hamilton writes, “For most people in poor countries there will be no redeeming features of climate change, just hard lives being made harder.”81 But for those living in affluent nations, these disruptions “could be the stimulus to a new orientation to life with more attention to higher goals”—the sort of reordering of priorities that comes from a sustained reflection on loss and mourning.82 In this way, Hamilton suggests that new values of “moderation, humility, and respect, even reverence, for the natural world” might emerge on a hot planet. A new narrative to accompany this shift “will reflect a world no longer subject to human will but governed by forces largely beyond our control,” a story closer to that of premoderns who saw themselves—perhaps rightly, after all—as threatened and sustained by an all-powerful supreme being. Perhaps some such supreme being has come (back?) into view with an Earth System understanding of the Anthropocene.83 This supreme Earth Other retains its stubborn alterity and singularity, its recalcitrance and unconstructable quality, in the face of the attempted erasure of nature and the human/nature distinction. It retains its otherness in the face of the anaturalism eagerly sought by neoliberal ecomodernist think tanks, leftist purveyors of postnatural “entanglement” and hyperconnection, pragmatic

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post-environmentalists, transhumanists, Teilhardian enthusiasts of a “planetized humanity,” exo-planetarians, “sky-fixers,” euphoric proclaimers of nature’s death, and all others whom Neyrat labels, collectively, as geoconstructivists looking with anticipation toward an Earth 2.0.84 As Neyrat writes, one of the beneficial effects of the Anthropocene concept—perhaps the only benefit—could be that “in contrast to an abstract ‘us’ made up of astronaut designers of a spaceship Earth,” the concept “forces us to reconsider the status of the human being.”85 This reconsideration will require of us a moral reckoning with a form of nature that is, in some respects, both old and new. Of course, this quasi-Augustinian, semi-secular narrative of the Anthropocene will not be at all comforting to some—least of all to the hypermodern geo-constructivist dreamers. But that is precisely why it might be appropriate as a theology or theodicy for our times. NOTES 1. Christophe Bonneuil, “The Geological Turn: Narratives of the Anthropocene,” in The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, ed. By Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and Francois Gemenne ed (New York: Routledge, 2015). 2. Bonneuil, “The Geological Turn,” 23. 3. Bonneuil, “The Geological Turn,” 19. 4. For example, as I have argued at length elsewhere, religiously inflected grand narratives of the Earth or the cosmos at large, such as the Epic of Evolution or the Universe Story, participate in some of the Anthropocene narratives identified by Bonneuil (Lisa H. Sideris, Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World, Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). 5. Hamilton, “Palaeo-ontology,” Draft Paper. 6. Fred Simmons, “Irenaean and Augustinian Anthropocenes,” Draft Paper, Princeton Center of Theological Inquiry, 4. 7. As well as that of ecotheologian Christopher Southgate, or Colin Gunton in The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). Some critics have charged that Hick presents a caricature of Irenaeus and that there is much more common ground between Augustine and Irenaeus than his portrait suggests. However that may be, I am more interested in how these two ideal types have been taken up than in defending Hicks’s possible distortion of these ideas. 8. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 256 9. Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 253. 10. George Young, The Russian Cosmist: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Federov and His Followers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 11. Mark S. M. Scott, “Suffering and Soulmaking: Rethinking John Hick’s Theodicy,” Journal of Religion 90, no. 3, (2010): 317

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12. John Hick, “An Irenaean Theodicy,” in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, ed. Stephen T. Davis (1981; repr., Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2001), 38–46 13. David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), 424 14. Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands, 412. 15. David Grinspoon, “Welcome to Terra Sapiens,” Aeon, n.d. Accessed Jan 15, 2021, https:​//​aeon​.co​/essays​/enter​-the​-sapiezoic​-a​-new​-aeon​-of​-self​-aware​-global​ -change. 16. Grinspoon, “Welcome to Terra Sapiens.” 17. Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands, 235. 18. Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands, 236 19. Adam Frank, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018). 20. Adam Frank, Axel Kleidon, and Marina Alberti, “Earth as a Hybrid Planet: The Anthropocene in an Evolutionary Astrobiological Context. Anthropocene, Volume 19 (September 2017, 13–21), 13. 21. Adam Frank, “How do Aliens Solve Climate Change?” The Atlantic, May 30 2018. 22. Adam Frank, “Climate Change and the Astrobiology of the Anthropocene,” 13.7: Cosmos and Culture, NPR.org. Oct 1, 2016. https:​//​www​.npr​.org​/sections​/13​.7​ /2016​/10​/01​/495437158​/climate​-change​-and​-the​-astrobiology​-of​-the​-anthropocene. 23. Frank, “Climate and the Astrobiology of the Anthropocene.” 24. Adam Frank, “Climate Change Is Not Our Fault,” 13.7: Cosmos and Culture, NPR.org, Oct. 6, 2015. https:​//​www​.npr​.org​/sections​/13​.7​/2015​/10​/06​/446109168​/ climate​-change​-is​-not​-our​-fault. 25. Clive Hamilton, “The Anthropocene as Rupture,” The Anthropocene Review, Vol. 3(2) 93–106 (2016), 95. 26. Hamilton, “Anthropocene as Rupture,” 96. 27. Hamilton, “Anthropocene as Rupture,” 96. 28. Frédéric Neyrat, Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 33. 29. Grinspoon similarly laments that we get “down on ourselves” as if we were selfish and destructive creatures. “Yet we are not. We are just confused” (Earth in Human Hands, 424). 30. Adam Frank, “Can Cities Change Earth’s Evolution?” 13.7: Cosmos and Culture, NPR.org, March 3, 2015. https:​//​www​.npr​.org​/sections​/13​.7​/2015​/03​/03​ /390349330​/can​-cities​-change​-earths​-evolution. 31. Hamilton, “Anthropocene as Rupture,” 99. 32. We see something similar, I would venture, in the Universe Story narratives I write about in Consecrating Science where humans attain species self-awareness, grasping our role as heart and mind of the universe; and consciousness of our new role as guiding future evolution. At the same time, we are channeling the universe’s own goals. The universe expresses itself through the human. The universe “thinks itself through us.”

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33. Neyrat, Unconstructable Earth, 60. 34. Neyrat, Unconstructable Earth, 60. 35. A similar account, and extended critique, of the Anthropocene storyline of a supposedly bifurcated modernity into an ignorant or innocent phase and a recent, reflexive modernity is offered by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz in The Shock of the Anthropocene (translated by David Fernbach; New York: Verso, 2016). 36. Neyrat, Unconstructable Earth, 61 37. Neyrat, Unconstructable Earth, 65. 38. Neyrat’s category of geo-constructivists is complex. It includes both those who view the earth as an external object or exoplanet—something to be manipulated and “fixed” like a spaceship—as well as postnaturalists and ecomodernists who want to collapse or erase the category of nature altogether. Both, he argues, arrive at the same point, of regarding earth as something to be remade by humans. In contrast to both, Neyrat calls for an “ecology of separation” that preserves some of nature’s otherness without defaulting to organicist or wilderness ideas of nature and their racist and sexist legacies. Neyrat writes: “the rejection of terrestrial nature is not a simple description or an ideological veil clothing a discourse; it is performative: The politics of geo-constructivism are founded on the anaturalist axiom that allows geoengineers, as well as any others who share this subjective position—whether they are CEOs investing millions of dollars into research dedicated to a climate shield, journalists, or essayists, such as Mark Lynas who tells us that the human species is ‘divinely’ capable of geoengineering—of exempting itself from the possible consequences and futures of its decisions . . . this psychological state of exception has been based on a representation of an abstract and off-planet humanity” (65). 39. I don’t have space to discuss it here but one of the more slender reeds upon which Clive hangs the distinction between his own account and that of the ecomoderns is that where they embrace teleology, his account conforms to teleonomy. It’s questionable to me whether this distinction can bear the weight of Clive’s claims for the divergence of his account from the ecomoderns.’ It also is worth noting that Clive expresses some sympathy for Hegelian philosophies of history as a general form, even while he rejects the ecomodernist version. 40. Clive Hamilton, “The Theodicy of the ‘Good Anthropocene,’” Environmental Humanities 7, no.1 (2016): 233. 41. Hamilton, “The Theodicy,” 235. 42. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 124. 43. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 134. 44. Eco-constructivism—which for Neyrat includes ecomodernism as well as Latourian assemblages and new materialist pan-agentialism, among other more “leftist” academic positions—is exploited by geo-constructivist capitalists and engineers who appropriate “eco-constructivist thought in order to justify [their] project of reformatting the Earth”(183). 45. Neyrat, Unconstructable Earth, 4. 46. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 127. 47. Hamilton, draft paper.

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48. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 47. 49. In a recent work, Paul Wapner has noticed some similarities between Hamilton’s account of a defiant Earth and his own claim that wildness has returned to nature at the global level in the form climate change induced upheavals. Paul Wapner, Is Wildness Over? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020). 50. Hamilton might dispute my conflation of “Earth System” and nature, though he sometimes elides them as well (e.g. p. 48 of Defiant Earth). 51. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 161. 52. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 49 53. Hamilton, draft paper, 2. 54. The fact that Hamilton has critiqued star-faring fantasies like Steve Fuller’s “Star Ark” project on the grounds that there is “no escaping the blue planet” puts him in a different camp from the planet-hopping Irenaean astrobiologists, or ecomodernists seeking to decouple from earth. Clive Hamilton, “Dreams of a Fallen Civilisation: Why There is No Escaping the Blue Planet,” ABC Religion & Ethics, August 21, 2015 https:​//​www​.abc​.net​.au​/religion​/dreams​-of​-a​-fallen​-civilisation​-why​-there​-is​-no​ -escaping​-the​-blu​/10097958. 55. Simmons, “Irenaean and Augustinian Theodicies” draft paper. 56. This idea might bear some resemblance to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s notion of a “negative universal” history, a collectivity that emerges from a shared sense of collapse. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 222. 57. Stefan Skrimshire, “Confessing Anthropocene,” Environmental Humanities 10, no.1 (2018): 314. 58. Note similarities of Brand’s endeavor with Fuller’s Star Ark, or Sagan’s time capsule idea, where the quest for becoming a multi-planet species is a quest for immortality of the species. 59. See Hamilton’s critique of this preoccupation in “Getting the Anthropocene So Wrong.” 60. Skrimshire, “Confessing,” 320. 61. Stefan Skrimshire, “Deep Time and Secular Time: A Critique of the Environmental ‘Long View,’” Theory, Culture & Society 36, no.1 (2019): 69. 62. Skrimshire, “Confessing,” 320. 63. Skrimshire, “Confessing,” 322. Here Skrimshire develops Augustinian confession along Derridean lines, e.g., “hauntology.” 64. Note, however, Hamilton’s claim that it is humans who supply meaning to the cosmos. This claim does not, in my opinion, fit convincingly into the overall thrust of Defiant Earth. 65. Thom van Dooren and Debra Bird Rose, “Keeping Faith with the Dead: Mourning and De-extinction,” Australian Zoologist, 38, no.3 (2017): 375­–77. 66. Van Dooren and Rose, “Keeping Faith,” 376. 67. “The general themes with which I identify in the Reformed tradition are strongly present and richly developed by the great bishop of Hippo,’ i.e., Augustine.” James M. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective Vol 1. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 168.

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68. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective Vol. 1, 157. 69. James M. Gustafson, A Sense of the Divine: The Natural Environment from a Theocentric Perspective (Pilgrim Press, 1996), 44. 70. Gustafson, Sense of the Divine, 149. 71. Also important for his account, including his definition of piety, are Jonathan Edwards and Schleiermacher. 72. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Volume 1, 164. 73. Sideris, Consecrating Science. 74. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Volume 1, 187. 75. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Volume 1, 187. 76. Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Volume 1, 263. 77. Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change (New York: Routledge, 2010) 220. 78. Eliade quoted in Hamilton, Requiem, 221. 79. Hamilton, Requiem, 221–22. 80. See Thomas Carlson, The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and the Creation of the Human (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) on the way in which our inability to comprehend ourselves, what it means to be human, and the mystery of being created in imago dei, functions as the source of our creativity—in contrast to the claim that humans are exceptional world makers, that our creative essence lies in intentionally remaking worlds. 81. Hamilton, Requiem, 217. 82. Hamilton, Requiem, 217. Hamilton here cites declines in mental illness during the Blitz of World War II. Rebecca Solnit points to similar findings about disasters, what she calls “falling together” rather than falling apart. 83. A question that remains is whether this account of the natural order and of human responsibility and respect for it, is ultimately compatible with the defense of anthropocentrism at the heart of Defiant Earth. I find Hamilton’s embrace of anthropocentrism, however qualified by nature’s power, the hardest part of his argument to accept (it is precisely what Gustafson, and in his own way Neyrat, reject). This defense is by no means peripheral to Hamilton’s account. 84. Geoconstructivism exists at the intersection of several discourses: “engineers and architects who would like to transform the Earth into a pilotable machine; biologists who would rather spend their time resurrecting already extinct species rather than protecting those that are still alive; political strategists offering solutions for global governance; the advent of new markets by businessmen who view climate change as a new industry for economic speculation; geographers enthralled by the power of humanity within the age of the Anthropocene; sociologists and anthropologists proclaiming that there is no common world and so it is up to us to build one; essayists promoting nuclear energy for all; prophets declaring the death of nature or the birth of the transhuman; philosophers inviting us to accelerate our technological control over existing society; paradoxical ecologists simultaneously lauding the merits of fracking and dreaming of the disappearance of any form of ecology containing a political dimension” (Neyrat, The Unconstructable Earth, 2–3). 85. Neyrat, Unconstructable Earth, 65.

Chapter 3

Is It Time for a Theological Step-Change? Clive Pearson

ENTERING A RUPTURED SPACE The dawning of the Anthropocene is a great worry for theology. This newly branded epoch attracts to itself the rhetoric of a step-change, a paradigm shift, a rupture, a “shocking confrontation of timeframes.”1 Is it indeed time to think of “geo-spiritual forces” for a new axial age?2 With a degree of irony Elizabeth Kolbert and Diane Ackerman proclaim a word of “welcome to the Anthropocene.”3 This neologism, which made its way into the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language in 2014, represents the transition into a new age for which there is no precedent or analogue. If the Holocene has been “terminated,” Bruno Latour warns the Earth no longer “remain[s] stable and in the background, indifferent to our histories.”4 Craig Childs advises that an apocalyptic planet is unveiling before us which Earth System scientists predict will be full of “surprise situations.”5 From the perspective of a public theology there is no escape. The globalized discussions in this field of enquiry take it for granted that theology must observe what David Ford has described as the discipline’s “ecology of responsibility.”6 It must engage with the public domain as much as it does with the academy and the church. It must distance its praxis (its performance) from the risk Linell Cady discerned of theology being no more than individualistic, parochial and inaccessible to those beyond the academy.7 On account of its being “inherently incarnational” a public theology must touch “lived life.”8 41

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Those who tread lightly on what constitutes a public theology might do well to heed Harold Breitenberg’s salutary advice: a public theology is more than a theology being public or contextual in some sort of vague way. It is a “theologically informed public discourse about public issues, addressed to the church, the synagogue, mosque, temple, or other religious body, as well as the larger public or publics.”9 Its vocation is to discern the “signs of the times” and recognize kairos moments.10 It is a recognized convention that a public theology must of necessity be interdisciplinary and dialogical: its right to speak in a democratic public forum depends upon a capacity to put a case “in ways that can be evaluated and judged by publicly available warrants and criteria.”11 In the service of such ends a public theology is bilingual, drawing upon the traditions, images, and symbols of faith, in order to engage with the pressing issues that confront humanity per se or specific societies.12 For some time, themes to do with the care of creation and climate change and the common good have fallen under that umbrella.13 Tim Harvie has gone further and extended the very idea of the publics with which theology engage and how that must now include a new public (“all connected flesh”) that lies beyond social constructions.14 The Anthropocene represents an extension of that engagement. That kind of judgment sounds innocent enough. It seems to suggest the next step in a linear progression. What is required is a variation on business as usual and a Christian theology that can respond to this shifting understanding of the Earth System in much the same way that it has responded to scientific and hermeneutical changes in the past. But is that so? Is this “superwicked” problem of an altogether different order?15 It is clearly not a “tame” problem.16 Is a planetary emergency management through new forms of Earth System stewardship actually conceivable?17 Is such hubristic? Is it time then for a step-change in the practice of theology as it shifts away from its foundations in the Holocene and contemplates plausibility and relevance in an altogether different epoch? Is it sufficiently credible to invoke the past greats of the discipline who all lived and responded to the quest for a faith seeking understanding before this new age was named and its challenges presented? Will this unprecedented future lying before the planet require a radical revisiting of doctrines in ways which as yet are not imagined? It is not immediately self-evident how and why theology should be part of this transdisciplinary enquiry. The disciplinary players were initially geology, before being extended to those discrete empirical sciences that make up the Earth System science. Whether the Anthropocene should then be extended to embrace the social sciences, let alone art, poetry, music, novels, film, media long reads, history, spirituality, the popular philosophy of Timothy Morton, and protest movements like Extinction Rebellion is a moot point.18 The

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geopolitical ramifications are made plain in statements such as the Planet Politics Manifesto.19 Clive Hamilton argues the case for the Anthropocene to be defined on the basis of the Earth System science.20 The counter-case is put by Frank Oldfield: the Anthropocene has already become so widespread within the humanities and social sciences. It is unrealistic to imagine that this is not the case—and besides this diffusion has recognized that however it is defined, human activities are an integral component of this new epoch.21 The strength of Hamilton’s argument lies in its recourse to objective scientific evidence susceptible to peer review and validification. The position Hamilton adopts in a sequence of publications leading to Defiant Earth should be seen alongside the report made by Will Steffen et al. on the trajectories of the Earth System toward the possibility/likelihood of a Hothouse Earth. The Anthropocene represents more than “the age of humans”: it bears witness to “the beginning of a very rapid human-driven trajectory of the Earth System away from the glacial-interglacial cycle toward new, hotter, climatic conditions and a profoundly different atmosphere.”22 The burden of this report is designed to examine a set of four questions flowing from an initial query as to whether there is a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent the stabilization of the Earth “in a range of intermediate temperature rises.” Those questions probe (i): whether there is a planetary threshold in the trajectory of the Earth System that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization in a range of intermediate pressure rises? (ii) where might such a threshold be? (iii) if that threshold is crossed, what are the implications, especially for the well-being of human societies? and, (iv): what human actions could create a pathway that would steer the Earth away from the potential threshold and toward the maintenance of interglacial-like conditions?23 The report carries a sense of urgency: “We argue that the social and technological trends and decisions occurring over the next decade or two could significantly influence the trajectory of the Earth system for tens to hundreds of thousands of years and potentially lead to conditions that resemble planetary states that were last seen several millions of years ago, conditions that would be inhospitable to current human societies and to many other contemporary species.”24 Steffen et al. are reporting out of a deep-seated awareness of how the human impact on “the essential planetary processes” are now so “profound”; the Earth has “been driven . . . out of the Holocene epoch in which agriculture, sedentary communities, and eventually, socially and technologically complex human societies developed.”25 The distinction is made between a future Hothouse Earth and a Stabilized Earth. The degree of change to the Earth System is such that a Stabilized Earth is itself “not an intrinsic state of the Earth System.”26 It is likely that even a Stabilized Earth will be “warmer

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than any other time over the last 800,000 years at least (that is warmer than at any other time in which fully modern humans have existed.”27 Steffen et al. are particularly mindful of the risk of a number of tipping points that might provoke a “domino-like” cascade effect.28 They are enquiring as to what planetary stewardship strategies are required to build resilience and maintain the Earth System in a manageable Stabilized Earth state.29 They argue that humanity will need to “commit to a pathway of ongoing management of its relationship with the rest of the Earth System.”30 They warn that a Stabilized Earth is “not likely to exist in the Earth System’s stability landscape without human stewardship to create and maintain it.”31 The seriousness of the situation is such that it poses “a fundamental challenge in the role of humans on the planet”; what is rather disturbing is that “most changes [that are necessary for such resilience] are largely irreversible on timeframes that matter to contemporary societies.”32 They concede that their scenario of a Hothouse Earth might seem “extreme.”33 It is certainly beginning to feel even more scary than Hamilton’s defiant Earth. Steffen et al. are deeply serious, prophetic figures communicating the work of Earth System scientists. They are not seeking to indulge in neologisms as euphemisms. In the midst of empirical statistics, graphs, and schematic illustrations they recognize the need to step over into the specialist expertise of others. They make the case for now being a time which requires a “deep integration of knowledge from biogeophysical Earth System science with that from the social sciences and humanities.” They do so mindful of the ethical conundrum surrounding the extent to which different societies have varying degrees of responsibility for the pressures brought to bear on the Earth System—and for their “capabilities to alter future trajectories.”34 The dilemma this reading of the Anthropocene poses for theology is that it is subject to an escalating sense of urgency. For several decades a Christian ecotheology was not averse to citing timelines of impending disasters. With the advent of the Anthropocene those disasters are converted into tipping points. The empirical evidence is now suggesting that nine of the fifteen key tipping points have been surpassed and the Earth is facing a “global cascade” of such. The planetary emergency should now be seen as “risk multiplied by urgency”: humanity is “rapidly running out of time.”35 Catherine Keller wonders if time has already run out, while Steffen foresees the collapse of civilization.36 For Steffen et al., the pathway to a Stabilized Earth—if indeed that is still possible—depends upon a contested rhetoric well-known within a Christian ecotheology, stewardship. It is a problematic claim given this biblical motif’s tendency to privilege an instrumental rather than an intrinsic valuing of nature.

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WHY BOTHER? It is arguably the case that theology has been relatively slow to respond to the challenge of the Anthropocene. For the most part theologians and biblical scholars go about their disciplinary business at a remove from this discussion of paradigm shifts and ruptures. One example will suffice: inasmuch as the doctrine of providence poses the idea of a benevolent God, divine foresight, and a continuing creation, the Anthropocene presents the Bible-believing inhabitants of low-lying islands in the Pacific with a potential crisis of belief. In this present age of rising sea levels, compromised food and water supplies, and likely cultural relocation, where is the previously assumed sovereign care and compassion of God to be found? How is its threefold structure of preservation, governance and purpose to be sustained?37 The highly distinguished David Fergusson makes no reference to any such concern for the Anthropocene in his recent polyphonic approach to the theology of providence.38 The project he set himself was to “explore the origins, problems and abuses” associated with this doctrine that is often held in an “inchoate or implicit” form. Is that now sufficient? There has been, of course, a number of significant initiatives taken with regards to the intersection of theology and the climate emergency.39 There has been an increasing body of literature to do with the praxis and spirituality of being responsible.40 There has been one conference and symposium after another. The papal encyclical Laudato Si’ is the most widely known and lauded of many declarations from church bodies expressing the need for “care of our common home.”41 There have been multiple works designed to comment upon and develop the encyclical.42 The issue at stake here is not the failure to engage with the climate emergency but, rather, the lack of reference to the dawning of the Anthropocene and a consideration of what that change of paradigms for the Earth System may mean. It is that lacuna which can be so worrying. The very fine interdisciplinary T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change only has a handful of references to the Anthropocene scattered through its more than 700 pages. Texts that one might expect to make some overt engagement with the Anthropocene do not do so. That is true even of Laudato Si,’ though Celia Deane-Drummond declares him to be the “priest and prophet” of the new epoch. That claim is based upon the way in which he seeks to address the “‘irreversible changes’ to the earth that is implied by the idea of the Anthropocene.”43 The “integral ecology” Laudato Si’ espouses flows from due recognition of “how humanity has failed to meet our human responsibilities to people and the planet.”44 There is a deep-seated sense of papal shock at

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the complacency of a modern “throwaway culture” (Section 22). In response to such, Pope Francis is not afraid to draw upon the language of sin and repentance alongside reference to “the gaze of Christ.” Francis preserves the traditional Roman Catholic view of the dignity of the human person rather than pursuing some form of biocentrism. The encyclical calls for the necessity of living out ecological virtues (Section 211). It emphasizes that this vocation is not “an optional or secondary aspect of Christian experience” (Section 217). The Earthly reach of the Anthropocene is captured in the encyclical’s desire to address “every person living in this planet” (Section 2). And yet there is no reference to this potential change of epoch. Deane-Drummond simply notes that Pope Francis manages to avoid “the negative aspects” of the term Anthropocene by “eschewing its use” altogether.45 She further acknowledges that “he could have gone further in places and brought his discussion more in line with recent scientific debates.”46 Hamilton quietly notes in Defiant Earth that “Pope Francis’ appeal to the love of nature, welcome as it is, is anchored in an era long-gone and rests on an authority most do not recognize.”47 This skirting around the Anthropocene is likewise evident in the highly esteemed Dennis Edwards’s Deep Incarnation. Its publication date falls well after Jan Zalasiewicz, the chair of the Anthropocene Working Group of the Stratigraphy Commission, recommended that the epoch be dated from “the bomb spike” that arose out of the nuclear fallout of 1945.48 Edwards is rightly concerned with the core question: “What relationship is there between the wider natural world, the world of galaxies and stars, mountains and seas, bacteria, plants and animals, and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ?”49 What is driving the framing of this question is the need to redress a theological balance. It is certainly the case that Edwards wishes to ensure that “other creatures” and a “wider creation” are deemed to be authentic subjects for theological enquiry: they are not to be “dropped” out which has been “largely” the case in the West.50 That redress is only one part of the equation, though. Edwards is seeking to distance himself from those forms of ecotheology that have allowed themselves to focus primarily on the equivalent of a creation theology. They have done so in relative “isolation from the theology of incarnation and redemption.”51 Edwards’s overriding interest is in seeking to describe God’s redemptive suffering with creatures via a theology of deep incarnation. It is as such a response to writers, beginning with Niels Gregersen who coined the term deep incarnation based on a reading of the Word made flesh. Its purpose is to probe a reading of the incarnation and the cross of Christ “into the very tissue of biological existence, and system of nature.”52 It is a highly suggestive approach given Gregersen’s imaginative beginning to a rendering of the person and work of Christ. It does not begin with any immediate reference back to the New Testament witnesses and Chalcedonian claims. Instead it begins

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with the plight of the human as a metabolic organism and an atmospheric being; it dispenses with a human exceptionalism through placing the species within the broad canvas of a creaturely sarx (all flesh).53 And yet—again—there is no overt reference to the Anthropocene. This theology of a deep incarnation may be seen more as an evolutionary Christology than one which has become embedded in the terminology and expectations of the Anthropocene. The rupture is not quite so fractured between one paradigm and another. It is a line of approach that could well sit with arguments warning about confusing an epoch with a paradigm shift.54 Edwards engages with a number of current writers; he does so while looking back further into the reaches of the Holocene and the classical legacy of Irenaeus and Athanasius. Now such a strategy is not without merit. It demonstrates the capacity of venerated theological traditions being able to engage with the divine presence in contemporary life. But is it sufficient? In a variation on a theme, the occasional effort is made to employ the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the service of a theology for the Anthropocene—but there are problems. Bonhoeffer was executed just before the date of the proposed geological spike that marks the Anthropocene: he neither lived in, nor wrote about, the Anthropocene. He lies on the other side of the rupture. In the circumstances, Rasmussen suggests that the most that can be claimed is that Bonhoeffer had a premonition of the Anthropocene.55 Hamilton concludes that Bonhoeffer’s ethics “were not strong enough to survive secularization.”56 LOST TIME There is no overarching consensus at present that theology should engage in a transdisciplinary enquiry into the Anthropocene. The origins of an earlier ecotheology sound a word of warning. There is a price to be paid for absence and neglect. It is now just over fifty years since Lynn White Jr. posed the thesis that the Judeo-Christian tradition ought to “bear a huge burden of guilt” for the “current ecologic crisis.”57 Those five pages, published in the (nontheological) journal Science, became “the foundation, jumping-off point, and lodestar for countless academic endeavors and even a new subdiscipline or two.”58 For those presently accustomed to discussions over when and who was responsible for the Anthropocene it is like a walk down (a more genteel) memory lane to be reminded of three core claims made by White. LeVasseur and Peterson summarize: ideological and cultural factors, especially religion, are the root causes of the “ecologic crisis” facing contemporary humans; Western Christianity has been particularly responsible; the solution to ecological destruction must be religious.

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The facts of the matter are that the Christian faith has often been more disposed toward what Norman Habel named as “heavenism” and a tendency to look upon this Earth as “disposable.”59 From this vantage point the Christian biblical and theological traditions are deeply problematic long before the Anthropocene hove into view and “the great acceleration” intensified the problem.60 How helpful this excursus into relatively recent history for life in the Anthropocene is up for grabs. For all its merits, an ecotheology variously named and organized must be wary of those warnings of ruptures and paradigm shifts. The era into which the Anthropocene takes theological thought is of a different order from that which has gone before. Now we come face to face with a gnawing reality. The Christian faith is a product of the Holocene.61 Hamilton declares it to be a “pre-modern” tradition, albeit “sophisticated.”62 The Christian faith came into being and has flourished rather late in the day in terms of deep time. In a cosmic timeline converted into one calendar year, Erle Ellis places the advent of Christianity at 28 seconds to midnight on the 31st of December.63 Its foundation, its subsequent systems of belief and praxis were worked out in a glacial-interglacial regime that allowed for a relatively stable climate that operated within generally benign boundaries for life as we know it. Its eclipse provokes an awkward question. Is what is now required of theology—and, likewise of biblical scholarship and ethics—simply another variation, an accommodation, on how a faith seeking understanding responded (more or less) to previous revolutions in astronomy, geology, and biology? Is it possible to proceed relatively “gently into the Anthropocene”?64 Or, does the dawning of the Anthropocene represent a rupture and a demand (rather than an invitation) for something different? Will the Christian faith of the Holocene epoch perhaps end up being little more than an “archive” and a “memory”?65 If so, what might that new agenda be like? Or, is the cupboard bare, as Hamilton suggested with regards to ethical resources in general?66 Will humanity survive and, if not, for whom is this theology for a “lost future” intended? SECULAR THEOLOGY Whatever theology is to emerge on the other side of this rupture, Rasmussen has argued that it must be “Earth-honoring.” There is no room left for a Godof-the-gaps or “the rescuer God” that really belongs to a “dysfunctional religion.”67 Hamilton chimes in with the warning that faith’s inherent turn inward and a preoccupation with the self is now little more than a “distraction.”68 These provisos are not surprising. They have indeed been both well-heeded by a significant body of theologians and Christian ethicists.

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The risk is having nothing to say and creating a theological vacuum. The dilemma that immediately presents itself is that a kind of secular theology, often implicit, has arisen that attracts what appear to be clear theological themes, but without explicit reference to the Christian agenda of belief. Those most often cited have to do with anthropology, theodicy, providence, and eschatology.69 It is not difficult to see why these items on the core agenda of a systematic theology have been so privileged. The Anthropocene has seen humankind as a species emerge as a geological agent and telluric force. It is no longer simply an “environmental actor.”70 It is evident that any subsequent anthropology must place humanity in relationship to the rest of creaturely existence. That is not too out of the ordinary. It is a frank recognition of humanity’s dependence upon the well-being of that created order. What is different is the deepening need to take account of the strengthening power of humankind and its capacity to alter the planetary system and contribute to Kolbert’s sixth mass extinction. Now is not the time for being satisfied with a naïve romanticism about a humanity being one species amongst others with which it is in some sort of harmony. That time has passed. The theological topics of theodicy and providence attract attention for good reason. They deal with matters to do with meaning and purpose and eventually weave their way into urgent considerations of climate justice and the prospect of “climate displaced persons”—the term “climate refugee” does not have any international rights-based standing and is regarded as “pre-legal.” Why theological ideas present themselves is because the Christian faith provided a master narrative for Western culture especially for much of the last two thousand years of the Holocene period. It was both formative in terms of providing a worldview while a kind of a default position around which other disciplines may, at times, construct their thoughts in the first days of the Anthropocene. Hamilton is not averse to dabbling in talk of God. How long will that last? So much depends on whether the Anthropocene will turn out to be “good, bad, or ugly.” This way of framing the possibilities is taken from Simon Dalby whose expertise lies in the fields of governance, security and the environment. It is a rather unusual turn, of course, to assign a moral quality to a geologic epoch—let alone the climate being thought of as constituting “a perfect moral storm.” Dalby’s imagery arises out of the Anthropocene becoming a “lightning rod” in a political geoecology. The prophetic-like task is to determine whether those who rely upon geo-engineering and technological advance on the assumption that the future bodes well for the human species in general are justified. Can the Anthropocene be good? Is it conceivable that social democratic traditions can mollify the most ideological and allow for an ecomodernism that is able to stimulate an acceptable “geoengineering

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justice”?71 The comparison Dalby makes is with the bad version which assumes that the Earth System is already locked into trajectories that are not sympathetic to most forms of life. In view of the “resistance of the fossil fuel industry,” Dalby expects that the political outcome is likely to be one of an Anthropocene that is ugly.72 This reading of the rupture from the perspective of governance is recast by Delft Rothe into a secular eschatology. The “three competing discourses of the Anthropocene” that he discerned are those of an eco-catastrophism, eco-modernism and planetary realism which presumes that the end-times are “neither near nor far but in fact already taking place.”73 For the present purpose the interest lies in how Rothe made use of icons, imaginaries, and motifs taken from a Christian eschatology. He was not seeking to compose a theology for the Anthropocene per se. Through these resources Rothe was reflecting on how ways of understanding linear time, endings, and what it means to be human are managed in the respective discourses. This turn to a Christian eschatology that he dwells upon was reckoned to be warranted because of the way in which readings of endings, messianism, salvation, the apocalyptic—and even resilience—are indebted to the Holocene worldviews of the Christian past. Can they make the leap from one epoch to another? Rothe suspects the need for a more pluralistic set of eschatologies will be required for the Anthropocene. THE SYSTEMATIC AGENDA Even this most cursory reading of writings on the Anthropocene hints at theological work needing to be done. It is not too difficult to discern hardly hidden beneath the surface of a diverse range of secular texts an implicit theology needing to be teased out more fully. There are now interdisciplinary modules on theology in the Anthropocene appearing as more conventional ecotheologies no longer seem so fit for purpose. There is clearly an apologetic task at hand—apologetic in the sense that Elaine Graham discerned in the service of a public theology. Writing in a post-secular setting that is “complex and novel,” Graham recognizes that what might have been a standard defense or advocacy of Christian belief in the past may not have the same power to persuade or represent that faith now.74 Her apologetics and its accent on a performative witness does not directly address matters to do with the dawn of the Anthropocene. The benefit of its necessity lies in its implications. It is evidently not sufficient for theology to proceed as if it can remain locked up in its own revelatory and dogmatic huddle and disregard what Earth System and climate scientists are saying. For Graham, apologetics describes “the various ways in which thoughtful Christians, in

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different ages and cultures, have striven “to give a reason for the hope that is within them.”75 It must engage with other disciplines, some of which will be rival and competing discourses. This apologetic task must be respected because of the “widespread suspicion that the root causes of the [ecological] crisis are related to the impact of Christianity.”76 There is nevertheless a prior complication to negotiate. The problem lies with the naming of the Anthropocene. The dilemma here is not tied to its formal definition as geological epoch. That remains a work in progress that takes time. Nor is the difficulty with the predictions of the Earth System and climate scientists and their use of the Anthropocene. It is now widely recognized that the dogmatic categories of a systematic theology should address climate change irrespective of periodic labels. The potential obstacle surrounds the issue of causality—and what that might mean for climate justice. The word Anthropocene presupposes a planet that has had to come to terms with the irruption of a generic humanity. It is not surprising that critics of the Anthropocene assign causality primarily to a white, masculinist capitalism. It is highly likely that those initially most disadvantaged by the Anthropocene are/will be those most ill-equipped to deal with its shocks to life. That this should be the case certainly highlights the gravity of a planetary governance of climate change that must not “forget” the vulnerable. In terms of a public theology, it is impossible to do so for its principles of good praxis embrace a liberative concern for the poor, the disadvantaged and those otherwise denied a voice. The awkward reality is that this critique of the Anthropocene may belong to an epoch that is passed: doesn’t the present kairos moment surrounding the Anthropocene tell us that the trajectory the Earth system now cannot be ignored and that these critiques must take their place within what scientists such as Steffen and Lenton et al. are mapping? It is delicate territory. With the framework of a public theology, it is much easier to draw upon a natural theology that is able to engage with other disciplines. That is obviously the case with those topics to do with anthropology, providence, theodicy, and eschatology. The bilingual nature of a public theology means that eventually it must seek to be more particular to its ecclesial audience broadly conceived. Writing in their ecumenical systematic theology and climate change, Michael Scott and Peter Scott suggest that the Anthropocene presents a “genuinely novel occasion” where the “central question” is a variation on Bonhoeffer’s legacy: “Who is Jesus Christ in the Anthropocene?”77 Deane Drummond notes that belief in Jesus Christ is indeed “the distinguishing mark of Christian faith.”78 At some point, given the place of Christ in the theological schema, this core question must be addressed. The first steps are there in the work of Gregersen and Deane-Drummond as they wrestle with deep incarnation and

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redemption. That said, these are not theological topics that stand in isolation from other areas of doctrine to be found in the core agenda of belief. They are not to be treated as if they are disjointed. Ford has noted that “[t]hese doctrines (or dogmas or loci) can be seen as a concentration of the main events and issues in the Christian overarching story from before creation until after the consummation of history.”79 How these topics relate to one another and are integrated into a coherent account of belief is not a fixed template. Hidden away in the background is a further foundational matter which has to do with how a premodern text like Scripture is to be read in the Anthropocene? Are the ecojustice principles of the Earth Bible commentaries sufficient? The extent to which one theological topic flows into another is evident in an anthology dedicated to current paths and emerging horizons in ecotheology. The question “Who on Earth Is Jesus Christ?” (posed by Deane-Drummond) is set in a sequence of who, what, where, and when questions relating to God, the Spirit, the church, being human, providence, and theodicy. It is not an exhaustive list, but each one of these questions was qualified by its relationship to the Earth. They represented, as a such, a modification to Jürgen Moltmann’s proposal, made in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, that Christology should be aligned alongside nature rather than history. Now it is the Earth itself that is the context for the potential “reformation” of Christian theology. Will this shift to the Earth and the planetary system end up forming a nexus perhaps with the recent apocalyptic turn in theology? That would not be a surprise given the way in which this new epoch has the capacity to attract words like rupture, shock, paradigm shift, endings, and beginnings. It is still early days in seeking to determine the theological response to the Anthropocene. The risk becomes one of trying to say too much too soon. The dilemma is that a public theology aspires after the need to address issues of a civil society in thought, word, and deed. NOTES 1. Adam Vaughan, “Human Impact Has Pushed the Earth into the Anthropocene, Scientists Say,” The Guardian, January 7, 2016. https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​ /environment​/2016​/jan​/07​/human​-impact​-has​-pushed​-earth​-into​-the​-anthropocene​ -scientists​-say, accessed 1 September 2018; Clive Hamilton, “Getting the Anthropocene So Wrong,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 2 (2015): 102; Mark Maslin and Simon L. Lewis, “Anthropocene: Earth System, Geological, Philosophical, and Political Paradigm Shifts,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 2 (2015): 108–16; Clive Hamilton, “The Anthropocene as Rupture,” The Anthropocene Review 3, no. 2 (2016): 93–106; and Ewa Bińczyk, “The Most Unique Discussion of the 21st Century: The

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Debate on the Anthropocene Pictured in 7 Points,” The Anthropocene Review 6, no. 1–2 (2019): 3–18. 2. Bronislaw Szerszynski, “From the Anthropocene Epoch to a New Axial Age: Using Theory-Fictions to Explore Geo-Spiritual Forces,” in Religion in the Anthropocene, eds. Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann, and Markus Vogt (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2017), 35–52. 3. Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), 92–109; Diane Ackerman, The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2014), 3–70. Ackerman 4. Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia; Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 112–3. 5. Will Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” PNAS 115, no.33 (2018): 8257, http:​//​www​.pnas​.org​/content​/pnas​/115​/33​/8252​.full​.pdf, accessed 1 September 2018. 6. David Ford, Theology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 9. 7. Linell E. Cady, “Public Theology and the Postsecular Turn,” International Journal of Public Theology 8, no. 3 (2014): 292–312. 8. Sebastian Kim and Katie Day, eds., A Companion to Public Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 10 9. E. Harold Breitenberg, “To Tell the Truth: Will the Real Public Theology Please Stand Up,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 23, no. 2 (2003): 66 10. Breitenberg, “To Tell the Truth,” 65–66; and Kjetil Fretheim, Interruption and Imagination: Public Theology in a Time of Crisis (Eugene: Pickwick, 2016), 59–73; Catherine Keller, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 2–5; Kim and Day, A Companion to Public Theology, 7–9. 11. Breitenberg, “To Tell the Truth,” 66. 12. Elaine Graham, Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Public Theology in a Post-Secular Age (London: SCM, 2013), 99–102. 13. Clive Pearson, ed., “Climate Change and the Common Good: Special Issue,” International Journal of Public Theology 4, no. 3 (2010); Fretheim, Interruption and Imagination, 132–39; Larry Rasmussen, “Whence Climate Injustice,” in A Companion to Public Theology, 349–68. 14. Tim Harvie, “A Politics of Connected Flesh: Public Theology, Ecology and Merleau-Ponty,” International Journal of Public Theology 13, no. 4 (2019): 494–512. 15. Richard J. Lazarus, “Super Wicked Problems and Climate Change: Restraining the Present to Liberate the Future,” Environmental Law and Policy Review 40 (2010): 10749–56, http:​//​www​.law​.harvard​.edu​/faculty​/rlazarus​/docs​/articles​/Lazarus​ _WickedELRArticle​ .pdf, accessed 1 September 2018; Kelly Levin, Benjamin Cashore, Steven Bernstein, and Graeme Auld, “Overcoming the Tragedy of Super Wicked Problems: Constraining Our Future Selves to Ameliorate Global Climate Change,” Policy Sciences 45, no. 2 (2012): 123–52, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s11077​ -012​-9151​-0; Shannon Osaka, “The New York Times and the Super-wicked Problem

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of Climate Change,” The New York Times, August 2, 2018, https:​//​grist​.org​/article​ /what​-the​-new​-york​-times​-got​-right​-and​-wrong​-about​-the​-super​-wicked​-problem​-of​ -climate​-change​/, accessed, 1 September 2018. 16. Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 155–69, https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1007​/BF01405730. 16. The contrast is sometimes made between a (super)wicked and a tame problem. The latter is marked by “having a well-defined and stable problem statement.” It has a “definite stopping point.” It has a solution which “can be objectively as right or wrong.” It belongs to “a class of problems which are all solved in a similar way.” Jeffrey Conklin, Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems. (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 2005.) 17. Delft Rothe, “Governing the End Times? Planet Politics and the Secular Eschatology of the Anthropocene,” Millennium—Journal of International Studies 48, no. 2 (2020): 152, http:​//​dx​.doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0305829819889138. 18. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters in Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015); Sam Olnick, Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017); John Lane, Anthropocene Blues: Poems, (Macon: Georgia University Press, 2017); and Ann Waldman, “Anthropocene Blues,” American Academy of Poets, 2017, https:​//​www​.poets​.org​/poetsorg​/poem​/anthropocene​-blues, accessed 9 September 2018; Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “The Anthrocene,” https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/ watch​?v​=14O​_HOQXSEM, accessed 1 October 2018; Peter Oren, “Anthropocene,” https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=DQUvbDY8fuw, accessed 1 October 2018; Anthony Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015); Alicia Vikander, “‘Anthropocene: The Human Epoch’ Review: Global Warmings.” The New York Times, September 24, 2019, https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2019​/09​/24​/movies​/anthropocene​-the​-human​ -epoch​-review​.html, accessed 1 June 2020; Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2015); Tim Morton, Being Ecological (London: Penguin Random House, 2018). 19. Anthony Burke et al., “Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 44, no. 3 (2016): 499–523, https:​//​doi​.org​ /10​.1177​/0305829816636674. 20. Hamilton, “Getting the Anthropocene So Wrong,” 103. 21. Frank Oldfield, “Paradigms, Projections and People,” The Anthropocene Review 3, no. 2 (2016): 163–72. 22. Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” 8253–54. 23. Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, 8252–53. 24. Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, 8253. 25. Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, 8252. 26. Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, 8256. 27. Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, 8257 28. Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, 8254–55.

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29. Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, 8255, 8258. 30. Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, 8256. 31. Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, 8254. 32. Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. 33. Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. 34. Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, 8256. 35. Timothy M. Lenton et al., “Climate Tipping Points—Too Risky to Bet Against,” Nature 575 (2020): 592–95, https:​//​media​.nature​.com​/original​/magazine​ -assets​/d41586​-019​-03595​-0​/d41586​-019​-03595​-0​.pdf 36. Keller, Political Theology of the Earth, 3–4; and Asher Moser, “‘Collapse of Civilisation Most Likely Outcome’: Top Climate Scientists Say,” Resilience, June 8, 2020, https:​//​www​.resilience​.org​/stories​/2020​-06​-08​/collapse​-of​-civilisation​-is​-the​ -most​-likely​-outcome​-top​-climate​-scientists​/, accessed 12 June 2020. 37. Clive Pearson, “God’s Continued Providence,” in T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change, eds. Ernst Conradie and Hilda Koster (London: T&T Clark, 2020), 395–405. 38. David Fergusson, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 39. For example: Ernst Conradie and Hilda Koster, eds., T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2020); Ernst Conradie et al., Christian Faith and the Earth: Current Paths and Emerging Horizons in Ecotheology (London: Bloomsbury T& T Clark, 2014). 40. Leah D. Schade and Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, eds., Rooted and Rising: Voices of Courage in a Time of Climate Crisis (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). 41. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Strathfield: St Pauls, 2015). 42. Anthony J. Kelly, Laudato Si’: An Integral Ecology and the Catholic Vision (Hindmarsh: ATF Press, 2016). 43. Celia Deane-Drummond, “Pope Francis: Priest and Prophet in the Anthropocene,” Environmental Humanities 8, no. 2 (2016), 256. doi:10.1215/22011919-3664369. 44. Deane-Drummond, “Pope Francis.” 45. Deane-Drummond, “Pope Francis.” 46. Deane-Drummond, “Pope Francis,” 259; Celia Deane-Drummond, “Laudato Si’ and the Natural Sciences: An Assessment of Possibilities and Limits,” Theological Studies 77, no. 2 (2016): 392–415. 47. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 155. 48. Nicola Davison, “The Anthropocene Epoch: Have We Entered a New Phase of Planetary History?,” The Guardian, May 30, 2019, https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​ /environment​/2019​/may​/30​/anthropocene​-epoch​-have​-we​-entered​-a​-new​-phase​-of​ -planetary​-history, accessed 1 June 2020. 49. Denis Edwards, Deep Incarnation: God’s Redemptive Suffering with Creatures (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2019), xv. 50. Edwards, Deep Incarnation.

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51. Edwards, Deep Incarnation, xiv. 52. Edwards, Deep Incarnation, xvii. 53. Niels Henrik Gregersen, “Christology,” in Systematic Theology and Climate Change: Ecumenical Perspectives, eds. Michael S. Northcott and Peter M. Scott (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 33–50. 54. Jeremy Baskin, “Paradigm Dressed as Epoch: The Ideology of the Anthropocene,” Environment and History 24, no.1 (2015), 9–29. 55. Larry Rasmussen, “Bonhoeffer and the Anthropocene,” NGTT Deel Supplementum 1 (2014): 954. 56. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 155. 57. Lynn White Jr., “The Historic Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (1967), 1203–7. 58. Todd LeVasseur and Anna Peterson, eds., Religion and Ecological Crisis: The “Lynn White Thesis” at Fifty (New York: Routledge, 2017), 2. 59. Norman Habel, “Ecojustice Hermeneutics,” in Readings from the Perspective of the Earth, ed. Norman C. Habel (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 3–4. 60. J. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Age of Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2016). 61. Rasmussen, “Bonhoeffer and the Anthropocene,” 944. 62. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 155. 63. Earle Ellis, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 11. 64. Michael S. Northcott, “On Going Gently into the Anthropocene,” in Religion in the Anthropocene, eds. Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann, and Markus Vogt (Eugene: cascade Books, 2017), 19–34. 65. Stefan Skrimshire, “Eschatology,” in Systematic Theology and Climate Change: Ecumenical Perspectives, eds. Michael S. Northcott and Peter M. Scott (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 138–54. 66. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 155 67. Rasmussen, “Bonhoeffer and the Anthropocene,” 947. 68. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 108. 69. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 68–71, 125–27, 159. 70. Simon Dalby, “Framing the Anthropocene: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” The Anthropocene Review 3, no. 1 (2016): 35. 71. Jonathan Symons, Ecomodernism: Technology, Politics and the Climate Crisis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019). 72. Dalby, “Framing the Anthropocene,” 48. 73. Rothe, “Governing the End Times?,” 1254. 74. Elaine Graham, Apologetics without Apology: Speaking of God in a World Troubled by Religion (Eugene: Cascade, 2017), 3–4. 75. Graham, Apologetics without Apology, 16. 76. Conradie et al., Christian Faith and the Earth, 1. 77. Michael S. Northcott and Peter M. Scott, eds., introduction to Systematic Theology and Climate Change: Ecumenical Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 5.

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78. Celia Deane-Drummond, “Who on Earth Is Jesus Christ? Plumbing the Depths of Deep Incarnation,” in Christian Faith and the Earth: Current Paths and Emerging Horizons in Ecotheology, eds. Ernst M. Conradie et al. (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), 31. 79. David Ford, “Introduction to Modern Christian Theology,” in The Modern Theologians, eds. David Ford and Rachel Muers (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 4.

Chapter 4

Icarus Falling Theological Anthropology and the Anthropocene Scott Cowdell

A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I

A new geological epoch is dawning in our own lifetimes, the Anthropocene. Since the mid-twentieth century the whole biological-physical-geological nexus that comprises our Earth System has come to bear the marks of human intervention. This reaches further than conventional ecological considerations about this or that ecosystem. Indeed, the looming environmental crisis due to climate change represents but one feature of something more comprehensive. The Anthropocene thus constitutes no less than a new stage in being human. We have become a unified global constituency within a larger systemic reality. But we are unsure how to belong and to act accordingly. Humanity now holds all the apocalyptic cards. Yet our confidence in human agency, technological progress, and the modern worldview is being called into question, robbing us of our accustomed assuredness. The result is a dangerous mix of ignorance, perplexity, and overconfidence. This situation is worsened by stubborn climate change denialism matched by a new pitch of born-again technological boosterism, all fueled by the culture wars. 59

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Each new historical era brings a new climate for theology, in which the old issues are reexamined and new perspectives are advanced. In theological anthropology, the customary questions to be addressed are those of humanity, sin, and grace. How might Anthropocene conditions advance our theological approach to these three classic loci? And how might such theological considerations help sinful humanity find the grace to live and act as best it can under Anthropocene conditions? HUMANITY Clive Hamilton, Australia’s troubled prophet of the Anthropocene, identifies a new Anthropos emerging in tandem with a new epoch for the whole Earth System. For Hamilton, this “new anthropocentric self does not float free like the modern subject, but is always woven into nature, a knot in the fabric of nature.”1 If nature and culture have been conceived dualistically, and modern progress has meant the mastery of nature, now the only viable future for humanity and nature must be synergistic. Yet at this point in history these truths are not held to be self-evident. Widespread disbelief and denial greet today’s expert consensus on anthropogenic climate change, which is a key bellwether of the new Anthropocene. Such denialism is a variegate phenomenon. It features the lazy conventionality of established mental habits, refusing to concede unsettling evidence to the contrary. It upholds ideological and religious convictions about divine, or human, or at least Western sovereignty over nature. It fuels avaricious pursuit of uninterrupted prosperity in pockets of advantage, preserving the fortunate against declining environmental and social conditions elsewhere. And it fosters a concerted program of misinformation as vested interests seek to manipulate public opinion and derail serious climate policy. Disbelief and denial about how we are changing the Earth System represents a combination of naivety, avoidance and bad faith. In the midst of all this can be found bidders for a heterodox version of theological anthropology. There is a variously sourced and expressed but nonetheless quite consistent account of humanity on offer in new, functionally religious narratives of our cosmic centrality. This so-called Big History draws on what is now known scientifically about the age of the universe, the Earth, and the evolutionary journey of life—a journey in which our species is deemed to represent the high point. With humanity the universe becomes conscious, whereupon the grand narrative of progress can supposedly shift up a gear. This Big History is compatible with so-called new atheism in its critique of traditional religions: that backward religious dreams of utopia must now

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give way to more robust secular utopian thinking. Hence, we find advocates of geo-engineering thinking they will fix the Earth’s climate change problem, as part of the grand cosmic narrative continuing its advance. Indeed, some climate skeptics find that they can preserve their faith in technological mastery more effectively by embracing geo-engineering than by their former climate change denial. But whether or not today’s utopian enthusiasts are strict economic bottom-liners of the neoliberal Right or alternative culture types on the Green Left, they share a mythological faith despite their affinity for science and post-religion. Lisa Sideris critically parses these new mythologically freighted grand narratives, while questioning their likely usefulness in addressing the actual practical and political consequences of worsening environmental conditions. She is concerned that this new mythology lacks the sober realism of yesterday’s more dystopian mythological texts.2 It is unrealistically upbeat, offering what Clive Hamilton calls a “narrative of fiasco.”3 Atheist philosopher John Gray differs from the new atheists, recognizing that religion dies hard in secular modern times. By acknowledging a functional rather than a substantive definition of religion, he traces a straight line from premodern religious apocalyptic and utopian dreams of world transformation—typically violent and unsparing—to modern, Enlightenment versions. From the French Revolutionary Terror to Nazism to both sides of the War on Terror, he dissects and excoriates uncritical modern myths of human transformation through violence. They simply update bygone religious myths of world purification through divine destruction. Accordingly, overconfident utopians pedaling Big History should temper their faith in uninterrupted technological advancement—likewise those others who anticipate a similar uninterrupted advance, though without the same role for human agency. All these need to wake up and start thinking about appropriate and achievable practicalities. Apart from which, our future is more likely to be a ravaged Earth fought over by war lords than any high-tech or low-tech utopia.4 In other words, a future less like Star Trek and more like Mad Max. Humanity’s response to Anthropocene conditions reminds me of a mid-sixteenth century painting from the school of Pieter Breughel the Elder, hanging in the Brussels Fine Art Museum, entitled “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (an image readily found on the Internet). Here is the busy, preoccupied human world of Breughel: a plowman at work in the foreground, his head bent in concentration; just below him a shepherd standing idly and distractedly by, while—in the middle distance and out to sea—a ship goes its way under billowing sail. Yet in the lower right of the picture, in the lee of that ship, and making no impact whatsoever on this whole cluttered scene of oblivious humanity, we can just make out two tiny white legs sticking out of the sea. Here is Icarus, fresh from his attempt to fly near the sun, now fallen

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ignominiously thanks to melted wings. He has received the proper comeuppance for his hubris. Yet the unmistakable moral of Icarus’s fall, which should give pause to every utopian, is wasted on humanity as Breughel perceives it. Even the fisherman on the lower right shoreline, close to where Icarus splashes down, seems either not to notice or not to care. W. H. Auden, in the section of his poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” devoted to this picture, observes wryly that the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.5

Here we see a combination of preoccupied mental habit, more-or-less culpable distractedness, and no doubt some willful ignorance. Another twentieth-century British poet, Michael Hamburger, in his “Lines on Breughel’s ‘Icarus,’” reads the picture as a warning to humanity about respect for its proper creaturely limits. Though for him it is the Earth that wreaks its revenge on human hubris, rather than the old gods: The angel, Icarus, for ever failed, Fallen with melted wings when, near the sun He scorned the ordering planet, which prevailed.6

Theology can justifiably use the category of sin to address humanity’s delusional liability in the dawning Anthropocene, and to such considerations we now turn. SIN The distinctive nature of sin under Anthropocene conditions is that its presence is both more widely felt and more deeply interfused. We have long despoiled particular environments, polluted waterways and eradicated species but never to the extent of drawing the whole Earth System into our sinfulness. But, since the 1950s, by deploying the threat of global nuclear annihilation as a tool of supposedly rational statecraft, and by courting ecological disaster despite plenty of expert warning, human sin has attained a new capacity for alienation and destructiveness. With apocalyptic weaponry maintaining an uneasy peace for nearly 70 years, and every likelihood that the Earth System itself is being compromised by our dreams of expansion, human sin now extends its capacity for harm in ways that are global, environmental, and even geological. Hence the old distinction between natural and human evil

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begins to dissolve, as Rousseau first proposed.7 A new type of evil is emerging, according to French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy, assignable neither to human or to natural evil, and it feels transcendent. He points out that natural disaster terms like “holocaust” and “tsunami” are now being applied to great instances of human evil, because they suggest its unfathomability and seeming irresistibility.8 “This evil is neither moral nor natural. It is a third type,” Dupuy writes, “which I call systemic evil. Its form is identical with that of the sacred.”9 Regarding the Anthropocene, this new account of sin and evil reflects the fact that nature is no longer regarded as an independent adversary of the human. Rather, nature is caught up with the human in a complex nexus. As with all sin there remains a foundation of concupiscence, setting the limited cognitive, imaginative, and volitional conditions from which emerge our particular sins of omission and commission: our willful failure to act, along with our conscious and explicit failures to relate appropriately to humans, the world, and God. And this overarching context of sin is formidable. It represents a constriction and deformation of our personhood, and distorts our agency. Sin thus names a transcendent condition from which we cannot extract ourselves. Even certain unalienable goods for humanity and, nowadays, for parts of the environment are compromised by sin’s systemic misalignment. Such sin issues both in harmful inaction and in misconceived remedial action, so that even the well-intentioned can prove to be destructive. The transcendent quality of sin is in keeping with the wider systemic nature of reality. For instance, a dysfunctional family system effectively, though deleteriously, controls the behavior of parents and children. This provides a simple and familiar model of what sin looks like. In complex interactive systems such as the human body, the lack of an overall perspective has left medical science with innumerable individual remedies, though without any universally acknowledged conception of holistic health. And regarding the Earth System, with its geological, physical, biological, and now human aspects, a failure of adequate systemic understanding fuels our present confusion about proper agency. Hence, insufficiently sensitive quick fixes in one or another area have left us with unimagined environmental consequences on a wider front. If land clearing to release more farmland causes erosion and runoff that eventually renders that farmland useless, while washing pesticides out to sea which then compromise the Great Barrier Reef, or if an introduced species like the cane toad in Northern Australia becomes a worse infestation than the cane beetle it was brought in to counter, how much more serious is it to underestimate the systemic complexity of our whole Earth System? The great champion of systemic wisdom in environmental matters was a twentieth-century prophet of ecological sensibility, a polymath and likely genius, called Gregory Bateson.10 Rightly or wrongly, he theorized a cause for schizophrenia in the so-called double bind that plagues many families

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of sufferers, whereby chronically mixed signals about love and welcome ultimately rob a child of agency. This leads to the irrational speech and catatonia of schizophrenic patients which accurately represents their situation of confusion and powerlessness.11 Madness is thus seen to result from being trapped in a system we cannot fathom. Bateson extended his early psychological theorizing to addictive behavior.12 From these beginnings emerged his groundbreaking ecological contributions. We could describe the double bind in this context as the need for humans to try and fix or arrest their environmental impact without knowing how to do so. To point us in a healing direction, beyond this double bind, Bateson calls for a new systemic wisdom in line with the new sciences of information theory and cybernetics. In a seminal 1968 address, Bateson reimagined the story of Adam and Eve’s fall in Genesis as their failed turn to purposive, linear activity, which cost them the systemic holism of their former life in the garden. This loss constituted their expulsion from Eden. Thereafter their wrongheaded approach to the Earth made it unresponsive and working it proved toilsome, so that Adam came to regard God (for Bateson, the system) as vengeful.13 But this outcome was really the natural consequence of distorted knowledge and misconceived action. I am interested in this because René Girard, who has become a significant contributor to theological anthropology at the intersection of biological and human sciences, was influenced by Bateson’s account of the double bind.14 As with Bateson, Girard sees the double bind most obviously at work in disordered human relations. The model of one’s desire becomes the rival when the invitation to imitate, which permits admiration and emulation at a distance, is withdrawn at closer range out of fearfulness, so that the message becomes: “Imitate me but do not imitate me.” Here is Girard’s recipe for rivalry which escalates readily into violence. In fragile social contexts lacking adequate institutional protective measures, this violence can only be prevented from escalating to the point of crisis and group self-annihilation by the mechanism of scapegoating: the war of all against all becoming the war of all against one, so that the scapegoat is loaded with the sins and hostilities of the group and killed or driven out. Girard relates sin thus conceived to the structuring principle of stable human community, which relies on the targeted violence of scapegoating as a way of averting descent into violent contagion. This systemic quality of sin and evil accounts for its transcendence, as discussed by Jean-Pierre Dupuy (who follows Girard). For present purposes, it is significant that Girard identifies the environment as a prime victim of contemporary scapegoating, paying the costly price of humanity’s materially aspirational unanimity.15 Regarding today’s emerging cosmic mythology of progress centering upon the human, including modern versions of utopian mythology traceable

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seamlessly from the religious to the secular, we do well to recall the function of mythology according to Girard’s mimetic theory. Which is the dissembling of structuring violence.16 Lisa Sideris identifies the obfuscation of actual political interests and consequences that these new science-based myths of progress entail, and how they typically fail to provide the impetus for much concrete environmental action.17 From a Girardian perspective, such grand cosmic myth does not represent a new advance in meaning so much as an unconscious device for preserving the status quo. It does so by an act of deception and denial, telling a satisfying and uplifting story that makes no reference to the actual structuring violence on which that story is based. Indeed, such human myth-making necessarily exhibits what Girard calls méconnaissance (mis-knowing). And of course, the victim in today’s global culture of unprecedented mimetic acquisitiveness is not only the environment. It is also the poor in developing countries who pay the price for declining local environmental conditions while remaining locked out of rising global prosperity. For Girard, once the myth is deconstructed and the actual sacrificial victims are revealed, the self-deception is no longer justifiable and we become morally culpable.18 We also lose the protection of the discredited deceptive structure, which returns the apocalyptic threat with renewed force.19 Humanity now becomes genuinely responsible, having been deprived of its former méconnaissance. The task is then to accept a more genuine transcendence. It is not so much that we have forced the paradox of our creatureliness and our transcendence of it out of sync, as in Reinhold Niebuhr’s influential definition of original sin.20 Rather, we have embraced a false transcendence. The transcendence of structuring violence based on misplaced desire comes to underpin human life together at the expense of victims. Yet the consequences of this distortion, this original sin, are now clearly working themselves out in the emerging Anthropocene. What might grace look like in these Anthropocene conditions, as humanity discovers its responsibility but has yet to find the systemic wisdom that effective agency will require? GRACE Were we to ask Gregory Bateson, he would say that grace works like therapy. It involves the revelation of what constitutes health in a system, along with what is distorted and dysfunctional. The approach that he prescribes for schizophrenia and addiction has its environmental echo in his call for a systemic reset of our confining linear and instrumental thinking. That way we begin to appreciate the complexities of systems that are not tailored to the structures of humanity’s narrowly evolved consciousness. Apart from which, as Bateson insists, “the systems are . . . punishing of any species

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unwise enough to quarrel with its ecology.”21 Anything fostering a broadening perspective, including poetry, literature, art, and good religion, he regards as contributing to the necessary shift, along with some aspects of the 1960s counterculture.22 Accordingly, for Hamilton, “we need an ontology founded on human-distinctiveness-within-networks rather than an ontology that deprives humans of their unique form of agency.”23 The practical upshot of such considerations is that limited agency may be all we have left. Fixing or winding back the climate damage that has already been wrought may not be possible, for instance. Yet, for John Gray, the requisite “realism requires a discipline of thought that may be too austere for a culture that prizes psychological comfort above anything else and it is a reasonable question whether Western liberal societies are capable of the moral effort that is involved in setting aside hopes of world transformation.”24 Gray’s model here is the frank—and, at the time, scandalous—pragmatism of Machiavelli in The Prince. His imperative is for us to get over the hunger for a narrative that makes overall sense of life and learn instead to live with contingency, frailty, and directionlessness. Contrary to expectations, there may be more grace to be found in that posture than in romantic myths that deflect us from doing the best we can with difficulties that may never fully be overcome. For Sideris, this will mean abandoning “timeworn anthropic, universal, progressive or scientistic storylines.”25 Such a small-scale scenario, with humans simply learning to cope in difficult environmental circumstances, is a very likely outcome according to Hamilton—a drawn-out struggle with no clear ending.26 This will involve learning a new way of thinking according to what he calls paleo-ontology, until we eventually work out what to do. It may take some decades of living in this liminal condition before the picture becomes clearer and our consciousness remakes itself concordant with the new epoch. And so, we must sit patiently, in a state of ontological unknowing, seeking ways to live with the terror as well as the beauty of the Earth, and struggling to reconcile our power with our powerlessness.27

What is confronting for confident Westerners is the sheer modesty of such a vision, it’s programmatic limitedness, its lack of can-do. A breakthrough may come but we do not know how or from where. We have heard Jean-Pierre Dupuy describe the new comprehensive version of evil emerging in our global context of unstable nuclear deterrence and environmental crisis as transcendent. This refers to its imprisoning double-bind quality, its apparent inevitability and givenness, hence it’s naturalness—employing natural terms for great moral evils of our day. Here is the false transcendence that Girard associates with status quo–preserving,

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functional human religiosity. Unlike Girard, however, there is no Christian alternative that Dupuy can articulate. In the face of this rush to an abyss that is external to us, this further instance of the double bind—that we humans are makers of a future that is also inscribed in our destiny—the best Dupuy can offer is the bare possibility of a miraculous way out if we are sufficiently self-aware to recognize it.28 Is there a better word of grace available to us than this? Is the future bereft of any telos whatever, as John Gray the clear-eyed atheist insists? His prediction of the best that we can hope for is just to muddle through. Yet if our future contains the only Archimedean point left to us—a sense on which Dupuy bases his largely mute protest against the transcendence of nuclear and environmental threats—might we be able to give that future some content? The Christian answer to the false transcendence of evil is faith in God’s inbreaking future, which announces itself in advance through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This future is sustainingly, subversively, and transformingly present in the Holy Spirit as witnessed by the Eucharistic Church. And what that Church traditionally offers to support this claim, rather than any triumphalist grand narrative, is the stubborn witness of its saints and martyrs. This witness is not romantic or utopian, nor is it violent and hubristic. It is not insensitive to the limits and contingencies of human experience. Indeed, it is not possible to mount a teleological grand narrative without obfuscating human limitations. This is why I regard theological dramatic theory as an improvement on theologies that embrace the category of narrative. What I mean is that grace is better understood in dramatic rather than narrative terms. Narrative can be fixed, demonstrating a closure and givenness that militates against openness or flexibility. It may engage the imagination and transform the reader, but in formal terms it is more like an artefact—more like a tableau belonging on the shelf rather than a drama taking place before the eyes. Such drama blends directionality and openness as an audience is drawn into the embodied struggle of human actors facing familiar challenges in a way that does not allow for closing the covers and returning the narrative to the shelf. It is not that narrative is an unworthy instrument for human engagement and transformation. But, as a vehicle for those purposes, drama has the edge. And, for present purposes, the point is that drama as a medium for conveying the reality of humanity with God in history holds together directionality, flexibility, and engagement in ways that closure-prone narrative cannot achieve so readily. As for Theo-drama, it works like this. In light of God’s future, with its vision of a new heavens and a new Earth, pressure is applied to the present in a way that brings hope and encourages appropriate agency. The systemic nature of created existence, and the transcendent systemic distortions of sin that are attendant upon it, are matched by an alternative systemic dynamic

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from within the very weave of nature and history. The incarnation transforms history in a way that is fundamentally non-mythological, declaring the ordinary human scale of operations to be adequate for God’s healing, transforming purposes. An admittedly large-scale cosmic vision with a key place for human history does indeed play out here, though never apart from the day-by-day, lifetime-by-lifetime participation of flesh-and-blood human beings who know their limitations. In this way, a meaning for history is revealed that is not fully immanent within history. Telos is preserved, though not mythologically. The sovereignty of God over history is maintained, but only through the living out of history. Charles Taylor captures this insight in a discussion of postmodern suspicion about grand narratives. In place of any attempt to restore a lost foundationalism—which is the business of mythology, and is well represented in Big History and modern utopianism—Taylor points to a more epiphanic understanding. The ever-present God is only knowable in the human story through epiphanies, and not as the uninterrupted presence or confidently affirmed foundation that would accompany an inbuilt teleology.29 It is only through such moments of epiphany that a meaningful, directional narrative of human life can be imagined without falling into mythology, given modern Western humanity’s undeniable sense of divine absence and of lives regularly lacking closure. What it requires is that an unrealistic and overblown narrative gives way to the more subtly paradoxical and realistic medium of Theo-drama. The great twentieth-century Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar championed Theo-drama as a way of holding together the epic and the lyrical30—an epic of creation and salvation on the way to God’s future, yet mediated in its outworking by the lyrical response of individuals and communities of faith through inhabiting that epic. So, history is reimagined as a theatre offering a constant program of improvisation. It is a loosely scripted performance in which properly trained actors can incorporate whatever comes up in creative ways though without ever deflecting the Theo-drama from its goal.31 It calls for humility, attentiveness, relationality, and creativity, rather than mastery or premature closure. This reflects an Irenaean approach to the rigors of history that Hamilton favors. He is happy to use the traditional theological language of human fallenness as a way of talking about the weight of environmental adversity we face through our own culpability. But, with Irenaeus, Hamilton regards this as a process to be worked through on the way to a more mature human future, rather than a blight on humanity’s every aspiration.32 He concedes that perhaps humans always had to pass through the trials of the Anthropocene in order to arrive at a reconciliation between our limitless potentiality and appetites and the finitude of the Earth, a long and jagged “Fall” as an unavoidable stage

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in the moral progress of the species. The imposition of planetary boundaries by the Earth System in the Anthropocene, harsh as it will be, might be seen by its survivors as the path to true liberation, the cost of learning to live in solidarity with the Earth.33

Regarding what might and might not be possible, Sideris suggests that this “crisis may indeed create new stories, songs, and forms of religious expression that help safeguard the Earth and motivate affection and action. But these forms will emerge organically and spontaneously.”34 Now, can we imagine some concrete steps toward that outcome in light of the circumspect teleology that Theo-drama envisages? The best hope for our Earth System, and for us humans who are now part of it, is if we can craft a global culture of mutuality typified by gift exchange, beyond history’s usual norm of rivalry, violence, and environmental exploitation. Gift exchange begins with sacrifice. We give at some personal cost, not just in expectation of delayed compensation but because we know that our sacrifice leads to reciprocal self-sacrifice. And hence the rivalrous escalation to violence can be averted. In the Girardian conceptuality, as developed by Mark Anspach, this is how nonviolent reciprocity unseats violent reciprocity. Sacrifice in primal religions was recognized as involving either the immolation of a victim or the communal sharing of food, but in Christianity both are combined. Communal sharing of the Eucharistic meal emerges as the outworking of Jesus’s willingness to name and confront humanity’s sacrificial machinery for the sake of its innocent victims, in the cause of love and justice. His confrontation with these violent world-making powers led Jesus into the darkness of that sacrificial process himself, not at God’s hands but at human hands, as God’s vector for a reimagined human future. That future erupts into our history of structuring violence through the resurrection and it takes history on a new trajectory as the Holy Spirit, God’s advocate for the defense of victims, begins universalizing the Easter breakthrough. Hence Jesus’s cross is the crowning act in his life of liberating praxis, which exposes and begins to undo violent reciprocity. And for Anspach, this last act of vengeance becomes the first act of generosity.35 The ontological weight of today’s threatening future is now being overtaken by a different future made present by God in Christ. In Theo-dramatic terms, there is an eschatology that works in the present against the transcendent inevitabilities we face. That alternative future becomes present in a new way of being human together, which the Church is called to discover, celebrate, and exhibit. The Eucharist ritually expresses this eschatological calling. It perennially recapitulates humanity’s act of vengeance against Jesus while also enacting a new era of healthy mutuality through sharing in Jesus’s self-consecration—in his

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perpetual offering of himself to us on the altar in the gifts of bread and wine, inviting us to join in. Mark Anspach extends how both Bateson and Girard see such a nonviolent reciprocity catching on more widely. In the same way that mental patients are rescued from their defining isolation through early therapeutic intervention, aided by a wider reconnection with others that the asylum is meant to provide, so the Church’s prophetic and practical witness can lead fixated, delusional, and addictive human culture in the direction of its healing.36 CONCLUSION Instead of romantic or utopian narratives that are likely to do more harm than good, Theo-drama calls forth a culture of unpretentious collaborative agency centered on the Eucharist. The Church’s actual life thus becomes an ethical challenge to today’s culture of liberal autonomy and seemingly endless political agonistics.37 The agency that humans need to recover in the Anthropocene must involve an end to structuring violence and a culture of gift exchange. Only from such a perspective of redeemed, respectful openness and mutuality will we be in the right place to begin facing Anthropocene challenges together. Because face them together we must, since together we are now influencing the whole Earth System. Christians believe that Jesus Christ has provided the breakthrough sacrifice and reset the cultural system so that such new things become possible. Bateson saw the need for such a systemic reset, though of course he would not credit this particular means of achieving it. Still, he did admit that good religion, alongside everything else that expands consciousness and perspective, will play a necessary part in fostering that necessary reset. And the Theo-dramatic perspective on grace, with the ecclesiology and liturgiology it entails, certainly points to “good religion.” NOTES 1. Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2017), 52. 2. Lisa H. Sideris, Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 170. 3. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 79. 4. John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Penguin, 2008), 285–86.

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5. W. H. Auden. “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Poetry by Heart, accessed September 9, 2018, http:​//​www​.poetrybyheart​.org​.uk​/poems​/musee​-des​-beaux​-arts​/. 6. Michael Hamburger. “Lines on Breughel’s ‘Icarus,’” Time’s Flow Stemmed, last modified June 22, 2014, accessed September 9, 2018, http:​//​www​.timesflowstemmed​ .com​/2014​/06​/22​/lines​-on​-brueghels​-icarus​/. 7. See Jean-Pierre Dupuy, A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015), 27. 8. Dupuy, A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis, 56. 9. Dupuy, A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis, 58. 10. For an excellent biographical introduction to Bateson and an overview of his work, see Anthony Chaney, Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 11. Gregory Bateson et al., “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, ed. Gregory Bateson, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 201–27. 12. Bateson, “The Cybernetics of Self: A Theory of Alcoholism,” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 309–37. 13. Bateson, “Conscious Purpose versus Nature,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 438–39. 14. René Girard, with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (London: Continuum, 2003), 291–94. 15. René Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker, Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 216. 16. See, for example, René Girard, “Myth: The Invisibility of the Founding Murder,” in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 105–25. 17. Sideris, Consecrating Science, 199–202. 18. See, for example, René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014), 55. 19. See, for example, René Girard, with Pierpaolo Antonello and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (London: Continuum, 2007), 234–36. 20. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation, vol. 1 Human Nature (London: Nisbet, 1941), 267, 270–76. 21. Bateson, “Conscious Purpose versus Nature,” 440. 22. Bateson, “Conscious Purpose versus Nature.” 23. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 99. 24. Gray, Black Mass, 273. 25. Sideris, Consecrating Science, 200. 26. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 161. 27. Clive Hamilton, “Palaeo-Ontology,” unpublished paper, August 2018, 3.

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28. Dupuy, A Short Treatise, 61. 29. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 495. 30. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 2 Dramatis Personae: Man in God, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990), 55–56. 31. See Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (London: SPCK, 2004). 32. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 126. 33. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 161. 34. Sideris, Consecrating Science, 201. 35. Mark R. Anspach, Vengeance in Reverse: The Tangled Loops of Violence, Myth, and Madness, Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017), 20–22. 36. Anspach, Vengeance in Reverse, 64, 99. 37. See, for example, Stanley Hauerwas. “Is Democracy Capable of Cultivating a Good Life? What Liberals Should Learn from Shepherds,” ABC Religion and Ethics, November 2, 2016, http:​//​www​.abc​.net​.au​/religion​/articles​/2016​/11​/02​/4567512​.htm. See also Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).

Chapter 5

Thy Kingdom Come Bonhoeffer’s Earthly Christianity as Theology and Ethic Dianne Rayson

INTRODUCTION This chapter uses Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s (1906–1945) theology of “this worldliness” as a way for Christianity to negotiate the Anthropocene. It relies on Bonhoeffer’s notion of “worldly Christianity” as both an eschatological and an ethical approach to responsible action. In doing so, it challenges other theologies, such as that of a future, replacement Earth, and the right for domination over other species and landforms. These are theologies that appear to influence parts of the contemporary church, but also political responses, and hence inadequate action on climate change and biodiversity loss. A political theology adequate to the tasks of the Anthropocene might well consider these problematic eschatologies and Earth ethics and instead offer more sound understandings and approaches. If “Australia is a burning nation led by cowards,” as journalist Hugh Riminton wrote (even before the Black Summer bushfires had reached their full extent), then better theology can at least help reframe the Christian interface with climate change and potentially influence the discourse.1 This chapter uses two lectures by Bonhoeffer: “Thy Kingdom Come! The Prayer of the Church-Community for God’s Kingdom on Earth” (November 19, 1932) and “The Right to Self–Assertion” (February 4, 1932), and offers the idea of “Earthly Christianity” as a way of integrating ecological insights with theological and ethical ones. It reinterprets Bonhoeffer’s 73

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“worldly Christianity” for a new age and in doing so responds to Clive Hamilton’s interpretation of relationships described in Defiant Earth. WORLDLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE KINGDOM Bonhoeffer’s notion of “worldly Christianity” is found in his prison letter from April 30, 1944, but can be considered shorthand for his entire theology of a unified reality and the Christian life being centered in Christ who is in the world. In Tegel military interrogation prison, Bonhoeffer’s theological work led him to ask what such a “religionless” approach to Christ might look like: when the religious a priori is not assumed, when actions rather than words describe God’s interest in the world, and when Christ is “not the object of religion but . . . truly lord of the world.”2 He was looking forward to a time, post-Holocaust, when the church would be “religionless-worldly”— Christians who do not see themselves as somehow religiously privileged, but rather “belonging wholly to the world.”3 Belonging wholly to the world is a condition that is consistent with Bonhoeffer’s ontological and ethical frameworks. It rests on his insistence on the unified reality that exists entirely within Christ. “There are not two realities,” he says, but only one reality, and that is God’s reality revealed in Christ in the reality of the world. . . . The reality of Christ embraces the reality of the world in itself. The world has no reality of its own independent of God’s revelation in Christ. . . . Hence there are not two realms, but only the one realm of the Christ–reality [Christuswirklichkeit], in which the reality of God and the reality of the world are united.4

The Christian, then, belongs wholly to the world not just for the sake of its salvation, but because there is no other way of being. Such an ontology needs to be first recognized, and then manifest in the outward looking “church-forthe-world” practice, “realizing the divine will for others,” as stated in his first thesis.5 Elsewhere, Bonhoeffer quaintly described this as the “service of active helpfulness.”6 It goes to the claim of the Sermon on the Mount on the Christian in “the very midst of their responsible action.”7 Put simply, “we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings,” and “[a]ll Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action.”8 In this, Bonhoeffer rejects the retreat to piety but rather sees the Arkanzdisciplin—the arcane discipline, the mystery of the faith—as being the powerhouse from which social action is fired. This is what it means to be the church for others,



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which for Bonhoeffer is the only true definition of church.9 Indeed, the church is only the church when it exists, not for meeting its own spiritual needs, but rather, in attending to the needs of the world. Freedom to act is truly only freedom to act for others, with an implicit relationality. It reflects God’s own freedom to act, not for God’s own self but in binding God’s self to humankind.10 Accordingly, we who are disciples, following after Christ, are bound to act for others and by extension, for the whole world. In his lecture examining the Lord’s Prayer in 1932, Bonhoeffer examines the problem of piety and its dislocation from real-world engagement. He does this by asking, “what does it mean to pray for God’s kingdom to come?” and answers it by articulating two conditions that indicate a disbelief that God’s kingdom is already introduced in this world. Those two problems are otherworldliness and secularism and they both have implications for our relationship with Earth. The first is an eschatological challenge, the second an ethical one. I will examine these below. Using the term “kingdom of God” can risk perpetuating an ideal that might seem intrinsically hierarchical and male dominated. Feminist theologians have long described some of the problems associated with kingdom-thinking, at its base being intimately associated with the problem of authority.11 Bonhoeffer’s use of “the kingdom of God” is particular to his context, and secondly the type of kingdom he espouses is consistent with a biblical ideal that transcends the misuse of power. Writing in 1932 (originally for a women’s convention), Bonhoeffer was alert to the political ideology of National Socialism. Hitler had added a transcendent dimension to the völkish Germanism that had characterized the First and Second Reichs.12 The Third Reich was to represent the reunion of God and the chosen (Aryan) people, manifest in “rightful” world domination: the kingdom of God, with Hitler as its messiah.13 Bonhoeffer’s exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer is also a critique of Nazism. The kingdom of God that Bonhoeffer advocates is therefore anti-hierarchical and, consistent with his Christological theology, symbolizes a world in which power and authority are not misused. Instead, participating in Christ’s kingdom is to be self-emptying and being-for-others, mirroring Christ’s own kenosis. Flourishing in this kingdom is necessarily relational, hence the ideal of the creation stories of Genesis. Mark Brett, for example, has demonstrated that in the garden of creation the archetypal kingdom of God has humans and creatures in a kinship group derived from the land, and decidedly not hierarchical as evidenced, for example, in the use of “generations of heaven and earth” (Gen. 2:4a). Furthermore, Brett posits that reading Genesis as resistance literature sees the creation stories as subverting the hierarchy that is implicit in monarchy. He provides ample evidence of kingdom thinking that subverts human domination: prophecies such as Hosea 2:18 work to undo the horror of domination over creatures (cf Gen 1:28–29); human

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expansion “from sea to sea” was not envisaged to involve social conflict; and the wisdom of the serpent satirizes the acquired wisdom of the humans. Even a hierarchy of men over women is debunked in the text, according to Brett.14 All this goes to an understanding of the kingdom of God that is consistent with an ecotheology of relationships and frees up such a use of “kingdom of God” from its detractors. TWO PROBLEMS: OTHERWORLDLINESS AND SECULARISM “This-worldliness” expresses the spatiality and temporality of God’s kingdom, inaugurated and manifest here and now: that Christ is present in the world and drawing Earth and her creatures into a realm of governance and flourishing. Otherworldliness, by contrast, and borrowed from Nietzsche, is what Bonhoeffer calls the “devious trick of being religious” and as such preempts his later promotion of religionless Christianity.15 “Otherworldliness,” he says, affords a splendid environment in which to live. When life begins to be difficult and oppressive, one leaps boldly into the air and soars, relieved and worry free, in the so-called eternal realm.16

As convenient as it might be to abandon the Earth that is ravaged by global warming and climate disruption and escape to another time and place (be it heaven or a new Earth), for Bonhoeffer such “cowardly” otherworldliness jeopardizes both human relationships with God and with Earth.17 Writing to his fiancée from prison, Bonhoeffer mused, “I fear that Christians who venture to stand on Earth on only one leg will stand in heaven on only one leg too,”18 meaning that a full engagement with the world is what is required to ensure salvation. In that same letter he spoke of a faith in the future—their shared future. He wrote: I don’t mean the faith that flees the world, but the faith that endures in the world and loves and remains true to that world in spite of all the hardships it brings us. Our marriage must be a “yes” to God’s earth.19

Such a “yes” to God’s Earth is consistent with the theological premise that Christ who has entered history remains present throughout creation. “Cowardly fleeing to other worlds” implies that Christ is not present in this one and that Christ has not validated all things material.20 Therefore, Bonhoeffer states in “Thy Kingdom Come” that otherworldliness means that we no longer believe in God’s kingdom at all. Bonhoeffer develops the



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notion of worldliness in his incomplete Ethics. “Faith in the revelation of ultimate reality in Jesus Christ,” he says, overcomes faulty divisions between the ultimate and penultimate, sacred and secular, or the temporal and spatial boundaries between this world and the “next.”21 “[T]here is no real Christian existence outside the reality of the world and no real worldliness outside the reality of Jesus Christ.”22 Therefore, according to Bonhoeffer’s theology of such a “Christ-reality,” being worldly does not separate us from Christ, and being Christian does not separate us from the world. The key ramification of otherworldliness is its inherent betrayal of Earth. Not only does otherworldliness focus on a future, superior time and place at the expense of the present, penultimate world, but it deprives us of our full restoration with Earth, our Mother. (Bonhoeffer quotes Sir. 40:1b, “from the day they come forth from their mother’s womb / until the day they return to the mother of all the living” in “Thy Kingdom Come” and elsewhere.) The Lord’s Prayer continues and as the words, “on Earth as it is in heaven” are prayed, the Christian enters into an agreement to participate in the restoration of the Earth, to realize the creation ideal of tilling the garden and calling to the animals. True flourishing in the new kingdom of God, which has been brought about through Christ’s entering into history, involves the manifestations of reconciliation. These include reconciliation among ourselves and, important, with Earth and her creatures. In Bonhoeffer’s penultimate world, humans might help manifest the new kingdom by learning to listen to the groans of Earth and her creatures. We might work to return to equity, order, and homeostasis. The ethical frames for doing so is something I will describe later in this chapter, but these are not the acts within the realm of private piety. They are embodied, embedded acts of those of us with both feet on the ground. Bonhoeffer’s focus on a Christological materiality negates the private piety that withdraws from the world, spiritualizes it, and instead focuses on the mysterious otherworld. The second problem that Bonhoeffer describes in “Thy Kingdom Come” is quite the opposite. If otherworldliness is too much spirituality, then secularism is too little. It is what Bonhoeffer says is “the Christian renunciation of God as Lord of the Earth.”23 Instead of retreat to a far-off future world, Christian secularism sees the fight for Christianizing the world as a real one, one of “exuberant human zeal” on God’s behalf.24 It is expressed, for example, in the type of evangelicalism that seeks to build religious communities of virtue that might be godly, but not worldly: they lose sight of the very Earth in which they exist. Christianity that is divorced from Mother Earth is also estranged from the Father.

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Seeking God’s kingdom, then, would have the Christian pressing into both sets of relationships: with God and Earth. This is possible via the immanence of Christ. In Bonhoeffer’s words: He who loves God, loves God as the Lord of the Earth as it is; he who loves the Earth, loves it as God’s Earth. He who loves God’s kingdom loves it entirely as God’s kingdom, and he loves it wholly as God’s kingdom on Earth. And this because the king of the kingdom is the creator and preserver of the Earth, who has blessed the Earth and taken us from earth.25

To this point in the discussion, the theological options involving worldliness and relationship with Earth have been addressed. This serves as a foundation for interrogating the ethical implications, which is indeed how Bonhoeffer commences the lecture: We are hostile to the Earth, because we want to be better than it, or we are hostile to God, because God robs us of the Earth, our mother. We flee the power of the Earth, or we hold hard and fast to it. Either way we are not the wanderers who love the Earth that bears them. . . . Only wanderers of this kind, who love the Earth and God as one, can believe in God’s kingdom.26

Hostility to Earth is addressed by Bonhoeffer in another text from 1932, “The Right to Self-Assertion” wherein he discusses the human attempt at mastery over both nature and technology.27 In this piece, Bonhoeffer addresses the West’s history of war, the manifestation of an obsession with grasping at mastery. The great delusion is that while we imagine we control both nature and technology, they in fact control us. This was clear to Bonhoeffer, living in the shadows of two World Wars and under the curse of technology’s monstrous part in the violence they perpetrated. Later, Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature would make explicit the intersection between the violence of exerting power (or attempting to) over nature and that of exerting power over women.28 I have made the case elsewhere that Bonhoeffer sets much of the groundwork for such an argument in “The Right to Self-Assertion.”29 The attempt at mastery occurs because human beings stand outside nature; they “stand facing [it], ruling and conquering it.”30 In short, Bonhoeffer is making the parallel argument of the problem of Biblical endorsement of “dominion” versus the empirical evidence of “domination” of the natural world. Brett addresses this in his Genesis exposition, and Hamilton sees the problem of domination as key to the current crisis. He makes the point that, while we can dominate other creatures, we simply cannot dominate Earth and the forces of nature, despite our attempts to do so.31 Geotechnical proposals to



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solve the problem created by the attempt to master nature simply perpetuate the delusion, and are the ultimate demonstration of hubris. The complicated relationship of humans with the natural world is caught between a biophilic love of creation and the historic abuse of natural resources and mistreatment of fellow Earthlings: “The human path to nature is a broken one. It refuses him everything; for that reason he must extract it from it against its will; for the sake of this struggle he loves it.”32 Bonhoeffer enlists hyperbole to make the case. Even so, the anthropological evidence is that even primal cultures, which live in apparent equilibrium with the rhythms of the natural world, when faced with increasing affluence, population growth, and technology (the drivers of the Great Acceleration) have been unable to maintain the harmony of their former state.33 Cultures enter the spiral of domination, or attempted mastery, with resultant environmental degradation, pollution, and suffering of other species. Hamilton not only confirms the results of attempted mastery, but sees the Anthropocene as complete rupture from the stability and rhythms of the Holocene. In such a rupture, Earth can no longer be understood as “Mother” because she is now “a new kind of Earth,” one who “opens her arms . . . not to embrace but to crush us.”34 In Hamilton’s view, if the fear of God won’t restrain humans then perhaps Earth will. The “uncontrollable powers of nature unleashed” on us force us out of relationship and into what Hamilton calls “new anthropocentrism,” where agency is directed to “save ourselves, from ourselves and from nature, knowing that every disturbance to the Earth System reduces the chances of doing so.”35 Old anthropocentrism, he says, is pictured as the world revolving about humans. The new anthropocentrism might be pictured as double planets—Planet Earth and Planet Humans— revolving around each other in mutual dependence. Hamilton seems to reject the nurturing, comforting notions of Mother Earth for the “ornery”: a defiant Earth fighting for her own existence and disregarding the human consequences—just as humans have treated Earth. The dichotomy of a nurturing or defiant Earth is both useful and problematic. It describes well the state of instability in which we find ourselves in the Anthropocene, a period when Earth attempts homeostasis, but tipping points have passed and runaway sequelae have been triggered. Any new state of stability “after” this disruption is a long way off, and in geological time that may well be long after humans and perhaps even life as we know it has ceased on Earth. This depiction is also troublesome in that, in at least Bonhoeffer’s interpretation, the notion of Mother Earth is more nuanced. In Creation and Fall, God is seen to love God’s work “and therefore wills to uphold and preserve it.”36 “Creation and preservation are two sides of the same activity of God,” Bonhoeffer says.37 God’s commitment to creation and preservation remain unchanged even in the post-lapsarian state, when blessing and curse are

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mixed in what he calls “the ambiguous twilight of creation.”38 In the middle period between creation and eschaton, the penultimate to the ultimate, Earth remains the created home for the ecology of life.39 Earth is the ground beneath our feet that captures us as we plummet through space and through the abyss which is sin.40 Earth is therefore grace, holding and preserving us to the extent possible as humans are limited by sin. Humans are hostile to Earth, either “flee[ing] the power of Earth or hold[ing] hard and fast to it.”41 Bonhoeffer maintains that we can only believe in God’s kingdom if we love the Earth and God as one, meaning that our love of God cannot be divorced from our love of Earth or made at Earth’s expense. It is love of Earth as Mother that truly characterizes the Christian response to the knowledge and grace of God. Such a love truly grounds the human experience and allows for the materiality of Christian expression that Bonhoeffer advocates. “This-worldliness” incorporates many aspects, including the literal grounding in the soil from which we are derived. It is this-worldly in both time and space, reflecting the unified reality that is in Christ. For Bonhoeffer, the incarnation is both a demonstration of Christ’s kenosis and necessary prelude to the crucifixion and resurrection and it is, at a higher level, an indication of Christ’s eternal immanence. The Word made flesh is a microcosm of Christ already throughout creation. Christ incarnate validates not only the body of Jesus, but all bodies. Since all bodies come from and return to Earth, the Mother, Christ’s materiality in Jesus affirms Earth despite the “ambiguity” of world. Ornery or nurturing? Earth is both. Hamilton interprets the human in relation to Earth as a fundamentally different relation to that toward the other creatures. Hostility and attempted mastery of Earth has not resulted in domination at all, but rather has shifted “the geological arc of the planet,” spiraling further out of control.42 Yet, human dominance of animals has been more apparent: domesticated species to the extreme degree of industrialized farming of livestock. The other implication is the human cause of the mass extinction of species: those not desirable as farmed food and therefore not instrumentalized, not protected. Perhaps at least partly to blame for these fractured relationships is the poor theology of dominion in itself. The Genesis 1:26 fiat for dominion over the fish, birds, cattle, and animals somehow came to be taken as permission, no less exhortation, to dominate and exploit all of life, nature, and Earth herself. The naming of animals described in Genesis 2:18, an act that establishes relationship, intimacy, and perhaps even shared communication, becomes subverted into a Linnaean scientific classification system of dominance. I can hardly speak of humans, creatures, and Earth without relying on “relationships” to account for our interactions with each other. The theology of imago Dei and the immanence of Christ are fundamental to a Christian ontology of what it means to be human. We are relational, ecological creatures



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precisely because we are created by and in the image of such a God. We are taken as soil from Mother Earth to be shaped and formed, just as the other creatures are, and we return to soil and return to the cycle in death. Christ’s incarnation affirms and validates the materiality of bodies. A Christology of immanence takes Christ to be in and through all of creation, allowing us to recognize the face of Christ in the other: in our fellow humans, creatures, landscapes, and Earth. The more we appreciate the science of ecology, the intricacy of networks of symbiotic and complex relationships, the better we understand imago Dei and our own relationality. It is only within this context that responsible action makes sense and it is only within an eschatology of a coming kingdom that any agency in the Anthropocene can provide hope. THE ETHICS OF EARTHLY CHRISTIANITY Following Bonhoeffer’s incarnational theology and his assessment of the rift between humans and Earth and her creatures, we might look to Bonhoeffer for an approach to a suitable Christian ethic as part of a more comprehensive and integrated way of framing Christianity in the Anthropocene. In a development of Bonhoeffer’s aphoristic phrase, worldly Christianity, I have described “Earthly Christianity” as a way to incorporate a contemporary ecological understanding of the biosphere as well as the inherent human responsibility in the Anthropocene.43 Hamilton certainly affirms human responsibility, despite seeing it outside the framework of intrinsic relationality. Responsibility sets us apart from other creatures, and as Hamilton suggests, “our power gives us greater responsibility than we have ever had to bear.”44 For Bonhoeffer, responsible action is at the heart of Christianity, just as Christ’s own responsible action is the foundation of creation and redemption. Bonhoeffer’s entire theological corpus might be expressed by Christus in Mundo, Christus pro Mundo, an extension of God’s acts of mercy in the world, generally accepted as pro Me.45 “Christ in the world and for the world” captures both God’s historical intervention and God’s intention, not only for the individual but for the Earth and all her creatures. In turn, this reflects the inherent interdependence of creation or what we might call the ecological turn in ontology. Bonhoeffer’s reliance on sociality as the foundational human and thus Christian trait is consistent with, despite predating, the ecological turn. Celia Deane-Drummond has affirmed that the recognition of sociality within the human community is part of a wider recognition of the sociality of all things. In this way mutual relationships are not narrowly defined, but both ecological and cosmological.46

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Extending the inherent human sociality, in itself derived from the trinitarian Creator, beyond the human community recognizes the horizontal relationships humans have throughout the biosphere and to Earth herself. Accordingly, our agency and responsibility extend to our fellow creatures, animate and inanimate, not as stewardship or dominion, but rather as an extension of relationality and mutuality. As sentient creatures with particular agency, human efforts must now be directed at restoring equilibrium in the world on the basis of recognizing our own moral and ethical imperatives, regardless of sentience or responsibility which may or may not be evident in Others. We take responsible action, not as Hamilton would have it, in a fight with Earth, but rather, because of our inherent relationships within Earth. Bonhoeffer provides further direction in relation to ethical action in a time of crisis. The notion of Stellvertretung, a legal term that has been translated as vicarious representative action, might frame Christian action. Bonhoeffer used Stellvertretung firstly to discuss Christ’s kenotic and redemptive actions: Christ stands in the place of all humankind, takes on guilt, and delivers forgiveness for sins.47 Christian Stellvertretung similarly “stands in the place of others,” or acts for the benefit and sake of others. In doing so, it aims to draw others into the love of God so that the entire Earth community might flourish. The kingdom of God might be characterized by an ecology of benefitting others. The second notion is Sachgemäßheit, deeming that actions be appropriate or commensurate to the particular context. Sachgemäßheit goes some way to explaining the ability of an apparent pacifist to participate in the conspiracy to remove Hitler. It is a type of ethical proportionism that accommodates the demands of the real world, paying close attention to action required in any unique moment in history.48 Bonhoeffer describes this as “the relationship of the responsible person to the world of things.”49 “The more purely one serves a cause,” he says, “free from secondary personal agendas, the more it regains its original relation to God and human beings, and the more it frees us from ourselves.”50 Restoring the original relationship, in this case, between humans and Earth, based on our responsibility in Christ, is what is at issue.51 Together these two ethical frames support the action implicit in an Earthly Christianity: action that is necessary for the sake of flourishing of the entire Earth community, or at least that serves to halt the worst of the warming and disruption, and to slow the mass extinction event. Such action does not serve to absolve guilt, but as in Bonhoeffer’s own testimony, might rather bring guilt upon the head of the actor. The conspirators of Nazi Germany were prepared to be found guilty by God, but acted “for the sake of Germany.”52 At the same time, Bonhoeffer remained confident in the mercy of God despite whatever guilt his actions might ostensibly accrue.



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The higher imperative was to use agency and direct it outward for the sake of others, drawing them into the flourishing of the new kingdom. The ethical demands of the Anthropocene are so urgent and seemingly hopeless that maintaining hope in the coming kingdom of God can seem like forced optimism in the face of impending doom. Praying for God’s kingdom to come is indeed an act of faith, just as it is a commitment to action. Prayer and action, Bonhoeffer says, are what will define the worldly Christianity required in a post-Holocaust age: “All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action.”53 Bonhoeffer continues, in the letter from prison for his nephew’s baptism (May 1944): The day will come—when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed. It will be in a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious language, but liberating and redeeming like Jesus’s language, . . . a language proclaiming that God makes peace with humankind and that God’s kingdom is drawing near.54

Prayer and action must also define Earthly Christianity if it is to have any authenticity in the Anthropocene. The ethical response taken by the church— in solidarity with the vulnerable, the at-risk species, the acidifying oceans, and the polluted skies—in itself becomes the “new, nonreligious, liberating, and redeeming language” of Earthly Christianity. We speak the words of liberation precisely through our ethical agency. The disciplines of prayer and meditation become the powerhouse of this action, conducted in privacy of the closed room. Our actions manifest the responsibility that lies between this silence and screaming we find ourselves in as we pray the Lord’s Prayer.55 While Bonhoeffer was writing before our present crisis and before the word ecology was yet in use, his theology preempts the ecological turn and his ethics provides the blueprint for Earthly Christianity in this age. To let Bonhoeffer have the last word: Those who would abandon the earth, who would flee the crisis of the present, will lose all the power still sustaining them by means of eternal, mysterious powers. The earth remains our mother just as God remains our father, and only those who remain true to the mother are placed by her into the father’s arms. Earth and its distress—that is the Christian’s Song of Songs.56

NOTES 1. Hugh Riminton, 10 News, November 19, 2019.

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2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, DBWE vol. 8, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Isabel Best, Lisa E. Dahill, Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), 364. 3. Bonhoeffer, DBWE vol. 8, 363–64. 4. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, DBWE vol. 6, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West and Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 58. 5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, DBWE vol. 1, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krass and Nancy Lukens (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 188. 6. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together; Prayerbook of the Bible, DBWE vol. 5, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly, trans. Daniel W. Bloesch and James H. Burtness (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996),100. 7. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 6, 243. 8. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 8, 389. 9. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 8, 501. 10. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3, DBWE vol. 3, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Douglas Stephen Bax (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), 62–63. 11. Rosemary Radford Ruether, The Radical Kingdom: The Western Experience of Messianic Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); Pamela D. H. Cochran, “Scripture, Feminism, and Sexuality,” in Christian Theologies of Scripture: A Comparative Introduction, ed. Justin S. Holcomb, A Comparative Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2006); and Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay 'On the Trinity' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 12. Stefan Heep, “The Long Way of Political Theology to Religious ‘Germanism’ or How National Socialism Could Be Perceived as Fulfillment of Christianity,” Politics, Religion and Ideology, Published online June 28, 2020. 1–26. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​ .1080​/21567689​.2020​.1786684.. 13. Heep, “The Long Way of Political Theology to Religious ‘Germanism’ or How National Socialism Could Be Perceived as Fulfillment of Christianity.” 14. Mark G. Brett, Genesis: Procreation and the Politics of Identity, Old Testament Readings (London: Routledge, 2000). 15. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932–1933, DBWE vol. 12, ed. Larry L. Rasmussen, trans. Isabel Best and David Higgins (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 286. 16. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 12. 17. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 12, 289. 18. Ruth-Alice von Bismarck and Ulrich Kabitz, eds., Love Letters from Cell 92: The Correspondence between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Maria Von Wedemeyer 1943–45 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), 64. 19. von Bismarck and Kabitz, Love Letters from Cell 92. Original italics. 20. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 12, 289. 21. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 6, 61. 22. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 6, 61. 23. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 12, 288. 24. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 12.



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25. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 12, 268. 26. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 12, 286. 27. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ecumenical, Academic, and Pastoral Work: 1931–1932, DBWE vol. 11, eds. Victoria J. Barnett, Mark S. Brocker and Michael B. Lukens, trans. Anne Schmidt-Lange, with Isabel Best, Nicolas Humphrey and Marion Pauck (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 246–57. 28. Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, ed. Teresa Brennan, Feminism for Today (London: Routledge, 1993). 29. Dianne Rayson, “Bonhoeffer’s Christology in a Warming World: Ecotheological Conversations with Feminist Theology,” SeaChanges: Journal of Women Scholars of Religion and Theology 7 (2016); Dianne Rayson, “Women’s Bodies and War: Bonhoeffer on Self-Assertion,” in Rape Culture, Gender Violence, and Religion, ed. Carolyn Blyth, Emily Colgan, and Katie Edwards (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 30. Rayson, “Women’s Bodies and War,” 252. 31. Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2017). 32. Hamilton, Defiant Earth. 33. Carl Folke et al., “Reconnecting to the Biosphere,” Ambio 40 (2011); Victor Galaz, Global Environmental Governance, Technology and Politics: The Anthropocene Gap (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2014). 34. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 48. 35. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 49–50. 36. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 3, 45. 37. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 3. 38. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 3,104, 129. 39. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 6, 146. 40. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 3, 36. 41. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 12, 286 42. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 43. 43. Dianne Rayson, “Earthly Christianity: Bonhoeffer’s Contribution to Ecotheology and Ecoethics,” The Bonhoeffer Lagacy: An International Journal 6, no. 1 (2018). 44. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 52. 45. Clifford J. Green, “Christus in Mundo, Christus pro Mundo: Bonhoeffer’s Foundations for a New Christian Paradigm,” in Bonhoeffer, Religion and Politics. Fourth International Bonhoeffer Colloquium, ed. Christiane Tietz and Jens Zimmerman, International Bonhoeffer Interpretations (IBI) 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012). 46. Celia Deane-Drummond, A Handbook in Theology and Ecology (London: SCM, 1996), 55. 47. See, for example, Bonhoeffer, DBWE 1, 120; DBWE 6, 232. 48. Terence J. Lovat, “Aristotelian Ethics and Habermasian Critical Theory: A Conjoined Force for Proportionism in Ethical Discourse and Roman Catholic Moral Theology,” Australian eJournal of Theology 3 (2004).

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49. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 6, 270. 50. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 6. 51. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 6, 271. 52. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, rev. and ill. ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 702. 53. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 8, 389. 54. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 8, 390. 55. Bonhoeffer, DBWE 12, 289. 56. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928–1931, DBWE vol. 10, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 377–78.

Chapter 6

Anthropocene and Ecclesia The Church as a Political Swarm Stephen Pickard

PERENNIAL QUESTIONS FOR A NEW TIME Immanuel Kant’s three questions seem as apposite now as they have ever been: What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope for? The advent of the Anthropocene, precipitated by the Great Acceleration of the mid twentieth century, is the new period in planetary history in which these fundamental questions press in upon us. The most haunting of these questions may well be the third, “what may I hope for?” It is certainly the question with which Clive Hamilton concludes his own inquiries in the third of his trilogy on the Anthropocene, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene.1 It is the very bleakness of the outlook for the future of humanity and the planet that provokes Hamilton’s question. The reason being that the “disturbance to the functioning of the Earth System is now to a greater or lesser degree irreversible.”2 Granted “irreversible,” then to what degree? Not only is this question difficult to answer, we have to reckon with the reality, as Hamilton argues, that “to a disconcerting degree, some of the biggest ‘decisions’ [about the possibilities for the world] have been taken out of human hands and given back to the caprice of nature.”3 The future is not only bleak but murky from the standpoint of the human being such that “we must live in the half-light of not-knowing, in the new atmosphere of endangerment.”4 We must reckon with the reality that, “to learn to live in the doubt on a capricious Earth may take generations.”5 In the epoch of the Anthropocene, Kant’s questions remain firmly on the table and each involves the other. The question: “What 87

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may I hope for?” prompts the very practical question, “what must I do?” and this in turn presses the question of knowledge itself. All three questions come to the fore with a new force and urgency and answers are not immediately forthcoming. This new uncertainty gives rise to “environmental panic” coupled with a “turn to the apocalyptic,” “acclimatization,” and “climate apathy,” all of which David Wallace-Wells associates with “engineering new indifference.”6 This author states that “widespread alarm will shape our ethical impulses toward one another, and the politics that emerge from those impulses is among the more profound questions being posed by the climate to the planet of people it envelops.”7 One of the ironies of this alarm is that it can lead to “normalizing climate suffering at the same pace as we accelerate it.”8 This appears to be a time-honored way by which human suffering might be navigated “without crumbling collectively in despair” and continuing as if the situation did not urgently require responsible moral and ethical engagement. Normalizing climate suffering may not be paired with climate denialism, though it is complicit with a “passive nihilism” which accords with a “formal acceptance of the fact of rapid climate change accompanied by a residual, nagging sense that the world ought not to be organized so that capitalism is a destructive geologic force.”9 The political theorist William Connolly notes that, while the “sources of passive nihilism are multiple,” there are many under its sway who “refute denialism but slide away from stronger action.”10 This, says Connolly, is “the contemporary dilemma.” Connolly recommends a fresh alignment of differing constituencies pursuing “affinities of spirituality across differences in creed during a dangerous time.”11 This assessment raises a question: What consequences might this new epoch have for the way humans live responsibly as planetary beings? For the Christian theological tradition, a particular question arises regarding the society named Church: How might the global ecclesial body join in responsible action as citizens for whom the earth is home? I pursue these questions in terms of the Church as an ecclesio-political swarming body. HUMAN BEINGS ENTANGLED IN THE UNIVERSE A major challenge for the human species in the epoch of the Anthropocene is to identify what it means to be an “earthling” within the cosmos.12 I deliberately draw attention to this universal setting because it resonates with an ancient understanding of the earthling or groundling as a being of the cosmos located on Earth (Gen. 1–2). This primal setting depicts a context for the human creature that is not simply the blue planet but the immense expanse and reach of the cosmos, seemingly infinite in all directions.13 In the Christian

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theological tradition, this context has been associated with an understanding of the human being as bearer of the imago Dei, i.e., human beings in the image of God. This high view of the human being—some have said unique standing within the cosmos—has become controversial in modern times because of its association with an unwarranted and privileged exceptionalism.14 I will return to this aspect later in relation to the ethical basis for political action. For the moment, I want to focus my discussion of the human being in relation to the Anthropocene with reference to Connolly’s illuminating and at times somewhat speculative thought regarding the nature of human entanglement in his book mentioned earlier, Facing the Planetary. I do so because I believe his approach provides a helpful orientation for the kind of sociality relevant to a political ethic for the ecclesia of God I want to develop in the latter sections of this chapter. In the first instance, Connolly’s discussion of the concept of the Anthropocene is instructive regarding his overall approach to human life on the planet. He notes that the word “Anthropocene” is “first and foremost a geological term set in relation to the trends and periodic volatilities of other geological periods.”15 (WC 32). Fundamental to Connolly’s understanding of the Anthropocene is his rejection of the assumption of gradualism in nature. Rather he draws attention to the “bumpiness” and volatility of “climate, ocean currents, glacial flows, bacterial crossings, and species evolution before the advent of the Anthropocene.”16 The image he has in mind emerges from his reflections on the book of Job which lead him to liken the bumpy and volatile planetary forces to a “volcano God” that “is closer to a lava flow bubbling along implacably with intense heat and energy.”17 In other words, he rejects the notion of “slow, gradual, or providential planetary processes before capitalist states became entangled with them.”18 Instead he calls attention to “self-induced and intersecting amplifiers of multiple sorts in several nonhuman processes.”19 Accordingly, “the world is neither our oyster nor our servant. Rather we inhabit it, and we are inhabited by its multiple stabilities and volatilities.”20 What is different and marks out the Anthropocene as such is that the history of bumpiness of geological history is now enmeshed with radically new upheavals and volatility associated with the forces of “extractive capitalism.”21 Connolly states: “To explore the Anthropocene is thus also to connect a variety of self-organizing processes that preceded it, periodically tipping over a short period of time, to the new triggers of capitalist and communist projects of mastery over the earth.”22 When the triggers join forces the results far exceed the initial triggers. Accordingly, for Connolly naming the Anthropocene does not accord with a new era of human mastery, nor “perverse human interventions” into otherwise “gradual and self-maintaining” forces.23 Rather, it is to challenge

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what he terms “human exceptionalism by coming to terms with bumpy processes of planetary self-organization that interact with each other and with human cultures.” It is also to name the “perils” of extractive capitalism [ugly, exploitative, and dangerous] associated with Euro-American regimes premised on mastery over nature, which now damage “regions that did not initiate these processes.”24 While thus resisting any notion of “generic human responsibility” for planetary behavior he argues for an “entangled humanism.”25 We are entangled with the planet and its forces. “The human estate is entangled with diverse beings and forces following trajectories of their own.”26 His point being that we are unavoidably enmeshed with the forces of the planet, and further, that our remarkable capabilities for perverse human interventions, when combined with nonhuman forces has set the planet on a trajectory that threatens life as we know it.27 Connolly imaginatively invokes the book of Job: “the Anthropocene has become the Whirlwind of today.”28 Entanglement minimally calls attention to the need for a much closer interaction between the work of “new earth scientists” and work in the social sciences and humanities.29 In short, “the ghosts still haunting the old separation between the humanities and earth sciences must be exorcised.”30 This may serve to displace the triadic viselike grip of “mastery, sociocentricism and human exceptionalism.”31 Entangled humanism runs deep. Connolly draws on important discussions in biological sciences recognizing that we need a model of species evolution “that appreciates the complexity of these processes while emphasizing numerous entanglements of human beings with a vast array of beings and force fields that qualify its sense of uniqueness . . . its modern sense of mastery.”32 We may be distinct, but human beings are not unique—“many of our prized capacities are also operative to some degree in other species, and the most vaunted capacities are entangled with multiple other beings and forces that allow them to be.”33 Connolly explores immanent creative evolution where creativity, agency, and purposive elements (that “sink deeply into evolutionary process”) embrace in differentiated ways biological work in symbiogenesis, evolution, and the impact of external forces upon the internal dynamics of evolution. The whole thing is one of complex entanglement and presumes a somewhat inchoate new naturalism that is both immanent, irreducible, and the result of an embedded teleo-dynamism. Connolly’s inquiries lead him beyond biology, the human sciences, and culture to examine the often strong demarcation between “life and nonlife.”34 The precise nature of such connectedness between organic life and non-life remains speculative at best. Connolly’s interest is focused on the “selforganizing systems of the Anthropocene” and its “powers”; specifically “the vexed and controversial question of whether inorganic processes express degrees of feeling, striving, or experience and to think about processes highly

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pertinent to life during the Anthropocene.”35 Connolly draws attention to the self-organizing capabilities of planetary processes (e.g., the ocean conveyor system) that point to “forces and amplifiers that generate periodic tipping points.”36 Entangled humanism is extensive, and purposive teleo-dynamism elements can be probed beyond the usual domains of organic life. “The idea is that the earth and cultural sciences need each other, that the boundaries between them are better construed as porous membranes that flow in two directions than either floodgates flowing in one direction or iron walls of separation.”37 ADAPTIVITY AND ETHICS The reality of human entanglement, as outlined by Connolly, is closely tied to notions of adaptivity in nature and human life and has implications for an ethic of responsible action, i.e., Kant’s question: What must I do? I would make a number of observations and comments. First, when the dualisms that haunt us begin to break down or are subject to recalibration (Earth sciences/culture; mind/body; organic/inorganic) this impacts how we understand the dynamics of adaptivity and the possibilities it creates for purposive action that is orientated to the well-being of the planet. Adaptivity is a necessary corollary of notions of emergence, species evolution and creativity, bumpy temporalities, the controversial theme of pan-experientialism, even prior to considerations of human and cultural adaptive capacities. Moreover, adaptation is a layered concept. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defined autonomous adaptation as “adaptation that does not constitute a conscious response to climate stimuli but is triggered by ecological changes in natural systems and by market or welfare changes in human systems.”38 Such autonomous adaptation might be purposeful or unintentional, reactive or proactive, independent or not with respect to external inputs. Planned adaptation is “the result of a deliberate policy decision, based on awareness that conditions have changed or are about to change and that action is required to return to, maintain, or achieve a desired state.”39 Second, adaptivity is not a unidirectional dynamic but multidirectional with feedback loops. In species evolution, for example, developments in other organic environments, nonorganic forces, and processes constantly interact with emergent properties of nonhuman life and this has the potential to influence not simply the evolution of new forms of nonhuman life, but presumably to exert a retroactive force/influence into other domains of nonhuman and nonorganic processes. Adaptivity is a feature of the full spectrum of planetary

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existence, notwithstanding a minimalist account of agency and purposiveness at the more nonorganic domains. Third, the concept of “autochthonous adaptation” is important. Autochthonous means “native to the soil” or “native to the place where found” and in biology “native to or produced within a system.”40 Autochthonous adaptation has four features: 1) it is deliberate; 2) refers to individuals and small groups; 3) is specific to a locality; and 4) occurs within a local system, and thus is not independent of external inputs. In this fourfold sense, autochthonous adaptation is a derivative of cultural adaptation. The point about autochthonous adaptation is that it occurs everywhere regardless of planned adaptation, sometimes in synergy or conflict with planned adaptation.41 Moreover, it is also apparent across the globe that “planned adaptation to environmental change is either absent, only weakly implemented or, in some cases, even backfires.”42 The result is that autochthonous adaptation is the major, and likely, defining role in “our community and common futures.”43 Critical here is the reality that adaptation is never simply top down but “continuously emerges from the micro and meso-organizational levels of human society.”44 Hence, “‘managing’ adaptation . . . necessarily involves connecting these levels and their constituent actors, pathways, and institutional nodes.”45 Not surprisingly there is an inescapable ethical and political dimension to identifying and promoting adaptation pathways.46 Fourth, the intensity and extent of entanglement of humanism suggests that human beings are already predisposed toward and necessarily enmeshed in auto-adaptive regulative dynamics in relation to a raft of planetary perturbations (both gradual and volatile) in such events as climate change, ocean currents, glacial flows, bacterial crossings, and tectonic movements. Humans, by virtue of their placement within cosmic and planetary structures and processes belong to complex adaptive relationships. Moreover, in line with the second point above, human beings are involved in feedback loops and retroactive powers in relation to other planetary forces. This is precisely the issue of human impact on the climate. Human actions, born of a presumed exceptionalism that manifests itself in terms of mastery and domination over planetary life, have materially altered activity in the nonorganic domain. And they have done this to such an extent that climate processes have adapted in such a manner that a new climate trajectory has been initiated. Fifth, this new climate reality (the epoch of the Anthropocene) requires a new kind of adaptivity from human beings in the form of new kinds of ethico-political responses. What this might be, what time frame is required, what impact it may have, what it might require of humanity in multiple dimensions (e.g. economic, political, spiritual), and what kind of human being and community is possible on a future planet are all urgent questions for the agenda of entangled humanity. And the answers are opaque at best.

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And all such questions are never without their ethical, moral, and spiritual dimensions and challenges. However, sixth, to the extent that entanglement theory encompasses a rejection of “human exceptionalism” it involves some ambiguities and difficulties when it comes to the ethical basis for purposive human action. Entanglement theory embeds human beings in irreducible complexities associated with an undifferentiated relational ontology. To this extent, the human creature is entirely unexceptional as a life-form. Anthropocentric and ethnocentric relations are thereby neutralized. A question arises as to whether or not this leads to a “degraded human subject” and possible “annihilation of human agency.”47 The rejection of human exceptionalism may achieve far more than it intends. Entanglement theory may not be necessarily antithetical to human exceptionalism, per se, but might offer insights regarding false and dangerous kinds of exceptionalism. This leads to a seventh and final reflection at this point concerning the question of ethics. As it currently stands, entanglement theory, insofar as it is associated with human exceptionalism, does not provide a coherent basis for an ethic of purposive human action to counter degraded forms of human behavior that feed the current trajectory of the Anthropocene epoch. In this respect, the UK academic Eva Giraud argues that there needs to be “a shift in conceptual focus from an ethics born of entanglement toward an ethics of exclusion.”48 Giraud is focused on what it means to act ethically within the complexities highlighted by entanglement theory. This requires a more nuanced appreciation of the differentiations and exclusions that operate within the complexities of entanglement. She notes that “inter-active, performative accounts of the material world are often used to denaturalize hierarchical distinctions between different actors in order to underline the notion that even matter itself can be otherwise.”49 A case in point is the rejection of human exceptionalism; it too becomes an example of a “denaturalized hierarchical distinction.”50 An undifferentiated relational ontology gnaws away at the foundation for an ethic of human engagement. Importantly, for Giraud, it also ignores or masks the ways in which “sociotechnical infrastructures and political decisions” associated with accounts of entanglement already exclude options for action or skew political action in particular ways.51 Hence her concern for “what comes after entanglement?” Being able to recognize the inevitable exclusions that obtain with complex and emerging entanglements is a critical step in being able to develop genuine alternative approaches to political action to counter established narratives of human agents in the Anthropocene. Giraud’s work is difficult, complex, and important. For the purposes of this chapter her argument for a move to an ethics of exclusion offers a strong basis for purposive, responsible human action. To this extent

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Giraud’s approach is relevant to my concern to articulate an ecclesial ethic of political action. HAMILTON’S CRITIQUE OF HUMAN ADAPTIVITY Clive Hamilton identifies a number of false tracks on human adaptivity which he relates to a basic failure to appreciate the nature of human entanglement and which trade on false notions of human exceptionalism. The main alternative to the “new anthropocentrism” associated with Earth System science is referred to by Hamilton as “ecomodernism” and is associated with notions of the “good Anthropocene.”52 The prowess and ingenuity of humans are here directed to a “humanized Earth” enabled by technology (techno-utopian solar geoengineering aimed at controlling the climate) and creativity “transcending temporary environmental setbacks” through “technologies of planetary control.”53 Sounds quite appealing at one level; certainly, more optimistic than Hamilton’s account of the new Anthropocene. However, this planned adaptive management approach trades on a weak view of entangled humanism and presumes a promethean view of human nature which gives rise to a new stage in human mastery. It has a decidedly Pelagian theological ring about it. The planned adaptations of the ecomodernists are premised on a failure to appreciate our precarious place within the cosmos and the volatility of the planet’s trajectories.54 Planned adaptations of this top-down kind will generate a multitude of unintended consequences that undermine the planned controlled response to the Anthropocene. This kind of adaptivity is associated with an ethic of mastery born of a false kind of human exceptionalism. The other approach identified by Hamilton is “post-humanism.” This entails a radical idea of adaptivity which has gained currency in recent years in discussions on transhumanism and artificial intelligence. A kind of new species of humanity within a radically globalized diversity and plurality which discards the local and the particular in favor of a new grand narrative. Here the question is less: What kind of human future might we hope for? and more: What kind of future post-human might be possible? The strength of this view is that it accepts the radical change that has been initiated in the new Anthropocene, i.e., that the planetary forces are not benign or pliable but rather have inaugurated a new epoch in which humanity as we know it no longer is reckoned as a power or a significant actor in the system. The problem with this approach is twofold in terms of our discussion so far. First, entangled humanism on this account becomes subsumed within the Earth System in such a manner as to diminish any ethical and/or moral responsibility as an active, powerful agent.55 The human is no more than “nodes in the tangled web of worldly processes.”56 On this account entanglement implies

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relinquishment of moral agency and ends up in a new form of quietism fueled by the negation of the differentiations between human and nonhuman.57 Second, the emerging non “earth bound” human requires a planned adaptation that entails new forms of covert and overt power in the hands of the illumined ones: a modern-day secular gnosticism.58 Self-appointed human beings planning for the replacement of entangled human beings via the masked language of “trans-human” has a decidedly dystopian feel and is scary stuff. The above alternative adaptive scenarios fail to appreciate either the precarious nature of the human and human capabilities in the light of the Anthropocene (scenario 1) or de facto capitulate to the inevitable demise of the human species in a form of contemporary nihilism (scenario 2). Both scenarios are blind to exclusions arising from structural and political bias and therefore remain unable to generate alternative modes of human ethical action. This begs the question: Is there an alternative? ETHICS AND THE POLITICS OF SWARMING In the face of the disturbances to the functioning of the Earth System which appear irreversible, Hamilton asks whether this means “we must abandon ourselves to our fate?”59 In Hamilton’s view, such a capitulation would be a sign of “moral cowardice.”60 What then must we do? It seems the way is now barred to redemption of a personal kind which is yet another indicator of modernity’s “preoccupation with self.”61 Such an escape into transcendence or the utopian dream of making the transcendent immanent belong, in Hamilton’s view, to the bygone era of the Holocene.62 Hamilton’s call, echoing Bruno Latour, is to live “on this world, as it really is, the immanent as immanent”; the hardest task of all because it requires living “half-light of not-knowing, in the new atmosphere of endangerment.”63 However, if in fact it is a “half-light of not knowing” then minimally we may be permitted to remain skeptical of too ready a claim that heaven on Earth might, with finality, be set aside. To live in the not knowing at least in the ancient apophatic tradition of Christian faith, leaves a wide space for what is not yet known let alone understood. Hamilton enjoins: “The only response to the threats of the Anthropocene is a collective one, politics.”64 This is surely the heart of the matter and from this perspective there is a great deal of room for many peoples from many different creeds to join forces. Certainly, Hamilton’s recommendation of the collective political resonates with Connolly who asks provocatively: “Is it possible to deepen appreciation of the attractions and sweetness of life on this rare planet? Who will be the priests, rabbis, poets, visionaries, singers, philosophers, activists, and preachers who help us do that work?”65 This is suggestive of a counter move

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to notions of mastery and extractive capitalism that appertain to “new generations in several places” which “forge reflective attachments to a broad range of people, nonhuman beings, and planetary forces with whom they are entangled.”66 The reconfiguring of spiritual attachments which eschews mastery and recognizes the uncertain and sometimes volatile nature of the human entanglement with the planet and indeed the cosmos could, in Connolly’s estimation, “make a difference to politics during the current era.”67 In this vein, Connolly examines the dynamics of what he terms “the politics of swarming.”68 It represents a response to the Anthropocene which, argues Connolly, is an alternative to “belonging to the organic world, being detached masters of a blind world, or sinking into passive or aggressive nihilism in an empty, meaningless world.”69 Instead, Connolly argues for the pursuit of “reflective attachments to a multifarious, entangled, dangerous world.”70 This is a move beyond “images of human exceptionalism, geogradualism, organic belongings, sociocentrism, uber-human intentionalism, and a blind world subject to human mastery.” Moreover, this positive affirmation of the world accords with Connolly’s notion of “the politics of swarming.”71 This is a move beyond creedal differences to “spiritual affinities” that generate action. He has in mind “political protest, cross regional strikes targeting states, corporations, churches, media, university trustees, neoliberal ideology, the ethos of human exceptionalism, investment priorities, and established infrastructures of consumption that together resist, defer, obscure, or delay affirmative responses to the current planetary condition.”72 Connolly’s recommendation of a politics of swarming resonates with that autochthonous adaptivity identified above which finds its generative force from the intentionality of individuals and small groups within a specific locality and system which is not independent of external inputs. The dynamism of this kind of action is essentially bottom up rather than top down causality. Its power derives from its local self-organizing capacity with an inherent drive for extension, intensity, and reach. In Connolly’s mind, a politics of swarming is a counter to an “extractionist capitalist history that haunts the world.”73 Connolly’s politics of swarming offers a sharp counter cultural critique with an associated militancy. It is the kind of conceptuality that resonates with the global “extinction rebellion” movement—a swarming nonviolent political critique of predatory capitalism. Interestingly and importantly, Connolly appeals to Gandhi’s practice of nonviolence and asks: how might his ethic of peaceful political action be pursued in the Anthropocene as a counter to the forces of extractive capitalism? He also finds common cause with Pope Francis insofar as this spiritual leader encourages “rapid action to respond to the entanglements between regionally distributed poverty and the dire effects of the Anthropocene.”74 Connolly is clear: “Under the shadow of the Anthropocene the practice of free citizenship involves the creative pursuit

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and consolidation of affinities across religions and creeds to speak to new conditions of being.”75 Hamilton’s Defiant Earth paints a foreboding scenario for the future of the planet. It is if nothing else a very loud, even shrill wake-up call. Hamilton is also clear that human beings have an ethical and moral responsibility to work together for a more sustainable planet for all, however forlorn a possibility that might appear given the trajectory of the planet. Not to do so is an act of cowardice that simply compounds human neglect of its responsibilities. Exactly what grounds such an ethic of responsibility and energizes it is not entirely clear. Hamilton is, however, clear that escape into transcendence has all the marks of a Pontius Pilate washing of hands for the fate of the Earth. Moreover, he appears skeptical at best about notions of transcendence through immanence because it easily succumbs to utopian programs for heaven upon Earth with all its attendant dangers of control by elites. He is surely right to give warning of the dangers inherent in such programs. Yet, quite a few billion humans on the planet might, with some good justification, be unwilling to jettison the Prayer of Jesus for the coming kingdom and God’s will being done on Earth as it is in heaven. Here is a longstanding and openended prayer of hope for new possibilities. It is a fundamental orientation and energetics for concrete action that draws the peoples of the world into harmony with the purposes of God for creation. Such a distinctly theological vision critiques all utopian ideals and programs and resists all attempts to colonize it for baser ends, however well-meaning they may at first appear. Connolly’s articulation of the entanglements that obtain between human beings and the organic and nonorganic world is extremely helpful in reimagining human life on Earth. His critique of geo-gradualism and human exceptionalism is important. His attention to the inherent bumpiness and volatility of planetary dynamics is an important counterpoint to forces unleashed via extractive capitalism and communism. Yet, he is alive to the fundamental trajectory of the planet in the epoch of the Anthropocene and the disastrous consequences of human actions born of false notions of mastery and supposed blind forces of nature. Both Hamilton and Connolly point to an ethical and moral responsibility of human beings in the era of the Anthropocene, though the grounding for this imperative is less clearly developed. Nonetheless, both authors are clear that such ethical responses have to be collective and political in an effort to counter the debilitating effects of unchecked human actions born of mastery and/or despair. Connolly’s politics of swarming provides a helpful heuristic to understand what is happening and what might continue to expand in the social and political domains under the impress of increasing volatility of climate change and its impact on the planet, its peoples, and their dislocations and disturbances.

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Both Hamilton and Connolly prove important interdisciplinary voices for the theological task of articulating the role and responsibility of the ecclesia of God in the Anthropocene. The Church is an ecclesio-political entity of two millennia with roots in the prophetic traditions of Israel concerning the ways of God with the world. Its best instincts resonate with those of other religious traditions regarding the value of human life, the precious giftedness of the creation which we inhabit, and our moral responsibility to care and nurture the gifts of God for all. Connolly’s notion of “spiritual affinities” that reach across all creeds and peoples points to a wider trajectory for common action. A SWARMING CHURCH FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE How might the insights of Hamilton and Connolly, in particular the priority both give to political action and the notion of swarming appealed to by Connolly, as well as concepts of entanglement and exclusion, assist theological reflection on the political character of the ecclesial body? A number of points can be made. First, concerning the matter of entanglement theory as developed in the political, biological, social, and political sciences. This represents a welcome integrative move, breaking down deep seated dualisms that have served a pattern of domination and mastery of human beings over material phenomena. Human beings are in fact immersed in creation and as interdependent creatures are finely tuned to the ordering of the planet. The implication is that human beings exercise a significant impact upon, and, as we are now discovering, can be significantly impacted by, the environment in which they live and move and have their being. Second, while recognition of fundamental entanglement is an important corrective, it fails, as noted earlier, to attend to the highly differentiated relational ontology appropriate to entanglement theory. Human exceptionalism is not the necessary logic of entanglement theory; however, poorly conceived human exceptionalism is. The failure to make this distinction undermines the development of a rationale for human agency and ethical action. In the theological tradition, as noted earlier, the human being has been understood as a creature in the image of God (imago Dei). In the modern period, this theological anthropology, when tied to the remarkable developments in technology, has been mistakenly and often willfully invoked as a justification for human mastery and domination of nature. Entanglement theory resonates with the ancient biblical Jewish tradition of the tripartite organic relationship between humans, Earth, and Yahweh. Recognition of this fundamental ecology did not eschew, but rather confirmed the particular character of the ethical and moral

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imperatives to care for the creation. Such ethical and moral imperatives are a necessary corollary of the originative concept of imago Dei. Third, the modifications of entanglement theory that arise from a richer theological anthropology of imago Dei establish a theological basis for ethical action. But what kinds of ethical action might be consonant with such a theological grounding? This is where Giraud’s critique and modification of entanglement theory and her proposal for an ethics of exclusion are helpful. Giraud alerts us to the inevitable systemic and structural realities embedded in entanglement theory, and the need to critically examine what alternative ethical options are being excluded. This matter requires further inquiry. Suffice it to say that at this stage an ethics of exclusion is potentially very useful in the development of a theology of political action for the ecclesial body. Fourth, a question arises about the nature of the ecclesial body as a participant in the politics of swarming. Minimally, what is required is a social body that has the capacity to practice alternative action, challenge entrenched prejudices, and empower ethically responsible local communities in the Anthropocene epoch. Such a body will need to be innovative, adaptive, and intelligently organized and networked. Contrary to popular opinion—which has little or no sense of history (nor cares)—the ecclesia of God has shown remarkable capacity for new adaptations and innovations over the course of its history. In this respect, there is an interesting resonance between notions of autochthonous adaptivity—identified above as that which is native to the soil and local environment—and the ways in which the Body of Christ has, over the centuries, responded to new contexts. As I have argued elsewhere, this capacity for innovation belongs to the logic of God’s ways with the world.76 Historically innovative developments in the Church are usually “native to the soil” on which they occur, i.e., they begin in a particular locality, they are intentional, they gather momentum from individuals and smaller groups and are invariably entangled in internal and external events. The ordering and inner dynamism of the ecclesial body is such that it can undergo significant transformation through its worldly engagements. Of course, it is always subject to deformations as well as reformations. Yet, the Church’s critical faculty for self-examination via its theological/philosophical reflection and worship traditions offers a sharpening and focusing and constant reminder of its founding charism in the love of God. It is this fundamental conviction that provides the energy for its ongoing transposition into new contexts. Much more of course could be said, but space does not permit that. However, at this stage I want to suggest that Connolly’s politics of swarming requires a capability for intelligent adaptation and innovation in response to new situations and this is evidenced in the history of the Church. What is sought is a renewed sociality that encompasses planetary life in a manner that befits a world beloved of God. What we have is an essentially entangled ecclesial

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world that has the potential from within its own inner reality to be a powerful liberating force, from the ground up so to speak. Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ is a contemporary example of how this might be brought to bear on society beyond the ecclesia. It seems to me that the Church, embedded as it is in multiple diverse contexts throughout the globe, offers a potential means for human beings to act collectively in an ethical, prophetic, and responsible manner. In the process, the Church of God may become a participant in the politics of swarming. Fifth, the foregoing invites closer examination of the actual dynamics by which ecclesial swarming for political engagement occurs. In some respects, there seems to be some fundamental characteristics of swarms across species. For example, a) swarms require a threshold density in order to generate swarm behavior; b) the swarm navigates as a coherent unit; c) this gives rise to the notion of a swarm intelligence—a sort of collective brain or thinking together that amplifies not only intelligence, but creative capacity; d) in swarm mode there is remarkable capacity for predictive power regarding movement and outcomes that direct, protect, and increase general capabilities of the swarm; and e) just a few leaders can influence the swarm. One of the key aspects of swarming identified above, i.e., creativity, has led to the development by Peter Gloor of the concept of collaborative innovation networks (COINS).77 Gloor, following the lead of scientist Eric Bonabeu, refers to COINS as a team of people (a self-organizing community), with a common goal and shared code of ethics, appropriate expertise, working remotely over the internet with no leadership hierarchy or central organization.78 Such teams form collaborative bonds.79 COINS exist in a wide range of fields including technology, science, the arts, charities, and political campaigns where the accent is on open source projects. Much more, of course, could be said at this point regarding the dynamics of swarming. However, for the purposes of this discussion I would highlight a number of key elements of swarms. First, it seems that human beings are irreducibly swarm creatures; the “primal master” of human creatures.80 This insight is surprisingly uncovered via technology, which reveals “something profoundly archaic, uncanny: humans are swarm animals.”81 Swarming appears to be constitutive of human sociality, as such. Second, the concept of intensification. For example, the politics of swarming involves, as notes Connolly, “multiple constituencies, regions, levels, processes of communication, modes of action, each carrying some potential to augment and intensify the others with which it becomes associated.”82 In similar vein, Gloor refers to the character of swarm creativity in terms of the “amplification of interactivity.”83 It is not simply that the whole is more than the sum of its parts but it is the manner in which this whole actually functions harnessing and magnifying beyond imagining an individual’s finite and limited intelligence,

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knowledge and capacities. Third, the notion of “crystallization” wherein the swarm activity gathers sufficient momentum and power generative of a new event, e.g., radical mass protest. Fourth, the mode of swarm communication and its power to direct is particular to the kind of entity being considered, e.g., bees, bats, birds. When it comes to human swarming the mode of thinking and acting together is of a different order and complexity compared, for example, to bees and bats. Social media and its associated technologies (internet, email, Instagram, Facebook, twitter) has become a key feature of human swarming exemplified in the recent global action of Extinction Rebellion, though importantly the catalyst came from a lone individual. The invention of the printing press in sixteenth-century Europe had a remarkable galvanizing effect upon people and communities across many geographically separated regions. Sixth, the above comments regarding the general character of swarms offer some insights of a theological kind regarding the capacities of the ecclesial body to act as a prophetic and political swarm in human society. Specifically, I would point to the capacity of the ecclesial body to amplify and intensify its immersion in the world through its embeddedness in the local contexts which is at the same time correlated with patterns of liturgical rehearsal of its identify and calling that have universal intent and trajectory. To expand a little on this matter, it is simply an empirical reality that the ecclesial body is a highly dispersed global phenomenon. It is embedded in highly localized regions and communities with varying levels of complex institutional structures extending from local, regional, and national to international domains. The relationships between these differentiated ecclesial arrangements are complex and at times contested. However, this structuring also provides pathways and feedback loops for communication and information flow critical for the generation of swarming activity. Importantly, at the ecclesial base (i.e., local communities) there are fundamental communal activities of worship and liturgy wherein is rehearsed the rationale and purpose of being the Body of Christ in the world. At the heart of this worship is the person and work of Jesus Christ and the overflowing presence of the Holy Spirit. These are the twin coordinates that give rise to the energetics and structuring of that body in the world called and beloved of God. It is the presence of the resurrected Christ in the Spirit who is celebrated and remembered through sacrament, word, song, prayer, and testimony. In such actions, the priestly and prophetic vocation of the ecclesia of God in the world is constantly rekindled and local communities of faith are empowered and orientated toward the world. These particular local communal activities are replicated myriad times across time and space. It might qualify as a planet-wide collaborative innovation network.84 Herein lies the hidden potentialities for thinking together and the amplifying of spiritual intelligence and purpose which concerns above all else

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the compassion, justice, and truth of God in the world. In this way, the global ecclesia of God is constituted as a highly complex and differentiated institutional structure imbued with untapped resources for swarming. However, the Church’s capacity for intensification, for it to spill over into concrete action, requires crystallization (a tipping point) wherein multiple local centers reach such a level of consciousness of their calling and mission that they participate in wider swarm-like behavior. Moreover, such crystallization emerges via highly developed and intuitive networks of communication operative in both the host culture and within the dynamics of the inner life of the Body of Christ. Such communicative action cannot be circumscribed by reference to sociological, psychological, and technological apparatus. Something more is in play at this point which involves a spiritual discernment concerning the way Divine sociality and justice are operative in creation and human life. A powerful example of the movement of the Spirit associated with such swarm activity is the tradition of liberation theology emerging in the latter period of the twentieth century in South America. This is an example of how local base communities became ignited into powerful centers of resistance and social action to address inequalities and injustices. It exhibited swarm-like behavior. Such a conception of the Church as a political body requires, from a theological point of view and in the first instance, a doctrine of the Spirit. THE SWARMING SPIRIT The initial conditions for an ecclesio-political swarming are established, as signaled in point 6 above, by the dynamic coordinates of Christ and the Spirit. In short, the possibility for a political ecclesiology that can respond in a socially and environmentally responsible manner to the epoch of the Anthropocene has its deepest roots in the doctrine of God; and in particular the doctrine of the Spirit (Pneumatology).85 The assumption is that a swarming ecclesia is generated from an understanding of the swarming Spirit of God. As unusual as this may at first sound, the theological tradition is a rich reservoir for such an understanding of the Spirit of God. For example, the concept of the Spirit as force field in the theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg offers an imaginative and innovative advance in pneumatology.86 Drawing upon Einstein’s theory of relativity, Pannenberg notes the “definitive turning point” for Einstein in his conception of an energetic field “from a conception of natural force on the basis of the model of the moving body to an autonomous idea of energy conceived as a field.”87 The upshot of this was a conception of energy as “the primary reality that transcends the body through which it manifests itself.”88 This leads to a concept of the Spirit of God as a force field related to, but also transcending, materiality as

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such. How such a notion of Spirit might relate to both organic and inorganic existence remains a question. However, Pannenberg’s engagement with the physical sciences illuminates how a doctrine of the Spirit might helpfully transcend the more familiar personalist and subjectivist categories that have dominated pneumatology in the modern period and made it so difficult for theology to contribute to contemporary issues concerning the planet, creation, Earth sciences, and ethics. Michael Welker offers a powerful account of the kinds of things that might occur in the force field of the Spirit. Welker’s emphasis is on the pouring out of the Spirit in creation, human life, and the remarkable diversity of social and institutional systems that underpin human life and its relation to the planet.89 Welker is clearly in debt to Pannenberg’s concept of the Spirit as force field. However, he extends and enhances this in relation to human social and political behavior. For Welker, the key is the overflow of the Spirit, its energizing power and personal and public manifestations. Those who are “seized, moved, and renewed by God’s Spirit can know themselves placed in a force field that is seized, moved, and renewed by many sides—a force field of which they are members and bearers, but which they cannot bear, shape, be responsible for, and enliven alone.”90 For Welker, this force field “wrought by the outpouring of the Spirit forms not a homogenous unity, but a differentiated one.”91 For Welker, the outpouring of the Spirit is a sign of the power of God to bring freedom and justice, and links people knowingly or otherwise in proximate or distant environments. Moreover, the Spirit is a “public person” insofar as the Spirit cannot be encompassed by any one individual, but the public and corporate action of the whole.92 Welker’s concern seems to be focused on giving an account of the energetics of the Divine Spirit that connects, empowers, and directs all who seek freedom and justice for the world “that is endangering itself.”93 CONCLUSION Pannenberg and Welker appeal to the Spirit as force field in order to highlight the energetics and domain of the Spirit in relation to materiality and creation more generally. As such, the force field of the Spirit is relevant to both organic and nonorganic materiality, though clearly in different ways. Welker sharpens this focus to the Spirit’s presence and action in human society. He does this with reference to the outpouring of the Spirit as a public and personal energy for the purpose of freedom and justice. This is the swarming Spirit that focuses and directs the energetics of Divine love for the world. This same Spirit is a public and political power manifest through people movements connected across myriad local eruptions of concern for the future of the

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planet and its peoples. The freedom and justice of God celebrated in multiple liturgical settings across the globe is transposed into public energy joining with all who share common concern for the future well-being of the planet. The ecclesia of God is fit for purpose in the epoch of the Anthropocene. To realize this, it must first grasp its own inner logic and trajectory and begin to enact this through engagement in the political domain as a force for good. NOTES 1. Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2017). 2. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 160. 3. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 159. 4. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 158. 5. Hamilton, Defiant Earth. 6. David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future (London: Penguin, 2019), 214–16. 7. Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, 213. 8. Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, 216. 9. William Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 9. 10. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 9. 11. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 8. 12. The book of Genesis chapter 1 refers to the human being as “earthling” or “groundling.” 13. Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). 14. The rejection of human exceptionalism is justified on the grounds that it has been associated with a false and dangerous dualism between nature and the resultant quest for human mastery and domination of nature. 15. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 32. 16. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 32. 17. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 6. 18. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 33. 19. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 32. 20. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 7. 21. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 25. 22. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 32. 23. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 33. 24. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 33. Connolly appears to have some sympathy with the thesis of Lewis and Maslin that the Anthropocene was not a recent occurrence but can be tracked via a series of “golden spikes” in past interactions between human and nonhuman planetary forces (Connolly, 31). See Simon Lewis and Mark

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Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519 (2015): 171–80. While Connolly can reckon on the Anthropocene being a period of two to four hundred years “depending on who is counting” (Connolly, 4) he understands the period of the “Great Acceleration” as the critical and determining period for the danger posed for human life and the planet. For a powerful critique of Lewis and Maslin’s “golden spikes” thesis, consult Clive Hamilton, “Getting the Anthropocene so wrong,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 2 (2015): 1–6. 25. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 33. 26. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 6. 27. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 4. Connolly states thus: “Dissonant conjunctions between capital as a geological force and self-organized amplifiers point to irreversible changes that will continue to accelerate after a certain juncture, even if capitalist states do reshape the energy grids and infrastructures of consumption.” Hence, he asks: “The real question is: At what juncture?” 28. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 5. 29. Interestingly and perhaps tellingly Connolly does not seem familiar with the phrase “Earth System” science. 30. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 13. 31. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 13. “Sociocentrism” is a general term Connolly invokes to refer to the privileging of one social group/demographic before all others—in this case Western capitalism. 32. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 39. 33. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 39. 34. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 93. 35. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 97. 36. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 104. 37. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 108. 38. See Patricia Howard and Gretta Peci, “Introduction: Autochthonous Human Adaptation to Biodiversity Change in the Anthropocene,” Ambio 48 (2019): 4. Published on-line November 2019 at https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1007​/s13280​-019​-01283​-x. 39. Howard and Peci, “Introduction,” 4. 40. Howard and Peci, “Introduction,” 5 41. Howard and Peci, “Introduction,” 5. 42. Howard and Peci, “Introduction,” 6. 43. Howard and Peci, “Introduction,” 6. 44. Howard and Peci, “Introduction,” 6. 45. Howard and Peci, “Introduction,” 6. 46. Howard and Peci, “Introduction,” 7. 47. This matter is addressed in Stephanie Wakefield, review of The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability, by David Chandler and Julian Reid, Society and Space, May 30, 2017, 1–6. 48. Eva Haifa Giraud, What Comes After Entanglement: Activism, Anthropocentricism and an Ethics of Exclusion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 171. 49. Giraud, What Comes After Entanglement, 172. 50. Giraud, What Comes After Entanglement, 172.

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51. Giraud, What Comes After Entanglement, 172. 52. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 65ff. 53. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 67, 72. 54. Hamilton points to their “inordinate emphasis on nuclear energy” (Defiant Earth, 71). 55. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 89. 56. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 110. 57. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 91, 95. 58. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 86. 59. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 160. 60. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 160. 61. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 160. 62. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 158. 63. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 158. 64. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 160. 65. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 119. 66. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 119. 67. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 119. 68. There is an emerging literature examining the nature of swarming as it relates to the animal world, human behavior, and the power of technology. For further information, see Mark W. Moffett, The Human Swarm: How our Societies Arise, Thrive and Fall (London: Head of Zeus, 2019); Molly Sauter, The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); J. Arquilla and D. Ronfeldt, Swarming and the Future of Conflict (Rand, 2000); Peter A Gloor, Swarm Creativity: Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 69. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 120. Italics original. 70. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 120. 71. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 120. 72. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 120. 73. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 121. 74. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 141. 75. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 149. 76. Stephen Pickard, “Innovation and Undecidability: Some Implications for the Koinonia of the Anglican Church,” Journal of Anglican Studies 2, no. 2 (2004): 87–105. 77. See Peter Gloor, Swarm Creativity, footnote 23. 78. Gloor, Swarm Creativity, chapter 2. For more information on COINS, see E. Bonabeau, M. Dorigo, and G. Theraulaz, Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems, Santa Fe Institute in the Sciences of Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Gloor, for example, refers to Leonardo DaVinci and associates as “swarm collaborators.” 79. Bonabeau et al., Swarm Intelligence, 21. 80. Justin Clemens, Psychoanalysis Is an Antiphilosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 165.

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81. Clemens, Psychoanalysis Is an Antiphilosophy, 165. 82. Connolly, Facing the Planetary, 125. 83. Gloor, Swarm Creativity, 20. 84. Gloor, Swarm Creativity, chapter 2. The literature on human swarming places emphasis on the leaderless nature of the swarm and the lack of any centralized organizing system. This matter deserves more careful attention given that human and other animal swarm behavior exhibits a variety of ways of both implicit and explicit hierarchical networks and associated leadership patterns. I suspect that the current anti-hierarchical emphasis arises from the field of technology. 85. The discussion that follows immediately encounters certain difficulties, not least of which is the very concept of spirit. Yet the category of spirit is important for a number of reasons. Most obviously from a theological point of view the domain of spirit—discussed in theology in terms of pneumatology—is precisely the way in which concern for categories of transcendence and the divine might be pursued. The presumption is a theistic framework, though of course there are other extra phenomenal philosophies of spirit that may eschew such a theistic framework. At this level, the point of commonality is that all such invocations of a spirit ontology are associated with a resistance to reductivist accounts of phenomena whether they arise from materialist, physicalist and/or immanentist philosophies that bracket out certain approaches to materiality as such. In this respect, we note that spirit talk is always straining toward a deeper ontology to explain the way the world is and as a consequence opening up possibilities for a more robust basis for ethical and moral action in the epoch of the Anthropocene. As observed above the lack of a basis for ethical action was a feature of both Hamilton’s and Connolly’s discussion. 86. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Toward a Theology of Nature: Essays on Science and Faith (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), esp. chapters 5 and 6. 87. Pannenberg, Toward a Theology of Nature, 130 88. Pannenberg, Toward a Theology of Nature, 131. 89. Michael Welker, God the Spirit (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 228ff. 90. Welker, God the Spirit, 228. 91. Welker, God the Spirit, 228. 92. Welker, God the Spirit, 312. 93. Welker, God the Spirit, 303.

Chapter 7

Thinking Eschatologically in the Face of the Anthropocene Christiaan Mostert

INTRODUCTION The great Reformer, Jean Calvin, is often quoted as saying that the world, though not the chief evidence for faith, is the “theatre of God’s glory,” a “most beautiful,” “glorious,” “dazzling” theatre.1 It is an echo of Ps 19:1, “the heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” But this is not the only biblical perspective in which to see the world. The Apostle Paul sees it in its brokenness, as “groaning in labor pains.” (Rom 8:22) The metaphor of labor pains implies a delivery, a redemption, a “glory about to be revealed,” (8:18) as he believed. This is to see the world sub speciae eschatologiae.2 In his provocative and timely book Defiant Earth, Clive Hamilton laments that humankind has not faced up to its responsibility toward the earth, to the point that a new geological age, the Anthropocene, is upon us. Humankind has for some time been seriously disturbing the surface of the earth and the atmosphere, with highly damaging effect. We have become “a worldmaking creature,” “a geological agent.”3 Moreover, the tradi­tional moral resources humankind could draw on to face this unprecedented challenge have lost their appeal, so that “the cupboard is bare.”4 Neither belief in God and divine power, appeal to a sense of responsibility, nor even the motive of self-preser­vation are realistic candidates for motivating earth’s human inhabitants to find a way toward a more hopeful future. That is a serious indictment of humankind. But might “new human beings emerge who embody another 109

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future, who allow themselves to be appropriated by the next future, who are willing to think eschatologically . . . ?”5 But does Hamilton really intend that eschatological thinking is what is now required? Are Hamilton and his theological friends “on the same page”? Is he using this term, unusual in a secular context, simply to call for a new kind of future-oriented thinking? This essay intends to focus on the question of what it means to think eschatologically, in a more original sense. There is at least a fair chance that the crisis which Hamilton analyzes with real poignancy will give rise to a new generation of people who have a different vision of what it is to be human and the courage to take the political power to enact it. But is this to think eschatologically? Will such “new human beings” just emerge in the rise and fall of the generations? Will there be enough time for this to happen? Hamilton’s reference to eschatology is surprising. What does “thinking eschatologically” mean? THINKING ESCHATOLOGICALLY Thinking eschatologically is certainly thinking about the future, but that is not enough to call it eschatology. Like the term “apocalyptic,” which has to do with the revelation or disclosure of what is hidden, vis-à-vis the ultimate future or end of the world, the term “eschatology” denotes the last or final things (the eschata) to happen in the cosmos, or the final event (the eschaton) to take place in the history of the world, or even the one who—as Christians believe—will come at the end to inau­gurate a new age (i.e., the eschatos). Its context is religious, mainly Judaeo-Christian.6 On the presupposition that history had a beginning, it postulates a correspon­ding end, not only in a chronological sense but in the sense of a telos, a goal reached or a pur­pose achieved. It includes the idea of a judgment, with a good outcome for the good or the faith­ful and, as some emphasize more than others, a range of nega­tive consequences for others. The human imagination has devised terrifying depictions of the fate of the latter.7 Essentially, what is central for Christians (and monotheists generally) is the reign (“kingdom”) of God in and over all things. Wolfhart Pannenberg describes eschatological ideas as a “rationally lucid projection of the conditions for a final realisation of human destiny in the unity of individual existence and social interrelatedness.”8 The teaching and activities of both Jesus and John the Baptist were clearly eschatological—not necessarily to the same degree—as was the climate of faith and life in the early Christian community. In the last half-century, at least, the influence of the Bible in shaping contempor­ary imagination has lessened considerably. Nevertheless, a robust Christian theology must in some serious sense be eschatological in character: Christian faith is intrinsically

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eschatological. The logic of Christian theology, with its paradigm in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, implies the breaking into the “old” of something radically “new,” of a decisive discontinuity within the course of historical events, whether on a macro or micro level, including our individual lives. The Apostle Paul went so far as to speak of a “new creation” already in this present life (2 Cor 5:17). He sees this as a proleptic experience or “first instalment” of the full experience of the new that is still to come. (2 Cor 1:22) This is not understood as a simple extension of the natural order of things but as involving a “radical break with all that has gone before.”9 But in this “radical disjunction” lies its “salutary power.” There is a negation and a judgment as well as a fulfillment.10 Three things follow from this description of the nature and importance of eschatology. First, Christians reckon with an ultimate future not confined to the belief in the continued existence of an individual person or soul beyond death. Everything that exists will be transformed and renewed. The just and peaceful coexistence of humankind across all barriers, which now we know only in the most fragmentary form, will then be realised. Nothing less than “a new heaven and a new earth” is foretold by the visionary in the final book of the New Testament, the Revelation to [or Apocalypse of] John. (21:1) The imagery in which this is depicted is highly dramatic, resisting ready translation into the factual language of natural events or cosmology.11 John Polkinghorne thinks of this in terms of a “transmutation,” even a “glorification” of the “matter-energy” of this world.12 The natural sciences presuppose a uniform secularity in their view of reality, a closed system with a contin­ uous chain of cause and effect and a comprehensible but perhaps ultimately pointless universe.13 Christian theology constructs a religious view of the same reality by discovering God in it and describing it in terms that invoke transcendence.14 Inasmuch as they are speaking of one and the same cosmos, dialogue should be possible, arguably an obligation. In the nature of the case, the debate cannot be settled by any adjudicator, but it is something that matters a great deal to many on both sides of the discussion. Second, eschatological thinking also has a critical function. While it may be easily criticized as otherworldly or escapist, focused on an unreal world instead of the challenging realities of this one, it offers a challenge to unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved through social, economic, and political processes. It undermines illusions about existing structures and arrange­ments, about justice and progress, human rationality and bene­volence, and about our capacity to solve our many problems and resolve our many conflicts, whether on the scale of world events or on the scale of communities, families, and individuals. It is a standing reminder that broken­ness, alienation, apathy, and evil characterize and determine the fabric of human sociality and political arrangements. This critical function of eschatological

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thinking is the other side of its constructive function, generated by a conviction that the hope for redemption has a transcendent source. There is no way forward without this critical element of eschatological thinking, expo­ sing our shortsightedness, lack of clear thinking, self-interest, and desire for short-term gain. Nevertheless, it is the hope of the “new” and the vision of its contours that continues to empower people to confront evil and suffering and to work for their alleviation. Third, thinking eschatologically means not only thinking about the future but also from the future. Not only does this hoped-for future stretch us to try to make the present correspond to it, but it already instantiates itself proleptically in the present, ahead of its time, as it were. It is present in an anticipatory way. This requires more than the usual noetic sense of “anticipation”; it requires an ontic sense: it concerns what is the case rather than what is thought. Thus, although the future and the present remain different, the future reality actually breaks into the present so that, in Pannenberg’s words, “the anticipated future is already present in its anticipation.”15 The eschatological tension, a future reality already present yet not fully so, remains. The final truth of the anticipa­tion remains open until the future reality confirms it. If this is indeed the structure of things in the universe, it will apply whether the anticipated reality is something desired or feared. The reality of climate change surely has this same already-not-yet tension. Recent bushfires and cyclones, fire, wind, and flood, are instantiations of the future. To claim that they are such is to venture a judgment about ontology, not simply to exercise one’s imagination. This pattern of thinking from the future has pertinence for both secular and theological reflection on our life in the world. This is not to dissolve their differences. In both realms of discourse, it is pertinent to think futuristically, from the future back to the present. To think eschatologically, however, is to think within a wider frame of reference, involving a trans-empirical dimension. This lies outside the discourse of the sciences as they have evolved in the post-Enlightenment world, though in their personal or existential lives many scientists and historians live and think within this larger frame of reference. EVOLUTIONARY AND ESCHATOLOGICAL THINKING We habitually think from the past and present to the future; but the present appears in a different light when we see it from the future, rather than simply as a development from the past. This involves no rejection of its connection with decisions and events in the past: historical and eschatological ways of thinking are complementary. Nevertheless, in our habitual perception of time the arrow moves in one direction only. More sig­nificant than its direction,

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however, as Paul Fiddes observes, is “its orientation to a goal.”16 A goal can be simply an end or a boundary, but it can also denote a purpose. History may be thought to have an end, however distant or near, without its being thought to have a purpose. The universe as a whole is heading irreversibly toward greater entropy. On this planet each living creature’s life ends in the disorder of death and decom­position, though whole species evolve to adapt to varying environments. The earth is likely in the future to be subject to chaotic events that will make it inhospitable to many forms of life, involving the loss of individuals that cannot adapt to new environments. As humankind “messes” with finely tuned ecologies, whole species will inevitably be lost, and who knows how or if humankind as a species will survive? For one reason or another, Planet Earth may become dead, either irreversibly or for an incalculable time. Can we simply take such a prospect in our stride? But “thinking eschatologically” moves in a different direction, seeing not an eventual lifeless cosmos but a different “future of creation,” with the opposite directionality. Jürgen Moltmann draws attention to a major difference between evolutionary and eschatological thinking: What is eschatological is the new creation of all things which were and are and will be. What is eschatological is the bringing back of all things out of their past, and the gathering of them into the kingdom of glory. . . . What has to be called eschatological is the movement of redemption, which runs counter to evolution. If we want to put it in temporal terms: this is a movement which runs from the future to the past, not from the past to the future. It is the divine tempest of the new creation, which sweeps out of God’s future over history’s fields of the dead, waking and gathering every last created being. [These things] bring a redemption of the world which no evolution can ever achieve.17

Such a view necessarily involves some transcendent reality other than itself, i.e., its source and goal, which has always, until recently, been a reference point against which to find meaning and purpose as well as moral obligation and personal orientation. There is no real eschatology without this. This does not negate or cancel out the evolutionary movement of creation, but from within a Christian worldview it has an ineradicable complement: its relation to God as its creator, redeemer, and perfecter.18 For this, a simple view of time as endless and unilinear is inadequate, since the “end,” understood theologically, has already been inaugurated. To quote Moltmann again, with a Christological turn: The evolutionary series in the history of nature and in human history are the outcome of continuous creation. The redemption and the new creation of all created things can be expected only from the coming of Christ in glory.19

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With that coming, a movement from the end back to the beginning, there is resurrection, renewal, and vindication, especially for those who have “fallen victim to the forward movement of biological and social evolution.”20 This emphasis is noteworthy: the vision of an eschatological transformation particularly inclusive of those deprived of their opportunity to survive the onward march of evolution or the power of the strong. Obliquely, a judgment is implied in this redemption, though even those responsible for making victims of others may have hope of inclusion in the transforming, redeeming work of Christ, though not necessarily along the same path as the victims.21 With the loss on a wide scale of a theological frame of reference, culturally and intellectually speaking, most marked in the so-called “first” world, such thinking has lost much of its traditio­nal traction. At the risk of over-simplifying, the theological response includes two markedly different strategies.22 On one side is the “liberal” or “progressive” one, in which cultural values and new intellectual norms, including findings in the natural sciences and cosmology, displace key doctrinal emphases of Christian orthodoxy, including eschatology. On the other is a form of doctrinal ortho­doxy in which hermeneutical priority is given to “the transcendent radicality of divine grace,” or the radical novum of salvation (and eschatology).23 The language is reminiscent of the explosive rhetoric of Karl Barth immediately after World War I. In his famous commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, he speaks of a “krisis,” precipitated by “the line of intersection between time and eternity, between the present and the future world,” a line which is “vertical from above,” which brings both judgment (krisis) and salvation, the source of which transcends anything known from below.24 What ensues from this point of departure is “an eschatological dogmatics,” which redefines the human situation, both in its general and its existential sense, and “orients faith, life, and thought in view of God’s redefinition of reality.”25 In the same vein, Carl Braaten speaks of “the creative negation,” in which, “by cross and resurrection, the vital eschatological future invades the passing age and conquers it from within, effecting a ‘neo-genesis beyond the last negation of life.’”26 Eschato­logical thinking is sui generis. But something significant may be learned from endings in ordinary life and in literature. ENDINGS: CLOSURE OR OPENNESS? In his stimulating study of endings, Fiddes moves between the end of a plot in novels and plays and the end of the narrative of the eschatological economy of God. As theologians increasingly recognize that eschatology is not merely the last topic on the theological agenda but “the medium of Christian faith as such,” it is fascinating to discover that “literary critics declare that the basic

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nature of texts is eschatological.”27 Endings can function in four ways: to organize and unify the story, to disclose a desired world, to defer meaning, and to open hope or future possibility. The first two tend toward closure; the last two are characterised by openness. In most cases there will be a mixture of the two: openness within the closure or closure within the openness. The Christian narrative, being much more eschatolo­gically biased than even many Christians recognize, is open-ended. It sees possibilities beyond the end of the world as we know it, divine possibilities. These appear to be ruled out a priori by many people in the current cultural climate, for whom nothing exists beyond the vast but finite universe, with the hypothetical exception of future “big bangs” or parallel universes. Others would consider such total closure as premature, since there is always a surplus of meaning, creating the possibility of something new, which would invite fuller or richer redescription. In the expected closure there is the possibility of the integration of otherwise disconnected and ultimately meaningless events, whether in the rise and fall of the generations, the emergence and disappearance of civilizations or the birth of new stars. Within or beyond closure, a grain of hope might remain or emerge that a desired world that was never given the opportunity to come to fruition might yet be actualised. There are grounds for such hope especially in theological traditions. For monotheists of various kinds, there is a “hope in God to whom we turn for the creation of new possibilities in the face of nothingness.”28 Jüngel proposes that, instead of defining the possible as “the not yet actual,” thus prioritizing actuality over possibility, the relation should be reversed. Within a theistic frame of reference, the possible is simply ‘that which God creates.29 Possibility does not presuppose the actual; actuality presupposes the possible, understood as existing in the mind of God.30 The classical Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing) implies such an ontology. By extension, the resurrection of the dead, a transformation of the material of our bodies, should be considered no more surprising, though in this case there are actually existing bodies, albeit dead ones. From the resources of the Christian faith, including its eschatological hope, how might we understand the relation of God to the possible? Fiddes is a helpful guide.31 The classical view has been that from eternity God “envisages possibilities for the world to which we are blind.”32 The medieval view was that these must all be actualized simultaneously, since there was no room in this view for change in God. A variation on this view is that they need not—indeed cannot—all be actualized, but that God may choose among the multiplicity of possibilities within God. A second view is that God can also conceive new possibilities from the divine imagination, as the work of creation unfolds. God can change God’s mind: there are many stories in the Bible that imply such an understanding of God. This leads to a third kind of

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new possibilities: that they are not simply in the mind of God but emerge from the interaction between God and the created world. Human freedom requires some such openness. This presupposes both an “unchanging ground of all possibility” in God as well as a “contingent” aspect of God’s being in which boundaries and limits are set for particular possibilities.33 Some possibilities in people’s personal lives and relationships, in the world or in the cosmos, cannot be actualized until there is an interaction between God and the relevant finite agent. These considerations are highly pertinent to the discussion of climate change.34 GOD, THE WORLD, AND THE ANTHROPOCENE Christian theology has often included the notion of God’s “accompaniment” of the world in its historical course. It is part of the doctrine of God’s providence. The creation is indeed to be affirmed as fundamentally good, as is repeatedly stated in the first creation story (Gen 1:3–31). However, it has deviated from what was intended for it. Moltmann suggests that “the Creator suffers the contradiction of the beings he has created.”35 But rather than accompanying the world with “supernatural interventions and spectacular disruptions,” he prefers to think in terms of “God’s patience,” which allows for crea­turely activity and “God’s presence,” which makes space for creaturely freedom.36 This is a freedom for both wisdom and folly, for alignment with God’s purpose and for impeding it. It is generally fruitless for those who believe in God to engage in abstract speculation about what God can and cannot do in relation to the cosmos. It is more fruitful to try to describe how God actually appears to relate to it and act upon and within it. At times when the world’s leaders enact foolish policies and make destructive decisions, the question arises whether God might conceivably withdraw God’s accompanying presence and leave the world to its devices.37 The use of nuclear bombs is an extreme example. The failure to act to prevent the effects of climate change is another. The logic of crucifixion and resurrection suggests no such withdrawal. That God “allows” or “suffers” humankind to go to extremes of cruelty, injustice, and destruction can hardly be disputed. In creating a world of freedom for humankind and nature, God accepted the risk, a limited risk, that this freedom would be used against the project of creation. “The end,” says Fiddes, “is in one sense certain, but the route to the end, and thus the character of the end, has an openness about it.”38 This end is the forming of people who have been brought into conformity with the image of Christ (Col 1:15). The theology of the Eastern church calls this theosis, a transfor­mative process of union with, and likeness to, God. God is about making persons who are in harmony with God and with each other.

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This implies a correction of all distortion, a victory over evil and whatever blocks the divine purpose. Christian eschatology requires “a balance between closure and openness,” as Fiddes suggests.39 This carries the implication that “there is room . . . for tragedy as well as triumph in God’s victory over evil and suffering,” which raises the question of theodicy, a formidable challenge to belief in God in the modern world.40 The sudden or gradual disappearance of humankind from the face of the earth would be a profound loss and a tragedy—Hamilton describes it as “the profoundest ontological event”—but it would not necessarily mean the final failure of God’s project of creation.41 Our formation as human beings to conform to the image of God need not necessarily end with the disappearance of human beings from the face of the earth, just as it need not—and arguably does not—end with the death of individual persons. If God is love, a basic Christian claim which refers both to the intra-trinitarian love of the three Persons of the Trinity for each other and to the love that God has for the creation, it is very likely that God will achieve the new creation, the recon­ciliation of all things with their Creator. In an enigmatic statement, Fiddes writes that “what is reconciled may be less than it might have been.”42 Some possibilities may not be actualized; some good may not be produced. If the nuclear button were to be pressed, plunging the world into a nuclear holocaust, or if a deadly and inera­dicable virus were to appear on the planet, as now seems eminently possible, human life would be greatly altered, if not destroyed. But even that would not necessarily render God impotent with regard to the creation of new possibilities. The same must now be said in respect of the arrival of the Anthropocene with its potentially highly destructive consequences.43 It has exposed the vulnerability of many species, including our own, as well as the shortsightedness, selfishness, and destructiveness of homo sapiens. The impact and significance of these threats can hardly be overstated. But would they reduce us to thinking only in terms of an absolute closure, the death of everything? There is a skeptical and a hopeful answer to this question. If the cosmos is seen as a magnificent, but ultimately meaningless, entity there is no alternative to skepticism. If the cosmos is understood as having a trans­cendent point of reference, a divine purpose and some kind of divine agency, the promise of redemption remains an option, whether as a beginning de novo or as the transformation of the old creation into a new form. Then the purpose of God in creation could still be achieved, albeit by a different route. In the biblical picture of the close of the age the Lord will “descend from heaven” (1 Thess 4:16) and the holy city, the “new Jerusalem,” will “come down out of heaven from God” (Rev 21:2). These “events” are not extensions of already existing events, but constitute the novum, the “new thing” that Christians believe God will bring about. The notion of a “higher plan”

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in the mind of God, “directing events toward a predetermined goal,” is problematic for Hamilton, on the grounds that it denies the possibility of the ultimate tragedy of humankind’s disappearance.44 But this objection can be sustained only if such a “plan”—and “plan” is a questionable term for it— does not include the possibility of tragedy, let alone the “ultimate” tragedy. The argument of this essay is that the divine “economy” allows for ignorance, shortsightedness, folly, and the tragedy which may ensue, and that this need not ultimately thwart the intention of God, though it would be no small matter. It is indeed to be hoped, with Hamilton, that “new human beings [will] emerge who . . . allow themselves to be appropriated by the next future” and who will think very differently about life on this planet and adopt very different values from those of the techno-industrial era.45 There are already many anticipatory instances of the conversion of humankind from the policies and practices of governments and industry that gravely endanger the earth and its creatures. Such proleptic occurrences are to be welcomed as signs of a possible redemption. They encourage the hope of a new way of living in and relating to the earth, even if for a shorter or longer time we must suffer its retaliation for the harm we have already inflicted on it. CONCLUSION The preceding discussion rests on two fundamental convictions. The first is that Christian theology is a “science” in the continental sense of a scientia, a Wissenschaft. It is the science of God and of all things in their relation to God. By definition, this cannot be a narrow enterprise; on the contrary, it is the most comprehensive, all-embracing intellectual project human beings can undertake. It does not compete with the other “sciences” in respect of their specific concerns; in principle it is reliant on them. Therefore, to view the world theologically is by no means to look away from it, but to always have in view its relation to God. To use an ancient term, it must see everything temporal sub speciae aeternitatis. In a time when the question of God’s reality or existence is more widely regarded as open, its conclusions are controversial and often thought to be without foundation. Nevertheless, to be true to what it takes as “given,” it has no choice but to press on with its proper agenda. In the process, it must also be prepared to establish its epistemic and methodological claims. The second fundamental conviction is that Christian theology must have an eschatological shape, so to speak. When Christians today celebrate the Eucharist, they still make the acclamation that “Christ has died, Christ has risen [and] Christ will come again”; this is both memorial and expectation, and retained even though they understand the world very differently from

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the first generations of Christians.46 The remembrance of Jesus’s death and resurrection contains the hope of his parousia, his “coming” at the end of the age. When celebrating the gift of “salvation,” they think of a final state of blessedness, but also its “anticipation” in a new life already in the “old” age. The final transformation of all things—all wrongs put right, all divisions healed, all sins forgiven—is already experienced here and now, though fleetingly, brokenly. As explained in the essay, this requires a strong ontic sense of “anticipation.” Theology must be done not only sub speciae aeternitatis but also sub speciae eschatologiae. It commits theologians to think eschatologically, from the future, as well as from the beginning. The doctrines of creation and eschato­logy are inseparably intertwined. Eschatology encou­rages us to think beyond the world as it is now, but not away from it. Ultimately, Christian faith affirms and celebrates the promise that God will make all things new when this age gives way to the next (Rev 21:5). This is one form in which the Christian hope is expressed. But God is also making things new already in this age. Throughout the history of the universe God has been doing so, in the physical universe and in the lives of living creatures. God has always called into existence new possibilities in every part of creation, some of which become actual through a divine-creaturely partnership. Moreover, Christians are open not only to an ultimate new future, but also to proximate new futures. Therefore they look with hope for a future world which is hospitable to all species of life. Whatever we hope for in an ultimate sense, we cannot be indifferent to the earth on which we live, let alone to assume a licence to wreck it. We have been given this earth “to care for and delight in,” to respect its fragility and to ensure that it is left for future genera­ tions also to enjoy.47 The arrival of the Anthropocene deepens and intensifies this responsibility. Whether regarded as God’s creation or not, it is our obligation to treasure it as given to us in trust for new generations. What will finally become of this universe, including our solar system and our planet, is quite properly the subject of scientific speculation, with several possible scenarios at the centre of the discussion. Theology enters into this discussion only at the point of considering the universe, again, in its relation to God. Where science may choose only to speak of an “end,” theology must speak of a new creation, however conceived. As noted, endings are not always totally closed. A small but increasing number of theologians, also at home in astro-physics, are addressing this relatively new set of questions. At the other end of the spectrum, there is a set of questions about the end of our individual lives on this planet. These questions have been much debated in the history of theology and continue to be discussed. Although some of the general remarks about endings as open or closed are applicable to this discussion also, this has not been a particular focus of this essay. The immediate focus—and the immediate challenge—is ethical in nature: how to act in the

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world so that we, earth’s controlling species, do not bring about the fearful consequences of climate change that will make the earth finally uninhabitable. Eschatological thinking in no way detracts from this moral obligation. God has placed the well-being, indeed the survival, of this planet as a hospitable ecology in human hands. It is to be hoped that those possibilities that emerge in the partnership between God and humankind will, in time, bear fruit. NOTES 1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. F. L. Battles, vol. 21, The Library of Christian Classics (London: SCM Press, 1961). Bk 1,14.20, 1.6.2, 1.5.8. 2. Literally, “under the aspect of”—or “under the perspective of”—or “viewed in relation to”—“eschatology”; a variation of the more usual “sub speciae aeternitatis.” 3. Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017). 65. 4. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 155. My emphasis. 5. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 156. Author’s emphasis. 6. The detailed content of eschatological hopes and expectations in the period before and after the life of Jesus varied considerably from group to group within Judaism at the time. 7. The classic, one of the greatest works in European literature, is book I of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, completed in 1321. See the excellent verse translation by an Australian: Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Clive James (New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 2013). The focus on such scenes, even in sermons, has greatly diminished. 8. Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Can Christianity Do without an Eschatology?,” in The Christian Hope, ed. G. B. Caird (London: SPCK, 1970), 33. 9. Philip G. Ziegler, Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018, 8. 10. Ziegler, Militant Grace, 9. 11. Some attempts have been made, e.g., David Wilkinson, Christian Eschatology and the Physical Universe (London: T & T Clark, 2010). See also many of the essays in J. C. Polkinghorne and Michael Welker, The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology (Harrisburg, Pa: Trinity Press International, 2000). 12. John Polkinghorne, “Eschatology: Some Questions and Some Insights from Science,” in The End of the World and the Ends of God, 39. 13. A quotation by John Polkinghorne of Steven Weinberg. See Polkinghorne, “Eschatology,” 32. 14. See Hans Weder, “Metaphor and Reality,” in The End of the World and the Ends of God, 291.

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15. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God, trans. P. Clayton (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 96. 16. Paul S. Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 191. 17. Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimension, trans. M. Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1990), 303. Much the same passage is also quoted by Fiddes, The Promised End, 190. 18. One might add that God is also the “mystery” of the world, to quote the title of one of Eberhard Jüngel’s books: Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). 19. Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 304. 20. Fiddes, The Promised End, 191. 21. Such a prospect or hope is strongly contested across the wide spectrum of Christian opinion. 22. Here the brushstrokes are necessarily very broad, and there are certainly variations on each. For a classic state­ment of the relation between Christianity and the prevailing culture, see H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1956). The observations made in the present essay are not representative of the comprehensive account Niebuhr gave 70 years ago. 23. The phrase is attributed to the American Lutheran theologian, Gerhard Forde, but taken up and unfolded by Ziegler, Militant Grace, 6ff. 24. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns, 6th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 46f. & 50. 25. Ziegler, Militant Grace, 13. 26. Carl Braaten, “The Significance of Apocalypticism for Systematic Theology,” Interpretation 25, no. 4 (1971): 491, 493. Cited in Ziegler, Militant Grace, 9. 27. Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. J. W. Leitch (London: SCM Press, 1967), 16. Fiddes, The Promised End, 5. Fiddes explains this statement with reference to Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), which argues that “the end of a narrative brings a concord between its beginning, middle, and conclusion.” In this way the past, present, and future are organized in such a way as to overcome “the mere successiveness of time as measured by the clock” (9). He refers also to Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeur. See Fiddes, The Promised End, esp. 8–45. 28. Fiddes, The Promised End, 75. See the whole of chapter 3 for his interpretation of King Lear. 29. See Fiddes, The Promised End, 48. Rom 4:17 offers support for such a view: about “the God . . . who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” 30. The word “existing” is, of course, problematic. Normally only that which actually exists can be said to “exist.” 31. Fiddes, The Promised End, esp. 168–71. 32. Fiddes, The Promised End, esp. 168.

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33. Fiddes, The Promised End, 170. 34. What is suggested here about divine and human creativity in partnership is strongly resisted by theologians of a more classical understanding of God. The argument surfaces in a number of major questions, not least that of God’s impassibility and immutability, traditional attributes of God that are increasingly under challenge. 35. Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, 1st U.S. ed., The Gifford Lectures; 1984–1985 (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 210. 36. Moltmann, God in Creation, 211. 37. In what follows belief in God is, of course, presupposed. 38. Fiddes, The Promised End, 178. 39. Fiddes, The Promised End, 184. 40. Fiddes, The Promised End, 178. 41. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 114. 42. Fiddes, The Promised End, 79. 43. In the first three months of 2020, we in Australia had a frightening taste, an “anticipation” of these. 44. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 114, 121. 45. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 156. 46. It is part of the Prayer of Consecration (of the bread and wine for Holy Communion). 47. The fourth Prayer of Thanksgiving in the second Order for Holy Communion in the Anglican Church of Australia. A Prayer Book for Australia, (Sydney: Broughton Books, 1995), 136.

Chapter 8

Apocalypse and the Anthropocene A Biblical Resource for a New Global Epoch David J. Neville

The demarcation point between the Holocene and the Anthropocene may still be open to debate, but what seems apparent is that a threshold has been crossed into an epoch in which humanity is now a determinative force of— and upon—nature.1 Various limits have been transgressed to the extent that the human species is now recognized as having significant long-term impacts on our planet’s climate. The Anthropocene is marked by the appreciation that one among all the species of life on Planet Earth is responsible not only for a range of geohazards that threaten the quality of life for many species, but also for making this globe uninhabitable for ever-increasing numbers of species—and perhaps also for itself. Faced with the range of dire prospects predicted for the future of our planet by Earth System scientists, why look to the Bible? After all, the Bible is in some sense a product of the Holocene. Given the enormity of various challenges associated with human impact on our biosphere, what might an anthology of texts written between three thousand and two thousand years ago possibly contribute to the task of addressing contemporary challenges faced by people in—and of—the Anthropocene? CONTEXT AND ORIENTATION Within the theological subdiscipline of biblical studies, a tempting approach to considering challenges associated with the Anthropocene is to adopt an 123

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ecological hermeneutic, of which there is a variety.2 Within the Australian context, the Earth Bible approach grounded in a series of six ecojustice principles springs readily to mind.3 Or one might appeal to biblical interpreters like Richard Bauckham,4 who read biblical texts with a view to demonstrating that damaging human attitudes toward our natural habitat are really the result of perverse receptions of particular texts, which careful exegesis shows to be historic mis-readings down through the centuries. Most alluring for me is the self-consciously Christian theo-ecological hermeneutic developed by David Horrell, alongside various colleagues associated with the Exeter Project on Uses of the Bible in Environmental Ethics.5 To adopt any one of these interpretive stances toward the Bible—or even aspects of all three and more—might well prove fruitful. As I have surveyed both the history and recent discourse of ecological hermeneutics, however, what seems evident is that most, if not all, such interpretive effort is expended with a view to encouraging more responsible “creation care,” as if that will make major modifications in and for the future. But if I have heard the warnings of Earth System scientists correctly, what we humans have set in motion with respect to the Earth’s climate is irreversible, such that whatever checking of our market-driven and advertising-fueled lifestyles might result from religious and/or moral exhortations to live more sustainably will not undo what we, collectively, have already done to our habitat home. Put bluntly, ecological hermeneutics of whatever stripe is perhaps too optimistic about its positive practical impact in the Anthropocene. Furthermore, although I comprehend the moral motive behind much eco-interpretive effort, both the scale of global problems facing humanity as a whole in the Anthropocene and the reality that ethics is difficult to apply meaningfully to a species in its entirety make moral suasion awkward, perhaps even futile, especially at the macro level (government public policy, international relations, multinational corporations, global power elites). Lest I be misunderstood, ethics is crucial, especially within a theological frame of reference, wherein human responsibility possesses penultimate value as a correlative and hence corresponding response to the ultimate value of divine reality and initiative. In theological perspective, human responsibility is directionless and inevitably solipsistic without its transcendent reference point,6 even though thoughtful Christians are able to participate in moral discourse and make moral decisions on humanist or broader-than-humanist grounds no less capably than anyone else. Ethics, for all its importance, comes after—after God, for Christians and other theists, or after one discerns a vision of the good or of life worth living, or after what parents or friends or societal conventions tell us we should think and feel and do. Something else precedes and thereby conditions ethics, whether that be trust, hope, vision, or wonder. Moral conduct may be a way of being good in our world, a way of

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relating responsibly to our world and to others—including other life-forms— in it, but ethics arises in response to something other than oneself, something that precedes me and faces me in otherness, eliciting conduct subject to moral judgment and constraint. As a result, in this study I take a different tack by offering an alternative perspective on interpreting the Bible—or, more precisely, a biblical resource—in the Anthropocene. Following a series of prior studies on the role of the Bible (and of biblical interpretation) in public theology,7 this exercise composes an attempt to relate the biblical notion of apocalypse to the Anthropocene in the dialect of public theology.8 Over recent decades, public theology has been defined in various ways, perhaps most simply as “theology that is deliberately intended to contribute to public debate and discussion,”9 but my working definition of public theology is that, within a pluralist context, public theology is a mode of non-insular Christian discourse regarding God and God’s world in which pressing public concerns are addressed by sharing the various resources of its heritage (biblical, historical, theological, spiritual, and moral) with the wider world in an accessible, non-presumptuous, and non-coercive way. Hence, on the assumption that the global challenges facing humanity in this new epoch comprise some of the most pressing perplexities for public theology in the twenty-first century, this study focuses on apocalypse as a determinative biblical resource for making sense of the Anthropocene in theological terms and for nurturing a particular kind of hope in what threatens to be a bleak future.10 Put differently, this study aims for a different understanding of the role of Bible study and biblical interpretation in relation to living in the Anthropocene. Its concern is to draw upon the biblical witness to engender hope or, restated, its aim is to attest to the theological virtue of hope with reference to a decisive biblical resource. Its specific burden is witness to hope or hopeful witness, not (herein) biblical interpretation in the service of moral exhortation to live more carefully and sustainably. To clarify, I neither dismiss nor denounce nor denigrate any mode of biblical study that seeks to encourage greater sensitivity to nature or to engender “creation care.”11 I need such encouragement as much as the next person, but in our current climate I am inclined to see any forward steps in that direction as a witness to hope rather than as a recipe for rescue. REIMAGINING APOCALYPSE If one pauses for a moment to reflect on current connotations of the term apocalypse, what associations come to mind? When intoned on news broadcasts, the term invariably refers to catastrophic devastation, either natural or the result of intentional or accidental human activity. Especially

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when associated or equated with eschatology, apocalypse connotes cosmic conflagration—earthly upheaval and/or celestial meltdown. It also tends to evoke a sense of violent payback, either in the form of divine retribution or in the sense of reaping the natural consequences of intractable recalcitrance. As Emma Wasserman observes in her Apocalypse as Holy War, “In popular usage, the term ‘apocalypse’ often evokes profoundly visual cues, be it blood-soaked battles, violent upheavals, or catastrophes on a grand scale. Inflected with a specifically Christian sense, the term usually carries notions of a worldwide reckoning or judgment long delayed.”12 No one welcomes the prospect of an apocalyptic scenario. With respect to the Anthropocene, the consequences of collective human activity on our planet are often described in “apocalyptic” terms. As Michael Northcott explains, The claim that humans are living in an anthropic epoch, the Anthropocene, is not only a matter of historical and scientific judgment. It also involves a departure from nineteenth-century ecological science and the related rise of environmentalism. In essence it is the realization that nature and culture are irrevocably mixed up, and that what for a century humans have called the “environment” is human as well as “natural.” But the announcement of the Anthropocene shares a dominant feature of environmental discourse—its apocalyptic character.13

In a similar vein, Lisa Sideris’s description of the attitude of certain new conservationists toward older environmentalists like Henry David Thoreau and Rachel Carson is as follows: “These heroes of the ‘old’ guard are charged with fueling technophobia and misanthropy, spawning narratives of eco-tragedy and apocalypse.”14 When, in his last major work, Battling to the End, René Girard characterized our time as “apocalyptic,” he meant it in this same basic sense, especially in tandem with his notion of the escalation of violence to extremes.15 In biblical literature, however, apocalypse is associated with discernment of divine disclosure and hope of divine deliverance. The Greek term from which apocalypse derives denotes “unveiling,” “disclosure,” “revelation.” From the opening word of the Revelation to John, scholars have borrowed the term apocalypse to refer to a literary genre, within which creative written works share a number of distinctive, even if not unique, features. Perhaps most important, however, biblical (and closely related extracanonical Jewish and Christian) apocalypses share what might best be described as a theological mindset, mythology, or cosmic imaginary. When thinking about apocalypse, it is important to differentiate between (1) the denotative meaning of the term (unveiling or disclosure), (2) apocalyptic literature as a genre of rather varied texts with overlapping themes and features, and (3) an apocalyptic mindset or mentality expressed in such texts

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(often referred to as “apocalypticism”).16 Two definitions formulated by John J. Collins, an authoritative interpreter of apocalyptic literature, provide helpful points of departure for understanding apocalypse as a genre and apocalypse as a vision of reality. In 1979, introducing a series of studies produced by the Apocalypse Group of the Society of Biblical Literature Genres Project, Collins wrote: “‘Apocalypse’ is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”17 As for an apocalyptic vision of reality or symbolic universe, Collins offers this description: “the world is mysterious and revelation must be transmitted from a supernatural source, through the mediation of angels; there is a hidden world of angels and demons that is directly relevant to human destiny; and this destiny is finally determined by a definitive eschatological judgment. In short, human life is bounded in the present by the supernatural world of angels and demons and in the future by the inevitability of a final judgment.”18 Though distinct, both apocalypse as genre and apocalypse as vision of reality share a common conception: reality is not merely mundane and hence empirically transparent; rather, the world is complex, strange, and more than one-dimensional, implying that genuine knowledge or necessary insight must be received from a non-mundane, ordinarily inaccessible dimension. The limits of reality do not coincide with the limits of human comprehension or even comprehensibility. Beyond the frontier of the mundane is a vast and vital transcendence that relates to empirical or immanent reality like the depth of an ocean relates to its surface. As a result, although there are limits to what can be known, such limits are transgressed by vision illumed from beyond. Apocalypse bespeaks a mystical, unpredictable world.19 This is a decisive datum for this study, especially in view of early Christian usage of apocalypse as a resource for interpreting the Christ event. Debate continues about the antecedents, origins, and social function of apocalyptic writings. Among the defining characteristics of Jewish and Christian apocalypses, however, the following would feature in most lists: recounted visions, sometimes including heavenly ascent and travel on the part of a seer; the motif of a heavenly intermediary, who unveils hidden information about the past, present, and/or future; eschatological expectation, often associated with divine judgment that vindicates the righteous and punishes the unjust; the depiction of correspondences between “upstairs” (the heavenly sphere) and “downstairs” (the earthly sphere); historical periodization, a form of ancient dispensationalism, often associated with key (salvation-)historical figures or political regimes; relative determinism and/or dualism, relative because Israel’s creation theology makes room for some level of human

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self-determination and Jewish monotheism relativizes strict ontological or cosmological dualism; frequent use of esoteric numbers, symbols, and codes; and exhortations to those perceived to be the righteous elect to endure current hardship or harassment because right and divine might is bound to prevail and is on their side. Although not everyone sees things this way,20 for reasons that will shortly become clear, I consider that the use of apocalyptic thought forms and motifs by the main New Testament (NT) writers to explicate the meaning and significance of the Christ event resulted in new, distinctive, and indeed innovative patterns of thought. This was the result of a twofold movement, akin to an interpretive feedback loop, by which Paul, the biblical Gospel writers, and John the prophet-seer mined apocalyptic modes of thought and mythical motifs for resources to convey their understanding of the identity and significance of Jesus Messiah but, in doing so, decisively reconfigured their mythmaking resources. APOCALYPSE RECONFIGURED IN LIGHT OF THE CHRIST EVENT In 1960 Ernst Käsemann presented a paper on “The Beginnings of Christian Theology,” subsequently published in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche.21 On the basis of texts selected largely from Matthew’s Gospel, Käsemann begins by outlining certain theological tensions within primitive Christianity, especially between Torah-observant Jewish Christians and expressions of early Christian conviction with a more relaxed attitude toward Torah observance as a result of Spirit endowment. Corresponding to this tension related to Torah observance is a discernible difference in eschatology: “This means that a difference of eschatology divides from each other the two groups which we have been considering in primitive Christianity. The one remains within the continuity of the Jewish hopes—the other passes beyond the eschatological tradition of the fathers (as in the question of the Torah and the ordering of the community) through the events of Easter and the receipt of the Spirit, driven on by enthusiasm along a new route.”22 Focusing on a stylistic form of sayings he describes as “sentences of holy law,”23 which in his view presuppose eschatological recompense (jus talionis), Käsemann argues that although Jesus of Nazareth took John the Baptist’s apocalyptic message as his point of departure, he himself proclaimed the nearness of God without an apocalyptic emphasis; in turn, however, the post-Easter community of faith under the guidance of the Spirit recast (or replaced!) the teaching of Jesus regarding God’s nearness in apocalyptic terms. Within this context Käsemann makes his memorable declaration:

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“Apocalyptic was the mother of all Christian theology—since we cannot really class the preaching of Jesus as theology. Even if the validity of this judgment were challenged and it was desired to associate Jesus more closely with the beginning of Christian theology than seems to me justifiable, those who took this view would still have to recognize in post-Easter apocalyptic a new theological start.”24 This judgment on Käsemann’s part is then defended in the concluding section of his paper, in which he associates end-expectation not only with notions of divine recompense but also with moral accountability associated with the ascended and enthroned Messiah, the righteousness of God, divine justice on earth, and God’s rectification of the ungodly: The heart of primitive Christian apocalyptic, according to the Revelation [to John] and the Synoptists alike, is the accession to the throne of heaven by God and by his Christ as the eschatological Son of Man—an event which can also be characterized as proof of the righteousness of God. It is this for which those referred to by the fourth beatitude [Matt 5:6] have been hungering and thirsting—for the realization of the divine justice on and to our earth. But exactly the same thing seems to me to be happening in the Pauline doctrine of God’s righteousness and our justification—which I therefore derive, so far as the history of religion is concerned, from apocalyptic. This can have been the only possible reason why primitive Christian parenesis was primarily grounded in apocalyptic. God’s justice done on and to our earth is here no longer a matter for the remote future, although it will not be universally revealed until the Parousia. But it is already being realized in the obedience of those who are waiting for this moment, who hear and accept the prophetic proclamation of the standards of the Last Judgment and pass it on through the whole world.25

The claim has been made that Käsemann stands at the origin of a renewal of research on apocalyptic,26 and he is also credited with being the originator of a major movement among Pauline interpreters who read Paul in apocalyptic terms.27 Irrespective of Käsemann’s standing in the history of NT scholarship, I hereby reaffirm but also refine his insight that apocalyptic is the mother of Christian theology—first by expanding his apparently limited conception of early Christian apocalyptic but also by pointing out that, when used as a resource for Christian theological reflection, apocalyptic thought forms and hence motifs are reconfigured by virtue of their use to interpret the life, mission, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. First, then, when questioned by Gerhard Ebeling about his conception of apocalyptic, Käsemann conceded the following in a footnote: “It emerges from the context that almost throughout I speak of primitive Christian apocalyptic to denote the expectation of an imminent Parousia.”28 Although end-expectation, especially imminent eschatological anticipation, is found in apocalyptic texts or texts with apocalyptic components, eschatology is

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not necessarily the sole nor even the principal defining feature of an apocalyptic vision of reality.29 As a result, to reaffirm Käsemann’s judgment that apocalyptic is the mother of Christian theology, a broader understanding of apocalyptic as a cosmogony or conception of reality is required, something along the lines of the following description. In theological perspective, apocalypse or the apocalyptic vision of reality to which it gives expression is what one might call a mythical theodicy in light of a perceived incongruity between two unrelinquishable but conflicting convictions: first, that the world that sustains us owes its presence to a good and generous Creator who formed it in goodness; and second, that the world as we experience it is inherently flawed beyond the level of our capacity alone to ruin it and also well beyond our capacity to repair it. Apocalypse expresses the hope that the beneficent creativity responsible for the world in the first place is fecund and effervescent enough to sustain the world through woe and to bring it finally to its purposed telos (end or goal). Thus, even though eschatology does not feature explicitly in all apocalypses, an eye upon Endzeit is implicit in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought because of its view of Urzeit, both of which it conceives as the Creator’s handiwork. In Christian theological perspective, then, concern for eschatological resolution is necessarily an aspect of an apocalyptic vision of reality, which arises from the discerned discrepancy between how things are and how things ought to be. When, moreover, the apocalypse at the center of one’s vision of reality is Jesus of Nazareth, understood as God’s messianic agent for the transformation of the world, how one conceptualizes apocalypse is reconfigured—not merely re(de)fined—in light of his life, mission, death, and resurrection (for which “the Christ event” serves as shorthand). The conceptual resource— apocalypse—employed to explicate the meaning of the Christ event is itself reconceptualized as a result. This reconceptualization is evident from several NT witnesses, albeit not uniformly, which perhaps explains why this point is not always appreciated. Perhaps the most notable feature of Ebeling’s rejoinder to Käsemann on the origins of Christian theology is this counter-claim: “The absolutely constitutive factor in primitive Christianity from its earliest beginnings is the appeal to Jesus, the belief in him, the confession of assurance in the proclaiming of his name.”30 This contention is then elaborated by such further remarks as, “what stands at the beginning of Christian theology is apocalyptic modified by faith in Jesus,”31 and “in certain respects we may regard the apocalyptic element as indispensable, and to that extent certainly as a criterion, yet, on the other hand, we cannot do without a criterion for the right way of speaking apocalyptically of Jesus.”32 To illustrate the point that, when used as a resource for interpreting the Christ event, apocalyptic thought forms and motifs are reconceptualized or reconfigured as a result, consider the apparent nexus between apocalypse and

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violence. It is a common prejudice that an apocalyptic mindset or apocalyptic thought patterns are inherently violent and vindictive. Indeed, one often encounters the supposition that eschatological vengeance is but a natural expression of an apocalyptic vision of reality. There is sufficient evidence that an apocalyptic worldview often finds expression in texts featuring end-time violence as God rescues the righteous and winnows the wicked. But careful investigation of the Gospel traditions leads to the conclusion that, by and large, the biblical Gospels destabilize the apparently inherent association between apocalypse and violence. In all four canonical Gospels, theological reflection on the mission and message of Jesus was facilitated by apocalyptic thinking. In that facilitation process, however, such apocalyptic modes of thought were reconfigured under the impress of the story of Jesus, especially in the Gospels according to Mark and John, but also in the Gospel according to Luke and its sequel, Acts.33 And one such reconfiguration was to dissociate divine action from violence. So we find ourselves in the curious situation in which we tend to associate apocalypse with violence and vengeance even though the apocalyptic event itself, God’s self-disclosure in the person of Jesus—as attested, albeit unevenly, in the Gospels—was peaceful.34 For more than a century, NT scholars have bickered about whether or not the historical Jesus should be regarded as an apocalyptic prophet, whether or not Jesus of Nazareth shared the apocalyptic mindset of at least some of his contemporaries.35 Whether or not Jesus is best considered as an apocalyptic prophet is a significant historical concern, but that question differs qualitatively from the theological intuition shared by the principal NT witnesses that Jesus of Nazareth was himself God’s apocalypse. To see Jesus as the apocalypse of God—true, even if not exhaustive, divine disclosure—is to discern God’s will and way as being in concord with Jesus’s historic mission, as attested in the Gospels and other NT writings. In this connection, it is worth considering the claim by some that the historical figure of Jesus was more indebted to prophetic and/or sapiential traditions of Israel than to apocalyptic traditions. Especially in connection with eschatological hope, there are those who perceive the teaching of Jesus as being more prophetic than apocalyptic. Prophetic eschatology is often differentiated from apocalyptic eschatology in various ways, with prophetic eschatology usually characterized as more historically, rather than otherworldly, oriented and also as more morally focused, allowing for a clearer conception of collaboration between divine and human agency.36 By contrast, apocalyptic eschatology is often considered to emphasize divine agency at the expense of human agency, especially in the moral sphere. God’s impending judgment and the visionary outcomes of divine judgment seem to leave neither room nor motivation for people to act for the common good.

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There are certainly differences between prophetic and apocalyptic eschatology, but such differences are easily overdrawn. Both historically and christologically, one must be cautious about positing a strict either/or between prophetic and apocalyptic eschatology. Historically speaking, various currents of influence flowed into Jewish/Christian texts characterized as apocalyptic writings and, perhaps more important, the mindset illustrated by such texts. One such current, perhaps even a major influence, was Israelite prophecy. This is a reasonable, even if contestable, inference from the range of biblical motifs and texts often described as “proto-apocalyptic.”37 Such a judgment also finds support in the fact that the author of the NT apocalypse par excellence considered his literary creation a book of prophecy (see Rev 1:3; 22:7, 10, 18–19).38 Moreover, in light of the hortatory content and tone of the seven letters in Revelation 2–3, which most clearly identify the original addressees of his visionary work, John the prophet-seer would likely have been nonplussed by any suggestion that his apocalypse encouraged moral passivity. Textured by Israelite scriptures, John’s dramatic re-presentation of divine disclosure by and about Jesus Messiah may be assumed to uphold the theological-moral nexus woven into Israel’s scriptures. Furthermore, once apocalypse is reconfigured christologically—that is, with reference to the life and mission, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth—a particular facet of that reconfiguration gleams more brightly. Traditionally, perhaps, apocalyptic thinking may have simply reinforced existing ethical norms or codes, although in the case of Jewish/Christian apocalypses this reinforcement was nevertheless morally powerful.39 Once Jesus is perceived as the apocalypse of God, however, the moral content of his teaching and the moral implications of his manner of being become normative for those who share this perception of his identity and significance. This is evident from Käsemann’s affirmations about “the heart of primitive Christian apocalyptic,” cited earlier, in which he affirms the ethical corollaries of the righteousness of God implied by the enthronement of Messiah Jesus as the eschatological Son of humanity: “God’s justice done on and to our earth is here no longer a matter for the remote future, although it will not be universally revealed until the Parousia. But it is already being realized in the obedience of those who are waiting for this moment, who hear and accept the prophetic proclamation of the standards of the Last Judgment and pass it on through the whole world.”40 In a similar vein, one might say that to accept Jesus as God’s apocalypse is also to accept Jesus’s call—nay, commandment!—to love enemies along the lines of God’s indiscriminate providence, perhaps even, in our current context, the earth as the locus of divine providence, which we as a species have made our enemy.41 Apocalypse reconfigured christologically is by no means inherently quietist in moral terms. Human agency for good is empowered by hope in God’s

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ultimate triumph over all that opposes God’s purposes for humanity within creation. Human agency, however, is a fragile basis for hope that things will ultimately work out well; after all, we find ourselves in the Anthropocene because of human agency, and biblical traditions do not encourage the view that people are capable, in and of themselves, of correcting calamitous consequences of our conduct. God the Creator, by contrast, is capaciously creative, according to Jewish and Christian conviction, transforming the tarnished, repairing the ruined, and even generating good from evil. In this connection, consider, for example, the eschatological hope of John the prophet-seer, from whose opening vocable to his visionary work we derive the term apocalypse (Rev 1:1). Based on the earthly mission of the (executed) Lamb, the principal christological icon of his creative work, John sees nature and history moving ineluctably under divine direction toward its climax in the New Jerusalem, even if such forward movement appears chaotic due to forces implacably opposed to God’s will and way. In the Apocalypse of John, the New Jerusalem (21:1–22:5) is the true goal, of which “Babylon” (Rome) is the counterfeit imperial “wannabe” that exercises political, economic, and even ideological dominance over the known world (16:17–19:4). More positively, John’s vision of the New Jerusalem at the heart of a renewed heaven and renewed earth also reprises, while also reconfiguring, traditional Israelite hopes for shalom, the created order restored to harmonious wholeness.42 The motif of a new heaven and a new earth centered on Jerusalem derives from Isaiah 65:17–25 (cf. 66:22; 9:1–6; 11:1–10), which in turn harks back to the creation accounts in the opening chapters of Genesis.43 Whereas the creation stories envisage an entirely bucolic world, with human beings contextualized entirely within natural settings, the later visions of creation restored make room for Jerusalem as integral (Isaiah) and even central (Revelation) to God’s renewing or recreational activity. This is remarkable, especially in light of the origin of cities within Israel’s myth of primordial history. Cain, the first murderer, is also remembered as the first founder of a city (Gen 4:17); subsequent to the Flood, cities and city-building (including Babylon and Nineveh) feature in the recollections regarding Nimrod, “the first man of might on earth,” and Asshur after him (Gen 10:8–12); and the well-known story of human hubris divinely frustrated in Gen 11:1–9 focuses on people’s determination to build a city containing a tower reaching to the heavens so as to elevate their reputation. In Israel’s myth of origins, nature is God’s creation, but cities are created by people and reflect fundamental human flaws. Even so, in visions of future restoration in Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21, the city of Jerusalem is integrated into God’s recreational action, thereby signaling that, in Jewish-Christian perspective, God’s capacious restorative transformation extends even to expressions of human arrogance, defiance, destruction, and self-sufficiency.

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With the God of Israel (and hence also of Jesus), there are grounds for hope that nothing human-engineered is beyond divine redemption. Grounds for hope? Earlier I indicated that the burden of this study is witness to hope or hopeful witness. As in the past, apocalypse now (in the Anthropocene) expresses confidence in God’s capacity to right wrong, to undo evil, and even to bring about good—the common, global, and cosmic good—through means diametrically opposed to God’s will and way. The Jewish-Christian notion of God as Creator is of an Other characterized by boundless creativity, imitated but ultimately unmatched by opposing forces. Thus, hope is but the forward-looking or leaning-forward facet of faith as trust in God’s faithfulness—faithfulness first to God’s own creative purposes but also to divine promises attested by the biblical writers, especially those witnesses to God’s lifesaving and creation-restoring initiative displayed and discerned in the life-story of Jesus of Nazareth. Looking ahead to eschatological rescue is no more and no less a matter of trust than looking back to the life and teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and leaning upon that messianic event as creation-celebrating, justice-and-mercy-affirming, and peace-preserving, in short, lifesaving in a holistic sense.44 However important it may be in psychological terms to be positive or optimistic, Christian hope is not reducible to optimism or a positive mental attitude about the future.45 Christian hope is grounded in God, especially in God’s creative capacity to bring about something unprecedented. That something new may—and indeed should—involve human agency and initiative, but in Christian theological perspective hope is grounded in God’s creative capacity to bring to fruition what is unrealizable from natural potentialities or by human effort alone. It is not “subjunctive hope,” hope in divine action that is itself contingent upon human consent to and collaboration with God’s initiative.46 Like Christian faith, rather, Christian hope trusts in God to accomplish what we ourselves alone cannot. We do not hope for what we have already, so hope is something like faith in the future or an expression of trust that the future is open to surprise, so long as we keep in mind that Christian hope implies trust in God’s future, faith first and foremost in God’s own integrity and trustworthiness, by which I mean God’s faithfulness to God’s own creative and restorative being and action, and hence also faith in God’s self-disclosed (“apocalyptic”) commitment to be God not without us people and our world but with us people in our world, which in theological perspective is not ours so much as God’s world for us. Seen in this light, hope may be characterized as a humble or non-hubristic stance of openness to the possibility of fulfillment of divine promise(s), which because of God’s inexhaustible creativity are likely to surprise by being filled fuller than it is possible to anticipate.

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CODA: APOCALYPSE AND ETHICS The stance adopted in this study might seem dangerously close to passive waiting on God to rescue humanity—hardly responsible! Yet in view of the theological-moral nexus one finds in the Bible, the stance of witness to hope or hopeful witness is generative (or supportive) of moral initiatives corresponding to the goodness, generosity, and creativity of God affirmed in Israelite and Christian scripture. The biblical nexus between theological discernment and corresponding moral responsibility implies that theological vision, especially when illumed by Jesus as divine disclosure (apocalypse), has moral ramifications. Put differently, since some of us hope and pray for God’s future, for God’s heavenly reign to refresh creation and for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, Christian hope has a present impact. In the same way that Jesus spoke of God’s heavenly reign being near enough to put pressure on the present, so also hope in God’s ultimate triumph over oppressive forces—even humanity’s oppression over the rest of creation—impinges on the present in ways that might be said to correspond to God’s life-giving, life-enhancing, and life-restoring work in the world, as evidenced in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s mission and message. Hope evoked by Jesus as apocalypse should in turn elicit anticipatory analogies of our ultimate hope in the form of corresponding conduct. Hope, one hopes, broadens one’s vision so as to care more keenly, share more generously, and perceive others (in the broadest sense) more magnanimously and mercifully. Hence ethics, if indeed it remains possible to reason morally together within the new conditions marked by the Anthropocene.47 NOTES 1. I am a biblical interpreter, not an Earth System scientist. My understanding of the Anthropocene is largely indebted to the work of Clive Hamilton, especially Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2017), alongside other shorter studies. I am grateful to Stephen Pickard, Peter Walker, and Jonathan Cole for the invitation to present an earlier version of this study to the third of three consultations on Religion, Ethics, and Climate Change, hosted by Charles Sturt University’s Centre for Public and Contextual Theology and focused on challenges associated with the Anthropocene. For constructive criticism of my work-inprogress, I thank Mark Brett, Keith Dyer, David Horrell, and Thorwald Lorenzen, as well as others who participated in one or more of the three consultations.

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2. For orientation to various approaches to ecological biblical hermeneutics, see David G. Horrell, Cherryl Hunt, and Christopher Southgate, “Appeals to the Bible in Ecotheology and Environmental Ethics: A Typology of Hermeneutical Stances,” Studies in Christian Ethics 21 (2008): 219–38; David G. Horrell, The Bible and the Environment: Towards a Critical Ecological Biblical Theology (London: Equinox, 2010; London/New York: Routledge, 2014); David G. Horrell, “Ecological Hermeneutics: Reflections on Methods and Prospects for the Future,” Colloquium 46 (2014): 139–65; Celia Deane-Drummond, A Primer in Ecotheology: Theology for a Fragile Earth (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2017), 18–34. 3. For scholars involved in the Earth Bible project, the six ecojustice principles guiding critical evaluations of biblical texts are: Earth’s intrinsic worth; interconnectedness; voice (or vocal agency); purpose within an overarching cosmic design; mutual custodianship; and resistance against injustice. For an early articulation of these ecojustice principles, see Norman C. Habel, “The Challenge of Ecojustice Readings for Christian Theology,” Pacifica 13 (2000): 125–41. Five initial volumes of the Earth Bible series published by Sheffield Academic Press (2000–2002) have since been followed by a volume emerging from the Society of Biblical Literature Ecological Hermeneutics Consultation/Section and also by the Earth Bible Commentary series, published by Sheffield Phoenix Press and Bloomsbury (2011 onwards). For studies emerging from the SBL Ecological Hermeneutics Consultation, see Norman C. Habel and Peter Trudinger, eds., Exploring Ecological Hermeneutics (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008). For an early critique, see Ernst Conradie, “Towards an Ecological Biblical Hermeneutics: A Review Essay on the Earth Bible Project,” Scriptura 85 (2004): 123–35. 4. See, e.g., Richard Bauckham, Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2010); Richard Bauckham, Living with Other Creatures: Green Exegesis and Theology (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011). Although Bauckham’s apologetic “reading of recovery” aims to iron out ecologically wrinkly biblical texts, his interpretive endeavors often prove illuminating and thought-provoking. The label, “reading of re(dis)covery,” derives from the respectful but incisive critique of Bauckham’s ecological hermeneutic by Horrell, “Ecological Hermeneutics,” 142–49. 5. See, e.g., Horrell, The Bible and the Environment; David G. Horrell, Cherryl Hunt, and Christopher Southgate, Greening Paul: Rereading the Apostle in a Time of Ecological Crisis (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010); David G. Horrell, Cherryl Hunt, Christopher Southgate, and Francesca Stavrakopoulou, eds., Ecological Hermeneutics: Biblical, Historical and Theological Perspectives (London: T&T Clark International, 2010). 6. An analogous point is articulated by Maria Antonaccio, “De-moralizing and Re-moralizing the Anthropocene,” in Religion in the Anthropocene, ed. Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann, and Markus Vogt (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2017), 121–37. For Antonaccio, “the Anthropocene raises a deeper, quasi-theological question about the sources of normativity by which humanity orients itself in the world. Insofar as the Anthropocene makes the idea of a singular and independent Nature distinct from human society increasingly difficult to sustain, it challenges the

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idea of an external norm, principle, or exteriority that has long served as a restraint on human power” (pp. 136–37). For biblically grounded Christian theology, Nature’s Creator rather than Nature itself is the “locus of otherness,” “source of normativity,” or “principle of exteriority, an ‘outside’ to the human project that sets normative limits on human action and provides a larger frame for human self-understanding” (p. 132). Even so, the biblical story begins by recognizing that, despite “normative limits on human action,” human transgression of such limits is the norm. 7. See David J. Neville, “Justice and Divine Judgement: Scriptural Perspectives for Public Theology,” International Journal of Public Theology 3 (2009): 339–56; David J. Neville, “Christian Scripture and Public Theology: Ruminations on their Ambiguous Relationship,” IJPT 7 (2013): 5–23; David J. Neville, “The Bible, Justice and Public Theology: An Introductory Essay,” in The Bible, Justice and Public Theology, ed. David J. Neville (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press; Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2014), 1–21; David J. Neville, “Parable as Paradigm for Public Theology: Relating Theological Vision to Social Life,” in The Bible, Justice and Public Theology, 145–60. 8. In linguistic terms, a dialect is a form of a language distinctive to a particular social group or geographical location. By analogy, public theology is a dialect of theology that is distinctive with respect to its pluralist context, its public (rather than in-house) audience, which may not share its perspective or presuppositions, and its accent (focusing on matters of broad public concern). To speak of public theology as a dialect of theology also hints at the importance of dialectic for public theology’s methodological stance, on which see David J. Neville, “Dialectic as Method in Public Theology: Recalling Jacques Ellul,” International Journal of Public Theology 2 (2008): 163–81. 9. Deane-Drummond, A Primer in Ecotheology, 17. 10. The hope I have in mind here is hope that remains (1 Cor 13:13), whether that be understood as steadfast hope or lasting hope, alongside faith and love. I would also prefer a more noble-sounding notion than “biblical resource,” which is enhanced only slightly by claiming it to be determinative. What I have in mind is Conradie’s idea of doctrinal keys or constructs or Deane-Drummond’s concept of “theological markers.” See Ernst Conradie, “The Road towards an Ecological Biblical and Theological Hermeneutics,” Scriptura 93 (2006): 305–14, discussed by Horrell, The Bible and the Environment, 117–37, who prefers the image of theologicalinterpretive lenses; Ernst Conradie, “What on Earth is an Ecological Hermeneutics? Some Broad Parameters,” in Ecological Hermeneutics, ed. Horrell et al., 295–313; Celia Deane-Drummond, “Performing the Beginning in the End: A Theological Anthropology for the Anthropocene,” in Religion in the Anthropocene, ed. DeaneDrummond et al., 173–87, esp. 184–87. As much as the idea of a biblical resource may suffer by comparison with “theological markers” or “doctrinal keys, constructs, or lenses,” it nevertheless conveys the sense that apocalypse is a mode of thought and expression employed by biblical (as well as non-biblical) writers to articulate both a vision of reality and an existential stance in and toward the world, but which while adopted was also creatively adapted by some biblical writers to make sense of and to

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articulate their intuition regarding God’s creative presence and lifesaving power in the person and mission of Jesus of Nazareth. 11. For example, I value the book by Douglas J. Moo and Jonathan A. Moo, Creation Care: A Biblical Theology of the Natural World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018). My study, however, is closer in intent to that of Jonathan Moo, “Climate Change and the Apocalyptic Imagination: Science, Faith, and Ecological Responsibility,” Zygon 50 (2015): 937–48. 12. Emma Wasserman, Apocalypse as Holy War: Divine Politics and Polemics in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 203. 13. Michael Northcott, “On Going Gently into the Anthropocene,” in Religion in the Anthropocene, ed. Deane-Drummond et al., 22. 14. Lisa H. Sideris, Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 142. On ways in which environmental debate is often characterized in “apocalyptic” terms, see Anne Gardner, “Modern ecological concerns, the persistence of apocalyptic and the signs of the end,” Pacifica 27 (2014): 4–27, and Moo, “Climate Change and the Apocalyptic Imagination,” 937–42. 15. See René Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chartre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010). On the relevance and value of Girard’s thought in relation to the Anthropocene, see Petra Steinmair-Pösel, “Cooled Down Love and an Overheated Atmosphere: René Girard on Ecology and Apocalypticism in the Anthropocene,” in Religion in the Anthropocene, ed. Deane-Drummond et al., 188–201. 16. I am not a scholar of non-biblical apocalyptic texts, though for teaching and research purposes I have studied the texts clustered together in 1 Enoch, various texts discovered at Qumran, 4 Ezra, and 2 Baruch. To varying degrees, I regard Paul, the biblical Gospel writers, and John the prophet-seer as sharing an apocalyptic mindset, albeit influenced, again to varying degrees, by the conviction that Jesus of Nazareth is God’s messianic agent. My own view on apocalypse is informed by biblical apocalyptic texts, but I am also indebted to scholars of apocalyptic literature, some cited in this study. Especially noteworthy are two collections of essays edited by John J. Collins: The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Vol. 1: The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity (New York: Continuum, 2000); and The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). See also the two-part review of scholarship by Lorenzo DiTommaso, “Apocalypses and Apocalypticism in Antiquity,” Currents in Biblical Research 5 (2007): 235–86, 367–432. On the value and relevance of apocalypse more broadly, see Samuel V. Adams, The Reality of God and Historical Method: Apocalyptic Theology in Conversation with N. T. Wright (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2015), a work with wide-ranging ramifications for method and epistemology in theological and historical enquiry. 17. John J. Collins, “Introduction: Towards the Morphology of a Genre,” Semeia 14 (1979): 9; reiterated in John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 5. Although routinely cited even forty years later, this definition was subsequently amplified as follows: “intended to interpret present, earthly circumstances in light of

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the supernatural world and of the future, and to influence both the understanding and the behavior of the audience by means of divine authority.” See Adela Yarbro Collins, “Introduction: Early Christian Apocalypticism,” Semeia 36 (1986): 7. 18. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination, 9. 19. Lest this should seem suggestive of an outdated cosmology, consider what present-day physicists inform us about the nature of reality at the quantum level. 20. Cf. Wasserman, Apocalypse as Holy War, in which the author adopts a consistently critical historical approach to apocalyptic dimensions of the letters of Paul by means of literary comparison and historical contextualization so as to counter a perceived apologetic concern on the part of scholars of early Christianity to demonstrate the novelty, uniqueness, or at least distinctiveness of nascent Christian apocalyptic thought. 21. Ernst Käsemann, “Die Anfänge christlicher Theologie,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 57 (1960): 162–85. Two replies to Käsemann’s paper by Gerhard Ebeling and Ernst Fuchs published in 1961 provoked him to respond with a clarifying paper entitled “Zum Thema der christlichen Apokalyptik,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 59 (1962): 257–84. In this subsequent paper Käsemann outlined his reconstruction of developments in early Christian “apocalyptic” from Jesus to Paul, including the future-oriented but also imminent eschatology of post-Easter Jewish Christianity and the over-realized eschatological enthusiasm of Hellenistic Christianity. Translations of all four of these essays by James W. Leitch may be found in the Journal for Theology and the Church 6 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969): 17–133. Here, however, citations from Käsemann’s two related essays are from Ernst Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today, trans. W. J. Montague (London: SCM Press, 1969), 82–137. 22. Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today, 88. 23. Käsemann had earlier presented a lecture on this topic at the 1954 SNTS meeting in Marburg. See Ernst Käsemann, “Sentences of Holy Law in the New Testament,” in New Testament Questions of Today, 66–81. 24. Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today, 102. Here Käsemann echoes the thesis statement that opens Bultmann’s NT theology: “The message of Jesus is a presupposition for the theology of the New Testament rather than a part of that theology itself.” See Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, 2 vols., trans. Kendrick Grobel (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, 1955), 3. A few paragraphs later (p. 103), Käsemann identifies the relation between the proclamation of Jesus and that about Jesus as the determinative problem of NT theology. For a nuanced restatement of Käsemann’s case that apocalyptic birthed Christian theology, see Adela Yarbro Collins, “Apocalypticism and Christian Origins,” in The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature, ed. Collins, 326–39. For Yarbro Collins, however, Jesus was influenced by an apocalyptic frame of reference no less than John the Baptist. See also Adela Yarbro Collins, “Apocalypticism and New Testament Theology,” in The Nature of New Testament Theology: Essays in Honour of Robert Morgan, ed. Christopher Rowland and Christopher Tuckett (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 31–49, as well as the volume dedicated to her “in recognition of her contribution to the understanding of early Christianity in relation to the Jewish apocalyptic tradition,” namely, Benjamin

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E. Reynolds and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, eds., The Jewish Apocalyptic Tradition and the Shaping of New Testament Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017). 25. Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today, 105. Käsemann concludes this paragraph by referring to the Fourth Gospel’s notion of divine judgment realized by virtue of a person’s response to Jesus as Messiah, thereby grounding most of the major NT witnesses in apocalyptic: all four biblical Gospels, Paul, and John the prophet-seer. He concludes this initial essay by reiterating that the central motif of post-Easter apocalyptic is not divine recompense but rather “the hope of the manifestation of the Son of Man on his way to his enthronement” (p. 107). Early Christian apocalyptic hope is grounded in Jesus Christ as risen and ascended Lord. See also the final section of his follow-up reflections on the theme of Christian apocalyptic, New Testament Questions of Today, 131–37, which fleshes out this emphasis with reference to Paul. 26. See DiTommaso, “Apocalypses and Apocalypticism,” 235: “While neither materialized ex nihilo, Käsemann’s celebrated declaration that ‘apocalyptic’ was the mother of early Christian theology (1960) and Pannenberg’s workshop paper on revelation and historical understanding in Judaism and Christianity (1961) inaugurated the modern period of research.” It would be more correct, in my view, to credit Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer for inaugurating the modern period of research on the relevance of ancient Jewish apocalyptic for understanding early Christianity. 27. See N. T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters: Some Contemporary Debates (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 145–50; J. P. Davies, Paul among the Apocalypses? An Evaluation of the “Apocalyptic Paul” in the Context of Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Literature (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 9–12; Ben C. Blackwell, John K. Goodrich, and Jason Maston, eds., Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016). 28. Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today, 109, note 1. Despite this concession, Käsemann wrote with a broader conception of Christian apocalyptic in mind, as evidenced by the citation above from his first essay, in which he elaborates on “the heart of primitive Christian apocalyptic,” and also by the concluding section on Paul in his second essay, in which he emphasizes the present, albeit interim, sovereignty of Jesus as exalted Messiah, thereby qualifying apocalyptic in christological terms. See Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today, 131–37. That said, in a paper on Paul presented in the same year as his lecture on the theme of Christian apocalyptic, Käsemann identifies imminent eschatological anticipation as determinative for Paul’s thought and mission. See Käsemann, “Paul and Early Catholicism,” in New Testament Questions of Today, 236–51. 29. See Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Christianity (London: SPCK; New York: Crossroad, 1982), 23–48. On the defining feature of apocalypticism, see Christopher Rowland, “Apocalypticism,” in The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, ed. John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 345: “What distinguishes apocalypticism as a religious outlook is its peculiar hermeneutical basis. In apocalypticism, theological understanding does not come by the exercise of established methods of reading and

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interpretation but by supernatural revelation. Revelation is not dependent on ingenuity or the interpretation of tradition but is in some sense given from beyond.” 30. Gerhard Ebeling, “The Ground of Christian Theology,” Journal for Theology and Church 6 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969): 55. Ebeling’s original response to Käsemann was published as “Der Grund christlicher Theologie,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 58 (1961): 227–44. 31. Ebeling, “The Ground of Christian Theology,” 56. 32. Ebeling, “The Ground of Christian Theology,” 57. The decisive point for Ebeling is that “we do not by any means merely interpret Jesus in the light of apocalyptic, but also and above all interpret apocalyptic in the light of Jesus” (p. 58). Käsemann’s response to Ebeling on this point appears in a cursory and rather obscure footnote. See Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today, 115, note 9: “It goes without saying that it has never been my intention to talk of any apocalyptic other than that . . . ‘modified by faith in Jesus.’ The critique exercised on Jewish apocalyptic by this faith is quite evident from a comparative study. But theological advances will become rare if they are undertaken only under the safe cover of text-books. I am satisfied if I can get as far as articles and then hope for my flanks to be guarded by good friends and well-disposed readers.” Having reread Käsemann’s studies, I venture the view that Ebeling’s rejoinder was necessary and deserved a more considered explicit reply, although it is possible to read Käsemann’s section on Paul near the end of his second study as an implicit response to this point by Ebeling. See Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today, 131–37. 33. This dynamic of “apocalyptic reconfiguration” is less evident in Matthew’s Gospel. 34. Not everyone agrees that Jesus was peaceful. Regarding many of the passages routinely identified as problematic for positing a peaceful Jesus, see David J. Neville, The Vehement Jesus: Grappling with Troubling Gospel Texts (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2017), which composes an anachronistic prequel to A Peaceable Hope: Contesting Violent Eschatology in New Testament Narratives (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013). 35. For a relatively recent contribution to this debate by a scholar of apocalyptic literature, see Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “The ‘Apocalyptic’ Jewish Jesus and Contemporary Interpretation,” in Matthew and Mark across Perspectives: Essays in Honour of Stephen C. Barton and William R. Telford, ed. Kristian A. Bendoraitis and Nijay K. Gupta (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 143–64. 36. I am grateful to Mark Brett for reinforcing the latter point, both in his formal response to an earlier version of this study and in his comments on Isa 58:11 within his section on hope and human agency in his contribution to this volume. On the former point, see Stuckenbruck, “The ‘Apocalyptic’ Jewish Jesus,” 146–47. 37. For a survey of the range of such biblical motifs and texts, see Frederick J. Murphy, Apocalypticism in the Bible and Its World: A Comprehensive Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 27–66. 38. For a comparable merging of prophetic and apocalyptic motifs, see 1 Peter 1:10–12, cited by Christopher Rowland to conclude his essay, “Apocalypse, Prophecy and the New Testament,” in Knowing the End from the Beginning: The Prophetic,

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the Apocalyptic and their Relationships, ed. Lester L. Grabbe and Robert D. Haak (London: T&T Clark International, 2003), 149–66. 39. Regarding the bearing of apocalypticism on morality, see, e.g., Dale C. Allison Jr., “Apocalyptic Ethics and Behavior,” in The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature, ed. Collins, 295–311, and John J. Collins, “Radical Religion and the Ethical Dilemmas of Apocalyptic Millenarianism,” in Radical Christian Voices and Practice: Essays in Honour of Christopher Rowland, ed. Zoë Bennett and David B. Gowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 87–102. I appreciate that apocalyptic modes of thought have resulted in mixed moral blessings, but this is a point on which apocalypse reconfigured christologically makes all the difference. 40. Käsemann, New Testament Questions of Today, 105 (emphases mine). I would like to press the ecological potential of the phrase, “God’s justice done on and to our earth,” but I am not convinced that Montague’s translation is the most accurate rendering of Käsemann’s German phrasing. On the continuing theological and ethical significance of Käsemann’s foregrounding of “apocalyptic” for Christian origins, see Ry O. Siggelkow, “Ernst Käsemann and the Specter of Apocalyptic,” Theology Today 75 (2018): 37–50. Siggelkow shows how Käsemann’s convictions, shaped by the “spectre of apocalyptic,” entail radical moral commitments—to and for the powerless. 41. I make this interpretive suggestion emboldened by Horrell’s creative and constructive ecojustice reading of 2 Cor 5:14–21. See David G. Horrell, “Ecojustice in the Bible? Pauline Contributions to an Ecological Theology,” in Bible and Justice: Ancient Texts, Modern Challenges, ed. Matthew J. M. Coomber (London: Equinox, 2011), 158–77; reprinted (along with another study on “rereading Paul in a time of ecological crisis”) in David G. Horrell, The Making of Christian Morality: Reading Paul in Ancient and Modern Contexts (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2019), 209–28. 42. Debate continues on whether John’s vision anticipates a completely new heaven and new earth, subsequent to the “passing away” of the first heaven and earth, or a renewed or transformed heaven and earth. At a minimum, continuity no less than discontinuity between the present heaven and earth and the new heaven and earth is foreseen in John’s vision. For ecological implications of biblical visions of future restoration and peace, see Horrell, The Bible and the Environment, 88–103, and Jonathan Moo, “Continuity, Discontinuity, and Hope: The Contribution of New Testament Eschatology to a Distinctively Christian Environmental Ethos,” Tyndale Bulletin 61 (2010): 21–44, wherein one finds this compelling claim: “The call for those who are in Christ is to live as beachheads of that new creation in the present age, to engage in what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls ‘truly responsible’ action that reflects care for the penultimate in the light of God’s ultimate future” (p. 29). Also crucial in this connection is J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014). 43. For further illuminating reflections on the renewal of heaven and earth in Isaiah 65, see the section devoted to this passage in Mark Brett’s essay within this volume. 44. In my view, apocalypse ultimately implies a fideistic or, perhaps better, suprarationalistic stance. Apocalyptic visionaries sought to facilitate a true vision of reality, but such vision was not amenable to empirical verification. Likewise, although there

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is little reason to doubt the veracity of certain events in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the conviction that his mission and message comprised a—nay, the—lifesaving messianic event is not susceptible to empirical verification. 45. This distinction is made by various authors, even though it is not based on linguistic grounds. See, e.g., Chris Doran, Hope in the Age of Climate Change: Creation Care This Side of the Resurrection (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2017), 56–59. In subsequent pages, Doran offers an analysis of the theological meaning of hope. In this connection, see also Richard A. Floyd, Down to Earth: Christian Hope and Climate Change (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2015), who by means of engagement with the work of Jürgen Moltmann and Sallie McFague proposes an ecological eschatology that is both humble and hopeful, and Willa Swenson-Lengyel, “Beyond Eschatology: Environmental Pessimism and the Future of Human Hoping,” Journal of Religious Ethics 45 (2017): 413–36. 46. See Floyd, Down to Earth, 48, near the beginning of his chapter on McFague, titled “Subjunctive Faith.” 47. See Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 136–56. If I understand Hamilton correctly, apocalypse as I have characterized it has no meaning for those without faith in a transcendent reference point, as illustrated in the following words: “Most of us are unable to invest our faith in divine providence. The gods absconded long ago” (p. 159). “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins effectively and affectively expresses a contrasting vision, meaningful still for some of the few left over from the “most” unable to envision, let alone entrust themselves to, divine providence.

Chapter 9

Redeeming Eden Biblical Ethics in the Anthropocene Mark G. Brett

There is a bitter irony in the social conditions of the Anthropocene: the growing awareness that human agency is affecting the earth’s systems coincides in time with the arrival of an increasingly unruly world of nature. The new ecological instability is said to be unprecedented over the past 10,000 years, and some theorists suggest that no ethic developed under the conditions of the Holocene could possibly be relevant to the task ahead. The ethical cupboard is bare.1 Others wonder whether a rebirth of virtue ethics might be possible— perhaps the virtues of humility, justice, truthfulness, compassion, and hope.2 Christian theologians have a potential contribution here, not least because these virtues have been developed within our tradition for more than a millennium, but according to Clive Hamilton, this time scale is unimpressively short in the context of deep geological time. A millennium just takes us back further into the conditions of the Holocene, and into the irrelevant presumptions of its natural harmonies. Hamilton’s argument for unprecedented cultural challenges is not entirely compelling. The dominant cultural traditions of ancient Western Asia did not presume a stable world of nature—quite the contrary, the capricious activities of the gods in their creation mythologies presumed an unstable world. One would therefore need to consider the question why the febrile conditions of the Anthropocene do indeed have some cultural analogies in biblical times.3 This leads me to wonder whether some elements of biblical theology may still be relevant for the practice of hope in a time of climate change, particularly among the faith communities who are ready to engage with these biblical texts. 145

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In this chapter, I will make a case for ecological theology via reflections on a few key texts in each of the three main sections of the Hebrew canon—the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. First, we will reexamine the possibility for the redemption of Eden envisaged in Leviticus 26, focusing on the representation of human agency. Secondly, we will turn to the divine poesis of renewed heavens and earth in Isaiah 65. In both visions, we find a new human—more ready to recognize a sacred earth, and more intimate with the divine presence on earth, but in each case the ecological redemption is centered on Israel’s own promised land, around which the rest of the world turns. The third text to be considered, Job 28, is much less provincial, less focused on a divinely chosen place, and instead, it can be read as enjoining humans to discover wisdom in the earth, wherever it may be found. This third theology, it will be argued, provides a way of rereading the redemption of the Eden within the Torah and the Prophets, and points the way toward a renewed practice of wisdom in public space. HUMAN AGENCY IN THE LOSS OF EDEN Instead of the ruling and subduing notoriously found in Gen 1:28, the vocation of the primal humans in the second creation narrative is to “serve and preserve” Eden.4 Putting to one side the complexities of Genesis 1–3, it is clear that the loss of Eden is not the end of the story, particularly for the prophets who envisage a return to Eden. Ezekiel, for example, imagines that the nations will marvel at the restoration of Judah: “This land that was desolate has become like the Garden of Eden” (Ezek 36:35). This is glorious poetry, one might say, but its focus is only on the land of Judah rather than the earth as a whole, and how do we read such eschatology today, even through the eyes of faith? Is the redemption of Zion a fatally narrowed vision? Before seeking to answer this question, it is worth noting that there is another fall from Eden depicted in the Hebrew Bible, in Ezekiel 28, and this text is equally relevant for illuminating the predicament of the Anthropocene. The character evicted from Ezekiel’s Eden is not Adam, but the king of Tyre. He also lays claim to a divine wisdom, according to Ezek 28:3–6, 17, but this royal rhetoric is exposed as merely human hubris that obscures the violent exploitation of natural resources and dishonest trade. Redemption only becomes possible when such delusions of power are unmasked. Indeed, as already suggested, there are several possibilities for the redemption of Eden envisaged within the Hebrew Bible, and these are worth considering in some detail.

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LEVITICUS 26 Over the past couple of decades, biblical scholarship has been converging on the idea that there are two main legal traditions in the Torah, each of which concludes with its own list of blessings and curses. Deuteronomy’s national tradition ends up with the list in Deuteronomy 28, and the Priestly tradition has its own list in Leviticus 26. It will not be necessary in this context to review the many recent theories about the composition of the Pentateuch.5 Here we are simply highlighting the arguments for thinking that Leviticus 26 is reinterpreting the Eden narrative, and I want to suggest that this reinterpretation goes to fundamental questions of ethics in the larger narrative of Genesis through Leviticus. In contrast with apocalyptic traditions in the Bible, Leviticus 26 implies the possibility of human agency in the redemption of Eden.6 Accordingly, our task in the present context is to understand the genuine choice that the Priestly tradition sets out in Leviticus 26. The first thing to note is that this chapter sits within the so-called Holiness Code of Leviticus 17–26, which is itself a reinterpretation of the cultic traditions contained in the older Priestly material within Exodus and Leviticus. To cut a long story short, the Holiness Code represents an argument internal to the Priestly tradition about the relationship between religion and ethics. The cult is not overtly criticized, as it is in the Prophets, but the older Priestly theology—which restricted holiness to the cult and its functionaries—is evidently undergoing reconstruction.7 For example, the older Priestly picture in Exod 29:46 locates Yhwh’s presence in cultic ceremonies with the promise: “I will place my dwelling in your midst,” but when this formula is reiterated in the blessing Lev 26:11–12, a slightly different point is added to it: “I will walk about (hithallaktı̂ ) in your midst.”8 This same reflexive verb (hithallaktı̂ ) is used within Priestly tradition to describe Enoch and Noah’s exceptional intimacy with God in the early chapters of Genesis (Gen 5:22, 24; Gen 6:9).9 Several scholars have argued that Lev 26:12 points back to these ancestral ideals, suggesting a picture of the restoration of divine-human communion not just in the sacrificial cult, but also beyond the precincts of the cult. In particular, Jacob Milgrom claims that when Yhwh “walks about” in Lev 26:12, “the clear implication is that . . . YHWH is not confined to a sanctuary but is present everywhere in the land.”10 Which land? The Holiness Code seems to focus specifically on divinely promised land, and by implication, Lev 26:12 is suggesting that Israel’s territory could once again be sacred, like the Garden of Eden in its pristine state. There in that sacred garden, Yhwh Elohim “walked about” (mithallēk in Gen 3:8) in a way that reflected intimate connections with the land.11

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The breach of a divine command in Eden leads to exile from God and from the earth, and the land itself is cursed (Gen 3:17–18). The curses in Leviticus 26 pick up on this theme of ecological distress, for example in v.19, where the earth and sky turn to iron and bronze. This particular curse is, however, inverted in the positive picture in Lev 26:4–5, which presents a world that is still available to law-observant Israelites: I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its produce, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. Your threshing shall overtake the vintage, and the vintage shall overtake the sowing; you shall eat your bread to the full, and live securely in your land.

The positive images of abundant bread and fruit seem to take up the specific wording of the creation narratives (bread in Gen 3:19 and Lev 26:5; fruit trees in Gen 1:29 and Lev 26:4), and the highlighting of bread and fruit may even evoke the vegetarian and peaceful ideal set out in the creation narratives.12 Leviticus 26 sets out stark choices for Israel, which is charged with the primary responsibility for the health of the created order. Remarkably, Lev 26:33–35 also imagines that the land itself has rights that need to be respected. The purpose of Israel’s exile then becomes not simply a matter of retributive justice for the sake of Israel’s own healing, but also for the sake of the land’s healing: And you I will scatter among the nations, and I will unsheathe the sword against you; your land shall be a desolation, and your cities a waste. Then the land shall enjoy its Sabbath years as long as it lies desolate, while you are in the land of your enemies; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its Sabbath years. As long as it lies desolate, it shall have the rest it did not have on your Sabbaths when you were living on it.

This explanation for Israel’s exile never appears in the books of Kings, but it does surface in the conclusion to the thorough rewriting of Israel’s history in the books of Chronicles (2 Chron 36:21). Along with the prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel, Chronicles can imagine the possibility of redemption in the divinely chosen land, as long as its Sabbath limitations have been properly respected. A key question for ecological interpretation then arises: does the Priestly tradition imagine the possibility of redemption and reconciliation with the earth beyond the boundaries of Israel’s sacred terrain? One answer to this question could be a qualified yes—especially if we consider the implications of the theology of divine names. Within the Priestly and Holiness traditions, it is very clearly stated that the ancestors in Genesis did not know the national name of the divinity (Exod 6:2).13 The national or “Yahwistic” tradition

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asserted the contrary view, notably in Genesis 12:2, which affirms Yhwh’s promise to Abram that he would become the father of one great nation. But the Priestly traditions contested this by insisting in Genesis 17 that Abraham was the father of many nations, and that Abraham was addressed by God only under the name El Shaddai. A related point is made in the Priestly creation story in Genesis 1, where the maker of heaven and earth is named Elohim, not Yhwh. All human beings are therefore made in the image of Elohim, not Yhwh. With this theology of divine names, a universal human solidarity was formed under the umbrella of an inclusive monotheism, while preserving the specific jurisdiction for Yhwh in Israel.14 This line of interpretation provides some clues for how to read the Eden narrative through the lens of the Holiness editors who were reflecting on its legacy in Leviticus 26. While the dating of the two creation stories and their redactions remains controversial, it is clear the Holiness editors knew the Eden narrative.15 The second creation narrative begins in Gen 2:5 with the question of who would serve the land (“for there was no ʾādām to serve the land”), and this points to a general predicament for the whole earth, since the Garden of Eden has not yet been mentioned. The peculiar combination of divine names in Genesis 2–3, “Yhwh Elohim” (or the LORD God in English translations) implies that Israel’s Yhwh is at the same time the Elohim of the nations.16 More important, readers could infer that Yhwh’s unfolding relationship with Israel and her land provides a kind of model for other peoples and nations in relation to their own lands.17 This reading would at least be consistent with the wider Priestly tradition that combines the intensely local demands of Israel’s holiness with clear affirmations of Israel’s wider, even ecumenical, kinship with all the descendants of Abraham.18 But even beyond the representation of an “ecumenical Abraham,” the Priestly theology in Genesis 1 establishes a universal human solidarity among persons made in the image of Elohim, while the covenant with Noah establishes a framework for inter-species relationships (Gen 9:10–12). Thus, we can conclude that although the redemption of Eden has a focus on Israel within the Priestly and Holiness traditions, the three-book story of Genesis through Leviticus is rich with theological implications that potentially extend well beyond the nation’s borders. THE RENEWAL OF HEAVEN AND EARTH IN ISAIAH 65 The vision of a return to Eden is foreshadowed in Isa 51:3: For Yhwh will comfort Zion; he will comfort all her waste places,

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and will remake her wilderness like Eden, her desert like the garden of Yhwh. This picture of redemption is then articulated in strikingly global language in Isa 65:17–25, and the verse in this passage deserves a fresh translation: For I am creating (bôrēʾ) new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or go up to the heart. (65:17) The participle bôrēʾ, “creating,” envisages divine action that is already in process, but once again we encounter our key question: is this poetry concerned with the redemption of Israel’s sacred territory (indicated by the reference to “Zion”), or does it have broader implications for the earth? We may begin by observing that the utopian vision in Isaiah 65 is emphatically this-worldly. Verse 20, for example, envisages long lifespans rather than resurrection. Verses 21–22 invert the curses that flow from covenant breaches and envisage the quotidian pleasures of living in one’s own house and eating one’s own produce.19 The alternative scenario—in which one could build a house and not live in it, or plant a garden and not enjoy its fruit—belongs to experiences of war and exile. The prophet now insists that past trauma will not “go up to the heart,” and the cry of distress will no longer be heard in Zion (65:19, inverting Isa 5:7). The curses of Eden come to mind when we read in 65:23 that “they shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity, for their seed will be blessed of Yhwh.”20 And then in v.25, we hear that the serpent will be harmless, and its food will be dust. This vision of redemption, which inverts the alienation of Eden, qualifies as “eschatology” in the sense that it presents an enduring transformation of ordinary life. It has often been observed that 65:17–25 also shares a number of motifs with the vision of shalom in Isaiah 11. In that earlier chapter we find a similar picture of peaceable rule, with the notable difference that a messianic figure reigns over the scene. This Davidic figure is absent from Isaiah 65 and indeed from the whole of Isaiah 40–66. Although the peaceable sociality of the wolf and the lamb are reiterated, the reference to a child in 11:8 is missing from 65:25, possibly because the messianic connotations are being avoided in the later text.21 For the late editors of Isaiah, it seems that the redemption of the earth does not actually require a Davidic messiah’s mediation. For our present purposes, the reference to a snake in Isa 65:25 is particularly relevant. When we read that the serpent will eat “dust as bread,” this imagery invokes the Eden narrative (Gen 3:14), rather than the earlier chapter in Isaiah. Isa 11:8 speaks of the “asp” and “adder” being no threat to the child,

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but the wording in Isaiah 65 speaks instead of the nāḥāš, taking up the specific vocabulary from the Eden narrative. Contrary to Genesis 3, however, the nāḥāš is now seen as harmless in the renewed earth.22 In short, the poetry in Isa 65:25 has conflated Isaiah 11 and Genesis 3 in order to present a picture of the redemption of Eden. In the renewed earth, there will once again be peace between all of God’s creatures, human and nonhuman. This eschatological picture is not dependent on the agency of a messiah, but is more directly a matter of human relations with God and with the entire created order. HOPE AND HUMAN AGENCY IN ISAIAH At first glance, the images of peaceable creation in Isaiah 65 overlap substantially with the covenantal blessings outlined in Leviticus 26, except that in Isaiah 65 the emphasis seems to fall on divine intervention rather than human choices and agency; it is God who is renewing the earth. But such a contrast would be misleading, since it rests on a reading of Isaiah 65 taken in isolation of its larger context in Isaiah 56–66. The key to these last eleven chapters is arguably established in Isa 56:1, which takes up the repeated calls for justice earlier in the scroll and juxtaposes them with the divine salvation to come: Thus says Yhwh, “Maintain justice and act with righteousness, For my salvation is to come near and my righteousness to be revealed.23 The imitatio dei in this keynote text emphasizes the practice of justice rather than cultic ceremonies, and this point is made repeatedly throughout Isaiah. The fruit of justice “shall be like a watered garden,” Isa 58:11 suggests, evoking the more specific reference to Eden in 51:3. In short, although prophetic ethics are not focally concerned with care for the environment, the environmental consequences of human actions are evident throughout Isaiah and the rest of prophetic literature. Eden’s redemption in Isaiah 65 might be seen to focus on the sacred territory of Zion, but we should note that the completed scroll of Isaiah eventually embraced an imperial imaginary, which encompassed all the nations and not just Israel. Accordingly, Jerusalem is seen as the metropolitan center of a globalized jurisdiction, notably in Isa 2:2–4; 42:4; and 51:4–5.24 This imperial imagination was, ironically, evidently produced during Judah’s own subjection to successive empires (Babylonian and Persian), so the picture of Yhwh’s imperial reach might be better described as a “counter-imperial” imaginary. As we have already seen, the “ecumenical” and international dimensions of the Priestly tradition extend outward into this global space as well, clarifying

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that the Creator will have a different name—not Yhwh—in the lands beyond Israel’s borders. It is precisely in these distant regions (distant at least in Israel’s own geographical imagination) where the wisdom tradition picks up the conversation, emphasizing not only intercultural spaces, but also the necessity to study the earth. A WISDOM HERMENEUTIC IN JOB 28 None of the characters in the book of Job advance the cause of Israel’s God, not least because Job himself is depicted as a non-Israelite and therefore beyond the scope of Israel’s covenants. Nevertheless, Job is said to be a person of complete integrity, and if measured against Israel’s own ethical standards, he is well able to defend the right of slaves, widows, orphans, and aliens, all on the basis of an ethic drawn from creation rather than from Israel’s law.25 In Job 31, the poetry also evokes the narratives in Genesis 2–4: If my land has cried out against me, and her furrows have wept together; if I have eaten her yield26 without payment, and taken the breath of life27 from her owners; let thorns grow instead of wheat, and foul weeds instead of barley. (Job 31:38–40) We have already encountered the idea above, when discussing the international reach of the traditions in Genesis and Isaiah, that biblical authors may at some points see an analogy between Israel’s land and the lands of other peoples. Here the Joban poet uses languages and ideas from Genesis 3 and 4 to discuss the ethical connection between Job and the earth—whether his own land or land owned by others. In a remarkable passage in Job 12, Job urges his friends to learn from nature: But ask the wild beast, and she will instruct you; the birds of the air, and they will declare to you; speak to the earth, and she will instruct you; and the fish of the sea will relate to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of Yhwh has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing and the spirit of all human flesh. (Job 12:7–10)

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This passage is dense with allusions to the creation narratives in Genesis, but most striking is the twofold choice of the verb form wᵉtōrekā (literally, “and she will instruct you”). This wording is related to the familiar noun for law and instruction in the legal tradition: “Torah.” The word play is too significant to overlook, and we may therefore conclude that, from the Joban point of view, the earth has its own form of instruction. The divine speeches in Job 38–41 might seem to contradict this natural theology, at least on a cursory reading, by satirically questioning the extent of Job’s knowledge of the earth. The use of legal language of “statute” and “command” is highly significant: Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! . . . Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?— when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and I prescribed my statute (ḥuqqı̂ ), and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’? Have you commanded (ṣiwwı̂ ṯā) the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place (māqôm)? (38:4–5a, 8–12a) The poetry suggests that all creatures have their place (māqôm), much as Israel has her own sacred place, but not all these places in the created order are accessible to human knowing.28 However, instead of concluding that Job 38–41 simply contradict the more positive affirmations of wisdom in Job 12, it is actually possible to hold these seemingly opposed affirmations together. This possibility is offered particularly in Job 28. There, the “birds of the heavens” (who provide Torah according to Job 12:7), seem to be denied access to genuine wisdom in 28:21—wisdom “is hidden from the eyes of every living creature, and concealed from the birds of the heavens.” This skepticism, which is ostensibly aligned with the divine speeches in chapters 38–41, then seems to be confirmed in 28:23, where we find that “God understands her (wisdom’s) way, and knows her place (māqôm).” This latter claim is often taken to imply that divine wisdom is hidden from creaturely purview in some transcendent realm. A quite different reason, however, is provided in the very next verse: “Because [Elohim] looks to the ends of the earth, and sees everything under the heavens (Job 28:24). Significant here is that wisdom is to be found “under” heaven, in the earth. The full extent of wisdom is available to be discovered not in the divine mind, but precisely in the earth.29

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Job 28:25–27 then clarifies that it is only Elohim who has discovered the full extent of wisdom by earth research:30 When he gave to the wind its weight, and the waters he regulated by measure; when he made a decree (ḥōq) for the rain, and a way (derek) for thunderbolt’s voice; then he saw her and declared her; he established her, and researched her (ḥᵃqārāh). (Job 28:25–27) Paul Fiddes rightly summarizes this paradox in Job by insisting that we do not find two wholly incompatible kinds of wisdom in this theology, one dwelling in heaven and the other in earth. The difference between divine and human wisdom is “a difference of scope and extent, not a different kind of thing altogether.”31 Fiddes also adds an important qualification, which relates to the unruly conditions of the Anthropocene. Against any suggestion that the wisdom distributed in the earth may be “as fixed as a law of nature,”32 he argues that “to know the fabric of the world is to know wisdom, and the order of the world might not be ‘fixed’ at all.”33 This point might seem to contradict the fundamental assertion found several times in the Hebrew Bible, not least in Job 38, that the natural world is given laws and statutes. Perhaps we need to gloss the point by distinguishing between the laws of nature (that all science must presuppose) and the regular patterns of the climate that have been disturbed under the new conditions of the Anthropocene. From an anthropocentric point of view, there may be a considerable difference between perceiving an ordered or a “disordered” nature, but either way, wisdom is found in the Torah of the earth. TOWARD A PLANETARY THEOLOGY The wisdom in the “many places” of the earth may lie beyond the reach of any particular creature, but it does not follow that wisdom is entirely inaccessible; it may be known in part, and according to Fiddes, humans can “exercise wisdom in tune with God.”34 When aspiring to sacred attunement, humans need to combine a non-oppressive presence in one’s own place along with a respectful regard for other places. A wisdom orientation to natural “resources” must be conceived not as objects to be grasped but as nodes of creaturely relationships within which wisdom may be discovered. “A wisdom theology for today will maintain that at any moment, anywhere, any place can become holy,” Fiddes concludes.35 By implication, wisdom theology also

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affirms that the divine names which may appear at the nodes of creaturely relationships may not have been previously known within the biblical covenantal theologies. This is a crucial point to make when seeking justice for the earth in our own time, but this same point was already made long ago in the Priestly traditions and in Job, where divine names other than Yhwh are readily contemplated. The Joban poet went even further in an intercultural direction by pointing a humble humanity toward the wisdom to be discovered in the earth. In this respect, the book of Job provides reasons also to embrace the Indigenous spiritualities that, historically, extend back well before the Holocene.36 With this kind of biblical theology in mind, there is every reason to affirm the argument of Pope Francis in Laudato Si’ when he suggests that Indigenous peoples “should be the principal dialogue partners, especially when large projects affecting their land are proposed. For them, land is not a commodity but rather a gift from God.”37 More recently, when commenting on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, he has suggested that Indigenous voices “should be at the center of the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and at the heart of the search for new paths for a sustainable future.”38 Religious communities will need to work harder at intercultural collaborations, beyond those imagined thus far. If anything, the economic and political developments of the past three decades have dragged our ecological indicators backward, precisely when the climate science has become so clear. One significant factor was the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s, which has managed to incorporate many among the middle and working classes.39 Decades of illuminated ecological arguments have not effectively connected with the range of polities within civil societies, nor even with the working classes in Western democracies, if recent voting patterns are anything to go by. As Thomas Piketty’s recent research has shown, significant social gaps have increased over the past few decades. On the basis of detailed international studies, he argues that the “Brahmin left” have lost focus on inequality, while many working class people have drifted to the right as they seek solace in their experiences of economic vulnerability.40 This same kind of class division has also been observed in research focused on attitudes to the environment.41 In a globalized economy, collaborations within the powerful economies of Asia are also urgently needed, most of which embody quite different cultural and religious traditions. The spirituality of the natural world needs to be recovered via all the relevant traditions. Communities of faith accordingly need to push further into the implications of decolonial praxis, within which human and nonhuman creatures are equally dependent on the larger web of creation, connected to lands, waters, and atmosphere. It will not be possible to stay entirely within one’s own religious culture, or to offer testimony to hope in one’s own peculiar dialect. We will need to

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develop more multidisciplinary collaborations with a broad range of professionals and activists (including lawyers and economists), each of whom can engage in their very particular idiom with the overlapping complexities of local and federal governments, the courts, the media, international forums, and the variety of institutions within civil society. And the churches, in particular, have a potentially significant role to play in bridging the gap between the Brahmin left and working class peoples across the globe. The international networks of the churches and their agencies still have an extraordinary reach, if only they can find more effective ways to attune themselves to creation. NOTES 1. Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2017); cf. Clive Hamilton, Francois Gemenne and Christophe Bonneuil, eds., The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch (London: Routledge, 2015). 2. For example, Byron Williston. The Anthropocene Project: Virtue in the Age of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Jeremy J. Schmidt, Peter G. Brown and Christopher J. Orr, “Ethics in the Anthropocene: A Research Agenda,” The Anthropocene Review 3, no. 3 (2016): 188–200. 3. The “Holocene vision” of Genesis 1, which does indeed envisage a stable order spoken into existence by a single God, is exceptional when considered in its intercultural environment, as many scholars have pointed out. See the classic discussion in Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: the Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (New York: Harper & Row, 1987). Arguably, creation theology in the Hebrew Bible shifts responsibility for the instability in nature away from the gods and on to humans, e.g., in Jer 4:23–28 and Hos 4:3 (cf. Jer 12:4; 23:10). 4. “Serve and preserve” is only a rough translation of the two verbs ‘bd and šmr in Gen 2:15, which does not yet capture the sacred and covenantal overtones of the Hebrew text. The same terminology is used to describe Levitical cultic service in Num 3:7–8; 8:26; 18:5–6. Cf. Genesis Rabbah 16:5 on Gen 2:15. See further, Mark G. Brett and H. Daniel Zacharias, “To Serve Her and Conform to Her: An Intercultural Reading of Genesis 2:15,” (forthcoming). 5. See the overview in Rainer Albertz, “The Recent Discussion on the Formation of the Pentateuch/Hexateuch,” Hebrew Studies 59 (2018): 65–92. 6. This possibility may also be counterintuitive for many Christian readers who assume that there is no remedy for “the Fall” before the New Testament, but such a Christian assumption would make a mockery of the genuine choices set out in Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26. See further, Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Does Not Say about Human Origins (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2013); William Connolly, “The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine,” in Crediting

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God: Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism, ed. Miguel Vatter (Fordham University Press, 2011), 160–75. 7. See especially Israel Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995). 8. See, for example, Erhard Blum, Studien zur Komposition des Pentateuch (BZAW 189; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), 297, who contrasts the goal of the exodus as God’s dwelling within the cult (Exod 29:46) with the goal of the exodus as land possession (Exod 3:8,17). 9. Blum, Studien, 287–332, 291–92; cf. Christophe Nihan, From Priestly Torah to Pentateuch: A Study in the Composition of the Book of Leviticus (FAT II/25; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 106, invoking Blum, Studien, 291–92. 10. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 23­27, AB 3B (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 2301. 11. See already, Gordon J. Wenham, “Sanctuary Symbolism in the Garden of Eden Story,” in “I Studied Inscriptions from before the Flood”: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1–11, ed. Richard S. Hess and David T. Tsumura, SBTS 4 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 399–404. 12. G. Geoffrey Harper, “‘I Will Walk among You’: The Rhetorical Function of Allusion to Genesis 1–3 in the Book of Leviticus,” Bulletin of Biblical Research Supplements Series (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2018), ch. 7. Cf. Alfred Marx, Lévitique 17–27, CAT 3b (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2011), 199; Mark G. Brett, Locations of God: Political Theology in the Hebrew Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 65–67. 13. See Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence, 168–69. 14. Reading Genesis 2–3 from the point of view of Priestly editors, it is significant that Adam and Eve never learn the name Yhwh. The speeches in Gen 3:1–5 use only “Elohim.” See the overview of recent research in Jan Christian Gertz, “The Formation of the Primeval History,” in The Book of Genesis: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation, eds. Craig A. Evans, Joel N. Lohr, and David L. Petersen (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 114–18. 15. See especially the insightful discussions of Cynthia Edenburg, “From Eden to Babylon; Reading Gen 2–4 as a Paradigmatic Narrative,” in Pentateuch, Hexateuch or Enneateuch? Identifying Literary Works in Genesis through Kings, eds. Thomas B. Dozeman, Thomas Römer, and Konrad Schmid, AIL 8 (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2011), 156–67; David M. Carr, The Formation of Genesis 1–11: Biblical and Other Precursors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 30–82. 16. See already John Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis (New York: Scribner, 1910), 54. 17. André Lacocque, The Trial of Innocence: Adam, Eve and the Yahwist (Eugene: Cascade, 2006), 258; Tryggve Mettinger, The Eden Narrative: A Literary and Religio-historical Study of Genesis 2–3 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2007), 57–58; Mark G. Brett, Political Trauma and Healing: Biblical Ethics for a Postcolonial World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 185. 18. Konrad Schmid, “Judean Identity and Ecumenicity: The Political Theology of the Priestly Document,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Achaemenid Period:

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Negotiating Identity in an International Context, eds. Oded Lipschits, Gary N. Knoppers, and Manfred Oeming (Winona Lake: Eisenbraus, 2011), 3–26. 19. Jacob Stromberg, Isaiah After Exile: The Author of Third Isaiah as Reader and Redactor of the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 94. 20. Also in contrast with the curse in Gen 3:16, see Isa 66:7–8 where the pain of childbirth is absent: “before she was in labor she gave birth, before pain came upon her.” Christopher Seitz, Isaiah 40–66, NIB (Nashville: Abingdon, 2001), 544. 21. Konrad Schmid, “New Creation instead of New Exodus: The Innerbiblical Exegesis and Theological Transformations of Isaiah 65:17–25,” in Continuity and Discontinuity: Chronological and Thematic Development in Isaiah 40­–66, eds. Hans Barstad and Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 187. 22. See further Odil Hannes Steck, ‘“. . . ein kleiner Knabe kann sie leiten”: Beobachtungen zum Tierfrieden in Jes 11,6–8 und 65,25,” in Alttestamentlicher Glaube und biblische Theologie. Festschrift für Horst Dietrich Preuß, eds. Jutta Hausmann and Hans-Jürgen Zobel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1992), 104–13. 23. See especially Rolf Rendtorff, “Isaiah 56:1 as a Key to the Formation of the Book of Isaiah,” Canon and Theology, trans. Margaret Kohl, OBT (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 181–89. 24. Reinhard Achenbach, “Mishpat Haggoyim, Mishpat Laggoyim and the Early Development of Measures for International Human Rights in the Hebrew Bible,” Transversalités 133 (2015): 9–21; Brett, Locations of God, 86–97. 25. See especially Job 31, and compare Deut 14:28–29; 16:11–14; 24:19–22. 26. A more literal translation of kōḥāh would not be “her yield” but “her strength,” as is also the case in Gen 4:12. See further, Mari Joerstad, The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics: Humans, Nonhumans and the Living Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 48–69, esp. 58–65. 27. This fresh translation of Job 31:39 reflects the parallel wording in Gen 2:7, where we also find the verb npḥ (“breathe”) and the noun npš (“life”), even if the specific phrase nišmat ḥayyı̂ m does not appear in Job 31. A more literal rendering of v.39 would be “caused them to breathe out their life,” which effectively reverses the gift of breath in Gen 2:7, as pointed out by J. Gerald Janzen, Job: Interpretation (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2012), 215. Cf. also Job 33:4, where we find: “The ruaḥ El has made me, and the nišmat Shaddai gives me life.” 28. See also Ken Stone, Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 174–75. 29. Katherine Dell, “Plumbing the Depths of Earth: Job 28 and Deep Ecology,” in The Earth Story in Wisdom Traditions, eds. Norman C. Habel and Shirley Wurst (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 124. 30. Pierre J. P. Van Hecke, “Searching for and Exploring Wisdom,” in Job 28: Cognition in Context, ed. Ellen Van Wolde (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 158–59. 31. Paul S. Fiddes, Seeing the World and Knowing the World: Hebrew Wisdom and Christian Doctrine in a Late-Modern Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 235. 32. For example, David J. A. Clines, Job 21–37, WBC 18A (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006), 920.

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33. Fiddes, Seeing the World, 234. 34. Fiddes, Seeing the World, 250. 35. Fiddes, Seeing the World, 264–65. 36. See, for example, Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008). 37. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home (Rome: Vatican Press, 2015), para 146, cf. para 179. Reflecting on the potential influence of Laudato Si’, see especially Ross Garnaut, Super-Power: Australia’s Low-Carbon Opportunity (Carlton: La Trobe University Press, 2019), 23–24, 48–49, 166, 173. 38. Pope Francis, “Conference on Religions and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Listening to the Cry of the Earth and of the Poor,” Vatican City, March 8, 2019, http:​//​w2​.vatican​.va​/content​/francesco​/en​/speeches​/2019​/march​/documents​/ papa​-francesco​_20190308​_religioni​-svilupposostenibile​.html. 39. Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2019). 40. Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2020), esp. 744–64, 772–74, 807–61. 41. See especially, Douglas B. Holt, “Why the Sustainable Economy Movement Hasn’t Scaled: Toward a Strategy That Empowers Main Street,” in Sustainable Lifestyles and the Quest for Plenitude: Case Studies of the New Economy, eds. Juliet Schor and Craig J. Thompson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 202–32.

Chapter 10

The Serpent in the Garden— Sin and the Anthropocene Peter Walker

A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.1

FLAMES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE The Australia summer of 2020 was scorched by heat, fire, and terror. For weeks, Australians digested distressing images of devastated landscapes, cremated animals for whom those incinerated landscapes were once a habitat, a plane flown by visiting firefighters from the United States careering into a hillside, the loss of human life, apocalyptic skylines of smoke clouds and charred leaves, and the all-too-familiar scene of home after home in cinders. As the acclaimed Australian journalist David Marr put it, “we know the sight by heart: corrugated iron in a low pile of ash with a chimney left standing.”2 The military were called up to manage mass evacuations in order to secure people from the blazing enormity of the fire emergency, which was estimated at its worst to have covered 5.4 million hectares of a state with a greater land mass than Texas.3 In some settings, entire coastal townships had no way to escape raging flames other than retreat to the shore of the ocean where they sheltered for days until collected by the Australian Navy. This Australian inferno was one act in a global drama. That drama appears increasingly to be a play that will end in utter tragedy. And we know it. Just like the human finger that bumps a spinning top from its perfect rhythm so that the rotating toy teeters out of balance before finding a new equilibrium or 161

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collapsing, the Earth System has been destabilized by a new force—bumped into a different epoch. Australians were firsthand witnesses in the summer of 2020 to one consequence of that potentially calamitous destabilization. Clive Hamilton has summarized the broader canvas on which the fire-ravaged Australian landscape is located, namely, the shift from the Holocene to the Anthropocene epoch: Paleo-climate records show an Earth history punctuated by periods of dramatic change. . . . This often-violent geological history stretching back to the planet’s formation 4.5 billion years ago has been the product of the blind forces of nature, ranging from solar fluxes, volcanism, and weathering, to subduction and asteroid strikes. Yet in the few years after the Second World War, something almost inconceivable happened. A conscious, willing, decision making “force of nature” began actively changing the functioning of the Earth System as a whole, so much so that a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, is expected to be added to the Geological Time Scale to supersede the Holocene.4

We are that willing, decision-making force of nature; the force that has been changing the functioning of the Earth System as a whole. Earth System Science, a discipline born late in the twentieth century, invites us to set aside our localized conceptions of nature and the environment and consider, instead, that the Earth is “a single, dynamic, integrated, and ever-changing reality.”5 Planet Earth is a calibrated, finely tuned system, which we may (and must) consider en globo and, within that integrated system, there is one species that has broken away. There is one particular species that has now made that Earth System serve its own needs to the extent that the cost to the whole has become intolerable. One species has muscled itself away from the will of its Creator and from every other competitor bar one—the planet itself. The species Homo sapiens is now impacting the Earth System in ways comparable to the manner in which asteroids, volcanoes, and solar fluxes had previously impacted in the paleo-climate record. One species is now a force of nature rivaling the very forces of the Earth itself. Human impact on the Earth System is caused primarily by our disruption of an enormous quantity of carbon from its settled state within the Earth and its relocation into the atmosphere above the planet. The process is profoundly unnatural and yet has become second nature to the industrialized world for over two hundred years. Oil and coal (liquid and solid carbon) are pulled from the Earth, burned in engines and smelters to fuel the activity of industry and, via this process, the previously unharmful carbon in the soil below is turned into harmful carbon dioxide in the sky above. We have placed a layer of carbon dioxide around the planet that is creating a greenhouse-like effect. Heat is held within the Earth’s atmosphere, unable to escape the carbon layer, and the

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planet’s temperatures have risen, and continue to rise. As temperatures rise, one consequence is that land and trees become a tinder-dry source of fuel. A bushfire is one carelessly discarded cigarette away. The overwhelming majority of scientific research concluded long ago that these changes to the Earth System are our own doing. The evidence that humanity is the significant factor behind rising temperatures, and the consequential deadly impact on lands, waters, and species across the globe, has had the near-unanimous support of climate scientists for decades. Early in his Political Theology of Climate Change, under the subhead “A Slow Catastrophe,” Michael Northcott points out that the link between rising temperatures and rising anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide was first accurately modeled by the New York glaciologist Wallace Broecker as long ago as 1975. There are now four Global Circulation Models run by supercomputers belonging to the U.S. and U.K. governments that are increasingly accurate in tracking climate changes and matching predictions to those observations. According to their modeling, present rates of rising greenhouse gas emissions will see global temperatures rise by 4 to 7 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by the end of the twenty first century.6 The U.K. Meteorological Office published in 2009 a map of a four-degree-warmer planet. It shows that three quarters of the Earth’s land area will be unsuitable for food growing or secure human settlement in a four degree warmer world, including most of Africa, the Americas, and Asia.7 Our abuse of the Earth has been sitting in plain sight for all to see. The debate about climate change is therefore not a scientific debate. Yet it has become a political debate. As long ago as 2004, a literature review of the esteemed journal Science found that precisely none of the 928 peer-reviewed articles it carried in the previous ten years on the general topic of “global climate change” had disputed the reality of human-induced global warming.8 Yet in the years since, human-induced global warming has become a deeply contentious and partisan political issue in the world’s second largest national emitter of carbon dioxide, the United States, and the world’s largest per capita emitter, Australia. A 2012 Pew Research Center survey asked respondents whether or not they thought scientists were divided over global warming. 70 percent of Republican voters said scientists were divided and 42 perfect of Democrat voters agreed with them. Yet a 2009 global poll of all known university faculty working in climate science or a closely related discipline found that 96.2 percent agreed that global warming is real and 97.4 percent agreed that the main contributing factor was human activity.9 Why has the near unanimity of the scientific community become so confused in the public arena? Why has this become contested ground? The story of the strategic attack on scientific knowledge in the public arena, of the attempt to obfuscate truth and create doubt in the public mind about

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human-induced climate change, is forensically explored by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway in Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.10 They reveal how ExxonMobil, and other corporations, funded selected think tanks, which then hired their own experts to challenge scientists in the public domain, especially the popular press. In what should be recognizable as a transparent strategy of placing profit before truth, climate change was portrayed as just a theory by these experts and public policy changes were not to be entertained while the science was still in doubt. The apparently shameless Heartland Institute is one case study. While working with Phillip Morris in the 1990s to raise doubt over whether passive smoking caused lung cancer, they followed the “manufacturing uncertainty” strategy pioneered in the 1960s.11 A leaked tobacco company memo from that time reveals their playbook: “doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.”12 By 2012, the Heartland Institute’s self-professed primary agenda was to apply that playbook to raise doubt about whether or not global warming is true. The New York Times has reported that Heartland’s strategy was to promote the idea that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy.”13 They are focused on “undermining the teaching of global warming in public schools [and promoting] a curriculum that would cast doubt on the scientific finding that fossil fuel emissions endanger the long-term welfare of the planet.”14 Tragically, this strategy of challenging knowledge, not by countering with alternative scientifically based arguments, but simply by manufacturing doubt, has worked. RESURRECTING SIN The concept of sin has almost entirely disappeared from public discourse. This reflects the secularization of Western culture. Discussion of sin has been moved to the private sphere, where, even in the domain of Church and personal piety, it continues to wane.15 In a search for linguistic correlates that led one former Archbishop of Canterbury to lament the loss of the language of theology to the language of therapy, the relevance of the concept of sin has vaporized, set aside by a Church experimenting with other forms of discourse that might present its perspective more meaningfully.16 Frank Farudi observes in his Therapy Culture that “Priests are increasingly encouraged to adopt counselling skills. Gradually, the theologian has assumed the role of a therapist.”17 Perhaps this climate emergency may be the time for the Church, its leaders and theologians, to resurrect the language of sin in order to wake us up to what has gone wrong and why?

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The most famous American theologian of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr, wrote in The Nature and Destiny of Man that the “Christian view of human nature is involved in the paradox of claiming a higher stature for human beings and of taking a more serious view of their evil than any other anthropology.”18 What did Niebuhr mean? Principally that Christian anthropology finds human beings a confounding contradiction. We are the likeness of the Creator, according to the book of Genesis (Gen. 1:27), and yet personally and corporately we are characterized by selfishness, disunity, and brutality. Famous Christian thinkers like the apostle Paul, Augustine of Hippo, and Martin Luther all wrestled with this contradiction with such utter seriousness that one can only conclude they saw it as the Achilles heel of the Christian message. How is it that human beings are capable of inspiring goodness as well as appalling cruelty? The doctrine of sin seeks to address the mystery of this seemingly innate paradox. The essential goodness of human beings is theologically bound to the concept of the imago Dei, that we have been set within creation as a reflection, icon, or image of God. It is the burden of the doctrine of sin to explain why that image has been fractured, why human history and behavior have perennially presented a dark contradiction to belief in the essential goodness of humanity. The depth of the Christian concept of sin is not touched if sin is understood only as a violation of moral codes. Rather, we are nearer its center when sinfulness is viewed as a condition. Our acts of selfishness, injustice, and violence are the outward sign of a greater problem. That problem has been framed by Christian thinkers in various ways, yet each framing has its source in a common biblical story portraying our alienation from God, from one another, and from the rest of the creation.19 Alienation is the condition; sinful acts are its symptoms. To speak of the damage we do to others, to creation, and to ourselves as sin is for Christian theology a claim that “the essential character and defining characteristic of such pathology, however else it may be described and identified in non-theological languages, is theological: the disruption of our proper relation to God.”20 Chapter 3 of the book of Genesis, to which we will turn later, narrates this disruption as a falling-out between God and the first humans involving a wily serpent. That story is the source of a particularly well-known, if not well understood, theory about the failure of human beings to live up to our stature as the image of God within creation—the doctrine of original sin. The doctrine of original sin, which has held a significant position in the history of Western Christianity, does not stand up to scientific scrutiny, and is fragile under sustained theological scrutiny as well, when it formulates sin as an inherited condition of guilt for which we will be judged—a stain passed from generation to generation which had its source in one original sin in the biblical Garden. Yet when human ‘original’ sin is understood as an inherited

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condition of alienation from God and from creation, an ailment of our species into which we are born whether we like it or not, it may still have currency. If theological language is found to speak of human beings as inheritors of this sin, that we in turn perpetuate, it can become meaningful in a fresh way. If this sin is described not as a guilt communicated to us pre-personally, as if part of our genetic coding, but a series of fractured relations which radically and universally afflict our species, it can hold explanatory power for us today. A power found, for example, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s description of original sin as “the universality of the gone-wrongness” of humankind.21 Or, in the words of the Reformer after whom the civil rights leader was named, as homo incurvatus se (the person turned in upon the self). “If this sin did not exist,” Martin Luther wrote, “there would be no actual sin. This sin is not committed, as are all other sins, rather it is.”22 As anachronistic as the language of Christian theology may seem, this human-induced climate emergency, brought about by humanity’s alienation from and abuse of the planet, and by our failure to be the image of the Creator within creation, is surely a time to resurrect the language of sin. THEOLOGY OR THERAPY? The first article of the Apostle’s Creed reads: “I believe in God, the Father almighty, the creator of heaven and earth.” That ancient affirmation is a confession of the Church’s faith that the Earth and all that is in it belongs to the Lord. In light of that confession, and centuries of traditional Christian proclamation about the nature of sin, any abuse of the Earth must surely be named as sinful; the abuse carried out by the decision-making force of nature, Homo sapiens, which is taking such a massive toll on the planet. Further, where there is willful obfuscation of the truth about what our species is doing to the planet, then surely that must be named as evil. Those who are willfully manufacturing doubt about our impact on the Earth have done so to ensure that an extractive, abusive, and sinful relationship with creation may continue unchecked. This planet abuse has seen the extinction of an unimaginable variety of animal and plant species and now threatens the survival of our own species. Creation, or rather one species within creation, is exerting itself as Lord over all, displacing the Lord named in the creed. Yet where is the Church naming this abuse of the Earth for what it is? Where, for example, did we hear the language of sin or evil from Australian Church leaders during or after the bushfire emergency? Direct connections were made by media, fire experts, and scientists between human-induced climate change and the unprecedented dry period that led to the fires in Australia. For example,

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former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull made the following observation in a Time magazine article during the height of the Australian bushfire crisis: In most countries, asking people whether they believe in the science of climate change is like asking them whether they believe in gravity. It is a simple matter of physics. The more greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere, the hotter our climate will become. But in Australia, as in the U.S., this issue has been hijacked by a toxic, climate-denying alliance of right-wing politics and media (much of it owned by Rupert Murdoch), as well as vested business interests, especially the coal industry. . . . Tragically, the climate-denying political right in Australia has turned what should be a practical question of how to respond to a real physical threat into a matter of values or belief. Even as the fires rage, Murdoch’s News Corp. newspapers and television networks have been busy arguing that arsonists or a lack of controlled burning are the real causes of the fires. This has been refuted point-blank by the chief of the fire service in New South Wales, but the misinformation continues in both mainstream and social media. . . . These fires show that the wicked, self-destructive idiocy of climate denialism must stop.23

Malcolm Turnbull can call climate denialism wicked—a tepid indictment, but an indictment nonetheless. So, what has been the response of Christian leaders? To be faithful to the Church’s confession, surely the sinful nature of humanity’s treatment of the Earth should be named by its leadership. Here are the public statements made by three significant leaders within the mainstream Australian churches. The Anglican Archbishop of the Diocese of Sydney, Glenn Davies, appealed for Christians to be in fervent prayer: Renewing the call for prayer he made at the start of the bushfire season, Archbishop Davies wrote to churches noting that many, especially in the Wollongong Region have been arranging special prayer meetings as well as practical offers of support to those affected. “Our January Sunday services will give us all an opportunity for bringing our prayers to God for his mercy to flow, and indeed for rain to fall,” Dr Davies said.

The Archbishop also issued a special prayer, for use in services throughout the archdiocese, which read in part: Father we pray, in your mercy, restrain the forces of nature from creating catastrophic damage; in your mercy protect human life. Guard those volunteers, rural fire service personnel, and emergency services who selflessly step into the breach to fight these fires. Guide police and authorities who help evacuate and shelter those who are displaced. Bring comfort and healing to all who suffer loss. Remembering your promises of old that seedtime and harvest will never

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cease, we pray that you would open the heavens to send refreshing rain upon our parched land.24

The Archbishop encouraged Sydney’s Anglicans to call upon God to “restrain the forces of nature from creating catastrophic damage,” a theologically questionable statement in itself, and yet does not name the fact that those offering their prayers are responsible—as are we all—for the catastrophic forces being unleashed. Archbishop Mark Coleridge, the then President of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, issued the following statement: Australia is facing an unprecedented calamity as fire engulfs the land in many places. We have all seen the apocalyptic images, even if we are not in the areas most affected. Lives have been lost, homes and towns have been destroyed, smoke has shrouded large swathes of our country. And there is no end in sight to the horror which confronts us with our powerlessness before the devastating force of nature. . . . Facing this exceptional crisis, we renew our call for insistent prayer for those stricken by drought and fire, for those who have lost their lives in the fires and their families, for rain to quench the parched land and extinguish the fires, and for urgent action to care for our common home in order to prevent such calamities in the future.25

It is commendable that Archbishop Coleridge included a call for urgent action alongside his call for insistent prayer. Yet the pointer toward human responsibility to “care for our common home” in the future is not joined by any hint of human responsibility for the crisis of the present. The Uniting Church in Australia released a Pastoral Statement signed by its national President and each of its state Moderators. As with the statements of the Catholic Bishops Conference and the Sydney Anglican Diocese, there is no point at which this statement strays from comfortable ground. It reads, in part: [We express] our deepest sympathy to those mourning. We pray for those who have lost property. We acknowledge that many have endured weeks of stress. We pay tribute to the extraordinary effort of our emergency services. We give thanks to the many who have given their time and resources. We give thanks for the ways you are bearers of Christ’s hope and compassion. We give thanks for the stories of amazing courage and goodwill in the community. We lament that God’s beloved creation is hurting. In the very long road to recovery ahead, the Uniting Church will continue to provide support to recovering communities through pastoral care and other relief projects in the months to come.26

This reads like an example of a “name them all” statement we might hear in a school principal’s address in which every student is named so that no one

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feels left out. God’s “beloved creation” is included among those named, along with the mourners, helpers, and hope-bearers. There is lament that the creation is hurting, yet no indication as to why, nor who should be accountable for the hurt. Do these Australian church leaders lack an understanding of the science, or do they lack courage? The focus by church leaders on pastoral responses to the bushfire emergency is worthy. Prayer, lament, and charitable action must be part of a faithful Christian response to an emergency such as the 2020 fires. Yet words of comfort read like a loss of nerve. Has the church lost faith in its prophetic calling? Has the power of the language of theology been set aside for the language of therapy?27 Listen, instead, to Greta Thunberg speaking to a UN Climate Conference on September 23, 2019. Thunberg is not speaking about the Australian summer, of course, but of the global climate emergency: This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!28

ORIGINAL S(P)IN “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the Garden?’”29 The early chapters of Genesis focus on human beings as “the glory and central problem of creation.”30 Daniel Castillo summarizes as follows: “If Genesis 2 describes an idyllic situation in which all things are ordered by, and held together in accordance with, the wisdom of God, then Genesis 3 narrates the manner in which all things fall apart.”31 Interesting work exists connecting this myth of humanity’s origin to the present climate crisis. Intriguingly, some of that work highlights how Adam and Eve first appear in the Genesis narrative as forest-dwelling gatherers of fruit and nuts, whereas their exile from Eden, construed as a consequence of their sin, requires that they raise their food thereafter by the backbreaking methods of agriculture. Is this Genesis story a naïve portrayal of humanity’s transition from hunters and gatherers to cultivators and laborers? A portrayal of humanity’s transition to the agricultural mode of production (if I may put it that way) as the source

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of our alienation from nature, and of nature’s subordination to our needs? Precisely where to locate the dawn of the Anthropocene is the subject of debate, with arguments being made for the Industrial Revolution or the post– World War II Great Acceleration, for example. Genesis has no place in that scientific conversation. Yet if the Anthropocene names the period in which humanity becomes central and determinative to the course of the planet, then Genesis is theologically interesting within the conversation. As Michael Northcott observes, “theologically this era begins not with greenhouse gas emissions but with the Neolithic ‘fall into agriculture.’”32 Yet there is another aspect of this story which may be fertile ground for reflection on sin in the Anthropocene. Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel all carry substantial symbolic freight within the Genesis narrative. Adam and Eve represent the significance to God of humanity’s place in creation, and their son Cain murders their other son Abel with an agricultural implement soon after God evicts the primal family from the pristine garden. As interesting as the nature and actions of those characters may be, however, of greatest interest to me is the Serpent. The Serpent makes its mark in Genesis 3:1–7, a handful of verses interpreted by some as an explanation for how evil came into world, and often described as “the fall” into sin. While that interpretation is simplistic, chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis certainly do present themselves as ancient Israel’s canonical attempt to address humanity’s determination to live in the world as if it were its own rather than God’s, along with the consequences of that determination. The role played by the Serpent is significant and is of special interest to our consideration of sin and evil in the present climate crisis. In Genesis 3:1, the Serpent says back to the woman what she has heard from God shortly beforehand, namely, “you may freely eat of any tree of the garden; but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.”33 Yet the Serpent repeats the injunction with the addition of a gentle distortion. In doing so, the Serpent renders the point of God’s speech unclear. “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?’” On the Serpent’s tongue, what was intended as a given has now been made to appear an option. As Walter Brueggemann observes, “the serpent grossly misrepresents God in 3:1 and is corrected by the woman in verses 2–3. But by then the misquotation has opened up to consciousness the possibility of an alternative to the way of God. From that point on, things become distorted.”34 Thus, to be clear, the Serpent is portrayed in the Genesis narrative as neither the origin nor embodiment of evil but as the one who manufactures uncertainty; the creator of doubt. The primordial couple goes along with the Serpent—knowingly, it would seem. The peaceful communion of the garden cedes to alienation and death.35 God’s response is clear. The couple are judged and punished; they are cast out of the garden.36 The Serpent has

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manufactured uncertainty. And it has worked. The original communion of God, humanity, and all creation is broken. South African theologian Ernst Conradie has written a fine book in which he seeks to answer the question, in light of human-induced climate change, “What has gone wrong with the world?” Answering that question is an interdisciplinary task Conradie describes as “social diagnostics.” He proposes that the Christian language of sin has an important contribution to make to this interdisciplinary work: The core intuition of this proposal is that Christian discourse on sin may contribute to the collaborative task of what I call “social diagnostics.” My agenda is to address the colloquial yet dangerous question: What has gone wrong with the world? Indeed, what on earth is wrong with us humans that we are destroying our own home (oikos)? . . . This is not only an ecological problem, but also a moral and a spiritual problem.37

For Conradie, Christian discussion of sin is best understood as a radical description of what ultimately went wrong in history. Thus, despite the strangeness of this language, the Church and its theologians should “redeem sin” (hence his title) as public discourse.38 Conradie argues that “the Christian tradition has developed a remarkably sophisticated and diverse pastoral and prophetic vocabulary to name sin,” and some of that vocabulary still cuts through.39 Further, through a prophetic impulse that has been yoked to the naming of sin and evil, the Jewish-Christian tradition has “helped set a standard of ‘speaking truth to power’ by putting (not pointing) the finger where it really hurts. The courage that this demands is only possible when evil is recognized, named, and exorcised.”40 There is only one thing that is worse and perhaps more dishonest than making an unsolicited contribution to the collaborative task of social diagnostics, Conradie concludes, “and that is failing to make such a contribution when it is indeed required.”41 This observation brings to mind Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, in which Socrates admonishes the young Euthyphro repeatedly to the point of his humiliation for claiming to know something he clearly could not (namely, what is righteousness). Plato’s point is to teach a lesson, not about righteousness per se, but about truth. The enemy of truth is not ignorance, nor is it doubt or disbelief. The enemy of truth is professing false knowledge. When we profess to know something in the face of absent or contradicting evidence, that is when we have become the enemy of truth.42

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NAME THE SERPENTS There was speculation in early 2020 about whether Pope Francis might name humanity’s abuse of the Earth as sinful in his much-anticipated statement on the plight of the Amazon and of the Church in that region. He did not. Querida Amazonia (Beloved Amazon), was released on February 12, 2020. Pope Francis denounces the unrestrained development taking place within the Amazon and the destruction of that most critical of the Earth’s forests. He wrote: The businesses, national or international, which harm the Amazon and fail to respect the right of the original peoples to the land and its boundaries, and to self-determination and prior consent, should be called for what they are: injustice and crime.43

The language of injustice and crime used by Pope Francis is powerful. However, it is not the most inherently powerful language available to Christian discourse. The abuse of the Earth is a sin. Furthermore, the obfuscation of scientific evidence revealing what we are doing to God’s good creation—the willful manufacture of uncertainty—is an act of evil. Serpents should be named. Perhaps it is time for Church leaders to consider, in all honesty, that calling people to prayer without naming the sin that makes that admirable response so urgent means the churches, too, must also face up to the words of Greta Thunberg: How dare you! NOTES 1. Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation (1518), 361–62. 2. David Marr, “Australia is becoming a nation of dread—and the world looks on with pity and scorn,” The Guardian, January 1, 2020. 3. “Understanding the Effects of the 2019–20 Fires,” NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, accessed 14 September, 2020, https:​//​www​.environment​ .nsw​. gov​. au ​ / topics​ / parks​ - reserves​ - and​ - protected ​ - areas ​ / fire ​ / park ​ - recovery ​ - and​ -rehabilitation​/recovering​-from​-2019​-20​-fires​/understanding​-the​-impact​-of​-the​-2019​ -20​-fires. 4. Clive Hamilton, “Paleo-ontology,” August 2018, 1. 5. Ibid., 1. 6. Michael S. Northcott, A Political Theology of Climate Change (London: SPCK, 2014), 4. 7. Ibid., 11. 8. Lee McIntyre, Respecting Truth: Willful Ignorance in the Internet Age (New York: Routledge, 2015), 72.

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9. Ibid., 73. 10. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011). See also James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), and James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2009). 11. McIntyre, Respecting Truth, 75. 12. McIntyre, Respecting Truth, 75. 13. Cited in McIntyre, Respecting, 76. 14. Justin Gillis and Leslie Kaufman, “Leak offers glimpse of campaign against climate science,” New York Times, February 15, 2012, quoted in McIntyre, Respecting Truth, 76. The resistance to climate science on the political right is particularly marked in Australia and the United States and has been increasingly obvious for all, including church leaders, to see. “Coal, oil, and gas corporations have poured vast funds into anti-climate science lobby groups and think tanks. The rationale for this lobbying effort is not hard to discern. The capital and stock values of fossil fuel companies, which are the most powerful of modern economic corporations, rest in part on their claimed reserves of fossil fuels. If the burning of these reserves will destabilize the planet, extinguish countless species, inundate coastal cities, and lead to the desertification or flooding of much farmland, as scientific research is telling us, then the value of these oil reserves is contentious. 15. Alistair McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3–5. 16. Frank Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (London: Routledge, 2004), 17. 17. Ibid. 18. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941), 18. 19. For an introduction, see Douglas John Hall, “Sin as Act and as Condition,” in his Professing the Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 226–232. 20. McFadyen, Bound to Sin, 4–5. 21. “I believe in what some call original sin, if not as a historical event then as a mythological category to explain the universality of the ‘gone-wrongness’ of human nature.” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., speech at Ohio Northern University, January 11, https:​//​www​.onu​.edu​/mlk​/mlk​-speech​-transcript. 22. Martin Luther, Gospel for New Year’s Day 1521/1522, quoted in Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 251. 23. Turnbull, Malcolm. ‘Denying climate science while my nation burns.’ Time Magazine, 27 January 2020. 24. Russell Powell, “Prayer for Protection amid Bushfire Emergency,” Sydney Anglicans, January 2, 2020, https:​//​sydneyanglicans​.net​/news​/prayer​-for​-protection​ -amid​-bushfire​-emergency. 25. Mark Bowling, “Church Launches National Bushfire Response as Australia Is Engulfed in ‘Unprecedented Calamity,’” January 7, 2020, The Catholic Leader, https:​

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//​catholicleader​.com​.au​/news​/local​/church​-launches​-national​-response​-to​-australias​ -bushfire​-crisis. 26. “Shared Pastoral Statement from UCS President and Moderators—Australian Bushfire Crisis,” Uniting Church in Australia Assembly (website), January 13, 2020, accessed September 14, 2020, https:​//​assembly​.uca​.org​.au​/news​/item​/3112​-shared​ -pastoral​-statement​-from​-uca​-president​-and​-moderators​-australian​-bushfire​-crisis. 27. Frank Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (New York: Routledge, 2004), 17–18. 28. “‘How Dare You’: Transcript of Greta Thunberg’s UN Climate Speech,” Nikkei Asian Review, September 25, 2019, https:​//​asia​.nikkei​.com​/Spotlight​/Environment​/ How​-dare​-you​-Transcript​-of​-Greta​-Thunberg​-s​-UN​-climate​-speech. 29. Gen. 3:1, NRSV. 30. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), 40. 31. Daniel P Castillo, An Ecological Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2019), 76. 32. Northcott, A Political Theology of Climate Change, 29, quoting Berry, R. J. God and Evolution (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), 68–71. 33. Gen. 2:16–17, NRSV. 34. Brueggemann, Genesis, 48. 35. Castillo, An Ecological Theology of Liberation, 81. 36. Gen. 3:8–22. 37. Ernst Conradie, Redeeming Sin? Social Diagnostics Amidst Ecological Destruction (London: Lexington, 2017), xii. 38. Ibid., xxii. 39. Conradie cites, for example, the “seven deadly sins”(232). 40. Ibid., 232. 41. Ibid. 42. McIntyre, Respecting Truth, 2. 43. Brian Roewe, “In ‘Querida Amazonia,’ Francis Defends Vital Ecosystem with Stern Indictment of Its Defilers,” EarthBeat, February 12, 2020, https:​//​www​ .ncronline​.org​/news​/earthbeat​/querida​-amazonia​-francis​-defends​-vital​-ecosystem​ -stern​-indictment​-its​-defilers.

Chapter 11

Defiant God The Fate of Christianity’s Holocene Ontology in the Anthropocene Jonathan Cole

INTRODUCTION In his stimulating and sobering book, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene, Clive Hamilton observes that the onset of the new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene marks “an ontological shift in the deep history of the planet.”1 Since 1945, the indicative year that Hamilton dates the shift, the Earth transitioned from a planet exclusively shaped by blind forces of nature to one “influenced by a conscious, willing being, a new human-geological power.”2 At its most succinct, the defining characteristic of the new ontology of the Anthropocene, according to Hamilton, is the “injection of will into the functioning of the Earth System.”3 Human will, born of consciousness and freedom, must now to be regarded as a “force of nature” capable of modifying the unconscious and necessary forces of nature which have long shaped the Earth System.4 One of the more provocative conclusions Hamilton draws from the emergence of Anthropocene ontology, particularly for Christian theology, is the idea that it renders all “pre-modern ontologies” obsolete.5 As Hamilton contends, for those who sense some larger meaning in the Anthropocene’s arrival and what it may be telling us about the role of humans on Earth, there is no going 175

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back to pre-modern ontologies for an understanding; we must look ahead to the evolution of modernity itself.6

This conclusion appears to emerge from Hamilton’s presupposition that there is nothing in the human story which could have predicted the epochal shift of the Anthropocene.7 Hamilton wryly notes that nothing in “human nature” can plausibly lead to the Anthropocene. After all, it arrives after 193,000 years of humans doing not much at all except migrate and struggle to survive, followed by 7,000 years of agriculture and civilization, 300 years of industry and 70 years of rampant growth that has seen us breach the planet’s natural boundaries.8

On this view premodern ontologies, perhaps even pre-1945 ontologies, stand deficient and inadequate in the face of the Anthropocene because by definition they are blind to its defining feature: the emergence of conscious will as a force of nature capable of affecting the Earth System. As such, their ontologies are incapable of explaining, and hence navigating, the newly revealed ontological realities of the Anthropocene epoch. At the “Theology and Ethics in the Anthropocene” seminar, held in Canberra, Australia, in 2018, Hamilton went even further and provocatively questioned whether a Holocene religion like Christianity could survive the Anthropocene on the premise that its Holocene ontology would no longer be plausible in the conditions and realities of the Anthropocene.9 In what follows, I challenge the idea that Christianity’s Holocene ontology is destined to obsolescence in the Anthropocene on account of its purported inability to predict, incorporate and/or accommodate the new ontological revelation that human will is a force of nature. Specifically, I will argue that Christian ontology is potentially compatible with Anthropocene ontology, as articulated by Hamilton, and that as such there are grounds for thinking that its survivability in the Anthropocene epoch, other things being equal, will not hinge on the “injection of will” into the Earth System.10 METHOD AND SCOPE I will seek to establish the potential compatibility of Christian Holocene ontology with Anthropocene ontology through an “ontological” reading of the first four chapters of Genesis, a book universally regarded by all major Christian denominations as forming part of a biblical canon that reveals, inter alia, important truths about the world and the place and destiny of the human being within it. The first four chapters of Genesis constitute a suitable

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test case for examining the potential compatibility of Christian ontology with Anthropocene ontology for the fact that it originates securely within the Holocene epoch, thus making it a premodern Holocene ontology par excellence, and under Hamilton’s contention, one rendered obsolete by the ontological shift of the Anthropocene epoch.11 The following “ontological” reading is unapologetically anachronistic and selective. It is anachronistic in the sense that it uses a conceptual category for interpreting the book of Genesis unknown to the intellectual milieu in which the text originated. It is selective in the sense that ontology forms the exclusive lens through which the source material is read, a reading strategy that consciously ignores other relevant hermeneutical lenses, such as ethics and theology. In this regard, it is important to clarify that I do not approach the text as a biblical scholar. While I will draw on the insights of biblical scholars to aid my “ontological” reading of the text, I do not intend this essay to be a contribution to biblical scholarship on the book of Genesis, and as such I recognize that my “ontological” reading of the book does not accord with the methods and goals of contemporary biblical scholarship. The biblical material of Genesis 1–4 serves in this context as a case-study for testing a twenty-first-century contention regarding the fate of Holocene ontologies in the Anthropocene. As this question does not turn on any consensus, current or potential, within biblical studies, nor any individual approaches to or interpretations of the text offered by contemporary biblical scholars, but rather on how Christians and churches might read, interpret, preach, and live out their Scriptures in the Anthropocene, I am more interested in what might be termed a “plain” reading of the text in contemporary vernacular languages.12 The underlying question, then, that guides my analysis is: Could a contemporary Christian reader, which is to say an Anthropocene Christian reader, reasonably read the first four chapters of Genesis in a way that accommodates the new ontological development of the Anthropocene on Hamilton’s account— the emergence of human will as a force of nature with consequentially adverse impacts on the Earth system? For the purposes of this essay I adopt the conceptual framework used by Hamilton, as I understand it, in Defiant Earth. This includes his use of the term “ontology,” which I take to denote what exists or the reality of existence. I thus use “ontology” in the same sense, which, when applied to the first four chapters of Genesis, can be understood to mean the account of what exists or of the reality of existence given therein. The notion of a Christian ontology, or a Holocene Christian ontology for that matter, is admittedly problematic. In reality, we must recognize that there are, have been, and likely will continue to be a multiplicity of ontological interpretations (both possible and actual) constructed from Christian Scripture and articulated in Christian doctrine. I therefore use the notion of a “Christian ontology,” and more specifically

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a “Holocene Christian ontology,” as a contrast to, and thus a case with which to test, Hamilton’s contention that the Anthropocene has marked an “ontological” shift in planetary history that renders all “pre-modern ontologies” obsolete. GENESIS 1–4: FOUR ONTOLOGICAL IDEAS REGARDING THE RELATIONSHIP OF HUMAN BEINGS TO THEIR NATURAL ENVIRONMENT Four relevant ontological ideas can be discerned in Genesis 1–4 that specifically relate to the place of man and woman in, and in relation to, their natural environment. The first is the aetiological and material connection of man and woman to nature. In the first creation story (Gen. 1–2.2a),13 man and woman are created on the sixth day as the culmination of a process that includes the creation of other animals on the same day as man and woman, following the creation of vegetation, land, and sea on the preceding days. Man and woman, other animals, vegetation, land, and sea, indeed, the entire creation, share a common origin in a single creator God. In the second creation account (Gen. 2.2b–24) the material connection between man and the natural environment is made even more explicit: God “forms” man “from the dust of the ground” before breathing life into him via his nostrils.14 This close material relationship between man and earth is semantically manifest in Hebrew in a way that cannot be captured in English translation: the word for man is ’ādām and the word for “dust,” also variously translated as “earth,” “ground,” and “soil,” is ’ădāma.15 The animals too are formed out of the same ground in the second creation account (Gen. 2:19). The second ontological idea is human preeminence. Man and woman are not only of nature, embedded in nature, and sustained by nature, but stand at its apex. Humans, in spite of their intimate aetiological and material connection to the natural world, occupy a unique place in the order of creation. Man and woman alone are created in the image and likeness of the creator and given dominion over the other animals.16 In addition to dominion over the other animals, God “blesses” humankind and instructs them “to be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28).17 However, again here we see the aetiological connection between the human being and other animals, with God also blessing living creatures of every kind by saying “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:22). I have more to say about the “dominion” and “subdue” mandates below, as the great consternation, controversy, and criticism this language has elicited warrants a special word. At this juncture, I merely want to highlight that the human occupies a distinct position at the apex of the created order, stands preeminent within the animal kingdom as the

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bearer of the creator’s image, and exercises a special mandate of dominion in relation to the natural world, notwithstanding the human’s aetiological and material connection to that same world. The third ontological idea is actually two connected ideas: harmony and responsibility. The “very good” creation (Gen. 1:31) saw man and woman placed into what can only be described as a harmonious relationship with the natural environment around them. In the second creation account God creates a specific environment, described as a “garden,” conducive to the sustenance and well-being of the creature man and woman (Gen. 2:9). The garden, located in a place called Eden, nourishes the man and woman in an environment of beauty. Indeed, nourishment and beauty stem from the same source: the trees of the garden, which are “pleasing to the eye and good for food” (Gen. 2:9). The man and woman “may freely eat of every tree of the garden” (Gen. 2:16), but the garden is not a passive prop for human utility and exploitation. The man (before the woman is created from his body) is tasked with tilling and keeping the garden (Gen. 2:15).18 Man and woman are placed into a relationship with their natural environment aptly described by Douglas Green as one of balance and symbiosis.19 The garden provides what man and woman need for nourishment, but only on the condition that they carefully maintain it. Man and woman accordingly have a duty toward the garden, which is to say their natural environment. Daniel Block, with others, maintains that the Hebrew term rendered “till” is more appropriately translated as “serve,” and that the twin mandate of “serve” and “keep” implies that “the subjects,” here human beings, “expend their efforts in the interest of and for the well-being of the object,” in this case the garden.20 The fourth and final ontological idea is free will and the environmental effects of sin. While the specific concepts “will” and “consciousness” do not appear in the Hebrew text of Genesis 1–4, they are implicit in the account of the fall in Genesis 3 (the concept of “freedom” does exist—“you may freely eat” in Gen. 2:16). Firstly, the man and woman in the garden can both talk, which presupposes consciousness. Indeed, a dialogue takes place between firstly the woman and the serpent, and then between both the woman and man and God (Gen. 3:1–13). Secondly, the fact that the woman is persuaded to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree in the middle of the garden by the serpent’s lie regarding the consequences of doing so, implies that her act was one of free will.21 The serpent does not coerce or compel her to eat the fruit. Moreover, there was apparently no physical barrier to her eating the fruit. The tree’s fruit was not hidden, out of reach or secured in such a way as to prevent access. The only ostensible obstacle to abiding by the prohibition against eating the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden was the human being’s will.

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THE ADAMIC CURSE AND SYMBIOSIS RUPTURED The story of the fall in Gen. 3 indicates that maintaining the garden was not the only duty given to human beings. Life in the garden came not only with the duty to care for the garden, but also with an obligation to obey a divine prohibition regarding one tree in the middle of the garden. It also indicates that the human being was given certain freedoms, not only the freedom to eat freely of every tree in the garden, but also the freedom to disobey the command prohibiting the fruit of one particular tree. The primeval sin in the garden, as it has typically been construed in Christian theology, led to a series of curses. The curse addressed to the man is particularly relevant to Christian ontology vis-à-vis the epochal shift to the Anthropocene. The ground from which man was formed is “cursed” as a result of his disobedience (Gen. 3:17).22 The harmonious order in which the man tilled and kept the garden, and in which the garden bore him fruit for his sustenance, is now irreparably damaged. The man, with his partner woman, is evicted from the garden and is now destined to toil for his food, frustrated by thorns and thistles. He will now have to eat “bread” by the “sweat of his face,” in a breach of the symbiosis in which the garden provided what man required for his nourishment. In short, man and woman are still dependent on the environment for their sustenance after the fall, but their relationship with the environment has become fraught, difficult and disharmonious, something evocatively captured by the apostle Paul in the New Testament when he described “the whole creation” in Rom. 8:23 as “groaning in labor pains.” The remarkable thing about man’s curse in Genesis 3 is that it implies that human sin, an exercise of free will, negatively affects the environment. In other words, sin has ontological consequences. The story of Abel’s murder at the hands of his brother Cain in Gen. 4 reinforces the idea that sin has ontological consequences, manifest in the disruption and aggravation of humankind’s relationship with its environment. We are told that Abel’s blood cried out to the Lord from the “ground” (Gen. 4:10), the ground from which man was originally formed in Gen. 2:7. As a consequence, God tells Cain: Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth (Gen. 4:11–12).

The allusions to the original Adamic curse in the garden of Eden are clear. Once again, we see human sin leading to a disruption in the symbiotic relationship between the human being and the earth. Only this time the human is

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estranged from the land, cursed to be a fugitive and a wanderer. It is instructive that Cain then proceeds to build a city, which he names Enoch after his son (Gen. 4:17).23 There are two evocative ideas in the Cain and Abel story. The first is that there is a powerful sense in which the earth, from which man was materially formed, is aggrieved at the murder of Abel. There is a sense in which the murder is an offence against the natural order, that nature might even suffer as a result of human sin. The second is that Cain’s banishment from the land, and subsequent founding of a city, seems to suggest that urban life represents an estrangement from nature and therefore is a consequence of sin, a symptom of nature’s curse.24 This is particularly suggestive in light of the fact that urbanization, with its connotations of industrialization and overpopulation in the modern world, is an integral part of the emergence of the Anthropocene epoch. EXCURSUS: MODERN CONCERNS ABOUT THE LANGUAGE OF “DOMINION” AND “SUBDUE” Before proceeding to an analysis of the potential compatibility of the Holocene ontology of Genesis with Anthropocene ontology, it is necessary to say a brief word about the apparent difficulties created by the language of dominion and subdue. As Block notes, these are “strong words” which seem to evoke something aggressive and domineering, at least to the ear of the modern reader. Hiebert notes that the Hebrew verb rādâ (to rule or to have dominion over) is typically used in relation to kings and those holding authority over others, and thus evokes “control and power.”25 The verb kābaš (subduing) is even more troubling for the fact that in other Biblical contexts it connotes “forceful subjection of another, the coercion into bondage and service . . . defeating an adversary in war, making slaves” and even “raping women.”26 However, I do not believe this concern is warranted by the context in which these ostensibly problematic terms appear. The dominion and subdue mandates must be read in conjunction with the verses around them, which indicate that man and woman are instructed to maintain and care for their environment, had everything they needed to survive in the garden, which is to say that they had no need to exploit their environment either to survive or thrive, lived in friendship with the animals, and generally enjoyed a harmonious and symbiotic relationship with their environment.27 In this regard, it is important to note that the act of naming the other animals in Gen 2:19, far from being a demonstration of power or an act of control, indicated “identification and relationship.”28 One must also bear in mind that when Christian readers read

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the English word “subdue” in translations of Genesis they do not necessarily, or even likely, hear the Hebrew connotations of slavery, war, and rape. Context thus seems to qualify, and in this case modify and ameliorate, whatever modern prejudices of domination and exploitation contemporary readers might be inclined to see in the connotations of the offending words when read in isolation. It is conceivable that the language of dominion and subdue, which are both found in the first creation account of Genesis 1, but not the second account of Genesis 2, represents a tension between the two accounts (between the Priestly and Yahwist sources according to biblical scholarship). But somewhere, at some time, someone (or somebodies) saw fit to meld these two accounts into a single narrative, thus inviting, if not demanding, that they be read together as part of a coherent whole. Indeed, this is how most Christians and churches read the two creation stories, in both cases conditioned to reading Scripture for maximum coherence.29 THE ANTHROPOCENE COMPATIBILITY OF GENESIS ONTOLOGY: PRESCIENCE OR ACCIDENT? We return now to the question posed at the outset: to what extent is the premodern ontology of Genesis compatible with the “new” ontology of the Anthropocene? I contend that it is notably compatible with Anthropocene ontology, and even converges in some ways with Hamilton’s articulation of that ontology. The new development, we recall, that characterizes Anthropocene ontology, according to Hamilton, is the emergence of human will as a force of nature. What is remarkable about the Genesis account of creation is that it already regards human will to be a force of nature.30 In Genesis, human will is not a force of nature in the sense of constituting what we might describe, with Danny Frederick, as an “interfering factor”—in the case of climate change the interfering factor is the significant injection of carbon into the atmosphere resulting from human culture and civilization which interferes with (inhibits) the natural process by which infrared radiation from the sun is returned to space.31 Rather, human will is a force of nature in a moral sense: the moral decisions humans make, such as disobeying God and murdering a brother, have grave and apparently permanent environmental effects, even to the extent of altering the environment.32 It is interesting to note that Genesis ontology and Anthropocene ontology, as articulated by Hamilton, converge on the idea that human moral choices have environmental consequences. In Defiant Earth, the “secular fable” Hamilton ventures to accommodate the new reality of the Anthropocene calls for humans “to evolve into beings able to exercise full moral autonomy and the power to transform the world for good or ill.”33 Both Hamilton and the authors/redactors of the book of Genesis

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in the Hebrew Bible understand human freedom as being confronted by moral choices that have consequences for the environment. Notwithstanding the apparent convergence between Hamilton’s Anthropocene ontology and the Holocene ontology of Genesis regarding the environmental effects of human moral agency, there is an important difference. The kind of moral choices Hamilton has in mind are those which constitute “interfering factors,” like the burning of fossil fuels and the consumptive habits which incentivize and reward such activity. One suspects he might struggle with the idea that disobedience against a deity, or even murder, can have profound and negative effects on the environment and humankind’s fortunes therein. And yet the Genesis account appears to have correctly intuited that human will, and in particular human moral choices, can be a force of nature, bearing in mind that the definition of a force of nature is the ability, even if only indirect, i.e., unintentionally, to shape and modify the blind processes of nature.34 Moreover, the ontology of Genesis suggests that nature has already been cursed by the abuse of human will, in the form of sin, in a way that makes the environment more inhospitable to humankind, and further that this curse can be repeated and extended through subsequent acts of human sin, i.e., acts of human volition. A Christian could, on a reading of the Genesis creation ontology, conclude that the Anthropocene is but the most recent and devastating environmental curse brought about by human sin, in this case the unnecessary and irresponsible consumption of resources and products which exploit, rather than care for or serve, the environment.35 There are grounds, therefore, for thinking that it might be premature to write off at least this particular Holocene ontology (Christianity) as it appears to be potentially capable of ontologically accommodating the “injection of will into the Earth system,” with all of its adverse impacts for future human life. In fact, it is possible that some, perhaps many, Christians might read the first four chapters of Genesis as either prescient or prophetic with respect to developments that mark the Anthropocene. Hamilton could reasonably retort, however, that the so-called compatibility I suggest exists between the ontology of Genesis and the Anthropocene epoch is entirely serendipitous, for human will has only been a force of nature since about 1945. Hamilton might argue that at the time the Genesis account emerged, and for the overwhelming majority of its history thereafter, it depicted a world that simply did not exist in fact. Genesis speaks of the human being as an actual force of nature, whereas in Hamilton’s account the human being was then only an unrealized potential force of nature. Indeed, Hamilton describes humankind’s “turbocharged agency” as being “latent” within a world in which “freedom is woven into the fabric of nature,” but only as an “emergent property.”36 This latent agency was only actualized

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(“liberated” in Hamilton’s language) by the creativity of the scientificindustrial revolution.37 Moreover, a necessary condition of that unleashed creativity, according to Hamilton, was the emergence of a “disenchanted world from which the gods had withdrawn.”38 In other words, the relevance of Christianity’s Holocene ontology might be accidental, not prescient, as it might appear to a believer. Such a view, however, would leave unexplained exactly how it was possible for this ancient people to even conceive of human moral decisions being capable of permanently altering, and in adverse ways, the environment on a large scale, especially if they did indeed live in an epoch in which human will had no impact whatsoever on the Earth system. Hamilton might further point out that the Earth System context is missing in Genesis ontology and that this marks an essential divergence between his construal of Anthropocene ontology and whatever Christian Holocene ontology can be derived or extrapolated from Genesis. He could correctly note that humans have long been able to shape their local environments, as evidenced in the premodern practices of irrigation and animal breeding, and that the new, unforeseen, and significant development of the Anthropocene is the ability of human will to affect planetary history and climatic conditions on a planetary scale. It is certainly true that the Hebrew people had no Earth System science, but the first four chapters of Genesis do clearly have the planet in view (witness the first creation story in Gen 1: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth” [emphasis mine]), not just man and woman in their local environment. Moreover, the environmental curse seems to denote something greater and more profound than the discovery of irrigation and animal breeding. Adam’s curse is portrayed as being universal in scope, perhaps even planetary in scope, as it fundamentally changes the environment of, and thus the human being’s fundamental relationship with, the Earth itself. So even if the human force of nature envisaged in Genesis falls ontologically short of the Earth System context characteristic of the Anthropocene, it is still arguably compatible with the latter to the extent that it understands human moral choices to be capable of planetary consequences, or something in that orbit. In considering potential compatibility, particularly from the perspective of a contemporary Christian reader living in the Anthropocene, one must also take into account the genre of Genesis. The genre is relevant because Genesis is neither a scientific nor a philosophical treatise. Its language is myth, in the technical literary sense of “an important if provisional way of perceiving and expressing truth.”39 In a prescientific age, scientific explanations for the place of the human being in, and in relation to, the planet are, by definition, unavailable, leaving symbol, image, and story as the only efficacious means of articulating meaning and transmitting truth. As Russell Kirk put it, speaking in relation to Israelite history, “the deep truths of revelation commonly are

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expressed in symbol, not literally.”40 If we dismiss a premodern ontology such as that depicted in the book of Genesis purely on the basis that it lacks the scientific insights we deem necessary to a meaningful understanding of reality, we are destined to miss the fact that the idea that humans are moral agents capable of making decisions which affect our habitat in profoundly adverse ways, whether by curse or carbon saturation in the atmosphere, is an ancient idea. Indeed, it is a Holocene idea, albeit one lost sight of in the mythological ignorance of today’s post-religious societies (at least in the West). In fact, it is one of oldest ideas in human possession, which might go some way to explaining its longevity and enduring significance for hundreds of millions of humans today, and its good prospects for Anthropocene survival. NOTES 1. Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2017), 7. There is still debate about both the appropriateness of the designator “Anthropocene” and when precisely to date the shift from the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene epoch. 2. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 4. 3. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 141. 4. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 5–6. 5. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 110. 6. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 110; emphasis original. 7. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 61. 8. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 61. 9. The second of three such seminars held between 2017 and 2020, and which generated the present volume. 10. As Christian scripture can be read, and is read, in different ways, and given the manifest variation in theological doctrine, contemporary and historical, one can only talk in terms of potential readings of Scripture and potential theological construals of reality, particularly in relation to the future. As such, my argument in this chapter is that Christian Scripture can reasonably be read in ways that are compatible with Anthropocene ontology, not that it must or will be read in such a way. The case I seek to make is not that Christianity is destined to survive the Anthropocene, only that the ontological revelation that human will is a force of nature is unlikely to be the reason for such an eventuality, should it come to pass. 11. In his contribution to this volume, Hamilton avers that “the god of the Bible is a Holocene god.” See chapter 1. 12. I assume here a divergence between the way biblical scholars analyze, discuss, and interpret the Bible and the way that common Christian believers and churches commonly read the Bible.

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13. Genesis contains two related, but distinct, creation stories conventionally demarcated as Gen. 1–2:4a and 2:4b–24. The divergence has traditionally been explained in biblical scholarship by some version of the documentary hypothesis pioneered by German scholar Julius Wellhausen in the late nineteenth century, whereby the first story is attributed to the so-called Priestly sources and the second story to the so-called Yahwist sources. The idea is that these two different sources have different perspectives on creation accounting for discrepancies in the respective accounts. 14. Unless otherwise specified, all translations of Genesis 1–4 are from the NRSV. 15. Wenham observes that the play on words here “emphasize[s] man’s relationship to the land. He was created from it; his job is to cultivate it (2:5, 15); and on death he returns to it (3:19).” Gordon J. Wenham, World Biblical Commentary Volume 1: Genesis 1–15 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1987), 59. 16. In some translations of Gen. 1:26 dominion extends also to the earth. See Collins, for example, who translates Gen. 1:26 as follows: “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thig that creeps on the earth.” Emphasis mine. C. John Collins, Genesis 1–4: A Linguistic, Literary and Theological Commentary (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2006), 48. 17. This mandate is reaffirmed near verbatim in the Noahic covenant following the Flood in Genesis 9:1: “God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.’” 18. A common alternative translation for “till” is “work” (Septuagint, NIV, Collins, Genesis 1–4). Alternative translations for “keep” include “tend” (Ephraim A. Speiser, Genesis: Introduction, Translation, and Notes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), Nahum M. Sarna, The JPS Torah commentary: Genesis (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), “watch over” (Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11: A Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984), “care for” (John J. Scullion, Genesis: A Commentary for Students, Teachers, and Preachers (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992), and “guard” (Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis: 1–15 (Waco: Word Books, 1987). 19. Douglas J. Green, “When the Gardener Returns: An Ecological Perspective on Adam’s Dominion,” in Keeping God’s Earth: The Global Environment in Biblical Perspective, eds. Noah J. Taylor and Daniel I. Block (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2010), 272. 20. Daniel I. Block, “To Serve and to Keep: Towards a Biblical Understanding of Humanity’s Responsibility in the Face of the Biodiversity Crisis,” in Keeping God’s Earth: The Global Environment in Biblical Perspective, eds. Noah Toly and Daniel I. Block (Nottingham: IVP Academic, 2010), 130. For another interpretation that works with the concept of service, see H. Paul Santmire, Nature Reborn: The Ecological and Cosmic Promise of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 39. 21. The serpent’s lie is that the man and woman will not die if they eat the fruit (Gen. 3:4) contrary to what God tells the man and woman in Gen. 2:17. 22. In the context of Gen 3:17, Davis identifies “a three-way relationship” between humans, God, and “the fertile earth.” Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and

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Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 30. 23. Hamilton correctly identifies (sociologically) Christianity as a premodern “city religion”—Christianity indeed found its early success in urban centers and only conquered the pagan countryside much later, and much more slowly. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 106. However, it is not accurate to describe Christianity theologically as a premodern city religion, as the creation story of its Scripture is premodern agrarian in two senses: both the social context of the community which generated the story and the social context assumed in the narrative of the story itself. While cities feature in both testaments, most notably Jerusalem (in both), the agrarian context is ever present, forming the context, for example, of many of Jesus’s parables in the New Testament. 24. Solomon Victus, Eco-Theology and the Scriptures: A Revisit of Christian Responses (New Delhi: Christian World Imprints, 2014), 53. Victus offers the following interpretation of this part of the Genesis narrative: “the Biblical authors of the Old Testament probably understood that any deviation from nomadic culture was dangerous for human beings, and for that reason the following chapters indicate that agriculture eventually leads to an urban culture and violence.” 25. Theodore Hiebert, The Yawhist’s Landscape: Nature and Religion in Early Israel (Cary: Oxford University Press, 1996), 157. 26. Hiebert, The Yawhist’s Landscape, 157. 27. The Noahic covenant alters this situation: “The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth, and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground, and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and just as I gave you the green plans, I give you everything” (Gen. 9:2–3). Note, however, that this alteration follows the continued sinfulness of humans: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Gen. 9:5–6). It is significant, therefore, that permission for humans to eat animals follows human sin, and can thus be considered a further rupture in the symbiosis that governed the “good creation” prior to the first sin, when humans and animals lived in friendship and harmony. 28. Hiebert, The Yahwist’s Landscape. Contrast this with White’s now outdated contention that this act of naming established man’s “dominance” over the animals. Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, no.3767 (1967): 1205. 29. Again, a distinction can be drawn here between popular or traditional Christian reading strategies from those found in some (not all) contemporary scholarship. While the former reads for maximum coherence, the latter is often predisposed to identifying and analyzing points of discordance. It is thus common for scholars to identify either possible alternative readings, as Oord does: “the Bible can be interpreted as supporting both domination over and care for creation” (Thomas Jay Oord, “God’s Initial and Ongoing Creating,” in T&T Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change, eds. Hilda P. Koster and Ernst M. Conradie (London: Bloomsbury,

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2019), 366), or contradiction, as Hiebert does, seeing “two opposite views of the relationship between humanity and the earth” in the accounts (Hiebert, The Yahwist’s Landscape, 157). 30. As an aside, the revelation that an intelligence, in the form of free, conscious human will, can shape natural processes arguably makes the traditional Christian doctrine of a free, willing intelligence which originates those process, i.e., God, conceptually more, not less coherent. In his commentary on Genesis, von Rad observes that “creation cannot be even remotely considered an emanation from God; it is not somehow an overflow or reflection of his being, i.e., of his divine nature, but is rather a product of his personal will.” Emphasis mine. Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1972), 51–52. 31. Danny Frederick, “A Puzzle about Natural Laws and the Existence of God,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 73 (2013): 271. “Natural laws hold only ceteris paribus, that is, only so long as there is no interfering factor.” 32. I am not the first to make this observation. Hiebert notes that in the agrarian narrative setting of Genesis (specifically the Yahwist account in chapter 2) “the relationship between these early farmers and their land, in particular, the link between human morality and the soil’s fertility—is every bit as important as the relationship between these farmers and their deity.” Hiebert, The Yawhist’s Landscape, 156. 33. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 126. Emphasis original. 34. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 6. Northcott observes that theologically the Anthropocene “begins not with greenhouse gas emissions but with the Neolithic ‘fall into agriculture’” depicted in Genesis. The ‘fall into agriculture’ refers to Northocott’s interpretation of Genesis as portraying agriculture as an “alienation” from Eden where Adam and Eve lived as “forest-dwelling gatherers of fruits and herbs.” Michael S. Northcott, A Political Theology of Climate Change (London: SPCK, 2013), 29. 35. This is a common view within ecotheology. See, for example, Celia Deane-Drummond, A Primer in Ecotheology: Theology for a Fragile Earth (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017), 112–13. 36. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 137, 144. In Hamilton’s account, freedom is an “emergent property,” which is to say a consequence of a “self-organizing complex system” characterized by “spontaneous creativity” (138). 37. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 144. 38. Hamilton, Defiant Earth, 137, 144. 39. Richard N. Soulen and R. Kendall Soulen, eds., Handbook of Biblical Criticism 4th ed. (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2011), s. v. “myth; mythology.” 40. Russell Kirk, Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics, with an introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd (n.p.: Cluny Media, 2016), 335.

Chapter 12

A Climate of Hope? Reflections on the Theology of the Anthropocene Clive Hamilton

Although written mainly for a thoughtful secular readership, in composing Defiant Earth I also provided signs along the way pointing to some theological implications of the argument. At times, as I thought through the ideas, I would substitute God for Earth to see where the argument went. So it’s gratifying to see that my book has inspired so much creative thinking from the contributors to this one. They have taken theological thinking well beyond the kind of eco-theology we have seen emerge over the last decade or two, which is fitting given the profound historical-geological rupture brought by the arrival of the Anthropocene. I argue in the book that scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and even in the sciences themselves, who attempt to shove the Anthropocene into their Holocene bag of ideas can only miss the significance and implications of the new epoch. It’s especially pleasing to see that the contributors, in contrast to many secular intellectuals who indulge in escapist strategies that deny, downplay, deflate, or reframe the Anthropocene, try to come to grips with the tragic grandeur of humanity’s relentless destruction. They have the courage to confront the truth of climatic disruption and its baleful consequences for the future of the Earth and its inhabitants. Doing so is emotionally hard, but it is intellectually liberating, and we see the results of that freedom in the pages of this book. The arguments are too rich and complex for me to respond to them all, so here I pick up a few themes that most intrigue me. It has seemed to me that theology, unlike modern philosophy, has the conceptual resources to explore the depths of the dispensation, its meaning and its end, and to help us grasp the reconfiguration of the human condition on an Earth rendered dangerous 189

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and uncontrollable. We have lost the ability to go to the depths; unlike in the first half of the twentieth century, no one today writes books concerning “the human condition,” “the destiny of man,” and “the search for meaning.” The contributions to this book open up the question of theology in the Anthropocene, going to some of the deepest theological themes—apocalypse, eschatology, hope, sin. Perhaps inevitably, they fall well short of satisfying answers; but they will take years to emerge as theologians come to grips with the new dispensation. In her incisive opening to the debate, Lisa Sideris develops a sharp-edged critique of the “theological anthropology and prophetic storytelling” used by many Anthropocene scholars. In doing so she grapples with the question of the place of humans on the Earth and how we should comport ourselves in the Anthropocene. Within a secular theology frame, she contrasts Irenaean and Augustinian narratives aiming to rehabilitate a “quasi-Augustinian” narrative that leads to a place of contrition and confession. As I do in Defiant Earth, Sideris deconstructs the errors and perils of various “Irenaean” accounts of the state in which we find ourselves, taking aim at the ecomodernists, the geoengineers, and the astrobiologists, each of whom has faith in technological rescue, often regarding humans as the carriers of larger cosmic patterns that unfold through us. For the ecomodernists, the Anthropocene is not a tragedy but a golden opportunity for humans finally to exert our dominance over nature and prove that our technological prowess can conquer every obstacle. Sideris argues that the account I give in Defiant Earth shares with the ecomodernists the mistake of Irenaeus, which boils down to theodicy. I contend that the advent of the Anthropocene may be seen as the final manifestation of the growth of humankind’s power to transform the Earth, rendering us hyper-agents with hyper-culpability. This hyper-agency I presented as the last stage of a process of maturation. However, I have insisted that the outcome— peaceful coexistence or a doomed attempt to control—was always unknown because of our free will. The essence of the “human project,” I suggested, was for humankind to reach the point of being capable of profoundly affecting the planet’s functioning but that the outcome was always in the balance, as forces pressing for endless growth contended with forces defending nature against human incursion. In the end, humans chose to ignore the warnings and now we have passed a point of no return, with the planet on a different trajectory, one we can still influence but cannot turn back. Sideris acknowledges that the difference between my Irenaean account and that of the ecomodernists lies in their failure to recognize planetary limits to human expansion. That’s true, although I think the point about planetary limits is only the expression of a deeper difference between the two accounts. For the ecomodernists, echoing the implicitly benevolent God of Irenaeus, human ingenuity will always prevail over natural constraints. For me the

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absence of both a Panglossian God and assured technological victory means the ending is not preordained; the outcome—nirvana or catastrophe—is the result of our decisions. As it turned out, we opted for catastrophe; that is, collectively and despite resistance we continued on the path in full knowledge of the consequences, ignoring the limits, denying the warnings of scientists, and convincing ourselves that solutions would be found in time. While the ecomodernists—who function as the spokespersons for the prevailing system—believe humans can remake the Earth at will, their blasé faith in technology is frightening to those attuned to the vast possibilities of human failure. For the ecomodernists, the sword of progress can slash through any obstacle; for others, the sword has hit a rock. I think the differences between Lisa Sideris’s worldview and mine reduce to two sensibilities. The first concerns the “sinfulness” of humans. I’m inclined to take an agnostic view where the good and the bad compete equally for the soul, whereas Sideris takes a more jaundiced view, like St Augustine, in which sinfulness has the upper hand.1 For me, free will allows us to avoid sin, which I believe is a Pelagian view vigorously opposed by St Augustine who believed that original sin made us weak-willed and prone to succumbing to sinful urges. The second bears on our implicit philosophies of history.2 Sideris is undoubtedly with the majority of contemporary intellectuals who balk at anything that smacks of teleology. I am more willing to read into history a narrative, an intelligible, unfolding process immanent to Earth history, while rejecting any idea of a super-agent lying behind it. I sense an order in the sweep of history. For Hegel, history was “the process whereby the spirit discovers itself and its own concept”; for me, history is the process where human progress expands our power on the Earth and in which we must decide to use our power to exploit or preserve the Earth. I can’t defend my sense of history as an unfolding process and find myself on the backfoot when asked to do so.3 The Irenaeus-without-a-happy-ending account I presented as a “fable” because it struck me as a fruitful way to think about the sense of directionality in human-Earth relations without claiming that the story is “true.” Sideris is not alone finding my “embrace of anthropocentrism” in Defiant Earth jarring (n. 85). I adopted the term “new anthropocentrism” because a better term evaded me; but at the same time I wanted to challenge directly arguments for some kind of biocentrism or ecocentrism instead, more recently morphing into the post-humanists’ total erasure of the human/ nature distinction through the dispersal of agency across “networks,” thus ceding “agency” to all elements of the natural world. Humans become no more significant than gut bacteria. While emotionally appealing for critics of anthropo-supremacism, this position directly contradicts the decisive fact that humans are now so powerful and have accumulated so much agency that we

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can shift the planet into a new epoch. Denying our enormous technological power by diluting our agency will not make it go away. My choice of “anthropocentrism” highlights the dominant scientific fact of our power while the “new” was intended to signal a rejection of the assumption of human moral superiority and right to exploit the Earth. We cannot accept our overwhelming responsibility without first accepting our unique capacity to cause harm. Implicit in most of the contributions to this book are Christian interpretations of history as the manifestation of divine will and a battle between good and evil, with some kind of transcendent in-breaking at the end. In the discussions of hope, apocalypse and eschatology, the prospect of divine intervention in human history is ever-present. Yet, the traditional Christian view of history avoids any narrative of history as such. For the most part, Christian theology has a beginning and an end but no middle. The human story has no narrative momentum. Facing up to the future forecast by climate scientists, Scott Cowdell draws on the work of French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy to write of a new kind of evil, neither human nor natural, but transcendent. “The Christian answer to the false transcendence of evil is faith in God’s inbreaking future” (announced through the Christ event). Against all teleology, Cowdell emphasizes that God, while ever-present, is knowable only through epiphanies, the breaking through of the transcendent into the mundane. The breaking of the transcendent into the mundane may be contrasted with the mundane fleeing the transcendent. Dianne Rayson draws our attention to Bonhoeffer’s biting criticism of “otherworldliness,” dreams of escaping to a transcendent world. Some evangelical pastors in the United States say they don’t care about climate catastrophe because they say they are going to heaven (leaving us wondering what their children think about that). But otherworldliness can also take the form of the astrobiologists’ dreams of escaping to another planet. Both are cowardly because our duty is to commit ourselves to this world, our Earth and God’s earth, which is now the Anthropocene world, one we must continue to love no matter what. We cannot subdue it or dominate it, but we can work to undo some of the harm we have done to it. So Rayson calls for an “Earthly Christianity” that embraces our responsibility to act in the world. Christiaan Mostert asks what it means to think eschatologically in the Anthropocene, questioning a claim I made in Defiant Earth (an admittedly confusing one). When I asked whether humans would be willing to think eschatologically I meant to ask whether they would be willing to contemplate, and even accept, the end, where the end may be the closure of human history on Earth, or a rupture that gives rise, however painfully, to something new. Already, the arrival of the Anthropocene brings the end of history as the study of agents acting autonomously in a mechanical natural world. Instead,

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the arrival of the Anthropocene means that human history and geological history have converged, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has observed, overthrowing the modern conception of history as “the break with nature caused by the awakening of consciousness.”4 It is indeed, as Mostert writes of the Christ event, “a decisive discontinuity within the course of historical events.” We are agreed that “thinking eschatologically means not only thinking about the future but also from the future.” In a strong sense, the future is inscribed into the present. The physical conditions will be deteriorating in predictable ways; the globe will be hotter and marked by more extreme weather events. However, while Mostert says of the transcendent “this future reality actually breaks into the present,” for a secular theology—one that rejects the mundane-transcendent dualism yet embraces a notion of a sacralized Earth, an immanent sacred beyond the material—the presence of the anticipated future is not any kind of ethereal presentiment of an imminent intervention from the transcendental realm but the anticipated future seen in the climatologists’ charts. Put another way, history can no longer be played out on a fixed stage with an impassive backdrop; the stage and the backdrop have come alive and entered into the drama. Affirming Christian theology’s story with a missing middle, Mostert writes: “History may be thought to have an end . . . without its being thought to have a purpose.” My instinct rebels against meaningless history—the vast human enterprise of artistic wonders, spectacular technologies and troves of knowledge must have meant something. To make sense of what has happened feels essential.5 Mostert concurs with Defiant Earth’s argument that “In creating a world of freedom for humankind and nature, God accepted the risk, a limited risk, that this freedom would be used against the project of creation.” Except he believes in that slippery thing called Christian hope. God will redeem us and make all things new. If so, I wonder, then what? Will the “new man” be chastened, contrite and wise? Or will he be free to wreck it all again? It’s worth noting here that a creative tension running through the book is a clash between secular theology (represented by Lisa Sedaris and myself) and transcendent or theistic theology (the other contributors). A creative debate is possible because secular theology, while not recognizing the transcendent and its possible in-breaking, accepts that there is more to the real than meets the eye. I wrote above that while secular theology rejects the mundane-transcendent dualism it builds on a notion of a sacralized Earth that goes beyond the material. This sense is heightened with the arrival of the Anthropocene because the immanent sacred of the Earth is intensified or takes on a new character. In Defiant Earth, I present the rupture represented by the advent of the Anthropocene as an in-breaking of the Earth into the

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course of human affairs, one that rewrites our understanding of our essential nature and our place on the Earth. David Neville begins his contribution by asking why anyone would go to the Bible to look for answers to the Anthropocene. He politely sets aside existing work on ecotheology by Christian scholars. While promoting an ethic of “creation care” is worthy, “religious and/or moral exhortations to live more sustainably will not undo what we, collectively, have already done to our Earthly home.” Put bluntly, he writes, ecotheology is “too optimistic” about its possibilities for saving the world. Neville has identified one of the sources of unease I have had with ecotheology. While we can admire the earnestness of purpose, the situation in which we find ourselves demands not so much the development and propagation of a Christian ethic of the environment, but a deeper confrontation with the magnitude of human failure, a profound questioning of the being that has wrought so much irreversible damage. Neville puts it this way: “Ethics, for all its importance, comes after.” For Christians, to ask what comes before demands a return to the foundations of faith and the question of the relationship between God and humans, and the nature of each. That’s why we might go to the Bible to understand the Anthropocene. Neville asks whether the biblical notion of apocalypse is a way for theologians to engage meaningfully with the new epoch, a way to “nurture a particular kind of hope,” the hope that remains when all hope is abandoned. Apocalypse is the discernment of divine disclosure and hope of divine deliverance. The apocalyptic is (to borrow from Collins’s definition) a message “directly relevant to human destiny” transmitted from the transcendent realm and bringing “a definite eschatological judgment.” Neville does not say exactly what the prompt is to reconsider the apocalyptic now. The implication, though, is that the Anthropocene brings such a fissure to the world, promising so much travail and destruction, that we seem to be entering a time of divine disclosure. Paraphrasing Neville’s defense of Christian hope, human agency is “a fragile basis for hope,” yet the possibility of divine redemption is always waiting in the wings. After all, God’s creativity brought the world into being in the first place. Christian hope is faith in God’s continuing faith in us. It is therefore not anything like an optimistic outlook but simply an expression of trust in God. For secular theology, the revelation does not emanate from the transcendent but from what we are forced to confront when we admit the scientific facts and forecasts. The true nature of the Earth, concealed from us by the Holocene’s ten millennia of exceptional quietude, now appears. The Anthropocene reminds us that we are “Earthlings” bound inescapably and tightly to this planet, to the world around us. Despite three centuries of

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working to make it otherwise, the natural world will, in the end, decide our fate. With its orientation to historical events and human agency rather than otherworldly interventions, Defiant Earth is in the tradition Neville calls the prophetic eschatological, distinguished from apocalyptic eschatology concerned with divine revelation of final judgment, leaving little room for human agency and moral choices. Having entered the Anthropocene, we are already beyond the point where, no matter what we do, things will work out well. But that is not to say that human agency cannot bring a world that is better than it would otherwise be, so there is space, squeezed between the worst-case and the best-case scenarios, for hope, but only the kind of hope that is rooted in real courses of action. Perhaps there is more to sustain us, a secular version of Christian hope. History is full of surprises. For decades after the first wave of feminism in the 1890s and 1900s, feminists worked away at building consciousness and pressing for reform. Little progress was had. Then, from nowhere in the 1960s the women’s movement burst back onto the historical stage and over a decade or two brought far-reaching changes. No one saw it coming, yet it had an air of inevitability about it. Repudiating my provocation that Christianity is a Holocene religion unsuited to the new epoch, Mark Brett turns to the Hebrew canon for a theology that can accommodate the Anthropocene. He reads my claim as one based on the hypothesis that the cultural traditions of ancient Western Asia from which Abrahamic religions arose assumed a stable natural order. But my claim is more than a commentary on the stability of nature when the books of the Bible were composed. Nature may or may not have been stable, but it was construed as humble and passive—unless, that is, God intervened to stir things up. When the land is laid to waste and the mountains tremble it is because man violates God’s commandments. In Genesis 3:17–18 the land is cursed by God because Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. In Leviticus 26 the Lord renders the land desolate—the sky like iron and the earth like bronze—because, he tells Moses, men have disobeyed His wishes. And against Brett’s view that Leviticus 26:33–35 indicates that the land has “rights” that need to be respected, the text tells us only that if the land is overworked it can become desolate and needs to lie fallow to recover. So in the biblical understanding, the land is always a victim or an instrument of God. The land and its fate is tossed about in the drama of God and man. In the Anthropocene, by contrast, the “land,” the Earth, takes on its own role, setting the terms of any dealings or contract man might seek to reach with it. Instead of the human-God dyad we have a human-God-Earth triad. How to reconfigure the relationships in this triad is the central theologicalphilosophical conundrum of the Anthropocene.

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Brett’s case is stronger in the striking passages he quotes from Job 12 wherein the land will punish with weeds and thorns those who abuse it and where Job tells his friends to listen to the earth for instruction. But what is the message of the earth and its beasts and birds and fish? They will tell Job’s friends that the Lord created every living thing. The earth speaks only because the Lord speaks through it. If in Job the earth were to have its own voice and speak from its own point of view, the authors would have been flirting with paganism. Finding the theological groundwork for the Anthropocene in the Hebrew Bible has a deflationary effect on the meaning of the Earth System rupture. If it was all anticipated thousands of years ago, then the recent arrival of the Anthropocene is not such a big deal. That might explain the mild tone of Brett’s proposed solutions to the new epoch. He calls for religious communities to embrace Indigenous spiritualities and to work harder for intercultural collaborations before concluding, gnomically, that the churches can make a difference “if only they can find more effective ways to attune themselves to creation.” In a text that could be nailed to church doors, Peter Walker gives us a searing indictment of today’s churches. He skewers church leaders for their anodyne words in response to the catastrophe of Australia’s “Black Summer” bushfires. He accuses them of being so fearful of naming the sinful behavior of those responsible for sending us all into a hot world that all they can do is issue salves. They responded to the conflagration not by calling on humans to restrain their baser impulses but by calling on God to restrain the forces of nature. Pope Francis, the greenest pontiff, has stressed that nature is God’s gift to humankind. Creation is created by God for us to inhabit and it embodies His divine plan for us. Yet he too has stopped short of naming the sin, and crafted an encyclical (Laudato Si’) that carefully avoids the nature-worship of his namesake, Saint Francis. Yet if anything calls for an upsurge in righteous anger, surely the unimaginable destruction made possible by the heat and drought brought by climate change would be enough. Why are Christianity’s chief spokespersons, including Pope Francis, unwilling to call the abuse of the Earth a sin, he asks. “Serpents should be named.” He embarrasses the church leaders by contrasting their anemic words with the angry moral clarity and courage of a fifteen-year old schoolgirl. Walker attributes the churches’ timidity to their capitulation to secularization, their retreat to the language of therapy now that theology is unfashionable in polite circles. I wonder whether the reluctance of the bishops to “resurrect the language of sin” in the face of the climate emergency is a mild version of the rejection of climate science itself by Christianity’s culture

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warriors. For them, the demands of environmentalists to protect the Earth are the worst kind of paganism. After all, a prominent Australian archbishop often excoriated “religionless and spiritually rootless” greens, holding up a cross to environmentalism’s influence as he once did to “atheistic communism.” Like Mark Brett, Jonathan Cole challenges my assertion that theology needs a thorough reworking if it is to reflect the new human condition of the Anthropocene epoch. He goes to Genesis to make the case. I think Cole more closely than Brett approaches my conception of the Anthropocene, defined by the emergence of human will as a force of nature capable of altering the Earth System, although his definition of “ontology” as denoting that which exists or the reality of existence does not comport with the way I use it. For me, ontology refers to the nature of what is, the world around us, and how we grasp our own being in the context of what is. Cole draws four ontological ideas from Genesis 1–4 that he believes come close to the ontology of Defiant Earth—the origin of humans in “the dust of the ground,” the place of humans at the apex of the natural world, the original harmonious relationship between humankind and the natural world (and the duty it imposes), and the effect of sinful acts on nature. The argument is intriguing, but I think it misses two decisive elements of my account of humans and the Anthropocene. First, in Genesis man is made from the earth, but is separated from it as he enters a relationship with God. It’s hard to see how that can accommodate my claim that humans have become a force of nature and human will has now entered into the functioning of the Earth System. Secondly, while the Bible is replete with instances of the land going to rack and ruin because of human neglect or abuse, the earth remains the passive victim. When man sins in a way that turns the land into one of thorns and weeds, the disharmony arises not because man violated nature’s limits but because God curses the land to punish humans. By contrast, in my account the Earth can be construed as active and dangerous, a new state that Earth System scientists have attempted to capture with metaphors like the raging beast seeking revenge. When the relationship between man and his environment is mediated by God we go from the mundane to the transcendent and back to the mundane. But what happens when man “sins” against the Earth itself, when humans selfishly and recklessly pit their technological power against the forces of nature, knocking the Earth from its geological trajectory? The same response can be given to Cole’s evocation of the story of Cain’s murder of Abel. God tells Cain that he is cursed from the ground; the earth will no longer respond to the plow and Cain is doomed to wander, “leading to a disruption in the symbiotic relationship between the human being and the earth.” But is the earth “aggrieved at the murder of Abel” because the murder is an offense against the natural world? I think a plain reading of the

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story makes it clear that the murder is an offense against God and God’s punishment is to alienate Cain from the land. If the earth itself were aggrieved, then we have crossed the line into paganism. (It’s akin to the “spiritual” reading of James Lovelock’s conception of the Earth as Gaia, one the scientists Lovelock himself hated.) It is true that a Christian could, as Cole writes, conclude from Genesis “that the Anthropocene is but the most recent and devastating environmental curse brought about by human sin,” but that would miss the essential qualities of the advent of the Anthropocene—the new relationship that the Anthropocene marks between humans and the Earth, the emergence of humans as a force of nature rather than merely a force that is able to disturb an environment, and the ontological shift brought by the injection of human will. In becoming a force of nature humans have bypassed God to sin directly against the natural world. It’s important to stress that when Cole argues that Genesis intuited that human will can be a “force of nature” he is not using the term in my sense. When I describe humans as becoming a force of nature I do not mean that humans are capable of altering their environments, even “on a large scale.” I mean that humans have become a force of nature on a par with the great forces of nature that have shifted the Earth from one state to another over its 4.5-billion year history, forces like solar fluxes, asteroid strikes, the movement of tectonic plates and volcanism. This idea is at the very center of my argument; it means that humans now contend with these great forces to influence the future geological history of Earth. They operate together. Such an idea, a very recent scientific discovery, could not of course have been anticipated by the authors of Genesis. I argue that it changes in a fundamental way how we must think about humans as beings. It seems to me that Cole’s argument leaves us still in the realm of ethics rather than ontology. The relationship of humans to God is not revised, which is not surprising as a new ontological reading of Genesis would be a remarkable thing. The question that will increasingly trouble the church is whether Christian ethical principles are workable in a world falling apart under the stresses of a disrupted Earth. NOTES 1. Curiously, I shared that view until a few years ago (2008 to be exact), when I came to accept that the battle between good and evil had been lost. At that point, after years of hope-tempered anxiety and anger about our destructiveness, I became more

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reflective and even at times forgiving of human weakness (in the abstract at least), lapsing into a more manageable existential melancholy. 2. For a helpful overview of the philosophy of history, see https:​//​plato​.stanford​ .edu​/entries​/history​/ 3. Perhaps it is a hangover from my youthful study of Marxism. 4. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The climate of history: Four theses,” Critical Inquiry, 35, no. 2, (2009): 197–222. The quotation is from Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, Indianapolis, 1979 [1868]), 31. 5. In a footnote (n. 63), Sideris comments on how the students in her seminar could not see how my claim that humans supply meaning to the cosmos can fit into the broader argument of Defiant Earth. Perhaps the students are right and my waywardness can be attributed to a two-decade hangover from reading Eliade and Campbell in a bid to understand noumenal experiences.

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Index

Ackerman, Diane, 41 actualization, 115–16 Adam and Eve, 64, 170, 180 adaptation, 91–95 advocacy, ecological, 155–56 agency: divine, 131–32, 134; hope and, 67–68, 133. See also human agency agriculture, 169–70 alarm, 88 alienation, 165–66 Amazon, the, 172 Anspach, Mark, 69, 70 Anthropocene epoch: Augustinian view of, 20, 28–35; cause of, 51; Church and, 104; definition of, 1, 43, 104n24; designation of, 185n1; disciplines concerned with, 42–43; emergence of, 1, 3, 46, 89, 170, 175, 176, 185n1; God and, 9; humanity and, 59–62, 197; Irenaean view of, 21–26, 68–69, 190–91; liberation through, 68–69; narratives of, 17–18; as natural, 24; ontology and, 182–85; as problem, 42, 54n16; recognition of, 45–47; as rupture, 1–2, 33–35, 48; significance of, 23–24, 162, 175– 76; stages of, 7, 22, 49–50; theology and, 45–52; threats from, 117; as unprecedented, 41, 59

anthropocentrism, 4–5, 39n83, 79, 191–92 anthropology, 9–10, 18–19; Augustinian, 19–20, 28–35; Christian, 165; created order and, 49; Irenaean, 20–26, 68–69 Antonaccio, Maria, 136n6 apocalypse, 125–28, 130, 131, 132–33, 138n17 apocalyptic, 110, 137n10, 140n29, 194–95; eschatology and, 129–30, 131–32; hope and, 130; Jesus and, 128–31; prophecy and, 131–32; theodicy and, 130; theology and, 128–30; violence and, 131 apologetics, 50–51 astrobiology, 21–25, 38n54 atheism, 60–61 Auden, W. H., 62 Augustine, St, 31 Badiou, Alain, 11 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 68 Barth, Karl, 114 Bateson, Gregory, 63–64, 65–66, 70 Bauckham, Richard, 124, 136n4 Beck, Ulrich, 25 Bible, 52, 109, 111, 116, 124, 136n3, 187n29, 195–96 219

220

Index

Big History, 60–61 Block, Daniel, 179, 181 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 47, 74–83 Bonneuil, Christophe, 22 Braaten, Carl, 114 Brand, Stewart, 29, 30 Breitenberg, Harold, 42 Brett, Mark, 75, 76 Breughel, Pieter (the Elder), 61–62 Broecker, Wallace, 163 Brueggemann, Walter, 170 Cady, Linell, 41 Cain and Abel, 180–81, 197–98 capitalism, 13, 89–90 carbon cycle, 162–63 carbon dioxide, atmospheric, 2 Carlson, Thomas, 39n80 Carson, Rachel, 25, 33, 125 Cassirer, Ernst, 6, 7 Castillo, Daniel, 169 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 193 change, 20, 24–25, 61 Childs, Craig, 41 Christ, 46, 51, 52, 67; coming of, 113– 14; creation and, 80–81; culture and, 114; responsibility and, 82; unity in, 74–75, 77 Christianity, 48, 49, 51; cities and, 187n23; early, 128–29; worldly or Earthly, 74–75, 81–83 Church, 69–70; on 2020 fire emergency, 196; on abuse of Earth, 166, 167–69; Anthropocene epoch and, 104; entanglement and, 98–99; ethics of exclusion and, 99; innovation within, 99–100; as swarm, 100–2; for the world, 74–75 cities, 133, 181, 187n23 civilization, 2, 44 climate change, 2, 4, 45, 59, 88, 91, 92; debate about, 163–64, 173n14; denial of, 60, 167; evolution and, 23 Coleridge, Mark, 168 Collins, John J., 126

communism, 15n27, 89 concupiscence, 63 confession, 28, 29–30 Connolly, William, 88, 89–91, 95–97 Conradie, Ernst, 171 consciousness, 17–18, 22 conversion, 118 cosmos, 88–89 creation: care for, 124, 125; Christ and, 80–81; as continuous, 113; eschatology and, 119; ex nihilo, 115; God and, 188n30; healing of, 148; new, 111, 113, 119, 142n42; of persons, 116–17, 178; stories of, 17, 75–76, 146, 148–49, 178, 182, 186n13. See also cosmos; world Creation and Fall (Bonhoeffer), 79–80 creativity, 39n80, 100. See also innovation critique, 111–12 Crutzen, Paul, 25 crystallization, 101, 102 culpability, 20. See also responsibility culture: Christ and, 114; nature and, 60 curses, 180–81, 183 Dalby, Simon, 49–50 Davies, Glenn, 167–68 Deane-Drummond, Celia, 45–46, 51, 81 death, 34 Deep Incarnation (Edwards), 46, 47 deification, 21, 29, 116–17 delusion, 6, 7 denial, 6, 11, 59, 60, 167 dependence, 28, 31–33 destiny, 110 domination, 75–76, 78–79, 80, 178, 181–82, 186n17 dominion, 80, 178–79, 181–82, 186n16 double bind, 64, 66–67 drama, 67–68 Dupuy, Jean-Pierre, 63, 64, 66–67 Earth, 167–69; abuse of, 166, 167–69, 196–97; fate of, 26–27; God and,

Index

78–80, 195–96; history of, 3; hostility toward, 78–80; Hothouse or Stabilized, 43–44; humanized, 7; instruction by, 153; new, 142n42; as nurturing or defiant, 28, 79–80; otherworldliness and, 77; power of, 27, 33; as sacralized, 193–94; sublimity of, 27–28, 31–32 Earth Bible project, 124, 136n3 Earth in Human Hands (Grinspoon), 21–23 Earth System: capriciousness of, 7–8, 27; care for, 31–33, 44, 45, 119–20, 179; complexity of, 63–64; control of, 80, 87; disruption of, 5, 28–29, 87; elements of, 1–2; entanglement with, 90; Genesis and, 184; God and, 9; human impact on, 3–5, 8, 12, 59, 148, 162–63, 175–76; nature and, 38n50; otherness of, 34–35; stabilization of, 43; in theology, 46; totality of, 27, 162; will and, 183. See also nature Earth System science, 3–4, 27, 162 Ebeling, Gerhard, 130 eco-constructivism, 37n44 ecojustice, 136n3 ecology, 45–46, 124 ecomodernism, 7, 25–27, 37n39, 94, 190–91 ecotheology, 44, 46, 48, 183, 189, 194 Eden, garden of, 75–76, 146–51, 179 Edwards, Denis, 46, 47 Ellis, Erle, 7, 48 The End (Badiou), 11 end, the, 116 endings, narrative, 114–16, 121n27 end times, 50 Enlightenment, European, 5–6, 26 entanglement, 88–91; adaptation and, 92; Church and, 98–99; exceptionalism and, 93–95 entropy, 113 environment: ethics and, 182; humanity and, 178, 179, 186n15; as nurturing,

221

179; as scapegoat, 64. See also Earth System; nature environmental crisis, 47, 59 environmentalism, 4, 7 eschatology, 50, 69, 109–12, 192–93; apocalyptic and, 129–30, 131–32; centrality of, 114–15; creation and, 119; evolution and, 113–14; history and, 112; prophetic, 131–32 eschaton, 117 ethics, 30–33, 47, 66, 81–83, 145; adaptation and, 91–95; alarm and, 88; apocalypse and, 132–33; bases for, 124–25; environment and, 182; of exclusion, 93–94, 99; hope and, 135; politics and, 95–97; science and, 32–33 Ethics (Bonhoeffer), 77 Eucharist, 69–70, 118–19 evil, 19, 26, 62–63, 170 evolution, 23, 24, 36n32, 90, 91, 113–14 exceptionalism, human, 4–5, 47, 90, 93–94 extinction, 11–12, 113 “extinction rebellion” movement, 96 Ezekiel, book of prophet, 146 Facing the Planetary (Connolly), 89–91 faith, 32, 74–75, 134 fall, the, 64, 170, 180 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Plumwood), 78 Fergusson, David, 45 Fiddes, Paul, 113, 114–16, 117, 154 final things, 110–12, 117 finitude, 29 fire emergency (2020), 161, 166–68, 196 force fields, 102–3 Ford, David, 41, 52 fossil fuels, 173n14 Francis, Pope, 8, 45–46, 155, 172, 196 Frank, Adam, 23–24 Frederick, Danny, 182

222

Index

freedom, 5–6, 8–9, 75, 116, 179–80, 182–83 Furedi, Frank, 164 future, 13; God and, 67–68, 69, 111; hope and, 134–35; thinking from, 112; ultimate, 111 Gaia, 9 garden of Eden, 75–76, 146–51, 179 Genesis, book of, 75–76, 80, 133, 147– 49, 169–70, 187n27; Anthropocene ontology and, 182–85; curses in, 180–81; dominion and domination in, 181–82; Earth System and, 184; genre of, 184; ontological reading of, 176–79, 185n10 geoconstructivism, 25–26, 37n38, 39n84 geo-engineering, 10, 24, 61 geostories, 17 gift exchange, 69–70 Girard, René, 64, 65, 125 Giraud, Eva, 93 global warming, 2, 162–63 Gloor, Peter, 100 God: Anthropocene epoch and, 9; apocalypse of, 131; creation and, 188n30; Earth and, 9, 78–80, 195– 96; faithfulness of, 134; future and, 67–68, 69, 111; history and, 192; kingdom of, 75–76, 78; love of, 117; names for, 148–49; normativity and, 136n6; patience of, 116; “plan” of, 118; powers of, 31–33, 131–32, 134; world and, 115–16, 122n34 “golden spikes,” 104n24 Gordon, Peter, 6 governance, 49–50 grace, 20, 65–70 Graham, Elaine, 50–51 Gray, John, 12, 61, 66, 67 Great Acceleration, 3, 79 Green, Douglas, 179 greenhouse gases, 162–63 Gregersen, Niels, 46, 51 Grinspoon, David, 21–23

Gustafson, James, 31–33 Habel, Norman, 48, 136n3 Hamburger, Michael, 62 Hamilton, Clive: on adaptation, 94; on Anthropocene’s characteristics, 43, 68–69; on Anthropocene’s emergence, 1–3, 175, 176; on Anthropocene’s significance, 23–24, 162, 175–76; on anthropocentrism, 4–5, 79, 191–92; on anthropology, 9–10, 18–19; apocalyptic and, 194–95; astrobiology and, 38n54; on capitalism, 13; on Christianity, 48, 187n23; on civilization, 2; on climate change, 2, 4; on culture and nature, 60; on denial, 11; on domination, 78; on Earth as nurturing or defiant, 28, 79; on Earth as sublime, 27–28; on Earth System, 1–2; on Earth System’s abuse, 3–5, 12, 196–97; on Earth System science, 3–4; on Earth System’s control, 80, 87; on Earth System’s disruption, 5, 28–29, 87; on Earth System’s fate, 26–27; on Earth System’s power, 7–8, 27, 33; on Earth System’s sacralization, 193– 94; on ecomodernism, 26–27; on environmentalism, 4, 7; eschatology and, 109–10, 192–93; ethics and, 47, 145; on European Enlightenment, 5–6, 26; on extinction, 11, 117, 118; on forces of nature, 190–91, 197–98; on freedom, 5–6, 8–9; on future, 13; on global warming, 2; on God, 49; on Great Acceleration, 3; on grief and hope, 9, 13, 87, 193; on history, 3, 13; on Holocene epoch, 2, 9; on human agency, 5–6, 9–10, 66, 182–84; on human exceptionalism, 4; on humanism, 6; Irenaean narratives and, 190–91; on mastery, 8; on maturity, 8–9; on modernity, 5–7; on narratives, 61; on nihilism, 10–11; on ontology, 66, 176, 177,

Index

183–84; politics and, 95; on Pope Francis’s view, 46; post-humanism and, 94; on priorities, 34; Requiem for a Species, 33; on responsibility, 5, 81, 82, 95, 97; on Scriptures and nature, 195–96; on the self, 48; on the sky, 33; on stewardship, 8; on theology, 9, 189, 194; on truth, 10; on utopias, 6, 12–13 harmony, 179 Harvie, Tim, 42 Heartland Institute, 164 heaven, new, 142n42 heavenism, 48 Hegel, Georg, 191 Heidegger, Martin, 6, 7, 10 hermeneutics, 124 Hick, John, 20–21 Hiebert, Theodore, 181 hierarchy, 75 history: Big, 60–61; direction in, 191; of Earth, 3; end of, 13, 192–93; eschatology and, 112; God and, 192; meaning of, 68; as theatre, 68 Holiness Code, 147 Holocene epoch, 2, 9 Holocene ontology, 182–85 Holy Spirit, 67, 69, 102–3 hope: agency and, 67–68, 133; apocalyptic and, 130; ethics and, 135; grief and, 13; ground of, 134–35; meaning of, 9; motivation for, 109; object of, 87–88, 115, 125, 137n10; redemption and, 194; secular, 195 Horrell, David, 124 human agency: entanglement and, 93, 95; evolution and, 36n32; forces of nature and, 182–84, 190–91, 197–98; hope and, 133; limitedness of, 32, 65–66, 195; renewal of Earth and, 146, 147, 151; as self-determining, 5–6; subsuming of, 24–25. See also ethics; responsibility humanism, 6

223

humanity: Anthropocene epoch and, 59–62, 197; centrality of, 60–61; creation of, 116–17, 178; disappearance of, 117, 118; disordered relations and, 64; domination by, 178, 186n17; dominion of, 178–79, 186n16; Earth System and, 3–5, 8, 12, 59, 90, 148, 162–63, 175–76; extinction of, 11–12; freedom of, 5–6, 8–9, 75, 116, 179–80, 182–83; legacy of, 12; naming of animals by, 181, 187n28; nature of, 18–19; power of, 9–10, 27, 33, 162, 175–76, 182, 183, 185n10, 198; pre-eminence of, 178–79; as serving environment, 179; setting for, 88–89 imago Dei, 39n80, 80–81, 89, 98–99, 165 imitatio Dei, 151 immaturity, 20–21 immortality, 28–29, 38n58 incarnation, 46–47, 68 indifference, 88 Indigenous peoples, 155 innovation, 24, 99–100 integral ecology, 45–46 interdependence, 31–33 interdisciplinary studies, 90 “interfering factors,” 182, 183 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 91 Isaiah, book of prophet, 133, 149–51 Jesus, 69–70, 110; as apocalypse of God, 131; apocalyptic and, 128–31. See also Christ Job, book of, 152–54 judgment, 111–12, 129 Jüngel, Eberhard, 115 justice, 129, 136n3, 151 Kant, Immanuel, 87–88 Käsemann, Ernst, 128–29

224

Keller, Catherine, 44 kingdom of God, 75–76, 78 King Jr, Martin Luther, 166 Kirk, Russell, 184–85 Kolbert, Elizabeth, 41 land, rights of, 148–49, 195–96 “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (Breughel), 61–62 Latour, Bruno, 41 Laudato Si’ (Francis), 8, 45–46, 155 LeVasseur, Todd, 47 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 12 Leviticus, book of, 147–49 Light of the Stars (Frank), 23–24 liminality, 27, 66 “Lines on Breughel’s ‘Icarus’” (Hamburger), 62 liturgy, 101 “Long Now” project, 29 Lord’s Prayer, 75, 77, 97 love, 20, 117 Lovelock, James, 12, 198 Luther, Martin, 166 Macy, Joanna, 13 Marr, David, 161 mastery, 8 maturation, 20–21, 23 maturity, 8–9 McKibben, Bill, 25 meaning, 38n64, 115 méconnaissance, 65 Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes and Conway), 163–64 Milgrom, Jacob, 147 modernity, 5–7, 25 Moltmann, Jürgen, 52, 113, 116 moral order. See ethics murder, 181 “Musée des Beaux Arts” (Auden), 62 mutuality, 69–70 mythology, 61, 64–65

Index

narratives: Augustinian, 19–20, 28–35; Christian, 115; creation, 17, 75–76, 146, 148–49, 178, 182, 186n13; deflationary, 23–24; drama and, 67–68; endings of, 114–16, 121n27; grand, 61; Irenaean, 20–26, 68–69, 190–91; pragmatic, 66 nature: culture and, 60, 136n6; Earth System and, 38n50; forces of, 182– 84, 190–91, 197–98; murder and, 181; stability of, 43–44, 145, 156n3; sublimity of, 27–28, 31–32. See also Earth System The Nature and Destiny of Man (Niebuhr), 165 Nazism, 75 neoliberalism, 11 Neyrat, Frederic, 24, 25, 26, 34, 37n38, 39n84 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 65, 165 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 11–12 nihilism, 10–11, 88 nomadism, 187n24 normativity, 136n6 Northcott, Michael, 125, 163, 170 Oldfield, Frank, 43 ontology, 66, 176, 177, 182–85, 197 open-endedness, 114 opportunity, 24 optimism, 10 original sin, 65, 165–66 otherness, 31–35 otherworldliness, 75, 76–77, 192 paleo-ontology, 66 Pannenberg, Wolfhart, 102–3, 110, 112 Parousia, 119, 129, 132 Paul, apostle, 180 penitence, 29–30 pessimism, 10 Peterson, Anna, 47 piety, 31–32, 74–75 Piketty, Thomas, 155 Plato, 171

Index

Plumwood, Val, 78 pneumatology, 102–3 Political Theology of Climate Change (Northcott), 163 politics, 49–50, 95–97 Polkinghorne, John, 111 poor, the, 51, 65 possibilities, 115–16, 117 post-humanism, 94–95, 191 power, 27, 31–33, 131–32, 134 pragmatism, 66 prayer, 74–75, 77, 83, 97, 167–69 progress, 13 prophecy, 131–32 proportionism, 82 protest, 96, 169 providence, 45, 49, 116 Querida Amazonia (Francis), 172 Rasmussen, Larry, 47, 48 reality, in Christ, 74–75, 77 reciprocity, 69–70 reconciliation, 28, 30 redemption, 46–47, 113, 117–18, 149–51 regress, 13 relationality, 64, 80–83. See also alienation religious sensibility, 33 rescue, 67, 114, 119, 121n21, 134, 142n44 responsibility: for ecologic crisis, 47; politics and, 95, 97; relationality and, 81–83; for remediation, 5; selfdeception and, 65; toward Earth System, 31–33, 44, 45, 119–20, 179; toward people, 45. See also culpability; ethics resurrection, 115 Revelation, book of, 132, 133 “The Right to Self-Assertion” (Bonhoeffer), 78 Riminton, Hugh, 73 rivalry, 64

225

Rose, Debra, 30 Rothe, Delft, 50 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 63 Russian Cosmists, 22–23 sacrifice, 69–70, 75 Sagan, Carl, 25 salvation, 18, 22, 67, 114, 119, 121n21, 134, 142n44 scapegoating, 64 science: of Earth System, 3–4, 27, 162; ethics and, 32–33; salvation and, 18, 22; theology and, 118 Scott, Michael, 51 Scott, Peter, 51 Scriptures, 52, 109, 111, 116, 124, 187n29, 195–96 secularism, 75, 77–78 self, the, 48 self-deception, 65 self-interest, 22 serpent, the, 169–70, 179, 186n21 Sideris, Lisa, 61, 65, 66, 69, 125 Simmons, Fred, 20 sin, 19–20, 21, 22, 62–65, 164–66, 171, 191, 196–97; cities and, 181; consequences of, 180; expansion of, 62–63; original, 65, 165–66; transcendence and, 63 Skrimshire, Stefan, 29 sky, 33 smoking, tobacco, 164 sociality, 64, 80–83. See also alienation society, 136n6 spirit, 107n85. See also Holy Spirit spirituality, 155 Steffen, Will, 3, 43–44 stewardship, 8, 25, 44, 119 stories. See narratives subduing, 182. See also domination suffering, climate, 88 swarming, 100–102, 107n84 symbiosis, 179, 180–81, 187n27 Syvitski, James, 3

226

Index

T & T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change, 45 Taylor, Charles, 68 teleo-dynamism, 90–91 teleology, 68–69, 191 teleonomy, 37n39 telos, 110 theodicy, 18, 28, 49; apocalyptic and, 130; Augustinian, 34–35; Irenaean, 20, 26. See also narratives, Augustinian; narratives, Irenaean Theo-drama, 67–68 theology: Anthropocene epoch and, 45–52; apocalyptic and, 128–30; in early Christianity, 128–29; Earth System in, 46; ecotheology, 44, 46, 48, 183, 189, 194; as eschatological, 110–11, 118–19; Holocene epoch and, 9; of incarnation and redemption, 46–47; planetary, 154–56; public, 41–42, 51–52, 125, 137n8; revision of, 42; science and, 118; secular, 18, 28–29, 48–50, 193; systematic, 50–52; wisdom, 154–55 theosis, 21, 29, 116–17 therapy, 65–66, 70 Therapy Culture (Furedi), 164 this-worldliness, 76, 80 Thoreau, Henry David, 125 Thunberg, Greta, 169 “Thy Kingdom Come!” (Bonhoeffer), 75, 77 time, 50, 113 tipping points, 44, 101, 102 tobacco smoking, 164

Torah, 147 transcendence, 63, 65, 111–12, 113, 192 transformation, 20, 24–25, 61 transhumanism, 94–95 truth, 10, 11, 171 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 23 Turnbull, Malcolm, 167 Tusa, Giovanbattista, 11 uncertainty, 26–27 The Unconstructable Earth (Neyrat), 25, 39n84 Uniting Church in Australia, 168 urbanization, 133, 181 utopias, 6, 12–13, 60–62 values, 33–34. See also ethics van Dooren, Thom, 30 vices, 19, 20 victims, 65 violence, 61, 64–65, 131 Wallace-Wells, David, 88 war, 78 Wasserman, Emma, 125 Welker, Michael, 103 White Jr, Lynn, 47 wisdom, 153–55 world: Bible on, 109, 111; in Christ, 74–75, 77; God and, 115–16, 122n34 worldliness, 76, 77, 80 worship, 101. See also prayer Zalasiewicz, Jan, 46

About the Contributors

Professor Mark G. Brett, FAHA, is professor of Hebrew Bible, University of Divinity, Melbourne. Mark’s research is focused on ethnicity and postcolonial studies and his publications include Locations of God: Political Theology in the Hebrew Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Mark was General Editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature (2019–2021). Dr. Jonathan Cole is assistant director of Research at the Australian Center for Christianity and Culture, Charles Sturt University, Canberra. Jonathan’s research is focused on political theology and his publications include The Reign of God: A Critical Engagement with Oliver O'Donovan's Theology of Political Authority (London: T & T Clark, 2022). Professor Scott Cowdell is research professor at the Australian Center for Christianity and Culture, Charles Sturt University, Canberra. Scott is an internationally regarded scholar on the work of René Girard, and his publications include René Girard and the Nonviolent God (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018). Professor Clive Hamilton is professor of public ethics and vice-chancellor’s chair in public ethics, Charles Sturt University. Clive has held visiting academic positions at Yale University, the University of Oxford, and University College, London. One of Australia’s foremost public intellectuals, Clive’s publications include Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2017). Professor Christiaan Mostert is emeritus professor of systematic theology, University of Divinity, Melbourne. Christiaan’s research interests are theologians and theological movements of the twentieth century and his publications include God and the Future: Wolfhardt Pannenberg’s Eschatological Doctrine of God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2002). 227

228

About the Contributors

Associate Professor David J. Neville is research fellow at the Australian Center for Christianity and Culture, Charles Sturt University, Canberra. David’s research focus is the synoptic gospels and his publications include The Vehement Jesus: Grappling with Troubling Gospel Texts (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2017). Associate Professor Clive Pearson is research fellow at the Australian Center for Christianity and Culture, Charles Sturt University, Canberra. Clive’s research focus is public theology, especially theology and climate. He is the editor of Imagining a Way: Exploring Reformed Practical Theology and Ethics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017). Clive is General Editor of the International Journal of Public Theology. Professor Stephen Pickard is research professor at the Australian Center for Christianity and Culture, Charles Sturt University, Canberra. Stephen’s research interests are ecclesiology, theology, and economics, and his publications include Seeking the Church: An Introduction to Ecclesiology (London: SCM Press, 2012). Dr. Dianne Rayson lectures in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Newcastle, Australia. Dianne’s research interests are focused on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and theology and climate. Her publications include Bonhoeffer and Climate Change: Theology and Ethics for the Anthropocene (Lanham: Lexington Press, 2021). Professor Lisa H. Sideris is professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Lisa’s research interests include environmental ethics and science and religion, and among her publications is Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017). Dr. Peter Walker is principal of United Theological College, Sydney. Peter’s research interests are public theology and theologies of religious diversity, and his publications include “Public Theology and the Modern Democratic State” in Enacting a Public Theology (Stellenbosch University Press, 2019).