Resisting Structural Evil

Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation

Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781451462678
• eBook ISBN: 9781451426397
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The increasingly pressing and depressing situation of Planet Earth poses urgent ethical questions for Christians. But, as Cynthia Moe-Lobeda argues, the future of the earth is not simply a matter of protecting species and habitats but of rethinking the very meaning of Christian ethics. The earth crisis cannot be understood apart from the larger human crisis—economic equity, social values, and human purpose are bound up with the planet's survival. In a sense, she says, the whole earth is a moral community.

8

Love: Ecological and Economic Vocation

“We cannot love neighbor without reducing our consumption.”

Sallie McFague

How do the features of neighbor-love play out for “us,” given the economic and ecological violence in which we are complicit? When mainstays of my life (automobiles, air travel, agribusiness, plastics, and more) depend upon damaging Earth’s life-systems and exploiting neighbors, what does love require? What is neighbor-love toward the woman who lost home and fishing livelihood to the construction of the hotel from which I enjoy the beach view?

I make no claim to a comprehensive response. My intent is more humble. It is to identify initial components for an ethic of neighbor-love capable of responding seriously to questions like these, and to proffer partial responses. This means fleshing out the implications of neighbor-love for twenty-first-century earthlings who live as beneficiaries of systemic economic and ecological violence.

This chapter sketches three initial components of such an ethic. They are:

• A moral anthropology: What love means depends upon who we are.
• The scope of neighbor-love: Neighbor-love extends beyond the human.
• Principles of love as an ecological-economic vocation: Ecological sustainability, environmental equity, economic equity, and economic democracy.

The subsequent chapter identifies other key elements of this moral framework.

The biblical injunction to neighbor-love is also vital to aspects of life that are not the focus of these pages. They include life’s interpersonal and intrapersonal arenas. Both intertwine with and overlap the economic-ecological, but are not the primary concern of this inquiry. The focus here is a particular underrecognized dimension of neighbor-love, the dimension that emerges at the juncture of economic and ecological life.

What Love Means Depends on Who We Are

“At the heart of the pathology of the environmental crisis is the refusal of humans to see themselves as creatures contingently embedded in networks of relationships with other creatures, and with the Creator. This refusal is the quintessential root of what theologians call sin.” ^[1]

Neighbor-love, we have seen, is contextual. Central to context is who we believe we are. Who are these human creatures, these beings called and created to love? What love means depends upon who we are. The “we,” here, has double meaning: we as humans and we as the world’s high-consuming beneficiaries of empire.

Chapter 5 argued that forging sustainable Earth-human relations marked by social justice will require a tectonic shift in moral consciousness. This entails a radically reoriented understanding of human being and purpose. “Who we are” is not “who we have assumed we are” in modern and postmodern Western societies. Modernity’s glorious myth is that we are the benevolent masters of Isaac Newton’s mechanized world ordained by God to have dominion over it. This myth has proven deadly. The more recent story—we the unique stewards of the Earth placed into it as caretakers—is biologically false. The Earth, arguably, has no need for us. Far from being the creature upon whom Earth depends for care, humankind is utterly dependent upon otherkind. They (for example, the microbes cleaning our skin, the trees giving us breath, the plankton of the sea creating food) are taking care of us.

Who then are we? Relational theologies of the last two decades convincingly have established the ontologically relational nature of human being. We are created to be in relationship with others. Increasingly acknowledged is the political nature of that relationality. The Bible attests that the relationality into which we are created and called is not only interpersonal. It is communal relationality, social structural relationality. We are called to receive the love of God and live it into the world, not only in interpersonal relationships, but also in shaping our life in common. The processes for shaping the terms of social life are, by definition, political. Hence humans are, both ontologically and normatively, political creatures. Being political is a reflection of our createdness as beings-in-relationship.^[2]

We are not only relational and political creatures, but also earth creatures. In the words of a second-century theological guide, Irenaeus of Lyons, we are “mud creatures”—in Hebrew, ha adam—crafted from adamah (“dust of the earth, topsoil”). Humans are made from humus. That is, we are made of the very elements that existed with the big bang some 13.7 billion years ago and that comprise the soil. We are not above and outside of nature. We are of the animal kingdom, the phylum chordata, the genus homo, and the species homo sapiens. As mud creatures, our God-given task in relationship to the rest of nature at this point in history may be to re-see and re-situate ourselves within rather than above Earth’s web of life.

As relational beings, political beings, and earthlings, we are also inherently economic beings. That is, our life together requires the use of material things and thus their distribution among us.

An ethic of love in the contemporary context must be adequate for human creatures who are by nature not only relational and and political beings, but also economic and ecological beings. From a theological and biological perspective, such an ethic of love holds that we:

• are “mud creatures,” made of soil that is made of “star dust”;
• are an integral and utterly dependent species in Earth’s tapestry of life;
• share origins, body matter, and ultimate salvation with the Earth community;
• live within a polis and economia that are planetary if not cosmic;^[3]
• need, in order to survive, the material goods that other humans and other-than-human parts of the planetary polis also require and, thus, must, in some way, distribute those goods;
• are charged with seeking the widespread good, not merely the good of ourselves and our own;
• are embedded in systemic evil that is enormously adept at parading as good, inevitable, natural, fate, or social necessity;
• are beloved by a love that will not cease to love us, is more powerful than any force on Earth or beyond, and loves also the entirety of creation;
• are bearers of that divine and indomitable love;
• are players in a story of hope;
• may be part of a vast global body of people committed to forging more just and sustainable ways of being human on Earth.

These are the creatures called to love neighbor as self. Any theology and ethic of neighbor-love will be tested by its power to move these “mud creatures” toward lives that serve the widespread good. I contend that we, the uncreators, will live that love into the world to the extent that we reconceptualize the Christian moral norm of “neighbor-love” from being primarily an interpersonal vocation to being also an economic-ecological vocation.

Neighbor-Love in and for the Household of Earth

The God revealed in Jesus is a living God, engaged with the creatures and elements of Earth. The expression of God’s engagement, divine love, responds to the realities of history. That love is not stagnant or heedless of the dynamic evolving nature of life’s needs. God’s love re-forms human love in response to where and how the world hungers for love’s healing and liberating hand. The escalating destruction of Earth’s life-systems in our day and the resulting human suffering cry out for new forms of love’s expression. We are called to love (that is, serve the well-being of) the other-than-human parts of God’s beloved creation, as well as the human.

This expanded scope of neighbor-love is not new with eco-theology and ecological ethics. Three decades before eco-theology emerged, H. Richard Niebuhr queried: “Who finally is my neighbor, the companion whom I have been commanded to love as myself?” “My neighbor,” he responds, is “animal and inorganic being . . . all that participates in being.”^[4]Hesed, argues Bernard Brady in discussing love in the Hebrew Bible, is not limited to people.^[5]

Extending the boundaries of neighbor-love beyond the human opens potholes the size of caverns. In what ways and to what extent does “neighbor-love” apply beyond humankind to the rest of nature? How? As object of love? As agent of love? As vessel of divine love? Biblical texts, read with ecological lenses, intimate all of these.

And what of justice? If neighbor-love demands justice, then to rethink the former is to rethink the latter. Feminist liberationist theories of justice insist that theories of justice start with injustice as described by those experiencing it. If the polis is planetary, how do we begin to consider the notion that we must hear voices of the Earth if we wish to understand more fully the injustices it suffers? How are we to perceive the cries and constructive proposals of waters, winds, and critters whose languages we do not yet know? The mode of knowing in modernity, reason, has proven inadequate. The mode of knowing in Western premodernity, revelation uncritically appropriated, proved deadly. Epistemology for the ecological era will incorporate and go beyond both; we will “learn to learn from” other-than-human parts of creation. We will seek to glimpse reality as experienced by otherkind.

The leap of expanding neighbor-love and justice beyond the human is not so vast where Earth’s well-being is understood as a requirement for human well-being. But the implications of neighbor-love for the other-than-human are murkier when that move is grounded in the intrinsic worth of the other-than-human, rather than solely in its utilitarian worth to humankind. Questions of relative worth emerge, as do questions of what criteria determine where love is due. If all is neighbor, and if intrinsic moral worth abides in the other-than-human, how do we measure and compare moral worth? Moral obligations to a dog may be relatively easy to consider. But how, short of arbitrary opinion, do we distinguish between the moral claims of a dog and a fly? What moral constraints ought to be placed on human beings in light of our dependence upon and kinship with otherkind? On what grounds do specific moral values and obligations apply differently to human neighbors than to other-than-human neighbors? More perplexing is the question raised earlier of whether moral agency extends beyond the human to members of other biotic communities. Are we the only ethical species?^[6]

And what of predation and plant life? We cannot eat without killing other life forms and destroying habitats of still others. Moreover, we are creatures in a chain of life that by nature includes not only predation but predation that causes suffering.^[7] The call to expand the scope of neighbor-love beyond the human is not a call to s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Opening Words
• Introduction
• Moral Crisis, Context, Call
• Structural Violence as Structural Evil
• Unmasking Evil That Parades as Good
• Countering Moral Oblivion
• Theological Seeds of Hope and Power
• Love: Mystery and Practical Reality
• Love: Ecological and Economic Vocation
• Love’s Moral Framework
• Love in Action: Resistance and Rebuilding
• Closing Words
• Index