Planetary Solidarity

Global Women's Voices on Christian Doctrine and Climate Justice

Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Hilda P. Koster, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Hilda P. Koster

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781506432625
• eBook ISBN: 9781506408934
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Planetary Solidarity brings together leading Latina, womanist, Asian American, Anglican American, South American, Asian, European, and African woman theologians on the issues of doctrine, women, and climate justice. Because women make up the majority of the world's poor and tend to be more dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods and survival, they are more vulnerable when it comes to climate-related changes and catastrophes. Representing a subfield of feminist theology that uses doctrine as interlocutor, this book ask how Christian doctrine might address the interconnected suffering of women and the earth in an age of climate change. While doctrine has often stifled change, it also forms the thread that weaves Christian communities together. Drawing on postcolonial ecofeminist/womanist analysis and representing different ecclesial and denominational traditions, contributors use doctrine to envision possibilities for a deep solidarity with the earth and one another while addressing the intersection of gender, race, class, and ethnicity. The book is organized around the following doctrines: creation, the triune God, anthropology, sin, incarnation, redemption, the Holy Spirit, ecclesiology, and eschatology.

II

Doctrines and Situations

God, Creation, and Humanity

5

Reimagining the Triune God for a Time of Global Climate Change

Sallie McFague

Traditionally, Christian theology has emphasized both God’s transcendence and immanence. For a doctrine of God to be effective, it must interpret both in a credible and powerful way. Transcendence has fared better here, though increasingly, while it is still powerful, it is no longer credible. Who can believe a supernatural, imperialistic, all-controlling super-person, imagined after a comic-book superhero? Yet, at one absurd end, this is the picture. Any powerful views of immanence, on the other hand, tend toward pantheism, in which all identity and distinctiveness of God and the world are lost.

We need a new basic model, paradigm, of the relationship of God and the world. Currently, in most Protestant circles, the prime model is not of God and the world but of God and the human being, specifically the male human being. While Roman Catholicism has had a doctrine of the world, since the Reformation, the Protestant focus has been narrowed to human individuals. This picture of two beings only marginally related, very independent, highly anthropocentric, is all about who has the power. It is a competitive model of two isolated monads, each vying for the gold medal, as in sports. The supposition is that God can intervene on behalf of individual human beings for their good (or not). At its most crude, the model is of two competitive human beings (males) vying for controlling power.

Therefore, power is the heart of the issue. Who has the most? The model we choose makes all the difference. But where do we get our models? The individualistic model is a combination of market capitalism and Enlightenment philosophy and anthropology. However, Christians believe Jesus is the face of God; Jesus’s life, death, and teachings are a reflection of the “mind of God.” A very different model emerges from this source—what can be called the “kenotic” model. Why accept one or the other? It is a jump, a leap of faith. There is no hard and fast evidence that one is better than the other. In terms of one’s most basic, deepest commitment, one cannot be certain. The test (and it is only a test, not a certainty) is that one is “better” for oneself, the planet, and other creatures. Hence, Christians start with the story of Jesus. We move from there to talking about God and the world. We understand who God is (God’s transcendence and immanence) and who we are because of Jesus. Does this mean literalism? Does it mean that Jesus is God and, therefore, we know what we Christians say is the “truth,” that we need nothing else than the story of Jesus to say both who God is and who we are? No, but we do get some clear clues and directions from that story.

A kenotic theology is a story of self-sacrificing love, a model that upends the Enlightenment at its most vulnerable place. It is contrary to all we as Westerners value, expect, reward, and honor. But, what if the cross (dying to one’s old life, trying to live a new, self-sacrificing love) is the way? What if we choose this as our model? How should we conceive of the transcendence/immanence of God and God’s relation to the world if we take the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as our model in a time of climate change? And what if some of the insights coming to us from postmodern philosophy, especially its anthropology, its understanding of how we fit into the scheme of things, have some interesting overlaps with the Christian kenotic picture? What if some of the novel insights into its basic “world view”—that is, the underlying assumptions about the human place in the world on issues of power, exceptionalism, responsibility, body, materialism, dependence, and so on—give us a very different picture than the traditional Protestant picture of two super-beings, God and man, struggling for dominance? What if we might learn something about how to live a kenotic life from the very different picture of our place on our planet from an anthropology challenging us to face up to our radical dependence, fragility, and even weakness? The seeming absurdity of living a life of sacrificial love for others, which is at the heart of most religions, and certainly of Christianity, may find a partner in insights from postmodern science and philosophy in terms of its insistence that primarily and centrally we are animals, bodies dependent on other bodies, incarnational beings at the mercy of the many sources of power in our planet, among them, climate change. The focus on the body at the heart of the Christian story of the incarnation of God should make this tradition open to some of the distinctive insights of postmodernism: its profound materialism, its suspicion of “spirit,” its call for a bio-cracy (in which all life-forms have a vote, unlike a democracy), its focus on human responsibility for our own actions, the call to love this world (not another), the insistence that we learn to face despair and death, the end of thinking in terms of “substance,” its claim that agency (subjecthood) is not limited to human beings, and so on.

So, to return to our present dilemma: we might wish we could believe in an all-powerful, supernatural God who could solve all our problems, but that no longer is a persuasive argument. Why is the picture of this God no longer credible, no longer powerful? In part, it is because we no longer believe in ourselves as powerful individuals. Our whole picture of who we are and who God is has changed, so say the postmodernists. The individualistic, solitary, isolated human being who was a product of Enlightenment philosophy and Newtonian science has been undermined and with it, belief in a similar picture of God. The picture we have of ourselves and of God go together, and both have been undermined in the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. Let us look at what has happened to the happy picture of progress in the latter part of the nineteenth century at the hands of the three masters of suspicion: Freud, Darwin, and Nietzsche.

Freud, Darwin, and Nietzsche

Freud, Darwin, and Nietzsche undermined the sense of discovery, progress, and human control during the nineteenth century. The industrial revolution, the colonization of Africa and the East by Western powers, and advances in medicine and the other sciences combined to make human beings feel confident and, for the first time, in control of nature. This was to be short-lived, however. Freud destroyed the sense of clarity that people used to feel about their “insides,” their motives and desire. Until Freud, things seemed relatively straightforward, but he opened up a vast internal swampy jungle, sowing seeds of doubt, mistrust, and deceit even in our most intimate secretive selves—our relations with parents and sexuality. One could no longer trust what people said about their motives, promises, or wishes. In fact, we didn’t even know what our insides were telling us, and to the extent we did figure it out, we didn’t like what we saw.

Whereas Freud generated an internal revolution—we could no longer trust our desires and our will to obey us (or even figure out what they were about)—Darwin worked on the “outside”—the world or cosmos and our place in it. Our industrial, scientific, and colonizing successes had led people in the West to believe in human centrality and exceptionalism. We were vastly different from all other animals—Descartes claimed we were unique because we could “think”; the rational mind set us off absolutely from all other creatures, making us the only subjects, and everyone and everything else became mere objects. Hence, it created a picture of human beings as rightful owners and users of the planet. We are living organisms and everything else is more like a machine with removable parts that can be used without damaging the whole.

It is difficult for us to imagine how it felt to be the hegemonic human being in such a world. By hegemonic, I mean the classic, desirable model of human being—Western, young, male, white-skinned, well-to-do, educated, confident, Protestant, able-bodied. To be sure, most people did not fit this model—women, children, all non-Westerners, physically or mentally challenged, old, colored skin, poor, uneducated, and so on. Immanuel Kant said that one owed such people as himself—the hegemonic human being—moral regard; that is, one should treat such people fairly a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: Global Women’s Voices on Christian Doctrine and Climate Justice
• Reimagining
• Doctrines and Situations
• Select Bibliography
• Index