Ecology in Jurgen Moltmann's Theology

Deane-Drummond

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498283533
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book offers a critical and constructive analysis of the contribution of Jurgen Moltmann to the field of ecotheology. Moltmann is one of the foremost and influential contemporary theologians of our time, but his specific contribution to ecotheology has received relatively scant attention in the secondary literature. The author deals sensitively with the relevant scientific aspects necessary in order to develop an adequate theology of the natural world. She also offers a careful and constructive analysis of the specific systematic theologies of creation, humanity, eschatology, and Trinity that are woven into Moltmann's rich interpretation of the relationship between God and creation.

PART 1

Theological Context to Jürgen Moltmann’s Ecological Doctrine of Creation

1

The Development of Contemporary Theologies of Creation in the Cultural Context of the West

1. Introduction

The rise in popularity and status of green issues must be one of the most rapid changes that we have faced in our particular cultural history in the Western world. The Friends of the Earth, founded in 1973, formed part of the largely middle class counter-culture to the prevailing modernist trend towards economic growth and technology. It is ironical, perhaps, that scientists have shown that even when we treat the environment as a resource within a market economy the crisis is so deep that green issues have been forced into the center of politics.1 A further irony is that a cultural shift towards a more pessimistic attitude to science and technology has given the Green movement public acceptance that would have been impossible even twenty years ago. Tim Beaumont points to the broadening that we find in today’s politics from a narrower environmentalism to a wider ecological concern.2 The latter includes interdependence between peoples, as well as environmental issues which serve to combine questions to do with global ecology with both nuclear issues and related questions of justice and peace.3, 4

Once we move into global questions the underlying factors are so complex that science no longer has the power to say anything sensible even within biological boundaries. Jonathan Schell comments:

“What is always missing from the results is the totality of the ecosphere, with its endless pathways of cause and effect, linking the biochemistry of the humblest alga and global chemical and dynamic balances into an indivisible whole. This whole is a mechanism itself, indeed it may be regarded as a single living being.”5

He believes that our activity has become a menace to both history and biology, with a loss of both whole ecosystems and individual species and now the possible specter of human extinction, “the death of death.”6 The nuclear issue as well as the wider ecological one raises important theological questions as well as narrowly ethical ones. We need to ask ourselves if our concept of God is adequate to meet the challenge that we now understand ourselves as having the power of self-annihilation.7

The presupposition of the ecological movement with its stress on interdependence is that we have become alienated from our natural environment. Jürgen Moltmann, who has a passionate concern for issues of justice and peace, alienation and oppression, is now, quite understandably, attempting to incorporate more explicit ecological issues into his eschatological theology.8 While a number of theologians have recognized the need for a theology that takes account of recent ecological concerns, the difficulty for Protestant theology is that it has largely focused on “history” rather than “nature” since the Enlightenment.9

The terms “history” and “nature” have ambiguous meanings. History can mean all that happened in the past, the records of these events, human responsibility or humankind’s action and the results of this action. We are using the term in the present context to mean “The totality of human events in past, present and future, as governed by God and directed towards his goal.”10 The word “nature” has had historically a plurality of meanings and has at least fifteen meanings today. We will use Gordon Kaufman’s definition of nature understood in terms of both the totality of processes and the context within which human activity takes place; in other words the raw material which human history transforms into culture.11

Kaufman believes that a historical focus to theology began prior to the Enlightenment, and is in fact endemic to the Biblical texts themselves where Israel asserted a belief in the God of history, compared with the gods of nature propagated by the pagan Canaanite cultures.12 While it is true that Biblical theology in the Protestant tradition has focused on salvation history in the twentieth century, Paul Santmire rejects Kaufman’s thesis that the Judao-Christian tradition necessarily excludes nature as a proper basis for theology.13 Peter Selby argues that our culture favours a biological self-understanding rather than a historical one.14 Hence the focus of mainstream Protestant theology on history actually alienates theology from popular thought. More liberal Protestant theologians have reacted against this trend by pressing for an immanent God who is the liberator of nature.15 The idea of immanence and liberation are not incompatible because of a novel dipolar theism introduced by process theologian Charles Hartshorne.16 This is a modified version of panentheism where God is seen to contain the world.

Process theology rejects the idea that we can trace an ecological motif back to the roots of our faith. Jerry Robbins, commenting on Santmire’s exposition of traditional Christianity, claims that “The very thin nature-affirming trajectory he traces displays the ecological bankruptcy of orthodox Western theology, rather than its utility.”17 Yet it is fair to say that the lack of interest in history shown by the theologians of Alfred North Whitehead’s school may make them insensitive to the message of the classics.18 David Tracy points out that we need to indwell a classic in order to allow it to affect us in the present.19 The appeal of a religious classic is less the violent appeal of authoritarianism than “the non-violent appeal to our minds, heart, imaginations and through them to our will.”20 He adds:

“What ultimately counts is the emergence of an analogical imagination for all those thi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface to New Edition of Ecology in Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Footnotes
• Part One: Theological Context to Jürgen Moltmann’s Ecological Doctrine of Creation
• Part Two: A Dialogue with Jürgen Moltmann’s God in Creation
• Part Three: A Critical Assessment of Jürgen Moltmann’s Ecological Doctrine of Creation and Future Horizons
• Bibliography