The Ecological Bankruptcy of Christianity? (5)

Reconstructionist Responses

At the other end of the spectrum from apologetic responses are those that argue that traditional Christian thought offers no usable theological resources to respond to the allegations of the title. Instead, what is required is a reconstruction of Christian theology from the ground up.

The most imaginative reconstruction has come from Matthew Fox. Fox proposes a cosmological Christology, but his understanding of that is rather different from Moltmann's.^[29] The issue for Fox is the harmful consequences of fall-redemption theology because it creates a false dichotomy between subject and object, human and non-human, God and nature, blessing and sin, and 'plays kindly into the hands of empire-builders, slave masters, and patriarchal society in general.'^[30] Instead, he proposes a theology of original blessing and the coming Cosmic Christ that he argues is more dialectic than dualistic - both-and, rather than either-or.^[31] This is expressed in two aspects of creation spirituality, which he calls the Via Positiva, emphasising blessing, harmony, and fertility, and the Via Negativa, affirming the experience of pain, suffering and death.^[32] Redemption for Fox, then, is a balancing of 'good' and 'bad,' and this is what the historical Jesus, revealer of the Cosmic Christ, offers.^[33] Jesus' death must be embedded in the context of creation and incarnation, and Fox's understanding of the atonement adapts Abelard's moral influence motif to a 'symbol of the ultimate letting go, that of death.'^[34] According to Fox, the historical Jesus enables us to grasp that we are also divinely born, and thus we are open to see God in all things.^[35] As a result, Fox's eschatology is fully realised, and this is the motivation for practical creation care.^[36]

Santmire welcomes Fox's critique of Christian theology as an important challenge to its spiritualizing, anthropocentric excesses and dualistic patriarchal tendencies.^[37] Northcott endorses Fox's affirmation of embodiment, the original goodness of creation and sheer delight in its fertility and diversity.^[38] However, Fox's scheme poses serious problems for the Christian tradition. God is such an immanent being that it is ultimately hard to distinguish God from cosmos, and the sacralization of creation results in a pantheistic position verging on animistic. Serious questions are raised about the atoning role of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.^[39] And Santmire challenges the practical relevance of Fox's spirituality as 'anti-urban, romantic individualism of the Thoreauvian tradition,' that is not just worthless but effectively irrelevant for inner-city communities.^[40]

The second major reconstructionist response comes from feminist thought, often referred to as ecofeminism. Ecofeminism is predicated on similarities between the domination of women and the domination of nature, at both the cultural-symbolic level and the socioeconomic level.^[41] The consequence of this symbiosis, Rosemary Radford Ruether suggests, is that the turning point in the domination of nature was not the Middle Ages, as White suggests, or the Renaissance, as with Moltmann. Instead, Ruether argues that the social patterns stemming from the rise of 'patriarchal slavocracies in the ancient Near East' delivered ideological tools to rationalise, as 'the nature of things,' the domination by men as a gender group of women, of slaves, of animals and of land as property.^[42]

The essential insight of ecofeminism is of an original, usurped but potentially restored equality: the Edenic harmony was deposed by the sin of dominant males in exerting power over others, but Christ came to overcome all such domination and restore the harmony of men, women and creation, not just in heaven but here on Earth.^[43] Sallie McFague seeks an ecofeminist Christology that is prophetic and sacramental that claims 'God is with us.' God is with us in Jesus' unique ministry of justice and care, telling us how to live with nature. And God is with us through divine inclusive embodiment, informing us that 'all of nature and nature's renewal is with divine love and power.'^[44] Ruether argues further that 'man's' domination of nature and of women must not be overthrown by revolution but rather challenged and 'converted,' by making a rediscovery of 'the finitude of the earth as a balance of elements, which together harmonize to support life for all parts of the community.'^[45] Thus Ruether advocates a non-hierarchical worldview that challenges androcentric, anthropocentric and dualist assumptions of Western theology.^[46] Ruether's 'ecotheology' offers its most serious reconstruction of Christian theology when it moves 'beyond God the Father' to talk somewhat oxymoronically of God/ess and the Primal Matrix.^[47] At this point it is unclear whether God/ess-Primal-Matrix is a personal agent and therefore any ontological distinction between God and creation is in danger of collapse: divine transcendence is engulfed in divine immanence, despite Ruether's intention to avoid this.^[48]

Nonetheless, McFague demands that ecofeminist theology must be embodied in praxis.^[49] She cites the second law of thermodynamics to question who benefits and who pays in our life on a planet with finite resources.^[50] Ultimately, hard answers must be found, such as limiting human species proliferation, and accentuating the ethics of the preferential option for the poor and sustainability.^[51]

Footnotes