An epistemological problem and possibility

The test of theological reflection is the extent to which it enables people to trust and embody God’s liberating and healing love in the world, and to relish the gift of life in ways that cultivate social equity and mutually enhancing Earth–human relations. Trusting and embodying God’s justice-making love today calls for challenging the power asymmetries through which a small segment of Earth’s people are disproportionately: (1) responsible for climate change; (2) ‘beneficiaries’ of the fossil fuel political economy causing it; and (3) protected from its worst consequences. Those imbalances in power and privilege are deadly. They have allowed a small minority – largely white people – to consume vast quantities of Earth’s goods by means that exploit the majority and the Earth itself. For many, that exploitation spells death. Hence, the call to love with God’s love – to give it social form – is a call to dismantle that systemic injustice.

We, the ecotheologians engaged in this project and most of our colleagues and students, are among this small segment. I write from this position. Christian ecotheology, done by us – people who are the historical and contemporary material beneficiaries of the fossil-fuel-based global political economy – is precariously situated. We seek, in our theologizing, to forge paths to ways of living that nourish Earth’s well-being and that dismantle various forms of systemic evil that are eating away at humankind and our planetary home. However, our operative frameworks – our presuppositions, definitions of the Earth crisis, modes of inquiry, epistemological assumptions, world-views, landscapes of reality and understandings of what makes the present unacceptable and what constitutes a desired future – are shaped by the very cultural ethos that generated the Earth crisis and the climate injustice inherent in it. So too are our interpretations of Scripture, tradition, experience and other bodies of human knowledge.

The question before us is whether these frameworks for doing theology are capable of eliciting the radical changes in society’s normative structures and behaviour necessary if the ends of life-giving Earth–human relations and relative social equity are to be met. If the answer is ‘yes’ then we journey on the right track(s). However, it is also possible that our frameworks – diverse, imaginative and faithful as they are – do not bear that transformative potential precisely because they are products of the culture that produced the crisis. Our ecotheology is done within and shaped by the structures of power and privilege that gave rise to the industrial revolution and advanced global capitalism, the exploitation of the many by the few that made these developments possible, and the Earth crisis stemming from them.

It is possible too that our operative frameworks actually obscure other ways of perceiving reality and generating wisdom that could lead to a more just and sustainable future. That is, it may be that sources of perception and theological wisdom outside the boundaries of power and privilege in advanced global capitalism are necessary to forge a future not governed by it.

Those sources of wisdom may be twofold. One is the Earth itself. The Earth crisis has moved the ‘margins of power and privilege’ beyond the boundaries of the human. If theo-ethical wisdom is to be found ‘at the margins’ then the other-than-human has wisdom to communicate and languages to do so. Ecotheology is challenged to learn to hear from voices not human, wisdom for ways of living in sync with creation’s needs. Biblical texts, especially the Hebrew Scriptures, suggest as much. They reveal God speaking through the creatures and elements of Earth and calling upon them, for example, to ‘testify’, ‘witness’, ‘minister’ (Ps. 104.4); convey God’s message (Ps. 104.4); and praise God (Ps. 148).

Key questions for ecotheology become, ‘How are we to perceive from other-than-human perspectives and learn from them? What might we learn from how other species “construct” the world?’ Moral vision for a just and sustainable future will venture into this uncharted epistemological terrain of asking how human creatures may hear moral wisdom spoken in ‘languages’ of otherkind. (I am not suggesting that nature is to be held up as a model of morality, providing a blueprint for human society. Such a claim would have to ignore many processes that are natural but certainly not normative for human morality. Among them are fierce competition for goods and mates, predation, unchecked disease etc.).

A second source of necessary wisdom is described well by Indian Christian ethicist, George Zachariah. It is the claims and cries generated by social movements of subordinated communities ‘who are uprooted from life’ by environmental destruction and by the dominant political economy responsible for it and for their subordination. ¹ He is referring to social movements of people who are not only uprooted but also engaged in ‘resistance against the mechanisms and systems that enslave and subordinate them’. ² These movements, Zachariah explains, generate knowledge as subjects of ecotheology, as agenda-setters for social transformation, and as theological ‘texts’ of their own inquiry. Such roles contrast starkly with the roles of objects and victims commonly assigned to people of these movements.

The problem for ecotheologians of dominant cultures is striking. The knowledge generated by subordinated and resisting communities is currently peripheral to the theological frameworks in which we now operate, for it has been ‘pushed to the peripheries of dominant constructions of knowledge’. ³ That problem for us is magnified if – and this may be what Zachariah suggests but I am not sure – this requisite wisdom cannot be learned from those movements, but rather is gained only by participation with them in the political praxis of ‘creating a different earth by dismantling the prevailing dominant social and ecological relations’. ⁴

Ecotheology seeks a future in which all have life abundantly. That future will be built partially on radical changes in ways of life that we high-consumers have been socialized to experience as normal. The journey of ecotheology could lead toward that future. Whether or not it does is up to us. One determining factor may be the extent to which we allow our basic structures for understanding and theologizing, and our sources of knowledge, to be challenged from beyond the boundaries of power and privilege. The stakes are hauntingly high.