Plundering Eden: A Subversive Theology of Creation and Ecology

Concilium, 2018

The threat of ecocide poses an ethical challenge which calls humans to rethink our relationship with nature, perceive the divine wisdom manifest in creation, and act cooperatively and co-creatively with other living beings. This article explores how God is present in creation and links Jesus’s proclamation of the Reign of God with the wisdom manifest in creation. Emerging insights from postmodern science are examined to better understand the ‘governing themes and basal intentionality’ manifest in an evolving cosmos. Finally, it is suggested that humans can develop ecological wisdom by opening themselves to the alterity of other beings and working respectfully and creatively with them to seek the healing, regeneration, and integral liberation of the Earth community.

International Journal of Public Theology, 2018

Religion Compass, 2011

This article explores contemporary shifts in eco-theological thinking as they relate to the overall field of 'religion and ecology ⁄ nature'. More specifically, this article looks not only at retrieving theological, biblical and ethical resources from Christianity to address contemporary ecological issues, but rather how meaning-making practices are changed in the contemporary context of globalization and global climate change. How does globalization challenge concepts of meaning that claim universality? How does climate change challenge a separation between moral and natural 'evil'? How do urban ecology and environmental justice challenge distinctions between humans, technology, and the rest of the natural world, and what might this mean for theological understandings of creation? In the end, these questions highlight an overall shift in theological thinking: moving from global understandings of the world toward planetary understandings.

2015

When Thomas Berry commented on the contribution of Teilhard de Chardin to theology, he asserted that “Teilhard … (1881-1955) gave expression to the greatest transformation in Christian thought since the time of St. Paul”1. Berry argued that Teilhard “was the first person to describe the universe as having, from the beginning, a psychic-spiritual dimension as well as a physical-material dimension”. Closely associated with this claim is another achievement of Teilhard – a repositioning of the human within the epic of evolution – that is, that humanity is derived from billions of years of cosmic evolution. If we awaken to this new cosmological perspective, we can tell the evolutionary story of both the physical-material as well as the psychic-spiritual dimension of creation, and how humanity, in all its dimensions, is inextricably linked to that story. Furthermore, with both Teilhard and Thomas Berry, we reawaken to the creative dimension of Christ, the Logos, who has been part of creation from its inception4. This can radically alter our understanding of the spiritual dimension of humanity and the sacredness of creation. The theological support for this new cosmological understanding of spirituality and Divine presence can inform an effective response to two of the main causes of our current ecological crisis – that humans perceive themselves as isolable from the rest of the Earth community, and that humans have lost an appreciation for the sacredness of creation. This paper will present certain biblical, Christological, pneumatological, and eco-theological support for Teilhard’s and Berry’s assertions, and demonstrate how adding a creation-centred understanding of Christian spirituality reintegrates theological anthropology into the universe story and reawakens us to the sacred dimension of God’s good Earth.

In this thesis I develop the parallel noted by Ewert Cousins between Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary Christology and the trinitarian theology of St Bonaventure, in order to develop a contemporary ecotheology. Teilhard’s anthropocentrism and determinism is corrected through an extension of his noosphere construct as a shared noetic space for a more-than-human ecology, identified as a site of both risk and potential reconciliation. I further develop the noosphere model by noting its congruence with Bonaventure’s vision of eschatological shalom, which proposes resurrection as the inauguration of a transformed creation. Although the application to ecotheology of Bonaventure’s trinitarian thought has been widely noted, the extended parallel with Teilhard’s evolutionary Christology enables it to be better applied to the contemporary ecological problem with its roots in the development of scientific models of evolution. Conversely, Teilhard’s neglect of trinitarian theology and failure to connect his Christ-Omega with the central Christian kerygma of crucifixion and resurrection is implicated in a deterministic and anthropocentric bias. This is corrected by bringing Teilhard’s evolutionary model into conversation with Bonaventure’s trinitarian theology. My argument links a robust creation-centred Christology with a theoretical model for the more-than-human ecology, and connects human and divine wisdom with contemporary noetic models of ecological process. As a construct with a history of application in the life sciences, the noosphere provides a local and temporally proximate frame for theological dialogue with ecology. My extension of Teilhard’s noosphere underpins an ecological anthropology in which human existence is oriented towards Christ through dialogic relationship with all created things. By linking Bonaventure’s eschatological vision of shalom with the extended noosphere model the claim of convergence on Christ-Omega is made relevant for an ecotheology, and an ecotheological eschatology emerges within which creation is identified both as cruciform and as a site of redemptive transformation.

KAIROS FOR CREATION Confessing Hope for the Earth, 2020

Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture

G.F. Wagenfuhr, Plundering Eden: A Subversive Christian Theology of Creation and Ecology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Publications, 2020), 206 pp., $27.00 (pbk), ISBN: 9781532677427.

Concilium, 2009

Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies, 1991

This article examines three metaphors for world processthe organic, the mechanistic, and the artistic-drawn from the work of Gibson Winter in his book, Liberating Grace. The significance of these three metaphors for ecology and theological method are examined in turn. In so doing a correlation is also offered between cultural types (Voegelin), theological styles, stages of meaning (Lonergan), and stages of faith (Fowler).