God's Lament for the Earth PDF

God’s Lament for the Earth 143 tion is God’s invitation to us to come into the vision of the New Jerusalem, embracing its promise of healing for our world rather than destruction. Rev...

God’s Lament for the Earth 143 tion is God’s invitation to us to come into the vision of the New Jerusalem, embracing its promise of healing for our world rather than destruction. Revelation also calls upon the Christian community to take up the role of the two witnesses of chapter 11, voicing our prophetic testimony about the dangerous trajectory that the world is currently on. Will our churches take up that urgent call to turn around our “empire” to a more sustainable path, in the same way that Nineveh repented and turned? Or, will we follow the “iron-smelting furnace” trajectory of the doomed empires of Egypt and Rome? There is still time for healing our world, scientists tell us. We have not yet crossed irreversible thresholds. Archbishop Desmond Tutu preached a sermon at a June 2007 United Nations climate conference in Tromsø, Norway, hosted by the Church of Norway. The service included the testimony of a young woman from the Pacific island nation of Kirabati, a country that will soon be submerged due to climate change. “We hold the planet’s future in our hands,” said Archbishop Tutu, basing his sermon on Deuteronomy 30:19, Moses’ final sermon to the people. “‘I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: there- fore choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.” For the sake of our sisters and brothers whose homes are already threatened by the effects of climate change, and for the sake of future generations who can still be saved, we must choose life. Our prayer must be the prayer of Archbishop Bartholomew: “May God grant us the wisdom to act in time.” DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2143 143 05/08/2009 16:33:01 PM DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2144 144 05/08/2009 16:33:01 PM  145 Cross, Resurrection and the Indwelling God Cynthia Moe-Lobeda Climate change presents a moral crisis never before faced in the history of our young and dangerous species. We have become a threat to life on earth. Our numbers and our excessive consumption threaten the earth’s capacity to regenerate life. God created a planet that spawns and supports life with a complexity and generosity beyond human ken. According to the creation stories of Genesis, God said, “it is tob,” life furthering. Never before has one species endangered that generative capacity. We—or rather, some of us—have become the “uncreators.” Climate change: a matter of “privilege” The suffering and death caused by climate change is not evenly distrib- uted among the earth’s human creatures. On the contrary, those dangers are structured into people’s lives along the same axes of oppression that structure social injustice. People not considered “white” and those who are economically impoverished are at far more risk. Said differently, privileges of color and class offer to a few of us relative protection from the earliest and severest impacts of global climate change. While we all may be in this together, initially we are not all in it in the same way or to the same deadly extent. This reality is gut wrenching for people of relative economic privilege, like myself, who live in the global North. Our lives are wound up in and benefit materially from social structures and norms that breed deadly ecological destruction and economic violence for many whom we fail to see. Everyday life, in the ravenously consumptive and petroleum dependent mode that we consider normal, threatens the web of life called forth by the One whom we know as Creator of all. The world’s great faith traditions are called to plumb their depths for wisdom to contribute to the great moral challenge of our day: to forge ways of being human that allow earth to flourish and all people to have the necessities for life with dignity. I believe that all religious traditions DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2145 145 05/08/2009 16:33:01 PM  146 God, Creation and Climate Change have particular gifts to bring to the table, and are called to put these in dialogue with each other and with other bodies of knowledge, including the natural and social sciences. A theology of the cross for the “uncreators” Christians who walk in Luther’s footsteps have an invaluable contribu- tion to make through a theology of the cross and resurrection, especially as it is linked to Luther’s notion of God dwelling in all of creation. Amid widespread and vast suffering caused by global warming, in which citi- zens of the USA play such a disproportionate role, the cross is central if Christians of relative economic privilege in the USA, or elsewhere, are to play a significant role in constructing earth honoring ways of living. But first, historical misuse of the cross issues a warning. There are reasons to distrust many theologies of the cross. The question is, Which cross and whose cross? An hermeneutic of trust and of suspicion need to work together. Led by our forbearers and by Jesus himself, we stand in a critical tradition, testing our claims and convictions. To what extent do they convey or betray the splendid mystery of God’s unbounded and undefeatable love for this good creation and presence with and within it, or do they betray that good news? False crosses have been with us since at least 313 AD when Christianity became the religion of the reigning imperial power of the “known” world. The cross of Constantine, for seventeen hundred years justifying war in the name of God, was not and is not the cross of the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. The cross of the “white Christ,” known most horrifi- cally in the American slaveholders’ religion, betrayed the cross of Jesus Christ. That cross is also present today in well-intentioned pictures of a North European Jesus, subtly linking whiteness with goodness and saving power. The cross of “bear your suffering meekly,” “like a lamb,” when it drives abused women and others back into the hands of their abusers is not the cross of Jesus. Nor is the cross of Christian religious supremacy, raised in communities where the faith of Jews, Muslims, or people of other religious traditions is denigrated. The medieval turn to a cross with Jesus nailed to it, forever dead or dying, bears another danger: the risen Christ, who is alive and breathing  See Kelly Brown Douglas, The Black Christ (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1994). DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2146 146 05/08/2009 16:33:01 PM  Cross, Resurrection and the Indwelling God 147 in and through creation, is lost. The Incarnate One revealed today in a grain of wheat, in the touch of wind or sun on bare skin and in human goodness—this Christ with and within us is pushed under when the cross holds a dead and captive Christ.  Indeed, false crosses abound, in history and today. At worst, they have justified domination, exploitation and dehumanization. The respon- sibility of “faithful disbelief” includes recognizing and exposing these falsehoods. Yet, the cross and resurrection make the central story of Christian faith ultimately and eternally life-giving. How might the cross, and our understandings of it, help move people of faith to work toward ecologically sustainable and socially just ways of life? How might the cross of Jesus Christ contribute to an all-encompass- ing transformation of society—the reformation of economic policies and practices, political structures, modes of transportation and recreation, architecture, business and more? To pursue that question, we need to consider what currently under- mines our capacity to work toward ecologically sustainable and socially equitable ways of life. What disables our moral and spiritual capacity to live as if we truly believe that God loves this good creation with a love that seeks well-being for all, and that we are called to embody that love? In short, what accounts for our astounding moral inertia in the face of earth’s distress and the anguishing poverty of multitudes? These crucial questions defy simply answers, and are highly contextual. The context out of which I write is that of US Christians who are “relatively secure economically.” This essay proceeds in two parts. I first respond to the above question by probing four key factors undergirding moral inertia. Subsequently, I argue that a theology of the cross could counter those four factors, thus enabling us to live in more sustainable and just ways.  For this insight, I thank Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Anne Parker, in their book, Saving Paradise (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006).  With this phrase, I mean those of us who have some degree of choice in how we spend our time, energy and material goods, and who have relative mobility and access to democratic processes. DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2147 147 05/08/2009 16:33:01 PM  148 God, Creation and Climate Change What contributes to moral inertia? Multiple factors contribute to moral inertia. In a previous work, I have investigated two. Others would include the power of sin in human life and the practical constraints of time. Here I suggest four additional factors: Avoidance and denial of our participation in structural sin Some of us are not engaged because we fail to recognize the role that we play in the ongoing sins committed against the earth and against the many people whose lands, resources, and labor make possible our lifestyles of outrageous levels of consumption. We do not see, because seeing would be too terrible and it would be too painful to acknowledge how we are implicated in profound and widespread suffering and in what threatens the life of the world today. Over 500,000 children under the age of five died in Iraq between 1991 and 1998 from disease connected to the USA’s bombing (devastation of water systems and electrical system and land contamination), and US invoked sanctions prohibiting medicines from entering Iraq. How could we live with realities like this, if we were truly to take them in? How could we face the piercing anguish endured by the parents of those children? While human life depends on the health of earth’s life-support systems (air, soil, water, biosphere), “every natural system on the planet is disintegrating,” due in significant part to massive consumption of petroleum products in the last fifty years. We, citizens of the USA, with our blind and insatiable addiction to oil, spew forth over one hundred times the deadly greenhouse gases per capita, as do our counterparts in some other lands. How will we face our children, when they realize what we have done? How can we think the unthink- able, acknowledge what is utterly unacceptable? Not by intent or will, but by virtue of the social structures that shape our lives, we are complicit in both eco-cide and economic brutality. It has been said that to be human is to suffer from knowing that we cause suffering. Knowing that we cause suffering is not new; knowing that we cause this magnitude of suffering is unprecedented. Our forbear-  Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Healing a Broken World: Globalization and God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), pp. 30–69.  Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (New York: Harper Business. 1993), p. 22. DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2148 148 05/08/2009 16:33:01 PM  Cross, Resurrection and the Indwelling God 149 ers have not prepared us for this self-knowledge of ourselves as the “uncreators.” From this kind of knowledge, we flee. Not seeing—moral oblivion—is far more bearable. Where it fails, numbness may set in, and when numbness thaws, despair lurks. We retreat into denial and defensiveness, privatized morality, or exhaustion. Holy outrage and lament are dead before they are born, and we hide from accountability for systemic sin under the comforting cloak of private virtues. Grave moral danger ac- companies this avoidance and denial. When good and compassionate people do not see the consequences of their ways of life, uncritically accepting them as normal, natural, inevitable, or divinely ordained, they simply carry on with them. Denying who we are as bearers of God’s love Others who dare to face their participation in structural sin may es- cape from resisting it by denying who we human beings are and why we are created: we are friends of God’s, called and empowered by God to receive God’s love, and live out that justice making love in the world. Life is breathed into us for a purpose. We are given a lifework: to receive God’s love; to love God with heart, mind, soul and strength and to love neighbour as self. We are here to let God work through us, in us and among us to bring healing from all forms of sin that would thwart God’s gift of abundant life for all. This is our vocation as Christ’s body on earth today. If the first factor is a failure to see the consequences of social structural sin in our lives, this second is a failure to see the depth and extent of the freedom for which God has set us free from sin to serve the God of life. A sense of powerlessness For many people, moral inertia in the face of the earth crisis stems from a sense of powerlessness. At some level, many of us sense that something is terribly wrong: life should not provide unlimited consump- tion to some while others starve. Yet the systemic forces undergirding this and the earth’s degradation seem too powerful for human agency. The sense of “not being able to make a difference” easily overwhelms. It seems impossible or at least difficult to trust that God indeed is lur- DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2149 149 05/08/2009 16:33:01 PM  150 God, Creation and Climate Change ing all of creation toward the reign of God, and that no form of sin can ultimately triumph. An anthropocentric lens Finally, the anthropocentric lens through which we tend to view God’s indwelling presence may inhibit the moral power inherent in it. Until recent eco-feminist theologies, feminist theologies of mutual relations, and ecological theologies, Western Protestant theology and ethics have not taken seriously the ancient Christian claim that God dwells not only within human creatures, but within “all things.” Failing to consider the presence and power of God abiding in “other-than-human” parts of crea- tion, we fail to consider how that presence might nurture the human capacity to serve God’s work on earth. Furthermore, anthropocentric assumptions preclude questioning the implications that ecological destruction might have for a faith tradition that locates Christ on the underside of power and in places of destruction and pain. We do not see a cruciform earth if the crucified Christ is imaged only in terms of what is human. To confess Christ is to profess “that little point [of the truth of God] that the world and the devil are at that moment attacking.” Today, those points include the truths that this earth is infinitely beloved by God, and that we are called to embody God’s justice making love in all that we do. I am persuaded that the cross of Christ and living out a theology of the cross may counter the above debilitating dynamics, and thus unleash moral/spiritual power to strive for justice making, earth honoring ways of being human. How the cross enables moral power How might the cross counter these disabling dynamics and enable God’s people to: (1) recognize the extent of our implication in ecological and economic injustice; (2) claim our identity as participants in God’s life-giving and lifesaving work on earth; (3) embody a sense of hope and power for that work; and (4) receive the moral power, motivation  Martin Luther, cited by Douglas John Hall, Confessing the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), p. vi. DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2150 150 05/08/2009 16:33:01 PM  Cross, Resurrection and the Indwelling God 151 and wisdom that flows from the presence of God inhabiting “even the tiniest leaf?” For insight, we turn initially to the lived theology of the cross emerging in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s last two works. We then consider the ancient theology of Christ immanent in all things, as this converges with a theology of the cross. A significant assumption about theological method surfaces in Bonhoeffer’s last two works, Letters and Papers from Prison and Ethics. Reflecting Luther, Bonhoeffer demonstrates that theology develops out of the struggle to live the gospel wherever and whenever it is betrayed. He was convinced that moral power dies when good people fail to recognize evil in the guise of good. He warns that the moral sensibility of good people is easily warped by their failure to recognize social evil “disguised as light, charity, historical necessity, or social justice.” Referring to “fools” who have become passive and complicit in the face of structural evil, he writes, “The fool will be ca- pable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. Here lies the danger.”10 Theology, then, must address the very points at which evil parading as good is attacking the life of the world, disclose evil for what it is and counter it with prayer and righteous action. As Bonhoeffer realized, to do so may be at risk of life, but is actually life- giving. In this sense, his theological method instructs that to glimpse the meaning of the cross, we must seek and see where the good news of God’s unquenchable and incarnate love for the world is betrayed, and there to act in accord with that love. In Ethics, Bonhoeffer formulates four alternative ethical frameworks. All are theologically grounded and elaborate three claims inherent in the theology of the cross expressed by Luther and by Bonhoeffer in his later works:  Martin Luther, “That These Words of Christ, ‘This is My Body,’ etc. Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics (1527),” in Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (eds), Luther’s Works, vol. 37 (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1961), p. 57. This 55-volume series is hereafter abbreviated as LW.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology, partly because it is inherently contextual and experiential, develops over time. Here we do not examine those shifts, but focus on Bonhoeffer as expressed in these two works. They extend the theo-ethical convictions, claims and constructions begun in his previous works, but also nuance, critique and develop them in substantive ways.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. by Eberhard Bethge (New York: Collier Books, 1972), p. 4. 10 Ibid., pp. 4, 9. DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2151 151 05/08/2009 16:33:02 PM  152 God, Creation and Climate Change The cross reveals us to be “curved in on self”11 First, people of relative privilege tend to arrange their lives in ways that hide from them the cruel impact of structural sin and our implication in it. Our media, zoning policies, investment procedures, commercial activities, vacation and recreation patterns, transportation routines and other life habits shelter us from those realities. I do not see the children of Mozambique, for example, who do not eat because their nation’s re- sources go to finance the international debt, a debt structure that brings wealth from the most impoverished nations to the wealthier. Mirroring Luther’s theology of the cross, Bonhoeffer counsels that the work and ways of God are revealed most fully in Jesus Christ. Moreover, in some way beyond full human comprehension, Christ is known perhaps most deeply in places of brokenness and suffering. Thus, we will know and glimpse God most fully when we recognize God in the goodness and splendor of earthly life and allow ourselves to be present in profound solidarity where people and creation suffer most.12 Where systemic in- justice breeds suffering, solidarity means seeing that injustice and, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, “putting a spoke in the wheel,” to stop it. To be deeply present “with and for” those who suffer the ravages of systemic exploitation, and to seek its undoing, is to begin to see the world upside down. We begin to see that ways of life previously assumed to be good, may not be. We begin to realize ourselves to be people so “curved in on self” that we accept the reality of poverty and ecological degradation, without asking about the political and economic structures that make this possible, and how they can be resisted. A theology of the cross opens our eyes to who we are as participants in systemic sin and thereby unleashes moral power. By itself, this would not yet be a theology of the cross of Jesus Christ. To behold in the cross the depth of human corruption, but not our sal- vation from it, would be to defy the gospel. The condemnation would be too much to bear without at the same time realizing that precisely there, in human brokenness and bondage to sin, the saving, healing and liberating Christ is present. The only force that truly can heal creation 11 Se incurvatus en se (self curved in on self) was Luther’s phrase for describing the distortion of human life by sin. We become beings turned in on ourselves, serving self-interest in evident and subtle ways, above all else. 12 Problems with the concept of solidarity and responses to it are sketched in Moe-Lobeda, op. cit. (note 4), pp. 118–223. DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2152 152 05/08/2009 16:33:02 PM  Cross, Resurrection and the Indwelling God 153 is drawn there, bringing forth healing power that we did not know we had. This enables us to see the structural brutality of which we are a part, without being destroyed by that knowledge. Canadian theologian, Douglas John Hall, says it well. The central message of the cross is not to reveal that our condition is one of darkness and death; it is to reveal to us the One who meets us in our darkness and death. It is a theology of the cross not because it wants to put forth this ghastly spec- tacle as a final statement about life in this world but because it insists that God … meets, loves, and redeems us precisely where we are: in the valley of the shadow of death.13 This claim is stranger than it might seem. God’s presence in the depths of our brokenness means that God is present with grace even there where we are perpetrators of tremendous violence against others. God is present even if we continue with that violence, and even if we have no awareness of God’s presence and no faith that God is present. A cen- tral message of what became known as Luther’s theology of the cross, and continued in Bonhoeffer, is that where God seems absent, there God is. God is hidden in God’s apparent absence. God’s saving power is hidden in the form of its opposite (sub contrario suo abscondita sunt). Nothing can “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:39). The power of this claim is immeasurable for those who have glimpsed even only momentarily the horror of being a wealthy Christian in a world filled with hungry people, whose hunger is connected to our wealth. This saving claim makes it possible to see that reality, rather than pretending that the economic systems creating our wealth are beneficial to all. When reality seems “distorted and sinful, and seemingly God-forsaken … a theologian of the cross is not afraid to recognize reality for what it is.”14 In Luther’s words, “A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.”15 13 Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Towards an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), p. 149. 14 Winston Persaud, “Luther’s ‘Theologia Crucis: A Theology of Radical Reversal’ in Response to the Challenge of Marx’s Weltanschauung,” in Dialog (29:4), pp. 265–66. 15 Luther, “Heidelberg Disputation (1518),” in LW, vol. 31, pp. 39–58. DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2153 153 05/08/2009 16:33:02 PM  154 God, Creation and Climate Change The cross reveals us to be bearers of indomitable love While the first claim revealed our identity as participants in structural sin, this claim reveals us as a dwelling place of the God revealed in Jesus Christ, and therefore as subjects of Christ’s love. A widely accepted theological understanding is that the baptized followers of Jesus Christ live in a paradoxical moral reality—the “al- ready and not yet” reign of God on earth. The implications of this claim are vast. One, relevant here, is that while we are implicated in cruel forms of oppression and ecological destruction, we also are the body of Christ on earth. The living Christ and the Spirit of God abide within and among the people of God even while we are not—on this side of death—free from bondage to sin. Bonhoeffer is adamant that the love of Christ—revealed most fully in the cross—has chosen to “abide in” the church (although not only in the church). For him, as for Luther, the finite bears the infinite ( finitum capax infiniti). The “finite” is all of creation, yet also the church. In Bonhoeffer’s terms, Christ dwelling in the church “conforms” it to “the form of Jesus Christ.” God’s overflowing love is incarnate as a believing community acts responsibly in the world on behalf of abun- dant life for all, and against what thwarts it.16 This requires recognizing social evil, naming it, and “putting a spoke in the wheel” of earthly powers that demand disobedience to God. The power to serve others and resist social structural evil, even when doing so is very costly, is the actual love of God as Christ taking form in the community of faith.17 Christians as objects of Christ’s love become subjects of that love. Faith is both “faith in Christ” and “faith of Christ.”18 For Bonhoeffer, this is not a matter of efforts to “become like Jesus.” Rather, it is a matter of 16 For Bonhoeffer, conformation with the form of Christ implies refusing conformation with ways of life that betray Christ. Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the cross bridges the gap between theologies of the cross that see Christ atoning for human sin, and theologies of the cross that see Christ executed by imperial power for his allegiance to the compassionate and justice making reign of God. For Bonhoeffer, the cross was both. 17 Bonhoeffer writes: “The relation between the divine love and human love is wrongly under- stood if we say that the divine love [is] … solely for the purpose of setting human love in motion. … On the contrary … the love with which [humans] love God and neighbor is the love of God and no other … [T]here is no love which is free or independent from the love of God.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. by Eberhard Bethge and trans. by Neville Horton Smith (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), pp. 55–56. 18 The New Testament Greek generally translated as “faith in Christ,” in many instances, also may be translated accurately as faith “of” Christ. DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2154 154 05/08/2009 16:33:02 PM  Cross, Resurrection and the Indwelling God 155 the Spirit working to unite human beings with God in Christ. Confor- mation with the form of Christ is formation toward a freedom to live as whole persons, to be fully human, to be the Creator’s creatures, and to help enable that freedom and fullness of life for all.19 The God in whom the church has its being and who dwells in the church is a God utterly active in every dimension of life. And, as revealed in the cross and res- urrection, is a God whose life-serving love is indomitable, even when it appears to be defeated. An ancient faith claim is that God’s love in Christ is “flowing and pouring into all things,” offering creative, saving and sustaining power for the healing of a broken world.20 Incarnate mystery lives in and among us as justice making, self-honoring love of neighbor. The church today is called to rekindle that ancient faith claim, to breathe and live in the promise that indeed this God is incarnate in us—mud creatures of the earth 21 –who are gathered to praise God and participate in God’s mission. God in us is hungering and hastening toward the restoration of this precious and brutalized world. This vision breathes power to open our hearts and minds to the signs of despair—including our being implicated in ecological and economic violence—without drowning in them. Rather, we can confront those realities on behalf of life abundant for all. In the face of hopelessness or despair, herein lies hope and power for living as the body of Christ. The cross ends in resurrection hope The cross communicates hope in the face of despair. For many people, moral inertia in the face of ecological and economic violence is born not of failure to see it, but of hopelessness; the forces of wrong seem 19 Is this “conformation with the form of Christ” a reification of servanthood and self-sacrifice, the state to which women and other marginalized people historically have been thrust and imprisoned? It may appear so, but I think not. Bonhoeffer’s theology opposes the assumption that one sector of society is primarily to serve the other. For him, “being for one another” is in the context of also “being with one another.” It is not servanthood that is elevated but daring to stand for life in the face of ecological or economic violence—despite the risks entailed. This is the work of people woven by the Spirit into a body in which all give and all receive. 20 Luther, LW 26, as cited by Larry Rasmussen, “Luther and a Gospel of Earth,” in Union Semi- nary Quarterly Review 51, no. 1–2 (1997), p. 22. 21 “Mud creatures,” is the English translation of the Greek term used by Irenaeus of Lyons to translate the Hebrew word usually rendered “Adam” in the Genesis creation stories. DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2155 155 05/08/2009 16:33:02 PM  156 God, Creation and Climate Change too powerful for human beings to impact. Despair is sown by a deep sense that things will continue as they are in this world. The cross and resurrection promise otherwise. The power of God liberating all of creation from the bonds of oppression, destruction and death is stronger than all that would undermine God’s promise of abundant life for all. Soul searing, life shattering destruction and death are not the last word; the end of the story is resurrection. The last word is life raised up out of brutal death. In the midst of suffering and death—whether individual, social, or ecological—the promise given to the earth community is that life in God will reign. This message of hope also bears danger. It could lead people to abdicate responsibility, leaving it in “God’s hands.” Bonhoeffer’s dialectic between ultimate trust in God, and unwavering critique of liberal Christianity’s deus ex machina, demands otherwise.22 His ethic of responsible action to disclose and confront evil is grounded in absolute dependence on God and trust in God. “I believe that God can and will bring good out of evil,” he writes, “even out of the greatest evil. For that purpose [God] needs [people] ….”23 Yet, Bonhoeffer denounces the proclivity to reduce God to “a machine for fixing life’s problems” or to expect that only God needs to act. He insists that God’s power on behalf of the world is found in God’s embodied presence in and with human beings who act responsibly for the sake of life. Christ present in “all things” Many streams of Christian tradition have affirmed the mysterium tremendum that God dwells within not only human beings, but all crea- tures and elements. As Martin Luther put it, “… [T]he power of God … must be essentially present in all places even in the tiniest leaf.”24 God is “present in every single creature in its innermost and outermost being ….”25 God “is in and through all creatures, in all their parts and places, so that the world is full of God and He fills all ….”26 “… [E]everything is 22 Bonhoeffer, op.cit. (note 9), pp. 281–82, 341, 361. 23 Ibid., p. 361. 24 Luther, op. cit. (note 7), p. 57. 25 Ibid., p. 58. 26 WA 23.134.34, as cited by Rasmussen, op. cit. (note 20), p. 22, citing Paul Santmire, The DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2156 156 05/08/2009 16:33:02 PM  Cross, Resurrection and the Indwelling God 157 full of Christ through and through ….”27 “[A]ll creatures are... permeable and present to [Christ].”28 “Christ … fills all things. … Christ is around us and in us in all places. … he is present in all creatures, and I might find him in stone, in fire, in water ….”29 If indeed Christ fills earth’s creatures and elements, then the earth now being “crucified” by human ignorance, greed and arrogance is, in some sense, also the body of Christ. Followers of Jesus the Christ, in every age are charged to ask Bonhoeffer’s question, Who is Christ for us today? Where is the cross today? Where are we lured into denying Christ crucified today? If earth, as God’s habitation, as body of Christ, is cruciform, and if believers took seriously this christological claim, might we be motivated to treat this earth differently? Furthermore, if God is boundless justice seeking love, living and loving not only in human beings, but also in the rest of creation, then other-than-human creatures and elements also embody God’s intention that all of creation flourish. Earth embodies God, not only as a creative and revelatory presence, but also as a teaching, saving, sustaining and empowering presence—as agency to serve the widespread good. How might moral agency—the power to resist social and ecological destruc- tion and to move toward just, sustainable life ways—be fed and watered in human beings by this God presence and God power coursing through “all created things”? 30 These two notions—of Christ crucified in a crucified earth, and of God’s saving power dwelling within the created world—may motivate us and empower us for a long, uncharted journey. It is the journey toward a world in which humankind is no longer toxic to our planetary home and in which none amass wealth at the cost of others’ impoverishment. Pursuing these theological possibilities at the intersection of cross and indwelling Presence, may be key to a theology of the cross capable of enabling moral agency in the face of ecological and economic violence today. Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), p. 129. 27 Santmire, ibid., p. 387. 28 Ibid., p. 386. 29 Luther, “The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—Against the Fanatics,” in Timothy F. Lull (ed.), Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Works (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), p. 321. 30 Luther, “Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper,” in Lull, ibid. (note 29), p. 397. DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2157 157 05/08/2009 16:33:02 PM  158 God, Creation and Climate Change In sum Today, ways of life that we assume to be “good” are destroying the earth’s capacity to sustain life as we know it, and are generating a massive gap between those who have too much and those who have too little for a life with dignity. In this context, Lutheran and other religious traditions are called to the great challenge of our era: forging ways of life that nurture rather than threaten the earth’s health, and that simultaneously counter the structures of oppression that produce excessive wealth for a few at the expense of the lives of many others. This “great work” is inspired and empowered by a living theology of the cross.31 We have asked here, How might the cross enable eco-reformation toward lifeways that nurture the earth’s health and that build economi- cally just relations with neighbors far and near? In response, we have noted four key factors that may hinder that movement and breed moral inertia: (1) the tendency not to recognize our own participation in social structural sin; (2) the tendency not to recognize who we are called and empowered to be as participants with God in God’s work on earth; (3) a sense of powerlessness in the face of systemic forces that seem beyond human agency to impact; and (4) an anthropocentric understanding of God’s indwelling presence. Finally, we have identified how a Lutheran theology of the cross can overturn those barriers, turning to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and to the ancient Christian understanding that God abides within God’s creation. The latter opens doors to sources of moral mo- tivation and agency that have been obscured by more anthropocentric notions of God’s indwelling presence. Bonhoeffer’s lived theology of the cross and resurrection reveals who we are as both perpetrators of systemic sin and bearers of God’s liberating and healing love. And it of- fers assurance that—by the grace of God—love will ultimately triumph over the sin. 31 “Great work” is the phrase coined by Thomas Berry to describe the work of creating a sustain- able relationship between the human species and planet earth. DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2158 158 05/08/2009 16:33:02 PM  159 Invoking the Spirit amid Dangerous Environmental Change Sigurd Bergmann If the Spirit of the Triune is a Spirit who gives life—how can Christians and churches follow the Spirit to wherever it might blow? How might climatic and environmental change today mirror the drama of the his- tory of salvation? Are humans as well as the whole suffering, groaning creation “hoping for liberation”? Where does the Spirit of life-giving remembrance and liberation “take place” today? The increasing consciousness about ongoing environmental change, locally as well as globally, is challenging much in Christian theology. Human-caused environmental change, as science clearly points out, is becoming dangerous, that is, irreversibly changing climatic and other conditions for life systems. For vulnerable human ecologies, such danger- ous change substantially threatens survival, while it challenges wealthy nations to change their infrastructures and lifestyles. Furthermore, dan- gerous environmental change increases economic, social and military tensions in many regions, and is already victimizing a large number of people in economically weak and vulnerable areas of the world. The extinction of certain species is expected to increase rapidly, ecological diversity is reduced and safe water will become increasingly scarce. The fact that environmental change is anthropogenic—a human- caused social and historical construction of an expanding capitalist, technocratic and unjust world system—is what sharpens the religious dimension even more. How can God be the Creator, Sustainer and Lib- erator, and how can human beings be understood as being in the image of God, if they destroy the gift of life? Where is God in this? Do climate change and the environmental catastrophe indicate a punishment for human sin? Is God angry? How should we imagine the Divine? Is God absent or present with the suffering? Environmental change not only transforms the conditions of life, but also radically changes culture, religion and the conditions for faith. Therefore, the question for faith communities of different confessions DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2159 159 05/08/2009 16:33:02 PM  160 God, Creation and Climate Change is how religion itself can change in light of this. What might believers contribute to creative adaptation to environmental change? Here I will focus on spatiality, climate politics, eco-justice and the remembrance of suffering. A spatial turn In the face of dangerous changes in climate and water systems, I propose that Christianity needs to accelerate its turning toward “space.” In relation to the challenges of that time, twentieth-century theologians reflected mainly in terms of time and history. But climatic changes clearly turn our focus to the spatiality of creation. As one common gift of life, creation reveals its glory in the complexity, diversity and interconnectedness of life systems, in one single planetary space for all.  “Earth is our home,” states the declaration of the Earth Charter.  This simple statement sum- marizes a deep wisdom that has been guarded by religions for many ages. “The earth is the Lord’s” (Ex 9:29; Ps 24:1). Paul makes very clear that the earth and humans as God’s icons are interconnected in a communion of suffering and hope for liberation (cf. Rom 8:21). Theology’s “spatial turn” was initiated in the last few years and will undoubtedly accelerate due to dramatic changes in our common planetary space. Thus, the challenge to faith traditions is to explore and interpret how the life-giving and all-embracing space given by the Creator contrasts with the global space where risks and damages are being experienced in violent and unjust ways. Is God’s good, all- embracing space turning into a catastrophic space where some are victimized for the sake of the survival of others? How does God’s love for the poor relate to situations where the most vulnerable become the  For a deeper reflection see also the contributions to a trans-disciplinary workshop in Octo- ber 2008, arranged by the EFSRE and PIK program, at www.hf.ntnu.no/relnateur/index. php?lenke=ridecc.php, forthcoming in Sigurd Bergmann and Dieter Gerten (eds), Religion in Dangerous Environmental Change, Studies in Religion and the Environment 2 (Muenster/ Berlin/Zurich/Vienna/London: LIT, 2009).  On the theology of “gift events” in our context, see Anne Primavesi, Gaia and Climate Change: A Theology of Gift Events (London/New York: Routledge, 2009).  At www.earthcharter.org/, accessed June 2009.  Sigurd Bergmann, “Theology in its Spatial Turn: Space, Place and Built Environments Chal- lenging and Changing the Images of God,” in Religion Compass 1 (3/2007), pp. 353–379. DTS-Studies-God_Climate_Change-2160 160 05/08/2009 16:33:02 PM