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Eschatological naturalism and ecological responsibility: Troubling some assumptions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2024
Abstract
The connection between ecological responsibility and differing conceptions of Christian eschatology is widely observed. It is often assumed that the necessary response to Christian environmental inaction is affirmation of a strongly this-worldly vision of new creation (so, influentially, N. T. Wright). However, recent systematic theology has seen retrieval of elements of eschatology that foreground discontinuity and transcendence (e.g. Hans Boersma). Moreover, there are exegetical challenges to continuationist claims (e.g. Markus Bockmuehl and Edward Adams) and doctrinal reactions to ‘eschatological naturalism’ (Katherine Sonderegger and Michael Allen). Where does this leave the connection between ecological witness and the content of Christian hope? Doubtless, continuationist accounts have some salutary emphases, but on exegetical, doctrinal and moral grounds I seek to disentangle the assumed compact of particular construals of this-worldly continuity and ethical commitment. Finally, drawing on James Cone's meditations upon black spiritual traditions, I explore how discontinuous interpretations of the life to come themselves need not undermine responsible action.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 This essay originates in a paper presented to the ‘New Testament and Christian Theology’ stream of the British New Testament Society's annual conference, in September 2023. I am grateful to the convenors of that group, Erin Heim and Jamie Davies, as well as to other attendees for discussion of the ideas contained here, especially Susannah Ticciati, and to conversation partners back in Durham, including Nick Moore, Sarah Millican-Jones and Robert Song.
2 Barton, Stephen C., ‘New Testament Eschatology and the Ecological Crisis in Theological and Ecclesial Perspective’, in Horrell, David G., Hunt, Cheryl, et al. (eds), Ecological Hermeneutics: Biblical, Historical and Theological Perspectives (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 268Google Scholar.
3 Wright, N.T., ‘Response to Markus Bockmuehl’, in Perrin, Nicholas and Hays, Richard (eds), Jesus, Paul, and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N.T. Wright (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), p. 231Google Scholar.
4 Wright, N.T., New Heavens, New Earth: The Biblical Picture of the Christian Hope (Cambridge: Grove, 1999), p. 12Google Scholar.
5 Wright, Tom, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (London: SPCK, 2007), p. 5Google Scholar.
6 Allison, Dale C. Jr., Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and the Last Things (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2016), p. 126Google Scholar.
7 Wright, New Heavens, New Earth, p. 21.
8 Middleton, J. Richard, A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014)Google Scholar. If anything, Middleton goes further than Wright.
9 This inheritance is explored insightfully in Allen, Michael, Grounded in Heaven: Recentering Christian Hope and Life on God (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2018)Google Scholar. See also Billings, J. Todd, Remembrance, Communion, and Hope: Rediscovering the Gospel at the Lord's Table (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2018)Google Scholar. Further discussion among neo-Calvinists has emphasised just how attenuated a reception of this tradition an immanentised eschatology represents.
10 A third good example would be Lincoln, Andrew T., ‘Heaven as Home in Christian Hope’, in Boniferro, Marcia, Jagt, Amanda, and Stephens-Rennie, Andrew (eds), A Sort of Homecoming: Pieces Honoring the Academic and Community Work of Brian Walsh (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2020), pp. 23–37Google Scholar.
11 Markus Bockmuehl, ‘Did St Paul Go to Heaven When He Died?’, in Jesus, Paul, and the People of God, p. 211.
12 Ibid., p. 213.
13 Ibid., pp. 214–5.
14 Wright, Surprised by Hope, p. 180, as quoted in Bockmuehl, ‘Did St Paul Go to Heaven’, p. 213 (italics original to Wright).
15 Bockmuehl, ‘Did St Paul Go to Heaven’, p. 223.
16 Ibid., p. 225. See also Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010).
17 Ibid., p. 230–31.
18 Ibid., p. 215. See further the discussion of William Wilberforce in ibid., n. 15.
19 Edward Adams, The Stars will Fall from Heaven: Cosmic Catastrophe in the New Testament and its World (London: T & T Clark, 2007).
20 Ibid., pp. 254, 255.
21 Ibid., p. 256. This is perhaps a slightly different judgment than Bockmuehl's, who allows for different angles of vision but writes of the ‘complex consistency to Paul's thought’ (Bockmuehl, ‘Did St Paul Go to Heaven’, p. 222).
22 Ibid., p. 259.
23 Edward Adams, ‘Retrieving the Earth from the Conflagration: 2 Pet. 3:5–13 and the Environment’, in Ecological Hermeneutics, p. 118.
24 Ibid., p. 116.
25 Ibid., p. 117.
26 Ibid., p. 116.
27 Ibid., p. 117.
28 Hans Boersma, Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2018); Katherine Sonderegger, ‘Towards a Doctrine of Resurrection’, in Philip G. Ziegler (ed.), Eternal God, Eternal Life: Theological Investigations into the Concept of Immortality (London: T & T Clark, 2016).
29 Matthew Levering, Jesus and the Demise of Death: Resurrection, Afterlife, and the Fate of the Christian (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012); John E. Thiel, Icons of Hope: The Last Things in Catholic Imagination (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013); Paul J. Griffiths, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018).
30 On which also see, in a Thomist key, David Elliot, Hope and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 2017).
31 Boersma, Seeing God, p. 4; see especially n. 3, which details the many biblical passages that are frequently meditated upon within the patristic and medieval sources central to contemporary efforts at eschatological ressourcement.
32 Allison, Night Comes, p. 126.
33 On the one hand, as magnificent an eschatological vision as that of St Gregory of Nyssa arguably contains within it different strains that are difficult to harmonise with strict analytic precision. There we find discussions that affirm the continuities of the resurrection body quite literalistically; we also encounter meditations that bespeak the unutterable unlikeness of the life of the world to come in contemplating the journey of the soul into the divine life. According to Rowan Greer, these ‘various glimmers Gregory offers as ways of imagining what eye has not seen or ear heard … are coherent in the sense that they can be regarded as complementary rather than contradictory. But, it seems, their true coherence will become apparent only when human hopes are finally replaced by their fulfilment.’ Rowan A. Greer, assisted by J. Warren Smith, One Path for All: Gregory of Nyssa on the Christian Life and Human Destiny (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2015), p. 225. The mysteries of the kingdom of God are more gifts to be received, than puzzles to be solved. On the other hand, we should probably seek, on some level, modestly to constellate these different objects of hope's longing with reference to an undergirding dogmatic affirmation that can hold them together – and I would take that anchorage to be, at its core, christological; as directions for this, consider Hebrews 13:8 and 1 John 3:2. (I am thinking here of something akin to that which Khaled Anatolios proposes in relation to soteriological motifs, in his Deification through the Cross: An Eastern Christian Theology of Salvation (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2020)).
34 Levering, Jesus and the Demise of Death, p. 125.
35 Allen, Grounded in Heaven, pp. 7, 17.
36 Sonderegger, ‘Towards a Doctrine of Resurrection’, p. 127.
37 Christopher Morse, The Difference Heaven Makes: Rehearing the Gospel as Good News (London: T & T Clark International, 2010). A wise book that could be more widely consulted in this respect is Margaret B. Adam, Our Only Hope: More than We Can Ask or Imagine (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2014).
38 Griffiths, Decreation, pp. 339–57.
39 Thiel, Icons of Hope, p. 6.
40 Rowan A. Greer, Christian Hope and Christian Life: Raids on the Inarticulate (New York, NY: Crossroad, 2001), p. 3.
41 More broadly, see e.g. E. Jerome Van Kuiken, ‘“Ye Worship Ye Know Not What?” The Apophatic Turn and the Trinity’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 19/4 (2017), pp. 401–20, which explores the work of Sonderegger, Karen Kilby, and Sarah Coakley.
42 David Bentley Hart, ‘Creation, God, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo’, Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics 3/1 (2015), p. 6.
43 Boersma, Seeing God, p. 3.
44 Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), p. 283.
45 St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1993), p. 113.
46 Karen Kilby, ‘Eschatology, Suffering, and the Limits of Theology’, in Christopher Chalamet, Andreas Dettweiler, et al. (eds), Game Over? Reconsidering Eschatology (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), p. 280.
47 See Paul M. Blowers, Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World (Oxford: OUP, 2016), p. 89.
48 Celia Deane-Drummond, Eco-Theology (London: DLT, 2008), p. 176.
49 With particular reference to ecotheology, Ernst Conradie maps four ways in which the connection of the present order to the new creation can be articulated: (1) replacement, (2) recycling, (3) restoration, and (4) elevation. See Ernst M. Conradie, ‘What is the Place of the Earth in God's Economy? Doing Justice to Creation, Salvation and Consummation’, in Ernst M. Conradie, Sigurd Bergmann, et al. (eds), Christian Faith and the Earth: Current Paths and Emerging Horizons in Ecotheology (London/New York, NY: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2014), pp. 65–96.
50 A whole range of significant considerations present themselves here, in regard to which we might find surprising resonance between the kinds of questions which vexed patristic theologians and those which trouble philosophical theology today. It is intriguing to read Allison's anecdotal account that, when pushed on ‘all the old riddles, such as the puzzle of shared matter’, Wright in fact ‘opined that Origen long ago had solved most of the issues’ – ‘the great modern apologist for resurrection turned out to be less than a full literalist’! Allison, Night Comes, p. 29.
51 Conradie notes that the doctrine of sin is a valuable focus because it ‘helps, for example, to maintain the primary focus on the anthropogenic causes of ecological destruction’. Conradie, ‘What Is the Place of the Earth’, p. 92.
52 Barton, ‘New Testament Eschatology and the Ecological Crisis’, closes in this vein with case studies of liturgical practices.
53 For a classic and persuasive interrogation of the ‘Hellenisation thesis’, see Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
54 That is, to comprehend ‘the force of the traditional teaching that in some profoundly important sense, heaven makes no difference whatsoever – and that itself makes all the difference’. So Donald Wood, ‘Response’ [to Christopher Morse, The Difference Heaven Makes], Theology Today 68/1 (2011), p. 73.
55 The theme could be explored in relation to many other textual traditions and communities of witness. For instance, Willis Jenkins observes that Anabaptist theology ‘keenly appreciates worldly evil and intensely anticipates a new creation’, but expresses its commitments in ‘Christian communal practices’ that show how ‘nature … shapes the faithful living of a particular people in a particular place’. This ‘suggests that redemptionist soteriology, even accompanied by strong senses of worldly evil, need not dislocate humanity from nature’. Willis Jenkins, Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (Oxford: OUP, 2008), pp. 91–2.
56 Howard Thurman, Deep River and the Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1975).
57 James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 40th Anniversary edn (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010); James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed, rev. edn (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997); James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1972).
58 It is fascinating to note the extent to which Cone felt he had to reckon here with Bultmann and the German theologians involved in the ‘theology of hope’. For reflections on how he moved on from this intellectual world and developed both his own more integral set of conversation partners and with them his own distinctive theological voice, see James H. Cone, Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2018).
59 Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues, p. 83.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., p. 84.
62 Ibid., pp. 84–5.
63 Ibid., p. 87.
64 Ibid., p. 88.
65 Ibid.
66 Cone, God of the Oppressed, p. 168. The allusion to 2 Corinthians 5 here is also to the point.
67 Ibid., p. 143.
68 Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues, p. 91.
69 Cone, God of the Oppressed, p. 169.
70 Ibid., p. 170.
71 Ibid.
72 Cone, James H., ‘Whose Earth Is It Anyway?’, CrossCurrents 50/1–2 (2000), pp. 36–46Google Scholar. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this reference.
73 Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p. 151.
74 Cone, God of the Oppressed, p. 152; see also p. 140.
75 Prevot, Andrew, Theology and Race: Black and Womanist Traditions in the United States (Leiden: Brill, 2018), p. 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
76 Sonderegger, ‘Towards a Doctrine of Resurrection’, p. 127.
77 By analogy, I am reminded of hearing about a group of moral theologians who, allegedly, knew that the stronger forms of ‘social trinitarianism’ were now seen to be untenable within historical and systematic theology, but who admitted employing such models in their political and ethical thought because of the expedience of the ideas in generating attractive practical proposals. Let's not make the same mistake in eschatology.