Theological Perspectives on Excess Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Rev. Douglas Olds
(all rights reserved)
(all rights reserved)
5 October 2018
Isaiah 44.9 All who make idols are nothing, and the things they delight in do not profit; their witnesses neither see nor know. And so they will be put to shame. 10 Who would fashion a god or cast an image that can do no good? 11 Look, all its devotees shall be put to shame; the artisans too are merely human. Let them all assemble, let them stand up; they shall be terrified, they shall all be put to shame.
12 The ironsmith fashions it and works it over the coals, shaping it with hammers, and forging it with his strong arm; he becomes hungry and his strength fails, he drinks no water and is faint. 13 The carpenter stretches a line, marks it out with a stylus, fashions it with planes, and marks it with a compass; he makes it in human form, with human beauty, to be set up in a shrine. 14 He cuts down cedars or chooses a holm tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest. He plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it. 15 Then it can be used as fuel. Part of it he takes and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it, makes it a carved image and bows down before it. 16 Half of it he burns in the fire; over this half he roasts meat, eats it and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, “Ah, I am warm, I can feel the fire!” 17 The rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, bows down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says, “Save me, for you are my god!”
18 They do not know, nor do they comprehend; for their eyes are shut, so that they cannot see, and their minds as well, so that they cannot understand. 19 No one considers, nor is there knowledge or discernment to say, “Half of it I burned in the fire; I also baked bread on its coals, I roasted meat and have eaten. Now shall I make the rest of it an abomination? Shall I fall down before a block of wood?” 20 He feeds on ashes; a deluded mind has led him astray, and he cannot save himself or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a fraud?”
--The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. (1989). (Is 44:9–20). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.
Alienation is humankind’s greatest existential
problem--alienation from God, from nature, from society, of the human soul from
the human body. Because of alienation,
humankind struggles with feelings of insecurity and insufficiency. In their idolatrous desire to become like
gods, Adam and Eve as the mythological representatives of fallen human nature
misapply their freedom in what they misconstrue as capricious and chaotic
nature—nature perceived at times graciously fecund or punitively hostile. This psychological dualism leads humanity
through history to fantasize looming, recurrent scarcities and consequently to
build stores of hoarded goods and commodities to serve as material security.
Alienation stimulates Adam and Eve’s modern human heirs to pursue a destructive
environmental ethic of hoarding and extractive exploitation of resources
unbounded by concerns of future generations, marginalized groups, indigenous
peoples with historical land tenure, and other species.
The atmosphere is a fundamental creation of God for the flourishing of human and non-human life. Carbon loading of the atmosphere from human activity threatens to cause (additional) catastrophic environmental degradation, social upheaval, extinctions, and unjust distribution of costs and privation from climate and ecological change. In terms of God’s justice and humanity’s mission for global creation care (Gen 2.9-15), Christians have a special call to reduce the carbon emissions from their economic and householding activities.
The atmosphere is a fundamental creation of God for the flourishing of human and non-human life. Carbon loading of the atmosphere from human activity threatens to cause (additional) catastrophic environmental degradation, social upheaval, extinctions, and unjust distribution of costs and privation from climate and ecological change. In terms of God’s justice and humanity’s mission for global creation care (Gen 2.9-15), Christians have a special call to reduce the carbon emissions from their economic and householding activities.
Yet attempts to ground an environmental ethic in God’s
directive to Adam in Genesis are notoriously hampered by conflicting or
non-reconciled witnesses: for humanity to have dominion over (Gen. 1.28) or to
maintain care of Creation as trustees (Gen 2.15). This conflict between humanity’s prerogatives
over and within nature suggests the anthropological split of body and soul
(Waetjen 2018[1])
narrated in the primeval history of Genesis. From his Native American
perspective, Tinker (2009) grounds environmental ethics in a recovery of the
primacy of the doctrine of the Creator that redirects humanity’s focus onto
nature’s balance. Tinker criticizes the Church’s primary emphasis on the Fall
of humanity and consequent need for redemption because it subordinates nature
to the psycho-historical narrative of humanity’s search for security. This
subordination suggests that humankind is primarily alienated from self and only
derivatively, at most, from natural Creation and its balances and harmonies.
Whereas nature is endowed with resources and environmental
capacities that could deliver material sufficiency to all, post-reformation Western
Civilization has grounded its political economy on satisfying unmediated appetites on those most willing and able to pay--appetites that neither limit themselves to the Creator’s
intent for nature nor for the needs for sharing by marginalized peoples and
future generations. The result is rampant injustices: gender injustice, racial
injustice, class injustice, and intergenerational injustice in the contemporary
distribution of benefits and costs of the carbon-intensive economy. The Western economy of promoting
combustion-fueled material growth to satisfy the private preference of wealth weighted by ability to pay has created a society in conflict with Jesus’s
gospel of the kingdom of God. From the
perspective of the Global South, the Accra Confession (2004)[2]
asserts that the “whole Creation is groaning” (Ro. 8.22) under the weight of
colonial injustices and environmental imbalances derived from an economy that
meets insatiable desires by Western wealthy for the satisfaction of their
unjustified, private, and autonomous preferences.
Specifically, Western political economies based on rising levels of carbon combustion are idolatrous as illustrated in the parodic account of Deutero-Isaiah
(Watts 2005[3],
Holter 1995[4]).
It is often alleged that there is no Biblical analogy to apply to the issue of
Global Warming and Climate Injustice, so that secular ethical foundations must be
developed. However, to my knowledge and
research, Isaiah 44.9-20 has yet to be applied to context of combustible
resources, the unbounded and
unsustainable scale of which is the root of the Greenhouse Effect. In that account, the idol maker diverts
combustible resources away from their Biblical function-- utilitarian
sufficiency for personal warming and cooking--toward the creation of idols. Following the strand of the Biblical witness condemning
idolatry from the Pentateuch through the Prophets to the visions of luxurious
consumption in Rev. 17-19, the charge of idolatry in the scale and
mis-allocation of carbon fuel stocks can be applied to contemporary Western
society.
Idolatry God’s violates God's primary commandment (Ex 20.3) and invokes God's protological curse (Dt 27.15). Humanity that
pursues a society heedless of the misuse of combustible fuels engages in the
most foundational sin against the Creator, and assaults God’s atmospheric mover
(Gen 1.2), the Holy ruach (Boff 2015;[5]
Wallace 1996[6]). In idolatry, the alienated human agent
considers himself the solipsistic center of his environment. To the extent they
are both willing to pay and able to pay, agents such as these have
collectivized to design an economic system of unhindered material growth to
deliver luxuries to themselves rather than delivering capabilities for
universal human flourishings (Nussbaum 2008[7])
or sufficient primary goods to the least advantaged (Rawls 1971[8]).
Increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere is a result of this
idolatrous system.
Despite its idolatrous turn toward a Kingdom of Oil (Robb
2010)[9],
humanity is not the sole arbiter of its
appreciation or use. Psalm 104 portrays
the creation of the natural world absent human intervention and management as
it valorizes distinct elements of the natural, non-human world as complete
wholeness and beauty--apart from human beings.
David both in his wilderness exile and in the psalms attributed to him
demonstrates an awareness of the sacredness of nature—not only hierarchical but
reciprocal and horizontal. In Psalm 148, the created animals of the world
praise God.
In addition to the grave transgression against God in its
idolatry, the modern society of the Global Northwest incurs a carbon debt to future generations and to unjustly
burdened populations and groups when it puts out greenhouse gases above the
capacity of the atmosphere to act as an absorptive sink. The Old Testament debt code that an
insurrectionist, liberationist Jesus advances (Robb 2010) gives additional
warrant for an atmospheric care ethic that distributes costs and benefits
fairly and allocates equal weight to future generations’ need for nature’s
balances and harmony. The Debt Code’s Jubilee provides a Biblical vision for a
grand, global reckoning of debts—climate and financial—if humanity can rise above its
private alienations to reconcile with others, with God, and with its natural
milieu--and become aware of its responsibility to build the Kingdom of God.
[1] Herman Waetjen, “American Identity
Politics as a Challenge to the Flawed Religions of the Book,” 2018.
[2] World Communion of Reformed Churches, “The
Accra Confession” (2004), accessed October 5, 2018,
http://wcrc.ch/accra/the-accra-confession.
[3] John D. W. Watts, Isaiah 34–66,
2nd ed., Word Biblical Commentary 25 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005).
[4] Knut Holter, Second Isaiah’s
Idol-Fabricaton Passages, Beiträge zur biblischen Exegese und Theologie Bd.
28 (Frankfurt am Main; New York: P. Lang, 1995).
[5] Leonardo Boff, Come, Holy Spirit:
Inner Fire, Giver of Life, and Comforter of the Poor (Maryknoll, New York:
Orbis Books, 2015).
[6] Mark I. Wallace, Fragments of the
Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the Renewal of Creation (New York: Continuum,
1996).
[7] Martha Craven Nussbaum, Women and
Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, The John Robert Seeley
Lectures 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008).
[8] John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
(Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971).
[9] Carol Wind Robb, Sun, Soil, Spirit:
Biblical Ethics and Climate Change (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010).
