Theological Perspectives on Excess Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Theological Perspectives on Excess Greenhouse Gas Emissions 

Rev. Douglas Olds
(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. 

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.

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[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).