Barth the Environmentalist

February 15, 2006

Barth the Environmentalist

I'm working on a paper right now on Karl barth's Church Dogmatics, III.4. The assignment is to wrestle with one of the ethical issues that Barth brings up in his doctrine of creation. III.4 is a work on theological ethics, it's a great starting point for reading and understanding Barth, especially from a pastoral perspective. I've chosen to look at Barth's section on "respect for life". I found this section especially powerful in how it deals with non-human life, i.e. plants and animals. Barth sets forth an ethical framework for respecting all created life. From this framework I'm attempting to develop a Bartian eco-theology, taking his ethical theology a few steps further for the 21st century. I'll post some of what I come up with later.

Comments

Open Source said…

That sounds fascinating. The student that helped Barth prepare that volume of the CD was a young German theologian called Heino Falcke. He later went back to East Germany during the communist period where he became one of the most important theologians dealing with peace and environmental issues. Not much has been translated into English but you can see more here.

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