Eco-Theology: Part 1
What is eco-theology? Unfortunately it's not something that the church or theologians have thought much about. It asks the question: "What is God's command toward his people in regard to the natural creation." I think the church and Christian/biblical theology has fallen far behind in responding to the sick state of God's beautiful creation due to human greed. Eco-theology is an exciting and desperately needed realm of theology for the American church to become serious about. First of all, does God care about global warming, extinction of thousands of species of animals, the fouling of our air and our water? These are questions we must first answer. Hopefully now that global warming is a fact, hurricanes have increased and worsened, and heat waves of this summer and recent other summers are actually killing thousands of people, we will realize that God must and does care about the environment in which his people and his creation live. I wrote a paper on the theology of Karl Barth and eco-theology. Below is how I started the paper. I hope that I can get a bit of a conversation going.
In The Church Dogmatics, III.4, Karl Barth creates a framework for doing special ethics from a theological point of view. Throughout this volume the degree of specificity in Barth’s topics is at first surprising. From the beginning Barth makes clear that he is not concerned in this volume with theological ethics that stay in the realm of metaphysics. Barth is concerned with the command of God, which involves the whole person in creaturely existence. From the introduction on, Barth makes clear that ethics have to do with all of creation. He says creation “is marked as a form of the divine Yes, which is the quintessence of all His works.”
Comments
I am not trying to disagree with your overall point, I just know this is a touchy subject and throwing out general statements without checking the facts may alienate those who disagree with you.
I personally am a partial skeptic to global warming. I feel it is happening and man does have some part of it. I just feel the earth's climate is much more complicated than that. Having said that, I agree it is our responsibility to take better care of God's creation and do what we can to clean up the environment.
You're points are well taken though. I do want to learn more on the scientific side.
By saying global warming is a fact I mean that there is no denying that our earth's average temperatures are going up, there is no question about that. There are questions, as you've pointed out, on exactly why they are going up.
I world rather see the human race err on the side of caution than say it's not our fault and destroy the earth. We COULD be destroying ourselves and home, or we COULD be experiencing something that is more natural. Like I said, let's stop doing the things that we think are causing temperature change. Heck, then if we're wrong, at least we did what we could.