Climatologists, Theologians, and Prophets: Toward an Ecotheology of Critical Hope

Abstract

As people of faith begin to recognize in larger numbers that our relationship with creation is one of the most important challenges facing us today, I find myself pondering what we have to offer the environmental movement. The Christian scriptures begin and end with stories of God and creation: the oft-mentioned creation stories of Genesis 1–2, and the eschatological reflections on the new heaven and earth, and the river and tree of life in Revelation 21–22.1 In between are the stories of the people of faith, and how we interact with God in the midst of creation. These stories place us in the larger picture and give us metaphorical concepts of where we come from, where we are going, and who we are in relation to all that is created. Within this transcendent story, each of us comes from a particular context, a place and time, an individual journey of relational connection to God and to others attempting to follow God's way. In this time and context, our stories are necessarily bound up with the ways that we treat one another and the rest of the natural world, but hope and purpose often feel elusive in religious and nonreligious settings alike. I am a Christian and a Quaker, with training in the social sciences, theology, and environmental studies and working in the religious academy. As such, I often ask myself what theologians and others involved in the interpretation and praxis of the Christian faith can contribute to caring for the environment in a more holistic way. My particular denominational history includes the connection of spiritual contemplation with social justice activism: a prophetic role in the midst of difficult situations. The biblical prophets held together both critique of their present time and hope for the larger meaning and purposes of God, and I wonder if this is the path for ecotheologians in the twenty-first century. Tying all of these strands together, the idea of an ecotheology of critical hope formed in my mind. I suspect that ecotheologians must not simply critique, but we must be willing to enact hope in the midst of the despair that has paralyzed so many regarding issues of environmental import. This paper will show how I got to the idea of an ecotheology of critical hope, and what a lived ecotheology of critical hope could look like. People of faith throughout history have often played the role of prophet, calling their cultures to more ethical treatment of one another, but it is not people of faith who are most often leading the prophetic call in the instance of climate change. In fact, there is a striking similarity between the prophetic and apocalyptic language in the Bible and the rhetoric of climatologists, economists, and even politicians.2 Therefore, when I read Forrest Clingerman's article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion last summer, “Theologians as Interpreters—Not Prophets—in a Changing Climate,” I found much that resonated with me, including his jibe at theologians: We are “a pretty helpless bunch” when it comes to fixing environmental problems.3 We are not the ones with the technical knowledge to solve the engineering problems that are happening as a result of climate change, or the ones who can create scientific models to help us anticipate the coming changes, or the ones to formulate holistic mitigation plans. We are good thinkers and we can be helpful advocates, and perhaps we can help shift our constituents’ worldviews, but we are not the ones who can solve the climate change problems we face as a global community if all we are doing is theological theorizing. Clingerman suggests that the role of theologians in the climate change conversation is to be mediators and interpreters of climate change, and in many ways, this makes good sense. Given the generally accepted definition of theology as “faith seeking understanding,” to seek to understand the issues of ultimacy surrounding climate change and interpret these issues in light of faith traditions and in language understandable to the general public is an important role.4 It is important for theologians to help sort out the “social frames of meaning” our cultures give to the climate debate.5 This may well be the role of the theologian in issues of climate change, I thought to myself. And yet, something felt like it was missing. If Clingerman is right, and “the theologian is not a lone prophetic voice crying against the dangers of climate change,” but instead “the theologian is…a researcher in the midst of a dialogue, reflecting on an interdisciplinary enterprise through its particular methods and outlooks,” who are the actors in this system? It is not the climatologists, who Clingerman shows to be prophets of doom but without the agency to move us away from the dreaded apocalyptic outcome. If this is so, who actually carries out the changes required to heal our planet from environmental degradation? To quote Karl Marx's critique, “The philosophers” (and, we might add, the theologians) “have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”6 Who will change the world if climatologists and theologians are simply presenting and interpreting data? What I realized was missing was a full account of the prophetic role. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the prophet is not only an apocalyptic doomsayer, but also a hope-giver.7 Though the traditional theologian of the last several centuries, like the traditional scientist, has felt the need to be “objective,” stating theory and expecting others to live it out, the issue of climate change has brought many in both fields out into the civic realm with passionate and alarmist cries of warning.8 These cries, however, have more often than not engendered fear and inertia in the attitudes of the public, or communicated a sense of inevitability of the apocalyptic conclusion. It is hope, however, which gives people courage to act faithfully, even in the face of oppression and suffering. The biblical prophet encourages the community of faith to move forward into a hoped-for future world by enabling them to make meaning of the situation. He or she does this by engaging people's imaginations so they can zoom out from present existence to a bigger picture that transcends their suffering, as we do when we invoke the inclusion of the creation motif at the beginning and end of the Christian Bible mentioned at the beginning of this paper.9 Clingerman moves in the direction of this conversation when he states, “theological reflection is well equipped to uncover narratives that advance our critical powers and offer us hope.” He identifies the importance of the location “between hope and fear,” which I see as the location of the biblical prophet.10 It is curious that the role of theologian as we think of it is not really present in the Christian Bible.11 There are priests to keep the rituals going, there are scribes to write and re-write the sacred texts, and there are prophets to help the community imagine itself into its present and future context. In the modern American church, are theologians simply the scribes, recording and reiterating long ago histories of God's interaction with creation? In my view, the role of theologian is the same as the role of the biblical prophet: interpreting in light of current events, leading with one's life and actions, and holding together hope and fear, critique and meaning-making. Based on Jürgen Moltmann's idea that hermeneutic is not “a simple matter of understanding but is itself performative, an action which is directed toward the transformation of the world,”12 I posit that if the role of the theologian within the context of climate change is in fact interpretation, it is this expanded version of interpretation: a hermeneutic of transformative practice. It is an interpretation that, through critiquing the world as it is and invoking a vision for the world as it can be, transforms our everyday choices into struggles that have meaning. This critical hope grounds the community in a broader view of history, allowing it to move forward in hope, acknowledging fear but not becoming paralyzed by it. To be transformative, a critique must, however, be embodied: enacted. It speaks against the current system and has the audacity to not just envision but to also move toward liberation of the entire community of creation. If one accepts this version of the theologian's expanded hermeneutical role, then the theologian becomes indistinguishable from the prophet, expounding and enacting critical hope and, in our particular context, an important focus is ecotheology. The term “critical hope” is based on Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of Hope, in which he updates his famous Pedagogy of the Oppressed with a more specific focus on hope.13 Critical hope is defined as “an action-oriented response to contemporary despair”14 and is discussed in extant literature in the fields of higher education classrooms,15 psychological settings,16 and participatory action research in community organizations,17 but this concept has thus far not been explored in depth in the theological or environmental literature.18 While I do not plan to expound a full ecotheology of critical hope here, what I hope is to show the need for theologians and climatologists to move from a space of critical alienation to one of critical hope, and for many pastors and people of faith to move from a space of uncritical hopefulness into critical hope. To do this, I will first describe what hope is and does, and how the meaning-making process of actively hoping alongside suffering and struggle can serve as a catalyst in the agential process of moving toward a hoped-for world. Then I will explain four categories of individuals within the framework of critical/uncritical and hopeful/alienated. Finally, I will show how, through an ecotheology of critical hope, theologians can participate in a continual, communal, interpretive dialectic between hope and suffering, facing fear by making meaning together through shared experience and stories of struggle and promise. Based on Paulo Freire's liberation pedagogy, critical hope is an area pedagogy scholars and practitioners are defining in order to give hope to those working to break the cycle of oppression pinpointed by Freire.19 His liberation pedagogy explains the struggle between oppressor and oppressed, the fact that we all are bound up in this struggle and dehumanized by it, and that most of us play both roles at different points in our lives and relationships. To break this cycle requires risking acts of love, seeing one another as human beings, and becoming conscious of the parts played by ourselves and others in this system of oppression, a process he calls “conscientization.”20 Since Freire “avoided separating pedagogy from theology or philosophy,” his work has influenced or can be read alongside a variety of disciplines, including theology, and arguably is in itself a kind of contextual theology for educators, or at least a “pedagogical spirituality.”21 For theologians, many of whom are also educators, Freire's liberation pedagogy provides helpful and convicting food for thought regarding the process of theological education. The system of domination that the church and theological educators often help to perpetuate is expressed in what Freire calls the “banking model of education,” where an expert bestows information on students (or parishioners), a transaction rather than a process where critical consciousness occurs. Though this domination system is in direct opposition to the freedom and liberation offered by God in the biblical witness, its oppressive structures infiltrate our church polity and relationships so that the church is always in need of renewal. For ecotheologians, Freire's framework is doubly helpful, since the anthropogenic problems facing our planet are present because of the fear-based system of domination and control Freire describes. Just as portions of humanity have enforced hierarchies of domination and control on one another in the form of class, race, gender, and nationality, we have also attempted to dominate and control the natural world. The social struggle Freire defined has the same roots as the ecological crisis. Hope is an ontological need. Hopelessness is but hope that has lost its bearings, and become a distortion of that ontological need. When it becomes a program, hopelessness paralyzes us, immobilizes us. We succumb to fatalism, and then it becomes impossible to muster the strength we absolutely need for a fierce struggle that will re-create the world. I am hopeful, not out of mere stubbornness, but out of an existential, concrete imperative.22 In other words, theology or climatology that stays within the walls of an academy based on the banking model becomes immobilizing and fatalistic. Critical hope provides an alternative: a “tension between fatalism and utopianism…[that] is partially resolved in action.”23 In order for the information on climate change to meet our own and our world's needs, it must be enacted, and the name for this action is critical hope. It is important to further explore the meaning of the word “hope.” Often confused with the more passive experiences of wishing, desiring, or optimism, hope refers to something deeper: a choice, a practice, an orientation toward the future while grounded in stories from one's personal and communal past, giving meanings to actions in the present that impact the future. Though one may feel various levels of hopefulness depending on the day, hope itself is not an emotion. It is a process of facing one's fears with courage and within a network of social support and meaning-making. Hope is both the object hoped for and the feeling one gets as one works to get there.24 We can only hope for things that are possible. Otherwise we are either wishing (if the outcome is impossible) or we are certain (if the outcome is inevitable).25 Psychological research over recent decades provides a helpful framework for understanding hope. According to hope theorist C. R. Snyder, hope is based on our belief in our ability to reach a goal. We base our understanding of our ability on our past history, perception of our own skill level (self-efficacy), and the amount of motivation or agency we think we have. We decide how much value we place on that goal, and whether or not we see a pathway that could get us there. So the important pieces are: setting a realistic goal, our perceptions of our history, imagining pathways, and believing ourselves to have agency. Hope, in Snyder's view, is the cognitive process of moving through these actions toward one's goal.26 Also important, finds Snyder, is one's response to failure, which can come in the form of an obstacle or a feeling of loss of hope. He and other psychologists distinguish between hope and optimism in the way one deals with failure or mistakes. Optimists tend to distance themselves from failure so it does not negatively impact their identity. Those who hope are willing to admit mistakes and failures, and incorporate these into their identity as opportunities for learning and growth. They see these as minor pitfalls on the way to a larger goal.27 Though this psychological framework is helpful, one still wonders: What can motivate us to make that step of courage and vulnerability? Excepting the most talented and successful individuals, most of us would probably find our agential reserves tapped fairly quickly if our own past and future were all that was involved in the process of hope, and indeed, this seems to be what has happened to many working on issues surrounding climate change. This form of hope, limited to our own lifetimes and achievements, is inadequate to the task of sustained mobilization and transformation that is required to combat climate change. Even in the case of those exceptionally talented and successful individuals just mentioned, we probably all recognize the sense of disappointment and dissatisfaction individuals sometimes feel upon achieving a personal goal such as a job promotion or an acquisition of a particular possession. The goal may have been achieved, but this is not equal to a sense of hope. Missing is the interpretation of the goal completion as having meaning. What is needed is a hope that is deeper than desire, broader than the individual, and that contains the transformative power to change suffering, injustice, evil, and apathy into meaning. This is the interpretive role that theologians can play, if we are willing to fuse hope and fear, and even suffering, into the courage to live out both sides of the prophetic role of active hope. In the biblical books, especially those of prophecy and wisdom, one finds two major types of hope: (1) the relatively easy hope of Proverbs, which is the hope for living faithfully within one's own lifetime and providing a safe and livable future for one's children, and (2) a long-term hope of participating in the community of promise. While the former requires some sacrifice, including living righteously rather than receiving all the comforts one sees others receiving, the latter kind of hope requires a much broader story in which to make sense of one's life. If one lived during the time of the Israelites’ exile from the Promised Land, for example, one would endure exile with the knowledge of a deeper meaning, with the hope of God's promise of faithfulness to the community. If one lives, as we do, in the time after Jesus, one can hope in the story of suffering, redemption, and liberation God enacted through him, and participate in that story, making meaning of one's life through the lens of that past, present, and future hope. Communities of faith have a deep resource of hope in our shared stories, and the infusion of meaning that comes with passing these stories from generation to generation. Not only do we have our own personal stories on which to base our hope, but we also have a vast repository of stories of ancestors and spiritual forebears. Holding the tension between acknowledging what is wrong in the world and continuing to hope is what Moltmann called the “dialectic of reconciliation,” similar to the dialectic of “conscientization” delineated by Freire.28 Arguably, it is our ability to hope that makes us human, and equally as human is the experience of suffering.29 Juxtaposing these two seemingly paradoxical experiences and intentionally creating meaning from the combination forms the heart of our humanity, as is evidenced by the theology of hope and psychology of meaning that emerged out of World War II.30 As Moltmann put it, “The theology of hope was born in a prisoner of war camp.”31 The process of hope is not easy or comfortable, but it is essential—it is bound up in the essence of what it means to be human. Viktor Frankl continued to do what was right even when he had very little agency as he lived through World War II concentration camps, and this ability to choose to live with a sense of meaning sustained his hope. He could not control his fate, but he could continue to serve his fellows by volunteering to care for typhus patients, for example, and by refusing to attempt escape when it meant leaving a patient for whom he represented a last shred of hope. He expressed feeling a sense of rightness within himself when he made these choices that aimed toward a broader goal than his own life, a deeper meaning. It pointed toward his participation in humanity. He came to see unavoidable suffering as an aspect of an individual's unique work in the world, and discussed the courage it took to face suffering with hope: with the willingness to still find meaning.32 Moltmann shares about his experience after the war that he and his fellow seminarians would not have accepted a “liberal, bourgeois theology,” but they needed a full Christian theology that could handle the suffering and liberation of Jesus.33 Though perhaps one generally imagines suffering and hope at opposite ends of a spectrum of experiences, Moltmann's need for a theology of suffering brought him to a theology of hope. I would venture to guess that most of us today who fancy ourselves ecotheologians have not experienced anything close to the physical and emotional suffering of Europe during World War II, and so we may wonder if we can yet experience hope fully. Frankl gives us a helpful metaphor. He likens suffering to a gas that is released in a jar. If there is a small amount of this gas, it will still become distributed throughout the jar, though in a smaller concentration than it might if more gas were placed in the jar.34 So it is with suffering. Though we may not have experienced the degree of suffering of those who went through concentration camps, we have experienced suffering and know its ability to impact our full selves. These authors, along with Freire and others, note that it is not the amount of suffering we endure that matters. What matters is our consciousness of it, and what we do with it.35 We all experience suffering. Those who emerged from World War II with hope had learned to transform those experiences through facing reality and making meaning. This meaning is hope's catalyst. One other point needs to be brought forward regarding hope before I move into an explanation of an ecotheology of critical hope, and that is the importance of relationships and community in finding and maintaining hope. In addition to hope and suffering, our need for relationships and community is an important aspect of what it means to be human.36 Psychological studies show that involvement in communities may be essential to the act of hoping. Zimmerman found that individuals can learn hopefulness and that this happens mainly within the context of community organizations. He found that participation in these communities helped individuals develop psychological empowerment or self-efficacy outside the therapeutic setting. In addition to helping people develop skills, communities also encourage collective motivation that provides agency toward a shared goal.37 Although his study did not go so far as to interpret the reasons for an increase in psychological empowerment, my interpretation is that communal, successful goal completion provides a repository of stories from which individuals can draw sustaining power as they attempt a new goal. Individuals joining such a community have not experienced the previous successes, but can still draw on their agential power as they hear stories from their peers. Philosopher Victoria McGeer talks about the concept of “peer scaffolding” as an important step in human development leading to hopeful individuals. As infants and children, we need “parental scaffolding”: We need our parents or other adults to set tasks for us that are just beyond our reach so that we can learn new skills and understand ourselves as individuals who can accomplish difficult tasks. As adults, it is important to learn to be a “self-scaffolder,” to be able to motivate oneself toward a goal and in so doing to build up one's self-esteem and self-efficacy, but this is not enough.38 Of vital importance is peer scaffolding, or relationships where we encourage one another to stay motivated, make meaning together through sharing our stories, and become a community that celebrates successes and urges us to try again in the face of failure.39 We need the support of others in order to continue to hope: We need an interdependent network of care. Peer scaffolding works because we recognize others as agents in their own right, with meaningful hopes and goals, and in so doing we care for those others. When we care for others, they are better able to respond in kind. We open up an expansive space where they, too, can respond to the world more expansively.40 Through acting as an agent who encourages others to hope, we learn our agential power, and this gives meaning to our own life and offers purpose and efficacy to our own actions. Building on the necessity of strong communities and peer relationships that motivate one another toward hope, the framework of critical hope helps elucidate the role of the theologian, prophet, and others in understanding how to move from critique into hope-filled action. A study by Christens et al. identified four types of civic engagement in the United States based on individuals’ perceptions of their ability to effect change (self-efficacy) and their knowledge and understanding of the sources of social issues (degree of critique of social systems): critical but alienated, uncritical but hopeful, uncritical and alienated, and critical and hopeful (see Table 1).41 While both “hopeful” groups had stronger community connections and both “critical” groups had better overall mental health, the combination of “critical” and “hopeful” generated the highest social capital, in addition to the benefits of mental health and community participation. Those who were critical and alienated did not have strong connections to community groups, but both Christens et al. and Zimmerman showed that as people became involved in such groups, they were able to move toward the “critical and hopeful” category.42 These types of communities are “settings that promote critical reflection on action, but do so in the context of enduring relationships, social support, shared meaning, and sense of community.”43 Developing groups that are able to be critical of current systems (where appropriate) as well as have the self-efficacy and social capital to effect change is an important aspect of a democratic society. That over half of the people in the study expressed feelings of alienation, of not having an impact on the way society works, while only 7.5% were able to critique the social order while simultaneously feeling enough empowerment to be hopeful about their ability to change the situation, shows a crisis of hope in American democracy, and American life in general. As Christens et al. conclude, it is important, therefore, to involve more individuals in the kind of community organizations that foster both social critique and hopefulness about one's level of agency.44 The church and other religious organizations are well situated to enact this form of community. It is here that the would-be ecotheologian must make a choice: Presuming that he or she sees the reality of the environmental problems facing our planet today and holds a vision of a better world, will the theologian seek only to understand the situation in light of faith and beliefs, or will the theologian risk practicing hope as a true prophet, interpreting the data into transformative practice, and building community and solidarity through an ecotheology of critical hope? Are we willing to take the step that goes beyond fear of the future, beyond denouncing fossil fuel companies, beyond despairing that we have no ability to effect change, beyond feeling that our personal choices cannot make a difference, and stand against the system that currently enslaves us as both oppressor and oppressed? If we are ready to make that leap into an ecotheology that fuses the two sides of the prophetic role of critique and hope, how do we begin? To unpack the Christens et al. study in light of this discussion, I suggest that climatologists are mainly in the “critical and alienated” category (see Table 2). They are critical of the situation facing the planet, but as the years have gone by with more and more people sounding the alarm and the world continuing to go in the same direction toward ever-worsening anthropogenic climate change, they do not have a high degree of hope that they can impact the system. They fear that the world will not change and will run out of time if they ever do decide to change, so they utilize the prophetic motif of apocalyptic warning. They can imagine the world for which they hope and long, but they despair of reaching it. In some ways this is good news: They are still, in a sense, hoping. Despair shows the presence of an underlying hope, the “hope that has lost its bearings” mentioned by Freire above.45 Apathy indicates a loss of hope, but fear and despair show that one is still hoping.46 To be sure, it is a dormant hope without a sense of self-efficacy, agency, or a pathway to reach one's goal. When theologians follow this line of thinking, they end up in the same place of despair as their climatologist colleagues. Virtue ethicists often fall into this category, emphasizing personal virtue but not necessarily translating this into a social critique that looks at root causes of social problems. Virtue ethics attempts to address the symptoms of poverty, climate change, and so forth, but has a difficult time catalyzing this into meaningful action in solidarity with others. The feeling of being “uncritical and alienated” is what drives the domination system described by Freire. These individuals focus on personal rights from a Hedonistic and Egoistic perspective, with little or no awareness of how this affects others around them. They do not particularly want to change the social system, except perhaps to reduce it as far as possible so that individuals are free to make their own choices. Although these people feel alienated in terms of making changes to the system as a whole, they seem to have a fairly high degree of agency for making changes within their own lives, for getting the things that they want and need for themselves. Unfortunately, for this reason, many of us feel forced to act in this way, too—hence the “tragedy of the commons,” where everyone anxiously grabs for as many resources as possible since otherwise someone else will get them and we fear we will not have enough.47 This perspective is the fuel for an individualist rather than a collectivist perspective, and many of us participate in this system not because we want to or believe in it, but because without a strong social network to trust to collectively