Abstract
Humanity is currently faced with deadly dangers that could bring about the breakdown of civilization, and even the end of human life on earth in short order. The Marxist and Green thinker Rudolf Bahro spoke of a ‘logic of salvation’, which involved a return to the idea of God. Ekklesia arose as a witness to such a logic of salvation. It can be understood as a social movement, that sketches out a prefigurative politics that can then be realised. The contemporary church needs to recover this understanding, adopting climate change as a confessional issue that defines its common life. This could be part of a practical logic of salvation.
Highlights
Humanity is currently faced with deadly dangers that could bring about the breakdown of civilization, and even the end of human life on earth in short order
Today’s four horsemen—overpopulation, resource depletion, loss of biodiversity and climate change—could each separately mean civilisational collapse and put together they could mean the end of human life on earth
That the problems posed by the four horsemen can be addressed? Any response will be at the same time spiritual, cultural and political
Summary
Doubtless every generation has its own version of the four horsemen of Revelation 6, and they have been grim enough over the centuries, but never as genuinely apocalyptic, in the popular sense, as today. Even peaking at 4 ◦ C will mean up to 40% reduction in maize and rice as the population heads towards 9 billion by 2050, so famine may be a consequence As it is, in 2016 the Arctic Council already charted temperatures 20 ◦ C above the norm and highlights nineteen aspects of regime change, all of which may lead to tipping points which affect the world as a whole (Arctic Council 2016). Half of the world’s countries are not democracies, including the world’s most populous state, China, and many exclude women from the vote (Lijphart 2012) Even those which are democracies are better regarded as pseudo-democracies, as corporate wealth and media power constantly skew election results, and the reservations Plato and Aristotle felt about democracy are vindicated by the rise of populism around the world. That the problems posed by the four horsemen can be addressed? Any response will be at the same time spiritual, cultural and political (and I include economics with politics)
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