The Flesh of God: Christological Implications for an Ecological Vision of the World

Abstract

The great religious traditions of the world, including especially the indigenous religions of North America, have profound contributions to make to the ecological vision we need. In this paper I can only speak of the ecological significance of the gospel of Christ. I begin with the faith stance that Jesus Christ, God's Word made flesh, is "our wisdom, our righteousness, our sanctification and redemption" (1 Cor. 1:30). This means that ultimately we shall find our salvation, even our ecological salvation, in God's grace. Because Christ is our wisdom, the scriptural witness to him in the Old and New Testaments stands alone as the incomparable source of our faith. That is why I think it appropriate to approach the ecological question from a christo logical centre and on a biblical basis. If we believe we have a decisive divine disclosure in the flesh of Jesus Christ, and, in his life, death and resurrection, the decisive appearance of God's reign, then all our theological thought, including our ecological theology, needs to be governed in him. But ecological theology is a kind of contextual theology which seeks to address the environmental crisis theologically. A further methodological premise is that theologians must attend to both the Bible and the context (or as in Karl Barth's oft-quoted bon mot, "the Bible and the newspaper").