What Else Is New?: Toward a Postcolonial Christian Theology for the Anthropocene

George B Handley

doi:10.3390/rel11050225

Abstract

Although there are many reasons for Christian skepticism regarding climate change, one reason is theological in nature, and therefore, requires a theological solution. This essay explains the theological grounds for climate change denial and for a compromised understanding of the power and creativity of human agency. Drawing inspiration from the ecotheological implications of postcolonial poetics, it seeks to offer revised conceptions of the atonement and the fall and of what it means to read both scripture and nature. The aim is to offer a more resilient Christian theology that can inspire agential creativity in the age of the Anthropocene.

Highlights

There are many reasons for Christian skepticism regarding climate change, one reason is theological in nature, and requires a theological solution
Assuming geologists do decide that we have enough evidence in the record to mark a new geological epoch shaped by human activity, the Anthropocene marks a novel turn from the earth’s history shaped merely by natural forces to one shaped by human agency
Much scholarly attention has been given to the psychological, political, and economic grounds for inaction,1 less attention has been given to the theological justifications conservative American Christians often invoke for their skepticism

Summary

Bruno Latour

Assuming geologists do decide that we have enough evidence in the record to mark a new geological epoch shaped by human activity, the Anthropocene marks a novel turn from the earth’s history shaped merely by natural forces to one shaped by human agency. Feelings of inevitability and theological or ideological justifications for the status quo cannot produce novel, moral responses Instead, it seems that all human populations and certainly all Christians need new ways of thinking about the earth, its climate, and its presumed telos that can teach, rather than shield people from, answerability to the world. The irony, is that such individualistic resistance to believing in a globally and humanly caused phenomenon like climate change results in an abdication of individual responsibility not just for the planet but for the human family It is as if Christian skeptics, in their anxieties about the weight of human freedom, want to protect themselves and their Creator from the shame of the Creation. Reach of globalization and destroying the diversity it encountered. Colonialism manifested, in other words, a simultaneous fascination with (and repulsion of) the diversity that colonialism laid bare, and generated a cosmology and theodicy that justified, and sacralized, its consequences

The Lessons of Postcolonial Literature

Postcolonial Poetics as Ecotheology

Practical Implications