Theology and Ecology

Abstract

Writing about theology in relation to ecology may seem strange within the scope of a book that itself stands within no particular religious tradition, or, more exactly, is unconcerned with its standing within any particular religious tradition as it aims for a “secularity of thought” within its own “non-theological” discourse.¹ There may even seem to be an air of insincerity or a cynical appeal to the power of a large group present in religious communities, a group that one may disagree with because they “don’t know any better” but that can be exploited for the same reason, an attitude present in the appeal of E. O. Wilson to religious believers in his The Creation (2006).² There is however an ultimately realist reason for considering theology within the wider paradigm of “environmental thought”: the form its thought takes is superior in a specific way to that of philosophy. Theology is concerned with many of the same questions as philosophy, and that includes the question of ethics and metaphysics raised by the ecological crisis. However, unlike the environmental philosophies discussed earlier, the works of ecotheology tend not to separate nearly as easily the ethical and the metaphysical, even within their own self-understanding of the discipline; these two strands are always unified within some broader paradigm, some single, theological vision. As will become apparent in the next chapter, this prefigures the methodology of non-philosophy; it is akin to the “vision-in-One” that non-philosophy thinks from.