Over the last twenty years, I've worked with strands of liberation theology and liberal theology, both of which aim to bring faith down to earth and aim our hopes for a better future toward a just society, more than, or even rather than, an eternal afterlife. From the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch to the Christian Realism of Reinhold Niebuhr to the Black Theology of James Cone to the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutierrez to the feminist philosophy of Mary Daly, the voices that ground me the most have been those that articulate ways to live toward a better future.
Then, global warming became the pressing issue of the day, an issue that Greenland's recent ice melt brings more into focus. More thoughts after the squiggle.
"Impermanence is Buddha-nature." That's the main religious insight that stuck with me from Buddhism. If somehow, civilization manages to make it through the worst crises of global warming, the Second Law of Thermodynamics suggests that the universe is still headed toward the uninteresting destiny of an undifferentiated soup. Buddhism manages to take the core ephemerality of things as a basis for Enlightenment. Christianity has tended to be more uncomfortable with the ephemeral, generally looking for a more stable "after" beyond the passing of things. Augustine in particular offered many poignant reflections on the relation of the ephemeral to the eternal. With the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment came a renunciation of the eternal dimension - a renunciation that many take as "putting away fairy tales" and other relics of childhood. Liberal theology, from Friedrich Schleiermacher through Albrecht Ritschl and Ernst Troeltsch, took that task seriously, and gave various answers to how Christian theology might still be pertinent in a modern world. The answer often resided in the quest for "the Kingdom of God," understood as a perfectly just society that we should work toward. For liberation theologians, the questions of the Enlightenment faded away as insignificant, and generally bourgeois, caviling that was irrelevant to the fact of a child dying of starvation. "Where hunger is, God is not," was Gutierrez's plain way of putting it. The liberation theologians' proclamation of "God's preferential option for the poor" was always bound up with a quest to create a society in which the oppressed were able to articulate their own needs and fight for their own destiny.
I sit between two wisdom traditions, one of which seems more suited for the immensity of the threat global warming poses to civilization, the other one is more in my bones. "Impermanence is Buddha-nature" teaches me to accept the fleeting moment, to accept how provisional every achievement is. The hope for "the Kingdom of God," understood as the future society we try to create - well, global warming puts a question mark on it at best. It feels more like something grinding down. Which gets me back to my title - my task as a theologian seems to be learning how to say goodbye to two interrelated things. First, it's learning to say goodbye to civilization - perhaps we'll make it, but I don't see how. And in any case, civilization is necessarily impermanent, so someone will have to say goodbye to it.
But, on an intellectual level, it's also saying good-bye to the motor that drives the traditions I'm most comfortable with. That is different than saying good-bye to the traditions altogether. Shifts toward grappling with the significance of ecological breakdowns have been going on in theology for decades, in every religious tradition. I worked out a syllabus that I hope to teach some day on "Liberal Eschatology: Social Justice and Human Extinction," a course offering that relates the achievements of Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr to Jared Diamond's warnings in Collapse and the meditations in Alan Weisman's The World without Us. I hope at least some readers of this diary pick up and read some books like Rosemary Radford Ruether's Gaia and God, Sallie McFague's A New Climate for Theology, or any of the books in the Religions of the World and Ecology Series. The traditions of liberal and liberation theology still have something to say, something worth saying, but the time to say it is running out.
I heard an aphorism many years ago, "I am mortal and speaking." I had hoped, no, assumed my speech would be a piece in a chain that would go beyond my mortality. That meant a great deal. Now, it seems as if my speech must simply try for eloquent variations on good-bye in the face of dimensions of impermanence that threaten my sense of why I should even speak at all.