I just finished Richard Bauckham's book Living with other Creatures: Green Exegesis and Theology. Independent of that I stumbled upon a TED talk by Naomi Klein on the Western addiction to risk. The TED talk was about the environment, but its title was a little misleading--“Addicted to Risk.” Both Bauckham and Klein make a similar argument, but on wholly different grounds.Bauckham’s work responds to an article that lays the blame of the current ecological crisis at the feet of the church. Bauckham responds that the real problem isn’t the church, but a modern approach to the Bible that views the world as a resource that needs to be exploited. Essentially Bauckham agrees with White, but claims its not the Bible that maintains that position. The problem is that we read the Bible in a culture that has taken on thought that the world is at our disposal.
On the other hand, Klein criticizes the prevalent western addiction to risk for our current ecological crisis. Our questions highlight some of the thinking: instead of asking how to keep the planet from getting hotter, we ask how hot can we get the planet before we have to do something different.
The responses that we have to ecological problems usually are high risk/high reward and usually executed without a lot of thought. Klein points to the idea of the junkshot, or the idea of shooting trash down a hole to stop a leak. This was an attempt of BP to stop the leak in the gulf. It didn’t work. It reminds me of a German saying: “keep the ball low”--stay conservative.
Though Bauckham and Klein are coming from different perspectives, they both take a similar slant on ecological issues. They’re platform is to analyze the dominant cultural scripts at play in our culture and how they impact our behavior. In this case, the idea of consumerism is at work. We thrive on what we can consume. Bauckham’s point is that the biblical understanding of dominion in Gen 1-3 means that we ought to protect the environment, not exploit it. Klein argues that our addiction to risk and the belief that we have unlimited access to resources is the root of our approach to the environment with little regard for for the consequences. Both show how a dominant cultural narrative is challenged. Its interesting to see from both Bauckham and Klein.
Christianity calls us to something similar. Part of being a Christian is to look at the scripts that are at play within our own world and challenge them with the Christian narrative. Paul tells the Ephesians that as children of light they expose the the shameful things in the dark. This means that we have to understand our own Christianity, but also understand the culture in which we live and how our Christian belief challenges it.
