Our first two responses to our pre-Consultation Paper #3 come from Elsa Barron and John Elwood. (Their bios are printed at the end of their responses.) To read the third paper, please click here. Elsa and John are addressing the third premise. You can add your own reflections in the comment section of this blog or email the organizers.
CONSULTATION PREMISE #3: The New Future demands greater attention to the inevitable suffering of climate change, and the spiritual foundations of courageous and compassionate responses to it; even if such focus arouses accusations of abandoning mitigation and adaptation.
Elsa Barron: Maintaining the Joy of the Lost Harvest
Dear Lowell,
I was particularly struck by your discussion of climate suffering as not only a hypothetical threat on the horizon but a reality already facing many communities today. Last year, I was giving a presentation on the Hill to a group of congressional staff on climate security risks in Iran, and after the presentation a staffer asked when these climate risks would escalate into security threats. I was shocked at this question– had they heard everything my team had just presented? That some parts of the country had reached temperatures so high they could not sustain human life? That the water taps had run dry in an entire region? Are these not grave security threats?
When it comes to the impacts of climate change, there is no need to wait for the worst to come– extreme suffering exists today if we care to pay attention to it. Yet, it is easy to remain so focused on our own bubble that we miss that reality. I am reminded of a poem by Palestinian storyteller Jenan Matari, shared to her Instagram in the midst of thousands of deaths and displacements in Gaza. It read,
“The end of the world.” / Everyone says it. Whether they believe it or not. / As if it’s some singular catastrophic event. / The “white” western world may seem like it’s ending. And I could see how you’d think this. / You’ve never witnessed the end of “your” world. / But the world has ended over and over and over again for Indigenous people everywhere since the beginning of time. / To think that watching millions of our people having their lives and our lands taken from us by brutal colonizers doesn't feel like “the end of the world” to us, shows just how detached from the Universe you truly are. / We’ve seen the end of the world. / Many times. / And yet, somehow, we have still survived and made it into the next one.
Yes, the world has ended, and the struggle has persisted. Omar Haramy, the director of Sabeel Liberation Theology Center in Palestine, once told a story that has stuck with me for years. Sabeel was hosting a group of American tourists who went out on a bus trip with a mix of locals. When the bus stopped in an area controlled by Israeli military, soldiers began firing warning shots, not realizing it was a tour group. The Americans ran for cover, but the Palestinians, accustomed to such militarized violence, remained outside, using the delay to harvest a wild vegetable, khobiza, to bring home for their families. When they returned to Sabeel headquarters and unloaded from the bus, the Americans were white as ghosts, while the Palestinians featured smiles, laughter, and full bags of vegetables, creating two very different impressions of what had happened.
Omar originally told this story to illustrate Palestinian community, culture, resilience, and humor in the face of chronic suffering. Today, I can’t think of a better story to illustrate turning “swords into ploughshares” or “guns into can-openers” as you describe it in your article– a call to maintain the joy of the harvest in the face of violence and injustice, even as the harvest dwindles. We must not forget that in the midst of unjust suffering today, inspiring leaders and communities have resisted the “triggered responses” you discuss in your paper, instead choosing the “formed responses” of love, compassion, community, solidarity, and non-violence. We have much to learn from their efforts as we engage our own struggle.
With our eyes wide open to the realities of suffering around the world– both now and to come– we must also retain our capability to imagine an alternative future. I had the opportunity to visit the Gaza solidarity encampment at DePaul University last week, and I witnessed a mind-boggling glimpse of what community can look like in the midst of joint struggle. In the space of a small quad, a vibrant community had formed– sharing food, housing, literature, art, faith traditions, and even medical care. Ambassadors were positioned around the camp to de-escalate tension and aggression, and there was a schedule of events for education and action. What I experienced felt deeply spiritual– a group that had cast down their nets (their education and job pursuits) to take up the chance to advocate for peace, justice, and liberation. In the midst of their struggle, this community had chosen– and extensively planned for– non-violence, solidarity, and mutual care.
In accordance with our faith, we must continue to envision communities such as these, and pursue them wholeheartedly, even in the midst of the grief, suffering, violence, and loss of climate change.
Elsa Barron
John Elwood: The Hidden Function of Our Theologies
Dear Lowell,
You’ve focused us on the question of how Christians could develop the compassion and courage to follow Christ in the pervasive suffering of the New Future with a discussion about the “righteous Gentiles” of the Shoah—that tiny fraction of Christians who actively resisted the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews. In discussing what distinguished them from the complicit majority of their fellow Christians, ethicist David Gushee begins with this: They had a theology that at least didn’t prevent them from participating in rescue of the Jews. For a brief moment, I wondered: What Christian theology could possibly prevent rescue of innocent victims of cruelty?
Of course, that question will never be posed by serious students of Church history. It was never just the crude antisemitic accusations of deicide, Christ-killers, “His blood be on us and our children!” It was rooted in the Church’s theology. As early as the 12th century, European Christians looked out on a world in which their conversionist conquest was virtually complete—except for the distant Muslim caliphates in Palestine and Iberia and, more problematically, a tiny minority within their midst who persistently rejected Christian evangelistic pressures and clung to the Shema: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One,” an ever-present rebuttal to the theology of universal trinitarian missiological triumph. Aggravating this offense, Christian eschatology imagined blood-soaked apocalyptic battles featuring the mysterious forces of “Gog and Magog” descending in force upon Christendom, making secret alliances—it was widely imagined—with treacherous internal factions which refused to bend the knee and embrace the dominant religion. The Christian majority could honor and defend the Jews in their midst, but elements of their theology tugged in the opposite direction.
Theology never just sits there, quietly being true or false—It functions. In Europe of the 1930s, the legacy of centuries of triumphal missiology, exclusive soteriology, and violent eschatology functioned as the de facto theology of the Holocaust. Looking forward, however, we must now ask how prevalent strands of Positive Christian theology will function in an increasingly chaotic world of suffering. How will expectation of divine favor and “our daily bread” stand in a world of growing hunger? How will a Christology centrally concerned with substitutionary atonement affect our resolve to carry our own crosses amongst the suffering of the world? How will “great commission” missiology and salvific exclusivity affect the making of common cause with the billions of humans who remain faithful to other traditions? How will orthodox understandings of providence—God’s control of all things—affect the willingness to rescue a world that, after all, is already “in God’s hands?” How will exclusive human endowment with “the image of God” coexist with a Franciscan sense of familial belonging amongst Brother Sun, Sister Moon, water, wind, fire and Mother Earth? How will eschatological expectations of a relatively imminent consummation of creation-history frame the Christian understanding of an unprecedented global crisis? And with this world in dire peril, how will prevalent understandings of another perfect world-to-come impact the willingness to make sacrifices for this one?
One might object: “Love your neighbor trumps all these impulses!” And that would be right, theoretically at least. But in the lived experience of the Church, Christian ethics is often in conflict with Christian dogma. Somewhere deep inside, we know what we ought to do. But there’s this verse, or this doctrine, or this popular teaching….
Gushee, as you noted, didn’t end with theology alone. “Righteous Gentiles” of the Shoah also cared for the oppressed, had hearts of compassion, and possessed courage. But there is little use calling on people and communities to exhibit abstract virtues if the life-shaping theology they take as eternal truth pulls them in another direction. Rather than settling for “Is it true?” we might now consider asking “How does it function?” Especially in the unprecedented contexts that are unfolding before us.
Thanks for your work.
John
Elsa Barron is an environmental peace and security researcher, writer, poet, and youth activist and works with organizations spanning from Washington D.C. to Hawai'i. Her climate advocacy has been featured in CBS News, the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, and the Christian Science Monitor, among others. Elsa is a co-director of the Christian Climate Observers Program, which brings first-time observers to the UN Climate Conference each year. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame where she studied peace studies and biology and will return shortly to begin a Ph.D. focused on applying truth and reconciliation to the global crisis of climate change.
John Elwood: After a career spanning more than thirty years in financial and private equity management, John began a second life on matters closer to his heart. He and his wife Barbara established a 50-acre organic produce farm, which today serves more than 700 cooperative members; chaired the board of a mission sending agency operating on five continents; served on the boards of three prominent Christian environmental advocacy organizations; and helped lead resistance to the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. In 2019, he turned his focus to the theological implications of the ecosystem crisis, earning a Master’s degree in ecotheology from Union Theological Seminary. He now serves on the Steering Committee of the Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership at William Carey International University.