Ebook
Christian ecotheology runs the risk of making God himself a resource for human exploitation as a means to species survival. The world of climate change, soil depletion, and mass species extinction reveals a frightening conclusion--humans act as cosmic parasites. The problem is not with the world--talk of climate change blames the symptoms displayed by the victim--but with human epistemology. Humans are systematically incapable of rightly perceiving reality, and so must socially construct reality. The end of this epistemological problem is necessary ecological devastation by the development of civilization. In Plundering Eden, Wagenfuhr traces ecological problems to their root cause in the broken imagination, and argues that reconciliation with God the Creator through Jesus Christ is the only means to ecological healing through a renewed, kenotic imagination expressed in the creation of an alternate environment that reveals the kingdom of God--the ekklesia.
“No one likes to be accused of being a parasite with delusions
of grandeur, but this is the opening note sounded in the prophetic
trumpet blast that is Plundering Eden. Like Nietzsche’s
madman, Wagenfuhr rushes into our global village announcing the
death not of God but civilization, that doomed project of thinking
humanity could by building things wrest order from chaos. The
Babel-onian captivity from which Wagenfuhr seeks to free us
consists of a wrong way of imagining the world, namely, as
something to be mastered, often through violence, with devastating
effects on nature and society alike. The solution lies in giving up
the juvenile fiction that we are masters of our own fate and
submitting our imaginations to the logic of creation and new
creation, that is, to the vision of the world created and recreated
in, through, and for Jesus Christ.”
—Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
“Civilization is an idolatrous myth that is literally killing us.
For Christians, argues Greg Wagenfuhr, the only plausible antidote
to our predicament is the redemption of our imagination of
ourselves as creatures. A timely and robustly theological
intervention in ecological ethics.”
—Brian Brock, University of Aberdeen
“Few can dispute Greg Wagenfuhr’s description of how humanity has
been (wittingly or not) a parasite, plundering, destroying, and
sucking the life out of the planet (Eden, creation). His analyses
of how our ways of thinking (our myths and imaginaries—especially
the uncontested rule of technique/technology and scientific
management) are the culprit behind the plunder are spot on.
Wagenfuhr’s bold revisionist theology of creation and redemption
and his calls for radical, costly change on the part of Christians
must be taken with total seriousness. . . . Plundering Eden
has a very important and urgent message for our times.”
—David W. Gill, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
G. P. Wagenfuhr is Theology Coordinator for ECO: A Covenant
Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. He is also the founder of a
pilot project called The Embassy, a renewed vision for the
ekklesia outlined within this book. Wagenfuhr is author of
Plundering Egypt: A Subversive Christian Ethic of Economy
(2016) and Unfortunate Words of the Bible (2019).