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The Holy Spirit, the voices of nature and environmental prophecy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2014

Rachel Muers
Rachel Muers*
Affiliation:
University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UKr.e.muers@leeds.ac.uk
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Abstract

I argue for the theological plausibility of reading contemporary environmental concern as a response to the prophetic voices of nonhuman nature, and in that sense as a movement of the Holy Spirit.

The literature on pneumatology and the environment tends to concentrate either on the Spirit's role in creation (and the continuities between creation and new creation) or on the ecclesial location of the Spirit's transformation of material reality. While these approaches are sound and necessary, neither appears fully to address the specific theological challenge of the contemporary environmental movement and of contemporary environmental stress, as a historical moment between humanity and nonhuman nature. Pneumatology needs to take account of the specific ways in which the environment becomes an issue for theology and society, and of the historical ‘discernment of spirits’ involved in Christian and theological responses to the environmental crisis.

In an attempt to address this need, I take up the now well-developed theological claim that nonhuman nature is a subject, rather than the backdrop of salvation-history, and develop it in relation to the idea that prophecy as the work of the Spirit both reveals and realises God's history with creation. I draw on Eugene Rogers’ approach to pneumatology by exploring the non-identical repetitions of pneumatology's paradigmatic narratives, but, going beyond Rogers, I trace these repetitions in nonhuman and extra-ecclesial realities – in ‘the environment’. The main paradigmatic pneumatological narratives considered in this article are those related to prophecy, and in particular to the miraculous extension of gifts of speech and hearing; rereading these narratives in the contemporary environmental crisis leads to an account of how the ‘voices’ of nonhuman nature are heard as prophetic speech that summons response. In a final section, I turn to another paradigmatic pneumatological narrative – that of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness – and propose, in dialogue with Donald MacKinnon and others, that it offers a starting-point for theological responses to the experience of despair, loss and failure in the context of environmental concern.

Keywords

ecotheologyenvironmentHoly Spiritpneumatologyprophecytheology of nature

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , August 2014 , pp. 323 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2014 

Introduction: environmental pneumatology

The theme of the Holy Spirit and the environment has attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent years.Footnote 1 Not only have there been monographs and articles specifically focused on environmental pneumatology,Footnote 2 but key works of pneumatology have paid close and extended attention to environmental questions and, conversely, pneumatology has been a significant dimension of extended theological treatments of environmental ethics.Footnote 3 Accounts of the environment in relation to pneumatology have generally sought to make strong connections between creation and new creation, in order both to explicate the naming of the Holy Spirit as ‘giver of life’ and to find new ways to speak theologically to the environmental crisis.Footnote 4

It might plausibly be suggested that pneumatology, particularly with a focus on the Spirit in creation, is the best way to address long-standing concerns about the anthropocentrism, or the ‘otherworldly’ character, of Christianity (or of the so-called Judaeo-Christian tradition, or of ‘classical theism’).Footnote 5 Clearly, however, it is not necessary to focus all talk of God's presence in, with and for the nonhuman environment on pneumatology; there are numerous recent counter-examples.Footnote 6 It is also by no means obvious, although it is often stated or implied in ecotheology, that traditional theological accounts of divine transcendence are environmentally problematic; and even if that claim were true, it is not obvious that the supposed problem can be solved through an appeal to the Holy Spirit's immanence to, or presence with, creation, without impugning the divinity of the Spirit.Footnote 7 In other words, speaking about the Holy Spirit in relation to the environment should not be seen primarily as the means to create a ‘greener’ Christian theology.

Theological reflection on the Holy Spirit and the environment should be motivated, I suggest, not only by the desire to find environmentally friendly strands in theological tradition, but also by the recognition that reading and responding to the signs of the times – in this case, both environmental degradation and the environmental concern to which it gives rise – is an exercise in the discernment of spirits, and hence, at least to some extent, in pneumatology. The whole question of ‘relevance’, of the vocation of theology in relation to historically contingent issues such as the environmental crisis – of what you do when (following Barth's supposed advice) you have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the otherFootnote 8 – is already a pneumatological question. So in asking about how theologians can speak about the Holy Spirit in and for the environment, I attempt to do so in conscious awareness of the particular contingent ways in which ‘the environment’ emerges as a question for theology.

In doing this, I take up in a small way the challenge posed by Willis Jenkins in the conclusion of a major study of key strands in Christian environmental theology and ethics. Despite the upsurge in environmental pneumatology noted above, Jenkins argues that the much-lamented modern ‘eclipse of the Spirit’ needs to be further addressed as a matter of ecological, as well as theological, urgency.Footnote 9 The context of this call is Jenkins’ distinctive attempt to take seriously the concrete practices of Christian communities in response to environmental stress. Environmental ethics is treated, not merely as a set of theoretical problems, but as reflection on praxis – praxis which often outruns the theory, theological or otherwise, which informs it.Footnote 10 In this context, it is not surprising that pneumatology comes to the fore. Pneumatology, after all, is the appropriate locus from which to speak about the story of God with the world in the world's unfolding history, the history that brings about the contemporary problematic of the environment. Indeed, referring to nonhuman nature as ‘environment’ directs us immediately to the relationships between humanity and nonhuman nature, and hence again to the reality of a shared history.

The idea is now relatively well established in both pneumatology and environmental theology that nonhuman nature is involved in, and not merely the backdrop for, redemption and reconciliation. What we call ‘the environment’ has a theologically significant history, even if that history does not precisely follow or map onto the history of humanity's redemption and reconciliation. Several recent environmental theologies have incorporated and reflected on cosmological and/or palaeobiological accounts of creation's history, repositioning humanity as one among many participants (and a late arrival at that) in the cosmic drama; others have focused more on rereading of biblical and traditional texts from a perspective which accords significance to the history of nonhuman nature.Footnote 11 The relevance of this for pneumatology, specifically, is that the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit in, with and for nonhuman nature can be considered as part of the Spirit's reconciling, revivifying and sanctifying work – without the need for this to be referred back entirely to the reconciliation, revivification and sanctification of humanity.

Pneumatological narratives: with and beyond Eugene Rogers

Clearly when locating and shaping talk of the Spirit, particularly in relation to the environment, it is important from the outset to reject the view that pneumatology must be concerned with whatever exceeds or escapes the material or the bodily. It is, I take it, fairly well established in theological circles – however little it is recognised elsewhere – that the opposition of ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ is a theologically barren, as well as ethically and politically suspect, construction, which has nothing to do with (for example) the complex biblical opposition-juxtaposition of flesh and s/Spirit.Footnote 12 This is, of course, one of the reasons why divine transcendence per se does not denigrate matter or the body, and is not (particularly) anti-environmental; the opposition of the material/bodily and the spiritual, if it does any useful work at all, is presumably an opposition within creation which is itself, qua inner-creaturely opposition, transcended by the Creator. Once we have said that, however, we are left with the question of how to speak about the Holy Spirit in a way which does not reduce to the immanent properties and capacities of given reality. How does one speak truthfully about the Holy Spirit in and for the world without just speaking about the world? It is a problem which could affect all theological engagements with any ‘world’ question, but that is particularly acute when the focus for theological reflection is material reality as such – ‘the environment’.

In what follows, I attempt to focus attention on the specificity of the Holy Spirit by reflecting – as Eugene Rogers does in his important recent work – on paradigmatic narratives and patterns, repeated non-identically in history, through which the Holy Spirit ‘befriends’ material reality and draws it into the life of God.

The core claim of Rogers’ After the Spirit is that ‘the Spirit is a Person with an affinity for material things’.Footnote 13 Rogers presents a rereading of the key narrative moments in the New Testament in which the Spirit ‘rests on’ or ‘befriends’ matter – not only the matter of human bodies (centrally, the body of Jesus, for example at his baptism) but also the matter to which they relate – the water of baptism, the oil of anointing. These narrative moments are, for Rogers, one step on the pneumatological ladder; the next step is their non-identical repetition in the sacraments, and the next step the particular transformations of material existence with which these sacramental performances are associated – the material difference that the church is, and makes, in the world.Footnote 14

This construction of the relationship of pneumatology to the environment is unashamedly anthropocentric, in that the stories on which it focuses are human stories (the story of Jesus and the stories of Christians). In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and in ecclesial and sacramental reality, the Holy Spirit befriends matter, and the primary focus of this befriending is human sanctification or deification. Despite the anthropocentrism, there is much in this account which should be retained for an environmental pneumatology. It avoids, or helps to avoid, the risk of meaningless ubiquity (the Holy Spirit is everywhere and anywhere, so why say anything in particular about her?). There is also no good theological or ethical reason to assume that all anthropocentrisms are a priori bad; we do not get very far by denying that we are anthropoi, or that Jesus Christ is huios tou anthropou.Footnote 15

However, the problem with Rogers’ approach, I would argue, is that in adopting a trickle-down approach to the Spirit's befriending of matter – from Jesus to humanity-as-church to material reality as a whole – he never quite reaches the point of speaking concretely about what this means for humanity in its material environment and its historical context. Several of his theological sources do reach that point, and several of the ways in which they do it are at least slightly problematic. They tend, for example, to move from narrative or positional anthropocentrism – we tell stories about the Holy Spirit and particular human beings, and learn about Spirit-befriending-matter through these stories – to an anthropocentrism of value – the rest of the material world is for the sake of sanctified humanity, and only acquires meaning, in theory or in practice, in its relation to humanity.Footnote 16

One risk attached to approaching environmental pneumatology through the biblical ‘known cases’ – if the principal known cases are christological and ecclesial/sacramental – is of an undue focus on humanity, and within humanity the visible church, as the centre of the Holy Spirit's activity. To think about contemporary environmental concern, by contrast, we have to pay sustained attention to the nonhuman environment itself, to a largely extra-ecclesial environmental movement, and to ‘the environment’ as the crossing-point of numerous non-theological discourses (scientific, political, economic and so forth). In what follows, then, I propose to take up Rogers’ approach but to go beyond it in finding the material and historical repetitions of pneumatology's paradigmatic narratives and patterns more directly in the environment – in nonhuman and extra-ecclesial realities. The narratives and patterns with which I am concerned in this article – which receive, in fact, rather little attention in Rogers’ work – are chiefly those which lead to the credal affirmation that the Holy Spirit ‘has spoken through the prophets’.

Prophecy, the Spirit and the cry of the earth

The ‘cry of the earth’ and the ‘voice of the earth’ resonate in a variety of theological and ecclesial texts on the environment. It appears, for example, in the title of Leonardo Boff's influential work on environmental theology and liberation theology; as the title of a major statement on the environment by the Irish Catholic bishops; and most recently in a World Council of Churches statement to the UN conference on climate change in Durban.Footnote 17 More than this, the idea of the earth's voice appears, clearly as more than a dramatic metaphor, as one of the key principles of ecological biblical interpretation adopted by the Earth Bible team: ‘The Principle of Voice: Earth is . . . capable of raising its voice in celebration and against injustice’.Footnote 18

The Earth Bible project has been widely criticised for the application of extra-biblical and non-theological principles as criteria for the interpretation of biblical texts. In this case, however, it does not seem that the Earth Bible ecojustice principle is straightforwardly extra-biblical. As eco-theologians of a more traditional bent have been quick to note, there is clear warrant in both scripture and liturgy for talking about created things, other than humanity, as having, in some sense, voices to praise God.Footnote 19 The voices of the nonhuman creation are raised in celebration and praise, either constantly or in specific historical circumstances;Footnote 20 and they are also heard in lament, and in rebuke or judgement.Footnote 21

Crucially for this discussion, the biblical voices of nonhuman creation do not only form a consistent backdrop, a cantus firmus against which the voices of human history play the theme. They intervene in the story and interact with human voices. They celebrate justice and condemn injustice.Footnote 22 In one of the passages discussed most extensively by eco-theologians, Romans 8:22, the whole shared and differentiated history of creation with God is heard as creation's ‘groaning in labour pains’, in suffering and anticipation.Footnote 23 The eschatological aspect of many of the relevant texts concerning the speech of nonhuman nature is noteworthy. Often biblical voices from the nonhuman environment are placed in the context of the decisive working-out of God's justice or of the consummation of God's reign.Footnote 24 Often, too, they are associated with ‘limit cases’ of, or long-delayed judgement on, human failure.Footnote 25

So the problem with the Earth Bible's attribution of voice to Earth – or, using the terminology of this article, to the environment – is not that it is extra-biblical; the problem is, rather, the difficulty of taking it outside the Bible, unless you happen to be in the mood for pathetic fallacy.Footnote 26 In many contexts, following Ruskin, the attribution of voice to the nonhuman environment is rightly regarded as the result of egoistic weakness or distorted anthropocentrism. We want our environment to speak with the voices we give it, to reflect what we need to feel and hear. If the environment speaks ourselves back to us, this might tell us something about us, but nothing about the environment.

It seems clear, however, that this egocentric projection is not what contemporary theological recognitions of the ‘cry of the earth’ are about; it is also not what most of the biblical passages, in which the nonhuman environment speaks, are about. The voice(s) of the environment set it over against us and do not merely join it to us. Nonetheless, to quote David Horrell and Dominic Coad (who in turn are quoting conversations with Mike Higton), it takes quite a lot of work to explain why, to use their example, the idea of shouting stones (Luke 19:40) is ‘non-laughable’.Footnote 27 My tentative proposal here is that environmental pneumatology helps us to take reflections on the voices of creation a step or two beyond the dispensable metaphor, without collapsing into absurdity.

I suggest that the ‘cry of the earth’ heard in a context of environmental crisis can be understood as the Holy Spirit's reperformance of the gift of prophetic voice. In the power of the Holy Spirit, the ordinary and creaturely communicative capacity of the natural world is summoned into historically specific acts of communication which interrupt and transform history. The narratives of Spirit-given prophetic speech and hearing – not only the scriptural narratives in which nonhuman nature speaks, but also the core accounts of Spirit-given speech such as the words of the prophets and the miracle of Pentecost – can, perhaps, make sense of how nonhuman nature speaks and is heard.

Putting it like that, although it might bring more textual voices into the discussion, probably does not yet get us beyond the laughable. Stones and trees cannot actually speak. It is not, however, very controversial to say that stones and trees can and do make sense, in all sorts of publicly available ways (including ecological and theological ways). Nor is it particularly outlandish to say – although it is, of course, contestable – that ‘stones and trees make sense in various ways’ is a fact about them, and not merely a fact about us. We do not have to be committed to any particular account of natural theology to be able to acknowledge the environment's creaturely capacity to make sense – both to and for the human beings who encounter it, and within itself. To use the terminology from Augustine's De doctrina christiana, the nonhuman environment is full of natural signs – which, given the presence of an observer but still in virtue of their own integral properties and relationships, point beyond themselves.Footnote 28 Specific natural phenomena, as we observe and interact with them, tell us things; and in most contexts, from the scientific laboratory to everyday judgements about what the weather is going to be like, it is neither reasonable nor useful to reduce this ‘telling’ entirely to an act of meaning-making on the part of the observer. Clearly the observer/interpreter cannot be taken out of the picture; but nor can she constitute the whole.

However, in the contemporary context, to say that the environment has voice is not merely to allude to its general capacity to make sense or to tell us things. Despite the phrasing of the Earth Bible principle in terms suggestive of a general capacity (‘Earth is . . . able to’), the biblical readings which it generates, and other contemporary readings of the ‘cry of the earth’, point to specific instances of interruptive and historically transformative communication. And this is clearly not covered by the general claim that nonhuman nature makes sense. Stones and trees, as we know, cannot prophesy; they might tell us things, but they cannot, as it were, speak out.

The claim about the prophetic ‘cry of the earth’ would be that the general capacity for sense-making in the nonhuman environment is taken up in a particular context to become prophetic voice. This is not as different as might at first appear from instances of the gift of prophetic speech to human speakers. Isaiah could not speak out before he received his prophetic commission; and the disciples gathered in the upper room could not speak out before the descent of the Holy Spirit. They had voices and language (the general conditions of comprehensibility); but only ‘as the Spirit gave them utterance’ could they speak, and be heard, in such a way as to reflect God's purposes and draw themselves and others into conformity with God's purposes. The obvious analogy to draw here is, of course, between the ‘book of nature’ and the Bible. It is a commonplace, and a theologically plausible one, to say that the Bible speaks to people in a particular situation, becoming living Word through the power of the Holy Spirit in the context in which it is proclaimed, heard and received – activating and transforming the general capacity to ‘tell us things’ inherent in its character as text.Footnote 29

In the contemporary context, nonhuman nature speaks out in the power of the Spirit, and sounds prophetic laments and calls to repentance. It speaks, inter alia, to pronounce judgement on lived untruth; to warn of the likely or inevitable consequences of distorted patterns of action; to build up communities; and to attract with fruitfulness and beauty. Following the pattern of the prophets’ and apostles’ Spirit-filled speech, this ‘speaking out’ of nonhuman nature is public – even if it is not automatically heard by everyone – and is not radically discontinuous with its general conditions of comprehensibility (its everyday language; the sense that it makes, or can make, all the time). Thus, numerous different witnesses – from the European meteorologist to the Saharan cattle herder – can and do hear and pass on contemporary ‘cries of the earth’, using their ordinary understanding of the environment and their capacity to interpret what it is telling them.Footnote 30

This might start to sound like an unwarranted or unnecessary theologisation of an unremarkable phenomenon – the fact that we (the meteorologist or the cattle herder, or even I in my small English garden) can pick up, by observing the environment, that something is wrong. Now, it is arguable that this – the fact that we can pick up that something is wrong in the environment – does in itself deserve theological reflection, around for example the inescapability of our relation as creatures to our material environment, or the tendency to deny the vulnerability of which ‘picking up that something is wrong’ reminds us. The point about prophetic speech, however, is not merely, and sometimes not mainly, that it communicates surprising facts in surprising ways. It is also, or perhaps mainly, that it produces effects. It communicates God both by revealing who God is and by drawing the world into the life of God. It calls forth a response that is itself the gift of the Spirit. Both the speech and the response are thoroughly material and creaturely – and thoroughly spiritual.

My hypothesis is, then, that the emergence of environmental concern is not just a shift in human sensibilities or ways of being in the world, and not just a value-laden response to value-neutral scientific information. It is what happens when the environment and its members, filled with the Spirit, speak out in judgement and as a call to repentance and hope – and even, perhaps, when the environment speaks of loss and despair. This is one reason why it is possible to understand the turn to environmental concern in contemporary community life, ethics, politics and theology as a movement of the Spirit.

Clearly this account of the environment speaking out relies rather heavily on the idea that the work of the Holy Spirit in relation to prophetic or inspired speech is not only or primarily about the production of words – but at least as much about the shift in capacities for hearing and response which makes those words an effective and transformative speech-act. Various strands of reflection might support this position. An obvious place to start would be the long-standing association of the Holy Spirit with the appropriation of the Word of God – which does not need to be understood as an individual, internal or cognitive appropriation, but can rather be seen materially and historically as the fulfilment or making-effective of the Word. Thus, to cite a key example, the one who is anointed with the Holy Spirit both proclaims the year of the Lord's favour and, in the power of the Spirit, brings it about (Isa 61:1ff.; Luke 4:16ff.).Footnote 31 There is the textual opening, recognised by Calvin, to treat the Pentecost miracle as a miracle of hearing or understanding, as well as a miracle of speech (Acts 2:8).Footnote 32 As Michael Welker puts it, the Pentecost experience is not only of strange speech but also, and more importantly, of ‘unbelievable comprehensibility’, of ‘frightening clarity . . . in the midst of the received complexity and variety’.Footnote 33

Now, clearly the suggestion that the nonhuman environment might speak in the power of the Spirit involves an interpretative leap. There are relatively few scriptural texts (beyond Romans 8:19–22) which directly associate the speech of nonhuman nature with the Holy Spirit. The claim must rather be that the cries of the earth – both biblically and in the contemporary context – sound, and work, like the speech of the Spirit through the prophets.Footnote 34 Moreover, it is, I think, possible to make at least some connections between the gift of the Spirit manifested as prophecy beyond the current bounds of the community (for example, in the gift of prophecy to the Gentiles, Acts 10:44–8) on the one hand, and the idea of nonhuman nature prophesying, on the other. Both would reflect the freedom, universality and multiplicity of the Spirit's revelatory and communicative work – the Spirit blowing where she wills (John 3:8).

It is important, however, to counterbalance this latter point with the recognition that nonhuman nature is not distant, obscure or strange – the next circle outwards or the next step downwards, even further beyond the boundaries of the ‘known’ than are the Gentiles for Israel. Nonhuman nature is, rather, the environment – it is that which we live from and within, that to which we are in constant relation. In fact, when in the contemporary context the environment ‘speaks out’, it becomes not more familiar and close to us (as do the Gentiles whom Peter hears prophesying, or the foreign visitors who hear the apostles at Pentecost) but more strange or alienating. The final section of this article considers how pneumatological reflection on this point might develop into further responses to contemporary environmental concern.

The cry of the earth as cry of destruction

If the patterns and narratives in the texts about the Spirit's gift of speech to the Gentiles do not quite fit the present environmental situation, a more disturbing parallel might be found in the narrative of Jesus being driven by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness (Mark 1:12–13 and parallels). Here we might see a hint of the unmaking of expected patterns of environmental interaction which enables the voices of nonhuman nature to be heard and to take effect. This would bring us, however, to the possibility that the ‘cry of the earth’ in the contemporary context draws attention to the waste, failure and chaos that Donald MacKinnon saw reflected in the Spirit's action of driving Jesus into the wilderness – a prefigurement, as MacKinnon and also Rogers read it, of the way of the cross along which the Spirit also leads Jesus.Footnote 35

Perhaps, following MacKinnon's reflections, a space needs to be made in environmental pneumatology for reckoning with the fact that ‘Jesus failed in very much’Footnote 36 – and that the activity of the Spirit in Jesus’ mission tends to accentuate, rather than to mitigate, his confrontation with failure. The cry of the earth, given out and heard in the Spirit, might not only be the effective prophecy which brings about repentance and renewed communal life. It might also turn out to be a leading by the Spirit into chaos and fragmentation, a summons towards death. Receptivity to the Spirit, or hearing what the Spirit is saying, might entail – as it appears to in Jesus’ responses to the wilderness temptations – an acceptance of limitation and of the tragic failure that this limitation may entail.

This matters because contemporary environmental concern is accompanied – however optimistically or pessimistically one reads the available scientific evidence, and whichever prophetic voices one attends to – by the increasing likelihood of total or partial failure to maintain a habitable environment for many living creatures, including quite possibly the human creature.Footnote 37 There has been some debate, among those concerned about present environmental stress and future environmental crisis, about the appropriate stance to adopt in relation to the possibility or probability of large-scale ‘social, economic and ecological unravelling’.Footnote 38 There is also an important body of work exploring the reappropriation of Christianity's apocalyptic texts and narratives in contemporary envisionings of the future. Stefan Skrimshire has argued persuasively, for example, that a re-engagement with apocalyptic has the potential to draw environmental activism beyond the alternation of ‘frantic activity and mesmeric inactivity’, by enabling ‘a hope in the world to come . . . [alongside] acceptance of certain change including death’.Footnote 39

As a coda to the central argument of this article, I propose that a contemporary environmental pneumatology, developed on the basis of attention to the ‘cries of the earth’, can and should incorporate reflection on ‘certain change including death’. Indeed, I would suggest that it needs to do so as a counterbalance to the naïve approaches to divine providence which assume that providential care excludes the possibility of large-scale destruction, or a planetary future without humanity.Footnote 40 Attention to the contemporary voices of nonhuman nature, as prophetic voices in the power of the Spirit, may bring about confidence in God's faithfulness to God's creatures – but this faithfulness may well, as the narratives of the Spirit accompanying Jesus recall, be a faithfulness which encompasses failure and death. Nor is this in tension with the earlier discussion of the effectiveness of prophecy and the possibility of repentance, renewal and transformation; the Spirit driving Jesus into the wilderness and accompanying Jesus to the cross is also the Spirit in whom his words and signs have their transformative effect.

It is important to note, of course, that Jesus’ journey into the wilderness can be interpreted as a remaking as well as, or even more than, an unmaking of connections to the nonhuman environment. Bauckham, for example, persuasively interprets Jesus’ journey into the wilderness (in the Markan version) as an anticipation of the messianic reign, the peaceable kingdom of Isaiah 11 – humanity dwelling ‘with’ the wild animals in a reconciled community of creation.Footnote 41 I would argue, however, that in order to appreciate the force of this christological-eschatological vision we must simultaneously recognise – as indeed Bauckham does in his discussion – the extent to which the wilderness is (in context) strange and hostile territory in which food and rest are scarce, physical vulnerability is accentuated, and known patterns of human flourishing are indefinitely interrupted. The devil's temptation (in the Matthean and especially the Lukan narratives) is to circumvent temporal and creaturely limits in order to secure immediate success; and the power of the Holy Spirit works precisely with and within these temporal and creaturely limits. It seems likely – though contrary to facile public perceptions of Christianity's otherworldliness – that theological reflection on environmental concern could have a distinctive contribution to make in a steadfast refusal to deny limitation, vulnerability, death and loss.Footnote 42

A pneumatological reading of contemporary environmental stress and environmental concern, then, can go beyond both the attempt to create a ‘green’ Christian theology and the attempt to provide easy reassurance to those troubled by thoughts of environmental destruction. It can attend to the particular prophetic voices of nonhuman nature – and to the movements beyond the churches which respond to these voices. It can attend, and respond, to these voices from a perspective of trust in God's faithfulness to nature in the context of ‘certain change including death’. Describing contemporary environmental concern as a movement of the Holy Spirit, in this framework, is not an uncritical affirmation of everything said or done in the name of the preservation of the natural environment, nor an attempt to make theology belatedly relevant; it is, rather, a commitment to responding with discernment and hope to the unfolding history of the human and nonhuman environment as the history of God with the world.

References

1 This article is based on a plenary paper given at the Society for the Study of Theology annual conference in April 2012. My thinking was also informed by ongoing conversations with the editors and other authors of Scott, Peter and Northcott, Michael (eds), Systematic Theology for a Changing Climate (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar. I gratefully acknowledge the help and support of all the members of these academic communities.

2 Edwards, Denis, Breath of Life: A Theology of the Creator Spirit (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004)Google Scholar; Wallace, Mark I., Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence and the Renewal of Creation (Edinburgh: Continuum/T&T Clark, 1996)Google Scholar; Studebaker, Steven M., ‘The Spirit in Creation: A Unified Theology of Grace and Creation Care’, Zygon 43/4 (2008), pp. 936–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nothwehr, Dawn M., ‘The Ecological Spirit and Cosmic Mutuality: Engaging the Work of Denis Edwards’, in Hinze, Bradford E. (ed.), The Spirit in the Church and the World (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), pp. 167–88Google Scholar; Johnson, Elizabeth A., Women, Earth and Creator Spirit (Mahwah, NJ : Paulist, 1993)Google Scholar, especially ch. 5. See also the discussion in Jenkins, Willis, Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (Oxford: OUP, 2008), p. 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and for an early proposal concerning directions for environmental pneumatology, Pannenberg, Wolfhart ‘The Doctrine of the Spirit and the Task of a Theology of Nature’, Theology 75/1 (1972), pp. 8–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 On the former point, see most notably Moltmann, Jürgen, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM, 1992)Google Scholar; Welker, Michael, God the Spirit, trans. Hoffmeyer, John F. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994)Google Scholar. On the latter, see most recently Scott, Peter, Anti-Human Theology: Nature, Technology and the Post-Natural (London: SCM, 2010), especially ch. 9Google Scholar.

4 See Edwards, Breath of Life, e.g. in the theological summary on pp. 47–9; Welker, God the Spirit, pp. 158–82.

5 Wallace, Fragments of Redemption, is an extended example of an attempt to use pneumatology to redress the supposed environmental shortcomings of Christianity. I would concur with the judgement of those reviewers who have suggested that it is done at the price of the too-hasty rejection of too many useful conceptual and substantive features of the tradition: see Ward, Graham's review, Modern Theology 14/3 (1998), pp. 452–4Google Scholar.

6 See e.g. Bauckham, Richard's ‘Christological Eco-Narrative’, in The Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2009), ch. 5Google Scholar; Deane-Drummond, Celia's trinitarian and wisdom-focused account in Creation through Wisdom: Theology and the New Biology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2003)Google Scholar.

7 See for a discussion of why the traditional divine attributes do not imply God's remoteness from creation, Soskice, Janet Martin, ‘The Gift of the Name: Moses and the Burning Bush’, in Davies, Oliver and Turner, Denys (eds), Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp. 61–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I have yet to be convinced that ‘classical theism’ (which, apparently, uses the divine attributes to construct something remote, dualistic, monolithic, imperialistic and generally unpleasant, not to say unbiblical) exists in any actual text, even though its spectre has been stalking Western theology for a while.

8 Of course, especially if you are a Guardian reader, you probably bemoan the religious illiteracy of the chattering classes, and resolve, if you have any sense, never to read the comments on the ‘belief’ section of the website.

9 Jenkins, Ecologies of Grace, pp. 237–41.

10 There are affinities between Jenkins’ approach and that of environmental pragmatism (on which see e.g. Light, Andrew and Katz, Eric (eds), Environmental Pragmatism (London: Routledge, 1996))Google Scholar. For Jenkins’ critical account of environmental pragmatism, see Jenkins, ‘Environmental Pragmatism, Adaptive Management and Cultural Reform’, Ethics and the Environment 16/1 (2011), pp. 51–73.

11 On the theological importance of the idea (in scientific and/or biblical context) that the nonhuman environment has history, see for recent examples from different perspectives Conradie, Ernst, An Ecological Christian Anthropology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 26–30Google Scholar; Primavesi, Anne, Gaia and Climate Change: A Theology of Gift Events (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), e.g. p. 1Google Scholar. For an intriguing older example, see Barth, Karl's small-print discussion of the theological history of nonhuman land animals in Church Dogmatics, III/1 (The Doctrine of Creation, part 1), ed. Bromiley, Geoffrey W., trans. J. W. Edwards et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958), pp. 180–1Google Scholar.

12 On the contemporary importance of which, see Welker, God the Spirit, pp. 258–64.

13 Rogers, Eugene F. Jr., After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West (London: SCM, 2006), here p. 60Google Scholar.

14 Rogers, After the Spirit, pp. 57–9.

15 See on this Muers, Rachel, Living for the Future: Theological Ethics for Coming Generations (London: Continuum/T&T Clark, 2008), pp. 156–61Google Scholar.

16 As Rogers notes without much further discussion, parts of Bulgakov's work, transplanted from his rather different time and place to ours, read like a brief for Monsanto (Rogers, After the Spirit, p. 41); and Schmemann (whom Rogers quotes only approvingly), in his very rich discussion of the sacramental character of existence, makes the whole of material reality ‘one all-embracing banquet table’ for humanity: Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1998), p. 11. Anthropocentrism in a nature-focused pneumatology is likewise apparent in Pannenberg, ‘Doctrine of the Spirit’, although without the narrative and sacramental focus.

17 Boff, Leonardo, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997)Google Scholar; ‘The Cry of the Earth: A Pastoral Reflection on Climate Change by the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference’, 2009; World Council of Churches, ‘Climate Justice for All’, 2011, <http://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/wcc-programmes/justice-diakonia-and-responsibility-for-creation/climate-change-water/statement-to-cop17-un-climate-change-conference-durban.html>, accessed April 2014.

18 Earth Bible Team, ‘Guiding Ecojustice Principles’, in Habel, Norman C. (ed.), Readings from the Perspective of Earth (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), pp. 38–53Google Scholar. See also the discussion of the Earth Bible principles in Conradie, Ernst, ‘What on Earth is an Ecological Hermeneutics’, in Horrell, David G., Hunt, Cherryl, Southgate, Christopher and Stavrakopoulou, Francesca (eds), Ecological Hermeneutics: Biblical, Historical and Theological Perspectives (London: Continuum/T&T Clark, 2010), pp. 295–313Google Scholar.

19 See Bauckham, Richard, ‘Joining Creation's Praise of God’, Ecotheology 7 (2000), pp. 45–59Google Scholar, and the discussion of responses to Bauckham's work in Horrell, David G. and Coad, Dominic, ‘“The Stones Would Cry Out” (Luke 19:40): A Lukan Contribution to a Hermeneutics of Creation's Praise’, Scottish Journal of Theology 64/1 (2010), pp. 29–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Hardy, Daniel W. and Ford, David F., Jubilate: Theology in Praise (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1984), p. 82Google Scholar.

20 In some of the best-known examples, the whole of creation – ending with humanity – praises God in Ps 148; the heavens declare God's glory in Ps 19:1–4, 89:5; the heavens, earth, sea and trees express rejoicing before God in Ps 96:11–12; the mountains, hills and trees rejoice at the liberation of Israel in Isa 55:12.

21 Examples include the mourning land in Jer 4:28 and 12:4, Hos 4:3, Joel 1:10, and the lament of the wild animals in Joel 1:18, 20.

22 See e.g. the stones’ cry against those who ‘build a town by bloodshed’ in Habbakuk 2:11–12, and the discussion of this passage in Horrell and Coad, ‘Stones Would Cry Out’, pp. 33–4. For reflections on the ecological implications of the trees’ celebration of Assyria's fall in Isa 14:8, see Brueggemann, Walter, Isaiah 1–39 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1998), p. 127Google Scholar; Northcott, Michael, A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2007), p. 106Google Scholar. Note also that nature's rejoicing in Ps 96:11–12 is linked closely to God's execution of justice (see for a discussion of this Wink, Walter, Unmasking the Powers (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1986), p. 163)Google Scholar.

23 It is not part of the remit of this article to resolve debates over the validity or otherwise of ‘ecological’ interpretations of Rom 8 – for recent accounts of which, see Brendan Byrne, ‘An Ecological Reading of Romans 8:19–22: Problems and Possibilities’, in Horrell et al., Ecological Hermeneutics, pp. 83–93; Hunt, Cherryl, Horrell, David G. and Southgate, Christopher, ‘An Environmental Mantra? Ecological Interest in Romans 8.19–23 and a Modest Proposal for its Narrative Interpretation’, Journal of Theological Studies 59/2 (2008), pp. 546–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 A particularly clear example is Ps 96:11–12. Bauckham describes many of the ‘nature speaking’ texts as eschatological in character – see e.g. his discussion of Ps 148, Bible and Ecology, p. 82.

25 One example being the shouting stones in Habbakuk and Luke – see n. 19 above.

26 Although Ruskin (referring to Isa 14:8 and 55:12) excuses the biblical writers for their pathetic fallacy because of the overwhelming experience of the ‘presence of Deity’. Ruskin, John, ‘Of the Pathetic Fallacy’, in Modern Painters, part III (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1856), pp. 157–72, §14Google Scholar.

27 Horrell and Coad, ‘Stones Would Cry Out’, p. 43.

28 Indeed, as Susannah Ticciati has argued following John Deely, Augustine's account of signification in nature ‘transcend[s] the divide between nature and culture’ such that signification – centrally, the triadic relation between sign, observer and the thing signified – ‘pervades the universe’. Ticciati, Susannah, ‘The Apophatic Potential of Augustine's De doctrina christiana: Creatures as Signs of God’, in Nelstrop, Louise and Podmore, Simon (eds), Christian Mysticism and Incarnational Theology: Between Transcendence and Immanence (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 165–76Google Scholar. See Deely, John, Augustine and Poinsot: The Protosemiotic Development (Scranton, PA, and London: University of Scranton Press, 2009)Google Scholar. I am grateful to Dr Ticciati for discussions of these issues. For a comparable account of the pervasiveness of semiosis in nature, in this case following Charles Sanders Peirce, see Robinson, Andrew, God and the World of Signs: Trinity, Evolution and the Metaphysical Semiotics of C. S. Peirce (Leiden: Brill, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 I am grateful to the late Christopher Jones for a discussion of this point. Clearly there are risks in the analogy between the ‘book of nature’ and the ‘book of scripture’; historically, it has tended to presume in each case a fixed text which, while subject to different interpretations, was itself essentially unchanging. In the case of nonhuman nature, this is clearly not a tenable approach. However, it is also possible that shifts of emphasis in biblical scholarship, and in the theological work that enters into dialogue with it, might enable a changing book of scripture (as it is received and read in the communities for which it operates as scripture) to be drawn into new comparisons with a changing natural environment.

30 See e.g. the impressive and sobering assembly of witnesses, from both the global South and the global North, in Northcott, Moral Climate, ch. 1. For an example of intercultural dialogue in response to climate change, see Deane-Drummond, Celia, ‘A Case for Collective Conscience: Climategate, COP-15 and Climate Justice’, Studies in Christian Ethics 24/1 (2011), pp. 5–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 See the extended discussion of this and similar passages in Welker, God the Spirit, pp. 108–24, which helpfully emphasises the concrete instantiation, in particular contexts, of the righteousness proclaimed by the one who bears the Spirit.

32 John Calvin, Commentary on Acts on 2:4. The reading of Pentecost as miracle of hearing is, of course, extremely controversial in the context of current debates about glossolalia and xenolalia. If we step back from these debates, however, it can perhaps be agreed that the narrative of Pentecost is not new speech on its own, but transformed speaking and hearing giving rise to new possibilities of shared existence – the concluding narrative of repentance and common life in Acts 2:37–47.

33 Welker, God the Spirit, pp. 232, 233.

34 There are intriguing interpretative possibilities in Joel 2:28ff. – particularly significant of course because of its association with Pentecost – where the pouring out of the Spirit on ‘all flesh’ (which elsewhere can mean all living beings, even though in this context its most obvious reference is to humans; see on this Barton, John, Joel and Obadiah (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), p. 96)Google Scholar is linked both to the unprecedented extension of prophetic speech and to natural and cosmic phenomena. Along the lines of my earlier comments – trees cannot really prophesy, but then, in Joel's context, neither could maidservants. Disappointingly but unsurprisingly, the scholarly consensus is decisively against the commentator who proposed that in Joel 2:28 the Spirit of God is being poured out on locusts: Karl August Credner, Der Prophet Joel (Halle, 1831).

35 See the discussion in Rogers, After the Spirit, pp. 163–8, of MacKinnon's reflections on the temptations and failure of Jesus in ‘The Relation of the Doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity’, in Themes in Theology: The Three-Fold Cord: Essays in Philosophy, Politics and Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1987), pp. 145–67, here pp.154, 162–3. Rogers, departing from his practice in the rest of the book, does not say anything about the non-identical repetition of this narrative (the Spirit ‘driving’ Jesus into the wilderness) in history. I suspect that the ‘much further treatment’ of the pneumatological and trinitarian implications of this text, for which MacKinnon called (‘Incarnation and Trinity’, p. 154), has not yet been completed.

36 MacKinnon, ‘Incarnation and Trinity’, p. 154.

37 Looking simply at material evidence concerning the future of the global environment, it is widely acknowledged e.g. that an unusually rapid and irreversible loss of species – labelled the ‘sixth mass extinction’ – is already occurring and is linked in numerous ways to human-made changes to the environment. See Anthony D. Barnosky et al., ‘Has Earth's Sixth Mass Extinction Event Already Arrived?’, Nature 471 (March 2011), pp. 51–7. Predictions about the possible, likely or inevitable scale of planetary warming vary enormously, but reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change consistently point with a high level of confidence to significant disruptions in global weather patterns in the twenty-first century – even if large-scale action is taken now to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. See IPCC Core Writing Team, Pachauri, R. K. and Reisinger, A. (eds), Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Geneva: IPCC, 2007)Google Scholar.

38 Kingsnorth, Paul and Hine, Dougald, Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (www.dark-mountain.net)Google Scholar. In the UK, the Dark Mountain project – whose manifesto continues ‘All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it’ – has been one of several recent foci for debates about the environmental movement's confrontation with the prospect of environmental disaster. See the response to the manifesto by George Monbiot, ‘I share their despair, but I’m not quite ready to climb the Dark Mountain’, Guardian, 10 May 2010.

39 Skrimshire, Stefan, ’What are we Waiting for? Climate Change and the Narrative of Apocalypse’, in Bergmann, Sigurd and Gerden, Dieter (eds), Religion and Dangerous Environmental Change (Berlin: Li-Verlag, 2009), pp. 205–26, here p. 221Google Scholar.

40 On presenting an earlier version of this article I was questioned about the expression of divine election in the Noahide covenant (Gen 9:8–17) and its implications for the limits of environmental destruction. An adequate response would, I think, have to combine a proper openness to the surprising future outworkings of God's history with the world, on the one hand, with the recognition on the other hand that election – understood through a christological lens – can be election to failure and death.

41 Bauckham, Richard, ‘Jesus and the Wild Animals (Mark 1:13): A Christological Image for an Ecological Age’, in Green, Joel B. and Turner, Mark (eds), Jesus of Nazareth: Lord and Christ. Essays on the Historical Jesus and New Testament Christology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 3–21Google Scholar. I am grateful to Matthew Barton for discussions of this.

42 John Bradbury's as-yet-unpublished christological reflections on the death of the church have helped to shape this discussion – see http://johnpbradbury.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/christmas-reflections-on-death.html (accessed April 2014).