In summary, the insights of deep incarnational theology assert the vast scale of the universe and the process of evolution and so extend the breadth of scope of human existence and meaning from the local to the global. To assert that all that exists is interconnected is to invite and invoke action to heal and restore the environment. The understanding that the love of God is revealed through the event of the Incarnation and the process of creation extends the depth of meaning of existence and affirms the validity of central Christian claims. By understanding the Incarnation in a way which is
comprehensible within a scientifically informed culture, deep incarnational ideas resonate strongly with a positive and hopeful attitude to the environment.
Thus a fifth ecochristological thesis claims that:
Deep incarnational theology is an ecochristologically rich expression of the universal meaning of the Incarnation.
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The fifth thesis assumes and adopts the two initial and foundational theses. Deep
incarnation has a central understanding that God is embedded in the natural world thereby echoes the immanent emphasis made in the process-panentheist understanding (thesis three). It also utilises the understandings of cosmology and (especially) evolutionary theory and thereby is involved in the work of incorporating scientific understandings into Christian theology (thesis four).
This fifth thesis is the first of three which relate the Incarnation specifically to ecological Christology. The doctrine of creation has an especially significant place in both the thought of Peacocke and in ecological theology, and undergirding the claim of this fifth thesis is the fact of an implicit integration between the doctrines of creation and
incarnation. A synthesis of creation and incarnation is important for ecological Christology for three reasons.
First, both the doctrines of creation and incarnation make claims about God and the natural world, about grace and nature. For both Pittenger and Peacocke the theory of evolution has profound theological meaning because it expresses the fact that the
universe operates through a process of discontinuity-within-continuity. In the process of creation, freedom and chance operate within broader laws. A parallel action occurs in the Incarnation where the distinctive historical, geographical and biophysical context of Jesus’ life and death is a universal expression of the divine. The Incarnation is both continuous and discontinuous with the context of the life of Jesus and of the cosmos, and God expresses God’s own nature implicitly in the ongoing creative process and explicitly in Jesus’ life death and resurrection.88 Incarnation and creation, as articulated by
Pittenger and Peacocke in terms of God as love and consummation, express the way that God’s grace, through Christ and in the world, unites the entire cosmos.
This conjoining of the two doctrines helps to counter the tendency within ecological theology to focus on creation somewhat at the expense of Incarnation. It also facilitates a
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stronger emphasis on the meaning of the divine in relation to the natural world, avoiding what has commonly been an exclusively or primarily divine-human emphasis in Christian thought. However, the contrary focus on creation which is sometimes made in
ecotheology can so emphasise the divine in relation to other-than-human-nature that the place of human beings can become equivocal. The solution to this dilemma is to integrate the doctrines of creation and Incarnation as a means of affirming the triangular paradigm of God-nature-humankind. This understanding affirms human beings as part of nature but also acknowledges that we have a complex and unequal power relationship with non- human nature.
The second reason why it is important for ecochristology to integrate creation and incarnation is that together they can articulate the ecologically positive idea that God is expressed in and embodied within matter. Jesus of Nazareth, constituted of universally occurring elements, represents an affinity between human beings and the entire physical cosmos. For Pittenger, at the core of God’s activity in the cosmos is the Love which is the root-attribute of God. For Peacocke, God expresses Godself and effects God’s purposes through matter. In both cases, the dual expressions of creation and Incarnation disclose something of the nature of God and indicate meaning and value about the material world. If matter is so fundamental that God expresses Godself through it in the Incarnation, then this makes a very high claim for the value and meaning of the physical cosmos. God’s purposes for creation are intricately linked with Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. The third important reason to conjoin creation and incarnation is that it connects the person of Jesus with the current environmental context. Pittenger’s discussion of the way that Jesus is a product of his context, along with his insistence that the church is the outcome of all that Jesus was and has meant to the Christian community, suggests that there is always a connection between Jesus Christ and the present context. Similarly, and in more ecologically explicit terms, the insights of evolutionary theory which extend the scale and scope of human existence from the local to the entire cosmos enlarges our physical context. To accept, affirm and learn from our immediate material surroundings,
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to claim status and value for them, and to situate them in a wider context is an important basis for environmental statements and action. Environmental metanoia involves
changing personal habits and altering social and economic systems. At the most basic level, this involves ‘a strong sense of solidarity with the matrix of material life.’89 The physicality of the ministry, life, death and resurrection of Jesus points to the meaning of the physical world which surrounds us and implicitly condemns our currently degraded environmental context. The strongly material and bodily aspect of Christianity is
expressed in the tangible, physical, dimension of Jesus’ work, indicated in his actions of healing and feeding, in his suffering and death on the cross, and his bodily resurrection. The understanding of deep incarnation connects the person of Jesus with our present situation in a way which is theologically coherent and ethically compelling.
The drawing together of creation and incarnation, as is done by Pittenger and Peacocke in relation to God’s love and to the meaning of the material world, is extremely relevant to ecological Christology. Evolutionary understanding has led to a greater appreciation of the commonality in composition between human beings and the rest of the universe. This helps us to see that Jesus, like other human beings, bears the marks of evolutionary history both in a general way, being continuous with the rest of creation, and specifically in terms of being the individual biophysical entity that he was. In the case of both
thinkers, a strong connection between the doctrines of creation and incarnation resembles the claim of deep incarnational theology that the character of matter is so foundational and so important that God has expressed Godself in it through Jesus of Nazareth. According to the writer of John’s Gospel, the event of the Incarnation occurred because ‘God so loved the world.’ This phrase has often seemed to speak of human spiritual salvation, yet in an era of environmental collapse it is a phrase whose meaning might be extended to include and affirm the physical well-being of the multitude of life forms and of the planet which supports them. Although Pittenger’s emphasis is on the love of God
for the world, while Peacocke focuses more strongly on the love of God for the world, in
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both cases the universal aspect of the Incarnation is articulated in a way which is ecologically relevant.
The universal dimension of the Incarnation has been a primary focus of this chapter. However, as was discussed in Chapter 1, an ecological ethos calls for attention to the particular as well as the general both in light of the over-emphasis on the abstract and the general (which occurs both in Christian thought and in Western culture in general) and the relative neglect given to the ecologically significant category of what is tangible, local, specific and material. In contrast, the following chapter concentrates on the particularity of the Incarnation.
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