It is the ecofeminist vision of Rev. Adler that brings us to another aspect of Lutheran theology that useful in addressing the daunting systems that are leading to ecological destruction. As Rev. Adler explains, the cross is where Lutherans must turn to truly grapple with an overwhelmingly complex and mammoth issue like fracking:
I’ve had serious bouts of depression this year. When I realize the enormity of this problem. And it’s like, the deeper you go down into the rabbit hole and you start doing research into the ways that the oil and gas industry, the fossil fuels industry, has manipulated this country, and really the whole global system. […] It has a utilitarian view of human being and nature. It sometimes sends me into tailspin. I feel like I’m at the foot of the cross and watching an eco-crucifixion. The only thing that keeps me going is my faith, where I look at the story of the women, who were faithfully at the foot of the cross. I’m an ecofeminist, so my work is informed by an understanding that the oppression of the earth and the oppression of women are conjoined.
She explains that it is the Lutheran theology of cross that helps her to make sense of her role in addressing fracking and all of the world’s interlinked ecological dilemmas. She explicates this piece of Lutheran theology and describes how it ties into her current situation:
And Lutherans have what’s called a ‘theology of the cross.’ It’s the opposite of the ‘theology of glory’. The ‘theology of glory’ says that our God is great, and magnificent and wonderful. And the evidence of that is how successful I am, or how much faith I have, or how strong my church is. You know, it’s how good we are reflects how good God is. Whereas the Lutheran theology of the cross says God is found in the least expected place: On the cross. Dead. No hope. That’s where God is. Because the resurrection that comes out of that transforms everything that is death giving and just turns it inside out and flips it around and [here is] this amazing surprise. So, instead of chasing after the things that human beings thing are going to get us what we want, we are called to go to those apparently God-forsaken places and people, because that’s where Jesus is. Jesus said in Mt. 25: ‘Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.’ So I look at the least of these in this situation and I see it as every animal and plant on that previously protected site in the state forest that has been clear-cut. Who is speaking for them? That’s our job is to speak for that community and say that they were meant to be protected and what you’re doing is a kind of genocide. To the woman who watched her husband sign this lease and now their well is contaminated, and their children have sores and now she has
headaches that she cannot explain and her horses are dying. And her dog’s hair is falling out. And she’s completely powerless. They can’t sell their land, because no one wants to buy it. They can’t move, because they don’t have any money.
Rev. Adler demonstrates how a pastor can translate an ancient doctrine into vivid stories, to transpose the face of a suffering Christ onto the women, children, animals, and plants she describes. The Lutheran theology of the cross is a very specific doctrine that warns against a “theology of glory” that abstracts God from his action in history, as Kleinhas reiterates. “A theology of glory looks up and says, ‘God’s in heaven and all’s well with the world,’” Kleinhas explains. In contrast, a Lutheran theology of the cross, “keeps its feet firmly planted on our broken Earth and says, ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to God.’”141 God chooses to put
aside diving characteristics and suffered from human abuse. “Christians confess that God’s saving power works precisely thought such weakness (1 Cor. 1:23-25, 2 Cor. 12:9),” Klienhas concludes.142
This does not mean that such suffering is what every creature should aspire to—far from it. Rather, as Moe Loebeda notes:
God is drawn into brokenness in this world—including the complicity of some people with economic ways that exploit others—and there God becomes lifesaving power incarnate. Luther's theology of the cross and of Christ indwelling and empowering the believing community, together, render the promise without which, to open ones eyes to the data of despair might be to drown in it. That ‘Christ […] fills all things’ and is present particularly in sites of suffering enables us to acknowledge soul-searing economic brutalities that must be faced if we are to resist neo-liberal economic globalization, and convert to
141 Klienhas, 4.
economic ways that enable just and sustainable communities and Earth community for generations to come.143
This theology of the cross has been a balm to Lutherans throughout history during dark times. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, while writing from his cell in a Nazi prison, facing the tyrannies of this age, said “May God in his mercy lead us through these times; but above all, may he lead us to
himself.”144 To Bonhoeffer, only by living fully in the world, with all its death and pain, can one
learn to have faith. In doing so “we throw ourselves completely in the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world—watching with Christ in Gethsemane.”145 We watch for renewal in the midst of suffering.
But the theology of the cross encompasses more than just the events of Good Friday, for after death came Christ’s resurrection, the most magnificent of renewals according to Christian tradition. Lutherans believe, as most Christians do, that it is the Easter renewal—a cosmic renewal—that gives Christians faith that death is far from victorious. God can bring life back into the bleakest of denuded landscapes, to the most toxic of rivers, to the most cancerous of bodies. According to Waldkoenig, the work of Christ “attests to and establishes the reliable salvation of God in the midst of it all.”146 God is in midst of the well pad, the midst of the
tainted river, and in midst of the house of the unemployed woman who needs a job—if we are attuned and open to the Spirit’s redemptive presence. “The creative instability in scenes of grace evokes a God beyond fathoming; but with the means of grace, creative instability frames and heightens the sufficiency of saving grace in Christ.”147 It is this God that Rev. Adler calls
upon for strength in the face of fracking, on behalf of the distressed woman and the distressed woodland.
143 Moe-Loebeda, “God ‘Flowing…,” 4.
144 Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Letters and Papers from Prison: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works. Fortress Press, 2010: 370. 145 Bonhoeffer, 369.
146 Waldkoenig, 333. 147 Ibid., 333.
Fig. 11: Lutheran Church in Milton (Union County); Source: Lena Connor