The Liberating Theology of a planet’s beneficence: a possibility

Abstract

Current climate crises could be considered an end of times as we have known them, requiring the human species as stewards of Creation, to make revolutionary changes to how the planet has been mis treated. Are we – the people of the twenty-first century Anthropocene age – also capable of a ‘Copernican revolution [evident] in Paul’s thinking’ (Witherington 2005: 40) to see the planet as sacred and through Christ’s wisdom as part of divine Creation? Do the peoples of the world have the capacity to re-store the planet through this reverential prism? Or – disassociated from our source – are we set at rapid speed to a catastrophic end, driven by neo-liberal greed and post-modern ‘idolatry’ (Inc. 11: 61 in Behr), dressed up as the necessary economics of late capitalism? It seems that the worries of Athanasius (On the Incarnation) in the early Christian Church (4^th C) are as relevant today as they were then, even if the context differed.