Benedict XVI's Cosmic Soteriology and Environmentalism

Pope Benedict XVI is beyond doubt a world class theologian.  His theology (thanks in large part to Ignatius Press) is highly accessible to the English-speaking world and has had a profound impact on society.  He has been described as the "greenest pope in history" thanks to his advocacy of environmentalism and his emphasis on respect for creation.¹  In his encyclical letter Caritas in Veritate, the pontiff writes, "The Church has a responsibility towards creation and she must assert this responsibility in the public sphere."²

Crater Lake, Oregon
CC image courtesy of Stuart Seeger on Flickr

The underpinnings of the pontiff's environmentalism are highly theological.  For Benedict, the entire cosmos shares in the salvation brought about by Christ.  He describes the cosmic scope of salvation in the final paragraph of Eschatology:

Heaven will only be complete when all the members of the Lord’s body are gathered in.  Such completion on the part of the body of Christ includes, as we have seen, the ‘resurrection of the flesh.’  It is called the ‘Parousia’ inasmuch as then the presence of Christ, so far only inaugurated among us, will reach its fulness and encompass all those who are to be saved and the whole cosmos with them.  And so heaven comes in two historical stages.  The Lord’s exaltation gives rise to the new unity of God with man, and hence to heaven.  The perfecting of the Lord’s body in the pleroma of the ‘whole Christ’ brings heaven to its true cosmic completion.  Let us say it once more before we end: the individual’s salvation is whole and entire only when the salvation of the cosmos and all the elect has come to full fruition.  For the redeemed are not simply adjacent to each other in heaven.  Rather, in their being together as the one Christ, they are heaven.  In that moment, the whole creation will become song.  It will be a single act in which, forgetful of self, the individual will break through the limits of being into the whole, and the whole take up its dwelling in the individual.  It will be joy in which all questioning is resolved and satisfied.³

The basis for Benedict's insistence that human beings respect creation is that both humanity and the rest of creation share the same destiny, a destiny designed by God and fulfilled in Christ.

In addition to his ecological moral injunctions, Benedict explicitly associates environmental issues with life issues and argues that the two are inseparable:

The deterioration of nature is in fact closely connected to the culture that shapes human coexistence: when “human ecology” is respected within society, environmental ecology also benefits. Just as human virtues are interrelated, such that the weakening of one places others at risk, so the ecological system is based on respect for a plan that affects both the health of society and its good relationship with nature . . . If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology. It is contradictory to insist that future generations respect the natural environment when our educational systems and laws do not help them to respect themselves. The book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development. Our duties towards the environment are linked to our duties towards the human person, considered in himself and in relation to others. It would be wrong to uphold one set of duties while trampling on the other. Herein lies a grave contradiction in our mentality and practice today: one which demeans the person, disrupts the environment and damages society.⁴

Human beings need to respect the environment but they cannot respect it unless they respect their own humanity.  Abortion, euthanasia, and the exploitation of human beings for the sake of technological development cannot be ignored at the expense of the exploitation of the earth - these two tasks are mutually interrelated.  One cannot truly care about the environment if one is unconcerned that there are millions of abortions occurring in our own country, and one cannot truly care about human beings if one is unconcerned about the way companies and individuals harm the environment through the dumping of chemical wastes and other ecological disasters that occur throughout the world.  Benedict is right to see that these two concerns are connected.  We must, as a Church destined for salvation in Christ with the rest of creation, care for creation too, and fulfill our Adamic role as stewards of creation.

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1. Benedict XVI and Woodeene Koenig-Bricker, Ten Commandments for the Environment: Pope Benedict XVI Speaks Out for Creation and Justice (Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria, 2009), 8.^↩

2. Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009), 51. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate_en.html.^↩

3. Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, trans. Michael Waldstein, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 237-238.^↩

4. Caritas in Veritate, 51.^↩

Thoughts on Cosmic Soteriology

The caption under the Rublev icon of the crucifixion, the permanent image to the right of my blog posts, expresses the cosmic import of the sacrificial death of Jesus.  According to St. Paul, "all things" (Col. 1:20) were reconciled through the blood of Jesus.  What does this mean?  One way of responding to this question would be to argue that this passage alludes to Gen. 3:16-19, which indicates that there was a rupture of the prelapsarian harmony that existed between human beings and the rest of creation.  This interpretation, however, fails to explain some of the problems that arise when considering some of the discoveries of modern science.

According to modern cosmology, the Big Bang occurred approximately 13.7 billion years ago.  It preexisted human beings by billions of years.  Since the universe was presumably as imperfect before human beings came onto the scene as it was after, how can the primary meaning of cosmic soteriology be that the relationship between human beings and the created order is healed?

Crab Nebula, CC Image courtesy of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center on Flickr¹

Cosmic soteriology may be approached in at least two ways.  The first is to consider how the universe itself is saved and the second is to consider cosmic soteriology in light of the role of human beings.  In the first approach, the Christian faith says that the universe will be saved (whatever this entails) through the action of God as St. Paul writes in Colossians.  In the following passage from his letter to the Romans, Paul develops his cosmic soteriology further and explains what the universe will be saved from:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience (Rom. 8:20-25, RSV).

According to Paul, the universe is "subjected to futility" (8:20) and "will be set free from its bondage to decay" (8:21).  The scientific term that corresponds to what Paul is describing in this passage is entropy, i.e. the principle that left to itself, a system will tend towards a maximum state of disorder.  Paul links entropy with human existence in the present universe and insists that the eschatologies of human beings and of the universe are intertwined.  Both the universe and human beings were "subjected to futility" and both will obtain redemption, a redemption that occurs through the blood of Christ (Col. 1:20).

This passage resonates with the following prophecy from the book of Revelation: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away" (Rev. 21:1, RSV).  One can only speculate as to what this really means since it is beyond the understanding of human beings to know in any great detail what is to come (one has only to look to weathermen to see that this is true).  This is merely speculative, but I believe that it is a possibility that through God's action there will be a new stage of of the evolution of the universe that would allow for a quasi-physical human existence (i.e. in a glorified body) in a universe that shares a certain continuity with the old, just as our glorified bodies will share a certain continuity with our material bodies today.

Throughout the history of Christianity, human beings have been the primary focus of soteriology. Human beings are on the cutting edge of the evolution of the universe and are the crown of creation. Yet, human beings exist within the context of the universe - we cannot exist apart from the universe, regardless of our capabilities of abstraction.  Commenting on Romans 8, Adrienne von Speyr, the close friend of Hans Urs von Balthasar, expounds on the interconnectedness of human beings and the universe:

Even in the deepest solitude [man] cannot think of himself as being so exclusive as to have the promise of salvation for himself while perdition is threatening the created world.  Plants and animals belong to the sphere of his life, the wide earth, the intimacy of a home, the familiarity of a landscape.  He cannot separate himself from it even when he is a captive.  The world shares his destiny.  If he is imprisoned, so is the world.  When he, a captive, calls for liberation, he paints it in the images of the created world that has become inaccessible to him and is thus more than ever companion of his captivity and loneliness, thus accentuating his aloneness even more.  And as the whole of creation shares in the vanity, it also shares in the hope.  And hope means for creation in all its beauty and wildness, in its captivity, its dream of freedom, access to the Creator, to his presence and his love.  God showed the same love on the first day of creation that he showed on the Sabbath-day; he said: ‘It is very good’ to everything: the fishes and birds, the animals and man.²

A human being that is not in the universe is not a human being.  Similarly, the universe cannot be the universe as it is today without human beings.  The quote above suggests that human beings and the universe are saved together in one sweeping salvific motion of cosmic magnitude originating in the grace of Jesus Christ.  The salvation of human beings occurs in the context of the salvation of the cosmos, and human beings will be glorified together with the universe.

Von Balthasar has a similar view as von Speyr.  Celia Deane-Drummond comments on von Balthasar's vision of eschatology for creation: “While [von Balthasar] is somewhat hesitant in spelling out the eschatological future in any detail, he is clear that creation as a whole is the object of future glory while also sharing in a ‘radical dying and rising’.”³  In other words, according to von Balthasar, the universe will follow in the footsteps of Jesus' suffering, death and and resurrection.  This seems logically congruent with the Scriptures since it is through the cross that the world (cosmos in Greek) is saved:

[A]s Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.  For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him (John 3:14-17, RSV).

Although the details of what is to come are shrouded in mystery, the subject of the salvation and glorification of the universe and the participation of human beings in cosmic redemption provides ample material to contemplate and think about. 

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       1. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU).^↩

       2. Adrienne von Speyr, The Victory of Love: A Meditation on Romans 8, trans. Sister Lucia Wiedenhöver, O.C.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990), 66.^↩
 

       3. Celia Deane-Drummond, “The Breadth of Glory: A Trinitarian Eschatology for the Earth through Critical Engagement with Hans Urs von Balthasar,”  International Journal of Systematic Theology 12 no. 1 (January 2010): 54-55.^↩