I am attending the Society for the Study of Theology conference at Warwick university. This year’s subject is ‘The End of the World’
In the first plenary, David Clough summarised his paper ‘The End of Creatures‘ with a further interaction from Marilu Bosoms and questions from the room and online delegates. Here are my disjointed notes.
The ‘end of the world has a history’ – survivors of Hiroshima spoke about it as such. Shierry Weber Nicholson speaks of trauma as ‘world-ending’ for the victims. Clough – ‘The ending of myriad human worlds that have come and gone’
The key question: ‘Who’s world is ending?’
1. A theology committed to God as creator of all that is must attend to the whole creation
2. ‘It’s all about us’ must be contested
Creatures and environments, and humans amongst them. Ps 104 and the impact of human industrial activities. An anthropogenic mass-extinction event. Ps. 104 written well after the ‘Quaternary Megafauna Extinction that made around half of large land mammals extinct.’ Gen 1-2 / Isaiah 11
99% extinction. Theology done on the grounds of creatures which have come to an end.
Scotus’ haeccity / G M Hopkins
Teilhard de chardin’s view of history – ends
‘God’s work of redemption is inclusive of all creatures’
RESPONSE FROM MARILU BOSOMS
Q. What are other compelling theological questions for caring for creation?
Animals reveal more facets of God’s fullness and reveal ways of making God known. Take Job’s command to ‘ask the beasts’ seriously.
The medieval emphasis – Aquinas ‘For God brought many things into being… might be supplied by another.’ [is this dependent upon scholastic metaphysics]
What does it mean to praise the creator of all with the knowledge of human complicity in their disappearance?
CLOUGH’S RESPONSE
At heart he is an ethicist – the exploration should extend beyond the reality of the praise psalms to the actual content of them.
Resistance to formulating theological explanations patterned upon Teilard. Rather focus upon the capacity – God making time and place for creatures, as much pre-comet as post. Thinking redemption in a more than human sense.
QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR
1. Ps. 104 re. God having a secure place for all – Divine failure rates! Do we only care about creatures when they live to a certain maturity level? Quite close to the problem of evil which we have strong reasons for not addressing theologically (clough)
2. What place do these creatures have for you in eschatological perspective? Descartes denied animal souls in order to ensure that Heaven remained a viable Christian doctrine. Because there would be too many bugs. Clough’s vision, by contrast is ‘ridiculously exuberant and maximally inclusive’.
3. Further to the previous: How does the non-competitive nature of God’s care apply to viruses and bacteria? Conservatively, one might say that viruses exist right at the boundary of living and unliving. Clough is ‘allegeric’ to this. A Christian theology cannot get by without reference to the fallenness of creatureliness. Irreconcilable conflict between human and non-human beings. Liberation from bondage must entail harmonious co-existence of creatures.
4. The questions of scale and cheerfulness – Clough’s greatest criticism is for those at the high extremes of both of these. Praise where there is simultaneously sorrow and joy? John Wesley’s sermon ‘The New Creation’ where he mourns that two thirds of creatures can only get by by taking the lives of others. Clough wonders whether this comes over as a bit gnostic – a theologian who is not really into the world as we find it. He thinks not; it is an impassioned love for fellow-creatures which drives the project. Therefore, he remains in love and sorrow and lament rather than tragedy.
5. An invitation for C to expand on his understanding of sin. The Priestly author of Genesis 6 describes it as bloodshed. The other instance of describing it as deficit – inability to now read the book of nature, which is what Paul says. In on animals 1 – C has a passage for describing sin as transcending the human sphere – sin in the more-than-human realm. Ref. Jane Goodall and chimpanze infanticide (and the shock exhibited by the animals in the community).
6. Does the agrarian nature of Abrahamic… self-domestication of dogs and humans: was agriculture ‘human domestication’? Hunter-gatherer vs agrarian. How did the vegan visions of Genesis 1-2 and Isaiah 11 come from an agrarian society using animals for food? The distance between their lived experiences and God’s will. Abolition of argriculture? No!
7. Death. Psalm 104 – God gives life, God takes life. What is so awful about this? What is the difference between dying one by one or mass extinction. How serious is death if there is an ‘exuberant’ future? C says the difference between ethicists concerned with an animals and those with environments: The destruction of a ‘mode and possibility’ of a way of living is the difference. DF – What’s your theology of death?
8. What does good and bad intervention look like? Reconceiving what good living alongside other creatures looks like. We exoticise it – elephants rather than badgers. In On Animals vol 2 a consideration of contexts – Cheltenham races where four horses died this year. 50-100,000 dogs destroyed in the UK last year in consequence of the settlement on companionship.
9. The transformation of relationships between predators and prey in the new creation – does predation become play?
10. Sympathetic refusal of telelogical theodicies – Christology and salvation history does not need to fall with the rejection of theodicy.
11. Regarding animal sacrfice, the sacrificial system and fulfilment in Christ. C – It is not a discounting – the astonishingly radical idea that the only way to kill an animal is under sacrificial, priestly regulation. The ability of the animal to mediate between human and God. Is this an aspect which will be redeemed.
12. Ben Quash quoted Arthur Hugh Clough ‘The Latest Decalogue’: ‘Thou shalt not kill, but need not strive officiously to keep alive’… We need an account of different kinds of killing. There are forms of killing which deserve the name murder. These are difficult ethical distinctions. C says the place to start is Karl Barth – respect for life in non-human animals specifies a long series of caveats without which, the killing is murder. Augustine thinks it a reductio ad absurdum to think of a stopping-off point for murder beyond the human. C thinks that there are other stopping-off points beyond the human.
13. The goodness of creation. For Schleiermacher the goodness of creations was its openness. C – that which creates the demand for lament. If we could just despair it would be different. But we can recognise the goodness of the telos of these creatures which surround us and their inability to fulfil this is a sorrow to us, ergo the goodness of creation is evidenced by the devastation which prevents its manifestation.