When my two kids were in their grammar school years, each of them would sometimes say, “Daddy, you talk funny.” True. I still do. Consider this. My new book is the end – the finis and the telos – of my vocation as a Church theologian and pastoral activist.
Finis for sure. The Earth and the Fullness Thereof: A Down Home Reader in Ecological Theology (Cascade) is my eighth and last exploration in ecojustice theology: last, simply because I am now pushing ninety and, among other things, beginning to deal with some serious cognitive issues.
But this book is also a telos for me. Not because it somehow summarizes everything that I’ve ever attempted to argue theologically, but because, in various ways, it gives expression to two points on the theological compass that have guided my explorations from the very beginning: the theology of discipleship and the theology of culture, represented respectively by theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich. I began to read their works already as an undergraduate in the nineteen-fifties. I still hold their theologies dear to my heart, all the more so in this, the age of Trump. How so?
I did my undergraduate honors thesis on the German resistance to Hitler, a story I’ve often told. Turns out that the Nazis, many of them, loved the theology of nature! Learning that – was that a crisis of faith for me or what? I, a German Lutheran, who had come to love Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, as well as Genesis 1 and Psalm 104? Early on, therefore, I decided that all my theological reflection about nature had to go through Bonhoeffer, the great pastoral resister to the Nazis, by no means around him. Surely, not any theology of nature would do.
But I also realized, again, already as an undergraduate, that I had been destined to become a theologian of culture, not just a theologian of discipleship. I realized this not from probing Bonhoeffer’s prison reflections on a world-come-of-age when I was a graduate student, but when, earlier on, I fell in love with the theology of Paul Tillich. I threw myself into the first course I ever took from Tillich, when I was a college sophomore, his lectures on the theology of culture.
It was Tillich, more particularly, who first released and then shaped my deep passions for the theology of nature. I’ve carefully studied his great essay “Nature and Sacrament” (available in his book The Protestant Era [1948]) in a variety of settings, as an excitable undergraduate, as a sometimes too intense graduate student, and as an increasingly mellowed pastoral and theological practitioner. Retired now for more than two decades, I can imagine that I may read it yet again, before my own finis.
Still, especially in this the age of Donald Trump, who so exemplifies the fascist spirit that so powerfully challenged both Tillich and Bonhoeffer: I realize that my theological telos, as I’m now approaching the very finis of my life as a Church theologian and pastoral activist, must be, all over again, not so much the theology of culture, which I so dearly have loved, but all the more so the theology of discipleship: because we all now live in the age of Trump and the time appears to be at hand, as Bonhoeffer felt called in his time, to resist.
I invite you to understand that commitment as the life-and-death telos of The Earth and the Fullness Thereof. I also invite you not only to read the book yourself, but also to order copies to share with your many friends and fellow pilgrims. Thank you for thinking about this – and for your understanding.