theological ecology - something new

Meanwhile... you might be interested in theologicalecology.blogspot.com - a new blog I'm starting, in parallel with this one. You could click on the link above - or read the first post here...

I'm going to try something new.

Since 2010, I've been writing a blog, on and off, rooted in my outer estate neighbourhood on the edge of the city of Birmingham. Often its subject matter has stretched wider - touching at times on national politics, and the internal politics of the Church of England - but its focus has been, and remains, the labour of love that we call "community-building", often across dividing lines of race and class, but with a focus on nurturing relationships between neighbours rooted in particular places. Much of what I've written there over the years has been about what we've been doing in our own neighbourhood (the Firs & Bromford estate, Hodge Hill), and what we've been learning through that doing. Some of that learning became a PhD (developing a "radically receptive" political theology from the urban margins), and that in turn has turned out to be a springboard for some writing and speaking and some fascinating, stretching conversations in the wider world.

This is something different.

This is venturing into terrain that I, personally, don't know remotely well. It will be following the footsteps (and, at times, paw-prints) of people (and other creatures) that know the ground much better than me. I come as a late arrival to a "party" - or perhaps it's a walk in the woods, a picnic, a protest, a dance, a lament - that many others have been at for years.

But better late than never. And better something than nothing. As the public-theologians / comedy-rap-jazz-duo Harry and Chris put it:

"They say it's a drop in the ocean / as if that's a reason to stop.

Well maybe they've forgotten the ocean / is literally made up of drops."

So what is it?

When theology is divided into sub-disciplines, it's often labelled "eco-theology".

But many practitioners of "eco-theology" would argue, I think, that compartmentalising it as a sub-discipline is, itself, part of the problem.

An earth-centred (rather than human-centred) theology should change everything: not just the way we think about creation and salvation, but the way we think about God, and Jesus, and the gospel, and discipleship, and church, and mission, and... everything...

Eco-theology reminds us that everything that is, is connected. Interrelated. Entangled. Interdependent.

In Western theology, over the last couple of centuries, the idea that everything in theology is connected to everything else has been expressed in the sub-discipline called "systematic theology".

But the "systems" of "systematic theology" have too often been overly rigid, fixed, rational. Drawn only in straight lines. "Mind over matter", imposing their intellectual categories on messy reality. And captive to a profoundly white, Western, heterosexual male way of thinking about the world.

What if we were to think about theology not as a "system" but as an "ecology"? Where the connections and interrelations are rarely in straight lines, and are often more mysterious, hidden, buried deep beneath the surface? Where nothing is fixed - where everything grows, changes, evolves, dies? Where one thing changing, changes everything else? Where "matter" is what matters, and what thinks, and breathes, and communicates... and grows, changes, evolves, dies...?

This is what I want to call the "theological ecology".

And the blog posts that follow will not attempt, as systematic theology has often claimed, to offer a comprehensive description of all the ecology's elements and interrelations. The ecology is too wonderful, too mysterious, too complex for that to be even possible. And even if it were, I am - as I've already said - a late arrival, a novice, a stumbling beginner in this unfamiliar terrain. Here, then, I'll just offer a handful of fragments, whether picked up from others or glimpsed for myself - fragments of beauty, wonder (and sometimes terror) that I find myself turning over and over in my hand, or straining my eyes to see from a distance.

Some connections between the fragments may emerge over time. I'm expecting this to be a place, though, not just to sit back and marvel at the complex connections. But a place that calls us to jump in with both feet - to immerse ourselves in the overwhelming realities of the one world that we live in - and to action: to be changed and to change; to grow and evolve; to live and to die...