Blessed Are the Consumers: Climate Change and the Practice of Restraint

7. Kenotic Theology

7 Kenotic Theology Introduction Having looked at the uses of kenosis in fields ranging from biology to the arts and parenting, as well as its widespread importance in religion, we turn now to an in-depth study of kenosis in one tradition, the Christian. This is meant to be illustrative—spelling out the implications of kenosis in one religion in order to highlight some characteristics of its depth and breadth. The resources for this chapter are a combination of insights from our saints as well as my own interpretation of theology, while focusing on its relevance for our twin crises in ecology and economics. While the perspective will be Christian, the discussion here is not limited to Christian readers, for a similar analysis of kenosis in other religions would, I believe, bring similar though different insights. A kenotic theology is necessarily a body theology, for kenosis is about the sharing of scarce resources among the needy. We are all needy at the most basic level of food in order to survive from one day to the next. This is certainly what the lives of our three saints tell us—the primary symbol of need at all levels of our existence is “food,” whether it be Woolman’s economics based on universal love, Weil’s notion of “cannibalism” of others as the most basic sin, or Day’s endless soup kitchens feeding hungry bodies. Our saints are not pie-in-the-sky spiritualists who see religious practice as focused on people’s souls. Rather, the “pie” is concrete and physical. It is the grocery business that Woolman sold in order to keep his eye “single,” in order to see his own body, as he says interpreting a dream, as mixed up with the mass of “human beings in as great misery as they could be,” no longer considering himself “as a distinct or separate being.” Or the pie is Weil’s “paralytic” prayer, in which she asks that her body “be stripped away from me, devoured by God, transformed into Christ’s substance, and given for food to afflicted men whose body and soul lack every kind of nourishment.” Or the pie is the bread crust that Day shared with others. (“If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread.”) A kenotic theology is therefore an incarnational theology, a theology that focuses unapologetically on “food,” the lowliest, most basic need shared by 171 172 Blessed Are the Consumers all living beings. A kenotic theology is not a lofty theology, not a theology glorifying “God or man”; rather, it is a theology that begins with need, both God’s need and ours, a need that runs all the way from the most elemental biological processes of the energy transformation to understanding the Trinity (the being of God) as one of continuous and total exchange of love. Kenosis is the process that begins and continues life, all the way from the splitting of cells to the sacrifice (and death) of some human beings for the nourishment of others, and of God’s quintessential act of self-emptying both within the divine being and for the creation and salvation of the world. Thus Christianity’s manner of making contact with the most basic physical, biological processes is through an inclusive, radical interpretation of its doctrine of the incarnation of God, not now merely in one human being, Jesus of Nazareth, but in the world as God’s body. This model attempts to express the most basic relationship of God and the world as one of shocking totality and intimacy, one that goes to the core of what it means to live and flourish. Moreover, it implies that we human beings, made “in the image of God,” likewise might model our relationship with the world in a similar fashion: the world as our body. A thumbnail sketch of this model suggests that all flesh, all matter, is included within God (as God’s “body”) but that God is not limited to this body, to matter. Here, God is understood to be “more than” the body, more than the world, but intimately, radically, and inclusively identified with it. We human beings are likewise thoroughly linked with the world; in fact, to see the world as our body is one metaphor expressing what we have called the “universal self,” the awareness that the self has no limits. Moreover, by focusing our understanding of the divine...