Green Christianity: Five Ways to a Sustainable Future (review)

In Green Christianity, Mark Wallace argues for an animist response to the eco-justice crisis. Borrowing from the writings of Thomas Berry, Wallace asserts that the great work of our time is making the earth whole and verdant again. Christians have not always been active participants in that work. According to Wallace's analysis, one mitigating factor in this regard is that Christianity lagged behind other faiths in loving the human body and honouring the planet. However, contemporary ecological degradation and its accompanying social injustice are now calling Christians toward active and prophetic responses to the eco-justice crisis. This calling is similar to the one felt by the religious activists who contributed to the abolitionist, women's suffrage, and civil rights movements. Wallace asserts that the only sufficient theological basis for eco-justice action in this mode rests upon abandoning contextually maladaptive notions of a disembodied God in the sky and recovering a sense of Christianity as an earthly and fleshy religion at its core—a faith that celebrates embodiment, pleasure, and the created world.

To achieve this recovery, Wallace explicitly goes beyond the orthodox concept of panentheism (God in all things) to argue in favour of Christian animism, which upholds all things as holy, good, and filled with God's kenotic presence through "carnal spirit" (39). He discerns a biblical basis for this position in the Gospels' depiction of the Incarnation and of God taking on the animal form of a dove at Jesus's baptism. What is perhaps most surprising in his theoretical basis for Christian animism is the way that Wallace connects human erotic pleasure with loving the planet. For Wallace, rejoicing in the earth and the celebration of the body are inextricably intertwined. Furthermore, he asserts that such erotic holism is necessary to adequately extol the flesh. In this regard, Wallace argues that unprejudiced seekers will find Christianity to be infused with eroticism. An exegesis of the story of the woman offering herself to the Lukan Jesus by wiping his feet with her hair, lubricated by tears and oil, provides Green Christianity's biblical basis for the incarnate God's celebration of an erotic script, even as the eroticism of that script offends the guests at Simon's dinner. According to Wallace, it is the sensual touching of this moment that precipitates the intimate forgiveness of the woman's sins at the close of the narrative.

It is this erotic power that Wallace invokes to overcome the moral disconnect between understanding and action that marks our journey toward planetary ruin; we fully understand that our ways of being are damaging ecosystem health and reducing the prospects for the flourishing of future generations, yet we continue upon our destructive course. In this regard, he emphasizes that the current eco-justice crisis, as recently manifest in the social and ecological disaster of the Gulf oil spill, is a problem not of the head but rather of the heart and is sourced in a lack of will that requires an infusion of desire for the body and for the earth in order that humans can help to usher in a vital future.

Previews of ways of being that will help carry a verdant life community into a sustainable future are offered via eight thematic case studies presented in the final chapter. These case studies touch upon key themes of eco-justice and describe moments of creative religious environmental activism. Noteworthy non-Christian examples include a Jewish summer camp that overcomes the nature deficit disorder by exposing urban children to aspects of the awe-inspiring wonders of creation and a group of Buddhist monks who dressed trees in their robes, a mark of benediction that prevented Thai loggers from cutting an old growth forest.

One major tension within the book surrounds Wallace's construction of animist Christianity. Perhaps, working with panentheism in the manner of a liberationist such as Rosemary Radford Reuther would have allowed Wallace to...