Biocultural Wholes, Partial Perspectives, Path Dependency and the Global Climate Change: What’s Theology Got to Do with It?

Abstract

The Church of Sweden and its bishops have been active in the discussions on climate change. Uppsala Interfaith Climate Manifesto. Church of Sweden, 2008. And “A Bishops’ letter about the climate: Bishops’ conference 2014”. Climate change science is well developed and relatively coherent, regarding its theory and methods. Theological as well as social scientific responses to the climate change have been also numerous, often either listing the important failures or analyzing costs and benefits of particular policies. Yet consensus is hard to achieve and in the end, both scientists and theologians may feel that the whole problem is beyond our rational understanding, a matter of belief rather than either a reliable science or a matter of concern for responsible religious communities. I will approach climate change as a “super wicked problem”: these are problems that lack a discrete solution or end point, that allow no immediate test of a potential solution, no opportunity to learn by trial and error, etc. Institutions and states are like people: they do not want to change. And the change has to be simultaneous: the individual members of the churches (and states) must change, so that the institutions could change. All religions, including Christianity, are about transformation and we could use our available resources to trigger transformative decisions and mechanisms that will keep us on the “narrow” and possibly inconvenient track.