Sinai Bush and Jordanian Dove Meet Haitian Snake and Amazonian Vine: Reading Christology at the Crossroads of Empire and Ecology

Abstract

The Issue of sustailiability climbing [ike an Amazon smoke signal over a burning ecology—is the apocalyptic sign of the times for an entire planet careening toward calamity under the reigning growth Idolatry of neoliberal globalization. While obviously part of a much, much bigger question, the chapter to follow here will focus its intervention on Christianity in particular, as a 2,000-year-old form of anthropocentric conviction that has contributed in no small measure to the crisis we now⁷ face. The focus favored will not involve thinking at the problem from merely a present, mainstream Western position, but will rather seek orientation from a depth-sounding of indigenous cultures still partially embedded in an economics of reciprocity and obligation with their local ecologies. Attention paid to what speaks from beyond the borders of mainstream (and Western) Christianity will find an inner echo in Christianity’s own myths of origin, as well as in “hybridized”¹ versions of the tradition such as vodou practices or ayahuasca churches—often dismissed as heterodox—that have also worked out a creative adaptation of Christian orthodoxy to local ecology. The core conviction of the exploration is Christologicai: the idea that images of the means and media of salvation are a critical litmus test for a tradition committed to incarnational notions of divinity and anthropological responsibility for humans.

God ccilkd to him out of the, bush.

—Exodus (3:4)