Encountering of Climate Crisis and Ecological Theology - An Essay for the Ontological Turn of Theology Beyond New Materialism -

As ecological theology discourse has traditionally argued, to address the global climate crisis, including ecological crises, we need to clearly recognize that we human beings are also part of the whole creation who “has been groaning in labor pains until now,” and thus “waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” Therefore, there is no problem in theologically accepting the critique of human exceptionalism that appears in the recent ontological turn in humanities and social sciences. However, it is difficult to proceed directly from this affinity to the claim that theology should accept the ‘flat ontology’ proposed in some strands of New Materialism and Eco-Things-Theology. As we can see in Galatians 3:28, for Paul, not only the basic elements that constitute the social world (religion, race, class, gender) but also the basic elements of the natural world such as earth, air, fire, and water were judged to be meaningless in the face of the Christ-Event. Therefore, if Paul perceives the basic elements that constitute the material world as elements that dominate humans, just as the law does, theology needs to seriously reconsider whether it is desirable to attempt reconstructing theology based on matter, as New Materialism claims.