A God Who Cares? : Reformed Perspectives on God’s Providence amid the Shift from the Holocene to the “Anthropocene”

Abstract

This monograph may be read as a constructive supplement to Volume 4 of the series entitled An Earthed Faith: Telling the Story amid the “Anthropocene.” Volume 4 of this series is on the Christian doctrine of providence and is entitled Making Room for the Story to Continue? In addition to an extended introduction (on the state of the debate in the field), this monograph includes three constructive essays on the doctrine of providence, employing the traditional Reformed distinction between conservatio, gubernatio and concursus as aspects of God’s providence, as well as a concluding essay provocatively entitled “Who Cares a Damn?” The argument of this contribution may be captured in the following way: 1. That God’s providence is best understood in terms of the deeply held Christian conviction that God cares for every creature—and not in terms of Greek assumptions around a pervading rational world order 2. That conservatio and gubernatio have found rough secular equivalents in global debates on sustainability, mitigation, and adaptation in the context of climate change 3. That conservatio and gubernatio are typically in tension with each other when it comes to the question of whether God maintains order in nature and society or whether God transforms unjust orders (the call for ecojustice) 4. That concursus is not only an implication of conservatio and gubernatio but also captures the heart of the problem posed by the advent of the “Anthropocene,” namely that (some) humans have become a “geological force of nature.” At the same time, God’s agency has become sidelined or usurped by the Promethean quest to become divine. In each of these essays, a highly constructive contribution advances the debate in eco-theology by placing providence in the context of the shift from the Holocene to the “Anthropocene.” The method adopted is a constructive argument based on a critical review of the available literature. This monograph is scholarly and is addressed to other scholars in eco-theology, systematic theology, and Reformed theology.