Masters Degrees (Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology)

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Browsing Masters Degrees (Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology) by Author "Greyvenstein, Juanita"

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    Planetary health in the anthropocene : sharing agency in the body of God
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-03) Greyvenstein, Juanita; Forster, Dion Angus; Van der Walt, Charlene; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Theology. Dept. of Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The earth, more-than-human communities, and many marginalised human communities are currently suffering because of the immense strain industrialised societies place on the earth’s life-support systems. Climate change is but one of the symptoms of a planet in peril. A number of earth-system processes are functioning in high risk zones and being fundamentally altered by the impact of society. To signal the changes observed by many scientists in the functioning of the earth, this epoch has been named the Anthropocene. This term is however more than a scientific designation, it disrupts our understanding of the presuppositions on which we have built both environmental and humanistic sciences and it specifically challenges their absolute separation. The Anthropocene as term itself is, however, controversial because it is not without cultural and gender bias. For theology to take up its public and prophetic role, it is necessary to engage with the wide range of disciplines that are defining, characterising and critiquing the Anthropocene. This study engages these disciplines through a specific methodology – through an eco-feminist critique. It shows how an androcentric bias has informed both scientific and religious understandings of the world – leading to a perception of the more-than-human world as inert, mechanic, fully knowable and primarily a human resource. This study suggests that an organic and agentic cosmology – as e.g. defined by Sally McFague in her model of the universe as the body of God, provides a more appropriate religious cosmology that takes the natural sciences and specifically an evolutionary cosmology seriously. I argue that this religious cosmology may offer a framework for ethical reorientation in the time of the Anthropocene. McFague’s theology gives fundamental value to embodied existence. It is through the matter of our bodies that we experience life and do theology. In this perspective it is also through our bodies that we share in the body of God, who is “transcendently immanent” through the physical processes of the universe. The doctrine of incarnation is both complexified and radicalised to apply to all fleshly bodies. To further understand how entities relate to one another in McFague’s model of the universe as the body of God, her conceptualisation of agency is explored. Masculinist formulations of agency as autonomous efficacy are shown to have cost the bodies of women and the earth dearly. To think more democratically and organically about being agentic beings, Bruno Latour’s argument of “sharing agency” is explored. When we realign human history with the common creation story we begin to see that humans are not the only actors in this world. An agential view of all matter allows us to articulate new orientations between the call for humans to be heroic earth stewards and the call to return to “wild untouched nature.” Sharing agency brings us to the humble acknowledgement that we are not the sole authors of bodily life but that our bodies are intertwined and implicated by the lives of other more-than-human bodies and the body of God.