by Michael S. Northcott
Wm. B Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids Mich. 352 pages
REVIEWED BY ANDREW PLOCHER
Michael Northcott is no newcomer to the topics of environmental crisis and climate change. He has published several tomes on the subjects, yet his new book, “A Political Theology of Climate Change,” may be his most important. It is both a haunting portrayal of the realities of climate change and hopeful in the proposal of a cultural theological shift. While the footnotes and philosophical, scientific and theological language make the text challenging to navigate at times, it is nevertheless compelling and, at times, page-turning.
Northcott opens with an overview of the current research regarding climate change, citing works from 2008 to as recent as 2013. He then embarks on a genealogical journey through philosophy and theology, showing the reader how we have ended up in a political and philosophical culture that has empowered behaviors that cause climate change. While ramblingly professorial, this section is the backbone of the book and engages the work of a diverse group of scholars ranging from J.R.R. Tolkien and William Blake to Carl Schmitt and Alastair MacIntyre.
Central to his genealogy of climate change is the ‘second Copernican revolution’ which, Northcott posits, caused the repositioning of man as the shaper of planetary history. Northcott labels this turn of events as anthropocene, and then contrasts the anthropocene narrative to a christocene narrative in which Christ stands at the helm of God’s creation, thus favoring a narrative of restoration rather than domination. Engaging Latour and Whitehead to examine the nature and culture divide, Northcott shows how the relationship between human and non-human needs to be redefined.
Northcott compellingly argues for a return to theological practices that connect the church to the created order, namely the communal practice of the Lord’s Supper. He notes that these early practices of fellowship are political to the extent that they resist the secular liturgy that divorces nature from culture, bodies from souls, and subjective from objective realms. Stewardship of creation and fighting climate change, therefore, hinge on seeing the world in a unified way.
The need for the shift in theological and philosophical center that Northcott advocates can be summed up in the following quote: “If climate change is not only a scientific datum but a shaper of social and political experience, then liberal democratic capitalism is itself built upon an illusion: the illusion that the corporately sustained engine of economic growth can spread freedom and material prosperity to all seven billion humans on the planet … provided they acknowledge the supremacy of Enlightenment reason, and, in particular, economic rationality, as the means of progress for the human condition.”
While he does not end with a singular conclusion, Northcott believes that the way forward is the combination of local collective efforts (including the church) and sustained moral commitment on behalf of individuals who form community (like Transition Initiatives or Eco-Congregations in England). It is a call to the local and the national, believing that all political bodies (all groups of people) possess the ability to change the narrative of climate change.
ANDREW PLOCHER is a teaching elder and pastor of New Hope Presbyterian Church in Olny, Maryland.
