Plundering Eden - by G P Wagenfuhr (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Christian ecotheology runs the risk of making God himself a resource for human exploitation as a means to species survival. The world of climate change, soil depletion, and mass species extinction reveals a frightening conclusion--humans act as cosmic parasites. The problem is not with the world--talk of climate change blames the symptoms displayed by the victim--but with human epistemology. Humans are systematically incapable of rightly perceiving reality, and so must socially construct reality. The end of this epistemological problem is necessary ecological devastation by the development of civilization. In Plundering Eden, Wagenfuhr traces ecological problems to their root cause in the broken imagination, and argues that reconciliation with God the Creator through Jesus Christ is the only means to ecological healing through a renewed, kenotic imagination expressed in the creation of an alternate environment that reveals the kingdom of God--the ekklesia.

Review Quotes

"No one likes to be accused of being a parasite with delusions of grandeur, but this is the opening note sounded in the prophetic trumpet blast that is Plundering Eden. Like Nietzsche's madman, Wagenfuhr rushes into our global village announcing the death not of God but civilization, that doomed project of thinking humanity could by building things wrest order from chaos. The Babel-onian captivity from which Wagenfuhr seeks to free us consists of a wrong way of imagining the world, namely, as something to be mastered, often through violence, with devastating effects on nature and society alike. The solution lies in giving up the juvenile fiction that we are masters of our own fate and submitting our imaginations to the logic of creation and new creation, that is, to the vision of the world created and recreated in, through, and for Jesus Christ."
--Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

"Civilization is an idolatrous myth that is literally killing us. For Christians, argues Greg Wagenfuhr, the only plausible antidote to our predicament is the redemption of our imagination of ourselves as creatures. A timely and robustly theological intervention in ecological ethics."
--Brian Brock, University of Aberdeen

"Few can dispute Greg Wagenfuhr's description of how humanity has been (wittingly or not) a parasite, plundering, destroying, and sucking the life out of the planet (Eden, creation). His analyses of how our ways of thinking (our myths and imaginaries--especially the uncontested rule of technique/technology and scientific management) are the culprit behind the plunder are spot on. Wagenfuhr's bold revisionist theology of creation and redemption and his calls for radical, costly change on the part of Christians must be taken with total seriousness. . . . Plundering Eden has a very important and urgent message for our times."
--David W. Gill, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

About the Author

G. P. Wagenfuhr is Theology Coordinator for ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians. He is also the founder of a pilot project called The Embassy, a renewed vision for the ekklesia outlined within this book. Wagenfuhr is author of Plundering Egypt: A Subversive Christian Ethic of Economy (2016) and Unfortunate Words of the Bible (2019).