Kimberly CarforeChristianity and EcologyPARP 6532: Fall 2011

Christianity and Ecology: A Deconstructive Approach

[D]econstruction is structured like a religion. Like a prayer andtear for the coming of the wholly other (tout autre),for something impossible, like a messianic prayer ina messianic religion, viens, like a vast and sweepingamen, viens, oui, oui. Like a faith in the coming ofsomething we cannot quite make out, a blind faithwhere knowledge fails and faith is what we have to goon.1

Since 1967 with Lynn White’s, “The Historical Roots of Our

Ecologic Crisis,” it is apparent that Christians have had a

problematic relationship with the environment.2 Amidst the

controversy, the general message shook up the Christian community

in stating that Christianity is blameworthy for the environmental

crisis due to the anthropocentrism of the Christian worldview.

Whether related to a misreading of the Bible, or the western

development of science and technology, the message is clear—our

current conception of God is destroying the planet.

1 John Caputo and Michael Scanlon, God, the Gift and Postmodernism, p. 4.2 Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155/3767. (March 1967): 1203-7.

Subsequent to the publication of White’s article, the field

of Religion and Ecology has emerged to address this problematic

relationship. Christian scholars and practitioners and

environmentalists have converged in addressing how Christianity

can better respond to the environmental crisis instead of causing

further damage. So much literature has been dedicated to

retracing the historical thread of where modern Christianity went

wrong. In the midst of the complexities of science, emerging

technologies, the excitement of cultures and societies forming,

all in the likeness and “image of God” (Gen 1:26), it seems less

important to me to critique the past, but rather to celebrate

modernity’s messy achievements, massive projects, and possible

misplaced enthusiasm as Christians.

What I mean by celebration isn’t in the traditional sense—

bottles of champagne and streamers claiming, “Foreword we go!”

The celebration I would like to see is a sort of deconstructive

celebration—a critically creative exploration into the human

project. The massive implication of the environmental crisis is

evidence that when a group of people put their heads together,

large scale change can happen. However, misplaced enthusiasm is

the important issue here—it is not yet time to pop open the

champagne and celebrate our achievements. After deconstructing

“where we went wrong,” situated from where we are at, eschewing

guilt and remorse, we can use the power and promise of

Christianity to construct a better future together, that is, a

more peaceful, sustainable, and just future. It is a sensitive

time, a time where current societal and worldview structures are

propagating intense oppression and subjugation. It is time to

adapt a deconstructive theology in order to develop a more

sustainable relationship to the planet, in hopes of ensuring a

positive future for generations of future Christians to come.

While there are many answers to solving the environmental

crisis, this paper will focus on how deconstruction can help

Christians respond to the crisis. It is one answer among many,

and we need all of the help we can get. His Holiness Ecumenical

Patriarch Bartholomew states, “[t]he crisis that we face is—as we

all now know and as we all readily admit—not primarily ecological

but religious; it has less to do with the environment and more to

do with spiritual consciousness. It is a crisis concerning the

way we imagine the world…The starting-point, then, is our

worldview.”3 Deconstruction can help undo oppressive binaries

and open to the new—the messianic dimension of experience. As it

criticizes the logic of domination, it opens up to new ways of

being that seemed hitherto impossible. It facilitates more

creative encounters with mystery and the real.

In this paper, I consider four different deconstructive

concepts in terms of their capacity for facilitating a more

ecologically-oriented Christianity: religion without religion,

the arrivant, the gift, and responsibility. In each section I give

an overview of each term and discuss its relevance in the

intersection of Christianity and Ecology. In this discussion, I

propose that another world is not only possible, but it is

coming, it is always ‘to come.’ The space of mystery, of

impossibility, of the ‘to come’ is precisely what makes a new

world possible—a more just and creative world. Deconstruction

leaves open the space of the impossible—the paradoxical entrance

into a more vibrant future for the whole Earth community.

IntroductionDeconstruction is justice.4

3 Foreword from Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment, p. ix.

Derrida opens his Specters of Marx with Shakespeare’s Hamlet,

who decries, “The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite,/ That

ever I was born to set it right!”5 The time is out of joint

indeed. Derrida writes, “[N]ever have violence, inequality,

exclusion, famine…affected so many human beings in the history of

the earth and of humanity…[N]ever have so many men, women and

children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth.”6

This disjointed time is precisely the space of the impossible.

This opening allows that which is wholly other to emerge, and it

is only in this impossible space that the wholly new, wholly

creative [is welcomed] can emerge.

Modernity by its very nature disconnects. The scientific or

technoindustrial project of organizing, categorizing, and

establishing clear boundaries has allowed humans a greater

understanding of themselves, the planet and its many creatures

and complex entanglements, but unfortunately has brought with it

massive oppression and injustices. In this separation project,

4 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” from Acts of Religion, p. 243.5 Jacques Derrida. Specters of Marx, p 21.6 Ibid., p 85.

we have forgotten that we have forgotten and therein lies the

work—a remembrance or reverence project. After separating the

sacred from the secular, religious from profane, where can we

find a God that still exists in our civilization? How can we

reconnect to a source that has been claimed to be disconnected

from ours? To me, the relevant question is not how to reconnect

these categories—the sacred and secular, religious and profane,

but rather how to move ahead from where we are with what we have.

The impossible can happen. Paradoxically, it is possible.

Another world is possible—one that can thrive on an economy of

creativity opposed to an economy of never-ending progress. How

can the new, the impossible, be communicated to this world, and

is this even a relevant question? In these times of trouble it

is difficult to know what questions are worth asking and which

should remain a mystery, where one should invest effort and what

one should leave untouched. However, things that ecological

thinker Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects are currently making

these decisions for us.7 In the world of hyperobjects—climate

7 Hyperobjects are the “longest-term ecological problems,” objects that will be around much longer than one’s individual lifespan—materials that will shapeour world. For more on hyperobjects, see Timothy Morton’s, The Ecological Thought, p. 19, 130-132, 135.

change, plutonium, and Styrofoam— these things force us to think

on a scale much greater than our own biological and social form,

and in terms of the planet as a whole instead of divided

individuals. As the anthropocentric human claims to have

developed control over nature, each other, and non-human others,

hyperobjects disclose the grandiose power of non-human things,

forcing us to interact on their terms. The survival of our

species rests upon us accepting these terms, these ideas and new

ways of thinking. These objects force us to accept the extreme

unpredictability of our future, and our interconnectedness with

all things and the ethical implications of this are immense. Is

it even possible to know the ethical dimensions of our actions?

To what extent are we helping or hurting? What can we do?

There is another world. In Edwin Abbott’s classic Flatland,

the discrepancy of this unknown world is portrayed as a two-

dimensional square describes its world to a one-dimensional line.

“You ask me to believe that there is another Line besides that

which my senses indicate, and another motion besides that of

which I am daily conscious.”8 How can we remain open to that

8 Edwin Abbott, Flatland, p. 49.

which is unknown? How are we to “save” our current world, and

make it better for generations to come? As Lynn White so

forcefully argued, Christianity in the past has somewhat

neglected to make the Earth a priority, including informing

Christians about important environmental issues. A religion

should be that which forms relevant worldviews and informs its

followers about the real—God, death, life, the cosmos, humanity

and our role in the whole. It is important to update religions

and religious followers as large paradigmatic shifts take place.

Therefore, as our current disjointed time calls for a more

ecologically conscious and environmentally friendly Christian,

leaders and communities of Christians should respond. But how?

The field of Religion and Ecology is facilitating such responses,

asking Christians if and how they should reexamine dogmas,

recover forgotten practices, transform everyday life, and

reevaluate their religion.

Religion without Religion

Deconstruction…keeps its eye peeled for the little bitsand loose fragments easily lost sight of by the law. Deconstruction is on the watch for the exclusion, the victims, the injustice produced by the law…

Deconstruction’s justice does not aim at disinterested impartiality but at a preferential option for the disadvantaged, the differends, the losers, leftovers, the little bits and fragments. Far from being blind, justice cultivates a…’prophetic’ eye.9

For Derrida, this prophetic eye rests in his post-secular

religion without religion. It is a messianic structure without a

determinate Messiah. The prophetic eye is on the lookout for

those subjugated others—those who have been excluded or rendered

invisible throughout history. “Deconstruction is justice.”10 This

justice is that which brings to the forefront those others who

have been excluded—the poor, women, children, disabled, ethnic

minorities, and non-human others.

The work of deconstruction, for Derrida, affirms a messianic

call for the arrival of an event of justice, yet his messianic

affirmation takes place without a determinate messiah and without

a determinate messianism, whether Jewish, Christian, or

otherwise. The arrival of the event of justice is always to

come, infinitely exceeding the limits of presence. Accordingly,

the messianic call for justice is a call for something or someone

9 John Caputo, Against Ethics:Conributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction, p. 87.10 Derrida, “Force of Law,” p. 243.

to come that displaces place, or what is currently perceived as

possible. It leaves open the space of the impossible for the

arrival and welcoming of all others.

The unpredictability of the Messiah, this person, this

“other” forces us to be more open and amenable to all others,

which could give rise to a more hospitable world for all others.

For “tout autre ‘est’ tout autre”—every other is wholly other.11 The

coming of this other is present in us all and demands a certain

respect and vigilance. In a world where God has died, a post-

secular God has emerged in the face of every other.

In allowing those subjugated others to emerge in the

forefront, we are forced to be open and amenable to their

otherness—their strangeness, for when that which has been

invisible finally appears is a strange sight indeed, even to the

prophetic eye. However, one must not remain too vigilant, for if

the Messiah were predictable, it would lose all sense of

“otherness” and allow a certain appropriation, closing of doors,

boundaries, and borders—a dismissal of the Messiah as such.

11 This is Derrida’s phrase emphasized in The Gift of Death as well as Specters of Marx(p. 195n37). In French this is palindromic where its translation is both “every other is altogether other,” and “altogether other is every other, emphasizing the extension of every other as wholly other.

“[W]ere the Messiah actually to come, say, among the

wretched living under the bridges in any American city, dressed

in rags, among the beggars and the lepers and the HIV-positive,

the only sensible thing to ask him…would be, “When will you

come?”12 This is the only possible answer—the respectful

response. For if every other is wholly other, then even the

least among us harbor the divine within their presence. What if

we perceived the drug addicts, the substance abusers as the

canary birds of our society instead of parasites? Although, this

is somewhat an appropriated version of the Messiah, it seems to

be an important place to start cultivating a practice of

openness. How can I as a mere mortal human predict or interpret

the Messiah as such? However, for the sake of perspective I

leave open this speculation.

Remaining open to the other—the placeholders of a disjointed

time—is the condition upon which justice emerges. “On Earth as

it is in Heaven”—we can usher in a new God, in the likeness and

image of God as earthly, mortal beings, ridding ourselves of the

urge to mirror an all-powerful, punitive, transcendental God. At

12 John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion, p. 87.

a time when people claimed to have seen the “end of history” and

the “death of God,” and when a theologian claims that one must

“put the Bible down for twenty years,” it is not enough to simply

do away with religion.13 For it is the grounds from which we

emerged, the rituals and practices that have formed us—our

inheritance. We should not simply trash gifts that were given by

our ancestors, ones they have worked so hard to box up, nor

should we re-gift them, for we can agree this is quite rude. For

Derrida, a post-secular religion without religion proposes a more

just future. It is a “way of being enlightened about

Enlightenment, of passing through the critique of religion set

forth in modernity.”14

Through the project of Enlightenment, we have killed a

transcendental God. It could be argued that this death is

another stage in the incarnation of God, such that, in this

death, we have successfully ushered in a material God, or God of

13 This packed sentence includes well-known phrases by political economist Francis Fukuyama, Neitzsche, and theologian Thomas Berry. In his 1989 essay titled, “The End of History?” Fukuyama argues that Western liberal democracy signals the endpoint in human sociocultural evolution—a bold statement indeed.Some years ago, Thomas Berry stated that putting down the Bible, and “reading nature” instead would be a good starting point in solving the environmental crisis.14 Caputo and Scanlon, “Introduction: Apology for the Impossible: Religion andPostmodernism,” from God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, p. 4.

the Earth. There is good news and bad news to this, as the

transcendental God becomes somewhat ordinary. Derrida refers to

this messianism as a “weak messianic power.”15 Walter Benjamin

has a similar concept in relation to inheritance—“There is a

secret agreement between past generations and the present one.

Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that

preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power…

That claim cannot be settled cheaply.”16 For us, this claim has

cost us a large part of the Earth’s resources—the project of

Enlightenment has not been cheap, but grandiose indeed.

The concept of the ordinary is an important one, especially

in light of the Messiah. The future of religion to me is an

ordinary, intimate, everyday religion. Caputo states that, “The

flow of ordinary time and language are interrupted and disturbed

by certain supercharged words—like “madness” and “fear”—among

which is also to be numbered the name of God.”17 These names of

“God” or “Messiah” make it too easy to disregard the reality of a

heaven on earth, a new religion, or post-secular religion without

15 Derrida, Specters, p.180-81n2.16 Ibid.17 Caputo, Prayers, p. 87.

religion. Separated into the dual categories of

religious/secular and sacred/profane, taking responsibility for

the Earth and one’s participation here on Earth can all too

easily be bracketed and disregarded under a secular guise. This

trend cannot be repeated for the future of the planet as well as

religion. To repeat this trend is to fail to respond to any and

all of the material and mundane affairs composing the ecological

crisis.

For Caputo, “[T]he death of God, it refers to an ongoing and

never finished project of deconstructing the God of

ontotheologic, which is for me above all the God of sovereign

power.”18 Instead of doing away with God, or with religion as a

whole, one must remain open to the possibility or impossibility

of a new Messiah, that which is always coming as well as that

which will never come—it is always to come. The death of God

brings the arrival of something new, something other, something

foreign and unfamiliar. Remember Derrida’s provocative phrase,

“tout autre ‘est’ tout autre”—every other is wholly other. “To prepare

18 John Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God, p. 67.

oneself for this coming (venue) of the other is what can be

called deconstruction.”19

The Newcomer: Arrivant

Deconstruction is a practice of welcoming the alterity of

every other, which is the task of doing justice to the other.

The arrival of that (the other) which has been excluded in in

history is the arrivant.20 To learn from the other is the

impossible event. The arrivant is what comes in the opening

maintained by the messianic without the Messiah. This is for

Derrida, the impossible event—a justice that exceeds the

coordinates of what we currently understand to be possible. To

welcome home the arrivant is to put into practice the postsecular

religion without religion, opening up to the otherness that overflows

the proper boundaries between believers and nonbelievers, saints

and sinners, the saved and the damned, the sacred and profane,

and other categories that typically determine religious

expressions.

19 Caputo. Prayers, p. 73.20 I derive this interpretation of the arrivant from David Wood’s essay “Specters of Derrida: On the Way to Econstruction,” in Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth, p. 267.

The arrivant is a guest or newcomer. It is that which has not

yet arrived. The welcoming of the arrivant is always to come, in

the future (avenir, translated literally as “the future”). The

arrival of the arrivant is “The thinking of the specter, contrary

to what good sense leads us to believe, signals toward the

future. It is a thinking of the past, a legacy that can come

only from that which has not yet arrived—from the arrivant itself.”

21 In the hope and promise to one day bring about justice, the

arrivant continues to arrive, as a spontaneous presence, as a ghost

protesting to us through the other, the subaltern other. The

thinking of the ghost “is a thinking of the past, a legacy that

can come only from that which has not yet arrived—from the arrivant

itself.” 22

Practicing a religion without religion would be welcoming the

arrivant—welcoming the arrival of the messianic without knowing or

having a determinate expectation of what the messianic is.

Remaining open to the undeterminant Messiah is the task of

justice. Therefore for Christians, the arrival of justice would

not necessarily be the second coming of Jesus Christ, but it also

21 Derrida. Specters, p. 196n39.22 Ibid.

does not rule out the possibility of Christ as the Messiah.

Remaining open to the unknown, the undecidability, welcoming

alterity and in that, the future—the “to come”—this is the

project of deconstruction. The project of justice is the project

of the ghost—of exorcisms. It is ongoing, the work is never

done. This is reflected in Derrida’s statement, “haunting is

historical.”23

The arrivant is always “to come” (à-venir), in “the future”

(l’avenir), such that, when the arrivant haunts, it marks the coming

of a past that calls for a more just future.24 In the hope and

promise to one day bring about justice, one can call for the

arrivant to continue arriving, to continue disseminating its

unpredictable force, which haunts us with its compelling

alterity. Deconstruction is the practice of welcoming the

alterity of the arrivant as it shows up in the haunting calls for

justice issuing from all others. Dwelling in the space of

haunting, deconstruction welcomes every ghost as a newcomer.

Injustice plagues so many beings right now. It is

impossible to keep track of all the others calling for justice.

23 Ibid., p. 4.24 Ibid.

Taking on this impossible task, Derrida lists ten “plagues” of

the current global civilization (the “new world order”):

unemployment (or social inactivity); exclusion of the homeless

and stateless; economic war; contradictions of the free market;

national debt; the arms industry; nuclear proliferation;

interethnic wars; mafia and drug cartels (phantom states); and

the limits of concept and practice of international law.25 This

list focuses primarily on injustices done to human beings, thus

raising the question as to whether Derrida really honors the

compelling alterity of every other.

What about nonhuman others? David Wood responds to this

question in his attempt to propose an ecological deconstruction

or “econstruction—a living, developing, and materially informed

deconstruction.”26 According to Wood, deconstruction can and

does indeed respond to the alterity of the natural environment.

“Environmental destruction gives us a wake-up call of epic

proportion, and is surely a candidate for the status of

arrivant.”27 Accordingly, Wood suggests that Derrida’s list of

25 Ibid., p. 81-84.26 Wood, “Specters of Derrida: On the Way to Econstruction,” p. 267.27 Ibid.

plagues should be extended to include the environmental crisis.28

Furthermore, when Wood made this suggestion to Derrida in

conversation, Derrida “quickly accepted this suggestion”.29

Deconstruction is a messianic practice of welcoming every other

as a newcomer, even and maybe especially animals, plants, and

ecosystems.

Timothy Morton and theologian Anne Primavesi have similar

things to say about the environmental crisis and its relationship

the arrivant. Morton divides his ecology into two main terms—the

mesh and strange stranger.30 Morton is explicit in that the strange

stranger is his translation of Derrida’s arrivant.”31 The possibility

of the strange stranger to transform is incredible, and serves as a

prime example of the true object of hospitality. The arrival of

the strange stranger shatters one’s worldview, opening a space for

the other to truly enter. In this I mean upon its arrival, you

are on its terms, it is not on yours. Instead of fitting this

other into one’s “horizon of meaning,”32 the strange stranger

interrupts one’s idea or definition of what it means to be other,28 Ibid., p. 266.29 Ibid., p. 588n7.

30 Timothy Morton. The Ecological Thought. p. 14.31 Morton, Ecological Thought. p. 143n72.32 Ibid., p. 46.

or what is other. When something can be categorized, it can be

backgrounded and therefore disregarded. The strange stranger calls

into question one’s knowing, or preconceived notions—Is it a

“‘who’ or a ‘what’?”33 The sheer “thereness” calls for attention

and demands a genuine response.

This is where Primavesi fits in. Just as Morton uses his

term hyperobject to describe a non-human other demanding human

attention to respond, Primavesi’s work with climate change does

the same. In her book, Gaia and Climate Change (2007), climate

change is Primavesi’s arrivant, which she refers to as an “event.”

Although she uses some of Derrida’s concepts (e.g., gift and

event), she does not use the concept of arrivant explicitly. As a

hyperobject entangling humans with the biosphere and atmosphere,

the event of climate change has the power to shift worldviews and

in that, to force a reexamination of current religious

structures. For Primavesi claims that the event of climate

change requires a theological response. The immensity of climate

change and its implications shatter current worldviews (or

expand) and demand people to pay attention, interact and consider

33 Ibid.

these objects on a different level. The ‘eventness’ of both

climate change and hyperobjects is found in its ‘givenness’—there

is an overflow of alterity, its agency, it is unpredictable. We

can only detect this event after the fact.

It is interesting to note the -vant in arrivant and -vent in

the term event are both etymologically the same, meaning comer.

This event of an undeterminant Messiah is what creates both the

past and future. The “to come” of both the past and future are

connected to the idea of the event. The work of deconstruction,

for Derrida, affirms a messianic call for the arrival of an event

of justice, yet his messianic affirmation takes place without a

determinate messiah and without a determinate messianic

structure. The arrival of the event of justice is always to

come, infinitely exceeding the limits of presence. Here, we are

not privileging presence over absence. In light of the event,

there is an opening that loosens up these categories. The event

of climate change overflows these boundaries and opens the space

for a new impossible justice to emerge. It is a good time to

note that Derrida’s idea of the impossible is not meant to

discourage action. In fact, it is the opposite. It is meant to

prevent us from ever stopping our concerned action. “Otherwise

it rests on the good conscience of having done one’s duty, it

loses the chance of the future”—of the messianic ‘to-come.’34

In the waiting or calling for the…messianic: the comingof the other, the absolute and unpredictable singularity of the arrivant as justice…[we] believe this messianic remains and ineffaceable mark—a mark one neithercan nor should efface…doubtless of inheriting, of the experience of inheritance in general.35

The Gift

The gift of inheritance passes through humans, across

generations as both a gift as well as a responsibility. Benjamin

states, “Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class

itself is the depository of historical knowledge…the avenger that

completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of

the downtrodden.”36 Therefore, the task of liberation is

completed in responding to the other—the oppressed, subaltern

other. Responding and exorcising these ghosts is granting

righteousness, our inherited duty as “it is assigned by who

(what) came before him [sic].”37 German philosopher Martin

34 Specters. p. 28.35 Ibid.36 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, p. 260.37 Derrida. Specters. p. 20.

Heidegger refers to this gift as “original indebtedness.”38 Es

gibt, or “there is,” is translated more literally as “it gives.”39

This implies an ontological relationship between existing and

giving, or existence as a gift. As a process of giving, being

reflects our ongoing indebtedness to every other. To exist is to

give, therefore requiring action toward justice, according to

which everyone is given their due. If something is not right, it

is our duty to work towards making it right.

“Freely you have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8).

This gift of life, death, our home on Earth and all that comes

with it is an overwhelming thought, indeed. Framing our lives on

Earth as inheriting a divine gift makes one think a little harder

and feel more empowered with the decisions one makes with one’s

life, not to mention how we treat one another. His All Holiness

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew states, “We are treating the

earth in a senseless, even godless manner because we fail to see

it as a divine gift inherited from above and owed to future

generations.”40 This concept of indebtedness to future

38 Wood, “Specters of Derrida,” p. 265.39 Ibid.40 His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, foreword from Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment, p. ix.

generations is one that some Christians seem to have forgotten

about. The “living thread” as Derrida calls it, both precedes

and stretches beyond timescales that we can perceive. It is a

“diffuse and diffused relationship stretching back beyond and

between present giver, gift, and receiver.”41

How is it possible to know what to do with this gift?

Primavesi affirms that, “unpredictability is part of the

givenness of our theological legacy.”42 This mystery should

remain, and also be viewed as a gift instead of a punishment or

secret kept from ‘mere’ mortal humans. Caputo exclaims, “the

secret is the condition of the ‘come!’”43 To me, this is quite

exciting and liberating. There is freedom in the fact that we

are not slaves to an all-powerful God because he gave us a gift—

the gift of both life and death. The old God, the punitive,

transcendental God, taught Christians that death was a punishment

of the wrongdoings of Adam, the first man. Of course, many

Christians were and are timid to take responsibility in this

41 As derived from Anne Primavesi, Gaia and Climate Change: A Theology of Gift Events, p. 83.42 Ibid.43 Caputo, Prayers, p. 71.

world. A decision made out of ignorance resulted in punishment—

the felt sense of guilt for existing is quite disempowering.

Fortunately we cannot wallow in this guilt for long—people

and things, non-human others and the Earth itself need us to

respond. Derrida states, “No justice…seems possible or thinkable

without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living

present, within that which disjoins the living present, before

the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead,

be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence,

nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of

exterminations.”44 The gift of our life is also the gift of

death, as well as inheritance. To exist is to inherit. “God

himself, if He wants to live for you, must die: How do you think,

without (ohne, sans) death, to inherit His life?”45 With

modernity, if we continue along the lines of the project of

Enlightenment, accepting the terms that God has died we inherit

His (yes His—the old-man-in-the-sky God) legacy—a legacy of

freedom, responsibility, endless possibility, creativity, as well

as maturation, and care.

44 Derrida, Specters, p. xix.45 Derrida, On the Name, p. 82.

This concern for death, this awakening that keeps vigilover death, this conscience that looks death in the face is another name for freedom.46

Responsibility

The freedom described above is a freedom found in

responsibility. Responding as participants in this world is

responsibility. As heirs of a divine inheritance, as knowers and

seekers of a mysterious lineage we must respond with care and

concern for our neighbors—both human and non-human. Christians

in the past have derived their ideas of responsibility and ethics

from Biblical interpretations. As we now see from the event of

climate change and the environmental crisis, we must reexamine

these interpretations. A deconstructive approach to

responsibility and ethics can be derived from Søren Kierkegaard.

In Fear and Trembling he states:

The ethical is the universal and as such, in turn, the divine. It is therefore correct to say that all duty is ultimately duty to God…The duty becomes duty to God by being referred to God, but I do not enter into relations with God in the duty itself. Thus it is a duty to love one’s neighbour; it is a duty in so far asit is referred to God’ yet it is not God that I come inrelation to in the duty but the neighbour I love.47

46 Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 15.47 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 96.

Just as forgiveness occurs in us and through relationship

(“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”), the same

goes for responsibility and ethics. We are not responsible

simply for our life after death—or that our life here on Earth is

simply to guarantee us a spot in Heaven, or Hell for that matter.

One of Jesus’ main teachings was to “love thy neighbor.” We

cannot bypass our responsibility here in this world by loving a

transcendental God, proving ourselves worthy for another world.

We participate in this world and not above it. Primavesi agrees,

“Love of the world is not to be characterized as emotion but as

deliberate choice.”48

A love of deliberate choice is responsibility indeed—making

decisions and being responsible for their consequences as well as

facing the reality of one’s own mortality. In The Gift of Death

(1995), Derrida states, “Just as no one can die in my place, no

one can make a decision…in my place.”49 Our responsibility here

is our duty, our ethical relationship to God, and to being. To

put this in the words of ecofeminist Rosemary Radford Reuther,

48 Primavesi, Gaia, p. 139.49 Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 60.

“To be is to be related; shaping the quality of those relations is the

critical ethical task.”50

We need a new ethics—an ethics of alterity—one that regards

the singularity and importance of each individual thing, every

human and non-human other. Instead of a universal ethics with

universal laws and a universal authority figure, we need an

ethics which responds to every other as wholly other, in each

contextual situation. Kierkegaard points out that “the

temptation is the ethical itself which would keep him from doing

God’s will.”51 To me this is the old ethics—that which appears

to be the ‘right’ thing to do in the universal sense, as

justified in the past or through some transcendental, perhaps

false authority figure. We need to deconstruct our ethics and

welcome an ethics of the impossible, which never “rests on the

good conscience of having done one’s duty.”52

Forgive This: Conclusion

50 Rosemary Radford Reuther, “Ecofeminist Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics: A Comparative View,” from Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth, p. 87.51 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 88.52 Derrida, Specters, p. 28.

For Derrida, deconstruction is “a passion for the

impossible.”53 It is a passion for the gift, a passion of

forgiveness. It is a passion that opens up the confining cycling

of debtor/indebted, forgiving debts and becoming forgiven of

debts, but never giving up the mundane mortality and finitude of

existence. Donna Haraway, a feminist theorist of science and

technology deeply indebted to deconstruction, states the

following: “My suspicion is that the kind of forgiveness that we

fellow mortals living with other animals hope for is the mundane

grace to eschew separation, self-certainty, and innocence even in

our most creditable practices that enforce unequal

vulnerability.”54 We hope for a Christianity of mundane grace, a

Christianity that values interaction in the world and not above

it, engendering responsibility but not guilt, cultivating hope

for the impossible. Forgiveness of our past, our ignorance, our

anthropocentrism? That sounds insane. As Derrida puts it,

forgiveness is “madness of the impossible.”55

Derrida…is an atheist who has his own God, and who loves the name of God, loves that “event” and what

53 Caputo, Prayers, p. xix.54 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, p. 75.55 Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, p.45.

“takes place” or eventuates in that good name….[I]nitialing a pact with the impossible, sticking to the promise of inalterable alterity, tout autre—that, says Derrida, “is what I call deconstruction.”56

A deconstructive approach to the intersection of

Christianity and ecology could help Christians dehabituate and

better understand current religious structures. Deconstructing

these structures could help introduce a post-secular religion

without religion more open and amenable to all others. Rehabituating

the Christian perception to recognize both life and death as a

gift, as well as God as a weak messianic force could help

Christians feel more situated, empowered, and responsible in

their home here on Earth. We are included among a vast living

thread of ancestral others stretching both far back into the past

and ahead to the future. Learning to inhabit this living thread

means enacting what Primavesi calls an “ecology of love,” which

engages the radical alterity of every other without

discriminating on the basis of conduct nor from differing

evolutionary histories.57 I envision this ecology as becoming a

56 Caputo, Prayers, p. 4.57 Primavesi, Gaia, p. 121.

part of Christianity, adopted in doctrines and implemented

through practice, both individually and communally.

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