Barth and Environmental Theology
This chapter explains the critical reception of Karl Barth by scholars of ecotheology and the challenges that his theology presents to environmental thought. Then, working along lines of critical reconsideration in environmental thought, it develops lines of possibility for reconsidering the environmental legacy of Barth. It argues that Barth silences nature and that his searing critique of modernity unwittingly reproduces its fundamental ecological illusion, the sundering of humanity from nature. Yet the silencing of nature is the first moment in a dialectic that anticipates a recovery of creation in which one may listen to other creatures. With an ecological imagination informing Barth’s logic, his system could constructively be developed to support an unusual stewardship ethic.