Editors' Introduction:Ecology and Christian Soteriology

摘要

Talk about salvation has been controversial in assessing Christianity's environmental responsibilities. Influential scholarship has traced exploitative cultural attitudes to Christian salvation narratives and blamed religious indifference to the earth on otherworldly hopes. Concerned to show Christianity in a greener light or to reform its traditions, ecotheologians rarely develop an explicit soteriology. Yet soteriological ideas, metaphors, and images continue to work beneath the surface. When the late James Nash called for an ecological reformation of the entire Christian tradition, he himself pursued that by developing the transformative mode of God's relationship to humanity—love—into a transformative relationship of humanity to nature: "loving nature" (Nash 1991).