Accordingly, in the face of neoliberal capitalism, which envisions creation only as exploitable nature, an apocalyptic perspective calls the church and the world to exercise not merely or primarily power over creation but power with creation. We may—we must—long and work for an economics that responds to creation gently and attentively. And as the climate crisis demonstrates, we must work for a sustainable economics, not one that assumes and promotes infinite growth in a finite world. Such an economics “does not idolize or fetishize nature, but it affirms that salvation is cosmic in scope, and it enacts a participation in Christ in which the sacramentality of all nature is affirmed in proclaiming God’s glory. The question is not so much whether we are to evangelize nature as whether we will allow ourselves to evangelize with nature and to be evangelized by nature”—which already, by biblical testimony, is constantly and copiously praising God.
All told, though we need not deny the place of the market, we must recognize that it does have a place—not as the all-encompassing and all-defining framework of being but as within, limited, and constrained by a surrounding and suffusing social and ecological matrix. Within that matrix, it should serve the rightful and prospering ends of society and all of creation. Its own survival depends on this.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 168-69 (embedded quotation from Stone, Evangelism after Christendom, 220)
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I would add, our survival depends on it as well! Relatedly, see this video of Sandra Richter on what the Old Testament says about creation care (compliments of Jim Eisenbraun).
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