[Ecotheology 9.

2 (2004) 151-177] Ecotheology (print) ISSN 1363-7320

Ecotheology (online) ISSN 1743-1689

Debt, Epistemology and Ecotheology

Philip Goodchild
Senior Lecturer, Department of Theology, University of
Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
Philip.Goodchild@nottingham.ac.uk

Abstract
The roots of the contemporary ecological crisis demand theological re-
description: economic globalisation, driven by debt, is founded on a poor
epistemology constructed around a theology of money. Modern and
postmodern epistemologies with a humanistic frame of reference, as well
as more traditional epistemologies with a naturalistic frame of reference,
are inadequate to address the contemporary predicament as well as restric-
tive in the space they construct for theology. An ecotheology, liberated
from secular humanist constraints, is necessary to construct an adequate
epistemology.

Introduction
Theology and economics give competing accounts of the natural world:
while theology places the created order within a meaningful narrative,
economics works with purely technical measures of human interaction
and exchange. Both may be regarded as ‘humanistic’ in very different
ways: theology produces human meaning in the form of narrative and
interpretation; economics produces quantified knowledge for the pur-
poses of human management and intervention in the natural and social
orders. One may question, however, whether either of these forms of
‘humanism’ are adequate to the growth of a new ecological conscious-
ness born of the crisis inflicted upon the planet by human domination.
In the discussion that follows, we shall examine the roots of the
contemporary ecological crisis and locate them in the phenomena of
momentum of social change and debt. The maladaptation of humanity to
its environment results from its misunderstanding of its predicament: its
poor epistemology, or inability to effectively account for all the costs of
its actions. We shall explore how this poor epistemology is grounded in

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152 Ecotheology

self-reference, in the ‘naturalistic illusion’, and in the theology of the

secular order. An ecotheology, by contrast, liberated from humanism
and the secular model of knowledge, may attempt to construct new
media of knowledge and accounting that are sufficiently adaptive to
address the ecological predicament.

Environmental Crisis: Momentum and Debt

The single issue that threatens to dominate the twenty-first century is the
clash between economy and ecology. Economic activity is unquestiona-
bly responsible for the environmental crisis, and continuing economic
growth threatens to intensify it. At the same time, the finitude of envi-
ronmental resources such as fossil fuels, fresh water, fertile soil, forests,
biodiversity and pollution sinks threatens to destabilise the global econ-
omy. It is already possible to gain a sense of the scale of this collision
course, if not its ultimate consequences. A recent paper presented to the
US National Academy of Sciences, ‘Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of
the Human Economy’, aggregates the area needed for cropland, grazing,
forestry, fishing, human habitation and absorbing carbon dioxide, and
concludes that the human economy has exceeded the carrying capacity
of the planet since 1980. At present, some 1.2 planets would be needed to
sustain current levels of consumption. Moreover, if 12 per cent of the
planet were set aside for the preservation of biodiversity, which contrib-
utes to a wide variety of essential environmental services,1 then the figure
is closer to 1.4 planets (Wackernagel et al. 2002).
We are consuming our own collective body. The United Nations Envi-
ronment Programme reports that 15 per cent of fertile land has degraded,
that two-thirds of the global population will live in water-stressed coun-
tries by 2025, that 2.4 per cent of forests are removed each decade, that
populations of other species have declined by about 15 per cent since
1970, that 211 million people per year were affected by natural disasters
during the 1990s, and that, in 1999, global financial losses from natural
catastrophic events were estimated to exceed US$100 billion. Carbon
dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have increased by 30 per cent
since 1750, while energy usage increased by 57 per cent in the period
between 1973–98 (United Nations Environment Programme 2002).

1. Such as regulation of the gaseous composition of the atmosphere, protection of

coastal zones, regulation of the hydrological cycle and climate, generation and
conservation of fertile soils, dispersal and breakdown of wastes, pollination of many
crops and absorption of pollutants (United Nations Environment Programme 2002:
120-21).

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 Goodchild Debt and Ecotheology 153

Yet more severe than the slow process of self-consumption are the
unpredictable possibilities of destabilisation of the climate: positive feed-
back effects on global warming may be caused by a reduction in the
albedo effect through which snow and ice reflect the sun’s heat, or by the
melting of permafrost leading to a release of methane stored as hydrates
(in molecular ‘ice-boxes’), or by forest fires releasing much of the seques-
tered carbon (trees constitute some 84 per cent of planetary biomass).
These could lead to such a rapid temperature rise within just a few years
that much of the Earth could become almost uninhabitable.
The apparent ‘mystery’ regarding environmental destruction is
humanity’s inability to respond effectively and significantly to the
approaching crisis—as evidenced in the paucity of progress made in the
Rio, Kyoto and Johannesburg summits. For while the technical possibili-
ties for ‘contraction and convergence’ give some grounds for optimism,
since the human impact of those in the developed world upon the envi-
ronment could be reduced to about a tenth of current levels, our ability
to respond remains constrained by a variety of phenomena which we
may characterize as ‘momentum’. While most environmental dam-
age has occurred in the last sixty years, the conditions preparing such
destructive effects were set in place many years ago with the rise of
modernity. Similarly, aside from these physical changes, the social,
political, cultural and technological changes of the last sixty years—the
globalisation of modernity—will have their most significant effects over
the next few centuries. Thus it may be the case that future global warm-
ing resulting from current greenhouse emissions may trigger runaway
climate change, whatever we do over the next few decades. Or it may be
the case that the impact upon land, water, forests and biodiversity of
increasing consumption and ongoing population growth will signi-
ficantly reduce much of the world’s carrying capacity. Or it may be the
case that in the time taken to shift from a fossil fuel economy to a re-
newable-energy economy, so much carbon dioxide is produced that it
makes the entire climate unstable. Or it may be the case that the damage
caused by the increasing number of natural disasters destroys accumu-
lated capital faster than it can be produced, leading to ‘undevelopment’.
Or it may be the case that the established balance of power is such that
significant and dramatic transformation towards sustainable develop-
ment is politically impossible—as many current indications suggest.
It is necessary to be realistic. Much of the global population is already
so stressed by poverty and insecurity that the struggle for short-term
survival takes precedence over longer-term environmental concerns. On
the other hand, many of those who live comfortable lives in the devel-
oped world may feel little motivation for change. Although there are

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many economic advantages of sound ecological management, the advan-

tages of externalisation of costs may always remain greater. While this is
so, an integrated power complex of the military, governments, finance
capital, transnational corporations, the media, science and education will
challenge any threats to its metastability and hegemony. The history of
the exercise of this power in the latter half of the twentieth century—
charted by the likes of Noam Chomsky (1997), William Blum (2002) and
Mark Curtis (2003)—demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain alterna-
tive social paradigms in a hostile environment. Nowadays, the power
complex of free market capitalism is apparently more ascendant than
ever, and its ability to disempower opponents through abusive moral
slogans, through misrepresentation, slander and flak, through subver-
sive operations, and through challenging scientific conclusions should
not be underestimated.
While the phenomena of ‘momentum’ and the nature of corporate
power are widely recognised, the source of the inflexible acceleration of
our current system is not. For at the heart of the clash between ecology
and economy lies an accounting problem: debt. It is essential to distin-
guish between a ‘natural’ economy of goods and services, produced to
meet needs and interests, and the flow of money through which such
goods and services are exchanged. Money is the effective demand that
stimulates the production of goods and services through consumption,
and generates it through capital investment. Yet money is not created by
the production of goods and services; instead, it is created in the form of
credit—always accompanied by debt.2 Since one has to pay back one’s
loans with money rather than goods and services, then such money can
only be acquired if it is created elsewhere by someone else taking out a
further loan. Thus, the cycle of debt controls the activities of individuals
and businesses, making rational adaptation to the external world impos-
sible.
Since nearly all money is created as a debt or liability, then the econ-
omy as a whole is governed, as we shall explain below, by scarcity of
money, interest payments, a drive for growth, competition, and the
transfer of resources from the poor to the wealthy. Even the so-called
‘wealthy’ economies thrive on debt. While the US National Debt runs
close to $6 trillion, other forms of borrowing in the US economy exceed
$20 trillion, some twice the GDP. In the UK economy, private borrowing
amounts to £1.2 trillion, about 120 per cent of GDP. In order to service
such debts, further economic growth, including increasing use of natural
resources such as fossil fuels for transportation and fresh water for

2. One of the fullest accounts of this process is given in Rowbotham (1998).

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agriculture and industry, is essential. Moreover, such debts are con-

stantly increasing—private borrowing in the UK has increased to 42
times its size thirty years ago.3 The obligations introduced by debt
determine economic activity. Then the problem of ‘momentum’ is not
simply one of inertia, or even of active resistance to change. Change is
much more difficult to achieve than it was thirty or sixty years ago; the
crisis has deepened. Instead, the human economy is driven by a run-
away positive feedback system consisting of cycles of debt. Moreover, as
soon as the global economy reaches a global constraint, such as the
availability of primary energy, transport fuel, or fresh water, or as soon
as it reaches a point of destabilisation, where the forces of financial
speculation far exceed the capacity of central banks to compensate, then
sudden collapse will be an inevitable result of a system that is structured
around debt (see Soros 1998, Greider 1998 and Lietaer 2001).

Epistemological Crisis: The Fall

The conflict between economy and ecology epitomizes the current mal-
adaptation of ‘civilization’ to ‘nature’, of the human species to its con-
ditions of existence. The problem lies in humanity as such, in its current
mode of formation; it may also lie in ‘nature’ as such, in its current mode
of conception. If the distinguishing characteristic of our species is
reflective consciousness or knowledge, then it is our epistemology (or
accounting) that is defective. We are currently unable to produce and act
upon an adequate knowledge of the world. In the modern world, the
relationship of the individual to its environment is conceived in linear,
quantifiable terms: the world is regarded as an external resource to be
perceived, cultivated, consumed, digested, and expelled, in a competi-
tive bid for power over other individuals, where power and success are
measured in linear terms as wealth. According to Val Plumwood’s
classic analysis, the relationship between individual and environment is
misconceived as a hierarchical dualism: the environment is treated as
background, excluded from the human sphere of value, defined and
explained in terms of concepts that name human qualities, treated as an
instrument for human ends, stereotyped, and homogenized (Plumwood
1993: 47-55). The result is a denial of human dependency upon the
provision of the environment, a denial of the similarity of humanity with
animals and plants, a denial of the autonomy, creativity and emergence
manifested outside human life, and a denial of the distinctiveness of

3. These figures are obtained from the websites of the US Treasury, the World
Bank, and the Bank of England.

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each ecosystem—all costs of the desire to maximize a single quantity that

we measure as ‘wealth’. Such preconceptions about wealth as a linear
commodity are falsified by our current predicament. In an ecological
system, of which we are a part, everything operates by networks, cycles,
solar energy, partnership, diversity and dynamic balance (Capra 2002:
201). As Gregory Bateson puts it, ‘there are no monotone values in
biology’—there is always a threshold beyond which too much becomes
toxic (Bateson 1980: 64). While the linear quantities measured by science
may be adequate in their own terms, they are fundamentally inadequate
to address ecological systems.
How are we to overcome such misconceptions? A dominant approach
within the ecological movement is to understand humanity as part of
nature, within the context of ecological cycles. One may contrast modern
humanism with the ‘ecological consciousness’ that regards the human
individual and its environment as an inseparable whole. Edward Gold-
smith, for example, draws a sharp contrast between modernism, which
holds that ‘all benefits, and therefore our welfare and real wealth, are
man-made’, and vernacular societies, which hold that the living world or
ecosphere is the basic source of all benefits and wealth. Thus vernacular
societies are teleological, sharing a common goal: ‘the overriding goal of
this behaviour pattern of an ecological society must be to preserve the
critical order of the natural world or the cosmos that encompasses it’
(Goldsmith 1998: xi, xv). Linear growth of the economy is fundamentally
incompatible with the cyclical exchanges of ecology. For Goldsmith, the
fundamental error of modern epistemology is its reductionism: the view
that only the individual is real (Goldsmith 1998: 22). This is repeated
when living things are studied in the laboratory, in isolation from the
natural systems within which they developed. For the more the envi-
ronment of living things differs from that in which they evolved, then
the more their behaviour is likely to become erratic, maladjusted and
destructive (Goldsmith 1998: 17-18).
While few might accept Goldsmith’s recourse to teleology, his strongly
ecological perspective does indicate the developments that consistency
demands. In this respect, the beginning of human history itself, when
humanity first started to adapt its natural environment through the
introduction of agriculture, is the moment of a ‘fall’ from a paradisiacal
world where humanity was effectively adapted to its ecosystem. This
ultimately results in progressive cycles of ever more unstable behaviour
leading to the rapid destabilisation of the environment as humanity
becomes increasingly maladjusted to the world that it has created
for itself. We are now all freaks of nature, living outside our proper
environment, poorly adapted to both the surrounding world and society,

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 Goodchild Debt and Ecotheology 157

for the behaviour programmed by our evolutionary history is for sur-

vival in small bands of hunter-gatherers, and not for modern life. In this
context, then, it is difficult to see how we can restabilize ourselves. For
we have developed maladaptive impulses alongside our maladaptive
knowledge. For our modern life or culture, unlike our biological nature,
has evolved in adaptation to its human environment, exploiting and
magnifying our instincts for competition, sex, security, risk and con-
sumption, without any concern for long-term stability. Insofar as we are
programmed by both modern life and evolution to act in accordance
with our instincts and group-thinking, then a significant change in
behaviour is difficult to achieve through reason alone. It may only come
when it is forced by circumstances.
The environmental crisis is therefore as much a crisis of our habits,
instincts and inclinations, as it is a crisis of epistemology, or a crisis of
momentum and debt. In searching for appropriate solutions, we must
find an approach that is mindful of each of these areas. In this regard, the
epistemological crisis cannot be solved by means drawn purely from the
domain of linguistic expression, for our knowledge is shaped by extra-
linguistic forces. Hence the advantage of much ecological thought that
aims to place the human individual back within its environment.
According to this, the modern quests for wealth—the increasing domina-
tion of the material world—and freedom—the separation from natural
constraint and social obligation—are exposed as illusions, linear projec-
tions of an idealized condition in which humanity cannot survive and
flourish. Once regarded as part of a wider world, then the primary goal
is to re-establish stability. Linear projections that isolate the individual
from its environment are replaced by the circulation of material and
information through successive bodies, regulating stability by means of
negative feedback loops. Our only hope is to understand how the world
works, so that habits, instincts and inclinations can be retrained to adapt
progressively to the actual world (see, for example, Mies and Shiva 1993).
Yet this epistemological shift requires a corresponding shift that
situates thought within evolutionary history. Human thought must be
understood not only as part of ecological cycles, but also as a function of
the evolutionary biology of the brain. Thus George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson, who aim to rethink the nature of philosophy on the basis of
cognitive science, point out that: ‘The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphori-
cal’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1993: 3). The result is a rejection of realist
metaphysics in line with the philosophical heritage of those pioneers
who already tried to place the mind back in the body, Freud and
Nietzsche. For Lakoff and Johnson:

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we can have no direct conscious awareness of most of what goes on in our

minds. The idea that pure philosophical reflection can plumb the depths of
human understanding is an illusion… The cognitive unconscious is vast
and intricately structured. It includes not only all our automatic cognitive
operations, but also all our implicit knowledge. All of our knowledge and
beliefs are framed in terms of a conceptual system that resides mostly in the
cognitive unconscious (Lakoff and Johnson 1993: 12-13).

It is at this point that the shift towards ecological consciousness bears a

passing resemblance to the epistemological challenges of postmodernity.
Yet the key question here is whether the cognitive unconscious is ‘struc-
tured like a language’. Alongside the humanism of linear, instrumental
rationality we must also place the humanism of cultural-linguisticism,
the assumption that thought has a privileged relation to language, narra-
tive, and hermeneutics.4 As Bateson emphasizes, ‘the map is not the
territory, and the name is not the thing named’, for ‘language commonly
stresses only one side of any interaction’: it isolates the individual from
its context (Bateson 1980: 37, 72). Our language is only used to express
the end products of the processes of cognition, yet it substitutes a herme-
neutic context for the properly biological and ecological contexts of
cognition that it cannot represent.
It is therefore possible to distinguish between recent epistemological
challenges to the modern ideal of perfect knowledge: there are those
challenges that issue from the linguistic expression of knowledge and its
hermeneutic incompleteness which are properly called ‘postmodern’,
since they intensify critical strategies of thinking developed within mod-
ernity. Such postmodernism may be regarded as a continuation of
humanistic idealism. As Félix Guattari maintains in his critique of post-
modernism, there are ethological, ecological, and economic components
of any concrete assemblage, as well as aesthetic, corporeal and fantas-
matic components that are irreducible to the semiology of language
(Guattari 1996: 111). The world does not function according to signifying
chains. In contrast to postmodern critiques, there are those challenges to
epistemology that situate thought in relation to its outside. One example
of these is Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, in which thinking
depends on forces which take hold of thought, but do not resemble
thought:
The taste for replacing real relations between forces by an abstract relation
which is supposed to express them all, as a measure, seems to be an int-
egral part of science and also of philosophy… Now, in this abstract relation,

4. For the emergence of cognition through biology, see Maturana and Varela
(1992).

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 Goodchild Debt and Ecotheology 159

whatever it is, we always end up replacing real activities (creating, speak-

ing, loving, etc.) by the third party’s perspective on these activities: the
essence of the activity is confused with the gains of a third party, which he
claims that he ought to profit from, whose benefits he claims the right to
reap… The most curious thing about this image of thought is the way in
which it conceives of truth as an abstract universal. We are never referred to
the real forces that form thought, thought itself is never related to the real
forces that it presupposes as thought (Deleuze 1983: 74, 103-104).

Thus questions of interpretation are subordinate to the material practices

that actually generate thought. More boldly, the distinction may be
expressed as follows: ‘A schizophrenic out for a stroll is a much better
model than a neurotic lying on an analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air,
a relationship with the outside world’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 2).
Such a distinction may give us some guidance in formulating an episte-
mological response that addresses all dimensions of our given problem.
Once it is recognized that such forces include ecological, biological,
linguistic, epistemic and economic relations, then the true magnitude of
the problem confronts us.

False Accounting: The Problem of Self-reference

It is necessary to diagnose the conceptual source of our current predica-
ment. The fundamental weakness of modern (and postmodern) episte-
mology is that it operates a system that is self-referential. Examples of
self-referential ideas include a conception of God as supreme power, a
conception of human identity as self-consciousness, a conception of truth
as founded on empirical evidence, and a conception of money as su-
preme value. To illustrate their logic, let us take the case of economic
value: all economic values are measured in terms of money, as a price.
Let us say that an asset, such as a house, is worth £100,000. Such a price
is only fixed when an exchange is agreed. Alongside the physical
exchange of property and money, however, the measurement of price
produces an abstract equivalence from the perspective of a third party:
the price of the house is £100,000. Money, here, is both a means of pay-
ment and a unit of account. As a commodity, £100,000 is tautologously
worth £100,000. Yet this tautology, like all tautologies, contains a
reduction and falsification by which the subject collapses into the predi-
cate: the difference between a means of exchange and a unit of account is
neglected. But a subject is not a predicate; a price is not a sum of money.
This ‘paralogism of pure epistemology’ (Goodchild 2002: 44-45) gives the
appearance that money is ‘neutral’ in exchange: for, as a unit of account,
money appears on both sides of the equation, pricing both the house and

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the sum of money. It becomes invisible, while constituting the abstract

perspective from which price can be conceived, and in relation to which
monetary value is an unlimited good. All the forces that contribute to the
selection and designation of the predicate become lost in the ignorance
of objective knowledge.
On the assumption that money is ‘neutral’ in exchange, economic
theory assumes that only the ‘natural’ economy exists, the exchange of
goods and services to meet wants, needs and interests. This naturalistic
illusion becomes the basis of modern epistemology, the lens through
which what is ‘real’ can be seen. The assumption of neutrality is built
into foundational economic theories such as the quantity theory, general
equilibrium theory, and the theory of marginal utility. As a result, prices,
trade, and exchange are taken as a measure of real wealth: value only
exists insofar as it is incorporated into the economic sphere of exchange.
Yet all assets only hold value in proportion to the value of the currency
in which they are denominated. All value is man-made; it is a repre-
sentation.5 The increase of wealth can then only be understood as an
increase in the linear quantity that represents wealth: monetary value.
Such modern knowledge is blind and self-referential: it is blind to
inequalities of power in actual market relations, blind to those without
assets or health for labour, blind to institutional power relations between
corporations, producers and consumers that shape the economy, blind to
the legislative basis upon which the market is founded, and blind to the
provision of resources and subsistence by women and the wider
environment. It is blind to the externalisation of costs, and to the enor-
mous inefficiencies of the contemporary capitalist system: the wastage of
resources, labour, excess production and consumption, people, and the
environment. It is even blind to the enormous wastage of financial capi-
tal effected by the permanent secondment of vast quantities of wealth
into speculation on financial products and property.
There is a morality that emerges from this self-referential, modern
perspective, and it emerges quite ‘naturally’ from assuming that money
is neutral in exchange. From this ‘natural’ perspective, all trade is positive
and productive since it is measured as wealth, even if it includes war
and cleaning up after accidents and disasters. Consequently, all that
limits free trade must be bad since it limits the potential for economic
growth and development. For if one wishes to address poverty and envi-
ronmental destruction, it is necessary to create the wealth to spend on
these via trade and production. Moreover, the spread of free trade by

5. This is the premise of de Soto (2001) who recommends maximising wealth by

formally registering anything that can count as property.

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political or economic means, or even by military interference in other

sovereign states, may be justified in the interests of the people in those
states, just as economic growth is regarded as the precondition of envi-
ronmental sustainability.6 For the creation of monetary value defines the
common good.
John McMurtry, in a powerful critique of corporate capitalism, empha-
sizes the extent to which current political polarisations reflect a war of
values (McMurtry 2002). Whereas many critiques of corporate globalisa-
tion concentrate on the influence of giant corporations, and the frame-
work of international law that serves their interests (see, for example,
International Forum on Economic Globalization 2002; Cromwell 2001),
the merit of McMurtry’s work is to explain an integrated power-system
also consisting of the military, of foreign policy, of the media, of science,
and of financial institutions, including the role of the creation of money
as debt. In contrast to the economic value-system that is expressed in
these institutions, his principles are grounded in the ‘life economy’: the
regulations needed to prevent the monetary system from turning into a
runaway system of profit-seeking, and to prevent ecocide by making
commodity cycles accountable to ‘life standards’. From the ‘natural’
perspective of maintaining and enhancing those conditions that are
necessary to sustain life, our current system is inherently destructive,
driven by profit and transforming its own professed values of freedom,
democracy, civilisation and development into their opposite: the totali-
tarianism of the global market. Such totalitarianism is manifested even in
science, which is taken as defining reality itself by liquidating life that is
not externally observable and quantifiable, by liquidating life that is not
uniformly repeatable, and by enforcing its vision of reality through tech-
nology and coercing people to conform to it (McMurtry 2002: 101-105).
We may develop these insights in relation to the preceding discussion:
self-referentiality necessarily results, through positive feedback, in a will

6. I emphasize the clash between economy and ecology because it demonstrates

beyond contradiction the fallacy of the current system. A careful, theoretical disman-
tling of mainstream economics and its morality can be opposed by the selective use of
figures demonstrating ‘development’—as though the economic system were responsi-
ble for such development, rather than the hard work of people and the sharing of
knowledge. Such debates are short-circuited by global ecological finitude. I am well
aware, however, that for most of the human race this collision between economy and
ecology has already taken place, in the appropriation of land and means of subsis-
tence, for example. Economic and environmental crises of tragic proportions have
already occurred; in practice, however, they are deliberately displaced and localized,
so that they do not impact upon the prevailing power structures. It is the end of this
geographical solution to the contradictions of capitalism that will be in evidence in the
coming century.

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to power. Since it excludes negative feedback loops from its considera-

tions as externalities, there is no stability possible in such a climate. The
social Darwinism inherent in the modern economic governance of insti-
tutions is an effect of our poor epistemology, just as the privileging of
competition in the theory of evolution is shaped by modern economic
behaviour.7 Yet our current predicament is worse than social Darwinism,
for the promise of future profit has been bought not merely at the
expense of others and the environment, but also at the expense of cur-
rent debt. Contractual obligations to the future require profits to be
made. Growth becomes a condition of survival, yet it always comes at
the expense of others: because the basic goods required for prosperity
have an irreducibly physical dimension, and so detract from the environ-
ment; because acquiring money to pay off a loan requires that someone
else take out a loan elsewhere; and because the money system becomes
fundamentally unstable, beyond the control of central banks, because of
the increase in scale of monetary and speculative transactions (see, for
example, Douthwaite 1999: 23-27, 73). The effect is a complete transfor-
mation of the determining element of human civilisation. Once it is no
longer merely a question of domination, but debt or financial obligation,
then an autonomous, impersonal system comes to take control of human
life. The human is surpassed by the inhuman.
Here we come to a strange paradox. If the debt-based money system is
a human product, then it would seem to be entirely dependent on the
legal and institutional arrangements in which it survives. It could easily
be eliminated by a legislative change, several of which have recently
been proposed (see, for example, Douthwaite 1999; McMurtry 2002;
Lietaer 2001; Huber and Robertson undated; Shakespeare and Challen
2002; and Hutchinson, Mellor and Olsen 2002). On the other hand,
however, if the debt-based money system now determines the shape of
human politics, then it may utilize all the resources of elective dictator-
ship, including military, financial, academic, media, and corporate sec-
tors, in order to protect its vulnerability. The crux of the matter is that
both moralities focusing on economic growth and moralities focusing on
ecological survival appeal to a ‘natural’ perspective, from which their
opponents seem self-evidently unrealistic, if not downright evil. The
weakness of proposals for legislation based on ‘life-values’ is not their
practical but their political viability. Moreover, human understanding is
such that, faced with competing versions of ‘reality’, it is most likely to

7. According to the biologist Lynn Margulis, ‘most evolutionary novelty arose,

and still arises, directly from symbiosis’ (Margulis 1999: 43). See further Primavesi
(2000: 108-20).

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 Goodchild Debt and Ecotheology 163

choose that which gratifies its own immediate interests—however cul-

turally constructed such interests may be. At this point, what is ‘natural’
seems to come into conflict with what is ‘natural’. In such a predicament,
our only recourse must be one that deliberately tries to guide and shape
the ‘natural’, whether in the form of instincts and inclinations, in the
form of our knowledge, or in the form of the social forces of momentum
and debt.

Reproducing the Naturalistic Illusion

We can crystallize the dilemma as follows. Freya Mathews has identi-
fied two metaphysical axioms in Deep Ecology: the first is explicit (in
the work of Arne Naess, for example), a ‘rejection of the man-in-envi-
ronment image in favor of the relational, total-field image’; the second is
implicit, that ‘nature can best look after its own interests…only our
interventions in the natural course of events…give rise to terminal
ecological disasters’ (Mathews 1994: 236). For the aim of Deep Ecology is
to develop an ecological consciousness consisting of identification with
the wider world (see Fox 1990). Any such attempt to place humanity
back within its wider environment results in what she calls the ‘identi-
fication dilemma’: if we are truly part of, or one with, nature, and nature
knows best, then our depredations of the natural world must be ecologi-
cally, and hence morally, unobjectionable (Mathews 1994: 237). On
similar grounds of realism, the biologist Lynn Margulis brushes aside
the rhetoric of most environmental theology and philosophy:
To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is
laughable—the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not
we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide our wayward Earth or
heal our sick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for self-delusion.
Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves (Margulis 1999: 143).

The natural consequence of such an identification might be a celebration,

as presented by Paula Allen Gunn:
Our planet, my darling, is gone coyote, heyoka, and it is our great honor to
attend her passage rites. She is giving birth to her new consciousness of
herself and to her relationship to the other vast intelligences, other holy
beings in her universe. Her travail is not easy, and it occasions her inten-
sity, her conflict, her turmoil (Gunn 1994: 329).

For if evolution proceeds by punctuated equilibria driven by adaptation

to environmental change, then the coming crisis might well be the
occasion for a rapid evolutionary advance, involving, amongst other
things, the emergence of a new consciousness as humanity learns to

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become conscious of itself as part of the planet. Thus the birth of a ‘new
consciousness’ could be the birth of a superior humanity.
How, then, are we to choose ‘life values’ as a principle of change,
rather than acquiescence? Mathews draws out two conflicting kinds of
morality from the natural order: one is acquiescence in the ‘justice’ of the
ecological order, whereby ‘transgressors’ are selected out of existence, as
though whatever is, is right; the other is based on imitation of the
boundless generosity of nature as the source of all life, resulting in care
and compassion for actually existing individuals. The result is ‘an irre-
ducible moral ambivalence consisting of compassionate intervention on
behalf of nature on the one hand, and enlightened acquiescence in the
natural tide of destruction on the other’ (Mathews 1994: 243).
There is a fundamental problem which recurs in every attempt,
whether political or theoretical, to set humanity back within the context
of ‘life’: the knowledge that we have of ‘life’ or ‘nature’ is a human,
embodied knowledge—we only know ‘nature’ from our own point of
view, one that is irreducibly shaped by language, culture and human
interests. The science of ecology gives us no account of ‘what nature
wants’, or of values implicit in nature—we have no objective knowledge,
apart from the wants, needs and interests we discover in ourselves.
Whether we conceive ‘Gaia’ simply as a self-regulating chemical system
whereby living organisms adapt the ecosphere to their own interests
(Lovelock 1995), or whether we conceive ‘Gaia’ as an autotelic whole,
aiming at its own stability (Goldsmith 1998), or whether we conceive
‘Gaia’ as a metaphorical Earth goddess (Christ 1997), in each case we
simply project a small portion of what we know onto the surrounding
world. We remain caught within the shallow skin of human reflective
consciousness, unable to enter the depth of reality.
The political danger of this dilemma is that in the war of values,
‘compassionate intervention’ can be subsumed into current forms of
progress and development on the one hand, while ‘enlightened acquies-
cence’ can be subsumed into passivity before the dominance of the
inhuman money system. A credible basis for political intervention must
be much stronger than this.
In reality, there is no possible reversing of the ‘fall’, no re-entry into
an adaptive paradise. The world to which we try to adapt is still merely
our model of the world, constructed from linguistic symbols, from imagi-
nation, metaphor and experiment, and it only contains what we dare to
put into it.8 We cannot escape our human skin, our self-constructed

8. This is evident above all in those attempts to construct an ecological world-

view, especially much ecotheology, yet also Edward Goldsmith’s reintroduction of

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membrane of reflective consciousness that individuates us from the

surrounding world. Yet just as it is the characteristic modern error to
regard the individual in isolation from its environment, it is also a
modern ecological error to regard the environment in isolation from the
human individual. For not only has humanity already changed the
environment to a significant extent, but the emergence of humanity
changes the entire meaning of the universe. The emergence of reflective
consciousness, language, money, and perhaps even spirituality are part
of the ‘momentum’ or dynamic of the universe itself. When we privilege
stability and survival as the ‘natural’ perspective of life, then our per-
spective is partial, deriving from a position of risk and scarcity; when we
privilege evolution, emergence and creation as the ‘natural’ perspective
of life, as did an earlier generation including Nietzsche, Bergson,
Whitehead, and de Chardin, then our perspective is again partial.
We fall into a ‘naturalistic illusion’ whenever we claim to know what
nature is or what nature wants. We fall into a ‘naturalistic illusion’
whenever we adopt, implicitly or explicitly, a realist metaphysics. Yet
we fall into the ‘idealistic’ illusion of postmodernism whenever we claim
that knowledge of entities and processes are impossible. For we remain
cognitive animals, partially adapted to our environment: the inadequacy
of knowledge as hitherto conceived does not imply the impossibility of
knowledge.

The Theology of the Secular Order

How does the ‘naturalistic illusion’ arise? It is, once more, an instance of
the self-referentiality of modern epistemology that is only achieved by a
disavowal of the instincts and inclinations expressed within it, as well as
a disavowal of its own theology. Theological questions may be reintro-
duced as soon as we consider what we do with our time. Saving time
forms the essence of the Enlightenment project of emancipation: if we
are liberated from the constraints of natural necessity that may fore-
shorten our lifespans, and if we are liberated from the constraints of
social obligation that occupy our time, then we have true freedom to
become what we wish to be. The aspiration, here, is for a condition of
atheism, where we are finally unconditioned by God or nature. Eco-
nomic rationality depends on a symbolization of time, so that a cal-
culation can be performed that minimises our relative expenditure,
while maximising our control over nature through technology, and

teleology (Goldsmith 1998: 27-32) and Fritjof Capra’s invocation of spirituality (Capra
2002: 57-60).

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maximising control over social obligation through money. The certainty

that attaches to economic rationality derives from its proofs in practice—
technological invention and acquisition of wealth. Yet the knowledge,
power and wealth acquired are always local and partial—projecting a
future when liberation will be complete, economic rationality is faith
seeking understanding. In this total future, abstract symbols of time will
effectively represent time as open, empty, and undetermined, in a glori-
ous, heavenly future where the passage of time is no longer constrained
by natural necessity or social obligation. Trust in the transcendent will
vanish when we finally attain the complete repeatability and universal-
ity required for scientific certainty, and all our knowledge is grounded
on evidence. Only as such will the ‘secular’ sphere be constituted, the
sphere of the present age untrammelled by obligation to repeat the past,
or anxious expectation of the judgements of the future, where all causes
are mediated to their consequences by our knowledge.
In order to attain such a condition, however, it is necessary to short
circuit our expectations, and treat the secular age as though it were
present, here and now. We project hypotheses about the natural world,
before we can test and correct them. Similarly, in the sphere of value, we
estimate the price of a commodity in relation to other commodities,
needs and interests. And this very anticipation, this very faith, intro-
duces a distortion into our emancipatory practice, producing ignorance
and slavery. For one has to project the secular utopia as already attained
in order to construct the world of nature or the sphere of value. The
result is a totalization that attempts to effect both a formal and a real
subsumption of reality. Concepts of nature, value, society, necessity and
even money are abstractions that depend upon a prior totalization, as
though the system of exchange and relation that constitutes the world
were universal. In each case, a representation of material life, which
functions as a medium of social interaction, assumes an autonomy from
social interaction as soon as it is posited as existing in itself; it only
maintains such an autonomy by attempting to realise itself, by effecting
first a formal and then a real subsumption of material life under its
organising categories. In short, the material, secular, natural or social
worlds have no ontological purchase; they are representations that only
exist insofar as they attempt to realise themselves. They possess an
abstract unity that can never be realised in practice.
The mechanism for the constitution of the secular order of nature, or
the ‘novo ordo seclorum’ celebrated on the dollar bill, is again explained by
money. Failing the arrival of the universal, secular utopia, one substi-
tutes a particular for the universal, in anticipation of the universal. In the
Grundrisse (1973), Karl Marx noticed the ‘contradiction’ that occurs

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between money as the universal unit of account and money as a

particular commodity that can be exchanged:
Money—the common form into which all commodities as exchange values
are transformed, i.e. the universal commodity—must itself exist as a
particular commodity alongside the others, since what is required is not
only that they can be measured against it in the head, but that they can be
changed and exchanged for it in the actual exchange process. The
contradiction which thereby enters, to be developed elsewhere (Marx 1973:
165).

The consequence of such a contradiction is that there is no longer such a

thing as nature or society. We always substitute a particular for the
universal: for, lacking access to knowledge of the full order of nature, we
project partial and particular images to substitute for the universal. Yet
what are rendered invisible in a commodified, naturalistic, secular ontol-
ogy based on evidence and information are not merely social forces, but
temporal forces. In the very act of saving time, one loses time altogether.
In the construction of secular knowledge, a knowledge of the ‘present
age’, one excludes the past and the future in favour of an imagined
eschaton. This attempt to save time by attaining a partial vision of perfect
knowledge in advance of the eschaton is the very move that at once
eliminates all possibility of true knowledge of time and allows the entry
of diabolical forces into human thought.
Let us explore the consequences of the substitution of the particular
for a projected universal (and here one must consider whether post-
modernity is little more than the successive substitution of a series of
particulars for the universal). First, since there is no necessity that
governs which particular should be substituted for the universal, this
structure of thinking can capture all desires. For the substitution of the
particular for the universal is a purely formal structure: it does not
initially seem to matter which content will come to fill it. In the secular
eschaton, once progress has been achieved, people will have the freedom
to do as they please with their time and money, since they will no longer
be subject to natural necessity or social obligation. Progress offers the
promise of limitless possibility.
Secondly, however, those particulars that are best suited to occupying
the place of the universal are those that are capable of universalizing
themselves: a conception of God as supreme power, for example, or a
conception of human identity as self-consciousness, or a conception of
truth as founded on empirical evidence, or a conception of money as
supreme value—it is astonishing to consider the extent to which human
activity has been regulated by such autopoietic ideas. The relevant
characteristics of such ideas include both an openness to relation, so that

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the rest of the world is judged from their perspective, and a closed
interior generated by self-reference. In the case of money, since it is both
means of payment and unit of account, then the best way to acquire
what one wishes is to make money first—thus money posits itself as the
universal, the supreme value, the means of access to all other values. At
the same time, money becomes a kind of encompassing membrane that
determines what will count as valuable, just as empirical truth deter-
mines what counts as real, or self-consciousness determines what counts
as experience, or the will of God determines what happens in the course
of history.
Thirdly, when a particular is substituted for the universal, then its
endurance will be subject to the constraints of scarcity of human
attention. Only those ideas that attract human attention or regulate
human action will survive. The consequence is a kind of ‘natural selec-
tion’ of ideas, where the fate of ideas depends on their capacity to repro-
duce, as well as their adaptation to their environment. Whereas scarcity
induces competition, in the form of a ‘will to power’, adaptation can
induce cooperation or ‘structural coupling’, symbiotic adaptation to
other dimensions of experience, through which ideas flatter or lend self-
affirmation to their bearers.
Fourthly, any substitution of the particular for the universal is specu-
lative: on the one hand, it speculates on the arrival of the secular
eschaton that it will come to embody; on the other hand, it speculates on
its membership as one of the ‘saved’ who will remain in the secular
eschaton. Indeed, it is this very speculation, this leap of faith, that short-
circuits the arrival of the eschaton, inflating the value of the proposed
particular. Let us illustrate this once again with the example of money:
while everyone knows that the promise written on a bank note cannot be
fulfilled, for no bank possesses enough reserves, the permanent deferral
of the realization of its value enables it to keep its value: one has to act as
if money is valuable because everyone else does, and, in doing so, it
becomes valuable—until the currency collapses. Speculation on the par-
ticular, combined with deferral of the universal, constitutes the signifi-
cance of the particular.
Fifthly, a vital distinction is introduced between the sphere of signifi-
cance of the universalized particular and that which is merely external:
between the will of God and human sin; between human self-conscious-
ness and the animal or vegetable; between empirical fact and mere
tradition or superstition; between wealth creation and simple subsis-
tence. Such distinctions are not merely conceptual, for to the extent that
human activity is regulated by the universalized particular, then it opens
up the possibility of all kinds of mediation and cooperation: the public

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sphere can be constituted by obedience to the will of God, or by mutual

recognition of self-consciousness, or by acceptance of verifiable knowl-
edge, or by the value of wealth. The collective force of those who serve a
universalized particular is contrasted with the individual forces of the
insignificant and excluded, constituting a substantial yet reconceived
notion of class difference.
Sixthly, as a corollary, there is an ongoing colonization of the sur-
rounding environment driven by the promise of inclusion as contrasted
with the threat of exclusion, driven by the autopoietic nature of the uni-
versalized particular, driven by its ‘will to power’ or need for continual
expansion, driven by the autonomy of the self-referential universalized
particular which is liberated from all recompense since the universal is
perpetually postponed, and driven by the power differential contained
in class difference.
Finally, once significance has been delegated to the universalized par-
ticular, it then becomes the source of all benefits, wealth, and signifi-
cance. By saving time, and borrowing our particular postulate from a
future secular utopia, we owe a debt of gratitude for our existence: it is
up to us to ensure that our idol will indeed appear in the secular utopia.
In this respect, the extreme vulnerability of the monetary system consti-
tutes the very source of its power. Not only are we committed to making
future profits in order to pay off current debts, but we are committed to
preserving and restoring our fragile monetary system as the very con-
dition of all human activity. The devastating effects of financial crises
demonstrate how dependent we are upon our monetary systems.9 More-
over, such devastating effects tend to impoverish and disempower
ordinary people, while the IMF ensures that reconstruction gives prime
importance to restabilization of the monetary system in the interests of
international capital. Volatility and instability, the result of the ‘internal
contradictions’ of capital, only strengthen the system as a whole. The
analogies also hold with other universalized particulars: the absence of
evidence of divine power in the world makes belief in God all the more
necessary. Failures of human self-consciousness make self-knowledge all
the more important. Our errors and prejudices make empirical verifica-
tion of the truth more urgent. We become indebted to the future that we
have created; life is determined by eschatology.

9. The World Bank reports some 69 countries suffering from serious banking
crises, and 87 suffering from adverse currency speculation, since 1975 (see Lietaer
2001: 321).

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Intelligent Money
It does not have to be so. While the future environmental crisis and
economic collapse seem to bear down upon us with absolute necessity,
the human condition remains one of contingency. We require redemp-
tion from the future, not the past; we require redemption from our
fantasies of a secular eschatology; we require redemption from our
neurotic urge to save time; we require redemption from submission to
exaggerated instincts and inclinations. The source of slavery is a theol-
ogy embodied in a money-system based on neutrality, self-positing, will
to power, speculation, self-reference, colonization, and debt. This relig-
ion of money has gained hold of us through the promises it offers,
through its capacity to objectify and transmit human value and demand
over distances, through its capacity to be exchanged for any goods and
services and thus coordinate human activity, and through its capacity for
growth. The automatic results of a money-system based on debt and
interest are that it encourages competition, it continually fuels economic
growth, and that it concentrates wealth (see Lietaer 2001: 50). Yet this
money system was formed in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries to serve the needs of mercantilist expansion; other money
systems have and can be devised that serve entirely different purposes,
expressing other theologies.
We require a new kind of information system, a new epistemology, a
new way of expressing demand effectively, a new way of adapting to the
needs of stabilization and sustainability. Instead of seeking an infinite
understanding of the natural order, we can seek a partial understanding:
we need to know what really matters, what are the urgent needs; we
need to direct our efforts and attention where they are needed, especially
where there are threats to stability, or collective and personal survival;
we need know-how, the ability to solve problems; and we need an over-
arching information system that will coordinate our efforts, make our
demands effective, and reward the exercise of virtue and ingenuity. If it
is impossible to achieve these through our inclinations and reason, since
humanity remains fallen, it may still be possible to achieve through
creating an artificial social environment that guides our inclinations, in-
ventions and attentions according to an over-arching theological vision.
Recent technological developments may enable a new proposal: intel-
ligent money. Our money-system already functions as an autonomous
process of response to signals, like a kind of artificial life. It is simply one
that is grossly inefficient and dysfunctional. Yet there is no reason why
an entirely new system cannot be designed, one that specifically aims to
meet collectively perceived needs and reward collectively perceived

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virtues. It is now possible to create and programme new media of

exchange in a computerized information system. Intelligent money flows
where it wills. The mechanism of prices can still be used. It is possible to
devise a complex system that rewards virtue, meets demand, encourages
stability, and limits excess—always operating guiding controls through a
‘pricing’ mechanism. For there is no reason why the money that is attri-
buted to accounts needs to remain an entirely passive object of exchange,
a fixed quantity, or a form that grows only in response to profits and
interests. For if money is essentially information, then it can simply
accumulate, rather than being exchanged—indeed, it already does. It
would be possible to devise a monetary system that responds precisely
to collectively agreed needs and virtues, where money attributes itself in
response to a specific information profile. Such a system could be con-
structed by making each account a quantified output of units of ‘artificial
life’—individuals that are designed to respond, to search, to reproduce,
or to diminish, in response to stimuli in a created informational environ-
ment. The goal of unlimited acquisition would be replaced by a goal of
encouraging cooperation by in-built mechanisms that discourage excess
and insufficiency. Artificial life could respond negatively to measures of
environmental damage or crime, for example, and positively to meas-
ures of cooperation, creativity, thrift, increase in labour for the sake of
others, and work for the rehabilitation of others.
We already have a highly sophisticated informational representation
of the world; it is merely a matter of designing appropriate responses to
the diversity of informational stimuli. The details need not concern us at
this stage: it is simply necessary to know that anything is possible.
Interacting with a universal database, and monitored for effectiveness,
such a system could attribute buying power to its participants. Such a
system differs from our current technocratic epistemology in two signi-
ficant ways: it is a money system, making effective demands respond to
perceived changes in the external world, rather producing them from
its own blind self-reference; and it strives to take its own failures into
account, constantly seeking to adapt and improve itself in the most
fundamental of ways.
Such a system could coordinate human interaction and exchange apart
from, and in addition to, the formal monetary economy. If participation
were voluntary, on the basis of gift, then it could bypass the nation-
state and political competition; its expansion and inclusivity would be
dependent on it functioning as a far more effective economy than the
existing one. Yet since the entire system would operate on the basis of
trust and collective virtue, it would constitute a religious underpinning

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for everyday life. It would need to be shaped, maintained, monitored

and improved according to a theological vision of the good life. In this
respect, the organizations best placed to devise, develop, introduce and
monitor economies based around intelligent money would be religious
organizations such as churches, mosques, temples or sangha. Whatever
the institution, real questions arise as to the extent to which such organi-
zations could be entrusted once more with such social responsibilities.
Abuses would no doubt occur, and political systems of regulation and
accountability would need to be devised. Nevertheless, a secular vision
of the good life has been proved insufficient, and an alternative is
urgently required.

Conclusion: Ecotheology
Ecotheology rejects the self-enclosure of modernity on two separate
fronts: on the one hand, it rejects the humanism that separates humanity
from the environment in which it is embodied, in which it participates,
and within which it emerged. On the other hand, it rejects the secular
humanism that aspires to construct a total representation of the world
from its own linguistic resources, neglecting what it sees as ‘spiritual’
concerns.
Yet the introduction of a theological perspective is a perilous business.
For theology has been deeply associated with human language. In Anne
Primavesi’s terminology, theology belongs within our ‘poieticscape’: the
linguistic, poetic, creative, imaginative and expressive dimension of life
(Primavesi 2000: 9). If such theology is a human product, expressive of
human predicaments and aspirations, then it may simply be a form of
projection and wishful thinking of ambivalent adaptive value. On the
other hand, if theology is regulated by a particular set of texts or forms
of words in a particular language, one is in ‘a curious position of pre-
scriptively universalizing a particular authority bound to a particular
time, place, people and expressive environment’ (Primavesi 2000: 46)—
a move that seems all the more parochial given ecological as well as
historical consciousness.
Modern theology has been caught within a dilemma. On the one hand,
the world can be regarded from the perspective of theology’s own texts,
narratives, concepts, doctrines, traditions, communities and history, in
relation to which reality acquires a hermeneutic meaning. In neo-ortho-
doxy and postliberalism, it is often the case that theology has nothing
but a forced relevance to our problems and concerns; apart from meta-
phorical substitution, it largely leaves everything as it is, and thus is

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culpable of conserving the status quo. On the other hand, liberal theol-
ogy can take its shape from engaging with contemporary issues, con-
tributing all of its resources to a reconfiguring of our understanding of
problems. Here, however, theology has contributed little more than
metaphorical substitutions for problems and insights that have been
developed outside theology, and which remain substantially unchanged
by their theological redescription; it simply leaves everything as it is
once more. In both cases, theology is confined to a purely hermeneutic
enterprise, contributing to the human sphere of the construction of
meaning, but achieving little in the way of effective intervention in our
economic and ecological conditions of existence. In choosing language as
its sole medium of expression, theology renders itself irrelevant to non-
linguistic modes of communication; theology remains humanistic, all too
humanistic.
It is now time to proclaim the liberation of theology from a double
Babylonian captivity: theology must be liberated from the ‘secular’
model of knowledge, not only insofar as this infects the discourse of
theology itself, but also insofar as the implicit theology of secular episte-
mology is exposed to critical scrutiny. Theology needs concern no other
world than this one, when no longer approached through the lens of a
utopian present, a secular age.10 At the same time, however, theology
may also be liberated from its captivity within the semiosis of language,
where it remains largely irrelevant to the determining fields of power
that shape contemporary life. Theology can discover and create new
media of expression where it engages directly with the actual lines of
force that determine contemporary life.
A theology that is truly meaningful, rather than an excess of meta-
phorical afterthought, would be deeply engaged in the problems that
effectively determine our lives, including such issues as ecology, econ-
omy and epistemology. There is no question here of a ‘theology of the
gaps’, imposing the external, mythical language of theology once secular
thought reaches its limits. Instead, theology would be better off setting
aside its specialized conceptual apparatus that belongs to a period prior
to the rise of science, of historical consciousness and of ecological con-
sciousness, and working within the sciences, natural and social, and
philosophy, constructing its own concepts only as and where necessary,
and drawing on the resources of the past for recuperation where fruitful.
Questions of theology do not need to be added as an afterthought to
an objective ‘nature’; on the contrary, theological questions are encoun-

10. This is the challenge to modern secular reason posed by the likes of Johann
Hamann, Franz Jacobi, Friedrich Schelling, and Søren Kierkegaard, and taken up
again in the movement termed ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ (see Milbank 1999: 21-37).

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tered within and presupposed by nature.11 Such is the case whenever we

encounter contingency. For the assumption of a ‘secular’ or ‘natural’
order is that the world proceeds as it does out of necessity: each effect is
determined by a particular, linear chain of causes. Yet the real world
exhibits nothing of the kind: each event is a product of a confluence of
causes and conditions, including physical, biological, physiological,
linguistic, social, historical, psychological and cultural factors. In the
conjunction of heterogeneous domains, there is often an element of
contingency in determining which factors have the ‘leading’ or ‘guiding’
role. This is a more complex example of the condition of complexity,
where, even in the same domain, nonlinear equations have multiple
solutions, multiple ‘strange attractors’ or possible behaviours. Whereas
physics describes the domain of the circular movement of matter and
energy, and whereas the second law of thermodynamics describes the
linear flow of energy through a system, organic systems involve the
continual creation of order and information.12 Whether or not one
invokes a monotheistic God at this point, the creation of order and
information, or the provision of actual solutions in conditions of appar-
ent ‘randomness’ or contingency, is inherently theological insofar as it
concerns an ongoing creation. It may be guided by how we direct our
attention, in line with our theology.
Human life produces the experience of contingency, for we determine
ourselves and our lives by the ways in which we distribute our atten-
tion—it leads us to respond to what we perceive, to what we take as
counting. Yet human ignorance also produces the condition of contin-
gency, for lacking the knowledge available in a secular utopia, we do not
know what effects will arise from the ways in which we direct our
attention. Since the pivot linking our attention to its result is invisible,
any act of attention is an act of faith—we trust that we may be granted a
suitable future. And this radical contingency implies a kind of transcen-
dence. Hence any determinate or disciplined act of attention expresses a
piety, determined by a theology.
The modern, secular faith is that such ignorance and transcendence
can be overcome. We posit a universal realm of necessity, where objec-
tive knowledge would hold, as a cure for our ignorance. In seeking to
obtain this realm of universality, we posit hypotheses about particu-
lars that might be true in the realm of the universal. Here, just as our
attention may lead to unexpected results, the particular may short-circuit
the universal, allowing the emergence of invisible forces that govern our

11. According to Mark I. Wallace, spirit is a ‘natural being’ (see Wallace 2002: 136).
12. For this as the locus of divine activity in the world, see Ward 1990.

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lives. In this respect, there is no question of avoiding a theology: contin-

gency demands theology; the positing of a secular utopia of knowledge
is a theology; and the emergence of invisible forces requires theological
description if it is not to be reduced to the meta-physics of the present
age. Such a modern, secular theology errs in three important respects: it
assumes that the world is subject to a universal, linear flow of necessity,
and thus is capable of representation as a system, instead of involving
adaptation and the creation of information; it assumes that the particular
can be individuated and tested against the behaviour of the whole,
without the very individuation of the particular changing the whole; and
it assumes that increasing knowledge in this way leads to freedom and
mastery, rather than observing that such freedom and mastery is bor-
rowed from a hypothetical future, and thus incurs a debt from that
hypothetical future, with the consequence that human behaviour is
driven by invisible forces beyond its control.
Theology can begin to address such problems when it abandons all
attempts to give an over-arching worldview, and acknowledges its
locality and partiality. Intelligent money will always remain partial and
local, unlike debt money as the universalising equivalent of modernity.
There will always be plural and varied forms. Theology can begin to
become relevant to the ecological, economic and epistemological condi-
tions of our lives when it chooses to work in a medium other than
language, whose functions have been superseded by other media for the
flow of information. If money has replaced God in the modern world,
with disastrous consequences, money can be replaced by an inherently
theological system: a model of an ethical world-order that effectively
attributes value to that which matters, that effectively adapts, transforms
and intensifies itself at the same time as it directs attention outside itself,
and that is oriented towards ultimately theological insights and goals.
Churches could discover an extraordinarily vital role and new relevance
if they were to act as the effective conduits for trust, credit and coopera-
tion within society. For this is the essential role that churches always
had, until they were replaced by banks in modernity. Such are the
promises afforded by the possibility of intelligent money.
As a result, it would be possible to create a collective spiritual environ-
ment in which human virtues are encouraged and rewarded rather than
human vices, in which moderation is rewarded rather than excess, in
which contraction and convergence become achievable, in which atten-
tion is directed to properly spiritual goals of human life, and in which
the crises of the environment and social exclusion are solved by new
patterns of human behaviour. Such are the possibilities afforded by a
true ecotheology.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2004.

176 Ecotheology

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