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Environmental theologian Timothy Gorringe speaks with Robert Owens Scott about the human quest for meaning and how what we build—from suburban neighborhoods to shopping centers—says a great deal about how we see God.

Robert Owens Scott: You wrote in 2002 that in the lifetime of the generation born today, the planet could either be terminally ill or on a path to sustainable recovery. Now it's 2008. How would you describe what you see now?
Timothy Gorringe: We don't know just how serious things are with global warming. Global temperature has risen by one degree. If it rises six degrees it means the end of human life on Earth.We don't know whether we can actually intervene to stop it. All the stuff that we've been doing since 1800, it's all up there, and it's all contributing to global warming. James Lovelock says we've had it and good riddance.We hand the planet back to the mollusks and that's that. I think that's immoral.

ROS: How is this a spiritual crisis?
TG: It's a spiritual crisis because it's not just human wickedness or even folly that we've gotten where we are. If you look at the world in 1700, you've got a world population of maximum 500 million; life expectancy is quite low everywhere and in every class. Then, in the course of the 19th century, with better diet, better housing, and better sanitation the population starts to climb. All over the world human beings find themselves suddenly living better than they ever had before. This becomes reality for two-thirds of the world afterWorldWar II. It seems that we've entered paradise: there's the world and it holds all kinds of things that your great-grandparents could never have dreamed of —and they're cheap.

It's what humans have always wanted and it's incredibly seductive. It's shaped our spirituality, a spirituality where life is good and easy, where we rule the world and we can do what we want. It is completely false. That whole world is built on cheap energy—it was built on cheap coal first and then on cheap oil. Within a generation and a half, we've come to take it for granted. And that world is coming to an end.

The question is, what is there which is actually more satisfying than consumerism and this leisure culture? Ultimately these things don't answer the human quest for meaning. All the great ethical traditions of the world talk about the need for limits. Finding appropriate limits and working within those limits has always been at the heart of human flourishing, in so far as human flourishing is about depth, not superficiality.

ROS: At the same time, there's been a widening gap between rich and poor. Does that stem from the same sort of spiritual crisis?
TG: Possibly. There is a certain spirituality which lies behind what we call capitalism, this particular way of configuring the economy, and the way in which that's linked to political institutions. I think it's a diseased spirituality because it's premised on the need for these kinds of disparities. If we are going back to a world where super-abundance can't be taken for granted, what's really vital is to cultivate a view of the world where the goods of the Earth are distributed more fairly.

ROS: What about abundance? Is that a purely spiritual concept?
TG: Scripture promises abundance, but one of the distinctive things about the Hebrew tradition is that it's abundance for everybody, and so there's a question of distribution. There are 800 million people who don't have enough to eat today. To aim for abundance is good — and the vision of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures is everyone will have abundance — but it only works in and through the quest for justice at the same time.

If it's true that oil has already peaked, and that we're going to move to a post-carbon future; if it's true that climate change is going to have major impacts on our economy, then we simply can't maintain the lifestyle that we've gotten used to in North America and Europe and Japan over the past 50 years. The option is to live more simply. And it seems to me, you know, that's actually not going to be a moral imperative, it's actually going to be a simple, practical imperative. We just have to do it.

ROS: Your book,A Theology of the Built Environment , is very widely read. When you say a built environment, what do you mean?
TG: I try to understand where God is in the everyday world. Most theologians who write about buildings write about churches. I think about houses and shopping areas, the layout of villages and cities, to make theological sense of the real world, not the religious world. Where is God in what we see? How do we understand it?

ROS: How do the spaces that we construct reflect ideologies?
TG: Wherever you look, buildings reflect particular ideologies. Look at any public building, university building, or shopping center—they reflect a particular view about what itmeans to be human. The buildings of the past 60 years or so reflect a very utilitarian,market-driven view of the world. That's why somany of our buildings are just dreadful places to live and work in.

ROS: You've said that a theology of the built environment must be a theology of liberation.
TG: The theology of liberation reflects one of the central thrusts of the Hebrew Bible: the engagement of the free God with the free human being. So a theology of liberation is simply a theology which honors that freedom in reality. Any theology of the built environment has to be a theology of liberation, because if it's coming out of the right understanding, it's going to be looking to honor human dignity. What lies at the heart of liberation theology is the cry of the oppressed.

ROS: There's a particular insight about sin from liberation theology that you apply there. Can you talk about that?
TG: It's not particular to liberation theology, it's one of the most ancient insights of the Church. Paul writes that sin isn't about individuals behaving badly, it's about structures, about ways of ordering society, about the patterning of relationships and people being trapped. Therefore, what people need is to be freed from these life destroying patterns of relationships.

The way in which we currently think about planning in Britain—top down, a building industry solidly focused on the middle class, focused on social pretension and not sustainability—are the structures of sin.Dying to sinmeans changing those practices, changing the planning regulations, changing the building culture. Dying to sinmeans rediscovering the vernacular tradition,which ismuch humbler and wiser. People need to be empowered.

ROS: You obviously value the land, but you don't seem to accept the idea that we're closer to God in nature.
TG: I don't believe that, no. If the Trinitarian understanding of God's engagement with reality is true, then, as Jurgen Moltmann says, God is in the city, God is in the town, God is in the suburbs. It's nonsense to think that God is more in the countryside than elsewhere. The economy of redemption is seeing what the particular virtues and strengths of each form of dwelling are.

ROS: What do you mean by economy of redemption?
TG: That's a phrase from the theologian Irenius. He talks about the economy of redemption, which is the way in which you understand God working for the redemption of all things. I argue that different kinds of human settlement— villages, towns, cities—play different roles in the economy of redemption.

In the economy of redemption, cities are uniquely good at fostering human creativity. Most great art and music come from the city. What cities have been bad at is the poor. Most cities throughout history have had slums, where the people who do the real work, the everyday work, live. If you're thinking about how you redeem a city, and its role in the economy of redemption, then it's a question about social justice, it's a question about how you maintain the fizz of creativity without social injustice.

ROS: What would a redeemed neighborhood look like?
TG: Near my home there is a village of 160 people who so value the community spirit that the local landlord, who owns a great deal of the property, won't allow rich incomers to buy his property. He rents his properties below the market rate to local people at a rent that they can afford.Meeting people, knowing and responding to their real needs, enables that incredible community. The challenge is, can it be done on a bigger scale?

ROS: How is all of this about sustainability?
TG: Sustainability is the key ethical issue for our generation.What's the world for? What's the future for our grandchildren, their grandchildren, and so forth? Sustainability is a core Christian ethical dimension. All these questions about the built environment, about farming, and about lifestyle, they're all questions about what it means to live sustainably, and how one might structure society sustainably. We've got to structure that responsibility for the future into our ethical consideration.

ROS: Given the enormity of the challenges we're facing, do you feel hopeful?
TG: When I'm asked that question, I always go back to a beautiful passage in Jurgen Moltmann's book, God in Creation, where he says we can't say that the worst will not happen. According to all the laws of historical experience, it will. All that we can do is live and act out of faith in the God who raises the dead. And then he goes on to say, this is the secret meaning of the famous story of Luther's apple tree. Luther was asked, "What would you do if the world was going to end tomorrow?" He said, "I'd plant an apple tree."

That's where we are. In the face of these utterly unpredictable results of climate change which might be catastrophic, we plant an apple tree. Literally,metaphorically, socially, we plant an apple tree.

Timothy Gorringe is an environmental theologian and St. Luke's Professor of Theological Studies at the University of Exeter in England.

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