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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:06.912)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Sean McGrath, Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University. And we're here talking about his book, Political Eschatology. Dr. McGrath, wonderful to have you on today.
Sean (00:21.336)
Thanks for having me on.
PJ (00:24.022)
Dr. McGrath, why this book? Really excited to hear about this. I know it's a collection of seven essays. Why political eschatology?
Sean (00:33.868)
This is my pandemic book. For two years we were locked down and many of us began to think about our lives and our work in new ways and I wasn't an exception to that. And I had been invited over the years to write various pieces on eschatological thinking. It's something that I've always been interested in. It's sort of a leitmotif of my work actually. My dissertation was on Heidegger.
And I was interested in how the early Heidegger had, what he had done with Christian eschatological thinking, how he had translated that into being in time. So eschatology had always sort of been on my mind. And then suddenly it was in the forefront of my concern, because especially in that first year of the pandemic, at least from my perch, it seemed to us that we were, it seemed to me that we were in deep, deep trouble.
there were no quick fixes on the solution and there was something that looked like it could have been much more vicious pandemic than it turned out to be. So I was thinking about the end of the world.
PJ (01:37.258)
That was... I think a lot of people are thinking about the end of the world during the pandemic.
Sean (01:41.965)
Yeah.
PJ (01:45.184)
So, one, we rescheduled this, and I did laugh that today of all days we're talking about political eschatology, for me in the United States, this is the, you know, it's voting day, so it'll be about a month out that this comes out, what does political eschatology mean? I do feel, whatever happens next, I don't know what's going to happen next in American politics.
But it does have like a kind of end of days feel, at that's the way everyone's talking about it. So tell us a little bit about what you mean by political eschatology.
Sean (02:16.216)
Yeah.
Sean (02:20.706)
Good. Okay. So first of all, back to the pandemic, the end of the world, there was a lot of anxiety in the press. There was a lot of anxiety in my life, in my family. We were worried about everything. We were filling up our freezer. We were becoming preppers. We were considering that the world would never be the same again. And there was a doom about us. And I am a Christian, have been a Christian.
most of my adult life, a serious Christian in the sense that Christianity is not Sunday observance for me, it's, you could say it's my way in the world. And it occurred to me that the attitude of a Christian towards end times should be quite different from the attitude of the non-Christian. That is, we should not be filled with anxiety. We should not be...
gloomy about it or frightened about it because our whole religious orientation is towards the end. And this, course, is well known that Christianity started as an eschatological sect of Judaism. But I think that we have deployed certain strategies over the course of centuries of Christendom to kind of mitigate the eschatological sting of the gospel. And I...
I'm not interested in those strategies. And when one opens the gospel and reads it and sees what's there and recognizes what the context was and how Paul and Jesus, for example, really thought about time and their times, one realizes that this eschatological expectation is essential to the Christian view, that Jesus very likely at his own time expected the end of the world. Early Paul expected the end of the world in his own time.
And then of course there was this deferral of the eschaton, which was the great transformation in Christianity. By no means only a negative transformation, but at point, some unimaginable point or unrecorded point is imaginable, but it's unrecorded. It's an unrecorded point in the past. The last eyewitness to the resurrection died. And at that point it was clear that the end would not happen in the lifetime of the first generation.
Sean (04:37.208)
that it was now deferred and we had to think differently about eschatology. And so eschatology is something that is, think, essential to essentially Christian and yet so too often Christians become caught up in a general anxiety, apocalypticism in the negative sense and fail to realize that a Christian ought to always be living as though the world is ending. They ought to be living so joyously. They ought to be in a certain way.
interested in the signs of the time that indicate that perhaps it's happening sooner than expected. They ought not to think of this as something simply evil. Of course, there is much that is evil about eschatology. Many good things will pass away, but they should also think about it as something that is good. You know, it is the doctrine of the last things. It gets translated as apocalypse. Apocalypse means revelation. It is the revelation and the final consummation of our longing for the return of the Christ.
for the recapitulation of all things, for the resolution of the partial victory over evil. All these are good things. This is what we live for. So yeah, the pandemic, the doom and gloom about the possible end of civilization and the need to rise to the occasion and now actually become a Christian, that is one who lives eschatologically, whether it's a pandemic or not. That doesn't really answer your question though.
What does political eschatology mean? I think my bells are going off here. Are they? Do hear those? Okay, good, good, The notifications are on, but you're not hearing it. So eschatology in the book, I've got it to hand here just to make sure that I don't misquote myself. It begins in the negative. It rejects the world as it merely happens to be. It's not only Christian, it's also Jewish, Gnostic, perhaps Buddhist.
PJ (06:11.548)
I do not hear them, fortunately. Yes.
Sean (06:36.042)
Islamic. I don't, I don't purport to be a specialist in all these forms of eschatology. As a Christian and as a Christian theologian, I'm committed to Christian eschatology. But this beginning in the negative is common, I think, to all forms of eschatology. There is this expectation, I'm sorry, we should say in the light of Heidegger's nice distinction between expectation and anticipation. There is an anticipation of a coming order of justice.
which will render this world, this age, this time, radically unjust. And so there's a kind of extreme critique of the current order of things. And this view, this negative view, this rejection of the world as it merely happens to be, has a surprising effect on eschatological communities. It renders them politically effective.
It mobilizes a political will to a more just world because it brings with it this belief in the possibility of the radically new. It's exactly the opposite of Nietzsche. It's the opposite of Ecclesiastes. It's not the view that there's nothing new under the sun and that the future will just be like the past, the strong treading on the backs of the weak and so on. rather there is this anticipation.
of something radically new and radically better than anything that's been before. And that ought to make us joyous, even if it's a pandemic.
PJ (08:12.768)
So that immediately raises, well, your last two minutes raises like four questions and everything you said before that raises like 20. All good questions, like you were very clear, but so many threads to pull on. So one, thank you for a great answer.
Maybe this isn't one of the easier threads to pull on, but I am interested, what is the distinction that Heidegger makes between expectation and anticipation, and how do you use that?
Sean (08:40.3)
Yeah, so this is the Heidegger's early Freiburg lectures, which part of it did come into being in time, but these would be the lectures he gave before he wrote Being in Time in 1927. But then in Being in Time, there are still traces of this, but it's now all, it's all, the discussion is very much about death. But when Heidegger was giving his courses in religion, he was studying things like St. Paul and St. Paul's letters to the...
Thessalonians in particular, and he was very interested in Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians where Paul berates the Thessalonians for clamouring and pestering him about the date and the hour. You when is the Lord coming back? Tell us when he's coming back. Tell us when we have to get ready. And Paul's answer is that, look, it has nothing to do with calculating the times. It has nothing to do with the date and the hour. This is not something that you're supposed to plan for. The whole point of living
PJ (09:22.614)
You
Sean (09:38.216)
in this joyous anticipation of the coming of Christ is that it changes your relationship to the moment right now. So it doesn't matter if it's tomorrow or if it's in 10 years or if it's, for that matter, in 200 years. The point is that it will come and because it will come and because you are identified with that new order of being, you live differently now. And so Heidegger introduced then a distinction to describe how the Thessalonians were thinking about the eschaton.
namely in terms of expectation. So it's going to happen, you know, on November 5th, 2026 or something. Yeah, this is calculative way of thinking, de existentializing the whole thing and then abstracting it from the need for orientation to the now and anticipation wherein one is always ready for the moment.
PJ (10:12.726)
Got two years. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead.
Sean (10:36.046)
Harberger then applies this to death and being in time and speaks about a kind of inauthentic being unto death and an authentic being unto death. There's no option. We have to be unto death. It is who we are. But there is an inauthentic being unto death and it's more or less expectation. I'm going to die when I'm 85. expect all the men in my family die when they're 85. I've got, well, I'm 57 now. know, I've got some three decades or so. Expectation rather than anticipation. I will die.
And that means the world will end for me. And that ought to change everything about how I am disposed or oriented to the moment.
PJ (11:19.382)
I had not read the Freiburg lectures, but I've read Being in Time. It's really fascinating to see those roots. I would never have thought of connecting it to that kind of Pauline exhortation. That's fascinating. Thank you.
Sean (11:31.342)
Thank you.
PJ (11:34.378)
This might be a little bit off the wall here. When we're talking about this kind of end of the age, do you see any of that as kind of a historical epoch sort of thing where we can have last times multiple times? Or do you see this almost exclusively as like an end time thing? Is it kind of typological or do you see it very much as like when Jesus comes back and the
the entire world changes.
Sean (12:04.802)
I'm glad you asked the question because I wanted to say something about time, because the really important point about eschatology is the model of time, which it presupposes. And it stands in sharp contradistinction to the cyclical models of time, which dominate most of the ancient cultures of the world. So we'll think about ancient Greek culture, ancient Hindu culture, ancient Chinese culture, probably many other examples of it.
I hesitate to say all ancient cultures because every time a philosopher says something like that, somebody finds one example of... So it doesn't have to be all ancient cultures. Let's just say the predominant ancient civilizations and their understanding of time is cyclical. That is, time is a kind of moving image of eternity, as Plato puts it. It brings back always what has always already been. So there's this eternal return.
PJ (12:37.236)
Right, right.
Sean (12:59.394)
That's Nietzsche's phrase, but he was based on his understanding of Greek thought. This eternal return of, let's say, a finite set of forms that will not be added to or taken away from. It's closed, it's repetitive, it leads to very different kinds of ethical conundrums. I think that the the attitude of the philosopher to...
cyclical time, is ultimately fatalistic time, time that cannot be changed, time in which there's no novelty, time in which my action really can't change the course of things, the attitude becomes one of, think, of Stoic ataraxia. And I mentioned Stoicism because I know it's very popular nowadays. And ataraxia is this sort of self-collected indifference to the vicissitudes of time, to the ups and downs of things.
I render myself invulnerable to bad fortune by becoming indifferent to good fortune. And so I let the cycle go as it will, and I find this still point at the center of the ever turning wheel of time. And in that still point, I find peace. So you can find versions of Adaraxia in the Upanishads, in Taoism, in the other forms of ancient philosophy. That is cyclical time, fatalistic time.
And in sharp contradiction to it is eschatological time. And eschatological time is free because it is a time that is open to the radically new. You could say it's linear. It's linear in the sense of a line that continues, at least for those who are on the line, into an open future. So it's typical of Jewish thought. It's perhaps most typical of Jewish thought. Who are the Jews? The Jews are the ones who are constantly
PJ (14:35.19)
Mm-hmm.
Sean (14:52.3)
recounting the story of who they were called to be by Yahweh, what they were promised and where they are in terms of the promise. And usually that has something to do with waiting for the fruition of the promise. But in any case, they're not returning to something that's already been or anticipating the return of something that has already been. They're anticipating something radically new, which has never been before, which will be justice. There are other forms of it. There's Gnostic forms of it. I referred to Buddhism and so on.
but I'm particularly interested in the Christian form of it. So Christian eschatological linear time, which became the paradigm for modern time. That is the time of progress, the time of, you know, where anything is possible, the opportunity economy, you know, the time of hope in that small H sense of the word, you know, that you can make a difference. All of this liberal language is unthinkable without this eschatological
notion of free or linear time. Now, if that's the case, then we find ourselves in linear time, and there are two very different modes of it. And the one that I just referred to, it's called the liberal, is utopian. It's about because the future is wide open, because we stand before the radically new, we are now empowered to bring about what it is we want in the world. We are the means
to desired end. And this is the language of progress. This is enlightenment talk. And it is, in my view, secularized, deteriorated eschatology. And it leads to cynicism and nihilism. And much of the cynicism and nihilism of our age is because we are all disenchanted, secularized utopians. The other mode of it, the older mode of it, and the authentically Christian mode of
PJ (16:33.195)
Hmm.
Sean (16:49.856)
of this linear free time is genuinely eschatological time. So we stand before the radically new. We're not doomed to repeat this cycle of things that have been before. And yet we understand ourselves, you could say, with a kind of concession to the fatalist view, we understand ourselves to be somewhat powerless to bring about what we most desire. The openness of the horizon.
PJ (17:13.43)
Mm.
Sean (17:17.144)
fills our imaginations with possibilities of justice. And yet we recognize ourselves as inadequate to bringing about the desired end. nevertheless, we do not become passive. This is exactly what Paul says to the Thessalonians, don't sit back and wait for the Lord to do the work. We rather give ourselves over to the achievement of the end without ever presuming to be its adequate means. That is the genuinely eschatological attitude.
because it has this close relationship to the modern utopian attitude. It's as relevant today as it was in the first century of the church.
PJ (17:58.622)
I think I understand the thread between recognizing our powerlessness in this older mode of thought, and I think that comes from relying on a higher authority to usher in this new age. What is the thread between the modern eschatological view? How does that lead into cynicism?
Sean (18:25.558)
Right. So the Enlightenment, the European Enlightenment could largely be described as a period of deteriorated eschatology as Christianity became secularized and became more or less misunderstood as a kind of a philosophy that's a rational philosophy, something that's naturally knowable. If we follow Kant, it's actually just the ethics of reason recounted in
biblical stories, but now we no longer need the biblical stories. We've kind of aged, so to speak. We can recognize that the humanism of the New Testament is a kind of natural ethic, one which we can justify now on purely rational means. And with this, of course, comes the empowerment of the human. Now think about Hegel, if you like, and his immanentization of the Christian eschaton, or Hegel's followers, people like Feuerbach, who set the whole point.
of all this Christian discussion of the kingdom of heaven and of providence and this idealization of the divine was that we projected onto the heavens what is true of ourselves. And that was a good thing. Thereby we became to understand what we are capable of, what a human being is. And now we withdraw the projection. We no longer need the God. We no longer need the providence. We need to recognize that this is about human beings and their capacities. And we've been told too long that we are...
We've been told for far too long that our limitations prevent us from producing justice. Now we are free of that. And so the project becomes one of, let's say, technologically, scientifically, politically, deploying all of that human potentiality towards the achievement, the political achievement of the kingdom of heaven, of the justice prophesied. And
When it doesn't work, which it manifestly didn't, when it flies back in our face, when we actually see something like horror follow from this kind of idealism, whether it's the terror of the French Revolution or it's the Second World War and Nazism, we become cynics, we become nihilists. We can no longer go back to the ancient ataraxia of the ancient fatalists.
Sean (20:46.582)
We have forgotten or so distorted our understanding of the genuine eschatological. So now we're just stuck in a world that moves forward into the new, but without any hope, without any sense, without any rationality, without any goal. So a progress without a goal, I think is probably with my best effort at defining nihilism.
PJ (21:14.55)
and make sure I.
PJ (21:18.364)
say it wrong. I'm reminded of the verse in the Bible that says, the arm of flesh will fail you. by empowering humans, it leads to cynicism because humans fail. Is that kind of... I just want to make sure I'm tracking with you.
Sean (21:33.518)
That's right.
Sean (21:37.09)
But we have to be really careful. This is why it's a razor's edge, Christian eschatology, because the humanists immensely empowered. I Christianity was, I think, the first great revolution, at least in the history of the Western world. We think about the small sect of outcasts and egalitarians. That's what they were. They were in the Roman Empire, whose strange doctrine became the imperial religion within three centuries. Changed everything.
Our sense of our duties to the society, our duties to each other, charity, social work, all of this. Science and technology, you know, let us now set upon nature with a view to making the world better for humans and let's make the world better for all humans. In other words, let's no longer have recourse to slavery. That's one of the impulses behind technology. Early modern science is very much motivated.
by utopian style deteriorated eschatology. But the empowerment is genuine. It's simply the case that the power that we see manifest in the human in a genuinely eschatological key cannot be merely human power. And this is why the real eschatologists are never defeated. They cannot be defeated. They live by a kind of politics of the absurd.
And I'm thinking of people, of examples right now, for example, Paul, but I'm also thinking of St. Francis, he's on my mind these days, C. Bonvall, this kind of energy to give oneself over entirely to a cause without for a moment thinking that you are crucial to bringing about, but not for a moment using that sense of your limitation as an excuse to hold yourself back from the historical momentum that has to go into this.
but on the contrary, giving yourself completely to it, using yourself up, no amount of defeat will take from you your conviction that the promise will become true. And so the eschatologist goes into his political life, her political life, believing that everything depends upon them, believing that nothing depends upon them.
PJ (23:58.294)
Sorry, that's... Can you say that one more time? I want to make sure I track what...
Sean (24:03.822)
Everything depends upon believing that nothing depends upon you.
PJ (24:09.686)
Hmm. That's good. I like that. That's very pithy. And this has kind of been running all the way through this. Can you talk a little bit about the deferral of the end? And you kind of mentioned at the beginning, you have a little bit of Christendom versus the gospel. And what are some of the strategies that came about through Christendom to remove the sting of the end?
Sean (24:42.038)
Right.
Sean (24:49.55)
I just want to read one passage here from the book, just a few lines. The essence of eschatological thinking in all of its forms. Theological and sexual can be summed up in two systematically related theses. The first is ontological, the second is political. The first thesis, time never loops back on itself, but throws us towards an irreversible end, eschaton, which cancels the passing forms of this world, even.
PJ (24:51.979)
Absolutely.
Sean (25:18.23)
as it renders every event in time of potentially singular and eternal significance and the moral responsibility of the individual to decide and so make history unavoidable and decisive. That's the first thesis, the ontological thesis. The second thesis is the political thesis. The anticipation of the end as the advent of justice places the present under the strictest censure. The world as it exists is unjust and will be condemned as such by what is to come.
So when there are various strategies for de-fanging this politics, because it is a dangerous politics, and it has produced as much horror as it's produced goodness, and one of them is to defer it. That is, to argue that the eschatological language of the New Testament is about another world, which will come after death.
PJ (25:58.58)
Mmm. Yeah.
Sean (26:20.842)
So this is a well-known strategy for keeping down revolutionary elements in your parish, for example, if you're in a failed South American state and you're in cahoots with the church and you're trying to keep the peasants happy with the meager lot that you've left them. You encourage a certain kind of Catholic Christianity, promises these abused people peace and wealth and justice in another world.
And therefore in this world, what they need to do is just be patient. Or another version of this is to sing hymns about how we are all destined for heaven. That's what Jesus has promised. His church is residence in heaven. Neither of these things are true. The eschatological hope is a hope in this world transformed. It's not a hope in another world. And if you look at early Christian thinking, it is
emphatically this worldly. That is, what the early Christians anticipate is not the kingdom of heaven, some kind of uploading of the redeemed into some, you platonic order, but rather the absolute reversal of the logic of the world, the overthrowing of the political, the overthrowing of all the kings of the earth, and the rule of justice.
which will now happen inevitably because the time is up, but this transformation will be a transformation of this world, this earth, these bodies, these material conditions. It will include everything. It will include the animals. It will include the plants, include the planets, include perhaps our past retroactively. It will be a material transformation as well as a spiritual transformation. And so it means
So we go back to the deferral, the deferral that would put the eschaton into heaven justifies an indifference to the material conditions of life on Earth, whether that's an ecological condition or a social justice situation, we justify indifference to it. It might even justify a certain kind of exploitation of the world, of nature, as we've seen in early modernity. And so I'm a big believer in the Lin-White Jr. that
Sean (28:43.544)
Christianity is the root of ecological ruin. certain reading of the book of Genesis is what justified this new attitude to nature, which has brought about the technological age and the ruin of the earth. all of this for me requires a kind of misunderstanding of what the call is. So the call is precisely a call to give oneself over
to the production of a just world that's this world rendered just, this earth recapitulated and justified.
PJ (29:22.582)
I myself consider myself a devout Christian, and I definitely grew up hearing sermons preached that everything else is going to burn, the only thing that matters is God, the Word of God, and the souls of men. Right? Which it doesn't... Go ahead.
Sean (29:36.77)
That's right. That's what I grew up hearing too. no, there's a couple of people have been really good on this, but one is somebody that's probably known to many of your listeners is the theologian N.T. the biblical theologian N.T. Wright, who has written extensively about the resurrection and what early Christians really believed about the resurrection. And what they believed is that their bodies would rise again and the earth, their bodies would have a home. So the earth itself would be risen again.
PJ (30:04.757)
Right.
Sean (30:06.81)
you know, quite literally. And so there that this this world itself would become renewed and restored. You see this in Paul's letter to the Romans when he speaks of all of creation groaning for the unveiling of the sons of God. He really means all of creation means the rocks, the trees, the animals, everything, right? Or another favorite example of BIND that I sometimes use in teaching is to discuss the catacombs in Rome. Many people visit the caves of Rome where the Christians hid during persecution. They certainly did that.
hid there during persecution. But that wasn't the primary role of the catacombs. The catacombs were places where they buried their dead. And they had a particular need of that kind of volcanic soil where you could carve hallways easily into the rock leading to the places where the bodies would be laid. They needed that because they fully expected that their loved ones would get up out of the grave and walk out the door into a transformed earth. N.T. Wright says that when we think about the
resurrection in this way, it changes our attitude to the earth and to the political. And he's 100 % right on that.
PJ (31:10.13)
I think that one example of his writings on that would be Surprised by Hope, correct? Yes.
Sean (31:16.083)
That's that's it. Yeah, that's kind of his popular treatment. But he also wrote a very big book on Paul. He's written on the resurrection. Yeah.
PJ (31:23.402)
Well, he's written a lot. that's he's very prodigious writer. Some other examples come to mind. mean, you know, there's a new heaven and there's a new earth, obviously, in Revelation. Like it seems pretty like you definitely hear. Even even today and for past centuries, we've heard that, you know, the world is passing away. But then when you read in the actual scripture like.
Sean (31:28.386)
Yes.
Sean (31:36.462)
It's written Revelation 20.
PJ (31:52.258)
It seems like it came back. Even Jesus' prayer, your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. The idea is not that we get, I love that, uploaded into this Platonic order. The idea is that God's order comes down to earth.
Sean (32:12.46)
That's right, and we become instruments to its achievement. And so it puts a completely different emphasis on the responsibility of the Christian. A certain kind of passive quietism is no longer on.
And that's why it's political eschatology, not a depoliticized eschatology. And the political really is not hard to see because as we begin to look more carefully at the New Testament in this light, however uncomfortable it might be for us to read the gospels like this, and it is somewhat shocking to read the gospels this way, because you begin to see how inescapable it is, that this is the way Jesus thinks. We begin to see then,
that there is this new, this new heaven, this new earth that's anticipated has structure. They have a certain anticipation about what is to come. For example, the dissolution of all national, ethnic and social distinctions. So I'm thinking of Galatians three. there's no, neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free person, but actually all are one in Christ Jesus.
And I have a pet theory that one of the things that really disgusted the Romans about the Christians was that they practiced this kind of social egalitarianism in a culture that could tolerate a lot, but they would not tolerate that. further, the delegitimization of all claims of earthly rulers to absolute sovereignty. So we need rulers for sure, but we do not need a ruler who contests the rule of God. And so no, good Christian refuses.
to worship the emperor as God. He'll pay the taxes, he'll keep the peace, he'll do his best to keep things running, keep the pacts of Ramana, but don't ask him to treat the emperor as a God. So it's kind of an objection to a certain kind of political absolutism. So the overturning of the logic of the world, the logic of the world, which is the logic of the strong ruling the weak.
Sean (34:22.734)
You know, the right of the strong to rule the weak. is precisely what Jesus says is now overturned in his presence and the last shall be first. So this has a political sting to it, right? Those in places of power ought to be nervous, you know, because their position is under threat. But the political edge to this is also in a certain way apolitical.
Because it's not something that's going to be brought about through politics, it's going to be brought about through providence. And the Christian will be its means and nothing more.
PJ (35:03.294)
And I think this is where we see the foolishness to the Greeks, the stumbling block to the Jews. We see this in the way that Nietzsche was so, at least the way that I read him, disgusted with this morality of the weak, that something that he blamed Christianity. And I think rightfully so. think Christianity should take the blame, quote unquote, for that.
Sean (35:10.35)
That's exactly right.
Sean (35:29.196)
No, Nietzsche got it exactly right, that he hated this thought of the overturning of the logic of the world, but he correctly saw that what Jesus was bringing, what he was offering, was a reversal of the values of the ancient world. Now, the fact is that we never pulled it off, it didn't happen, but these are still early days.
PJ (35:52.406)
stepping back for a second we were talking about God's order coming to earth what you have an essay in here on can the earth be sacred again what is the sacred what would it mean for the earth to be sacred again
Sean (36:03.649)
Yes.
Sean (36:09.74)
Yeah, in our correspondence, we put this in a different way. You said, what does the sacred look like for an atheist? Well, you've kind of given the answer. First of all, mean, for the atheists in the room, the first thing I want to convince them is that they're wrong, that actually God does exist. But God's existence is not self-evident, and there's nothing unreasonable about believing in his non-existence. So they're welcome, but they're wrong. That's the first point.
PJ (36:23.286)
Yes, right.
PJ (36:34.454)
Ha
Sean (36:35.83)
is that with regard to sacredness, is there a sense for the sacred in the secular age? And this is a big question, because one way of looking at the notion of the secular is the time in which the distinction between the sacred and the profane, which is perhaps the fundamental distinction of ancient cultures, no longer obtains. You could look at this as saying nothing is sacred. Everything's for sale. Everything's got its price. Everything can be commodified.
Or you could also look at it mystically that everything is sacred. It's a difficult thought. But what I wanted to do here is what I tried to do is to connect political eschatology to another one of my principal concerns, which is environmentalism and the environmental crisis, which I term I don't like. So that's what people call it. I call it the ecological ruin. The crisis sounds like opportunity, you know.
Now we can green the economy and find a new way of towards sustainable consumerism or something. And besides, most of the damage is already done. So in terms of the extinction of species, the loss of wilderness, the fundamental alteration of the climate, the alterations of the chemistry of the ocean, most of it's already done, at least for the near future. So we should speak rather about ecological ruin.
rather than an environmental opportunity. So now many of us are horrified by ecological ruin, not just Christians. In fact, Christians are the minority in this camp. Most of my environmental friends are not Christians at all. They're atheists or scientists or something like that. They're not Christians. Christians have a bit of catching up to do in this regard. Part of the reasons that Christians, one of the reasons that Christianity has failed to rise to the occasion of acknowledging
its complicity in ecological ruin is this deferred eschaton that we talked about, Christianity is not about nature. Christ doesn't care about howler monkeys and ocean plastics. Well, no, I'm not so sure about that. So if we have a new kind of secular sense of desecration, maybe it's coming negatively, a sense of desecration like this, we'll leave climate change aside. Climate change is a theory, it might be wrong.
Sean (38:58.796)
Okay, the sixth great extinction is not a theory. That's quantifiable science. can count the disappearances of the species on the earth as a result of human population growth and development. It's not a theory. Neither is ocean plastic a theory. The fact that you are eating plastics for lunch as I am too is not a theory. It's something you can demonstrate with a microscope. So when we decide the big theory, know, JD Vance's weird science, right, happens to be the most peer reviewed science in the history of humanity.
PJ (39:17.334)
Mmm.
Yes.
Sean (39:29.208)
peer review is the only measure we have for rigorous science. So I don't know what's weird about it, but because it's such a button that allows people to turn off, I would like to invite Christians to start to think about these other not so dismissible facts of extinction, for example, and pollution, and the question of justice too, or the question of the cultures that are doomed to bear the brunt of this kind of ruin.
And there is a, in the environmental world, a fully understandable horror at the desecration of the earth. Especially by people who know science, know, people who understand the Goldilocks conditions of life on earth, right? The, the, the, the improbability that this planet would be as rich and generous a host of life as it is. The possibility that it's even singular, that there might be no others. You know, yes. what about these exoplanets? Yeah. You're not going to see them.
We're not going to see them. So we have this extraordinary garden which has flourished with multiple forms of life over the ages, which is being desecrated or at least destroyed by human hubris, human ignorance, human guilt, human avarice, human consumption. And we feel horrified by it. We feel that something is happening that should not have.
And so here's where I would try to bring the language of the sacred into the secular discussion and say, yeah, your feeling of horror is a sense for something sacred that has been desecrated. So what is the sacred, you ask me? It's that which should be set apart. It's that which should not be simply used. It's that which isn't simply a means to our aggrandizement.
Yeah, so.
Sean (41:31.523)
Yeah.
PJ (41:33.142)
As an example, I I just recently saw photos of park rangers in Africa standing around with guns around one of the last remaining rhinos. Because of all the... I don't know if that... I want to make sure I'm tracking with you, but that seems to be kind of what you're talking about. Like, literally set apart.
Sean (41:44.267)
Yes, precisely.
Sean (41:52.14)
It's exactly what I'm talking about. And it's the feeling that we have in the face of that. Now, you could be indifferent to that. Of course, you could say, who cares? Use them up. No friend of mine. But that's not the attitude to which I wish to speak. That's a barbaric attitude that I'm not interested in speaking to. But I am interested in speaking to people who feel a sense of loss in the face of that beauty. Another example would be, well, two examples that I often speak of in my teaching would be the grizzly bear and
the Atlantic salmon, very different kinds of animals. But the grizzly bear used to roam all throughout the Rocky Mountains from Northern Canada all the way down to Mexico. And now it's confined to a small area of the Northern Canadian Rockies. And it's losing as well because it needs vast terrain in order to thrive. Its environment has to be enormous. And it's losing its environment mostly to skiing, skiing facilities, recreation and ranching.
And grizzlies and humans, you know, they don't get along well. And when we bump into one, it's usually a bad situation for one or both parties. But we, few of us have trouble recognizing the beauty and the glory of this animal. What's more beautiful, inspiring, more, you know, North American wilderness romance than the sight of a grizzly bear with its cubs profiled against a range of snow-covered mountains. It fills us with awe and inspiration.
And so we can say, well, they have to all go because we need space. But I would like to say something about that feeling of awe at the beauty of this. Why should such beauty be? And that we recognize it as beautiful. this not to be for us an opportunity to question whether everything is simply there for our use?
I spoke about the salmon, it's a little more complicated, but basically that stuff that you eat in the supermarket is a farmed fish that has pretty much nothing to do with the Atlantic salmon that filled the native peoples of North America with wonder as it made its journey up the rivers, jumping over streams to go back to the place where it spawned and to lay its eggs in its kind of final swan song moment of death. An extraordinary creature that anglers know this.
Sean (44:09.848)
people who spend time on rivers, you know, just for the moment of wrestling with one of these extraordinary creatures on the end of their line. They know that that animal is beautiful. And yet what we have done is we've replaced the wild one with the farmable one. they're at, they cost, they're incompatible with one another. You put in the aquaculture, the river dies. You see it happen in Newfoundland. All the rivers of Newfoundland have died one after another as aquaculture has been set up outside
in the waters nearby because what happens is the big fish escape from the pens and they hang around the mouth of the river and they eat the small salmon part as they come down from the pools to go out to the sea. This one of other causes, but this also is not weird science. So we would prefer to have this cheap substitute for chicken rather than this glorious creature thriving along with us on the earth.
And it's not as though it's impossible that we could save both, but you know, that we could feed the world and still have wild fish. That's not impossible. And yet it requires a shift in values. It requires attention to the beautiful. It requires a sense for, if you don't like the language of the sacred, at least a sense that there are some things which we will actually leave and not use because it's better that they are.
PJ (45:34.998)
Setting things apart for wonder. mean, I hear wonder quite a bit and beauty as the reasons for why you want to set these things apart. Am I tracking with you on that?
Sean (45:38.349)
Yes.
Sean (45:47.032)
That's right. You are absolutely tracking on that.
PJ (45:50.486)
So, and this might be a little too convoluted here as you're talking about environmentalism, but you mentioned earlier that Jewish thought is very eschatological, and you pointed to their continual remembrance, and we see this taken up in Christian scriptures as well, obviously, because New and Old Testament, but this continual remembrance of how they were brought out of Egypt, how they were saved, and they were constantly
through the Psalms, through the prophets, they're brought back to that initial Exodus moment.
We've talked about the concept of linear time as looking forward.
What is valuable about looking back environmentally? And what I have in mind here, I talked to Dr. Rebecca Laive about critical physical geography, and I had not been told, I had not been educated on what the Clean Air and Water Act had done. I remember hearing about the ozone layer, but I did not hear a big rejoicing when it got...
Sean (46:45.25)
Mm-hmm.
Sean (46:53.517)
Mm-hmm.
Sean (46:58.424)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (46:59.542)
When we fixed the ozone layer problem, right? We got together, we fixed this. I didn't realize, so part of the reason she got into critical physical geography, a field that she for the most part seems to have created.
is because when she went to go do recess in LA when she was a child, her lungs hurt. They could only be outside for a certain amount of time because of the smog in the air. And that was something that has since been cleaned up. And we see the same thing. I again did not know that many of the major rivers in America, and I believe the Thames also had this happen, caught on fire during the summers because they were so polluted. And that is again, something that we have fixed and solved.
Sean (47:36.886)
Yeah.
PJ (47:42.122)
And what's really interesting to me is in the face of, you know, the weird science, you know, the climate change, the extinction, people's forgetting that we have faced this stuff before and we fixed it before. It's almost like it's like, this is all new, everything that they're talking about. It's like, no, we've actually experienced these problems before and we fixed these problems before. And I feel like there's an amnesia here.
Sean (47:58.733)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (48:11.102)
And it does seem to have a similar structure to what you're talking about with kind of that remembrance of salvation. Am I reaching too far with that?
Sean (48:20.822)
No, I thought you were talking about the deep past, but you're talking about the more recent past. So you're talking about some of this tiny, the short list of environmental successes. But the ozone problem is really something. I remember well, because I was 20 years old when it was being discussed in parliament that we were punching a hole in the ozone because of the way we making our refrigerators.
PJ (48:31.19)
But we know we can, right?
Sean (48:49.152)
And what this so-called fix was simply a matter of changing how we designed the machine, not using CFCs in the refrigerator. And then we saw the ozone correct itself, which is an interesting kind of fix. Rather than doing something to the natural environment, we stopped doing something that we were doing to the natural environment. It's that gesture of pulling back and leaving something, B, because it's so precious. Even if in this case, it's utilitarian.
You know, where are we without our atmosphere? Well, we're dead. So, but we pulled back and we set up, I mean, there's so much about that example that's so powerful because of course it was a great international collaboration. It had to be international. So the international balance, CFCs, if not everybody was on board, there would have been no solution. So we proved that we could collaborate internationally, at least the developing countries that were guilty of.
of causing the problem. It was also clementological that it was some kind of problem with our shared climate system, which in every way analogous to the current situation we have with climate change. If something goes wrong there, it goes wrong for everyone.
Yeah, are other things, the other lessons to be learned too from the very short history of environmentalism. One is that environmentalism was not always associated with the left, quite the contrary. So the countries, the governments that spearheaded that policy that you're discussing were, well, two of them were conservative governments and that would have been Reagan in the US and Mulroney in Canada. Similarly, the Environmental Protection Act was brought in by Richard Nixon.
So environmentalism used to be something that was not identified with any particular politics. And now, of course, it is a banner for leftism. So the minute you speak about it, it's assumed that you are in favor of a whole set of other progressive politics, and you are immediately disqualified from a discussion with the other 50 % of the population. Well, my view is that actually something like environment ecology
Sean (51:14.444)
should be so, depends on how you think about it, either depoliticized or politicized, but in any case, should become the concern of everyone. So everybody needs to have a policy on this one. It's far too important to everybody. It can't be simply politicized in this way as a kind of banner around which a certain faction of the political will gather and the rest will immediately recognize them. No, I don't believe in that.
Yeah, the short history of environmentalism, doesn't go back very far because the situation that we're in is not very old, which is somehow gives me hope. We're not talking about a situation that has been brewing up. I don't believe that the great acceleration began when we started agriculture. People say things like that. No, we're talking about changes that occurred in production and consumption, which are really just about 300 years old, right?
This is a new way of being on the earth. It's not simply the product of evolution, it's the product of culture and politics. It has certain confused religious attitudes behind it. It's in every way something that can be changed. It's not essential to our being modern.
So that would be my deep view in the political past, which would give me some quiet optimism about the possibility of a political future.
PJ (52:42.058)
And I've appreciated throughout this entire interview your emphasis on optimism because it is very common. And I hear that more and more, the optimism, because you cannot sit in the cynicism, but it is still common and I think still popular in some circles to just be depressed about what's happening. And that's not a real answer.
Sean (53:06.466)
But you know, I've struggled with this one because I personally don't consider myself an optimist, but everybody else does. But that's because I'm an eschatologist and it's such a misunderstood position because when we hear eschatology, we think utopian and that's not what I'm speaking about. it's, but it's neither pessimist nor optimist is what I would say because it shares something of both positions. So with the pessimist, think.
PJ (53:12.33)
Yeah
Sean (53:35.362)
the eschatologist shares a low opinion of human possibility. I have a pretty low opinion about what humans are capable of, you know, on their own steam, without any aid from without, so to speak, left to their own devices. And there's plenty of evidence that we're not capable of much good under those conditions. And then with the optimists though, and against the pessimists, the eschatologist shares the belief in an open future, that is.
PJ (53:39.094)
You
Sean (54:05.004)
The pessimist's error, the error of pessimism is to assume that the future is certain when it is not certain.
PJ (54:13.454)
Dr. McGrath, I want to be respectful of your time. If I could ask you one more question for our audience, for those who have listened all the way to the end of this episode, what is one thing that you recommend for them to do or you would, besides by your excellent book, what would you recommend that they do or meditate on over the course of the next week after listening to this episode?
Sean (54:46.232)
Well, I feel like I've spoken out of two sides of my mouth. On the one hand, I've been speaking about early Christian theology and Christian eschatology. On the other hand, I've been speaking about environmentalism. And those are very different communities. one of the challenges I have is somehow to bring these together and to think them together. I'm not entirely alone in this. The pope himself has this challenge. So I can imagine three different kinds of audiences. There's the environmental audience who has no interest in Christian theology.
There's the Christian theological audience that has no interest in environmentalism. And then there might be this third audience who's a bit of both. So I'm not sure who I'm giving advice to, but I'm going to shoot for the Christian audience that has found itself alienated from environmental concerns because environment has become politicized and it is now the banner.
the rallying cry of the left with whom they do not identify. I would ask them to take very seriously that the New Testament eschatology is about justice for the earth, for the earth community, that the incarnation of Christ, as it's described by the first century theologians and as we see anticipations of it in the scripture itself,
is a transformation, a divinization of the human and that the human includes the non-human without which it could not exist. that wasn't just Christ's human soul that's divinized or rendered hypothetically united with the divine nature, but it's also everything in his body, his evolutionary history. And retroactively, I would say, why not all the way back to Homo erectus who roamed the earth for a million years?
You know, he has to be somehow included. He's the ancestor of the human nature of Jesus. All of this human history, all of the environmental conditions necessary for flourishing human body, this too is all caught up in the divinization of Christ. And ask them to think about whether indifference to environmentalism is really compatible with, or indifference to environmental ruin, let me put it that way, is really compatible with Christian faith.
PJ (57:11.188)
Very compelling and a great way to end the interview. Dr. McGrath, thank you so much.
Sean (57:16.468)
Thank you, PJ.