[1] What does it mean to have a calling\u2014to live out vocation\u2014if human civilization is headed for extinction?\u00a0\u00a0 Extinction, after all, is absolute in its finality.\u00a0 Theologically, it is the unraveling of Creation.\u00a0 It voids the relationship between God and God\u2019s people, effectively terminating the Genesis injunction to \u201cbe fruitful and multiply\u201d and \u201cfill the earth\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Extinction means the end\u2014full stop\u2014to vocation.\u00a0 Once extinction happens, there is no one left to be called, and no neighbor left to serve.\u00a0 Nothing.<\/p>\n
[2] The question may seem wildly premature.\u00a0 Human extinction in the physical sense is not likely to happen in the immediate future, assuming we are spared a full-blown nuclear exchange or a very sneaky asteroid or some universally lethal pandemic.\u00a0 Nor is complete extinction likely to happen for decades, or even by the end of the twenty-first century, even according to the most dire estimates.\u00a0 So isn\u2019t the real extinction of humanity too far off to worry about?<\/p>\n
[3] Any such complacency rests on a mis-framing of the question.\u00a0 Extinction is not an end state that appears suddenly out of nowhere.\u00a0 Rather, it is a road along which we travel–a dystopic process occurring within human history, not outside of it.\u00a0 As a process, extinction arguably has started already.\u00a0 Worrisome trends already are evident and likely will gather momentum over the next several decades. As the sinews of civilization and its supporting ecosystem \u201cservices\u201d are cut away, piece by piece,\u00a0 the number of extinct non-human species climbs slowly and inexorably; \u00a0the food chain is disrupted by species die-offs; lethal viruses are liberated from disturbed ecosystems;\u00a0 climate change inexorably reduces the carrying capacity of the planet;\u00a0 states fail; environmental refugees abandon their homes by the millions and are not welcome to put down roots elsewhere.\u00a0 Rising temperatures alone may make much of the world uninhabitable by 2100, with unstoppable trends by 2050.\u00a0 Rising temperatures engender feedback loops and interact with other disintegrative processes in ways that we are barely beginning to understand.<\/p>\n
[4] Theologians already have started pondering the vocational significance of these disintegrative processes.\u00a0 For example, Kristen Johnston Largen distinguishes natural from unnatural extinctions and argues that we are called to consent to the former and resist the latter.<\/p>\n
In our current context, it is critical that we both accept the inevitability of our own death and the inevitability of species extinction.\u00a0 Both are natural and built into the evolutionary mechanism of creation.\u00a0 Yet, at the same time, it is equally critical that we mobilize all our resources and begin to turn the tide on the looming ecological disaster that is the sixth extinction.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n The odds worsen when we realize that it might take considerably less to bring about the effective extinction of humans than the disappearance of other species.\u00a0 For nonhuman species, extinction requires the destruction of the material supports for life\u2014call it \u201cphysical\u201d extinction.\u00a0\u00a0 In contrast, the human species may require only whatever physical destruction is necessary to make life not worth living, through an unstoppable and irreversible erosion of past, present and future meanings.<\/p>\n [5] This \u201csocietal\u201d (as opposed to physical) extinction involves 1) the loss of an experienced and remembered past, 2) the loss of an anticipated and lived-for future, and as a result 3) the loss of a worthwhile present.\u00a0\u00a0 The absence of all three dimensions of time is what sets societal extinction apart from other losses and marks extinction as nothing less than the undoing of Creation.\u00a0 For Christians, the Genesis story signals not simply the beginning of life and the conditions for supporting life, but the beginning of meaning.\u00a0 Meaning is embedded in time.\u00a0\u00a0 A lively sense of vocation presupposes a rich saturation of meaning in time past, present and future.<\/p>\n [6] Of course, meaning lacks stability and permanence.\u00a0\u00a0 To lose meaning is a normal aspect of human life; each successive generation loses most of the memories of the previous, thanks to the passage of time.\u00a0 Parents and friends pass away; colleges, businesses and churches close.\u00a0 All this is as normal as our own natural mortality which Largen calls \u201cpersonal extinction\u201d.<\/p>\n [7] Societal extinction, in contrast, involves an unstoppable erosion of past, present and future meaning in our lives.\u00a0 We can see this starting to happen, as disasters and terrors undermine and destroy whole communities.\u00a0 Wars ravage entire countries destroying past, present, and future.\u00a0 Refugees have a bitter foretaste of societal extinction when they flee all that is precious to them.\u00a0 To be sure, the people of the U.S. are less experienced in the progress of societal extinction than residents of regions at risk: low-lying islands, flood-prone Bangladesh, the desertifying sub-Saharan Africa, and other places where climate change is producing victims by the millions.\u00a0 For them, the future is clouding over.\u00a0 Societal extinction involves the unstoppable degrading of natural and human environments\u2014the experience of being caught in crises that only get worse and never retreat or fade away.<\/p>\n The black hole of societal extinction<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n [8] What happens when all the meanings that occupy our social imaginary\u2014including apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fantasies\u2014disappear into a black hole of disruption and nothingness?\u00a0 Once in my dreaming, I experienced the convergence of physical and societal extinction.\u00a0 In the early 1980s, nuclear tensions ran high.\u00a0 I dreamed I was floating over pristine Minnesota lake country\u2014a landscape of clear lakes and deep green forests under fluffy white clouds against a pure blue sky.\u00a0 As I floated along, I was suddenly startled to realize that these were no longer \u201clakes\u201d or \u201ctrees\u201d or \u201cclouds\u201d or \u201csky\u201d.\u00a0 All the natural features were there but had lost their names in a nuclear holocaust that had wiped out humanity.\u00a0 In my nightmare, the first human\u2019s work of naming was undone.\u00a0 I felt unutterably sad that the human world of meaning\u2014past, present, future–was completely wiped away.\u00a0 But at least physical nature had survived, by whatever future name it might come to be known by some new species.<\/p>\n [9] My dream was tinged with sweet melancholy. \u00a0In contrast, Cormac McCarthy\u2019s The Road<\/em> offers a harsh and unsentimental answer to the question of what societal extinction might look like.[2]<\/a>\u00a0 The story follows a father and son who are making their way through the bleak greyness of the Allegheny Mountains.\u00a0 The past is remembered only by the father, and the future looks unrelievedly grim.\u00a0 Years earlier, nuclear war set off a \u201cnuclear winter\u201d which tipped the atmosphere into a flux of perpetual storminess, and effectively put an end to photosynthesis.\u00a0 Humanity lost the capacity to grow food.\u00a0 On the road the father and son encounter scary remnants of society, grotesque caricatures of what once were elements of a thriving social order: a marching legion, an aging housebound couple, a gang of thugs, and assorted loners.\u00a0 All these rough, emaciated beings are bent on surviving, but no food can be grown.\u00a0 Only one form of living protein remains, and these remaining humans are desperate to cannibalize it.\u00a0 As father and son flee for their lives again and again, the son clings to the one shred of present meaning that remains: he and his father are to be counted among the \u201cgood guys\u201d since they refuse to eat human flesh despite their looming starvation.\u00a0 Eventually the father dies.\u00a0 The grieving son is taken in by a wandering man and woman with a young daughter, all that is needed, in effect, to reconstitute the nuclear family.\u00a0 The novel closes on a note of precarious future meaning.\u00a0 It offers a faint glimmer of hope that human society might survive into the next generation.<\/p>\n [10]The Road<\/em> envisions one slender thread of meaning that staves off the finality of societal extinction.\u00a0 That thread of meaning is necessary to sustain agency\u2014the capacity of the father and the son to continue their journey.\u00a0 If, as seems likely, our own process of societal extinction worsens over the next few decades, will we be able to sustain such a sense of agency?\u00a0 The question is inexpugnably personal.\u00a0 Could I survive under such conditions?\u00a0 Would I have the strength, the emotional toughness, the cunning, the predatory instincts, the resourcefulness and the tool-making capacity to make my way through societal wreckage?\u00a0\u00a0 But then there is a further question, regarding meaning: would I want to?\u00a0 Would I have the resolve to keep moving, like the father in The Road<\/em>?\u00a0 What if I lacked\u00a0 the prospect of some survivor\u2019s camp, some new seedbed of civilization over the horizon, to draw me on?\u00a0\u00a0 What if my shallow civilizational optimism were thoroughly shattered by the loss of all the family members I held dear?\u00a0 Would I have any hope-driven energy to persevere across a landscape that was relentlessly indifferent if not hostile to my own survival?\u00a0 What would be the psychic basis of my survivalist strength?<\/p>\n [11] The questions are bleak, and I am not alone in asking them.\u00a0 For some people, this is not imagined as a nightmare but a real possibility; it is not a game.\u00a0 Informed by apocalyptic visions from Hollywood, they buy camouflage clothing, outdoor gear and guns to test their capacities against these cinematic fantasies.\u00a0 Some even welcome the prospect of societal breakdown.\u00a0 I won\u2019t join them.\u00a0 Much as I love wandering the woods and testing myself against whatever weather nature might throw at me, I have no appetite for proving that I could survive.\u00a0 My personal survival simply wouldn\u2019t mean enough to keep me going.\u00a0 To defend loved ones?\u00a0 That would help, perhaps.\u00a0 But as the climate crisis unfolds, we\u2014each of us individually, and collectively\u2014will need an all-encompassing reason for continuing to live.<\/p>\n Towards an account of vocation in a time of extinction<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n [12] For a life truly worth living, I would need a yet wider and deeper circle of reference and meaning, which cannot be ginned up from thin air or vacuous affirmations.\u00a0 For Christians, the meaning of life is expressed in a sense of being called to a vocation.\u00a0 \u00a0A sense of vocation requires rigorous self-examination, not simply affirmation of what we are doing.\u00a0\u00a0 Pious affection for Creation is not enough.\u00a0 It does us little good to implore God in Sunday morning prayer to protect Creation, or to call church members to more conscientious stewardship.\u00a0 To understand our call we need to take an unsparing look at how the human species is contributing to its own societal extinction.\u00a0 Hard questions must be faced.\u00a0 If God loves all of Creation, then how can God love the one species which is destroying the rest of Creation?\u00a0 Is God willing to sacrifice all of Creation for the one species which is ruining it?\u00a0 Does such a question even make sense?\u00a0 Most personally, since I as a member of the human species am inextricably implicated in the destruction of Creation, why would God even want me to live?\u00a0 How can we sustain a sense of meaningful existence once we absorb the overwhelming fact of complicity in our own demise?<\/p>\n [12] Lutheran theology will find this challenge familiar, at least on the surface.\u00a0 It knows the despair that is provoked by divine condemnation of human striving towards salvation.\u00a0 The root challenge that Luther faced and that we still face is how to regain a viable sense of agency in the face of overwhelming, disabling despair.\u00a0 In response to his own despair, Martin Luther paved a sure and certain road to hope by insisting that the law of divine condemnation is set aside by the gospel of God\u2019s indestructible love for us in Jesus, and then by discovering vocation as the active expression of such hope. \u00a0We need to know that we as a species are called to survive, that that is our vocation.\u00a0 The hope from God\u2019s right hand nourishes the life we are called to protect through God\u2019s left hand.<\/p>\n [13] We Lutherans live simultaneously in an order of salvation and of vocation. \u00a0Of course, the besetting problem is no longer my doomed individual effort to justify my existence, but the victimization of all Creation.\u00a0 This dramatic expansion suggests that in this larger frame, the traditional concern of justification has become marginal, but that is not the case.\u00a0 To be sure, the challenge is no longer to stamp down human pride, crush self-sufficiency, and escape a sense of personal powerlessness over his fate, as it was for Luther.\u00a0 Now the challenge is to provide a reason to continue to exercise agency\u2014a reason to live in the unstoppable slide towards societal extinction.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n [14] I can\u2019t imagine a belief system that could survive direct contact with societal extinction in the endgame when it arrives.\u00a0 But I can imagine a belief system that might prove its value along the road to that extinction, as conditions gradually darken.\u00a0 It would have to nurture hope in the strong sense, as that disposition of being oriented to the possibilities for constructive action, as the ethicist Frederick Bird defines hope.[4]<\/a>\u00a0 To that end, it would have to be sturdy and portable\u2014able to withstand the shocks of unexpected disappointments, betrayals, losses and other disheartening surprises. \u00a0It would have to provide a secure psychic home\u2014a comforting refuge.\u00a0 It would have to be composed of easily remembered concepts yet have enough substance to invite continuing pondering.\u00a0 It would have to provide a range of interpretative possibilities to keep conversation going among survivors, if only to keep their minds engaged, supple and open to the transcendent.\u00a0 Most important, it would have to provide transcendent, unimpeachable reassurance to jump-start human agency in the face of disabling despair.<\/p>\n [15] The recently deceased theologian Phil Hefner provides a frame for sustaining a sense of meaning past, present and future.\u00a0 In an early paper, he proposed a \u201cfuller concept of evolution\u201d to encompass what science tells us within faith.[5]<\/a>\u00a0 His notion of the human as \u201ccreated co-creator\u201d locates us in a process that began with the big bang and proceeds through biological and moral stages, with the emergence of imagination and spirituality as distinctive human features.\u00a0 \u201cBeing human involves a great deal of creating, imagining new worlds, and constructing those worlds.\u201d\u00a0 Now, of course, the science of climate change has destroyed such optimism, but not his prescription for vocation. \u00a0\u201cThe mandate of our vocation is to use our giftedness within nature and on behalf of nature, nature including our fellow humans\u2026.\u201d\u00a0 The abiding strength of this view is its comprehensive reach.\u00a0 Confident in where we have come from, we can position ourselves against the darkness of what is to come.\u00a0 Like the father and son in The Road<\/em>, we know where we have come from and are headed in the moment.\u00a0 With a comprehensive understanding of our evolution so far, we can acknowledge that a gracious God may have something more in mind than the survival of humanity as a species.\u00a0 We can embrace the paradox of God\u2019s will for us to live and the fact that we are destroying the conditions for our long-term survival.\u00a0 God promised in Genesis never to destroy humanity, but God did not promise to prevent humanity from destroying itself.<\/p>\n [16] Our vocation then is paradoxical. \u00a0Enveloped in a comprehensive cloud of meaning, we are called to resist extinction with all our might\u2014but then to consent to it when it becomes inevitable, in the belief that God has something new in store for planet earth.\u00a0 Hefner provides the frame for embracing both sides of the paradox.\u00a0 We can look back at the long history of our evolution, knowing with complete confidence that God created our agency as a means to protect and sustain Creation, including our species.\u00a0 We therefore are called to fight like hell to do so, even as our species bends our apocalyptic world towards the postapocalyptic end of human meaning.\u00a0 At the same time, we realize that creation of the human species does not exhaust God\u2019s creative aim, and that at some point we must acquiesce in our own demise.\u00a0 The father and son in The Road<\/em> never got to that point, and we might pray that we never do, either.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Kristen Johnston Largen, \u201cUn\/natural death and extinction\u201d, dialog<\/em> 57:4(December 2018), 279-286.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Cormac McCarthy.\u00a0 The Road.\u00a0 <\/em>New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> By raising the possibility of extinction, the argument made here extends far beyond current Lutheran teaching.\u00a0 For example, a recent ELCA social message claims we are at a \u2018kairos\u2019 moment\u2014an occasion for repentance and redirected action, which it prescribes in rich and thorough detail, even though its conception of \u2018kairos\u2019 does not extend as far as the threatening possibility of societal extinction.\u00a0 (https:\/\/resources.elca.org\/theological-discernment\/earths-climate-crisis-social-message\/?_ga=2.92941789.1103814902.1724895552-624643502.1724895552)<\/p>\n