Abstract

BUITENDAG, Johan. The indispensability of habitat in our definition of human personhood: In search of an eco-theological understanding of human life. Herv. teol. stud. [online]. 2012, vol.68, n.1, pp.1-8. ISSN 2072-8050.

The endeavour of this article is to arrive at a theological responsible conception of life. Life cannot be described adequately only in terms of body and soul (and/or spirit), or even in terms of human personhood. The point is that it is constitutive for life to take the human being's environment sociologically as well as ecologically into account. This article does not plead for a nature religion as advocated by the Deep Green Movement and all its variations of naturalism and supernaturalism, but asks for a revaluation of a Christian anthropology which approaches the Bible with a green hermeneutics. Perhaps the expression, 'bio-cultural' paradigm requests to be substituted with an eco-sociological niche of the human person. An eco-sociological (eco-theological) understanding of homo religiosus is therefore to assume human life as ontologically 'distributed'.

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