"The Kingdom of God as a Steady State Economy"

Brian Czech

I wanted to give a shout-out to this article by Brian Czech at CASSE (the Center for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy).

He begins:

I’ll never forget the privilege, maybe five years ago, of addressing a small, interdenominational group of faith leaders in Washington, DC. They’d asked me to talk about limits to economic growth and to give a synopsis of the steady state economy as an alternative to growth. We then went around the group, perhaps eight in all, and discussed the issues. One pastor, deep in thought, summarily theologized, “The steady state economy; now that’s the Kingdom of God.” I can hear it like it was yesterday.

 He goes on to reflect on an ecological interpretation of Isaiah's "all flesh is grass", and the trophic levels in the human economy analogous to those in the natural economy.  Good stuff.

But then he writes, in a couple of paragraphs devoted to population issues at the end of the article, "My theology is amateurish at best, but isn’t the Kingdom of God supposed to lead to the final Kingdom of Heaven? It would seem that, at some stage, after life on Earth, the Kingdom of Heaven comes to its fruition of souls..."

I don't really understand what is intended here, although I don't think that using "heaven" to relativize "earth" is good environmental theology.  But I'm not writing this post to criticize Czech's article but to say how interesting it is to see the folks at CASSE explicitly making such a theological connection.  Someone should take it further!

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