Revisioning the Anthropocene in a Trinitarian Frame: A Theological Response to Clive Hamilton’s Defiant Earth

Abstract

Australian public intellectual Clive Hamilton has been an active contributor to recent debates about the naming, timing and appropriate responses to the advent of the Anthropocene. Whilst in his recent book Defiant Earth Hamilton demonstrates an awareness of theological dimensions of this escalating planetary crisis, in the end he considers that mainstream theology has little to contribute to enabling an effective response. In this paper I argue that it is his presumption of what Charles Taylor has characterised as the ‘immanent frame’ of secular humanism that prevents him from engaging seriously with an alternative theological vision, particularly in relation to the challenge that the ongoing ‘technologisation of the world’ (manifest most notably in the rapid diffusion of the digital economy as well as in the anthropocenic modification of the earth system) poses for the taken-for-granted immanent frame itself. In response I argue that a constructive theological response to the issues Hamilton raises is to articulate an alternative ‘Trinitarian frame’ (tentatively explored by Taylor in A Secular Age).