Liberating the Creation: The Earthiness of Hope

Abstract

This paper examines the Korean ethic of the shared household, salim, read through Christian political theology, process thought, and the ecumenically ecotheological liberation of all beings. It addresses the logic of a modernity empowered by its religious inheritance to create a dissociation of the elite and wealthy from other humans and nonhumans, who are regarded only as resources. This extractivist existence not only fosters a political theology of exceptionalism but also nurtures an illusion of self-sufficiency. Bringing together salim, in its original sense of “care for the household,” reveals a shareable ethic of planetary liberation. This realization fuels “the liberation of all beings” through the decolonizing of creation—of air, soil, waters, animals’, women’s and planetary bodies—through active participation in the spirit of liberation.

1. Salim: At Home on the Earth

The liberation of things1—what a beautiful, if almost unimaginable, vision, especially as extended beyond “things” to signify ‘all beings.”

We, humans, have not yet come close to liberating even all members of our own species—or even to recognizing them all as human beings. In my own current context, systemic dehumanization has been intensifying. As I prepared for the Hanshin conference2, a so-called “war of choice” began with a US bombing that killed over 100 children at school, amid massive cuts to social, educational, and life support for the needy. As for nonhuman beings, well, if they are not profitable to our corporations, what do they matter? So, we have been witnessing the cutting away of every kind of governmental regulation protecting the environment; daily, more regulations on greenhouse gas emissions are shunned, along with legal protections for endangered species, and for all those varied beings that are endangered, along with so many human beings.

It is not that our species does not realize that it depends at every instant upon a vast network of nonhuman species. Yet we have fallen prey to a minority of the human species, an elite of power and wealth that practices systemic colonization and exploitation of other humans and of other creatures. And as that elite variously colonizes those populations it needs for the labor and the material that sustain its privilege, it imposes a collective repression of its own dependencies. It leads all of us to “eco-self-destruction” rather than meditating on “the mattering, the earth matter,” of all beings (Keller 2023, p. 151).

Fortunately, a decolonizing spirit also has a long human history, driving manifold movements, insurrections, and liberations in the East and West. This is a spirit not just of liberation from oppression—but of liberation for—what might we call it? Perhaps: for shalom in Hebrew, salaam in Arabic, both meaning ‘wellbeing’; as of course does the cognate (or consonant?) term salim in Korean. Salim, if I understand it correctly, in its Korean root is a bit different from shalom: it means originally ‘care for the household.’3 So salim seems to carry a communal wisdom for life together, for survival and flourishing, by caring for, rather than wasting, things in ways of reusing and repairing them. Thus, salim beautifully and immediately connects with the eco of ‘ecology’—oikos, home, in Greek. This is the same as the root of ‘economy’. So, the liberation of all things and beings into salim must imply a transformed world-home in which justice and equality become real. And in our epoch, we must increasingly add: salim requires an ecology of sustainable life for the whole of the earth, for its vast family of species, its creatures. And so, the household character of salim may be key to our species’ moment: if humanity is going to have an open future, a worthwhile future, it is only because we humans come to recognize planet Earth as a shared household: as a home for all of us humans and nonhumans, working toward a collective salim. Toward an ecosocial future worthy of hope. Not a hope indifferent to the materiality of the Earth—but an earthy hope.

Such a hope takes a crucial Christian form in the opening of liberation and Minjung theologies to a liberation of all creatures, including nonhuman things. Such an ecosocial hope does not downplay the needs of oppressed human publics. On the contrary: if we have hope for the earthy future—as this century opens—it is hope for a whole new way of being earthlings; of dwelling together with all the creatures of the earth in the salim of a planetary household. This shared home includes, of course, all our challenging relations with other cultures and religions. And with all those other species not as friendly to us as our pet dogs and cats. It is the hope for, and with, a new spirit—that of the liberation of all beings.

But of course, in much US Christianity and its missionary teaching, the old anthropocentrism reigns supreme, and with its human, white human, neoimperialism comes also a Christian supremacism. So, the connection between the economic and political imperialism and a certain imperial sense of Man made in the image of God—of course, of an imperious, omnipotent sort of Lord (oh so manly) must constantly be confronted. For it carries a theology of top-down divine power sanctifying political oppression. Over half a century of liberative theologies exposes the systemic Christian justifications for imperious and, of course, patriarchal power over the peoples and the resources of the planet.4

And now—as the theme of this Special Issue declares it—the liberation of all beings really is at stake. Therefore, the decolonization of the earth involves much more than human liberation—such that radical human liberation may not be possible apart from nonhumans. “Radical” in terms of the Latin radix root—for it is the nonhuman that provides the deepest and broadest root system of the human!

As to the theme of this Special Issue, “Liberation of Things,” it should perhaps be extended to that of “beings,” in order not to forget the importance of human agency in the entanglement of all creatures. It is to recognize the entangled mattering of all being on this planet; the “earth matters.” (Keller 2023, p. 152). And, in this context, it is important to note that “the liberation of all beings” has profound Buddhist roots. Consider the very first line of the bodhisattva vow: a common translation is “Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to free them.” (Wrisley 2020). In other words, the liberation sought by the human follower of Buddha begins with a commitment to the liberation of all others, but really all—all sentient beings, all living creatures. Also, Patityasamuppada, dependent co-origination (緣起), is also translated as interdependence. A deeply ecological notion.5

But I am not suggesting that Buddhism contains the solution to the current crisis. I and many of us involved in the current conversation work from within Christianity—which is an excellent perspective for criticizing the kind of Christianity that got secularized into modern Western forms of power. Christianity has a deep history of such self-critique; it has fueled liberation, feminist, ecological and Minjung versions of theology. So, the hope persists—the hope to liberate Christianity to be a yet more liberating force.

But the notion of “hope” remains a problem. Hope gets routinely confused with certainty. And this has something to do with what happened to hope in the Western development of Christianity. It became identified with a hope for another world—the world of a heaven separated from earth, where earth and its matter cease to matter! So, it is a hope that excludes the nonhuman beings of the earth. It was an anthropocentric and otherworldly hope that got secularized, paradoxically, into an all too worldly optimism: optimism that human ingenuity, technology and free enterprise will solve all our problems, including, of course, global warming. This superworldliness is worldly in the sense of a kind of economic commodification of all beings. However, hope is “not optimism,” which has been “the driving spirit of US capitalist progress thinking” (Keller 2023, p. 158). This capitalist hope is devoid of “the materialization of the ultimate concern” (Ibid., p. 149), if I cite from Paul Tillich.x

2. Four Key Problems for a Christian Political Theology

So, I would like to reflect with you on four key problems for a Christian political theology. These problematic assumptions of Christianity are anthropocentrism, the dualistic otherworldliness, omnipotence as the presumption of divine control (management) over everything in the world, and Christian supremacism, with its exclusion of the truths of other ways. The problem now is how they have been secularized through the centuries of Western modernity. I am presuming the key postulate of political theology, as Carl Schmitt famously put it a century ago: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” (Schmitt 2005, chap. 3).

(1) The first of the four problematic presumptions: anthropocentrism. But the problem of human-centeredness is not the awareness that humans, with our high intelligence and self-consciousness, are different from all other earthlings. The problem is in how that intelligence is deployed to exploit other creatures to the point of now driving several or even several dozens of species extinct every single day. The Western privileging of humans over all fellow creatures has many sources. The most influential may be the book of Genesis, with the creation of the human being in the image of God and its grant of dominion over all the other creatures. In its own context, it suggests not mere domination, but responsibility. Being in the image of the one who created all creatures implies care for all of them, not just for ourselves. Then sin comes fast, twisting care into a species self-centeredness—an ancient anthropocentrism. So, out of Eden we go! And that original sin becomes the status quo disrespect of all other beings. And of course, if other human beings were seen as not quite fully human, they could be subordinated as well.6

That ancient distortion forms the theological basis for the modern exploitation of the whole nonhuman world. So, the imago Dei, a symbol that should have inspired heightened responsibility, instead becomes secular as world domination. Then the human being becomes the great exception among creatures. Exception, in English—from the Latin excipere, pulled out.7

(2) The secularized Christian anthropocentrism made indifference to other earthlings the deep habit of modern civilization. Of course it did not remain in the West. So, it accompanies the second problematic bit of political theology: the dualistic otherworldliness of Christianity. The Bible makes two references, both in John’s gospel, to not being of this world—clearly meaning, in context, Jesus’ “kingdom” as the alternative to the ways of the imperial Roman world.8 But this symbolism was distorted into a full-fledged dualism, far more akin to ancient classical metaphysics than to the Bible—in which the dominant language of salvation is not of an otherworldly realm but of a new heaven and earth: heaven-and-earth together. The biblical vision is of a radical renewal of our atmosphere and earth—not a dualism of heaven split off from earth.

This dualism of heaven and earth cannot be separated from the anthropocentrism that imagines humans so much closer to heaven. So, the otherworldliness intensifies the indifference to the so-called things of this world. It became the hallmark of so much Christian spirituality: our faith, our priority, is “not of this world.” And, as this dualism was secularized, it justified the whole Western colonization of the world—of its other peoples, who were seen as heathen, not heaven-bound, and of the nonhuman nature of the planet. All other beings were merely ‘of this world’—they could be colonized with impunity. But of course, the bible protests against the colonialism, Babylonian and then Roman.

Against its dualistic background, the modern Western economy could then push from colonization to commodification of the world: human and otherwise. And here I cannot resist a peek at the Bible’s last book. In Revelation Chapter 12, we witness the collapse of the Roman Empire: a global empire signified by the Beast of political power and the so-called “Whore of Babylon.” Yes, a sexist symbol, which symbolizes the imperial economy. Global power rides intimately on the back of the global economy: named with a long list of luxury commodities, such as olive oil, perfume, gold, slaves, and so on. But the beast turns on her and devours her: in other words, the global economy that commodifies everything, even its own flesh, is consumed. Consumed—in both senses of the word. I cannot stop reading the Beast/Whore scene as a prophecy… not of literal individuals or facts. I do not mean that John of Patmos was predicting, say, the relationship between Donald Trump and Elon Musk (of course not). But he does seem to intuit a long-term pattern, now readable as the beast of global superpowers in bed with the Babylon of global capitalism.9

What I do think biblical prophecy warns of is the imperial colonization and commodification of our world. Its creatures are deprived of intrinsic worth by a dualistic otherworldliness gone secular, then measuring worth in dollars, and so, the old dualism that tears the earth from heaven works in capitalist form against the possibility of the new heaven and earth.

(3) The third distortion of Christianity is encoded in the doctrine of divine omnipotence. This is not a biblical concept. The bible only claims that God can do whatever it pleases God to do. And it seems not to please God to obstruct human responsibility. In that sense God does not control all that happens. It may be, as process theology has it, that God does not control at all, but calls.10 Yet Christian civilization soon developed the presumption of an all-controlling deity; the doctrine that nothing happens apart from the will of God. Nothing—whether personal mistakes or mass deaths. A lot of Christians have lost their faith due to this notion of divine control. You know the problem of “theodicy”—how can an all-powerful God allow so much evil, unless God is not good? Consider the political theology: whatever bombings of children’s schools or destruction of environmental protections our ruler chooses must be the will of God. Omnipotence then gets secularized as superpower. Very manly! And in bed, like Revelation’s Beast, with the economy of Babylon. In its US secularized form, we see this power manipulating the religious right. So, the question of a theological alternative to omnipotence cannot be avoided.

(4) Power presses right into the last of these four problems: that of Christian supremacism. It has long before modernity been both politicized and sanctified as the privilege of Christian empire. One nation, one God—one superpower supernaturally sanctioned. Its modern secularization carries along its political theology of one truth, our way the only way. And so, a country like South Korea deals with the deep complexity of Christian missions that have moved along the paths of Western colonialism and neocolonialism. I am aware from my many Korean Christian students of the ambiguity of their Christian identity—and of the challenge of using their Christianity against the exclusivism of much Christian teaching, and against the untruth of the claim to possess the one and only Way, the exclusive religious truth. When we cite the Jesus of John 14.6—as “the way, the truth and the light”—does that mean that there is no other truthful way? Would the exclusivism not be in contradiction to the way of Jesus, the way of respect in relation to great difference, of love in relation even to opposition? And if now we care not only about other ways but about other species and about the way to a sustainable ecological future for the planet—will we not practice a deep ecumenism—a planetary ecoecumenism? But the ‘-ecu-’ here in the term ‘ecoecumenism’ is the same Greek root as eco: meaning—again—“household,” Salim. A household of many religious ways as well as many terrestrial species.

3. An Earthy New Creation

At this point in our planet’s history, it has become all too clear: we urgently need many ways to come into solidarity. That is, ecology needs ecumenism, “the ecumenical collaboration of all the world religions,” in that the eco- of ecology shares the same Greek root with the ‘ecu-’ of ecumenism (Keller 2023, p. 156), and to do so for the sake of the liberation of all beings. At least all the beings of household Earth!

Such solidarity may be helped by the alternative to the above four-fold problem. That would mean then, first, instead of the anthropocentric exceptionalism, a political theology of the inception—of new beginnings for all beings. And such new beginnings crack open the dualistic wall between the otherworldly and this world. For the “New Heaven and Earth” is not a final destination but a shared and present possibility—the possibility of the radical renewal of our life in common with all the beings of sky, sea and ground.11 This new creation is an earthy new creation, one made possible by an imago dei read differently: dominion no longer as human dominance but as responsibility—as a capacity to respond to fellow creatures. And when we will “tend and keep the earth,” to do so mindfully, for we are, after all, made in the image of the cosmic creator. We are meant to participate in co-creative cooperation, rather than to proceed with discretion. And as such, this worldliness offers its own secularization—not secularism (as my teacher John Cobb insisted), which is its own religion, but a work belonging to its time, not transcending time.

Therefore, we might yet in our saeculum collaborate with other earthlings for the renewal of the planet. That is an alternative to the hope for an omnipotent intervention that keeps so many spinning in a vicious circle of false optimism and disappointed pessimism. Hope is not a guarantee with its false optimism. As I, and perhaps some of you, learned from Jurgen Moltmann12—hope is also not passive waiting but active participation in the spirit of liberation. And it does mean turning to the source of all beings—whether you call it being itself, the being of all beings, or God, or spirit.

It is only because I discovered process theology very early that I was able to stay with the work of theology. Many Korean thinkers are familiar with that tradition running from the philosopher Whitehead a century ago through such theologians as John B. Cobb Jr. and the whole network of process thought. That tradition understands God not as the all-controlling superpower, He who knows and controls everything, whether by direct intervention or by providential plan. The theos of process theology does not fully determine anything (not even the quantum of energy, with its element of indeterminacy). This divinity works by the lure of possibility, the initial aim at every moment of every creature’s existence, and at every saeculum. It is up to the creature to actualize the possibility—a little or a lot—or not. God inspires and feels but does not control the process.13 And it is a process of radical relationship—of every creature connected not just to its kind and kin but to an entire universe of interrelation. So, process works a great philosophical decolonization of the cosmos itself. And for earthlings, that means especially the relationships making up our planetary context. Through John Cobb, process cosmology became a deep resource for ecotheology. The relationalism of feminist theology emerged then too, with its own reach into the earth’s ecology. I have been glad to work the connections between process theology and the feminist sense of inter-connectivity itself.14

So sexist, top-down power is still in bed with the anti-ecological economy commodifying planetary life. The beast and Babylon are still at it. Late capitalism commodifies the very connections making us up: its planetary economy has turned the earth oikos into a marketplace. An answering solidarity holds the beings making up the earth with respect, keeping conscious of how our materiality matters. How we each differently materialize in and as this planet of entangled earthlings.15

We already touched on the alternative to the fourth problem, that of Christian exclusivism. Our earthy relationality is not the exclusive truth of any single tradition, religious or cultural: it demands a radical ecumenism. For in tuning to the spirit of life, we open our own households, our oikoi, our salim, to the truth of multiple traditions. For example: I first came to process theology because, as a teenager, I was a hippie interested in Zen Buddhism, and I happened a bit later in my seminary bookstore to find John Cobb’s new book, Christ in a Pluralistic Age (1975).16 There he describes how it was the Buddha who exposed for him the egotism of much Christianity—its focus on my salvation, my Lord, me, me, me. He hears Christ calling Christianity to hear the Buddhist teaching of pratitya-samupadda—to empty the ego and open to the flow—the qi—of what Jesus meant by love. That deep pluralism won me over: it offers a Christian repudiation of Christian exclusivism and of its colonization of the cultures and species of the earth.

4. The Hope of Salim

Because of the project of this Special Issue on “the liberation of things,” and the Hanshin conference, on “the liberation of all beings,” I was grateful recently to find an article called “Minjung Theology of Korea and Ecological Thinking: Focusing on the Theological Imagination of Ahn Byung-Mu” written by Jongman Kim and Andrew Eungi Kim. Their essay draws on Ahn Byung Mu’s reading of the poet Kim Chi-ha (or Kim Ji-Ha) to conceptualize the importance of qi to the ecology of all beings (Kim and Kim 2023).

The poet Kim writes: “In all of life, if the flow of qi is blocked, it is bound to get sick and die. Just as qi flows by itself and saves all life, so does minjung. When minjung live, the whole society lives.” In a move remarkably analogous to Cobb’s Buddhist Christianity, Kim Chi-ha reads the qi of Daoism as offering a way to connect Christ with the life of the world. In response, the two authors propose the concept of publicness as key to Minjung thinking. This publicness is an alternative to any economics of private property, including land. At the same time, it emphasizes the qi of all of life: so, all beings, including all animals, all natural creatures, are public. God, they write, after creating all things (material things or the material world), created humans as companions of God. This implies that humans should never monopolize or privatize the material world. So, by extension, they are responsible for its wellbeing.17 In this way, Minjung theology has long anticipated a public of all beings.

What, however, would Jesus think of all this earthy plurality? I believe that, if he could be consulted, he would affirm such Christian, Daoist and Buddhist publicness. In his context, he needed, of course, to focus on the colonized suffering of his fellow Jews under Rome. And such hope to decolonize human publics has been true of most liberation and Minjung theology as well. For good reason! Yet, at the same time, Jesus’ “kingdom of God” carries profound echoes of the older prophetic New Creation, the new Heaven and Earth—in the nondualistic Hebrew sense of hashamayim, meaning both the physical sky and God’s dwelling place. The new creation expresses not just an end goal but the ongoing creativity of God’s earthy love for this little bit of the creation. Hope itself comes down to earth—roots itself—in the life and struggle for the liberation of all beings—in all of our rich materiality.

So, the emerging Korean embrace of an ecotheological salim, crossing boundaries into other religions and other species, may offer an ecology of multiple social publics, human and other-than-human. And such an ecology fosters new kinds of liberation—wildly and wisely.

Such an earthy hope does not exclude the mysteries of our existence, including that of a life beyond this one. But its salimist hope focuses on this shared and embodied life. This life for which we are responsible. In its dense and lively togetherness.… As Whitehead put it a century ago: “we find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures…” (Whitehead 1978, p. 50). That does not give them all the vote! And maybe now we could say that it is a social democracy of fellow creatures that calls to us through faith and practice, not waiting for God or technology to fix the problems or let us escape.

Does the ancient metaphor of new creation then mean the radical renewal of this creation? Not one created ex nihilo and making this one irrelevant. A renewal radical with its deep roots—from the Latin radix—in the earth. So now the liberation of all beings calls on a new kind of political theology—one grounded, really, in the ground—of this precious planetary bit of the creation. Therefore, the earthy bodies of all creatures matter. Their—and our—matter matters.

Minjung has of course always sought the bodily wellbeing of vulnerable human populations. And that priority will not become less important if now Minjung understands human wellbeing as at the same time embodied—indeed incarnate—in the shared body of the earth and its nonhuman publicness. That shared body is now colonized by neoliberal global capitalism. So, the material earth matters in new ways—as it is ever more urgently in need of decolonization. This global imposition of an old modern Western materialism makes the Minjung hope of liberation ever more challenging, obstructed now by new US degradations of human and nonhuman publicness. And it may be said potentially to ally Minjung in intriguing ways with what is called “the new materialism”—an interdisciplinary discourse seeking to free our materiality from traditional mind/body dualisms as well as from “old materialist” reductionisms.18 For a more material example, it is important to note that South Korea, with its “Great Green Transformation Strategy,” has made impressive commitments to a green energy transition (Ember 2026).

But there are glimmers of ecopolitical hope even among us—“us” as in the US public. For just one example, take the big state of Texas, the world’s eighth-largest economy. Despite its majority Republican population and its huge oil industry, it is now leading the nation in the production of clean energy. Solar and wind power continue to grow under our anti-environmental regime—simply because they have become economically so inexpensive and so profitable. Leading environmentalist Bill McKibben makes this argument in his Here Comes the Sun (a book taking into account the 2024 Trump victory) (McKibben 2025). McKibben considers the larger irony of a national economy that subjects the planet to horrific damage by the sun now—mainly because of the profits—trapping solar energy for environmental purposes. And he does offer the hope: “not to stop global warming (too late for that) but perhaps to stop it short of the place where it makes civilization impossible.” (Ibid, p. 208).

So, sometimes the oikos—and with it the potential salim—of the economy can overlap with that of ecology. But such salim for the household of the planet houses not good old American optimism. Rather, it enables a prophetically deep-rooted hope. Hope, an honest hope, unlike optimism, casts shadows of doubt, of loss, of uncertainty. It accompanies faith, which is a relationship, not a guarantee. Hope is not certainty of good outcomes. Rather, it means the embrace of possibility. Possibility, not certainty. And hope’s embrace is not passive. It already begins to actualize, to enact, its possibility. The possibility of a decolonized creation. It lends it a new materiality. For this reason, hope matters. And this earthy hope for a liberation of the Minjung of all beings is already materializing just a bit more through the phases—and the salim—of this indispensable South Korean conversation.