Called To Care: A Lutheran Dialogue with the Scriptural Hermeneutics of Laudato Si'

Abstract

In the list of current social and economic discussions in the world, the topic of environmentalism ranks highly. World leaders meet to discuss how to alleviate climate change, activists vocally protest the use of nonrenewable resources, and actors and pop-culture figures give emotional pleas to “save the planet.” Another prominent figure has risen to the challenge of addressing the world’s environmental problems, Pope Francis. In his encyclical, Laudato Si’, Pope Francis addresses a large swath of the man-made issues in the environment and gives recommendations for how to solve them. This paper will analyze Pope Francis’s scriptural hermeneutics to evaluate the value and validity of his foundational arguments in Laudato Si’. For a baseline, it will define Lutheran and Catholic scriptural hermeneutics and compare them. This paper will argue that despite the Pope’s Catholic scriptural hermeneutics, his basis for reading Scripture through the lens of Genesis is valid, and conservative Lutherans can appreciate and acknowledge God’s call to care for creation from Scripture. It will also provide a view of ecological theology that maintains a Christocentric message of hope for the environmentally concerned Christian.