Logostalgia: Eschatology and the Sixth Extinction

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.The first century Christians' intense wrestling with the news of Jesus' resurrection gave way to a new accounting for the universal experience of dying, and then also to the experience of being trapped in scarcity, sin, and suffering. I propose that it is now time to wrestle out an account of the ways that same gospel touches our dawning awareness that we live after, alongside, and before unfathomable species and system loss. That is to say that the language tradition that accrues to the Christian community, exegeting the Christian scriptures as a fabric of life and meaning, needs a way to hold both the named and unnamed losses of the Anthropocene, as it also seeks to hold the losses that precede and succeed it. In what follows I briefly sketch new developments in the science of extinction. I then take note of two current theologians, Niels Gregersen and Christopher Southgate, who consider versions of the question. I suggest they are partially helpful in noting how such losses are logged theologically. Finally, I offer my own contribution of an eschatology that can allow extinction to register as theolgoically significant.