‘Theology, Ecology, and the Arts: Perspective and Prolepsis’

This article looks back at Francis Schaeffer’s disruptive ecological theology (Pollution and the Death of Man, 1970) linking the arts and the imagination to divine life and its outworkings in Christian environmentalism. From this, the article looks at recent authors—S. Richter (2020), T. Van Montfoort (2022), N. Wirzba (2023), L. Wilkinson (2024)—whose works see the imagination, creativity, and the arts as primary sources for renewal and ecological justice, and for whom practices of regeneration are moral imperatives in the church’s call to actively hope for ‘a new heaven and a new earth’.