I’ll be putting a few book reviews up over the next few days.  Guess what I’ve been doing recently?

The first is of Lester R. Brown’s Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.  I read Brown for my Creation, New Creation, and Ecology class and to a person the class was really impressed with the book.

As Matt points out here, it is pretty overwhelming at times, and indicting too.  I’ll analyze it below with some theological terms, but I’d say that it’s by far the best book I’ve read on the ecological crisis and what we must do to correct it–or die.

Brown structures his book in a simple two-fold manner.  In part I, “A Civilization in Trouble,” Brown lays out the harrowing facts of our time.  We may hit peak oil production by 2030.  And while an oil-based economic system is severely flawed as it is, without ecologically-sensible alternatives in place in the next few decades our way of life–indeed, the very lives of millions of people, let alone animals–will be in grave danger.  Brown continues the sobering story with heavy details about rising temperatures and sea-levels–and the creatures they will affect–food shortages, water crises, desertification, extinctions, and population growth.  The first half of the book informs, convicts, and horrors in striking ways.

Part II, “The Response–Plan B” paints a prettier picture of what might be done to curb, prevent, and restore such devastation.  In “Plan B” Brown gives hope by explaining what progress has already been made.  With well-spent funds he instructs how we might avert epidemics, feed more mouths, re-structure our transportation systems, and gain efficiency.  The hopeful second half of the book charms and excites while a the brief third section explains how the means to financing these changes are within reach.

Though it was pretty really effective, as a theologian Brown’s two-part structure gave me pause as it reminded me of a misreading of Martin Luther’s law/gospel theology.  That misreading, but a common stereotype of Luther, holds Luther’s law/gospel theology uses a stark dichotomy to distinguish between law and gospel.  “Law is bad, negative, convicting, sinful” goes this reading, “and gospel is good, positive, affirming, grace-filled–in short, Jesus Christ.”

This law/gospel stereotype builds assumptions onto old pseudo accuracies and ends up barely resembling Luther’s original theology.

Call me intellectually curious or just call me crazy, but when considering Brown’s approach to the ecological crisis with a mind to Luther’s theology, I read Brown as perpetuating — surely unintentionally — a misconstrual of Luther’s law/gospel theology.  Certainly Brown should not be held accountable for the unfortunate skeletons in Lutheran closets, but I wonder if the law/gospel misrepresentation critique might point to a larger critique of Brown’s book.

One reason the misreading of law/gospel is so common is that it is very simple for Western minds (particularly Western Christians?) to function with unhelpful and very hurtful dichotomies.  The world does not function with nice slice-and-bake dichotomies.  Oil = bad; wind = good.  Rising temperatures = destruction; leveled-off temperatures = hunky-dory.  Electric car = good; bicycle = better.  Brown, clearly, has an extremely sophisticated understanding of world economics, human systems, and ecology.  He absolutely, in the more detailed descriptions in the book, does not (often) overly simplify his argument to make climate cause and effect into stark black and white choices.  But, the bifurcated structure of the book could lead one to believe otherwise.  Maybe Brown knows exactly what he’s doing–dumbing down a sophisticated argument into dichotomies so that we might understand–but, I wonder, if the structure of the book might just invite more overly simple ways of thinking about the solution to the climate crisis.

Ok, those of you who have stuck with me so far have probably seen this move coming for a while now:  John Calvin’s third use of the law.

Calvin describes the third use of the law in his Institutes: ““Principally it admonishes believers and urges them on in well-doing.”1  According to Calvin, the third use of the law is the primary use, and it profits believers in two ways: (1) the law helps believers “to learn more thoroughly each day the nature of the Lord’s will to which they aspire,” and (2) “exhorts, arouses, and strengthens” them in continued obedience.2  As always with Calvin, much emphasis is placed in the prompting of the Holy Spirit.  Idiomatically, Calvin’s third use of the law causes us to keep on keeping on.

Perhaps Calvin’s approach to the law is a helpful way for Christians to respond to Brown’s exhortations.  With Calvin’s notion of law, rather than falling for an oversimplified dichotomy of law/gospel that the form of the book might point us toward, the book functions as a way to arouse us to action, to exhort us to respond not a negative nelly, but a push forward, a kick in the pants.  To use my favorite quote from Calvin: ““the law is to the flesh like a whip to an idle and balky ass, to arouse it to work.”3  Maybe Plan B 3.0 is the whip to urge us to work.

The stereotypical use of law/gospel calls people to action either out of fear or out of guilt.  If that’s the only way to convince people to work for Brown’s plan, then may God forgive us, but so be it.  On the other hand, I believe a faithful way to approach Brown’s work may be with the third use of the law in mind.  Brown’s clear, careful, but convicting prose should call us not to guilt, but to action, to response.  Whipped up for work, then, may God’s people go forward.

Check out the book’s great website here.  More Brown below.

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