This phenomenological analysis of waste is linked to my critical examination of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and an escapist fundamentalist eschatology—both of which have functioned as logics of domination and control. In particular, conservative eschatological frameworks that foreground dispensational premillennialism and pretribulational rapture are critiqued for degrading the earth as transient and disposable, and for reducing specific entities, including humans, more-than-humans, and even ecosystems, to waste and sacrifice zones—thereby eroding ethical responsibility in the face of ecological crisis and legitimizing a posture of passive escapism. Through South Korean contextual cases—including the mass culling of livestock during the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak and the history of South Korean conservative Protestantism's support for state-led nuclear energy policy—I illuminate how the theological logic of domination and nullification, which is rooted in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, has been translated into an apparatus within concrete ecological and political circumstances to conceal, distort, and suppress violence, sacrifice, and injustice.

Drawing on an ecological understanding of apocalypse, I further argue that waste functions not as passive residue but as an apocalyptic agent that exposes the contradictions of capitalism and anthropocentrism, bearing witness to the crisis of our time—and it is this age in which we live that I name the Apocalypcene. To overcome this destructive logic of domination and escapist eschatology, I bring waste studies, process theology, political theology, ecotheologies, and new materialism into conversation, proposing Catherine Keller's creatio ex profundis as a theological alternative. Grounded in a tehomophilic perspective that receives the chaos and the deep (tehom) not as evil to be controlled or eliminated but as the generative womb of creation, I develop an ethical praxis of mourning with, staying with, and caring for discarded beings—rather than casting them aside.

In conclusion, I propose a new pneumatology articulated as the Spirit of Compost—a process-relational Spirit of care whose two expressions are staying-with and creative transformation. Through this pneumatology, waste is recast not as an object of elimination but as the fertile ground of new theological and ecological possibilities, as I seek a path toward an open apocalypse (understood not as destruction but as radical disclosure and transformation) and planetary symbiosis—affirming the entanglement and interdependence of all beings.