PART 2: Encountering the Word of God

2.1 Theological approach

The remainder of our report tackles the question of how these theological and scientific accounts bear upon each other as we work out a theological response to climate change. The approach we have adopted is to:

• recognise the situation we find ourselves in, and the questions our faith provokes in this context;
• bring these questions into dialogue with the Bible and Christian theological traditions; and
• seek to discern the implications of this encounter for changed practice.

Our report also seeks to reflect our practice as Christians, and is structured to reflect many Christian liturgies. We seek to bring the situation of the Church, as part of a world facing threats of climate change, into encounter with God’s word in the Bible in order to inform and motivate a response by the Church and the world.

2.2 Christian hope in the context of climate change

We consider it crucial to begin our theological response to climate change by reflecting upon our situation in relation to the over-arching biblical narrative: God creating the universe, God in Christ bringing reconciliation to a world gone astray (eg Genesis 3, 4, 6), and God’s promised redemption of all things in Christ and through the Spirit. This understanding of the place in which the Church finds itself crucially shapes theological thinking about climate change. First, and most importantly, followers of Christ must hope in these days and not despair. If we affirm the goodness of God’s creation, God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ, and God’s promise of redemption, we cannot despair of what will be, because we are called to have faith in God and hope in God’s promises. God’s creatures do not have the power ultimately to frustrate the purposes of the almighty God we worship; God’s self-giving in Christ was a once-for-all effective action to defeat the sin of God’s creatures and to refuse to allow it the final word. In these days between the resurrection of Christ and Christ’s return, we are part of a creation groaning in labour pains for the new creation on its way (Romans 8). These are testing times, but faithfulness means not weakening our grip on the hope that has been set before us (Hebrews 6:18). It would be contradictory to our faith to imagine a future in which God has abandoned the project of creation and redemption, in which climate change destroys all that God has established or in which human irresponsibility overwhelms God’s ability to bring redemption to creation. The basis for Christian responses to climate change is hope in the realisation of the reign of God over a renewed creation.

This affirmation of Christian hope in the face of climate change is subject to misunderstanding. From the early Church onwards, Christians have been tempted to view redemption as an escape from the created order rather than its renewal. This view of the end-times leads to a lack of concern for what happens on earth, for it considers material creation as unimportant in comparison with the higher spiritual reality to which some human beings are destined. This has obvious relevance to debates about climate change. Such a theological view would suggest that actions to mitigate global warming are unimportant. However, the Church has consistently rejected any view which separates creation from redemption. It is inconsistent with the Christian understanding of the incarnation of God in Christ, as stated in the Apostles’ Creed, in which God affirms all God has made, the promise of the resurrection of the body (1 Corinthians 15) and faith that God will make all things new (Revelation 21:1–8).(1) Christian hope means hope for what God is doing in this world, not that spiritual beings will escape the destruction of the material.

A second possible misunderstanding is that we need not act in relation to the threat of climate change because God will sort out the problem for us. In creation God has given creatures freedom, and human beings bear weighty responsibility. Their good and bad actions have real and serious consequences for others. Hope in God’s future does not mean a naïve confidence that bad things will not happen. The biblical stories of Adam and Eve in Eden and Cain’s murder of his brother (Genesis 3–4) express the reality of human disobedience to God and its consequences, as we have seen rehearsed in a catalogue of human atrocities throughout history and continuing to this day. Hope in God’s future is, therefore, not an alternative to wise and moral actions in response to the situations that confront us (Romans 6:1–2).

Christian hope guarantees that such faithful actions will not finally prove to be meaningless and ineffective but will find a place in God’s purpose for the redeeming of the world. Hope is thus a reason for bold action in the world in accordance with God’s will for creation, not an excuse for inaction.

2.3 The human vocation to love and do justice

The Bible provides no shortage of counsel for how humankind should live in accordance with God’s will, bearing significantly on the question of climate change. Jesus summarises God’s law in the commandments to love God and love the neighbour (Mark 12:29–31). Our love of God is demonstrated in our response to the seventh day of creation, echoing the Sabbath commitment to worship and interruption of our daily work. This love can be seen as a response to the covenant God made with all living creatures as told in the story of the flood (Genesis 9), and cannot wholly be distinguished from the second call to love of neighbour: Luke’s gospel follows this two-fold commandment with the parable of the Good Samaritan as an example of neighbourly love (Luke 10:25–37). This love is linked in Matthew’s shocking identification of Christ with those in need in his image of God’s judgement of those who fed the hungry, gave water to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, cared for the sick and visited those in prison – and of those who did not (Matthew 25:31–46). In this account those in need are particularly identified with Christ. Priority claims of those in need are echoed in Jesus’ ‘Nazareth manifesto’ where he declares he has been anointed by the Spirit to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour (Luke 4:18–19). The beatitudes similarly announce God’s blessing on the poor, the mourning, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, peacemakers and the persecuted. Luke follows this with a catalogue of the woes to fall on those who are rich, full, laughing, and well-regarded by others (Matthew 5:3–12; Luke 6:20–26). There is no doubt that Christ’s disciples should show particular concern for the poor and vulnerable.

The New Testament call to ‘love your neighbour’, with particular attention to the poor, is in continuity with the emphasis in Jewish law and prophetic writings, which made particular provision for those in need, as well as establishing economic structures such as the Jubilee to prevent differences between rich and poor becoming too great (Leviticus 25:8–17). The prophets protested against oppression of the poor by the rich: the book of Isaiah opens with a vision of cities desolated because of evildoing. God calls Israel to cease doing evil, learn to do good, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan and plead for the widow (Isaiah 1:16–17). Amos declares that because Israel has trampled on the poor and taken their grain they will lose their houses and vineyards (Amos 5:11) and Deuteronomy associates departing from God’s law with agricultural catastrophe (Deuteronomy 28:38–40). The judgement Jeremiah prophesies has an ecological dimension in which the mountains quake, the birds flee and the fruitful land becomes a desert (Jeremiah 4:24–26). God speaks these warnings through the prophets to call God’s people back to the acts of love and justice required by their relationship with God: this is a call for changed living to transform Israel’s future, rather than the fatalistic living out of a future fixed by God. The words of the prophets remind us that concern for the poor and vulnerable is not only a matter of love and charity, but of what is due to them under God’s law: it is a matter of justice.

2.4 Hearing our neighbour as a test of discipleship

In the context of this biblical demand for love and justice, encountering those whose communities are imperilled by climate change is especially striking. In September 2007 the Pacific Conference of Churches issued a statement from their General Assembly concerning climate change. They understand themselves to be guardians of the Pacific Ocean or Moana, and ‘deplore the actions of industrialised countries that pollute and desecrate our Moana’. They declare ‘the urgency of the threat of human induced effects of climate change to the lives, livelihoods, societies, cultures and eco-systems of the Pacific Islands’ and call on ‘our sisters and brothers in Christ throughout the world to act in solidarity with us to reduce the causes of human-induced climate change. We issue this call especially to churches in the highly industrialised nations whose societies are historically responsible for the majority of polluting emissions. We further urge these countries to take responsibility for the ecological damage that they have caused by paying for the costs of adaptation to the anticipated impacts.(2) In a following statement the Pacific Conference of Churches identify that ‘the ecological crisis threatening Pacific livelihoods derives from a pathological old narrative of onefication that, first and foremost, extracts all abundance to serve the civilisation of the human. For colonisation to function, a powerful narrative had to be created to justify the elevation of one life or one culture above others’(3), going on to note that ‘where we are today in the Pacific is the continuation of the colonial project of onefication. This has resulted ... in a destructive and unsustainable lifestyle―the commodification of life, the increased exploitation of extractive activities, the market-pushed consumerism that nourishes a few, increased poverty and violence, and a single-strandic way of understanding reality’. In these statements from the Pacific Conference of Churches, we can hear echoes of the anger of the prophets. The Pacific Islanders face grave threats to their way of life as a result of the burning of fossil fuels by industrialised nations: we cannot fail to recognise this as the trampling of the poor by the rich criticised by Amos. The demands of justice and love for these neighbours are even stronger than the claim of the man cared for by the Good Samaritan: here are nations left wounded by our negligence in the past, whose injuries we continue to worsen through our irresponsibility in the present. Closing our ears to this call would be nothing less than giving up our claim to be Christ’s disciples.

Being able to hear the voice of these communities already threatened by climate change is a blessing to us in shaping a theological response, especially as many who are not able to make themselves heard are also threatened. Among these are communities in sub-Saharan Africa for whom changes in climate have already brought increasingly frequent famines and droughts, as well as those in India, the Americas and Europe who have suffered heat waves and storms that have been intensified by global warming.

There is also a much larger group of human beings threatened by climate change who have no chance of making themselves heard: those not yet born. As well as alerting ourselves to the demand of love and justice to our present neighbours, we need to understand what it means to treat as neighbours those in following generations. The covenant God made after the flood was with all the creatures in every generation descended from those saved in the ark (Genesis 9): we must not make the mistake of thinking that those alive today have any superiority under the covenant over those to follow us. For some, thinking of children and grandchildren helps to give faces to those who will inherit the earth we leave (cf. Malachi 4:6), but this must be only a first step in appreciating the enormity of the moral demand of future generations. The requirement to develop our moral imaginations in this direction is particularly crucial given that the worst effects of failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions now will be felt by those alive one hundred years and more from now. Christians should resist market-based economic analyses that discount the wellbeing of future generations in relation to those alive today, and thereby portray as unattractive actions that will benefit future generations but which incur immediate costs.

2.5 Attending to non-human neighbours

Attending to biblical depictions of human obedience to God’s will also directs our attention to non-human creation. The creatures of each day of the first Genesis creation narrative are declared good (Genesis 1) and the whole of creation in all its diversity is declared ‘very good’ at the end of the sixth day (Genesis 1:31). After the great flood, God makes a covenant not only with Noah and his family but with every living creature that came out of the ark (Genesis 9:9–10). The law of Israel protects not only human beings, but the animals they keep, who must not be made to work on the Sabbath (Exodus 20:10) or muzzled while they are treading grain (Deuteronomy 25:4).

The Sabbath year is to rest the land and benefit both livestock and wild animals alongside the Israelites and their hired workers (Leviticus 25:5–7). When Job questions God’s treatment of him he is reminded of the majesty of God’s careful provision for every creature, and of God’s creation even of creatures like Behemoth and Leviathan who are threatening to humanity (Job 38–41). This attention to creation beyond the human is echoed in the New Testament: where Jesus reminds his disciples of God’s concern for birds and lilies of the field (Matthew 6:25–34); the letters to the Colossians and Ephesians emphasise the union of all things in Christ (Colossians 1:15–20; Ephesians 1:9–10) and the letter to the Romans pictures the whole of creation awaiting its share in the freedom of the children of God (Romans 8:18–23). This biblical vision of solidarity among God’s creatures accords with modern scientific discoveries relating to both the genetic affinity between human and other animals and the radical interdependence of all life on earth.

This biblical regard for creation beyond the human has often been overlooked in interpretations of God’s injunction to ‘subdue the earth’ and ‘have dominion’ over other animals (Genesis 1:28). This instruction has been seen as giving human beings license to use other animals as they will, although there is no allowance in these verses for killing animals for food. Many biblical commentators on Genesis are now agreed that identifying human beings as the image of God does not name a particular capacity as God-like, but gives them a particular role in relation to other creatures. Our dominion should therefore be exercised in a way that it images and reflects God’s care for creation. This kind of care, made more explicit in the instruction to Adam to till and keep the soil of Eden (Genesis 2:15), has often been described as ‘stewardship’ of creation, rooted in the image of a person placed in a position of responsibility to manage somebody else’s property, finances or household. This picture of a human role on behalf of the rest of creation can help us recognise our responsibility to care for other life, although it is important to recognise its limitations. God is present and active in sustaining creation from moment to moment. We are not, therefore, stewards acting in place of an absent landlord, but servants called to play our part in response to God’s care for creation. This responsibility has obvious relevance to climate change, suggesting that the potential mass extinctions of other species on the planet caused by human activities represent our abdication from a divinely-entrusted duty. Biblical texts testifying to God’s concern for creatures beyond the human, together with Israelite law defending them, demand that we should be motivated by love and justice to protect all life threatened by climate change, not just human life. The language of ‘stewardship’ can foster an unhelpful sense of human separation from the rest of creation, rather than understanding ourselves to be an integral part of the community of creation.

2.6 Bringing God’s judgement upon us

Alongside hope in the future that God is bringing, therefore, comes an urgency to cooperate with God’s purposes. Where human beings have neglected their responsibilities before God, both Old and New Testament texts proclaim God’s judgement: Jeremiah prophesies that the rich will not get to enjoy their wealth and Jesus warns those who fail to care for him, embodied in those in need, are not fit for eternal life (Mathew 25:31–46). The Bible repeatedly tells of a world turned upside-down when God’s reign is inaugurated, with those now well-off going hungry and those now first finding themselves last (Matthew 10:30; Mark 10:31). In encountering biblical warnings about the consequences of failing to love and deal justly with those in need, it is hard to escape the conclusion that in continuing to emit carbon at rates that threaten our neighbours, present and future, human and other than human, we are bringing God’s judgement upon us. Humans are not equally placed in relation to this judgement. Those living in industrialised countries in the Global North, such as the UK, that have emitted the vast majority of the carbon precipitating climate change, have particular reasons to be attentive to their responsibility. Legacies of slavery and colonialism are part of the reason that those who are most exposed to the effects of climate change are disproportionately those who are least responsible for causing it. Those who stand under judgement should not despair: that God judges rather than abandons us is a sign of God’s grace and continuing love for us. But in our encounter with God’s word in the context of climate change we should be clear that, while we have grounds for hope in the future God will bring if we act in accordance with God’s love for all creation, we also have grounds for fear of God’s judgement if we continue to fail to respond to the urgent needs of our neighbours. A belief that God is our judge does not mean that we can assume that bad things that happen, such as climatic change, should be understood as punishments from God. Nonetheless, climatic change reminds us that the effects of our actions often rebound on ourselves, as well as others. When the rich man, who had ignored Lazarus begging at his gate, asked to be allowed out of hell to warn his brothers, Abraham replied they already had Moses and the prophets (Luke 16:27–28). Neither can we say we have not heard.