PART 3: Responding to God’s Word

3.1 Encountering God’s hope

In encountering God’s word in the context of climate change we have received a vision of hope in God’s faithfulness to creation, a call to practise love and justice to our neighbours, and a warning of God’s judgement of those who fail to do so. In response our first action must be confession: acknowledging what we have done wrong is the first and necessary step towards the change of direction repentance requires. We must confess that we: are heirs to the riches of an industrialised economy that has been instrumental in causing the climatic change already placing our neighbours in peril; are so addicted to the fruits of this economy that we find it hard even to want to live lives that do not threaten the future of life on planet earth; and know much of the good we should do to live within sustainable boundaries, but struggle to summon the moral will to change. Christians recognise that we sin through a combination of ignorance, weakness and deliberate fault. In a time before we knew about the consequences of our consuming of fossil fuels we were sinning in ignorance, but to continue to do so now is either weakness or deliberate immorality. Our wrongdoing in relation to climate change is best understood as complicity in structural sin, a socially-embedded and continuing pattern where the rich and powerful exploit those who are poor and powerless, just as they did in the days of the prophets. South African theologian, Ernst Conradie, has argued that the need for white South Africans to confess their involvement in the structures of apartheid is a good analogy for the confession necessary in relation to climate change.(1) Just as most white South Africans had no direct responsibility for the establishment or maintenance of apartheid but were guilty in benefiting from it and failing to challenge its injustice, so we did not originate the industrialised economies that resulted in climate change but are now guilty of enjoying the fruits of systems that threaten the future of God’s creatures. Drawing on Barth’s work, Conradie notes that our confession is only possible because of our knowledge of God’s grace: it is our encounter with God’s mercy that enables us to recognise our guilt. Conradie recognises, however, that for most of us confession is still some way off, because we are not sure that we can envisage or want to live the renewed and reordered lives that would result from being forgiven. Like the rich man who could not bear Jesus’ command to be separated from his possessions and sadly turned away (Mark 10:17–22), we look at the prospect of lives within levels of greenhouse gas emissions that the earth can sustain, and decide we prefer our lives of sin. Here, then, is the first challenge to the Church: receive God’s grace, come to desire a forgiven life, and thus be enabled to confess current wrongdoing.

3.2 Repentance and forgiveness

Authentic confession leads to repentance: a turning from past sin to the way God would have us live. As individuals, churches and nations, we need to work towards this about turn, which is the only hope for the kind of societal changes that will avoid our greenhouse gas emissions resulting in catastrophic climate change. If we think of this task of repentance only as an individual matter we are likely to fail in our attempts to bring about the change necessary even in our own lives: repentance of structural sin must have a corporate dimension in which, as churches, we take action collectively and turn our practice around at institutional and individual levels. Beyond this, we need to consider what role we can play as churches and citizens in contributing to a similar turning about of our communities, our nations and our world, by entering the political arena to make the case for strong action based on our moral duties to our neighbours. Even to sinners like us, God promises forgiveness (Romans 5:6), and in God’s name the Church offers absolution from sin. Before us, therefore, is the great and joyous prospect of being welcomed home with open arms by our God (Luke 15:20), released from our burden of guilt and despair into lives as God’s forgiven children. It may be that desire for this newness of life, for lives washed clean of the stain of our sin (Psalm 51), is the strongest motivation for the change of life to which God calls us.

3.3 Intercession

One response of those forgiven by God must be intercession for those threatened by climate change. In confidence in God’s good purposes for creation we ask God to:

• protect human populations made vulnerable by changes in climate;
• protect those in generations to come who will inherit the problems we have created; and
• protect those plant and animal species whose habitats will be eradicated by global warming.

As our prayers in this area become more detailed, however, they also become more uncomfortable: we pray for: nations to recognise the urgency of action in response to climate change; politicians to be bold in setting out strategy to achieve the goals that need to be reached; and the citizens of nations – and especially nations like ours – to be motivated to support costly action to cut greenhouse gas emissions and seek to ameliorate its effects for those it threatens.

Our prayers of intercession, therefore, lead us to pray for continuing change in our hearts and minds, allowing us to play a part in changing the hearts and minds of others, and becoming part of the answer to our intercessions.