The article argues that today’s “polycrisis”—the convergence of global challenges such as climate change, geopolitics, finance, and AI—requires the church to rethink how it reads the Bible. The author criticises common evangelical approaches that focus on individual salvation, church growth, and social transformation, claiming these misunderstand the missions of Jesus and Paul. Instead, Scripture should be read historically and prophetically, as the story of communities navigating crisis and divine intervention. Understanding this biblical framework can help churches respond faithfully to the uncertainties of the Anthropocene. The author therefore advocates deeper engagement with biblical and theological education.
The term “polycrisis” gets used a lot these days to name a peculiar consequence of globalisation: the collision of expanding systems in shock—energy, climate, geo-politics, finance, etc., with AI accelerating the chaos—in a confined planetary space.
The world has reached some sort of tipping point, which may or may not prove to be catastrophic but which arguably signals the irreversible transition from an age during which humanity has flourished within the natural order to an age of human domination over the natural order. This new age is often called the Anthropocene, though ironically the dominance of the anthropos is already being threatened by an AI insurgency. Serves us right!
The church also has to navigate this difficult transition—these birth pains of a new and very uncertain age.
The attention given to Pope Leo’s recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence makes it clear, I think, that the church can meaningfully and credibly address the ethical and social challenges.
My own interest has been much more in how we read the Bible under these circumstances—how we “tell the biblical story in a way that makes a difference” (see above).
The evangelical church in the UK, for the most part, has a theology that works outwards from the salvation of the individual person to encompass the community life of the church as an agglomeration of saved individuals, and on that basis, in principle, to impact the world around.
The mission of the Revitalise Trust, for example, based at Holy Trinity Brompton in London, is (emphasis removed):
to serve, resource and revitalise the Church in its mission to reach the unchurched, make disciples and transform society. Our passion is to see vibrant, Spirit-filled churches, sharing the love of Jesus in practical ways in every community.
The wonderful church-planting organisation that I have worked with for the last twenty-five years, Communitas International, has a similar centrifugal mission statement:
We start and shape churches that love like Jesus to transform our neighborhoods, cities, and world.
That’s all well and good from a certain pragmatic, modern perspective, but it constitutes a poor hermeneutic for reading scripture.
It was not the mission of Jesus to see churches sharing his love in practical ways in every community. It was not the mission of Paul to plant churches that would love like Jesus in order to transform neighbourhoods, cities, and the world.
It’s also a poor basis on which to make sense of, and respond to, the polycrisis of the dawn of the Anthropocene.
So biblical studies is of immense importance for the church at this time because it presses us to think and interpret historically. It gives us a hermeneutic—a way of reading—that begins not with the sin and salvation of the individual person but with the troubled existence of a historical community in relation to powerful nations and civilisations.
The mission of Jesus was to save at least a remnant of first century Israel from the impending catastrophe of a war against Rome.
The mission of Paul was to proclaim the future rule of Israel’s crucified and resurrected messiah over the nations of the Greek-Roman world and to form communities of believers which would practically and prophetically anticipate that political-religious transformation.
Evangelism was the public proclamation of these foreseen historical outcomes. Salvation was to become part of the community at the heart of these fiercely contested narratives. Discipleship was learning how to live these stories out.
This is a prophetic hermeneutic: it interprets the experience of the people of God in a time of crisis, giving as sharp an account as possible both of judgment and of deliverance—of the sovereign intervention of the God of Israel in history to effect far-reaching change.
It then seems to me that the better we understand how this works in the Bible, the more effectively we will form communities that will bear witness to the God of history during this churning polycrisis.
That frames a good part of what we are trying to do at Westbourne Grove Church in West London. We are learning how to disciple a small but growing community that continues faithfully to embody the past, present, and future of the people of God in its difficult engagement with the world around it.
But this sort of discipleship is bound to be—dare I say it—intellectually demanding, in the best possible way. Paradigm shifts are hard work.
Such “rational service” (logikēn latreian) is the work of the whole church; it is the mind or mentality of the community that needs to be transformed and renewed if it is to grasp fully the seriousness and possibilities of what lies ahead (Rom. 12:1-2).
But practically speaking, frankly, it would greatly help if more people engaged with formal theological (by which I really mean biblical) education.
There are many very good options out there, but I will be small-minded and self-serving and recommend a couple of non-denominational institutions that I have worked with for many years.
First, I am a tutor for the London School of Theology’s part time and online MA in Biblical Studies, for which I contributed the core hermeneutics module and an optional module on Romans. In addition, there are Masters programmes in Theological Studies and Practical Theology and Ministry. The school also has extensive undergraduate and postgraduate research programmes, but I would say that in many ways the MAs hit the Goldilocks spot for the sort of rethinking and reimagining that the church needs right now.
Secondly, I teach occasionally on the King’s School of Theology’s less academic but still very solid and stimulating part-time programme. They are part of Westbourne Grove’s ecosystem, along with the Forge family of churches in the south of England and a leadership training programme called Launch developed by Communitas and the Scottish Network Churches.
Don’t expect these organisations to agree with everything I have written here and elsewhere, but they are broadminded—more so than I am!—and are working hard to instil in church communities a robust, biblically grounded, forward-looking mindset.
Give it some thought.
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