At Westbourne Grove Church, we are currently doing a series of teachings aimed at renewing the intellectual foundations for our engagement both with the Bible and with a world going through tumultuous upheaval. An extravagant and presumptuous ambition, I know, but you’ve got to try.
For me, it is an opportunity to implement much of the narrative-historical hermeneutic that I have argued for and used on this site and in other writings. I’m not putting myself forward as a model speaker—far from it. But I’ve enjoyed doing these talks, the response has been pretty good, and perhaps they will give others hope that the church can be shifted on to more solid biblical ground as it braces for the shockwave of the age to come.
The text below the video is not a transcript but an overview of the topic.
The standard evangelical response to the climate crisis is that the church should preach and practice creation care as a witness to the good news about Jesus. In that respect, in the words of the Evangelical Alliance in the UK, we should understand “climate change as a pivotal gospel issue of our time.” I think that this opportunistic and utilitarian approach to the climate crisis misrepresents the relationship between crisis and “good news” in the Bible.
There is a repeated cycle of creation → transgression → justice → renewal in the Bible.
We see it in the early chapters of Genesis: God creates and blesses humanity → wickedness and violence corrupt the earth → an ancient flood is interpreted as an act of divine justice → Noah and his family are blessed as the beginning of a new creation.
The cycle is repeated after the flood, leading to the promise made to Abraham that his descendants would be a new creation in microcosm in the land. Then again in the story of national failure, exile, and return to the land.
The New Testament tells the story again: Israel has returned to the land, a wicked and adulterous generation of Israel faces the calamitous judgment of the war against Rome, but renewal will come by the way of the cross; and in an extraordinary expansion of the political-religious hope, the nations will be incorporated into this new creation.
The story of the Greeks follows a similar trajectory, remarkably. They have known that God is invisible and transcendent but they chose instead to worship the created thing rather than the creator (Rom. 1:19-25). Therefore, they face a judgment that will result in the conversion of the Greek-Roman world to the worship of one God and confession of his Son as supreme Lord.
That leaves us with the massive Christendom project, and the wheel goes round again: western Christian civilisation corroded over time and has collapsed under the weight of traditionalism, under the onslaughts of modernity; the church has been marginalised; but there is a slow renewal underway as we come to terms with a very different intellectual and social order.
Then finally, I suggest that the story must be told again on a geological scale: the blessed world of the Holocene as been brought to an end by the over-consumption of land, energy, and materials; the environmental crises that we face are a reckoning; but we may believe that the good creator God will renew humanity beyond the traumatic birth pains of the Anthropocene.
That is the narrative level on which we must learn to proclaim good news about the reality and action of God. We have left it too late to bleat on about creation care. Inspiration must come from the prophets and their recurrent exposition of a cycle of a failure of righteousness, judgment, and renewal.
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