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.

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I argued in the previous post that the injunction to subdue the earth and rule over all living creatures in Genesis 1:26-28 cannot be construed in helpful modern terms as environmental stewardship or creation care. The language consistently evokes contexts of enslavement, violent suppression of… ( | 5 comments)
There is an argument that the Bible is partly to blame for the current environmental crisis because humanity was instructed from the get-go to subdue the earth and have dominion over all living creatures (Gen. 1:26-28). The historian Lynn White famously argued in a 1967 article, “The Historical… ( | 2 comments)
I have a new book coming out with Wipf & Stock before the end of the year. It’s called In the Form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul. It looks like it will be the first in a new series of Studies in Early Christology, edited by Michael Bird, Scott Harrower, and… ( | 8 comments)
Christopher M. Hays and C. A. Strine have proposed a solution to the problem that Jesus seemingly promised to come back within a generation and didn’t. ( | 4 comments)
I follow the output of the Gospel Coalition site on the look out for material that I can use to illustrate the differences between, in this case, conservative theological readings of the New Testament and a narrative-historical reading. I do the same, naturally, for liberal-progressive thinkers,… ( | 1 comment)
There’s an odd little story about a man called Jabez lodged in the middle of the twenty-three verses that make up the list of the descendants of Judah in 1 Chronicles 4. It was made very famous twenty years ago by Bruce Wilkinson’s best-selling book The Prayer of Jabez, which exposed a… ()
What happens when Adam and Eve disobey God and eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? What are the consequences of their sin? How does it change things? The common assumption is that the “fall” is a catastrophic ontological event that corrupts not only humanity but the whole… ( | 5 comments)