What About Climate Change?

Question 12050.

Ask a room of British evangelicals about climate change and you will get two confident answers and a lot of silence in between. One group treats it as the defining moral emergency of our time. Another treats the whole subject as a political trap dressed up in science. I think both are answering a question the Bible does not quite ask.

What Scripture gives us is not a temperature projection but a doctrine of creation, a doctrine of humanity and a doctrine of the future, and those three things ought to shape how a Christian handles this.

Why climate change divides Christians so sharply

Part of the trouble is that climate change arrives bundled with a politics. It comes attached to policies, to campaigners, to a certain tone of voice, and many believers reject the bundle rather than the science because the bundle contains things they find objectionable. That is understandable and it is not thinking.

On the other side, some Christians have adopted the language of apocalypse wholesale, speaking of the end of the world in terms that would have made a Victorian revivalist blush. When the church borrows a secular eschatology it usually ends up sounding shrill and, when the predicted dates pass, foolish.

I want to unbundle the question. What is actually happening to the planet is a matter of evidence. What we ought to do about it is a matter of prudence and justice. Whether the world is heading for the judgement Scripture describes is a matter of revelation. Mixing those three is where the arguments about climate change start, and where they usually stay.

The creation mandate and what it actually says

God placed the man in the garden to work it and keep it, Genesis 2:15. The verb translated keep, shamar, is the word for guarding and preserving, used elsewhere of keeping a covenant and of a watchman keeping a city. Dominion in Genesis 1 is not licence to strip and abandon, it is delegated rule under the true King, and delegated rule is always accountable.

Scripture also insists that the earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof. We are tenants, not freeholders. That single conviction ought to make Christians the least casual people on the planet about waste, pollution and the destruction of habitats, whatever we conclude about climate change specifically.

I have written more on this in how the imago Dei bears on our responsibility for the environment, because the theological groundwork matters more than the current headline.

What about the evidence?

I am a pastor, not a climatologist, and I try to be honest about the limits of my competence. What I can say is that the overwhelming majority of people who study this professionally hold that the planet is warming and that human activity is a significant contributor. I do not think Christians honour God by treating scientific consensus as automatically suspect, any more than we honour Him by treating it as infallible.

Christians have been badly burned on both sides of this instinct. We were slow on tobacco and slow on lead in petrol, and we have also been credulous about health fads and dubious prophecy charts. The virtue we need is not scepticism or credulity but discernment, which is trained rather than instinctive, and climate change is a demanding place to practise it.

Where I part company with the loudest voices about climate change is not on the data but on the anthropology. A movement that treats human beings as essentially a contaminant has misread the image of God, and it will eventually reach conclusions about population and about the value of particular lives that no Christian can accept.

Where I would push back hard

Some environmental campaigning has taken on an unmistakably religious shape, complete with original sin, penance, indulgences and a coming judgement, but with no redeemer and no forgiveness. That is a bleak faith to hand to a teenager, and I have sat with young people crushed by it.

There is also a justice problem that Christians should be quicker to name. Policies designed in wealthy countries often fall hardest on the poor, at home in higher bills and abroad in restrictions on development. A believer who cares about the vulnerable cannot simply cheer for whatever is proposed in the name of the environment.

And I will not preach panic. Fear is not a fruit of the Spirit, and a church that shares the culture’s dread has nothing distinctive to offer. Concern, yes. Repentance for greed and waste, certainly. Terror, no. See also my answer on environmentalism.

Does prophecy make this irrelevant?

Some Christians argue that since the earth will be renewed and this present order will pass away, caring for it is a waste of effort. I think that is theologically careless. My body will die and be raised, and that does not make it pointless to eat well or to treat it with respect.

The prophetic picture actually cuts the other way in places. Revelation speaks of God destroying the destroyers of the earth, Revelation 11:18, which is a sobering phrase for anyone who assumes that environmental damage is of no interest to God. There will be a reckoning about how we handled what was entrusted to us.

As a premillennialist I expect a literal reign of Christ from Jerusalem in which creation itself is restored, the desert blossoms and the animal order is at peace. That is a hope, not an excuse. It tells me the direction of God’s purposes for the physical world, and it is the opposite of indifference.

Groaning creation and the hope attached to it

Paul says the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now, waiting for the revealing of the sons of God, Romans 8:22. That is one of the most important sentences in Scripture on this subject and it is rarely quoted in the argument.

It tells me that the disorder we observe in the natural world is real, that it is connected to human sin, and that it is not permanent. Creation is not a machine slowly running down towards nothing, nor is it a self-healing goddess. It is a good thing damaged, held by its Maker, and destined for release.

That gives a Christian a posture on climate change that nobody else in the argument can hold. I can take the damage seriously without despair, because I know who is coming and what He will do. I can work for repair without imagining that my recycling will save the world, and I can refuse the twin temptations of panic and shrug.

What faithfulness looks like in practice

Begin with the sins Scripture actually names, which are greed, waste and the failure to love your neighbour. Most of what needs to change in a British Christian’s life on this subject would be improved simply by taking those three seriously, without needing to settle any scientific dispute at all.

Buy less. Repair things. Waste less food, since roughly a third of what is produced globally is thrown away while people go hungry. Consider how you travel. None of this requires you to sign up to anyone’s political programme, and all of it is defensible from Scripture whatever you conclude about climate change.

Then think about your neighbour further away. The people least responsible for emissions are frequently the people most exposed to drought and flood. Whatever the mechanism, a Christian who loves his neighbour will not be indifferent to that.

Talking about it without falling out

This belongs among the matters of wisdom rather than the articles of faith. I would not divide a church over climate change and I would be uneasy about anyone who wanted to. Believers who disagree here can share the Lord’s table without difficulty, and if they cannot the problem is not the climate.

What I would ask of both sides is a bit of self-suspicion. If your view on this happens to coincide exactly with the political tribe you already belonged to, it is worth asking whether Scripture shaped it at all. That question stings me as much as anyone.

So, now what?

Take one step this week that reduces waste in your own household, and do it as an act of stewardship rather than as a statement. Then pray for the people already living with drought, flood and displacement, because prayer keeps a distant problem human.

If you are prone to fear about climate change, put the news down and read Psalm 104, which is a long, unhurried delight in a world God still sustains. If you are prone to dismissiveness, read Genesis 2 again and ask what keeping the garden was supposed to look like.

The earth belongs to the Lord. What would change in your week if you genuinely believed you were a tenant rather than an owner?

The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.

Psalm 24:1, ESV