• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Joint Public Issues Team

Churches working for peace and justice

  • Home Page
  • Who We Are
    • Six hopes for society
  • Issues
    • Economy
      • Tax Justice
      • Reset The Debt
      • Living Wage
    • Environment
      • Net Zero In My Neighbourhood
    • Poverty and Inequality
      • The Cost of Living Crisis
      • Universal Credit
      • Truth and Lies
      • Enough
      • Rethink Sanctions
      • Faith in Foodbanks
      • Housing and Homelessness
    • Asylum and Migration
      • Refugees
      • End Hostility
      • The Asylum System
    • Peacemaking
      • The Arms Trade
      • Nuclear Weapons
      • Drones
      • Peacemaking resources
    • Politics and Elections
      • Elections
      • Meet Your MP
      • Art of the Possible
      • Brexit
    • Other Issues
      • International Development
      • Modern Slavery and Exploitation
        • Forced labour in fashion
  • Get Involved
    • JPIT Conference 2022
    • Newsletter
    • Events
    • Walking with Micah
  • Resources
    • Advent
    • 10 Minutes on… podcast
    • Politics in the Pulpit?
    • Stay and Pray
    • Season of Creation
    • Prayers
    • Public Issues Calendar
    • Poetry
    • Small Group Resources
  • Blog

Real Hope for the Climate

Blog, Environment · 22 October, 2018

Not just damage control: why we can have real hope as we act for our climate

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently announced that Governments must urgently increase their current pledges if we are to avoid a rise in global temperature greater than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial levels. A rise greater than 1.5 degrees will increase the risk to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth. This calls our attention to the need to act now and change the future before it is too late.

In much of the current debate surrounding the recent climate predictions, there have been only these two positions suggested: we carry on destroying the world, or we can try to control the damage before we endanger the planet and people forever. But both of these positions are only about survival, yet a key theme in Christian theology of climate care is salvation. We do not only believe in a God of creation, but a God of re-creation, and this means that as followers of Christ we are called to act for transformation. This sets a different and hopeful tone for our response to the world’s need.

As Christians we should be leading the movement to reduce our carbon footprint and care for the world. Our vocation as humanity is to be stewards of the earth. In creation, God blessed us with dominion in the earth, giving us the call to work and care for the earth. Our actions against the earth break with this original call from God and remove us from that blessing. Ignoring this vocation also breaks our relationship with our neighbour: climate change affects the poorest the most, and so by plundering the earth’s resources we damage the most vulnerable within humanity. Isaiah depicts the ‘withering’ of both the earth and the heavens as a result of human greed: “The earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant” and graphically shows the impact this has on humanity.

In contrast, we are those called by God in to a new covenant, which means we have a renewed vocation and are enabled through Christ and in the power of the Spirit to model a new way of interacting with our environment.

However, this is more than damage control: as Christians we have real hope that it is God who redeems us from sin and calls us in to new life. Christ comes to make a new covenant with us: it is in Him all things were created and He comes to reconcile all things in heaven and on earth to himself through the cross.

Similarly, the book of Revelation has been described as a prophecy for the whole cosmos, calling us to think of the Kingdom of God “not only as the salvation of the human being, but also in terms of the survival and well-being of the entire creation”. [1] God’s redemption of humanity does not only mean that God transforms our broken relationships with God and with one another, but also that God will heal our relationship with the world.

Therefore, we can see that not only are we able to be saved from our greed, but we are also shown that creation is part of God’s plan of salvation; the Spirit is groaning with us for our restoration so that “the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption” (Romans 8). The biblical scholar NT Wright shows that the ‘new earth’ is not about hastening the old earth’s destruction as we pursue heaven, but that a new earth emerges from the old. This means that as part of those ‘first fruits’ of the new creation, we are meant to be people who enable this new restored relationship with the world.

We are called to join with God’s Spirit in the world to start bringing about this new kingdom ‘on earth as it is with heaven’. This totally changes our perspective: we can use this moment as a catalyst for renewal, seeing something new and extraordinary coming into being. This is not just a patch up job on the old world, but the start of a completely new future.

So does that mean we do not need to do anything, as God will fix the world for us?  The apostle Paul explained how this was not the case in his conversation about whether our salvation meant we could keep on sinning. If we love God, then we partner with God’s desires for the world.

This makes our starting place in the conversation of climate change one of real and deep hope, that the earth cannot only survive, but it can be re-created.

Read our response to the IPCC report here

 

[1] Zizioulas, as cited in Michael S Northcutt, A Political Theology of Climate Change (Cambridge: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2013), 26.

Filed Under: Blog, Environment Tagged With: Climate, Climate Change, Global Warming, Hope, IPCC, Redemption, Renewal, Salvation, Survive, Thrive

Beth Allison-Glenny

Previous Post: « Meet Your MP: Using our voices
Next Post: 2 Minute Briefing: Will money fix Universal Credit? »

Primary Sidebar

Search

Recent Posts

  • JPIT’s Review of 2022
  • What does Government Support for Asylum Seekers really provide?
  • God with Us – the Refugees of Calais and Dunkirk
  • How can we respond to COP27?
  • Statement on the conclusion of the COP27 Climate Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt
  • COP27 – what should we be looking for?
  • “He has filled the hungry with good things” – What we need from the Autumn Budget
  • What are the stories we should tell about the humanitarian crisis at Manston Airport Asylum centre?
  • How can we be sure that the products we buy are not the result of modern slavery?
  • Why I hate Warm Banks (and why my church is opening one)
  • How does our theology call us to challenge Poverty?
  • Introducing Alfie
  • Biden says nuclear risk is the highest since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
  • Churches respond to risk to benefit levels
  • Briefing on the ‘Mini Budget’ for the Enough to Live group
  • Introducing Hazel
  • Introducing Hannah
  • An energy cap announcement in three parts: the good, the absent and the ugly
  • Afghanistan and the UK – One Year On from the Fall Of Kabul
  • Inflation, interest rates and the poorest

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter

Footer

Follow us

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Quick links

Stay and Pray
Politics in the Pulpit
Faith in Politics podcast
Public Issues Calendar
Useful Links

Our work

About Us
Meet the Team
Join the Team 
Internship
Our Newsletter

Contact us

25 Marylebone Road
London NW1 5JR

Tel: 020 7916 8632

enquiries@jpit.uk

Copyright © 2023 · Showcase Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in