Systematic Theology and Climate Change

Ecumenical Perspectives

Michael S. Northcott, Peter M. Scott, Michael S. Northcott, Peter M. Scott

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415742788
• eBook ISBN: 9781317667742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book offers the first comprehensive systematic theological reflection on arguably the most serious issue facing humanity and other creatures today. Responding to climate change is often left to scientists, policy makers and activists, but what understanding does theology have to offer? In this collection, the authors demonstrate that there is vital cultural and intellectual work for theologians to perform in responding to climate science and in commending a habitable way forward. Written from a range of denominations and traditions yet with ecumenical intent, the authors explore key Christian doctrines and engage with some of the profound issues raised by climate change. Key questions considered include: What may be said about the goodness of creation in the face of anthropogenic climate change? And how does theology handle a projected future without the human? The volume provides students and scholars with fascinating theological insight into the complexity of climate change.

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INTRODUCTION

Michael S. Northcott and Peter M. Scott

In this innovative book, Anglican, Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox and Reformed theologians come together for the first time to consider the implications for Christian doctrine of the scientific reporting of anthropogenic climate change, and its effects on humanity and the earth. Christian theology is defined, first by Anselm of Canterbury and then by many theologians since, as ‘fides quaerens intellectum’ or ‘faith seeking understanding’.¹ It is an activity that has occurred continuously within, and flows from, the Church’s proclamation and worship of Jesus as the Christ since the birth of the Church at Pentecost.² Theologians since Thomas Aquinas have adopted a classic order in their systematic reflection on faith and worship whose shape arises from the Trinitarian understanding of the nature of God, Creation, Church and Eschaton. We do not significantly depart from this traditional shape here. But this volume reflects the fact that in the history of the Church, Christians have responded to civilizational crises through a combination of fidelity to scripture and tradition, and theological and ethical innovation. That new contexts call forth new teachings is for Christian theologians underwritten by the Trinitarian belief that the Holy Spirit, who was gifted to the Church at Pentecost, continues to reveal new truth as Christians reflect on scripture and tradition in new contexts. We therefore offer in this volume a number of new insights, and a new systematic theological topic – creatures – in response to the emergent civilizational challenge of climate change.

The phrase ‘climate change’ is shorthand for the scientific realization that human industrial activities, especially burning fossil fuels, clearing or burning forests and making cement, are taking place on such a scale that they are changing the earth’s climate. This is manifest in more extreme weather, drought, flood, melting ice, rising oceans and strengthening storms. But the experience of climate change is not directly empirical. The scientific prediction of momentous change in future atmospheres, without radical transformation in industrial practices, is not perceptible to the senses, although this is of course true of many other scientific claims that are less widely disputed. Nonetheless, vociferous voices and organisations – not least those which represent fossil fuel and forestry interests – contest with climate scientists, and developing world farmers, about the claim that the weather is becoming more extreme – and moving beyond historic norms – and that these extremes are anthropogenic. In the midst of the global contest of opinion on climate science, for Christians the witness that has most import is that of farmers, fishers and the urban and rural poor in the developing world for whom increasing weather extremes are already a threat to their ability to feed their families, or even to continue to dwell in their ancestral homes.

The threat from extreme weather is not, however, confined to the developing world or to future generations. Increasingly, farmers and residents of low-lying areas are also experiencing the effects of extreme weather in the developed world. Australia’s rural farmers and rural poor are among the most severely affected by growing weather extremes, but Australian politics is also deeply shaped by climate change denialism and the intention of the Australian government and corporations to continue to mine, burn and export its large coal reserves. The former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, won and lost elections over his efforts to fashion an economic and political response to climate change science in Australian government policy. For Rudd, an Anglican evangelical, the moral and political challenge of climate change arises from Christ’s parable of the Last Judgment, in which the judgment rests on how people responded in their lives to the hungry, the poor, prisoners and the sick. Climate change is already having grave effects on the poor and giving rise to forced migration, and this makes response to climate change part of the ‘prophetic mission of Christians’.³ And the planet, like the working people of the developing world, ‘cannot speak for itself’ and hence the planet is also among the weak that Christians are called to serve.⁴

The refusal of fossil fuel corporations, investment banks and governments to reduce climate impacts by reducing investment in fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure, and by restraining deforestation and cement making, is fundamentally about political economy and not science. Few in government challenge climate science, but given the very great wealth derived from fossil fuels no government whose terrain includes them has yet shown a willingness to legally restrain licensing of their extraction and use. Some governments have adopted emissions targets in the Kyoto Protocol but these targets do not affect fossil fuel extraction. They are therefore easily avoided by importing carbon-intense goods and services from other domains and emissions targets do not include fossil fuel production.⁵ The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates for the first time a ‘global carbon budget’ of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions which can be emitted without provoking more than 2 degrees Celsius of warming. The IPCC estimate this budget at 1000 billion tons and estimate that humanity has emitted just over half this budget since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.⁶

In the last fifteen years there has been a ‘great acceleration’ in both CO2 emissions and deforestation which shows no sign of letting up.⁷ Some argue this is because corporations and governments are anxious to extract and burn what they can before any global treaty restrains them. The refusal to act is despite the widespread availability of substitutes for fossil fuels, including electricity sourced from renewable energy, building insulation and other energy conservation technologies including heat pumps, low energy lighting, electric bicycles and so on. But investment decisions on energy use in the built environment, and for mobility, are still, in the main, driven by short-term cost considerations instead of future climate instability.

One of us argues elsewhere that the unfolding civilizational crisis that climate change will provoke in the twenty-first century is analogous to the crisis of German nationalism and Nazism in the twentieth, and that it calls for an equivalent confessional response from Christians.⁸ This is because the climate crisis threatens to reduce the habitability of the planet – of what Christians know and experience as the divine Creation – for billions of people including not only present farmers, fishers and coastal dwellers but all future humans.

The response to German nationalism and Nazism came to be known as the theology of crisis. The theologians of crisis, who included not only Barth, but also Brunner and Bonhoeffer in Europe and Reinhold Niebuhr in North America, called for the bold reassertion of the intellectual distinctiveness of Christian confessional doctrines, and the cultural distinctiveness of Christian moral and worshipping practices in the face of the crises of the twentieth century. For the theologians of crisis, modern Western culture represented an existential challenge to authentic Christian faith and witness that arises from the secular scientific and technological subversion of Christian doctrine and ethics, especially as represented in German nationalism and scientific racism, and their radically evil outcomes in world war and the Holocaust.

We suggest that climate change provides a different and yet parallel crisis, and thereby an opportunity for theological development and the necessity for confession. Climate crisis confronts the tendency of modern historians since the Enlightenment to separate natural history and human history and narrate them independently of one another.⁹ Climate change challenges this separation by remixing human and natural history, and this remixing also finds resonances in the New Testament. For the Evangelists, and the writer of the Book of Acts, the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ is still revealed in observable events in the created order. Hence Christ’s birth, Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, the revelation of Jesus as the Christ at the Transfiguration and his death and resurrection are all clearly marked with earthly and heavenly phenomena which include a star, a dove, clouds, a partial solar eclipse and mild earth tremors. Similarly, at Pentecost the Spirit is heralded by strange atmospheric effects: these included a ‘rushing mighty wind’ and ‘the appearance of tongues of fire’ on the heads of the apostles (Acts 2.3–4) as well as more obviously ‘religious’ phenomena such as ecstatic utterance and boldness and clarity in preaching the gospel. These resonances also challenge the broader post-scientific distinction between nature and culture which, as one of us argues elsewhere, is an obstacle to proper theological response to human industrial influence on the climate in the present century.¹⁰

Responding to and intervening in this remixing of human and natural histories, climate science involves a combination of new theory and new kinds of observation. In the mid-nineteenth century, the English scientist John Tyndall first theorized that carbon in the atmosphere is the reason for the modest diurnal change of temperatures between day and night on earth: the night time temperatures that were theorized are higher than they would be in the absence of direct radiated heat from the sun because a quotient of that heat is conserved inside the atmospheric envelope. In 1896, the Swedish physicist Svante Arhenius first estimated the likely warming effects of atmospheric CO2 from coal burning on the earth’s temperature. But it was not until the mid-twentieth century that physicists began to model a ‘biogeochemical’ network of relationships between mammals, plants, rocks, soils, oceans and the atmosphere which could begin to explain their complex interactions, and, more precisely, how anthropogenic movement of carbon from underground into the atmosphere would change these interactions. It is from an account of these interactions that the contributors to this volume work, because we recognize that climate science raises vital issues for the future of human, and more than human, life to which Christians must respond.

Science and technology were crucially implicated in the twentieth century theology of crisis, as they are in the climate crisis.¹¹ The use by Germany and the Allies of technologies of war – including chemical weapons and aerial bombing – took the violence and ecological destructiveness of war to unprecedented heights, so much so that the Vatican significantly revised Roman Catholic just war doctrine subsequent to World War II to respond to these new military technologies. In his systematic theological reflections on Genesis 1–3, which originated as lectures in 1932 in the context of the rise of the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer argues that a scientific and technologically advanced form of civilization carries particular threats to human beings, and to life on earth more broadly, precisely because its inhabitants refuse to know the earth as divine creation. Consequently, ‘the earth is no longer our earth, and then we become strangers on earth’, and from strangers we finally become earth’s subjects: through the power of technology ‘the earth grips man and subdues him’.¹²

Some argue that the Christian tradition is unable to adapt to modern scientific cosmology without denying revealed truths in scripture and tradition, and that Christians should therefore resist scientific theories about the origins of life and the nature of the universe as conceived by modern physicists and biologists.¹³ Others argue that modern scientific cosmology, as classically framed by Isaac Newton’s account of a universe governed by immutable laws which are independent of human or divine willing, is challenged by the new era that some scientists are now calling the ‘Anthropocene’.¹⁴ This is because in the climate changing era of the Anthropocene the human is in the observed: the carbon atoms now studied in recent ice cores, the hurricanes and typhoons bearing more strongly down on American and Asian cities, also now carry a human element. In this new context, religion, and especially religions like Christianity which are open to creative doctrinal reformulations in new contexts, offer cultural resources for enduring, and finding meaning in, the new world of the Anthropocene. We find a parallel here in Sallie McFague’s reflection on the implications for theodicy of the nuclear age. In earlier eras, Christians and Jews understood that human beings lived their lives on earth under the influence of a spiritual contest between principalities and powers in heavenly places where evil powers contested with God for influence over human and creaturely life.¹⁵ Something like this is envisaged in the Book of Job. In this worldview,

the metaphor of Christ as the victorious king and lord, crushing the evil spirits and thereby freeing the world from their control, is indeed a powerful one. In our situation, however, to envision evil as separate from human beings rather than as the outcome of human decisions and actions, and to see the solution of evil as totally a divine responsibility, would be not only irrelevant to our time and its needs but harmful to them, for that would run counter to one of the central insights of the new sensibility: the need for human responsibility in a nuclear age. In other words to do theology, one must in each epoch do it differently.¹⁶

Analoously, in the new era of the Anthropocene, the Church and humanity face a genuinely novel occasion which ‘teaches new duties’. Perhaps the central theological question for this new occasion is, in Bonhoeffer’s terms, who is Jesus Christ in the Anthropocene? In the chapters that follow we develop our answers to this question across the full range of Christian doctrines.

Ours is not the first attempt to think ecumenically about climate change. From the 1970s, the World Council of Churches began to articulate the emerging faith and moral challenges raised by the impacts of science and technology on the habitability of the earth and her ecosystems. It was at a consultation of the WCC in Bucharest in 1974 that Charles Birch, working with the scientists who had authored the Club of Rome report Limits to Growth, coined the phrase ‘ecological sustainable society’ for the first time.¹⁷ This was followed by Birch’s speech on the ‘sustainable society’ to the fifth WCC Assembly in Nairobi in 1975, which was widely acknowledged as a key moment in the awakening of ecological consciousness in the ecumenical churches. As the WCC continued to reflect on the ecological, social and technological challenges of an increasingly rampant takeover by science-informed humans of the natural systems of the planet, the WCC developed a theological agenda for the response of the churches. Under the banner of a quest for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation (JPIC) the WCC sought to lead its member churches in challenging a pattern and scale of industrial development which was increasingly pushing at planetary and social limits to growth.¹⁸ In the 1990s, the WCC sponsored a number of ecumenical meetings on climate change, at the conclusion of which the delegates noted that ‘the concept of “sustainable development” was in danger of being eviscerated of its transformative potency by being expanded to include “sustainable economic growth”’.¹⁹

In the present work we argue, with the WCC, that climate change repr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Trinity
• 3 Christology
• 4 Holy Spirit
• 5 Creation
• 6 Creatures
• 7 Humanity
• 8 Sin and salvation
• 9 The Church
• 10 Eschatology
• Index