20.05.2016
Church Leaders Discuss Their Biblical Influences on the Subject of Climate Change
Archbishop Michael Jackson was among the Church Leaders to take part in Thinking Allowed yesterday evening (May 19) as part of Ecumenical Bible Week 2016. The Church Leaders gathered in St Paul’s Church, Arran Quay, to discuss the topic: What Bible passages inform and challenge my response to climate change?
Speakers included: Rachel Bewley–Bateman (Society of Friends), Archbishop Michael Jackson (Church of Ireland), Gillian Kingston (Methodist Church), Archbishop Diarmuid Martin (Roman Catholic Church), the Revd Katherine Meyer (Presbyterian Church) and Pastor Nick Park (Evangelical Alliance). The forum was chaired by Philip McKinley.
Ecumenical Bible Week (EBW) is now in its third year. It includes parish based events in Dublin and surrounding areas. The theme this year looks at the Christian attitude to the environmental crisis and global warming: “In the beginning God created.. Gen 1:1 The Gospel and Care of our Common Home”.
The text of Archbishop Jackson’s address is reproduced in full:
ECUMENICAL BIBLE WEEK: THE DESERT
TOPIC AREA: WHAT BIBLE PASSAGES INFORM AND CHALLENGE MY RESPONSE TO CLIMATE CHANGE?
Dr Michael Jackson, Archbishop of Dublin Thursday May 19th 2016
The Desert may indeed seem an unattractive and unpalatable place to start, or even to think about, for inspiration in relation to climate change. It seems to us to be a place of wasted emptiness and has become a symbol of wilful sin. However, I choose The Desert for a very particular reason: it is that God chose The Desert. Theologically, through the Gospel of John, we are encouraged to see The Divine Trinity not so much as a sequential revelation of God One by One – as first Father, second Son, third Holy Spirit but as God the Father, the Son and the Spirit as a divine being from the beginning. The connection in St John’s Gospel is made with the creation in Genesis and the creation as John tells it theologically; and the Son is referred to there as The Word.
My interest, for our present purpose, is in St Mark chapter 1:12,13: At once the Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness, and there he remained for forty days tempted by Satan. He was among the wild beasts; and angels attended to his needs.
The overall thrust of this passage is positive, despite our modern preoccupation with progress and productivity rendering it largely negative. The Desert is not obviously a place of progress and productivity; but it is theologically a place of divine presence and of Spiritual guidance. This runs counter to our cultural antennae. It may even cause us to question a glib application to all of the negativities of the contemporary world of the word so pertinently used and developed by Pope Francis: desertification. It may also cause us to recognize that The Desert is inescapable in contemporary life as it was in the life of Jesus and – to go even further – that we should be lost indeed without it!
I return to St Mark chapter 1. Jesus makes the following moves: from baptism by John in the River Jordan to The Desert at the insistent driving of the Holy Spirit; thence to Galilee where he proclaims the Kingdom of God and calls working people from their work of fishing to active discipleship and apostleship.
I offer this passage in relation to climate change for a number of reasons. The first is that it is physically unattractive; it is not for the faint hearted; and it is frightening and dangerous. Much of contemporary life is such for the majority of the world’s population. Therefore it has an air of reality. The second is that it is not devoid of God. This is important as it not a place to be on your own. The positive depiction of three particular creations: human, animal, angelic as coming and holding together in a theological ecology would not have been possible had God not been there to; the alternative was the triumph of the satanic or the demonic. Again, a world of progress and productivity has little understanding of what I am talking about in saying these things. It is the coming together in mutuality under God of a range of created orders that makes The Desert a place of deliberate remaining rather than a place of wandering human delirium. The third is examples of Desert Living from the fourth and the fifth centuries of the Christian era. The urbanization and the metropolitanizing of Christianity under Constantine the Great resulted in a number of things. The first was the full official regularization of Trinitarian Doctrine in refutation of Arianism; the second was the flourishing of a counter–culture on the edge of and in The Desert consisting of individual and community monastic living. The Desert was reclaimed as an eschatological place akin to the vignette in St Mark 1.12, 13: aspects of the creation that seem not to be compatible are brought together in the most unexpected of places: The Desert and their primary articulation is wisdom. Preparation, violence, enterprise and the quest for more than vacuity/emptiness come to the fore as essential skills of survival and building blocks of community.
The Desert seems to me to be a real geography. It seems also to be a spiritual metaphor. It is, as Pope Francis is clear to say, a place where sin needs to be addressed. Perhaps in The Desert, Jesus Christ the HumanGod was equipped for redemption, for the rescuing of you and me from ‘creational destruction.’ The Desert and Climate Change: again you may ask: Why? Climate Change asks of us as disciples of Jesus Christ that we be just that: followers of Jesus Christ, and we are to follow into The Desert as well as into other locations. Lest we think that The Desert is a place of abstraction, the exegesis given by Pope Francis in Laudato Si (page 41) of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4.9–11) shows us the complexity and the crudity of crumpled ecology all in one. The relational nature of the rupture is clear at a number of points: between Cain and Abel, between Cain and God; between Cain and the earth. Because the connection between God and the earth is fundamental, life itself is therefore endangered. A neglect of self, others, God and the earth necessitates our urgent, intentional connection with another quartet: self, fraternity/sorority, justice, faithfulness to others. This is the way to confront and to affront sin. A change in self is pivotal. And so Pope Francis memorably says that the renewal entails recovering and respecting the rhythms inscribed in nature by the hand of the Creator. Thus we are moved to see a connection between sin and ecology, a change in spiritual climate that has significant earthly and societal repercussions.
My final justification for selecting this passage is the need to be real as well as being idealistic about climate change. The Desert is here to stay, in its many manifestations (pace St John 14.2), so we need to make an accommodation with it. It is all that many HumanHumans know in today’s world. As disciples and followers of Jesus Christ in baptism, in the Spirit, in the proclamation of the Kingdom of God, we need to grapple with that haunting Marcan word about The Desert:
he remained (St Mark 1.13).