For God’s Sake Take Climate Action

Christians are used to the idea of practising self-restraint for the sake of others or for a higher good. Yet the self-discipline required for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases — principally carbon dioxide (mainly from the energy and transport sectors), nitrous oxide and methane (mainly from livestock) — plus big changes in how we use our land, is a bigger undertaking than most of the self-restraints we have been used to.

The proposed Government Climate Change Commission will be set up some time next year. This substantial, Government-instigated effort to solve a major environmental issue is a bold step forward for New Zealand. The practical focal point for dealing with rapid and destructive climate change is the transition to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

All this will require widespread public support — not just in words but through large, probably uncomfortable, changes in our lifestyles. It is an objective that will need a strong ethical commitment from the public if we are to do this fairly and without coercion.

Where Do Christians Stand?

Where do, or where should, Christians stand in the range of public support for this objective? I have a sense that Christians are spread across the spectrum of New Zealand opinion, neither better nor worse than most. If this is true it should astonish us! By the year 2050 the difference between contributing to atmospheric pollution on the one hand or actually reducing it on the other will be stark. My guess is that future Christians looking back at us here in 2018 will be amazed that we did not see the fundamental contradiction between believing in a Creator God and continuing to lead lifestyles that contribute to rapid and destructive climate change.

“I believe in God Creator of heaven and earth” is a fundamental Christian belief. Most Christians repeat it often in the first sentence of the traditional creeds. To destroy, to vandalise, or to overuse other created beings beyond their capacity to regenerate, demonstrates a non-belief or at least a disregard for the God who created them.

Fundamental to the Bible is the belief in a Creator God. This belief does not come just from the creation stories in the book of Genesis that most of us already know about. It is a theme that runs through the whole of the Old Testament. The New Testament continues it by telling the story of recreation in the life of Jesus Christ and the invitation to all his disciples to become active contributors to a new creation. A human-centred reading of the Bible has sometimes led us to believe that only human beings are included in the “kingdom” (reign, realm) of God championed and activated by Christ. Yet how could we have fallen for the idea that the billions of years of God’s creative energy before human beings even appeared simply don’t count?

Just Human Beings or the Whole of the Earth?

Still, we do have to deal today with the lingering assumption that being Christian is to do with personal salvation, or building the Christian community, or social justice, while our relationships with the rest of God’s creation need not concern us much. By the late 20th century, if not before, it became clear that this assumption is wrong. Human activity is destroying many of the beings and processes of planet Earth. We have become vandals in God’s garden. We are not just eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden, we are poisoning the air and the soil around it.

Nearly all New Zealanders now know about and are concerned about environmental issues, especially the effects of rapid climate change. It seems though, that for many Christians, environmental issues are peripheral to their Christian beliefs. Either we don’t take environmental issues seriously enough to require a change in our lifestyle, or we do take environmental issues seriously but don’t see that this has much to do with Christianity. As a wise observer of human behaviour recently said, when we see more bicycles than cars in the church carpark on Sundays and more bicycles than cars at clergy gatherings we will know these people do actually believe in a Creator God.

Human beings have always had violent relations with other living beings within the planet Earth. We use them for food, clothing and shelter. But by the end of the last century, the over-consumers among us had shifted from being users to abusers. Vandalism and pollution have become normal. Contemporary environmental issues are no longer just a peripheral concern in Christian ethics but have become central to it. This has caught many Christians, including priests, ministers and pastoral leaders, by surprise. Our parents did not teach us this; we did not learn about it in religious education classes when we were young. And we still do not hear it very often in church on Sundays.

What Do Church Leaders Think?

At the international level, and for several decades now, Church leaders have called attention to human responsibility for any human actions that affect the wellbeing of the natural world – the need for restraint and reduction. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Archbishop of Constantinople, was one of the earliest to draw attention to the close link between the economy of the poor and the ecology of the planet in Orthodox theology. He called Christians to become spokespersons for an ecological ethic in which the world is not ours to use for our own convenience. It is God’s gift of love to us and we must return this love by protecting it and all that is in it.

The World Council of Churches’ 2012 mission document, Together Towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes, re-affirmed the stance that humanity is not the master of the Earth but is responsible to care for the integrity of creation. God’s love does not proclaim a human salvation separate from the renewal of the whole creation.

In his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis called us all to an “ecological conversion”. We are used to the idea of “conversion” — a change of mind and heart. But this call is to an ecological conversion. This is a call to stand for an “integral ecology” which respects all the environmental, human and social dimensions of the planet. A major part of this encyclical is concerned specifically with climate change.

A high-level, international document, The World is Our Host: A Call to Urgent Action for Climate Justice, from the Anglican Communion Environmental Network in 2015 called upon political, economic, social and religious leaders to address the climate change crisis as the most urgent moral issue of our day.

That’s the international view. Back home with us is where it really counts. Every one of us is either increasing or lessening our current emissions of greenhouse gases. There is still a real possibility of us being thrown out of the Garden of Eden, but a downward change of lifestyle would be the better option. 

Tui Motu magazine. Issue 230 September 2018: 4-5.