Hope in an age of anxieties

The standard evangelical response to the climate crisis is that the church should preach and practice creation care as a witness to the good news about Jesus. In that respect, in the words of the Evangelical Alliance in the UK, we should understand “climate change as a pivotal gospel issue of our time.” I think that this opportunistic and utilitarian approach to the climate crisis misrepresents the relationship between crisis and “good news” in the Bible.

There is a repeated cycle of creation → transgression → justice → renewal in the Bible.

We see it in the early chapters of Genesis: God creates and blesses humanity → wickedness and violence corrupt the earth → an ancient flood is interpreted as an act of divine justice → Noah and his family are blessed as the beginning of a new creation.

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The groaning of creation
We screened the People’s Emergency Briefing film in the week before this message, so the climate crisis loomed menacingly. In the film, Jennifer Saunders of Absolutely Fabulous fame asks a good question: “What’s the matter with us?” What is the matter with us as a civilisation? ()
What does it mean to be human?
For most of us, subjectively, the everyday experience of being human probably hasn’t changed very much, but we may be aware of a storm of questions blowing furiously outside the house, rattling the windows and loosening tiles. What does it mean to be male and female? What is a “normal” state of… ()
Consuming the world
The consumption of the planet’s resources—food, land, natural materials, fossil fuels—and the failure to deal with the waste products are central characteristics of modern societies. Scientific progress, technological ingenuity, and cheap energy have produced a massive acceleration in consumption… ()
Why I think Brian Zahnd’s discussion of Jesus, the Church, the Bible, and Christianity is outdated
In a Substack post, Brian Zahnd looks at four key theological “entities” and warns of the “theological mischief” that happens when the “critical distinction” between them is not properly respected. The Church, the Bible, and the religion of Christianity are all good and important things, but not as… ()
Why (and where) you should get some theological (by which I really mean biblical) education
The term “polycrisis” gets used a lot these days to name a peculiar consequence of globalisation: the collision of expanding systems in shock—energy, climate, geo-politics, finance, etc., with AI accelerating the chaos—in a confined planetary space. ( | 2 comments)
Some exegetical notes on the “worship” of Jesus, the “trinitarian” formula, and the “end of the age” in Matthew 28:16-20
In the last paragraph of the Gospel of Matthew, the risen Jesus is “worshipped” by his disciples, whom he sends into the world to baptise new disciples “in the name of Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:16-20). This has been a foundational text both for global mission (the “… ( | 1 comment)
Against Wright and Bird: among other things, why the wolf dwelling with the lamb is not new creation
In chapter three of Jesus and the Powers, N. T. Wright and Michael Bird explain how they understand the “powers” of the book’s title. They are “what we would call ‘earthly’ or ‘political’ rulers and what we might call any ‘non-human’ or ‘supernatural’ quasi-personal ‘forces’ that stand… ()