March 2003 Newsletter (Conference Special)

The conference, ‘Jesus and the Earth. The Gospel and the future of the environment’, took place on the 8th of February 2003 at the University of Gloucestershire Francis Close Hall Campus. Organised jointly by The John Ray Initiative and the University School of Humanities, it was attended by 190 people. We have had many enthusiastic messages about the conference.

The following account, by David Thistlethwaite, recalls some highlights. Full texts and audio tapes of the talks are available.

The emergence of hope

In keeping with JRI’s mission, the conference brought together leading figures from science, the church, theology and politics, under the authority of the Bible, concluding with a service of worship. Although there were sombre aspects to the issues being discussed, a common, if implicit, theme of the conference was hope, which helps account for the remarkably positive atmosphere of the day.

James Jones on ‘Jesus and the Earth’

James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, began with a presentation that was both theological and passionately personal. He recalled how, at first, he had thought that the gospels had little to contribute to an earth ethic. But during a sabbatical period of study, he became convinced that the environmental message not only overflowed from the New Testament, but also was absolutely central to the ministry and self-understanding of Jesus.

Jesus gave himself the mysterious title ‘Son of Man’, the representative man, the human of humans. Although this title resonated profoundly with Daniel’s vision of a man, ‘like a son of man’ (7:13) standing in heaven, it surely brought to mind Man in his original biblical representative, Adam (meaning ‘human’), whom God formed out of the ground (‘adamah’). Jesus knew that to be Man, was to be formed from the earth and to remain dependent on the earth. He was not just a visitor on the earth, but in his very nature identified with it.

St Paul, writing before the gospels, introduces Christ as the second Adam, and Luke (3:38), Paul’s friend, directly links Christ to Adam in the genealogy which concludes ‘the son of Adam, the son of God’. So the early church was well able to think of Jesus as the representative Man. It seems likely that the connection through from Son of Man to Adam was in Christ’s own mind. Certainly in his preaching he referred to the earth frequently, in fact six times, said the Bishop, in phrases associated with the Son of Man.

Digging a little more deeply into the gospels, Bishop James looked at how Jesus identified himself with Jonah. Jonah’s three days in the fish Christ likened to his own three days in the ground (Matthew 12:40). Adam’s sin had led to his being returned to the dust, his disobedience to the cursing of the earth. Christ, to redeem the earth from its curse, was buried in the earth, just as Jonah made atonement by being ‘buried’ in the whale. Christ’s burial was identification with the sin of Adam, that the consequences for the earth of Adam’s sin might be removed. The earth responded, as Matthew records, in a powerful earthquake (27:51).

The connection of Jesus with the earth has profound consequences for us today. First, it cuts away at the dominance of the ‘virtual reality’ in which people live in such a technologically insulated world that they forget that they are still dependent on soil, sun and air for life. Second, it shows that in robbing and torturing the earth, people are not only abusing themselves, but also in some sense taking what is Christ’s. All things, St Paul writes, were not only made ‘through him, but for him’ (Col. 1:16). In other words, it is God, not humanity, who has the right to define the terms on which the creation is used.

The paradox is, that when we break the limits, we find we have lost the very earth we had sought to grab, whereas when we respect God’s limits, we still have an earth left to enjoy. Bishop James pointed out that ‘crisis’ is the Greek word for ‘judgement’. If we find we are in a crisis today, that is not because God has forgotten the earth but because our treatment of it has already brought consequences.

Many heartily desire God to restore a just world, but, as James Jones said, ‘a just world is a cruel place for sinners’: none of us would have any part in it. The good news is that God is not only just, but merciful. By visiting the just judgement for the world’s sin on Jesus, God has set us free from, among other things, the terrible burden of ecological guilt. Set free, we can move forward in hope, to repair and restore the harm we have done.

John Houghton on climate change

The note of hope was also present in the next paper, JRI Chairman Sir John Houghton’s talk on ‘Signs in the sky and signs of the times. The Gospel and global climate change.’ His presentation of the known facts was very disturbing. Sir John spoke as someone who has spent a lifetime in close study of what has been happening to the world’s weather, and who in the last years has also worked hard to alert governments to the perils of human-induced climate change. Now he is also working to persuade the Christian community to act. But he finds it is the same human nature that Jesus confronted in the Pharisees of his day (Luke 12, 54-56), the love of comfort and security, and the willingness to talk, but not to act, that also characterises the normal response to this most urgent ‘sign of the times’, the over-heating of the earth’s atmosphere.

One of the most worrying predictions is that if sea levels continue to rise at the present rate, as the oceans heat up, 150 million people will be displaced from their homes in low lying regions by 2050. The human cost of such a mass migration is hard to imagine. And yet despite the evident fact of disasters becoming more frequent, many rich nations are unwilling to act or even admit the problem. Where then was the hope?

The hope, both implicit and explicit, was threefold. There was hope implied in the fact that scientists have now been able to assemble such a vast body of evidence. It is becoming increasingly difficult to question global warming, as the American government found when it was looking for contrary academic opinions. In a free society, truth will eventually have its effect. There is hope too in the new fuel technologies becoming available, though they need to be humbly applied. The greatest hope, however is not in ourselves at all. It is, that if the heart of the issue is to repent from greed and waste, Jesus Christ will enable us also to do so.

It is clear that to do something about global warming means facing up to some limits on a profligate lifestyle. ‘The polluter should pay’, said Sir John. If we travel a lot, for example, we should be taxed, and the funds used to mitigate the effects of the extra emissions. But it is also Jesus Christ who offers us something better than a profligate lifestyle, idolising consumption (see the parable of the rich fool in Luke 12). With Christ, there is hope not only for a more just, but also a more satisfying, life. Caring about the terrible suffering of drought and floods being visited on the rest of the world by the polluting West, is itself a calling. It could lead to a lifestyle in which ‘less’ turns out to be ‘more’.

Peter Carruthers on farming

Taking Matthew 12:1-8 as his starting point, Dr Peter Carruthers, JRI Executive Director, spoke on ‘Picking grains on the sabbath. The Gospel and farming’. One of Jesus’ six recorded disputes over the Sabbath was out in the fields, and Peter showed that the way Jesus used it to teach about himself and the Sabbath also has deep implications for farming today. Here were representatives of two completely opposed ways of thought. The Pharisees, snooping on a relaxed walk through the barley fields, were assessing Christ’s hungry disciples as they picked ears of grain. Focused on behaviour and measurement, their Sabbath was to be ‘enjoyed’ in terms of negatives.

Jesus, instead, had focused on the land as a gift and the Sabbath as a foretaste of the Jubilee, looking to the Messianic age: when there will be peace for all and everyone will be fed. In other words, we can focus on the rules, and miss the point. Agriculture likewise can be bound into a system that apparently fulfils legal and economic goals, but misses its purpose, ‘mercy, not sacrifice’. An example was the tragedy of foot-and-mouth disease, when six million animals were slaughtered and burnt. The economic system ‘required’ it, but natural instincts were appalled.

From the Sabbath and Jubilee themes, Peter drew out three Biblical principles for farming: sharing — with the poor; caring — for the earth; and restraint — on power and wealth. He also illustrated how far modern agriculture is from practising these. There is exploitation of the poor producers, pollution of the land, and domination by corporate power. The abuse of the land and livestock is part of an abusive culture, a ‘sabbathless society’, in which farmers themselves are abused.

But can we see Sabbath transformation today? Peter told the story of Tangier Island, a crab-fishing community in Chesapeake Bay which faced a downward spiral due to over-fishing and environmental damage. Biblical teaching, corporate repentance and a renewed covenant with creation and neighbour have begun an upward spiral of restoration and new prosperity.

Central to ‘healing the land’ is healing of relationships. The Sabbath principle is about right relationships between God and people, among neighbours and between people and the earth.

The Gospel, then, Peter concluded, is good news for farming. Our call, is to pray and work that God’s kingdom come and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven, but we can be confident that the future does not depend solely on our efforts — for the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath.

Michael Northcott on the ecological spirit

In the afternoon, Michael Northcott (Edinburgh University) continued the deep probing into human nature that the environmental crisis requires. The Bishop had shown that the church has been late to recognise its responsibility for creation; John Houghton that knowledge did not necessarily lead to action; and Peter Carruthers that the current global farming and food system fell far short of Biblical principles.

Michael began by asking why it is that contact with nature, so healing to the spirit, was not enough to condition environmental practice. Scotland, for example, has a culture of enjoyment of nature, but its ‘ecological consciousness’ is ‘among the lowest of any region in Europe’. ‘The problem would seem to be that individual contact with nature, what we might call ecological piety, cannot provide the basis for a new ecological order’. Unfortunately we think about nature otherwise than we feel.

‘The truth of the current predicament of the human species’, Michael continued, ‘is that the collective institutions of the State, corporations, banks and trade regulators are wedded to a form of civilisation in which human life and civilisation is envisaged, in all its essentials, as independent of nature’. Clearly, our sentiments, and what we regard as economic verities, belong to two different worlds. ‘The domination of nature by technology has created a collective illusion that humans are in control of their own destiny and the destiny of the planet, and it is precisely this illusion which represents the most dangerous threat to human life’. As C.S. Lewis and Dietrich Bonhoeffer foresaw, the attempt to dominate nature has left us subject to nature; over-masterful use of nature has led, for example, to floods and famine.

The ecological problem, then, is rooted in way we see ourselves, which does not correspond with reality. Christians need to ‘make it clear to the world at large’, Michael said, that ‘at heart the ecological crisis is a spiritual crisis’. We have failed to acknowledge our creaturehood, and, instead, have believed a story of human origins which magnifies conflict, dominance, and the emergence of human freedom as the highest goal.

Spiritual crises need spiritual remedies, and Michael spelt out carefully what had to be done. It is not enough to save fuel, recycle, and do environmental audits, valuable though these are. The really subversive project is worship. It is worship, in which we acknowledge our co-creaturehood with Creation, that tells us the true story of who we are, and what are the real conditions for human well-being.

‘Worship’ may not seem practical, but it is the springs of human behaviour that the church needs to challenge, not just its forms. So we must demonstrate, in the most public possible way, our belief in human creaturehood, and in the creation as Creation (not sacred) — representing it in sacraments, hymns and works of art.

Caroline Spelman on ‘who is my neighbour?’

The final speaker was the Shadow International Development Secretary, Caroline Spelman MP. Caroline came to politics from a background in agriculture, and is committed to seeing economic justice between nations, even at the cost of our own standard of living.

In a world where, through television, everyone’s suffering seems to be next door, and our affluence is advertised to the world’s poor, the question of ‘who is our neighbour?’ cannot be avoided.

Caroline, refreshingly, saw it as an opportunity in this global age to do good. She told us three stories of ‘neighbours’ - people she had encountered on her travels, and, by contrast, showed how little that we as a country are doing for them.

There was the Tajik widow she had met in the Jalozii refugee camp between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This woman had said to her ‘What good are you to me? You come, you look, you go, and I am no better off’. On another visit (with a food gift this time) the lady had explained how hard it was for her to get any food in this unofficial camp, ‘because I do not have a man to fight to the front of the queue for me’. As a nation, we spend only £334m a year to relieve refugees, but £1.26bn once they get here.

Another ‘neighbour’ was an Aids orphan in Malawi, struggling to bring up an infected younger brother against a background of drought and floods — a consequence, probably, of global warming. It would help the next African generation to survive if we provided free anti-retroviral drugs to HIV+ pregnant women.

A third neighbour was Abdul in Baghdad. Already dependent on food rations, he now faces possible war. Many of his friends have no access to clean water. At the very least, we should be preparing for humanitarian relief in the event of war, but at present there is no sign of us doing so. Caroline argued for reform in other areas of injustice — the debt relief that appeared to have been granted at the millennium, but which has largely evaporated, the Common Agricultural Policy which fails to help our farmers and hurts many others, and the inequitable trade rules which were not even discussed at Johannesburg.

Caroline concluded by saying that ‘when Jesus comes again and judges us we will need to answer some tough questions. I hope that we will be with the righteous who did not even notice that they had fed and clothed and sheltered the Lord…’ The note of hope in her speech was that there was so much that could practically be done. We need not turn away from need — because we have the resources to help.

Closing service

Bishop James Jones spoke again at the closing service. He preached on consumption, as an important part of human and Christian life — but within the limits God has set. ‘You may freely take’, God had said to Adam —‘but not everything’. Living within limits provides a joyful challenge, to create a lifestyle fitting for us and comfortable to the world God loves.



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