The Church at the Crossroads of Climate Catastrophe: A Pastoral Approach for Presentations of Despair

The Church at the Crossroads of
Climate Catastrophe: A Pastoral Approach for 

Presentations of Despair

9 February 2019

Rev. Douglas Olds

In 2017, the Union of Concerned Scientists profiled the Church signaling a petition for it to take on an increasing role in leading against Global Warming and Climate Injustice.  I began this work of ministry in 2008 and have intensified my efforts in my current Doctoral project of developing a "decarbonizing ecclesiology."

Cropping up in my recent research of adapting ministry toward Atmospheric Care and trusteeship of nature is a split between the faithful who believe that the Church needs to develop a pastoral program of "hospice for a dying planet" versus those who call for the invigoration of congregational praxis of lifestyle virtues and collective action. Ought the Church lead towards an acceptance of the inevitability of ecological collapse and extinction--comforting all who are soon to die--or does it move to inspire people to awaken to the issue and practice carbon thrift, the privileged to practice asceticism when they otherwise could afford a high-carbon-footprint lifestyle, and our elites to institute loyalty to place and planet as the just transition toward a decarbonized and renewable economic system?

While ministering to those grieving over the destruction of earth's ecosystems is appropriate and makes space for hearing, uttering, and responding to lament for what is being extinguished, I am choosing to focus my project on pastoral praxis that promotes individual responsibility and commitment rather than pastoral hospice. The Bible has repeated messages not to despair at calamity (Jeremiah 29.4-6; Psalm 23.4) or hypothesize a timetable for the end of the world (Matthew 24.36). I am choosing to minister for and from my active faith that, though the facts of climate science are dire, insists that God has powers over hearts and minds that can awaken humanity from its slumber, denial, and paralyzed indecision regarding Global Warming.  God has historically acted by implanting innovative consciousness and inspiration of the human heart by the actions of the Holy Spirit.  If we can continue to recognize that the Holy Spirit is intimately involved with atmospheric integrity--and that we can cooperate with the Holy Spirit in remedying and healing ecological imbalances--we can act as God's partners and trustees that might move God to endorse our repentance on this issue and  intervene through God's incumbent and caring powers.

If, however, privileged humanity continues its hardness of heart, practicing business as usual and makes no effort to demonstrate that our living values include a respect for and trusteeship of nature, I see no reason why God would intervene for our benefit other than pure grace, which humanity may not presume. Yet even in the case of God turning away from privileged humanity, I acknowledge that God could and would bring about the just recompense of the vulnerable and those oppressed from Climate Injustice.

Because we have a final judgment to anticipate, I entreat all to intensify their efforts on the issue of combating profligacy in their hydrocarbon-producing lifestyle choices and to work politically and collectively to rein in the systemic greed, intransigence, and denial of dirty-industry elites.  To that latter end, it matters if your preferred candidates for elective office take fossil-fuel industry money.  To the former end, it matters in God's judgment whether our consumer choices deconstruct nature and the flourishing of the vulnerable of humanity including of future generations and of other species.  If our values predominantly involve computer screens and human technological diversions like rocketry and Bitcoin at the expense of natural integrity and balance, I suspect our destiny will not include companionship with nature as part of its ambiance and/or reward.  In such a case, I fear that my eternal destiny could involve no more than adumbrations of human ingenuity without the input of God's ongoing dynamism inside natural beauty. My destiny in such a case might involve the profanity of technology rather than the holiness of trees because my values and choices in this life promoted the former and extinguished the latter.

Previously, I proposed Isaiah 44.9-20 as a theological resource for evaluating run-away hydrocarbon combustion and linked it with the material economy devoted to luxury production condemned in Rev. 18 as Babylon's "adultery" (=idolatry).  I note that in the Reform Judaism cycle of yearly readings of Torah and haftarot, this passage from Isaiah is regularly, but not always, included in the week prior to the Torah's presentation of the theme of the Approach of the Day of Judgment.  I think this sequence of idolatry followed by judgment is illustrative of the Jewish tradition of proclaiming against idolatry as a fundamental responsibility of religious humanity to God, and that such idolatry (and systemic participation in the luxury economy) may be a first-order determinant in God's final judgment of us as individuals.

This essay has been intended to outline a favored pastoral alternative for the contemporary Church involved inside a society of systemic Climate injustice and ongoing ecological catastrophe.  I have argued that the Church functions pastorally in such a society by refocusing its faithful on the Ever-Approaching of our individual Final Judgments from God rather than on acceptance of the inevitability of ecological or civilizational collapse.  I do not propose this as a psychological denial or defiance mechanism, but rather from my faith that faith requires continuing trust in the miracle-working God as well as the necessity to continually prepare for a Final Judgment which will take into account our values and our commitments in this life.  That Judgment by God will deliver us into an unchangeable destiny in the life to come.  I believe that recalling us to the warning (and the Good News) of the Final Judgment is pastorally more responsible even if the planet is inevitably dying.  Our values, commitments, and actions even in a lost cause will provide (part of) the basis of our destiny in the life to come, more than any pastoral hospice program that encourages quietism and acceptance of inevitable extinction.

Continuing to practice virtue in the prospect of looming catastrophe is keeping faith.  It demonstrates to oneself and to others an appreciation of God's continuing presence and potential for miracle. By all means, the Church should allow for expressions of grief and lament.  But I believe our experiences and expressions of those may only be assuaged and potentially healed by an active trust in God in which we involve God in our prayers and continue in our virtues that keep faith with God. As our virtues demonstrate our trustworthiness, God may keep faith with (trust in) us.  There may be no escape from suffering in this life, but repentance and trust in God is the foundation of virtue which demonstrates to God that we take God's presence and power with utmost existential seriousness.  We need to remain practicing the virtues of thrift, asceticism, and loyalty, cultivating the habits that will serve us in eternity even if we currently live in a temporally-limited and -concluding natural world.

As I write these words at 3:30pm on a rainy Saturday in Northern California, I look out my window to see the partial but thick arc of a rainbow.  Its thickness indicates proximity. I recall God's covenant with Noah and hope this appearance reconfirms for us that God will not again extinguish the totality of humanity from the earth.  This is where I move from hope to faith. Not faith in a doctrinal sense.  My hope doesn't allow for the recovery of the pristine nature of my youthful explorations in the woods in Northern Michigan.  The facts of ecological catastrophe and Climate Injustice are too pessimistic in aggregate.  But faith over hope suggests another message: an optimistic one.  Faith trusts God even when hope is fleeting and despair looms.  I know there's a God--one who can and does love humanity and who can and does work miracle for its benefit.  Keeping faith with God is an active requirement that requires the additional virtue of recollection--our practices of recalling when hope was extinguished, but then our dawning awareness comes of renewal.  With recollection, there seems no precedent that sin and systemic evil have the last word.  God and God's word is the beginning AND the end (Revelation 21.6).  Our faithful actions are intermediary--a bridge between freedom and destiny.  God, and God alone, will determine our conclusion.