Jesus, the Earth, and Environmental Justice (an extract from Justice for Christ's Sake)

In the millennium year, in the weeks leading up to Easter, I travelled in and around Liverpool, meeting as many young people as possible. In the secondary schools, I asked them to tell me about their dreams for and fears about the future, and I shared with them why I thought the message of Jesus was still on point 2,000 years later. I showed them a video about the threats to the planet and asked, on a scale of zero to ten, how worried were they about the future of the world? Zero was ‘not bothered’; ten was ‘really concerned’. I asked for a show of hands if they’d placed themselves between five and ten. In each school, sometimes in an assembly of 250 young people, every hand went up. It showed how, even twenty years before she arrived on the scene, the upcoming generation was such fertile ground for the message of Greta Thunberg. I then asked them to what extent should we do something about it? Some 98 per cent of the hands went up indicating agreement between five and ten on my scale. I came away from those encounters more challenged than challenging, and began to think through my own attitude to the Earth. I began to ponder the difference in attitudes to the environment between the generations and what is known as ‘intergenerational justice’, captured by the African proverb ‘We have borrowed the present from our children.’ Sustainability requires us to balance our own needs with the needs of future generations.

I discovered that there are those who question the whole concept of intergenerational justice on the grounds that those who have not yet been born cannot be said to have equivalent rights that can be set alongside those of people who are already alive. If morality were purely anthropocentric, it would be difficult to swat away such an argument. If, however, morality is rooted in some transcendent accountability that spans time and space, then the moral quality of our actions is measured by what is just in and to every generation.

The young people also sent me on another journey, which was to ask more searchingly if I could find anything in the teaching of Jesus about the Earth and environmental justice. If this was a pressing question for Christians at the dawn of the present millennium, it is an even more urgent question as I write now. Both former President Trump of the USA, with his denial of the science relating to climate change, and President Bolsonaro of Brazil, with his encouragement of those ravaging the Amazon rainforest, came to power with the pivotal support of evangelical Christians, who interpret the Bible literally. Coming from the British evangelical tradition, which takes the Scriptures as authoritative in understanding the ethos and the ethics of the Christian faith, I felt and continue to feel a special responsibility to unearth what the Bible really teaches us about environmental justice.

In my studies, I sought also to find out what the Jewish and Muslim ethics of the environment were. I enlisted on a course about Muslim theology and went to see the Chief Rabbi, the late Lord Jonathan Sacks. When I ventured that Jews might begin with the book of Genesis and God granting the human family dominion over the Earth, he stopped me.

‘No, James. That’s a very Christian way of reading the Bible on this subject! No,’ he repeated, ‘we start in the book of Deuteronomy with God’s instruction to Moses that, as they entered the promised land, they were never to destroy a fruit-bearing tree.’ Long before anyone knew the science of climate change, there was a religious intuition that trees were central to our ecology for both present and future generations.