Re-Imagining A Christian Response To Changing Climate - Comments By Dr. Julia O’Brien, Lancaster Theological Seminary

On October 6, the Lancaster Theological Seminary, Interfaith Power and Light and other groups kicked off a new webinar series on Religion and the Environment.

              One of the featured speakers in the first webinar-- Re-Imagining A Christian Response To A Changing Climate-- was Dr. Julia O’Brien from the Lancaster Theological Seminary.

She shared her expertise as a scholar of the Hebrew Bible [the Old Testament] and what the implications are in reading the text can have on our theology.

Here are her remarks--

Thank you, Katie, and hi everybody. It's great to see all of these faces. I'm really grateful for this opportunity, for the work of Interfaith Power and Light, and the opportunity to share a little bit about my own work. 

Over about, I would say, the last 10 to 15 years, that I've been paying lots more attention to climate change, I have actually seen some hopeful trends. 

And one of these is that Christians, from very different theological realms, now are increasingly caring about the environment. 

So you can find official statements and action plans with Protestants and Roman Catholics.

 You can find them, not only among people who call themselves liberals or progressives, but also among people who consider themselves conservative and/or evangelical. 

So for example, while the progressive denomination, with which our seminary is associated, the United Church of Christ, and the nonprofit Evangelical Environmental Network, will not agree on abortion, worship styles and lots of other things, they do agree that Christians are called to climate activism.

So you can look at their websites and they support a lot of the same causes, for example, being supportive of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 

Some might use the language of environmental racism and another might say, "Pollution hurts the poor." 

They're not going to be the same, but they all recognize, not only that Christians are called to address the environmental issues before us, but also that there is a power differential about how different humans experience the effects of climate change. 

So they don't agree on everything, but at least they're somewhat on the same page. 

As I've been watching this kind of a greater coming together of Christian groups, one of the themes that I keep hearing is that almost all of these groups, progressive as well as evangelical, are grounding their conviction about Christian call to climate change in the Bible's description of creation.

So, many Christians across the spectrum will appeal to those early chapters of the Book of Genesis, but also other biblical passages to insist that God created the world to be a good place and has given humans the responsibility of, and these are the terms, creation care or stewardship of creation. 

So if you don't believe me on that, go do an internet search sometime on creation care, creation stewardship. 

So that focus on the beauty of the world, the awesomeness of nature and the praise that's due to the God who's the creator of all things, has fueled really important work. 

And I try, whenever possible, to celebrate good work whenever I can. 

But my own work is suggesting something different, and that is in this planetary moment, I believe that this exclusive focus on appreciation and praise is too light for the severity of the moment that we're in. 

So I'm going to overstate the case to get the conversation going later.

Earth is no longer the beautiful, orderly garden that Genesis says God created it to be.

 The climate has already been changed by human hands, and I am arguing that we are long past the mandate to care, maintain, preserve, or appreciate. 

The alarms have sounded, and it's now time for an emergency response to crisis. 

So in my work, as a biblical scholar and theologian, I've been asking the question of what are other ways that our religious tradition, and particularly the Bible, can resource us for the emergency that stands before us? 

And because my own research, as you heard, is primarily in the Hebrew Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament, I've really focused there. 

And in this short time that I have, you can probably tell that I'm really excited about talking a lot about it. 

I'm going to lift up three ways that I think that the Bible can provide resources beyond that creation care paradigm.

So number one, I think these texts can help us recognize when our traditions need to be criticized. 

If you've done any climate work, you know that many climate theorists are arguing that the roots of the planetary crisis lie in human greed and human self-interest. 

And while Christianity does seek to limit those human traits, it's also true that our tradition, like other traditions, is not immune from perpetuating those problems. 

And we need to be able to critique our traditions, including the Bible, whenever they do harm. 

So not all of the Bible treats the earth with care, and in fact, a lot of the same passages that Christians use to kind of lift up the beauty of creation, if you read them in their larger contexts, they actually serve to promote human interest and often the interest of some humans over other humans.

So one example is, Psalm 8, which is this beautiful passage, when I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers. 

But if you keep reading, what it insists is that that creator God has put all things under humans' feet. 

So it is all bound up together, the praise of God, but also this sense that humans are the ultimate power in the world. 

As you heard, I also work on the prophetic books of the Bible, and I have lots of examples of how in one moment God is called the creator, and in the next, that argument is used to support a particular agenda, where the author's trying to convince you to believe something. 

So I'm hopeful that by seeing that in biblical text, we can see it in ourselves as well.

So number two, the Hebrew Bible offers us powerful words of lament. 

So already, for many places around the globe, the losses due to climate change are already evident. 

But soon, and very soon, all of us are going to feel those types of grief, losses of homes due to extreme weather, loss of work, family, and the familiar ways that we've done things. 

And my observation is that many Christian traditions have been so focused on praise and worship that they don't really know how to express pain. 

And this is where books like Lamentations, and Isaiah, and Joel, can teach us how to express our losses. 

There's a beautiful passage, and disturbing one too, in Isaiah 24, that talks about how the earth dries up and withers and the earth lies polluted under its inhabitants. 

Now of course, when we use those words, we'll have to be careful to make sure that we keep the blame on ourselves because some of these talk about that as God's punishment, but we can use these words carefully to help us grieve.

And then the third one, I'll mention briefly. One of the greatest gifts of the Hebrew Bible is its stories, right? Stories about people who have adapted when the world changed. 

So people who remained immigrants their whole life, like Abraham, or people like Ruth that moved around due to famine and drought, these are stories that can help us think about what it means when there's no going back to normal, when we have to find new patterns of belief and worship. 

So I find a great comfort in these stories and particularly in stories of exile, of people who learn to sing new songs in a foreign land. 

So my time is up. I do care about these issues and would love to talk with you more about them either here or, as Katie may share, my email. So thank you.

Biblical Resources

I was really struck by [how] people are finding resources in places that you wouldn't think to find them. 

Many folks know, if you've been in a biblical studies class, you may have heard the name of Ellen Davis who did a book about an agrarian reading of the bible. 

And she actually convinced me that the book of Leviticus actually provides some kind of model, because what it does is that it insists that the way you behave, that your practices can transform your thinking.

And so, I was working with a group of students and we found that really intriguing, that often it's so hard to change people's mind about climate change, but often you can change people's behaviors. 

So you don't have to change minds before you change behaviors. You can do them both at the same time. 

And Leviticus has lots of stuff in there, including very clear claims about how the land is treated and that you restrict yourself for things other than profit. Profit does not rule. 

And so, it was a surprising resource to us as we brought that into conversation with some of the more secular climate change work that's really critiquing not only consumerism but production.

I recently read the book by Joerg Rieger, Theology in the Capitalocene, and his argument is that it's very convenient for corporations to let climate change be the responsibility of consumers, when the whole system depends on growth and creating markets. 

So, strangely, it was interesting for us to put that into conversation with Leviticus that said, "You don't work on Sabbath. You don't work all the times you can because wealth is not the ultimate value."

Final Thoughts

I think sometimes what's happened in some Christian traditions, it's really done climate, environmental work at the individual level, like recycling. 

How do you change your consumption patterns? And those are all really important things to consider. 

And then we've gone to the global and said, "How do we change all of those things?"

One of the things I take away from this conversation today is, how can we draw on some of the things that we already know, some of the wisdom that we already have about how people are moved to change, how does change happen? 

How do people adapt to change? 

And maybe we need to learn how to celebrate the ways that communities have adapted, instead of assuming that the past was great and we could return to it.

 Somebody said this in the chat, how our communities have changed and maybe changed for the better in response to crisis. 

So again, how do we draw on all the wisdom that's available to us no matter where it is?

Click Here to watch the Re-Imagining A Christian Response To A Changing Climate program online.

              The Religion and the Environment series is sponsored by Interfaith Power and Light, Delaware Interfaith Power & Light, Green Muslims and the Better Path Coalition.

Next Event In This Series

The next event in the Religion and the Environment webinar series will be held on November 1 -  A Jewish Approach to Activism and Accompaniment Through The Climate Crisis.

Click Here to register and for more information.

Resource Link:

-- PA Interfaith Power & Light 10th Annual Conference- No Faith In Fossil Fuels - Nov. 5: Virtual Keynote & Panel Discussion, 5 Regional Workshop Locations  [PaEN]

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-- Re-Imagining A Christian Response To Changing Climate - Comments By Dr. Julia O’Brien, Lancaster Theological Seminary  [PaEN]

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[Posted: October 11, 2023]  PA Environment Digest