Abstract
Since taking up a post at the Pacific Theological College in 2014, I have found myself frequently writing and thinking about climate change. Many of my students are from Kiribati, whose islands are under threat from rising seas. I also have a Tuvaluan doctoral student writing about divine providence in the context of rising seas. My prayer for him is that he completes his PhD in time to be of use to the people of Tuvalu.
For many peoples of the Pacific there is little they can do to stop climate change. There is much truth in saying that they are victims of a monstrous injustice; while these tiny countries contribute almost nothing to global emissions, they face annihilation. It is a global, moral, and political challenge to give their islands and low-lying lands a chance of survival. While the scientific issues are becoming clearer, regretfully the theological challenges are too often sidestepped, even by the Church. How do we think about God in the face of climate change? Or of God’s love in the face of mass migration in a world which is turning its back on refugees? How can our theological traditions speak to people most affected?
In March 2017 PTC celebrated 500 years of the Protestant Reformation. The 20 member churches of the College are all heirs, in one way or another, of the Reformation, being Anglican, Methodist, Lutheran, Reformed, and Uniting churches. A central question of my presentation was ‘What does Luther have to contribute to climate discussions in the Pacific region?’
Luther and his contemporaries understood the world as stable and ordered, the product of a rational God, whose creation could be rationally understood. This view is under threat today as we realise that we are changing the world to such an extent that some are calling our era ‘the Anthropocene’.
Despite the gap of 500 years, I found, somewhat to my surprise, Luther’s relevance to the current discussions on climate change. I was recently reminded of one aspect of Luther’s thought when I heard news of the risk of major coral extinctions in Australia and Japan. Discussing Noah in his ‘Lectures on Genesis’, Luther remarked that, in the flood, humanity’s dominion over creation was taken away partially and temporarily—an element of the punishment of the flood. Ironically, as humanity gains technological, military, and economic power over the ecosphere, we are tragically losing our humanity when it comes to having dominion over an ever-shrinking pool of species.
I fear, however, that many such theological deliberations on climate change do not go far enough. As climate records continue to be broken, and the global prognosis gets worse, the end times for many people in the Pacific are approaching fast. In this environment, climate change theology needs to move into an apocalyptic phase. Nothing less will meet the pastoral and theological needs of many Pacific peoples.