When creation and justice converge

In a world of climate catastrophe, what does the message of Easter have to offer? N.T. Wright contemplates the hope of a new heaven and a new earth.

N.T. Wright

N.T. Wright is one of the world's best-known theologians and currently a senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall at the University of Oxford.

On a misty beach, people comb the tide line to remove rubbish.

A beach clean in progress.

Brian Yurasits on Unsplash.

What on earth might the Easter story have to say about our climate catastrophe? What does this ancient story mean to us today, who know that the universe is fourteen billion years old and that, according to the best predictions, one day entropy will have its way with our world, leading to the universe either cooling down as it expands or rushing back together as gravity reasserts itself: the big chill or the big crunch? And what more urgently, might it mean in a world where we have woken up not only to man-made climate change but also to frightening levels of toxic pollution, in our seas, in the atmosphere?

John’s gospel is one of the sources of that ancient story. And the way the author tells it, gives us an answer.

A new story reflects an old story

Like Shakespeare, John does nothing by accident. The way the author introduces the story of Easter reaches far beyond the central fact of Jesus rising again from the dead. John’s point is that with that extraordinary event a new creation is launched. And that means hope – not just for individual humans, but for all creation.

On the first day of the week, very early, while it was still dark. That’s how John begins the story. Twenty chapters earlier, at the start of his book, he deliberately echoed the start of the book of Genesis: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. He has told his story in a great sequence of seven ‘signs’, representing as it were the ‘week’ of creation itself. Now, with Jesus’ resurrection, a new week is beginning: the eighth day of creation, if you like.

It takes everyone by surprise. At the time, many Jewish people had longed and prayed for God’s new day to dawn, but nobody had imagined it would look like this – a young Jewish prophet announcing that it was time for God to become king at last, being brutally executed by the ruling authorities, and then rising again from the dead. The hope of ‘resurrection’, cherished by many Jews at the time, was the hope for all God’s people to be given new bodies to share in God’s new world, the world in which heaven and earth would at last become one. Nobody imagined that this might happen, in advance as it were, to one person ahead of time. But by the time John writes his gospel he has reflected long and hard on what it all means. When he says ‘On the first day of the week’ – which he repeats a little later, in case we missed it – he is pointing to the truth that Paul expressed when he wrote that ‘if anyone belongs to the Messiah, there is a new creation.’ With Jesus, and then with his followers, we see in microcosm that the new creation has been launched.

Back on earth

This truth, central to the early Christians, has long been obscured by the influx of Greek philosophy into Christian thinking. For Plato, and those Christians who looked to him to help explain their faith, the point of it all was not to renew the present creation but to leave it behind. They supposed, as many Christians do to this day, that the aim of the their faith was to go to ‘heaven’ after they died, where they would at last see God. But the central story of the Bible, stretching back into Israel’s scriptures but focused now on the story of Jesus, is that ‘heaven’ was supposed to come to earth. That, after all, is what Jesus himself taught his followers to pray. The point was not that we – or our ‘souls’ – would go and live with God. The point was that God would come and live with us. The ‘God’ in question is the creator God. His aim, emphasized repeatedly in the Bible, is to renew his good creation, flooding it with his presence ‘as the waters cover the sea’. That is the biblical hope, quite different from that of Plato and his followers.

St Paul insists, at the climax of his greatest letter, that this will happen through a powerful, convulsive, fresh action of God. All creation, he says, is groaning like a woman going into labour, awaiting the new world which is to be born. And he sees Jesus’ followers as themselves ‘groaning’ in their present suffering; a majority of Christians in Paul’s world, just like a significant number in our own day, were being persecuted for their faith, and Paul encourages them to see that suffering as part of the larger cosmic labour-pains. But then, he says, God’s own spirit is also groaning within us, so that the new world which is to be born will come by the same divine agency that raised Jesus from the dead. In fact, Paul’s claim could be summarized that way: God will do for the whole creation, at the last, what he did for Jesus at Easter. The message of the resurrection isn’t just about God rewarding Jesus for his own terrible suffering. Nor is it simply about there being hope beyond death for his followers. It is about new creation – a new world in which we are all invited to share, not just eventually but already in the present.

Looking at the evidence, at the present state of the world, it might indeed seem that the promise of new creation is just a fantasy. But the message of Jesus’ resurrection was never designed to fit into the expectations people already had. Everybody knew perfectly well that dead people don’t rise. The Jews believed that one day all God’s people would be raised because they believed in two things about God: first, that he had made creation and made it good; second, that he was committed to putting right everything that had gone wrong. Creation and justice converge at this point: resurrection and new creation.

But Jesus’ resurrection, bursting into the world unexpectedly, like an important guest arriving several hours early when the family is all still asleep, adds another dimension to this. In Jesus, God himself has come forward in time to meet his tired and groaning world halfway. When the early Christians tell the story, they indicate that this is above all else an act of love: of rescuing, re-creating love. And that love invites an answering love, which takes the form both of faith itself and of allegiance, personal commitment. It takes basically the same faith to believe that God will one day renew the whole creation, flooding it with his glorious presence, as it takes to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. And that faith is awakened, again and again, as people hear the news about Jesus and realise that it is a message of love, the love of the creator God for his wounded and weary world.

A community of care

With that faith, and that love, there comes as well a new vocation. If Jesus represents the long-term hope of God’s people arriving unexpectedly in advance, in the present time, then part of the point is to equip people who follow him with his own spirit so that they can be agents of new creation even in the present time. That means a vocation to be small working models of new creation: to engage in advance in the tasks of creation care and renewal, and to encourage those working to address the major challenges of global warming and pollution. We are meant to bring into the world such a measure of justice and beauty as we can, to model in communal and personal life what the creator God always intended and what will come to pass in the ultimate new creation. We are meant to be people of hope: not just people who are motivated by the personal hope of sharing God’s new world, but people through whom that hope comes true in the present time in a thousand living ways, all of them anticipations of, and hence signposts towards, that final new creation.

Article

Belief

Creed

Identity

Truth and Trust

18 November 2025

5 min read

Calls to revive the Enlightenment ignore its own illusions

Returning to the Age of Reason won’t save us from post-Truth

Alister McGrath

Alister McGrath retired as Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University in 2022.

In the style of a Raeburn portrait, a set of young people lounge around on their phones looking diffident

Enlightened disagreement (with apologies to Henry Raeburn).

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Is truth dead? Are we living in a post-truth era where forcefully asserted opinions overshadow evidence-based public truths that once commanded widespread respect and agreement? Many people are deeply concerned about the rise of irrational beliefs, particularly those connected to identity politics, which have gained considerable influence in recent years. It seems we now inhabit a culture where emotional truths take precedence, while factual truths are relegated to a secondary status. Challenging someone’s beliefs is often portrayed as abusive, or even as a hate crime. Is it any surprise that irrationality and fantasy thrive when open debate and discussion are so easily shut down? So, what has gone wrong—and what can we do to address it?

We live in an era marked by cultural confusion and uncertainty, where a multitude of worldviews, opinions, and prejudices vie for our attention and loyalty. Many people feel overwhelmed and unsettled by this turmoil, often seeking comfort in earlier modes of thinking—such as the clear-cut universal certainties of the eighteenth-century “Age of Reason.” In a recent op-ed in The Times, James Marriott advocates for a return to this kind of rational thought. I share his frustration with the chaos in our culture and the widespread hesitation to challenge powerful irrationalities and absurdities out of fear of being canceled or marginalized. However, I am not convinced that his proposed solution is the right one. We cannot simply revert to the eighteenth century. Allow me to explain my concerns.

What were once considered simple, universal certainties are now viewed by scholars as contested, ethnocentric opinions. These ideas gained prominence not because of their intellectual merit, but due to the economic, political, and cultural power of dominant cultures. “Rationality” does not refer to a single, universal, and correct way of thinking that exists independently of our cultural and historical context. Instead, global culture has always been a bricolage of multiple rationalities.

The great voyages of navigation of the early seventeenth century made it clear that African and Asian understandings of morality and rationality differed greatly from those in England. These accounts should have challenged the emerging English philosophical belief in a universal human rationality. However, rather than recognizing a diverse spectrum of human rationalities—each shaped by its own unique cultural evolution—Western observers dismissed these perspectives as “primitive” or “savage” modes of reasoning that needed to be replaced by modern Western thought. This led to forms of intellectual colonialism, founded on the questionable assumption that imposing English rational philosophies was a civilizing mission intended to improve the world.

Although Western intellectual colonialism was often driven by benign intentions, its consequences were destructive. The increasing influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of biological and cultural evolution in the late nineteenth century led Darwin’s colleague, Alfred Russel Wallace, to conclude that intellectually and morally superior Westerners would “displace the lower and more degraded races,” such as “the Tasmanian, Australian and New Zealander”—a process he believed would ultimately benefit humanity as a whole.

We can now acknowledge the darker aspects of the British “Age of Reason”: it presumed to possess a definitive set of universal rational principles, which it then imposed on so-called “primitive” societies, such as its colonies in the south Pacific. This reflected an ethnocentric illusion that treated distinctly Western beliefs as if they were universal truths.

A second challenge to the idea of returning to the rational simplicities of the “Age of Reason” is that its thinkers struggled to agree on what it meant to be “rational.” This insight is often attributed to the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued that the Enlightenment’s legacy was the establishment of an ideal of rational justification that ultimately proved unattainable. As a result, philosophy relies on commitments whose truth cannot be definitively proven and must instead be defended on the basis of assumptions that carry weight for some, but not for all.

We have clearly moved beyond the so-called rational certainties of the “Age of Reason,” entering a landscape characterized by multiple rationalities, each reasonable in its own unique way. This shift has led to a significant reevaluation of the rationality of belief in God. Recently, Australian atheist philosopher Graham Oppy has argued that atheism, agnosticism, and theism should all be regarded as “rationally permissible” based on the evidence and the rational arguments supporting each position. Although Oppy personally favours atheism, he does not expect all “sufficiently thoughtful, intelligent, and well-informed people” to share his view. He acknowledges that the evidence available is insufficient to compel a definitive conclusion on these issues. All three can claim to be reasonable beliefs.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell contended that we must learn to accept a certain level of uncertainty regarding the beliefs that really matter to us, such as the meaning of life. Russell’s perspective on philosophy provides a valuable counterbalance to the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism: “To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”

Certainly, we must test everything and hold fast to what is good, as St Paul advised. It seems to me that it is essential to restore the role of evidence-based critical reasoning in Western culture. However, simply returning to the Enlightenment is not a practical solution. A more effective approach might be to gently challenge the notion, widespread in some parts of our society, that disagreement equates to hatred. We clearly need to develop ways of modelling a respectful and constructive disagreement, in which ideas can be debated and examined without diminishing the value and integrity of those who hold them. This is no easy task—yet we need to find a way of doing this if we are to avoid fragmentation into cultural tribes, and lose any sense of a “public good.”

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