Essay

Climate

Creed

Sustainability

30 May 2024

9 min read

Why Climate Change is at heart, a spiritual problem

Climate change does not begin with technical solutions but with spiritual ones.

Mark Scarlata

Mark is a lecturer and priest. He’s the author of several books and his latest, Wine, Soil and Salvation, explores the use of wine throughout the Old and New Testament.

Planet Earth viewed in totality from space. Africa and Arabia are visible under some cloud in the south.

Captured by Apollo 17, the Blue Marble image is credited with influencing how humanity viewed our home.

NASA.

In 1972 the United Nations commissioned a report called Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet. Its authors chose a cover image which captured the earth from space. The bright blue marble-like planet sits majestically against the black background of the vast universe. The beauty and simplicity of the image was a reminder of the unique habitat we share on this planet and the need to care for it.

Over fifty years after the authors raised concerns about a future ecological crisis, we do not find ourselves in any less critical circumstances. Average temperatures around the globe continue to rise, deforestation and pollution of water carries on and the land still suffers from over-farming and the use of harmful chemicals. These are only a few of the ways the planet has suffered.

The tone of the book, and the tone of the dialogue since then, often depicts environmental issues as a problem to be fixed. Rather than changing our own habits, many seek to maintain our current quality of life by coming up with green solutions that satisfy our levels of consumption.

The trouble with this kind of thinking is that we can reduce the beautifully complex and dynamic ecology of our world to a problem that requires a technical solution. The environment becomes common matter or stuff that can be used as a commodity to be bought, sold or traded on the market. This promotes the idea that the world around us is nothing more than material to be mastered through technological innovations by the ingenuity and determination of the human will. But is it just a matter of time before advanced technologies will solve all our environmental problems? Or is it possible that reframing the environmental crisis through a theological lens could help us see that the problem might not only be technology or industrialization, but that it might be something deeper in our souls?

Looking at creation through a different lens

In 2014 Pope Francis wrote an encyclical (a letter to the Catholic Church) called Laudato Si (‘Praise to you’). The title comes from a song of St. Francis of Assisi to celebrate creation - ‘Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs.’ The saint’s hymn of praise celebrates creation as a living being, a partner, a sister, a mother that sustains us and reveals the glory of God. And this is what Pope Francis sets out to remind his readers—that creation is not merely a commodity to be used or a problem to be solved. Instead, the natural world is sacred because it was created by God, is sustained by God, and is filled with his divine glory.

Francis writes,

‘We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will…This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor.’

The ecological demise and poor health of our environment reflects our misunderstanding of humanity’s role within an integrated ecology. Francis warns that if we fail to see the deepest spiritual roots of our problem, we won’t be able to work out how we are to live within creation.

Rather than focusing on rising sea levels or changing weather patterns, Francis asks us to step back and see the larger picture through the lens of how God relates to his creation and to our role as human beings.

‘Ecological culture cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution, environmental decay and the depletion of natural resources. There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational programme, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm.’

The globalization and technologization of the world have led us to believe that our relationship to the environment is not a complementary one that is mutually sustaining. Yet Pope Francis reminds us that all of life is bound together in an ‘integral ecology’ and that we live in a vast meshwork of living organisms that sustain and support each other. In an integral ecology these interrelations are fully entwined so as we look to address environmental concerns we also examine our own spiritual health as well as addressing social, economic and political issues in order to build and sustain heathier communities especially for the vulnerable and the poor.

An age of gluttony

To look with new eyes at the environmental crisis, however, humanity must also look within. Over the centuries the Christian tradition has highlighted some of the most destructive habits for human beings. These can have a disastrous impact on us and on those around us. In the church these are sometimes called the ‘seven deadly sins’ which outline the most common ways that human beings end up destroying themselves and the world. One of the sins is gluttony.

Gluttony is often associated with overeating or excess. Though excessive consumption may reflect outward signs of gluttony, the real root of it is connected to our desire for more than we need and a fear that we don’t have enough. Consuming more than we need (out of anxiety or for whatever reason) always comes at the expense of the needs of those around us. When we are driven by gluttony, we forget about our interdependence in the world, in our communities or in our families. Instead, we become consumed with satisfying our own needs and making sure that we have enough.

Rowan Williams sums up the dangers of gluttony by saying that we fail to grasp something fundamental in how we relate to others and to creation. ‘Gluttony, as the spiritual tradition approaches it, is another way of losing touch with our createdness: so much comes back to this. We lose touch with what it is to be a created being, and so lose touch with the basic truth that we are because God is.’ When we forget that we are God’s creation, living within an integrated ecology, we forget how we relate to all living things around us. Losing our idea of being created within God’s creation begins to unveil some of the spiritual roots of the current ecological crisis.

Part of what Pope Francis is saying is that a Christian approach to the environment is one that recognizes the spiritual and ethical implications of our actions in the world. A lack of attention to our spiritual condition can result in the abuse of the poor and the exploitation of the earth. When we fail to recognise God’s presence in each person and in his creation we mask the true problems behind extreme global consumerism that seduce us into wanting more without considering the needs of others.

Francis goes on to write,

‘The current global situation engenders a feeling of instability and uncertainty, which in turn becomes “a seedbed for collective selfishness”. When people become self-centred and self-enclosed, their greed increases. The emptier a person’s heart is, the more he or she needs things to buy, own and consume.’

The ecological issues we face today are not problems that can ultimately be solved through technology. They require a change of heart, a change of vision and the ability to see the presence of the divine once again in the world we inhabit.

The re-enchantment of creation

The word ‘re-enchantment’ has seen a recent surge in popular cultural language recently. Indeed, this website uses it to describe its flagship podcast! The word expresses the desire of many to move away from the purely scientific and material approach to the world in order to recapture something that the secular age seems to have lost.

Though the word ‘enchantment’ can often conjure up images of fairies and magical forests, its Christian use is a way to describe how we see God’s divine presence in creation. Both Christians and Jews historically have understood that God inhabits the whole of the cosmos.

This is not some type of pantheism where all things that exist are god. Instead, God’s life and his Spirit sustains all things and brings all life into existence. To see the divine presence in creation is to recognize that the world is not just a material commodity but, rather, as Francis of Assisi understood, it is our companion that sustains us, nurtures us and journeys with us through life.

The re-enchantment of the world has also found its voice through non-Christian environmental approaches that have leaned towards pagan ideas around Gaia. They argue that nature, or Gaia, is something that should be honoured, worshipped and preserved. Philosopher Mary Midgley wrote, ‘The idea of Gaia—of life on earth as a self-sustaining natural system—is not a gratuitous, semi-mystical fantasy. It is a really useful idea, a cure for distortions that spoil our current worldview.’

Though these ideas for creation care move in the right direction, the Christian faith claims that worship should be offered to God alone. To treat the creature as the Creator is a mistake. God is not Gaia. God is the only creator and the creation is filled with his glory.

To see the world through re-enchanted eyes is to see the divine presence radiating through all things—an ocean wave, the sand, soil, trees, streams, birds, insects and animals. All creation breathes with the breath of God. The ancient Israelites understood God’s presence in the wonder of the created world and yet they also saw themselves fully integrated into the life of that world both physically and spiritually. Rather than thinking of God as some eternal entity or ‘thing’ that exists apart from creation, Christian tradition understands that he inhabits his world and sustains all life.

Pope Francis is right—our environmental challenges are not a technological problem to be solved, they’re a spiritual problem that effects all of humanity. Technology can certainly help address some of the issues that we’ve created and move us towards a healthier future, but if we’re serious about an environmental response it needs to include a spiritual change. If we are called to cherish, keep and live in God’s creation, we will first need to change our hearts and our habits. To grow as participants in God’s integral ecology we begin with an understanding of who we are and our inclination towards things like gluttony. Then we can begin to recognise who we are as God’s creatures and how we can live beneficially and generously in our communities, in relation to our neighbour and to the natural world.

Christianity does not offer some ‘heavenly spirituality’ that detaches our lives from the natural world. Instead, it believes in a God who got his hands dirty in the soil of Eden to make human beings. This a God who fashioned his creation and inhabits his creation through his divine presence and his breath of life. This is also a God who inhabited flesh like us in the incarnation. He is a God who brought all things into beings, sustains all things, and invites us to participate and bring hope to a world fully integrated in the peace, justice and mercy of his love.

Explainer

Creed

Gaza

Israel

Middle East

Old Testament

War & peace

18 October 2023

12 min read

A history of Israel and Palestine – 4,000 years of history in 2,500 words

The land at the heart of the Middle Eastern crisis is at the centre of world attention again. For those whose grasp on the history behind the situation is hazy, Graham Tomlin offers a brief survey.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A blue and gold domed mosque sits surrounded by old stone buildings of a city.

Dome of the Rock, over the skyline of the Old City of Jerusalem.

Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash.

The story begins around 1800 BC, in the middle/late Bronze Age. According to the Bible, a nomadic tribal chief called Abraham received a mysterious call from God – known by the name of YHWH – not another tribal god among many, but the Creator God above all the gods. He was to move from his home in Ur in Mesopotamia, in modern day Iraq, to travel to Canaan in the west - a fertile strip of land bordering the Mediterranean Sea, a land inhabited at the time by various tribes known as Canaanites and ruled by the Egyptian Pharaohs.

Biblical texts report that somewhere around 1400 BC, the small tribe which understood itself to be the descendants of Abraham migrated further to Egypt. There, they experienced severe hardship, and sought to escape back into the land of the Canaanites, through a miraculous event known as the Exodus in around 1250 BC.

Over the coming centuries they began to settle in the land. The biblical stories depict this as a largely violent conquest, although the archaeological evidence suggests gradual assimilation into the land. It may have been a mixture of the two.

The growing kingdom

Around 1000 BC, the people now known as Israel, after one of Abraham's descendants, chose a king for the first time, called Saul, but it was his successor David who expanded the Israelite kingdom, capturing the ancient Jebusite stronghold of Jerusalem, making it the capital of the new nation. His son Solomon later built a Temple in the city, dedicated to YHWH, the God of the Israelites.

Infighting within the nation resulted in a division into two kingdoms, the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. In 722 BC, Israel was overrun by the Assyrians to the north, and in 587, Judah fell to the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed Solomon’s Temple.

Most of the Israelites were taken into exile, some scattered into Syria, many taken away to the dominant empire of Babylon. In 538 BC, by which time the Persians had taken over as the dominant empire in the region, Cyrus, the Persian king, gave permission to the descendants of the exiles to return to their ancestral land. In around 520 BC the Temple was rebuilt, even though it was a mere shadow of the former building. Around 445 BC, Nehemiah, against much opposition, tried to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, to make it a fortified city.

In 333 BC, the remarkable young Greek warrior, Alexander the Great, conquered the land. When he died in 323, two empires emerged from the territories that he ruled – the Ptolemaic and the Seleucid empires. These empires took it in turns to rule over the land until the Maccabees, a radical Jewish group, revolted against the Seleucids and formed a Jewish kingdom for the first time since the exile. This was the Hasmonean kingdom which lasted from 142 BC until it was overrun by the expanding Roman Emperor, with Pompey conquering Jerusalem in 63 BC.

The Roman and Byzantine empires

In 37 BC, Herod the Great, a half Jewish-half Idumean, ambitious yet paranoid man became king of Judaea with the permission of the Romans. He built several remarkable buildings, including a new, grand Temple in Jerusalem, the one present at the time of Jesus. In or around 6 BC, Jesus of Nazareth was born. He lived, taught, and performed miracles around Galilee and eventually journeyed to Jerusalem, where he was crucified by the Romans, after which his followers have always claimed that he rose from the dead, and appeared to many witnesses. The Christian community's presence in the land has shaped it in many ways until recent times as we shall see.

During this time, Judaea remained part of the Roman Empire. In the 60s AD, Jewish rebels revolted against Roman rule, a rebellion which was crushed by the Romans, who proceeded to flatten Herod’s temple. There has never been a Jewish temple on that site since that date.

70 years later, the Jews revolted against the Romans again, an uprising known as the Second Jewish Revolt, under Bar Kokhba. Yet again, the rebellion was put down – more severely this time. Much of Jerusalem was destroyed by the emperor Hadrian, who rebuilt it as an entirely new Roman city called Aelia Capitolina, trying to erase Jewish presence to put an end to the successive revolts, and renamed the land Palestina, after the Philistines, a seafaring tribe who had arrived in the land before the time of King David.

In 312, after an internal political and military struggle, Constantine became the first Christian emperor. This was the beginning of the Byzantine empire, named after the city of Byzantium, a new capital, chosen to rival Rome. In 326 Constantine authorised the building of Christian churches in the land, including the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, over the site of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

The rise of Islam

In the 7th century, Christian Byzantine rule over Jerusalem came to an end. The new faith preached by Muhammad (570-632) inspired determined armies to spread northwards from the Arabian desert. The second Caliph, Omar, accepted the surrender of Jerusalem bringing it under Arab, Muslim rule for the first time, although people of Arab descent had been in the land for a long time before – they are mentioned in the New Testament in the second chapter of the Book of Acts.

Since the Roman destruction of the temple in AD70, during the Byzantine period the site of the old Jewish temple had been kept as a dump for rubbish. In around 690, a Muslim ruler, Abd-al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock as a shrine on the site, to mark Muhammad’s reported night journey to heaven, followed soon by the Al Aqsa mosque nearby on the same site. Jerusalem now became a site of Muslim Pilgrimage.

In the early 11th century, tensions between Muslims and Christians led Caliph Hakim to demolish much of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was rebuilt shortly afterwards, but in a much less impressive format. In 1099 western Christians, hearing of attacks by Muslims on their holy places, and inspired by the idea of re-taking the Holy Land for Christendom, arrived in Jerusalem as part of the First Crusade. The Second Crusade arrived sometime later, but the Crusader armies were finally beaten by the Muslim leader Salah-ud-din (Saladin) in the battle of Hattin in Galilee in 1187. A third crusade tried to win the land back but was unsuccessful and the last Crusaders were banished back to Europe in 1291.

From the 13th to the 16th century, the land was ruled by the Mamluks, an Egyptian military class of former slaves. Meanwhile, the Byzantine empire came to an end in the mid-C15th when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, or Turks. This was the beginning of the Ottoman Empire, which ruled over the land of Palestine for 400 years, from 1517 to 1917. In the C16th the Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent built the famous walls of Jerusalem that are still standing today.

Throughout this long period, most inhabitants of the land were Arabs, descendants of the early settlers, and remnants of the Arab conquest. They were a mix of Christians and Muslims, while there were a number of Jews who lived in the land.

The rise of Zionism

In the 19th century, the long story of European anti-semitism began to gather pace, manifested for example in the famous Dreyfus affair which took place at the end of the century. The idea grew that Jews needed a homeland, with the first Zionist conference to advance the idea taking place in Basle, Switzerland in 1897. The obvious candidate, for historic reasons, was Palestine. The problem was there was already an Arab population long established in the land.

Towards the end of the first world war, the Ottoman empire began to break up. The Middle East was divided up into zones ruled by different European powers, with the British taking control of Palestine. The British recognised the gathering momentum for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and declared support for the idea in the Balfour declaration of 1917, while claiming at the same time to acknowledge the rights of the Arab peoples of the land. Before long, Jewish immigration to Palestine began to increase in volume, leading to increasing tension with the existing, predominantly Arab population.

In Europe, the extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust gave a radical urgency to the need for a homeland where Jewish people could feel safe. Many European Jews fled to Palestine, hoping to find a home and safety there. The British found themselves increasingly caught in the middle of violent and deadly clashes between Arab and Jewish groups. Underground Jewish militia sometimes targeted the British, such as in the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, the British headquarters in Palestine, by the Irgun, a Jewish militant group, which killed 91 people, most of them British soldiers.

Recognising their position was untenable, the British decided to withdraw from Palestine. In November 1947 the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, a proposal to partition the land into Jewish and Arab states of roughly equal size, although the Jewish territory was larger than the Arab one. The Arabs refused to accept the plan, as they felt they were the rightful owners of the land, and the Jews were newcomers.

When the British Mandate over Palestine came to an end in 1948, almost immediately, the Jews declared the creation of the State of Israel. Surrounding Arab countries immediately attacked the new state, but Jewish forces resisted successfully, and, under the leadership of David Ben Gurion, Jewish groups started to occupy Arab towns and cities, removing much of the Arab population, who for the most part were forced to leave. When this Arab-Israeli war finished, the new Jewish state held about 75 per cent of the land of Palestine, though with a significant Arab population still present within Israel. Around 700,000 Palestinian former residents became refugees, either in camps within Israel, or in surrounding countries such as Jordan, Syria or Lebanon. This period is known by the Israelis as the War of Independence, but by the Arabs as the Nakba – the catastrophe.

Israel as a nation grew and prospered. After a period of increasing tension between Israel and the surrounding Arab states of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, in 1967, to establish a buffer between themselves and their Arab neighbours, Israel issued a series of successful pre-emptive strikes, and after just six days, had occupied the Sinai Peninsula, formerly Egyptian territory, the Golan Heights belonging to Syria, and the West Bank of the river Jordan, including East Jerusalem, which had been under Jordanian rule.

UN Resolution 242 urged Israel to surrender the land that had been occupied. Instead, Israel began to build Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, enclaves where Jewish people lived within the territories, although these were regarded as illegal under international law. Settlement building has increased in recent years under more recent Israeli governments and remains one of the points of tension - Jewish settlements built on land that could in future become part of a Palestinian state, if one ever came into being.

In 1973, the boot was on the other foot as Egypt launched a strike on Israel on the festival of Yom Kippur, which, although ultimately beaten back by the Israelis, dented Israel’s sense of invulnerability to attack from their neighbours.

International pressure to resolve the long-running tension began to mount, and in 1978, under the mediation of US President Jimmy Carter, the Camp David accords were signed by Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt and Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel, establishing peace between the two nations. This was seen by militant Muslims as treachery and Sadat was assassinated by Egyptian Islamic Jihad in 1981.

Nonetheless, Israel withdrew from Sinai as promised, in 1982. Even though peace was established with Egypt, this did not bring an equivalent sense of harmony within the other occupied territories, particularly the West Bank. In the 1960s and 70s, Palestinian groups had carried out a campaign of attacks on Israel and Israeli targets abroad including the notorious attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, yet these had largely ceased by the late 70s. From 1987 to 1993, a Palestinian uprising against what they saw as Israeli occupation of their land, known as the first intifada increased tension across the region. As a result, secret talks between Israeli and Palestinian officials led to the Oslo Accords of 1993, signed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, in which Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation recognised the state of Israel and Israel gave up land in Gaza and the West Bank to the limited control of a Palestinian Authority, although with still some element of Israeli influence and control. Just as Sadat had been assassinated for what was seen as surrender on the Arab side in 1981, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist in 1995 for what was seen as a betrayal of the Israeli cause.

The 21st century

What was meant to be a peace process rolled on. The Camp David meeting in 2000, which was expected to bring about further progress for the Palestinian cause failed to do so and triggered the second intifada which lasted until 2005, much more violent and deadly than the first, with Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel and Israeli retaliation in the West Bank and Gaza. To stop incursions from Arabs into Israeli territory, the Israelis proposed building what they called a Security Wall, but as the Wall of Separation by the Palestinians, who felt that the wall was effectively a land grab, as at points, it stretched into land which hitherto had been traditionally part of the West Bank.

In 2005, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw troops and settlements from Gaza, yet in 2007, the Islamic militant organisation Hamas took over control of Gaza in a brief war with Fatah, the Palestinian party who had held control until this point. Hamas, unlike the PLO or Fatah, remained dedicated to the elimination of Israel and thus became a dangerous neighbour to Israel. In 2014, in a period of rising tension, Hamas rocket attacks into Israel provoked Israeli air strikes and a ground invasion. In this war, around 67 Israelis and around 2000 Palestinians died.

In 2017, President Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, something which had not happened before as Jerusalem had always been a divided city and claimed by both sides as their capital city.

In recent years Israel has sought to normalise relationships with Arab states, signing the Abrahamic Accords in 2020 with Bahrain, the UAE, and Morocco, with a possible deal with Saudi Arabia tentatively on the way.

The Hamas attacks on southern Israel in 2023 and the Israeli response in Gaza will have set back any progress in resolving this long-running tragedy for many years, in what is a familiar pattern of attack and retaliation.

The history is tangled, much more complex than outlined in a brief survey like this. Any attempt to understand the present needs to engage with the history of this fertile, fought-over and precious land, home to two great peoples with contested, but deep roots in the land, who we pray will one day be able to live together in peace – the peace brought and taught by the Prince of Peace.