According to the BBC website, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams has urged a “Radical change of heart” to prevent runaway climate change and has said that God would not guarantee a “happy ending”.
So is consumerism and the environment a problem for people? Is it a moral issue? Is it an issue of love? Is greed and laziness the cause of it and something that Christians should take a stand against?
On the other hand is it the responsibility of the Christian? What about spirituality? What about salvation? What exactly do we think the future of the world is?
Certainly you can’t deny the power of spiritual issues to take away emphasis from the world in which we live. For a lot of Christians the Gospel is the answer to the problems of the world, and therefore separate from it – the point being to concentrate on God and spirituality, not be concerned with “earthly” things.
Of course written like that it sounds silly, we are of course concerned with earthly things. And Jesus made it clear that this is what we should do, not only by getting out of bed and coming down to earth in the first place, but he told us to.
So how much of our command to love one another extends to the issue of the environment and consumerism – this is the question.
Dr. Rowan Williams says this: “I think that to suggest that God might intervene to protect us from the corporate folly of our practices is as unchristian and unbiblical as to suggest that he protects us from the results of our individual folly or sin”. He also went on to say that humanity could be “choked, drowned, or starved by its own stupidity”, a funny and poignant way to put it.
For me what matters is the fact that, at the moment, Christianity is oriented towards personal responsibility, and Christians attitude towards the environment reflects this. We can believe what we want to.
