Unraptured by Zack Hunt

Author:Zack Hunt [Hunt, Zack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-5138-0417-0
Publisher: Herald Press
Published: 2019-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

New heaven, new earth

At the heart of the incarnation-versus-escape dynamic is the issue of climate change. In the beginning, God commanded Adam and Eve to care for the creation God had given them—care for, not exploit. The word dominion often appears in our English Bibles, but the Hebrew word being translated as “dominion” (radah) isn’t about exploitation. Radah is the sort of responsibility Old Testament kings were called to have. The kings of Israel weren’t anointed by God to exploit their subjects however they saw fit. They were called to care for the people of Israel by ensuring justice for the poor and defending the weak. In the same way, the call of Genesis to have “dominion” over the earth is a call to care for the earth, not exploit it for our own selfish ends. We’ve obviously not done a great job of that task to steward the earth, and as a result, the climate is changing rapidly. Temperatures are rising, and sea levels with them. Glaciers are disappearing and so are animal species and entire ways of life for people in coastal communities.8

As caretakers of the garden—people with a divine calling to care for creation—we should be at the forefront of caring for creation. But we’re not. In fact, the very idea of climate change is anathema to many American Christians, particularly dispensationalists. Part of the refusal to accept the truth about climate change is the result of a never-ending stream of propaganda from right-wing media. The years-long effort to brainwash people on behalf of the oil and gas industries can’t be overstated. But when we talk about the church and climate change, we cannot overlook the role that dispensationalism plays in neglecting creation.

When most of us read the last two chapters of Revelation and hear about a new heaven and new earth, where there will be no more sickness or death or sorrow or mourning, for the old things will have passed away and all things will be made new—when we read that, our hearts are warmed and our souls are filled with hope. That’s true for dispensationalists as well. But end-times theology also gives them a pass—a “get out of jail free” card—for caring about the environment. After all, why do we need to make sure our oceans are clean and the air is breathable if Jesus is just going to set it all on fire and start over again?

While climate change denial might be new, escapism and ambivalence are not. They’ve been around as long as Revelation itself. In the sixteenth century, long before fossil fuels were invented or factories were chugging out smoke, the famous reformer Martin Luther is said to have confronted this attitude directly. What was his apocryphal response to a laissez- faire attitude about caring about the here and now if Jesus is just going to start everything over again? “Even if I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree.” It’s a defiant statement, one that speaks to our call to incarnate faith in the here and how.

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