Climate Crisis – Review
Climate Crisis, The Challenge to the Church, by David Rhodes, April 2020. Kevin Mayhew, ISBN: 978-1-83858-081-0, 164 pages. RRP £10.99 (paperback)
If you are looking for a book that addresses the important role which the Church could play in engaging with the climate crisis, and share the author’s sense that the Church has become lost in its own preoccupations, then this short book is for you. David Rhodes introduces its focus: “The Church has ignored the Jesus vision of radical social justice summed up in the call to love our neighbour. It has buried him under a mountain of religion, blinding us to his message of love and liberation”.
He begins by recognising that the climate crisis overshadows all the poverty, injustice and racism that blights the world, before arguing that some basic theological assumptions are blocking the ability of the Church to engage with that crisis. What is lacking is not the necessary technology but the political will to make the changes required. But he believes that the Church must change before it can support the radical social change needed globally. “To play its part in halting climate disaster, the Church needs to recalibrate its understanding of why it exists. To lay aside the comfort blanket of religion and get down and dirty in the political arena – as Jesus did.”
Rhodes, a former journalist before becoming a parish priest, with a gift of being able to say important things simply and powerfully, has produced a book which will be accessible, engaging and helpful for many Christians. It is not a comfortable read. He means to challenge the reader, and does so with startlingly fresh readings of some of the more difficult parables. He asks whether in the parable of the workers waiting to be employed in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16), Jesus was actually confronting the poor with the injustice which kept them in poverty and whether, in the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), the third servant, burying his money, reveals how the rich man ruthlessly exploits those who are economically vulnerable.
I did feel uncomfortable with Rhodes’ combative journalistic style. To say that the Church has buried the real Jesus under centuries of dogma and tradition is true in some respects, but it also minimises how dogma and tradition in their specific, culturally-bound ways, actually witness profoundly to the real Jesus. It is, after all, the Church which has given birth to Christian Aid, CAFOD and so many local projects.
I would have appreciated a more balanced treatment of theological sources. Rhodes criticises St Augustine’s “command and control strategy” as a bishop, and his abrasive thinking about original sin. But it was Augustine who wrote: “What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear sighs and sorrows. That is what love looks like.” As Rhodes himself writes, “The Church treats love as an abstract noun but, for God, it is an extremely active verb. Love means much more than having a kindly and sympathetic disposition towards another person. It is a social and therefore political activity.”
Andrew Norman
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