Here I am at a TWU faculty lunch sharing a few words with fellow faculty on the issue of Global Warming, or in the new politically correct speech, “Climate Change” (CC herein). This was a change in name necessitated by the fact that recent science has confirmed a cooling rather than a warming of the the earth and its atmosphere.We are about to hear a lecture from Clive Mather, former CEO of Shell Oil, on this topic and judging by what he says here, we are in for a major call to completely change the social and economic basis of our current society. The issue of CC is one that militates against all other topics of theology in terms of its claim to preeminence. The onus on the church to reconsider its doctrine of the Creation mandate has never been more keenly felt since the recognition of its importance in the writing of Augustine on Genesis 1. Searching around for a recent theology of Creation that does any justice to the problems associated with the mandate of human dominion, visa vie Creation, leaves much to be desired. Yet, the recent flood of social, scientific and political ink being spilled on the subject fairly cries out for a divine perspective on the matter. One of the central questions will certainly be, “to what degree should theology be made to serve a renewed ordering of society based on the incomplete findings of environmental science with respect to CC?” My suspicion, based on Mather’s lecture today, is that we will once again have theology hear from humanity before it hears from God, and once again what it does in the service of this scientific perspective will not in the long run be a service of theology. More on this later.
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