Exile
Leaving Today’s World in a New Climate
In his book Why Christianity Must Change or Die the late John Shelby Spong, an Episcopal bishop in the United States, discussed the exile of the Hebrews at the time of the first Temple, thought to be around the year 590 BCE. Jerusalem had been conquered by Babylonian invaders led by King Nebuchadnezzar II. The Hebrews were forced into exile, and their Temple was destroyed.
Of this event Spong says,
Exile is never a voluntary experience. It is always something forced upon a person or a people by things or circumstances over which the affected ones have no control. One does not leave one’s values, one’s way of life, or one’s defining beliefs voluntarily . . .
. . . exile is not a wilderness through which one journeys to arrive at a promised land. Exile is an enforced dislocation into which one enters without any verifiable hope of either a return to the past or an arrival at some future desired place.
In the despair of meaningless, these Jewish people were forced to leave everything they knew and everything they valued . . . There was no hope of return.
Eventually, after about fifty years, the Hebrews were able to return to their homeland. But there had been no guarantee of their return. And even when they did return the old Jerusalem and its Temple were gone to which they returned was not the same place — they had to rebuild, both physically and spiritually.
Spong compared the exile of these ancient peoples with the manner in which people of faith in the 20th century were reluctantly forced to abandon statements in the Bible and creeds, particularly those statements that purportedly described how the physical world worked. For example, how can a Christian who understands the basics of astronomy read or hear the following words of the Nicene creed without feeling as if he or she is in some kind of exile?
For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven . . . he ascended into heaven.
A person of faith in our time who has even the most rudimentary knowledge of astronomy may reasonably wonder what the term ‘down from heaven’ means when our vehicles are exploring the planet Mars, and when ‘heaven’ is increasingly full of our space junk. Wherever heaven may be, it is not ‘up there’.
The person who hears the words of the creed is in intellectual exile. He or she may be a person of faith, but they cannot reconcile their faith with what they know about the physical world.
Our Climate Fate
Spong’s insights to do with exile can also be applied to our dilemma with regard to climate change and other physical predicaments such as resource depletion and biosphere destruction.
The Hebrews were driven into exile by a superior military power. They had no choice in the matter. Had they built up their own military forces earlier, or had they forged different political alliances, they may have been able to prevent a successful Babylonian attack. But they didn’t, so they were forced out of Jerusalem.
So it is with climate change. Had we acted thirty years ago we may have been able to create a smooth transition to a ‘green’ world. But we didn’t, so here we are. Even if we were to take drastic action now — a highly unlikely event, as we see from the lack of interest in COP27 — the climate will continue to deteriorate because there is a significant lag between our actions and the subsequent changes to the climate.
Like it or not, we are being driven into a climate exile. Just like the Hebrews of old, we do not know where we are going, we do not know what life will be like once we are there, and there is no promise of return. The old, stable-climate world has gone forever.
An Unknown Destination
The Hebrews did not know what their new home in Babylon would look like. It was likely that they would become slaves, and that they would be treated harshly. It was even possible that they would be killed en masse. (In fact, there is some evidence to indicate that they were treated relatively well, and that they were allowed to retain their own culture and religion. They even developed their own businesses and trading networks. But none of this was guaranteed.)
So it is with climate change. We anticipate that the consequences will be bad, maybe to the point of human extinction, as summarized in that magnificent acronym: TEOTWAWKI, The End of the World as We Know It. But we may be wrong. Maybe things will turn out better than we anticipate. We simply don’t know. However, prudence suggests that we should plan for the worst, and hope for the best.
Many people hope and believe that ‘green’ technology such as hydrogen cars, or Gen IV nuclear, or a carbon tax, or carbon capture, or solar mirrors will allow us to remain in our Jerusalem and avoid exile. One of these magical technologies will, it is hoped, allow us to cool the planet while maintaining our current energy-profligate lifestyle and continuing to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer. we hope that we can have our environmental cake and eat it.
This way of thinking, assumes that we still have a choice — that exile is not inevitable. This is not the case — all that we can do is try to control the speed of decline and the impact of the changes. We treat climate change as something with which we can negotiate, as if we are working with other human beings. But the laws of physics, thermodynamics and biology do not negotiate. The have no interest in our needs, attitudes or beliefs. They merely exist. This is our exile.
Many of the Hebrews did eventually return to Jerusalem following the eventual military defeat of the Babylonians. (Some of the Hebrews may actually have preferred to remain in Babylon — after all, it was for most of them the only home that they had known.) Those that did return did not return to the world that they had left many years earlier. In particular, their Temple — the physical and spiritual center of their world — was gone.
So it is now. We don’t know what the world say 50 or a 100 years from now will look like. But we can say with certainty that it will be profoundly different from today’s world. Our equivalent to the First Temple is buried sunlight in the form of coal, oil and natural gas. We will have to live without those resources.
Throughout this series, we provide three guidelines that may be helpful in the development of a theology that is appropriate for these new and rather scary times. The second of these guidelines is,
Accept and Adapt
