The Added Benefit of Being True: Part 2
July 18, 2008
This post originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine. Part 1 appeared yesterday.
The Rev. Jim Ball, Ph.D., is an ordained Baptist minister, the President and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network, and the national spokesperson for the Evangelical Climate Initiative.
So it was with my biblical worldview that I entered the hearing room of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee on June 7th as a representative of the Evangelical Climate Initiative to face possibly the greatest global warming denier in the country, Sen. Jim Inhofe, Republican from Oklahoma, who has called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” During my testimony I flatly stated that “We believe the science is settled, and it is time to focus on solving the problem.” Sen. Inhofe later remarked that “No one with a straight face can say that the science is settled.” (My face was straight when I said it, by the way. I checked the videotape.)
Now Sen. Inhofe is a fellow Christian. But he is in denial about the problem of global warming. He is not the only one.
During my testimony I was joined by three other witnesses who affirmed that global warming was a problem that must be addressed: Bishop Schori, the head of the Episcopal Church; John Carr, representing the Catholic Bishops, and; Rabbi David Saperstein, representing the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life.
But we were opposed by three of my evangelical brethren, all invited to testify by Sen. Inhofe. They all denied the human contribution to global warming, saying the science wasn’t settled. It was quite sad, actually, because the science has never been clearer, with the world’s most authoritative body on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recently concluding that there is a greater than 90% probability that the warming since 1950 is mainly due to human activities. President Bush has now finally recognized the human contribution. Even ExxonMobil, a key funder of global warming skeptics, now recognizes this and is ready to begin to solve the problem.
Because we are human, all of us are wrong about something – heck, maybe multiple somethings multiple times in a day. My four evangelical brothers at the hearing – Sen. Inhofe and his three witnesses – are wrong about global warming. They’re still in denial. I don’t know why, but they are.
With its realism about the human condition the Bible teaches us not to deny problems, but to face them. The examples of the disciples shows us that even though we make mistakes, even though we fail, the Lord picks us up and dusts us off and sets us on the path of righteousness.
We don’t have to deny hard problems like global warming that will inflict tremendous suffering on the least of these. We may not like knowing what global warming will do. It could tempt us to despair, or to deny. But our hope rests not in ourselves but in our God who turns crucifixions into resurrections. With God’s help we can face anything, including global warming.
Comments
Got something to say?
