Climate change: Church must reclaim its role to make 'a little heaven down here'

People take part in a Fridays for Future protest outside the Austrian Economic Chamber, in Vienna, Austria, May 14, 2021.[Reuters]

If you remove the Garden of Eden from the Bible’s creation narrative, the church’s message would be significantly altered–it may even collapse. This garden is critical to the church’s existence.

Even when critics challenge the concreteness of the garden account, the church guards the garden fiercely. Maybe the critics of the Garden of Eden would be disarmed if the church actively translated its protection of the Garden-in-the-Book to the preservation of the drying-up-brooks everywhere. Few entities have a reason to be on the frontline of the climate-change conversation more than Bible-believers and their institutions. Their very existence is hinged on it.