Al Gore on the Antarctic Isle of Patmos (Revelation)

CLIMATE BIBLE STUDY: May 2023  

Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos, by Titian, c. 1553/1555

by Lowell Bliss

Director, Eden Vigil Institute for Environmental Leadership, WCIU

In the final book of the Bible, Revelation, the visions—especially the cataclysmic ones—seem to come at us relentlessly. The first of the seven seals are opened up at the beginning of Chapter 6 and they follow one after another: war, violence, economic dislocation, famine, and earthquakes among them. The seventh seal however is different. It contains seven trumpets poised for judgment. Think of the seventh seal as a malevolent Russian stacking doll because the seventh trumpet also contains the seven bowls, the worst of them all, until:

The seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and out of the temple came a loud voice from the throne, saying, “It is done!” Then there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder and a severe earthquake. No earthquake like it has ever occurred since mankind has been on earth, so tremendous was the quake. The great city split into three parts, and the cities of the nations collapsed. God remembered Babylon the Great and gave her the cup filled with the wine of the fury of his wrath. Every island fled away and the mountains could not be found. From the sky huge hailstones, each weighing about a hundred pounds, ell on people. And they cursed God on account of the plague of hail, because the plague was so terrible (Rev 16:17).

Biblical scholars call this a telescoping structure: the bowl judgements are contained in the trumpets which are contained in the seals. They telescope out, not only into the future, but also out upon planet Earth. Revelation is very much an earth-based drama. In fact, the word earth is mentioned 63 times in the Book of Revelation, almost three times more than in any other New Testament book. A naturalist reading of Revelation would probably substitute the word “cascading” for “telescoping.” That’s what Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen do in their new book An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity. They borrow a phrase from the late Jim Koplin, “multiple cascading crises.” “It’s time for a summary of our assessment,” they write. “The human species faces multiple cascading social and ecological crises that will not be solved by virtuous individuals making moral judgments of others’ failures or by frugal people exhorting the profligate to lessen their consumption. Things are bad, getting worse, and getting worse faster than we expected” (82).

I’m used to my news feed feeling like a relentless cascade of bad news about the climate crisis, but this past month I felt the same thing from scientific reports. Last month, we prayed about the conclusion of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Cycle. We won’t necessarily be hearing from them again for a while, at least not so systematically or fulsomely. I thought we had some time to process (i.e., grieve) what the report was saying about the 1.5°C target. But of course, climate research continues even if the IPCC isn’t convened to summarize it, and so we had a report on European glaciers, with glaciers in Switzerland losing six percent of their bulk in a one record-breaking year. And then a team of Australian and American scientists published that fresh water intrusion from “ice melt off Antarctica could, over the next few decades, dramatically alter ocean circulation, with knock-on effects that would affect everything from sea levels and marine habitats to weather patterns over land.”

Cataclysms and bad news aren’t the only things that can cascade. So can thoughts and memories and connections. I remembered that the first time I had ever heard about the possible collapse of what is called the global ocean conveyor belt was in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. In fact, that was one of the surprising findings of this most recent study: a slowdown of ocean circulation will more likely be caused by what is happening at the South Pole rather than the North, as Gore had described. I also remembered a photo in An Inconvenient Truth of an Alpine village devastated by a flash flood and Gore narrating, “Europe has just had a year very similar to the one we’ve had where they say nature has just been crazy, crazy, all kinds of unusual catastrophes like a major hike through the book of Revelations.” (Gore resurrected the phrase in a CNN interview in 2016 when he said, “When every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation, that builds demand for meaningful action.”)

I remembered that part of the conservative Christian backlash to An Inconvenient Truth included reference to that scene. “How dare Al Gore try to co-opt the Book of Revelation!” “How dare,” the denialists said, “Al Gore compare the climate hoax to the seal, trumpet, and bowl judgments!”

And then I remembered to stop and take a deep breath.

I’ve said it before in these newsletters, but I appreciate how the issue of climate change encourages us to read the Bible in new ways, ways that nonetheless remain faithful to handling Scripture reverently. I really have no interest in trying to track down the details of climate change in the Book of Revelation as some sort of exercise in End Times Prophecy. Honestly, that feels like buying into the denialist’s game. If you are interested, you can read Focus on the Family’s rebuttal entitled “Al Gore’s Curious Interpretation of the Book of Revelation” and maybe conclude, as I have, that there is nothing there for anyone’s edification, certainly not the planet’s.

Instead, I’m ready to read the Book of Revelation as Bible scholar Bart Erhman does in his Fresh Air interview (Apr 3, 2023). Of all that the writer John might be doing in exile on the Isle of Patmos, he is certainly processing his anger toward the Roman empire’s unjust treatment of vulnerable Christians. I too am processing anger. “The time has come for the judging the dead. . . and for destroying those who destroy the earth” (Rev. 11:18). Will it play out like this? I don’t know. But my emotions are as real as John’s.

Instead, I’m ready to read the Book of Revelation as Jackson and Jemson do in their book An Inconvenient Apocalypse where they note that, for however the word apocalypse might have been co-opted by zombie movies, it means something quite specific. “The two words are synonymous in their original meaning: revelation from Latin and apocalypse from Greek both mean a lifting of the veil, a disclosure of something hidden from most people, a coming to clarity.” I welcome each new scientific report because, as Jackson and Jemson say, “we need to lift the veil, to be able to see reality as clearly as possible. Our chances of coping successfully with the ‘end times’ of those human-created systems increase if we are diligent in learning how the laws of physics and chemistry, along with the lessons of biology, are relevant to our struggles” (77).

Instead, I’m ready to read the Book of Revelation as theologian Brian Blount does in his interview on the Bible for Normal People podcast. “I like to tell people that one of my pet peeves is that people will often say ‘Revelations’ when they’re talking about the title of the book,” a mistake that Al Gore makes in his 2006 documentary but corrects in his 2016 interview. No, Blount says, “there is only one revelation in the book; there are many visions, but there’s one revelation. The title is singular. The Revelation is simple: it’s that Jesus Christ is Lord, and the expectation is that the people who read this book will witness to the revelation that Jesus Christ is Lord.” And so, in the face of multiple cascading crises, news reports, and scientific reports, let’s continue to witness to Caesar, to the polluters, and to the recalcitrant parties to the Paris Agreement: “Jesus is Lord, and you are not!”