Tracing the Birth of an Idea
I’ve been trying to remember when I started taking note of global warming. And I have no idea what events triggered my interest or my care. My only clear recollection is sitting in Cineworld’s Glasgow Renfrew Street cinema watching a special showing of An Inconvenient Truth. That experience was so emotionally powerful, I can still recall that I had an end of an aisle seat next to the stairs. It leaves me assuming that by 2006 my environmental awareness had taken root sufficiently for this documentary to have a lasting impact upon my life. One of the thoughts that began circling my mind that night as the credits rolled was: surely Jesus would speak out for environmental protection even if his church rearming predominantly silent?
About a year later, Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change came out. I was already a huge fan of Brian’s work, but this book still remains one of my all time favourites. I think this is because Brian was asking similar questions to what I was contemplating: what do the life and teachings of Jesus have to say about the world’s greatest problems?
By April 2014, I was formulating a plan for the book I’m now writing. I wanted to write “environmental theology.”
Like many non-fiction authors, I regularly deep dive into Amazon and other online book stores, searching for books, reading reviews, and stalking authors who are writing about the topics I want to write about. Research can be expensive, particularly into theological topics, so I always like to make sure as much as I can that I only purchase books that are not simply regurgitating tired and/or violent theology.
Occasionally, you come across a book that opens up a whole new way of thinking. And one of the books I took a risk on that April was The Lost World of Genesis One by John H. Walton was one of those. Everything clicked for me. I had already sensed we were reading the creation story of Genesis 1 wrongly, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly how. Simply put, I lacked the imagination to think outside of our culture’s and church’s fascination with the material side of creation. Walton’s fresh theological interpretation of the opening pages of the Bible was nothing short of revolutionary for me. Suddenly, I had my entry point in to what I wanted to write about. Walton’s unexpected take on Genesis 1 provided me with the roots to grow the rest of my environmental theology.
I spent the whole of May 2014 writing down my thoughts about creation and the environment, but it never went further than a notebook. I don’t know about you, but I tend to have several ideas battling it out for my commitment. And by the end of 2014, I had chosen to commit to writing another idea that had been growing for even longer. That book became Lament Forgive.
It’s now been over seven years since my initial ideas were written down—much, much longer than I would have guessed at in 2014 or even in 2018 when I released Lament Forgive, but life can go like that. I’m also all too aware, that there’s much I’m writing now in 2021 that my 2014 self was not ready or unable to write, especially in regard to a nonviolent reading of the Bible. In a world that values the instantaneous and getting things as quickly as possible, some ideas just need time to grow and their writers sometimes just need space to learn and mature and gain new insights.
While I wish my memory for this kind of thing was better so I could pinpoint my experiences and influences upon my environmental care before 2006’s cinema trip, this exercise has reminded me how reliant we are upon the pioneers who go before us confronting the status quo and challenging the accepted truths. An Inconvenient Truth, Everything Must Change, and The Lost World of Genesis One all continue to be sources of inspiration for me as I write my own addition to this world in the hope that I can help propel environmental care to its rightful place at the forefront of Christian life and practice.
