This short text (>40 pages) is a quick read, but is well worth it. Published by Wide Margin, “a new Christian publishing house focusing on books on Christian living particularly from first-time and non-Western authors,” the essay examines the “climate of crisis” — economic, environmental, and otherwise — that characterizes the contemporary world.

I highly recommend this essay as a manifesto for the necessity for radical political, social, and cultural action by Christians. The author, a former missionary, combines down-to-earth Christian experience with academic acumen, and did a good job shattering my own stereotypes about what sorts of things people doing missionary work believe. Drawing from such diverse authors as C. S. Lewis, Walter Wink, Naomi Klein, Walter Benjamin, and Slavoj Žižek (who is cited the most frequently), Ingleby unapologetically calls for very left-wing solutions to the crises that face the world.

Ingleby does a good job of critiquing several inadequate Christian approaches to environmental and economic crisis in the world, dispelling the myth that “this world is not our home” and that therefore we should ignore its problems. The author’s admirable goal is to contextualize the message of the Gospel to the real-world circumstances that face twenty-first-century humanity, and thus he is unashamed to see Christianity as being inherently environmentalist, anti-capitalist, and justice-oriented.

Two insights struck me as particularly valuable. Ingleby makes the much-needed point that “because relationships are at the heart of all this, we can say that even more important than survival is justice.” Borrowing from Walter Wink, Ingleby straightforwardly describes systems that privilege survival over justice as demonic, and correctly notes that sacrifice will be needed for justice. Though easily (and, I feel, wrongly) critiqued as naïve, this moral clarity is a much-needed reminder in the current political climate.

Ingleby’s other key insight is his appropriation of Žižek’s call for an alliance between political radicals (particularly in the environmentalist movement) and proponents of Christian apocalypticism for the creation of a “radical emancipatory politics.” Ingleby is correct in his assertion that these two groups (often viewed as polar opposites in popular discourse) share many of the same goals. It is tempting to imagine what American politics would have looked like over the past few decades if this call for a leftist Christianity had been heeded earlier.

Constrained by the shortness of his essay, Ingleby presents few solutions to the crises he trumpets. But Christians and Catastrophe effectively presents the Biblical case for a renewed and contextualized Christian apocalypticism, and, perhaps most importantly, reclaims apocalyptic rhetoric and vision as a tool of radical hope rather than destructive despair. For this vision of Christianity as a call for action in crisis, I recommend this short book as a basic, coherent introduction to its topic — and even as a manifesto for a differently-politicized Church of the third millennium.

Advertisement