Matthew Henry John Bartlett

In a recent emergent church ‘theological conversation’ Brian McLaren said:

One quick example about theology: I spend about half my time in main-line churches and half my time in evangelical circles and I think a lot of main-line folks have no idea how pervasive a lot of the old thinking is, until they hear about polling numbers for elections, or until one day the radio doesn’t work right and they listen to all those stations they normally avoid. But just to give an example of how much theology does matter in this: I think probably most of you are somewhat familiar with the issues of global warming. I was at a meeting recently that I discovered was a meeting that was staged in a sense to help the Southern Baptists become part of a discussion about whether global warming might be real. What I was told by scientists in England was something like this: “All of us involved with this issue know that if the United States doesn’t get involved and care about this, everybody else’s efforts are reduced by 30%. If the Republicans are in power we know that they will not change their opinion on global warning unless the Religious Right tells them to. But we also know that the Religious Right won’t go any further than the Southern Baptists will go. For scientists in many places of the world it looks like the environment of the planet belongs to the Southern Baptists and it’s being held hostage.” And I find that when I speak about environmental issues, there’re an awful lot of people who say, “Why do you worry about that? The world’s going to end within the next ten years, it’s going to burn up anyway.” And there are a lot of us who live with that theology and see it, and it’s very pervasive.