A religious response to

the challenge of climate

change:
A perspective from
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dr Dianne Rayson
Senior Lecturer in Theology and Ethics
Pacific Theological College, Suva, FIJI
Image: Torres Strait Regional Council
Matthew Abbott | NY Times
09/04/2023 7
Dan Himbrechts/EPA
NASA: Ice core data
In the becoming human we recognize God’s love toward
God’s creation,
in the crucifixion God’s judgment on all flesh, and in the
resurrection God’s purpose for a new world.
Nothing could be more perverse than to tear these three
apart, because the whole is contained in each of them.

Ethics, “Ultimate and Penultimate Things”

DBWE 6:157
In the body of Jesus Christ, God is united with humankind, all
humanity is accepted by God,
and the world is reconciled to God.
There is no part of the world, no matter how lost,
no matter how godless,
that has not been accepted by God in Jesus Christ and
reconciled to God. . . The world belongs to Christ . . .’

Ethics, “Christ, Reality, and Good”

DBWE 6:66-67
In the becoming human we recognize God’s love toward
God’s creation,
in the crucifixion God’s judgment on all flesh, and in the
resurrection God’s purpose for a new world.
Nothing could be more perverse than to tear these three
apart, because the whole is contained in each of them.

Ethics, “Ultimate and Penultimate Things”

DBWE 6:157
 Whoever has felt but once how nature can embrace us
and rob us of our senses,
perhaps at a quiet forest lake in the evening, a lake that
shines into our soul like the deep eyes of a child,
perhaps before the simplicity of a beautiful forest
flower we encounter like a pure greeting nature sends to
its children; whoever has felt but once how creation,
how Mother Earth seizes the heart—that person will
know forever what he or she lacks. . . .
[A] rift runs through the world, a rift that is visible in
nature where human beings are, and that disappears
where human beings are no more.

Sermon on Philippians 4:7, Barcelona Feb 3, 1929

DBWE 10:546
 Humankind created in this way is humankind as the
image of God. It is the image of God not in spite of but
precisely in its bodily nature. For in their bodily nature
human beings are related to the earth and to other bodies;
they are there for others and are dependent upon others.
In their bodily existence human beings find their brothers
and sisters and find the earth. As such creatures, human
beings of earth and spirit are ‘like’ God, their Creator.

Creation and Fall, “The Human Being of Earth and Spirit

DBWE 3:79
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 I should really like to feel the full force of it again, burning on
one’s skin and gradually making one’s whole body glow, so that
one knows again that one is a corporeal being.
I’d like to get tired by the sun instead of by books and
thinking.
I’d like to have it awaken my animal existence, in the sense not
that debases one’s humanity but that delivers one from the
peevishness and artificiality of a merely intellectual existence
and makes a person purer and happier.

June 30, 1944

Letters and Papers, DBWE 8:449
Only when one loves life and the Earth so much that
with it everything seems to be lost and at its end may
one believe in the resurrection of the dead and a new
world.

Letter to Bethge, Second Sunday in Advent, Dec 5, 1943

DBWE 8:213
di.rayson@ptc.ac.fj

dirayson.com

Dr Di Rayson
Pacific Theological College
Suva, FIJI