For a former seminary student Tony Abbott is not a very good interpreter of the Bible. Of course, he’s very strong on defending western culture and its Judaeo-Christian roots. For this cause he is an unwavering ideological warrior. But as in all wars, truth is often the first casualty. In this case, it’s the truth of the very scriptures Abbott himself employs.



His latest intervention, invoking Genesis to push back against the “religion” of climate change, is a prime example. His use of the Bible was clumsy – and not for the first time.

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A few years ago on Q&A, he was asked “What would Jesus do?” in relation to refugees. Stunningly, his first impulse was to invoke the example of Jesus clearing the temple. When pressed, he expanded on the connection. Jesus knew everything, he told us, and this included that there was “a place for everything and it is not necessarily everyone’s place to come to Australia”. Are we to believe that when Jesus cleared the temple of what didn’t belong there he was giving us a mandate for the treatment of refugees? What possible connection was Abbott drawing? The mind boggles.

But perhaps this cavalier attitude to the Bible is not unrelated to the battle he wages for western values.

His 2015 Margaret Thatcher lecture, addressing Europe’s refugee crisis, was an earlier occasion when he linked a oblique Bible reference to the roots – and preservation – of the west:

[T]he imperative to “love your neighbour as you love yourself” is at the heart of every western polity. It expresses itself in laws protecting workers, in strong social security safety nets, and in the readiness to take in refugees. It’s what makes us decent and humane countries as well as prosperous ones, but – right now – this wholesome instinct is leading much of Europe into catastrophic error.

The command to love the neighbour is invoked, but circumscribed. The “error” to be avoided is allowing the influx of refugees to “possibly changing [Europe] for ever”. In other words, Europe and its preservation is the goal. Biblical teachings (or allusions to them) serve to defend western culture – as idealised by Abbott and his fellow cultural warriors. It can be used to critique other cultures, but not “the west”.

It is therefore not surprising to discover that the former prime minister’s recent speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation displayed a similar juxtaposition of the Bible and an endorsement of the west. On this occasion, however, there was an added concern: the alleged advance of a new religion.

Climate change is by no means the sole or even the most significant symptom of the changing interests and values of the west. Still, only societies with high levels of cultural amnesia – that have forgotten the scriptures about man created “in the image and likeness of God” and charged with “subduing the earth and all its creatures” – could have made such a religion out of it.

The logic seems to go like this. Climate change is replacing Christianity as the west’s religion. But if we’d just stick to the Bible we would realise that climate change isn’t a problem. After all, the Bible teaches that we are to “subdue the earth”. In other words, climate change is actually part of the divinely-mandated human vocation.

It is regrettably true that the teaching about “subduing the earth” (found in Genesis 1:28) has been used as an ideological tool to justify exploitative and destructive attitudes towards the earth. But even a cursory engagement with the critical discussion of this verse will quickly reveal that this use and English translation of the text are themselves in some tension with its use in Genesis 1.

The text preceded the industrialised world by at least a couple of thousand years and was pitched at an agrarian society. Even if we take the resonances of the English word “subdue” at face value, it would have meant something quite different in that earlier context. To invoke it to justify the climate change produced since the industrial revolution is a straightforward category mistake.

But, and this is the crucial point, we shouldn’t take the English translation at face value in any case. We need to engage the meaning of the original Hebrew word: kabash.

All exercises in translation are complex, and, yes, there are some problematic dimensions to this word where it surfaces in other parts of the Bible. But in Genesis it’s connected to the divine declaration of creation’s goodness. In this first chapter of the Bible kabash can suggest the idea of “development”, argues Old Testament scholar Terence Fretheim. “This process offers to the human being the task of intra-creational development, of bringing the world along to its fullest possible creational potential.”

When the original readers of this text read it they would not have heard a cavalier “change the climate at your convenience”. Instead, they are more likely to have heard something like, “make something good of this earth”.

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If this is what subdue means in Genesis 1, and if human actions harm the earth, despoil it of its goodness, and frustrate its potential, then this biblical teaching becomes a critique of the environmental damage humans have caused, not a justification for it. That the west has undeniable Christian roots does not mean that the Bible is simply there to defend whatever “the west” has become.

Convinced that climate change is the new religion, Abbott argued in his London speech for “less theology”. Actually, Abbott himself needs more Christian theology if he’s going to quote the Bible. As a former seminary student, perhaps he could rekindle his own theological studies. He would discover that the Bible contains literature capable of calling every culture into question, not least “the west”. And he would be better informed for those occasions when he makes theological pronouncements from the various platforms he is given as a former PM.