"Hastening the Day" when the Earth Will Burn? Global Warming, Revelation and 2 Peter 3 (Advent 2, Year B)‪.‬

Vice President A1 Gore compares the terrifying prospect of global warming's effects on the world to "taking a nature hike through the book of Revelation." Gore's nature hike could also include 2 Peter 3-the epistle text assigned for the Second Sunday of Advent this year in the lectionary. For Christians seeking biblical counsel on the environment, 2 Peter 3 poses particular problems because it consigns the earth to burning up by fire. We are well on our way to that burning. Three scientific reports from the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released in 2007 read more like Revelation's plague sequences than like typical scientific reports--with predictions of higher sea levels, more acidic oceans, fiercer storms, deadlier forest fires, more heat-related deaths, longer dry seasons, declining water supplies, catastrophic floods, and increasing infectious diseases around the world. In an ironic coincidence, one of those reports was released Good Friday--fitting, perhaps, since the report narrates the future passion and suffering, even death, of hundreds of millions of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people, even if temperatures rise only as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit or 2 degrees Centigrade.