The Church of England’s House of Bishops has produced, in Hope for All Creation, a document of considerable craft. It is beautifully set, theologically literate, and pastorally sincere. It draws on Psalm 104 and Romans 8, on Lambeth resolutions and primatial statements, and on the latest bulletin from the Stockholm Resilience Centre with equal confidence. It sets out, in three tidy movements — See, Reflect, Act — to place the “environmental crises” at the heart of Christian faith and mission and to summon the Church of England to what it calls “ecological conversion.”
That the bishops have written such a document at all is unsurprising. That they have written it this well is a small mercy. That they have written it with so little critical distance from either its scientific premises or its theological drift is the burden of what follows.
What the Document Argues
Part One, See, presents the Earth as “diverse, interconnected and in crisis.” The bishops adopt without qualification the planetary boundaries framework associated with Johan Rockström and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, whose 2025 update reports that seven of nine boundaries have now been “transgressed”: climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, and atmospheric aerosol loading. Atmospheric CO₂ is reported at 427 ppm, up from a pre-industrial 280. Extreme weather, sea-level rise, and the sufferings of the global poor are said to be intensifying and largely of human manufacture. Biodiversity loss is described in comparably urgent terms, with industrial agriculture, industrialisation, and consumption identified as the dominant drivers of what the document, following the fashionable usage, calls the Anthropocene. Creation, in the words of Romans 8, “groans.” The response required is correspondingly comprehensive.
Part Two, Reflect, offers the theological warrant. Creation is God-sustained and interconnected; humanity is created in the image of God yet embedded in the “web of life”; sin is portrayed as a fracture not only of the vertical relation to God and the horizontal relation to neighbour, but of the ecological relation as well, with Hosea 4:3 pressed into service. Redemption is cosmic: the Incarnation as divine solidarity with creation, Colossians 1:19–20 as the reconciliation of “all things,” Romans 8:19–22 as the promise of liberation for a groaning cosmos. The eschatological horizon is the “new heavens and new earth” of 2 Peter 3 and Revelation 21, read with a marked preference for continuity over discontinuity. The Five Marks of Mission are invoked, and the fifth — “to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation” — is drawn into close, at moments almost interchangeable, relation with the first. The sacraments are commended as foretastes of a transformed creation, and the faithful are summoned to “ecological conversion,” restraint, and solidarity with the poor and with creatures alike.
Part Three, Act, is what one would expect, and need not detain us.
The rhetorical achievement is real. The bishops have produced a document that is coherent, humane, and eminently quotable. It will be preached from, cited in synod, and pressed into diocesan environmental strategies for a decade. It deserves, for that reason alone, a careful reading rather than a reflexive one.
The Science, Considered
A conservative reader — by which I mean here one who is neither a denier of climate change nor a devotee of catastrophism — will note first that the bishops have adopted a particular scientific narrative as though it were the whole of the settled science. It is not.
The planetary boundaries framework is not an empirical measurement in the way that atmospheric CO₂ concentration is a measurement. It is a normative model, developed by a specific research network, in which the “safe operating space” for humanity is defined by value judgments about acceptable risk. Several of its boundaries — biosphere integrity and “novel entities” chief among them — remain notoriously difficult to quantify and have drawn criticism, from within the environmental sciences themselves, for their alarmist framing. To present the crossing of seven boundaries as a settled diagnosis, rather than as one contested interpretation, is to mistake a school of thought for the mind of nature.
On climate proper, the document tracks IPCC summaries closely and passes in near-silence over the well-documented uncertainties still resident in the literature in 2026. Climate models have persistently run hotter than tropospheric observations. The warming since the late nineteenth century — somewhere between 1.1 and 1.4°C, depending on the dataset — has coincided with an era of extraordinary human flourishing: longer lives, a greater than ninety per cent decline in extreme-weather mortality when adjusted for population, agricultural gains attributable in part to CO₂ fertilisation and lengthened growing seasons, and a measurable greening of the Earth visible from satellites. Extreme-weather trends, once normalised for exposure and accumulated wealth, do not display the unambiguous escalation that advocacy literature routinely asserts. The Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, and the Little Ice Age remind us that the climate system was neither invented in 1850 nor rendered fragile by industry alone.
None of this is to deny that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, that human emissions contribute to warming, or that biodiversity faces genuine pressures. It is to observe that the bishops have written as though these questions of magnitude, attribution, urgency, and policy prudence were long since closed. They engage no dissenting voices — not the Global Warming Policy Foundation, not the NIPCC reports, not the working scientists who have documented the model-observation gap or the benefits of modest warming. Adaptation, which has proved remarkably effective, receives less attention than mitigation, whose costs — borne disproportionately by the poor through higher energy prices and by developing economies through blocked industrialisation — are treated as an implicit good rather than a matter for prudential Christian judgement.
The document, in short, does what institutional environmental statements now routinely do: it treats a particular reading of the science as the science, and enlists the authority of the Church behind it.
The Theology, Weighed
The theological difficulties are graver, because they are the bishops’ proper business.
Conservative evangelical and confessional Anglicans will affirm — indeed, must affirm — much of what the document says. Creation is good and God-sustained. Human beings are stewards under God (Genesis 1:28; 2:15). Sin has cosmic effects. Christ is Lord of all. The renewal of creation is a genuinely biblical hope. Any reading that flinches from these truths is not conservative but merely reactionary.
Yet four concerns press themselves upon the reader.
First, the document’s expansion of “sin” to include ecological disruption as a primary category risks dissolving the biblical emphasis on sin as, first and foremost, rebellion against God and injury to one’s neighbour. Scripture teaches that creation was subjected to futility on account of human sin (Romans 8:20); it does not teach that environmental degradation constitutes an independent locus of sin co-equal with idolatry, unbelief, and injustice. When “sin” is redefined ecologically, the gospel begins, almost imperceptibly, to shift from justification by faith in the atoning death of Christ to a programme of ecological repentance secured, in the end, by works. The bishops would deny the shift; the document nonetheless invites it.
Second, the cosmic scope of redemption is rightly confessed, but the bishops’ reading of Romans 8, Colossians 1, and Revelation 21 leans heavily toward an immanent, this-worldly transformation and passes lightly over the eschatological discontinuity of which 2 Peter 3:10–13 speaks with sober plainness: “the heavens will pass away with a roar… the elements will be dissolved with fire.” The new creation is not merely the present order tidied up; it is the present order judged, glorified, and renewed. An over-realised eschatology, in which present ecological action becomes the principal anticipation of the kingdom, quietly displaces the central Christian hope in the return of Christ and the resurrection of the body. It is a very old temptation in a very new key.
Third, the distinctive human vocation is treated with a hesitancy that would have surprised the framers of the Articles. Biblical dominion — radah — comprehends both care and use, and the imago Dei establishes a real hierarchy of creaturely order, however unfashionable the word may now be. The document’s language of “interconnectedness” and “solidarity with creatures,” commendable as far as it goes, blurs the Creator–creature distinction and softens the priority of human beings as rational, moral, and relational image-bearers. This is not merely an academic quibble. Policies pursued in the name of “creation care” that inflict energy poverty at home and block development in the Global South require, on any serious Christian reckoning, a far weightier justification than the bishops here provide.
Fourth, and most gravely, there is the question of mission drift. The Fifth Mark of Mission is not to be despised. But when it is elevated to near-parity with the proclamation of the gospel and made the interpretive lens through which the other four marks are read, the Church begins to exchange its unique message for a generic environmental ethic indistinguishable, at ground level, from that of secular NGOs and other religions. That the bishops appear untroubled by this convergence is itself a symptom of the drift. Many conservative Anglicans and evangelicals will happily manage churchyards for biodiversity, insulate parish halls where the sums add up, and teach children to love the world God has made. They will do so, however, as an expression of dominion and neighbour-love, not as fealty to a contested scientific narrative or to a policy programme borrowed wholesale from the ambient political culture.
What is Worth Keeping
It would be churlish to end without acknowledging what Hope for All Creation rightly commends. Gratitude for the created order, lament over genuine harms, practical faithfulness in the ordinary places where Anglicans have long practised it — these are commendable and have deep precedent in our tradition, from Gilbert White at Selborne to the Tractarian sacramental reading of nature. Solidarity with the global poor is a biblical imperative, and any environmental policy that intensifies their suffering through higher energy costs or arrested development ought to be opposed on straightforwardly Christian grounds. On these points the bishops have not led their people astray.
Conclusion
Hope for All Creation is a coherent expression of one strand of contemporary Anglican environmental theology. Its scientific foundations are more fragile, and its theological emphases more immanentist and mission-shifting, than its authors appear to recognise. A reading formed by the Reformation heritage and by the plain sense of Scripture will welcome the call to faithful stewardship while insisting that such stewardship remain subordinate to the gospel, ordered by a robust doctrine of sin and eschatology, and open — as the science itself must be — to legitimate debate rather than captive to institutional consensus.
The Church of England would serve its people and the wider Communion better by recovering a biblical proportion: affirming the goodness of creation and the responsibility of humanity under God; proclaiming, without embarrassment, the priority of eternal salvation in Christ; and approaching contested empirical questions with the epistemic humility proper to bishops rather than with the prophetic certainty borrowed from secular institutions. True hope for all creation rests not in planetary boundary compliance or net-zero timetables, but in the Lord who “makes all things new” (Revelation 21:5), and who calls his Church, first and always, to repent and believe the gospel.
Such a perspective need not breed indifference. It can, and ought to, foster prudent and evidence-based care for the world God has made — care that serves human flourishing and glorifies the Creator, rather than advancing a particular political eschatology under sacred cover. This review is offered in the hope that a more robust conversation within the Anglican family may yet recover a witness on these matters more biblically proportioned than the one the bishops have here bequeathed us.