The bishop, a leading evangelical, says in a new book that time is fast running out and that the planet may not survive this century without irreversible damage. He has speculated privately that there may be as little as 50 years before Man’s exploitation of the environment causes irrevocable damage to God’s creation.

His book, Jesus and the Earth, published today, is an indication that Anglican church leaders, in particular evangelicals, are at last willing to turn their attention away from internal, destructive debates about gay sex to look at their responsibilities in the wider world. Lord Carey of Clifton, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, made global environmental issues a central plank of his archiepiscopate, calling repeatedly for Christians to make the issue a priority. In an address to Church of England bishops at a meeting in Liverpool, he linked environmental desecration and poverty and argued that it was in the interests of the rich countries to help poor nations out of poverty so that they could care better for their environments.

Ordinary parishioners in the pew have often shown heightened environmental awareness, compared with their church leaders. Parish-based support for initiatives such as Fair Trade, the purchase of ethically produced goods including tea, coffee and chocolate, has also been strong.

The General Synod last debated the environment in 2001, when it discussed a development report, Global View, written in collaboration with Christian Aid. But churches, particularly the Bible-based Protestant organisations, are still struggling with a battle between those who hold to the Genesis-based teaching that man has absolute mastery and dominion over nature, and those who argue that it was God’s intention that mankind should serve and tend God’s creation.

The argument advocating “stewardship” has tended to be the one followed by liberals and Catholics, while evangelicals have traditionally gone for the more Bible-based view. Lord Carey’s tenure marked a shift of emphasis and Bishop Jones’s book will further strengthen the case for stewardship rather than mastery.

In his book, Bishop Jones poses the “big ecological question: Have we passed the point of no return?” The environment is central to God’s mission, he concludes, yet a majority of the prophetic voices about the dangers to the environ- ment have so far been secular.

For too many people, the bishop suggests, Christianity has taken on a form of escapology where evangelism is reduced to providing converts with a chance to escape Earth and bag a place in Heaven.

He said: “It is much more urgent than any of us realise. If somebody like Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and renowned astrophysicist, says there is a 50-50 chance of surviving the 21st century, then I think we should take notice.

“I am saying, ‘Listen to what scientists and environmentalists are saying because their warnings have the ring of truth about them’. We as Christians have a moral and religious responsibility to heed these warnings and also to do something about it.”

The bishop, the father of three daughters, said that in Lent 2000 he visited 14 schools in his diocese and came away awed by the obvious fears and concerns of a younger generation. He visited Orissa, in India, where he saw the devastation wreaked on fragile seaboard villages by the super cyclones, the result of climate change. The bishop came away feeling guilty about his own culpability.

The spiritual journey, he said, took him back to the Bible to question the orthodoxy that Jesus has little to say about the Earth. On a four-month study leave in Oxford he reread the Gospels, highlighting seven contexts where Jesus talks about the Earth and himself as Son of Man, or, as he suggests, in the Hebrew, “son of one hewn from the Earth”.

The bishop writes that Jesus is the saviour not only of humanity but also the saviour of the planet. Jesus saw his mission as the “earthing of Heaven”. “We are not just interested in saving souls, we are also interested in the redemption of the Earth.”

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