I doubt I’m alone in having read the news of the recent heatwave in Southern Europe, and of the attendant wildfires, with a combination of horror, helplessness, and hopelessness. The effects of human-created climate change appear to have rapidly accelerated in recent years, and the future is frightening.

Does theology provide us with the tools to face our fears, in ways that go beyond giving us a false sense of security? For many decades, eco-theology has been responding to these issues, through Biblical hermeneutics, environmental ethics, and reflection on the relationship between doctrine and the environment. However, in the face of the climate breakdown we’re now experiencing, we might need another set of tools, which come from the branch of theology known as trauma theology. Trauma goes beyond mere suffering: it is understood as a series of ruptures. For the sufferer, there is breakdown in their ability to communicate, or to use language to describe their experience. There is a physical rupture – even if the traumatic event is experienced solely psychologically, its effects will be felt in the body too. And there is a rupture in the person’s sense of time.

Eco-trauma-theologians such as Dr Tim Middleton have taken this definition and argued that what the climate is now going through fulfils these criteria, so that we can now think of the world as communicating its experience of trauma. The physical effects of this are the clearly visible, from deforestation in the Amazon to the death of coral reefs. There has been disruption of time, as we have now entered the ‘anthropocene’, a geological age predominantly shaped by the actions of human beings. And the way in which the world around us communicates with us is increasingly chaotic and difficult to interpret.

This insight might help us to interpret our own fears and feelings of hopelessness in the face of climate change: if the world is going through trauma, we will also be experiencing trauma vicariously, albeit we are sheltered in this country from the most acute effects. More than that, trauma theology argues that trauma is already deeply embedded in the Christian tradition, because of the centrality of the Crucifixion. We have already experienced the worst possible thing, in the death of the Son of God. We have a tendency to think of the redemption obtained through the Crucifixion a purely human affair, making it all about us, but the vision of the redeemed world in the book of Revelation points to ‘a new heaven and a new earth’: a perfected creation, which nonetheless, like Jesus’ resurrected body, bears its scars.