How should Christians respond to existential threats?

The Last Judgement, Heironymous Bosch (detail)

In the last few days, we’ve been hearing ‘tech bros’ speculate that AI may choose to eliminate humanity sooner rather than later, unless action is taken urgently to mitigate the existential threat. AI technology promises wonderful things, such as cures for cancer, but could also be used to engineer pandemic viruses. We can all see how current AI models pollute social media with dangerous nonsense. It is easy to see how in future AI can eliminate millions of jobs, creating a crisis of white-collar unemployment, with unpredictable, and probably nasty, social effects. And military-industrial complexes around the world are already developing automated weapon systems to fight deadly wars without human intervention.

Yet I remain sceptical. In the short term, I think I fear the global economic shock of an implosion of the AI bubble, more than I do the creation of an artificial general intelligence determined to destroy us. And this AI panic threatens to distract us from the other existential threats we already know about: climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, nuclear Armageddon.

But it does focus our minds on the question, how we as Christians should respond to existential threats? I have seen nothing wiser than this reflection, given as a comment by someone calling herself ‘hidden sister’, on the Thinking Anglicans web page a few days ago, copied with her permission.

Do read it, and let me have your thoughts!

‘hidden sister’ writes on the threat that AI may soon eliminate humanity, 9 Sep 2026

God does not desire our elimination but our consecration and flourishing. Humanity is perfectly capable of eliminating itself. We basically need saving from ourselves (I do for sure), through God’s grace, mercy, healing and love. I believe that’s God’s desire, and always has been. I only believe in ‘end times’ in the sense of our own ‘end times’ – by which I mean the fleeting brief lives we have and our transience. In which context, as gift, God calls us repeatedly to open each day, in the here and now, to God’s grace and devotion to us, and asks us to devote our lives in return.

Each day, the eternal Love of God is offered to us, to flow through us, to draw us into the divine compassion for other people and the world. It’s not rocket science, but it does come with cost. At heart it’s so clearly God’s will, though we prevaricate over rules, disputes, and anything else, to distract from the gospel heart or put off actually living out the love. But if we pray and devote ourselves each day – sharing sacrificial devotion with and in God – and seek mercy for the pitiful needs within us and around us… then by the way of the Cross we may open to who God is within our hearts, and become conduits for the flow of tender love to others. We are called to be alive today, in the here and now. Apocalypse can wait. Today is the day to be saved I am told, day after day, and I am reminded that God says “I desire mercy”.

All space and time will run on for billions of years when we have long been wiped out from the face of the earth. But here, now, today… God invites us to open our consciousness to God’s vast and eternal consciousness… in the eternal now… in the very love, the very compassion of who God is… the endless flow. And to become sacrifice like God. To be given in love. And what gift and privilege, and what opportunity in each encounter we have today… with people we know and prayer for those we have never met. All vulnerable, all transient, all wounded by hurt and sin, in need of merciful compassion and the grace of God. We can leave judgment – the discernment of a person’s heart – to our merciful and compassionate God.

What we are invited to do – the whole point of the gospel – is to open to the flow, the cost, the compassion of God’s Love.

The flowing stream of God’s Love always seeks mercy, always seeks healing, and always seeks inroads through our resistant hearts, minds, souls… to open our lives – today in the here and now – so grace, mercy and love may reach out into the darkness and the lostness (in the process touching our own darkness, let’s be honest) and, in giving our lives to God this day in practical love, we may find ourselves made more of who we are in Christ, find ourselves drawn into the very mind and consciousness of our compassionate God, and drawn into the sacrifice and devotion of Jesus Christ.

Isn’t that the call? To be living sacrifices?

We don’t live long, but while we are granted another day, we may become conduits not of judgment but of mercy. All by grace and the givenness of God. So…

Come let us worship. Let us open to God. Let us own our own sins. And let us pray for the pitiful needs of the world. For God – the ever-living God – is love. And God’s nature is always to have mercy, always wanting to heal, and make people whole.

 

Celebrating the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary

 Reflection at morning worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 8th September 2026

The Birth of Mary, by the Master of the Life of the Virgin, late C15th 

In our church calendar, today is the Feast of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The NT tells us absolutely nothing about Mary’s birth, not even who her parents were. Indeed, it tells us nothing at all about Mary before the angel announces that she will give birth to Jesus, and Mary responds in the words of the Magnificat we have just heard. However, one thing we can be sure of is that Mary was carried in her mother’s womb and born, just as every human baby is.

There was a tradition in the early church that her mother was called Anne and her father Joachim. The apocryphal Gospel of James, written towards the end of 2^nd century AD, seems to be the earliest mention of them. It is a kind of prequel to the canonical Gospels, telling the story of Mary’s family, childhood, education, and eventual betrothal to Joseph. St Jerome accused it of containing absurdities, and popes condemned it as untrustworthy in the 4^th and 5^th centuries AD, so it was excluded from the New Testament canon.

Pious Christians in the early church came to believe that the Son of God could not have been born of a woman tainted by original sin, which was believed to be transmitted through sexual intercourse. So they imagined that Mary must have been conceived of Anne by God’s action without the help of Joachim, in much the same way as Jesus was conceived of Mary.

The Gospel of James has this to say. Anne and Joachim are distressed to be childless, Joachim goes out into the wilderness to pray, leaving Anne by herself to lament not having a child. God hears Anne’s lament, angels announce she will give birth, and 7 months later Mary is born. Anne dedicates Mary to God, and at 3 years old she is sent to be brought up in the Temple. The story is clearly modelled on that of Hannah and Samuel in the 1^st Book of Samuel in the Old Testament.

While excluded from the NT, the apocryphal Gospel of James supported belief in the Immaculate Conception, that Mary was free from original sin from the moment of her conception. Since those times, some but not all Christians have continued to believe in Mary’s immaculate conception. The Eastern Orthodox Churches did not, but the medieval Western Church was divided, with Franciscan ‘Scotists’ in favour, and Dominican ‘Thomists’ against. After the Reformation, Protestant churches denied the Immaculate Conception, teaching that Mary was a sinner saved through grace like all believers, though some Anglo-Catholics hold it as an optional pious belief. As Marian devotion increased in the Roman Catholic Church in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, pressure increased for it to be believed as an article of faith, and in 1854 Pope Pius IX promulgated it as a dogma, something all Catholics must believe.

Now I myself do not believe in the Immaculate Conception. It is not supported by canonical scripture, and church traditions differ. But I think it would be ungracious to our RC brothers and sisters in Christ, who are required to believe it, to reject it as a heresy. Better by far to consider it a pious belief which Christians may choose to believe or not, rather than something that must divide us.

What matters, surely, is that we should all give Mary the honour due to her. She willingly accepted the responsibility of carrying Jesus in her womb. She gave birth to him, nurtured him as an infant and raised him to manhood. She stayed with him through his ministry, and finally she stood nearby at his crucifixion, as her heart was pierced with sorrow to see her beautiful child tortured to death.

It is surely right for us to celebrate her birthday today.

Giving thanks in the Season of Creation

Article in the November issue of Grapevine, the parish newsletter of the Nenagh Union of Parishes

I am writing this on 1^st September, the first day of autumn in the meteorological calendar. We are in the season of ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’, as John Keats put it in his Ode to Autumn.

It is my favourite season, I think. The garden is adorned with fruit and nuts, more than I can possibly eat, so I shall have a surplus to give away to family and friends. The apples have rosy cheeks, the pears are golden, the wild damsons in the roadside hedge have gone blue, and the filbert nuts are ready for picking. Such a harvest of good things, thanks be to God!

1^st September is also the first day of the Season of Creation, which lasts right through to 4^th October, the feast day of St Francis. It is a special season where we celebrate God as Creator, and acknowledge Creation as the divine continuing act that summons us as collaborators to love and care for the gift of all that is created.

Celebration of the Season has its roots in the Eastern Orthodox church, but has been taken up in recent years by all the major Christian traditions, including Roman Catholics, Methodists and our own Anglican Communion, through the efforts of the World Council of Churches. This year the theme of the liturgy they have developed for us is ‘Living Water’ based on the text Ezekiel 47:9,12.

⁹Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish, once these waters reach there. It will become fresh; and everything will live where the river goes. ¹²On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing."

Here in the Church of Ireland we have, of course, a long tradition of celebrating Creation and thanking God for feeding us through our Harvest Festivals. We will do so again this year, bringing into our churches the best fruits of the harvest. Wouldn’t it be marvellous if we could also join with Christians of all traditions in an ecumenical celebration of Creation on the banks of the Shannon, our own Living Water?

We have seen both damaging droughts and floods this year, a result of global heating we have caused ourselves by burning fossil fuels and foolish land use. As we give thanks for the blessings we have received, and pray for the good earth and all its creatures, we should also lament and repent of the damage we are doing to its ecosystems, including Lough Derg.