Unholy Economics and Environmental Impacts: Reading Revelation’s Great Whore in the Climate Crisis

Abstract

Wealth inequality and climate disruption are defining issues of our time. This article addresses ways in which dispensationalist interpretations of the book of Revelation shape decision making on these issues in the age of Trump. It argues that these modes of interpretation imitate the dynamics in capitalism by exploitatively extracting specific elements from the biblical text absent their socio-historical context. This article first surveys how extraction takes place in contemporary economy and ecology, and then provides examples of how dispensationalist interpretation imitates this dynamic. It concludes that alternative modes of interpretation rooted in the text’s socio-historical context are needed in developing biblical resources to address the interwoven crises of capitalism and climate disruption.|Keywords: Revelation, dispensationalism, capitalism, climate change, economy, ecology