Notes on Environmentalism and Christian Stewardship
Many environmental efforts are dominated by special interest groups whose ultimate goal is to displace Christianity.
The central problem is that our priorities about creating care have shifted as people’s worldviews have become more secular
From the beginning, environmental advocates believed that scientific advances, despite their benefits, resulted in air and water pollution and other ills that affected the health of the planet itself. A new social movement was needed to fight back
Today, two myths surrounding the environmental movement tend to keep Christians on the sidelines.
Myth No. 1: Environmental Issues Are Worldview Neutral
Environmentalism thinks the less human influence there is on the planet, the thinking goes, the better off the planet will be
Environmentalism rose up to challenge another philosophy that people in the twentieth century held: progressivism.
Progressivism’s mantra is, in short, “Every day, in every way, we’re getting better.”
While secular environmentalists think the point is to stop stewarding nature and leave it alone, spiritual environmentalists see environmental damage as a spiritual offense.
Myth No. 2: Only Radicals Care about the Environment
Proponents of deep ecology see humans as no more valuable than other organisms
In the Christian view, it would be better if humans prospered. In the view of environmental extremists, it would be better if humans disappeared.
There are radicals who care about the environment for the wrong reasons, but that doesn’t mean Christians shouldn’t care about the environment for the right ones.
Christians ought to care about creation. God commands it, and it’s central to our understanding of the gospel.
God made all things, reigns over them, and sustains them
First, God created it ex-nihil - “out of nothing” - as a free, active expression of his nature. Creation is contingent; that is, it didn’t have to come into being. God relied on himself, and nothing else, to make something that didn’t have to exist.
Second, creation is the work of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
God Spoke creation into being
Not only did God bring creation into existence through Jesus but, according to Scripture, Jesus is the one sustaining creation. “In him, all things hold together.
The act of creation was relational. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in perfect communication, brought into physical form exactly what God wanted to have happen and actively sustained it.
Third, God is other than his creation. God made things, but he is not a thing. He transcends nature. God doesn’t depend on creation; creation depends on God.
The goal of creation is Shalom
Creation is good, but it is not God.
Dominion is a call not to meanness but to management
God superintends creation through Christ. It’s an ongoing act of servanthood that rejects the deist and materialist ideas of domination for a biblical idea of dominion that leads to shalom.
God owns creation. We manage it under this authority.
A steward is a caretaker who manages something on behalf of the owner. God owns it all. We’re accountable to him for the flourishing of creation.
Because we steward the earth as God’s image bearers, our obedience to him in this respect is what makes “free and healthy functioning” as human beings possible.
We have violated creation, but we haven’t destroyed it. We have acted self-destructively, but this hasn’t ruined our ability to bear God’s image. Redemption restores to right what was made wrong. It also restores disobedient humanity so that we may pursue rightness, The fall complicates our responsibility to creation, but it doesn't eliminate it.
As opposed to Gnosticism, orthodox Christianity affirms the material world and our bodies rather than denying them.
If what The bible says is true, Christians ought to be the most enthusiastic people on Earth when it comes to caring for creation.
Christians see humans as made in God’s image, and because of this, we should never support anti-human policies clothed in a proenvironment disguise. Instead, we should ask, “Do the policies we support try to help people pull themselves up out of poverty, pollution, and illness?”
Here are some areas where the attack on humans is most severe.
The belief that population growth harms the planet and slows economic development has led to much inhumanity and the denial of personal freedom.
According to Hvistendahl, there are significantly more men than women in China and in countries like India.
“There is no evidence to prove that a large population creates poverty and undevelopment.”
Some of the most crowded planets on the planet like Hong Kong and Singapore - are also the most prosperous.
Rapid population growth hasn’t “inhibited economic progress in either the West or the contemporary Third World.”
Prophecies of environmental disaster
A World Bank press release that said the global water crisis affects 4 percent (not 40 percent) of the world’s population
People find disaster and crisis exciting. This makes the media want to dish up more disaster through new alerts and dramatic headlines.
What the skeptics of climate change question isn’t the existence of global warming or cooling but whether humans have caused it and whether dramatic action of the sort called for is financially and socially justified.
Resource Depletion
Economist and theology Wayne Grudem says, “There is no good reason to think we’ll ever run out of any essential natural resource.
Rather than running out of oil in a few years, as once predicted, geologists now believe the available supply may last hundreds of years, perhaps even a thousand.
Even though the world population is growing, more people have access to drinking water and sanitation, housing, and more food calories. Life expectancy has risen dramatically and continues to rise, even in less-developed nations that are mired in extreme poverty.
Beware of claims of mass species extinction. They’re overblown.
Our care for creation means recognizing the intricate balance of plants and animals in creation.
“We have used our wealth and technology to exclude nature from our lives and from our consciousness and so have lost touch with it.”
In short, we need to get out more.
Caring and enjoyment are part of living rightly-that is, “rightly aligned”-with creation.
Animals need to eat to be productive for their owners, and their wonders ought to take care of them.
Humans are more valuable to God than animals. And yet caring for animals is also a scriptural virtue.
Scripture indicates that we’re to care for animals, but we’re also permitted to eat them.
People with a consumer mindset consume not only products but also themselves-and others.
“Our falleness is particularly evidenced in the habits by which we treat the rest of creation as an endless stock-pile-or an endless waste heap. We are all in a hurry to be about our own business, which traps us into ignoring the Creator’s business-and the needs and health of creation.
We can learn to fix things instead of just throwing them away. We can focus on simplicity. We can learn to make food rather than always buying it prepackaged.
“We work not to make ‘all new things’ but rather to make ‘all things new.’
God wants us to take initiative and be productive.
We are image bearers of God. We’re producers of creative ideas, not just consumers of scarce resources.
“The contributions people make to knowledge are great enough to overcome all the costs of population growth.”
As people apply their God-given and education-improved intelli-gence of the world around them, they multiply resources.
Government agencies experience political infighting and high turnover and are prone to making decisions based on what maintains their budgets rather than what is in the public interest.
Two things are necessary for a proper balance in changing human activity: incentives and information.
1: Incentives. When the government controls incen-tives (such as rewarding actions it supports or punishing those it doesn’t), good behavior usually lasts.
2: Information. When the cost of information is high-when people don’t have the ability to get the knowledge they need to make good decisions-the economic system becomes sluggish.
There are those who use the threats of environmental disaster to call for dramatic changes in society, usually including a dramatically expanded role for government. Christians ought to be aware of this ploy.
We need to focus on inno-vating and increasing freedom if our caring is to have any effect beyond our own personal spheres.