Nov 12 2005
How Dare You!
Chad Wayner has a great piece on the audacity of Christians and the implication of daring to believe that you are made in the image of God (Gen 1:26).
It sure seems that in our society, Christians are seen as the root of all that is evil. Chad notes Lynn White’s article The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, saying that it is this very audacity that has propelled Christianity into “its leading role as instigator of our current environmental crisis.”
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that we have the lead role as instigators, but White’s argument almost makes sense from a secular perspective. After all, if we as Christians are focused on eternity, then we’re not going to care what happens to the planet, right?
I mean, 1 John is pretty specific when it says,
“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.” (1 John 2:15-17 NIV)
That just crawls with hate-the-planet-ism, doesn’t it?
The problem is that it doesn’t. The world, in this context, is the world system that sets itself up against God. And besides, even if the passage referred to the physical world, God never released us from the requirement to “have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
Dominion implies that we act as caretakers or stewards. At this point, to paraphrase Three-Fingered Jack, the whole dang anti-environment opera falls apart.
We have probably been uncharitable to the rabid environmental crowd on the opposite grounds - that many environmentals don’t acknowledge a Creator God (or His Son), so all they can see is the planet because they have no hope of anything beyond.
I’m still trying to grasp full meaning of being made in the image of God, but being made in His image doesn’t give us license to lord it over others, even if we have been given eternity.
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November 14th, 2005 at 15:09 pm
Matter is precious if for no other reason than Christ became incarnate. The Christian who doesn’t care about matter whether their own flesh or the planet is affected by gnostic dualism, I think. Also we are promised a new heaven and a new earth, why bother to recreate something essentially worthless? The planet, in a sense, fell with us and, in an sense, will be redeemed with us.
November 14th, 2005 at 17:01 pm
Hmmm. Matter is precious? Useful maybe. What’s the opposite of gnosticm? Ultra-naturalism? That seems to be the route that the environmentalists have taken. At the risk of being accused of Taoism, I think there is a balanced path that respects the natural resources we’ve been given without subordinating the Creator.