The church always has the potential to be a powerful motivator for social action, but on the issue of climate change it has been something of a sleeping giant. This is a pity, particularly in the US, where religious conviction and politics are so entwined. The church's slow response to environmental crisis is all the more mystifying when you consider the Bible's teaching on the subject. It really should be a major pillar of Christian discipleship. Even atheists can see this, as conservationist E.O. Wilson points out in his book The Creation:
I am puzzled that so many religious leaders… have hesitated to make protection of the Creation an important part of their magisterium. Do they believe that human-centred ethics and preparation for the afterlife are the only things that matter?So, in the interests of provoking that sleeping giant, what does the Bible have to say about the environment? Here are four principles that I see in the Bible that I think the church needs to start shouting about a whole lot louder.
1. The earth isn't ours
Last summer the Creation Museum opened its doors to the world, designed to promote creationism and ridicule evolution. To me, it's a testament to misplaced priorities on a very grand scale – why does the church spend so much time and money trying to persuade people that God made the earth, and so little caring for what God made? There are endless Creationist think-tanks, magazines, and campaigners, but I only know one hands-on Christian conservation organization at work in the field, the wonderful little A Rocha.
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," says the first line of the Bible. A couple of paragraphs later, the first chapter concludes the creation account with a summary of approval from God. "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good." Personally, I agree with God on that point, the earth is very good. Even if you stopped reading the Bible right there, I think you'd have enough to believe the environment matters – God made it, and he's proud of it, and we shouldn't be trashing his handiwork.*
If you do read on, you'll find some great sections of the Bible that deal with the relationship between God and his creation, often in the most loving terms. The end of the book of Job is extraordinary, God practically boasting about his work. Isaiah 40 is another. "Who else has held the oceans in his hand," writes the prophet in one of his epic flights of rhetoric. "Who has measured off the heavens with his fingers?"
Whether Christian or not, as a species we're pretty much guilty of behaving as if the world belongs to us – every plant, animal or natural resource is there at our disposal, and we have no responsibility to anyone but ourselves. Psalm 24:1 sets the record straight: "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it."
2. A species of gardeners
In 1967, Lynn White famously described Christianity as "the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever seen". In his essay The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis, he lays the blame at the door of the church, saying that Christianity has "not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends."
White makes a serious point, and he is partly correct. Particularly from the medieval period onwards, through the writing of Thomas Aquinas and other theologians, a very utilitarian view emerged. Christians came to believe that the world was gifted to them to use as they see fit, and that the natural order was only important insofar as it was useful to civilization.
The basis for this comes, again, from Genesis chapter 1. Having made man and woman, God commissions them with these words: "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground." Seizing on words such as 'rule', and 'subdue', it's easy to see how medieval theology reached its conclusions. But Genesis tells the story twice, with chapter two echoing and expanding on chapter one. In the second version, God's blessing is quite different in character – he places Adam in the Garden of Eden "to work it and take care of it." (Genesis 2:15)
As is often the case, the truth comes in balancing the two. Yes, in the Biblical view of things we are to be in charge, but being in charge means to serve, to care, to tend. That's the Bible's view of leadership, as Jesus models later on in the Gospels – he's clearly the boss, but he still washes his disciples' feet. That's the kind of attitude the Bible suggests we take with the earth. We need to hold Genesis' twin accounts in balance. If we do, we find that the Bible's first words to us are not about sin or about religion, or even about belief. Our first God-given priority is in fact environmental management – to rule, to care - we were intended to be a species of gardeners.
3. Passing it on
If you're looking for specific answers to world problems, you won't find a prescription to climate change in the Bible. But what you will find is ancient wisdom, and much of it applies. For example, the Old Testament law gives instructions on having a Sabbath day, one day in seven that is set aside for rest. This principle isn't just for people, but for the land as well. Every seventh year, says Moses in Leviticus 25, "the land is to have a year of rest." The people are also instructed not to plant their crops all the way to the edges of their land, but to leave the marginal areas to wildlife. Both of these, leaving fallow land and marginal land, are such good agricultural practice that they've been part of EU law until this year, when they were removed to try and up food production.
The Old Testament law is tricky, and it's probably best not to try and apply too much of it directly to our world in any literal sense, but there are some interesting and sometimes random little laws in the mix. When attacking an enemy city, God's people were forbidden to cut down the fruit trees, protecting the future fertility of the area. If you came across a bird's nest, you were allowed to take the young, but you had to leave the mother so it could breed again. Where there are a mass of people together, there should be designated places for waste disposal, rather than everyone just dumping where they please.
It's not so much the specifics that are important here, but the overall message. God promised the ancient Israelites a land of their own, and that was to be an inheritance that could be passed on. God deals in long time spans, and it was important that the land was passed on to the next generation with its value intact. Land was to be preserved, used wisely, its resources passed on to children and grandchildren. Alongside Moses' detailed laws about inheritance and the leasing rather than sale of land, what you have is a set of rules for social stability, and environmental sustainability. Essentially, it's a set of policies for ensuring that the people "meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs," to borrow the Bruntland Report's definition of sustainability.
It's almost a cliché that we should think of the world as borrowed from our children, but it's a helpful way of thinking about it. In our over-fished, deforested, eroded, strip-mined world, these longer-term, forward thinking principles are something we desperately need to re-capture.
4. Building heaven
Finally, no Christian theology of the environment would be complete without mentioning the end of the world. Christians talk an awful lot about the end times, and even more about heaven or hell and who's going to which one. But we ought to keep more perspective, because the Bible doesn't actually say we 'go' anywhere when we die. What it does promise is a new earth.
Isaiah reports God's plans in Isaiah 65: "Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth." Several hundred years later, the apostle John sees his apocalyptic revelation and hears Jesus claim "I am making everything new". In both of these the original word 'new' means 'renewed' rather than 'replaced'. There is no heaven, or at least not as the faraway, spiritual, otherworldly paradise of the popular conception. Heaven is in fact right here, it is the earth, re-cast and perfected.
A commonly preached Christian message is that Jesus will come back, the earth will be destroyed, and off we will go to eternal damnation or eternal bliss. But, says Dave Bookless of the aforementioned A Rocha, this is a very modern notion that isn't found in the early church. In fact, he writes in his book Planetwise, "the idea that God might remove this earth completely seems to have developed at roughly the same time as the growth of large cities, where human busyness shuts out God's voice in creation, and as the economic ambitions of the Western nations led to an increasingly rapid destruction of the earth's resources."
The idea of heaven is a useful cop out – if we're going to be spirited away to paradise, it doesn't matter what happens to the earth. If God's plans are actually for this planet, right here, then everything changes. When we get to work in conservation, in campaigning, in restoring and reforesting the earth, our agenda is in line with God's. And that can only be a good thing.
I've barely scratched the surface of what the Bible says about the environment. A recent theological review found 2,463 verses in the Bible that related to the natural world, so there's plenty more to explore. Thankfully, it's a changing scene. It's good to see a growing number of organizations and churches getting to work, groups like the Christian Ecology and Operation Noah are getting more attention, and there have been useful statements in the US from alliances like the Evangelical Climate Initiative. The church will wake up to this, sooner or later. And when it does, it'll have considerable weight to throw behind the drive to make things better.
*Knowing how easily any debate can be derailed by the issue, I'm skipping the Creation/Evolution thing entirely. The big question for me is not if and how God made the world, but how we should live within it. If you want to know what I personally believe, we can talk about that elsewhere.
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