A Christian Response to the Environment, Part One

 

   

     Why did God make humans? That is undoubtedly a complicated question, but God gives us at least a partial answer before we were even made. In Genesis, God says, “Let us make humans in our image.” Why? So they can “steward the fish of the sea the birds of the air and the cattle and all the earth” (Genesis 1:26). Before we discovered what it was to love each other or to love God, before sin entered and salvation followed, before the Word of God was written, humans were put here to take care of the earth. That is a monumental statement and a monumental responsibility. If we stand before God tomorrow and he asks how we did at the first purpose he gave us-- caring for his world--- how would we answer?

          American discourse has a bad case of guilt by association. If many of the voices advocating for environmental responsibility are also advocating for things that are not biblical defensible, then it all must be wrong! That is, of course, a logical fallacy. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. If instead of starting with who is supporting a position, we start with the question, what does the Bible say about this position, we may find out we have common ground with those once thought to be enemies.

          Starting in Genesis 1, the Bible presents the natural world as belonging to God and being entrusted to humans. Our relationship to the natural world is one of mutual dependency. We need nature. We need trees to give us oxygen and clear carbon dioxide from the air, so we do not suffocate. We need plants and animals to give us food to eat, clothes to wear, and a thousand other resources. And the Bible views the earth as requiring us. Even before sin entered the world, God declared the natural world in need of someone to look after it. Ecologists talk about symbiotic relationships where both organisms involve benefit. God designed humans and the earth to benefit from one another. He even took this a step further by making us of the physical world. We are made from the same dust of the ground--- carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc.--- that everything else is. Humans are a mutant species of both spiritual like God himself and angels and earthly like golden retrievers, oak trees, and the centipede.

          When humanity fell, we dragged the rest of the natural world with us (Gen 3; Roms 8). Throughout the Old Testament, blessings and curses on God’s people were manifested in the ecosystem around them. Their obedience brought rain and plenty and their disobedience brought famine and drought (Duet 28). God created humans for the world and the world for humans; salvation was never about saving humans from the world, but about restoration of the whole system. Human salvation is the foretaste of living in this new reality.

The ultimate triumph of the Kingdom of God is a new heaven and earth, not disembodied spirits floating on clouds in a vague, incorporeal afterlife. Colossians explains that this world was created through the Son in the beginning; it will be reconciled to God through the Son’s death on the Cross (Col. 1:15-20). Isaiah describes this new heaven and earth as a paradise not just for humans, but for animals, too. Here the lion and the lamb lay down together and the leopard and the cow are no longer in competition for food (Is. 65). The Bible is bookended by the creation and recreation of the world. Genesis 1 and 2 describe creation and Revelation 21 and 22 describe the new heaven and the new earth in which “no longer will there be any curse” (Rev 22:3). Which curse is being done away with? The one that humanity inflicted on the whole cosmos in Genesis.

          When we talk about Emmanuel--- God with us--- it is not just that God visited our earth. In the person of Christ, he became a part of our world with the same atomic structure, cellular matrixes, and physical co-dependencies with the earth that we all have. He ate, breathed, lived, and died. His cells split, regenerated, and sloughed off just like the rest of us. When he rose, it was as the “firstborn” of a renewed creation (Col 1:18). His resurrected body was the prototype, the model, the sample of what the new creation will be like. It will be like the old in many ways. Jesus’ body was still physical atoms and molecules; he still ate; he still had the scars of crucifixion. Yet it was not like the old in others. The Pauli exclusion principle (two things cannot occupy the same space) on some level no longer applies as he walked through walls; his body was glorified; his suffering was over.

          Which returns us to our very first command. God’s love for the world he created is woven into the fabric of his Word. When he asks humanity how we cared for the world he created for us and us for it, the world he became a part of in the incarnation, the world he redeemed on the cross and will someday fully restore, how will we answer him?