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Evangelical Environment 

In the Hollywood thriller The Day After Tomorrow the near future is envisioned through the lens of the catastrophic effects of global warming: the ice-cap begins melting, global weather patterns are disturbed, and major climatic shifts devastate the northern hemisphere. In one scene, while trying to stay alive in the now frozen city of New York, a group of survivors keep warm by fuelling a fire with books from the City Library. An ancient copy of the Gutenberg Bible is nearly thrown to the flames when one of the surviving library clerks convinces the others to burn something even less useful, like the tax codes.

The metaphor is significant, though hopefully, unintended. In the midst of a global climate change, everything that we have known changes: the global north becomes an artic wasteland, the global south the only place to live, the seas over-step their bounds, the climate is transformed, and even ‘death and taxes’ (represented by the Gutenberg Bible (i.e., religion) and the New York tax code (i.e., government)) seem to be flexible quotients, no longer relevant in a transformed environment.

Though some may welcome the dissolution of the tax code, Christians would want to make some exceptions for the relevance of the Bible. After all, God did create the world – seas, climate and lands; and as humankind, we have been given stewardship over this global creation: “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” (Gen. 1:28-30). As God’s ‘imaged-representatives’ the world has been entrusted to human authority and rule. Surely, in a newly configured global climate, the Bible would have much to say about how the world, its resources and humanity in general ought to function together.

The irony, however, is that Christians and their Bible are hardly taken into consideration when global climate change is considered, let alone conservation or recycling at the local level. And as for evangelicals, a notable agnosticism seems to characterise our own view of the importance of the world and its resources. After all, many quietly seem to excuse their littering ways with the words of 1 Peter, “The day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare” (1 Peter 3:10). If “a new heaven and a new earth” will replace the worn out one we know, what motivation is there to care for this broken creation anyway?

Much indeed. Christian history reminds of the insidious dangers of allowing a cleavage to emerge between the body and the soul, between the spiritual and physical. Whenever Christians have taken on a disparaging view of creation, spiritual dangers have ensued. This kind of Gnostic dualism was one of the first great enemies of the nascent church, and it has never fully disappeared from the theological scene. In denying the goodness of creation, the Gnostics also denied the relevance of the Incarnation. Time and again misguided Christians, longing for greater holiness and nearness to God, have mortified the flesh, headed for the desert, and have drifted into the unspiritual habits of trying to save their souls by losing the world. “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?” (Luke 9:25).

But for Christians, the Incarnation should be a reminder of the divine pledge that God has come as a man, not to condemn the world, but to save it: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:17). Ironically, many evangelicals embrace the preceding verse (John 3:16) as a mandate to save souls from a hell-bent world, without reflecting on the grand horizons of God’s great plan to save not just sinful humanity, but the whole, broken creation.

Paul, who so often is recruited as the patron saint of the industrial economy with his ‘flesh-spirit’ dualisms reminds us clearly that “…the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). In fact, Paul goes on to say that “…the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth, right up to the present time” (Romans 8:22). It “eagerly awaits for the sons of God to be revealed” (Romans 8:19). There is an organic unity, a very Jewish realism about the wholeness of creation, and our integral relation to it. It has been marred by sin, as we have, and it groans and aches under the duress of Sin’s long legacy, as many of us still do, and it looks forward to the glory soon to be revealed, when it will share with us in the great ‘liberation from bondage’.

Most evangelicals will admit, however, an uneasiness with a too generous naturalism or embrace of the created order. It has the feel of pantheism, perhaps, or idolatry. And yet, from the biblical account, idols are not features of the created order, but of the human order, ‘fashioned by human hands’. It is the profound misapprehension of God’s glorious self-revelation in creation, in nature generally, but in Christ primarily, that humanity’s understanding has been darkened and has led to an abuse of God’s created order, “exchanging the natural for the unnatural”, and “serving the created things rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:19-25). 

And yet for many of us, evangelicals in particular, living in an industrial age that is ruled by a sophisticated exploitation of the created order that transforms what God’s hands have made into idols 'fashioned by human hands', there is little or no protest against these insidious rejections of the Incarnation all around us. The sea is polluted, but we are happy to go on vacation cruises; the atmosphere is being ruined, but we see no problem with availing ourselves of all the happy products of industrialisation; humanity is impoverished, yet we continue to support the global industrial complex with our money and our tacit approval. At base, there is a lack of faith, a nihilism that says “what can I do in a world so dominated by ‘the works of human hands’?”

Much indeed. Our spirituality is always connected with our bodies. In Romans 12:1-2 Paul makes this plain: “…in view of God’s mercy… offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God”. Our response to the Incarnation should be a life characterised by sanctification. Every thing we do, or refrain from, should edify, bless, sanctify, and honour God. Evangelical spirituality has thrived on recognising the importance of the individual’s soul and relationship with God in Christ, but it has often suffered the seductions of Gnosticism as it has disparaged the created order, the very created order that God chose to fill with his Son, who became man, born of a woman.

In The Day After Tomorrow it is up to those new priests of western culture, the scientists, to face the growing threats of pollution and destruction of the global biosphere. And indeed, we can learn a great deal from them. As news begins to trickle down from the scientific conventions, symposiums and societies to the popular level, it is becoming clear that the world is in trouble. A lot of damage has already been done. More seems inevitable. Sadly, governments have been little help in meeting this crisis, but so too have Christians. Perhaps it is time that Christians begin to voice concerns, and offer biblical solutions to the global industrial hegemony that is desecrating God’s good world. As a writer and activist recently advised me, “tell Christians to live out their beliefs locally, and start changing the world there”.

As a final irony, there is a lovely, bedraggled greenhouse on the LST campus that serves as a helpful evangelical metaphor of the environment. Like God’s good world, this greenhouse has been neglected and misused. Living out my beliefs locally may just mean that I’ll need to start changing the world where I live. I suppose that makes the greenhouse my next little project!

© London School of Theology Review

John-Paul Lotz is Lecturer in Church History & Pastoral Studies, London School of Theology