I am not Catholic and I am not overly concerned about Pope
Francis’s encyclical. But even us Protestants should remember that the Bible
does have an ecology theology in it.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and
multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of
the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that
moves on the earth.” Gen. 1:28 (ESV)
There are five imperatives in Genesis 1:28
(1) Be fruitful and (2) multiply and (3) fill the earth and
(4) subdue it, and (5) have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the
birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
1.
Procreation. Man is told to be
fruitful and multiply again after the flood.
2.
Colonization. There is a frontier
mentality. Don’t simply stay in paradise or within sight of it, but go to every
corner of the earth. There is a civilization component.
3.
Fill the earth.
4.
Work and keep the earth.
5.
Subdue and have dominion. This is a
royal figure of speech “to have dominion, to subdue, and to rule.” Man is a
representative of God. This is a world and life directive including culture and
spiritual realms. Man is to be the earthly overseer.
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden
to work it and keep it. Gen. 2:15 (ESV)
Notice Genesis 2:15 that we are to “work” the garden and
“keep” the garden. It’s not that there weren’t weeds in paradise. After the
fall, we lost our efficiency in dealing with the soil.
There is a Biblical tension between an agrarian and urban
society. God’s people, after the fall, stayed away from cities while those who
hated God built cities into which they ran to defy him. When God’s people take
up residence in cities it is first as slaves then, in the promised land, they
become servants of a king.
There appears, repeatedly in the Bible, including in the New
Testament, a preference for the rural and wild. Christ wanders in the
wilderness, but dies in the city. There is no coincidence, theologically, that
even today the loudest voices against the church and people of faith are often
in cities concurrently demanding that everyone move into cities to stop sprawl,
waste, etc. They’ve made the earth their god.
Regardless, the Bible makes clear that we are custodians of
the soil. It is a mutual arrangement. If we look after it, it looks after us.
Likewise, labor does not begin with the fall. There will be labor in the new
heavens and new earth. There is pleasure in work. Unemployment is degrading and
inhuman.
Christians have to remember that it is not our world, but
God’s world for us. We are stewards. So it requires us to love our neighbor
because we share the world with them and tend it together. Though exiled from
the Garden itself, we are still to tend the planet as stewards. It does, in
fact, suggest a required level of responsible capitalism, which necessitates a
commitment to safeguarding our environment and the local economy around us.
Remember though Gen 8:22: “While the earth remains, seedtime
and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”
Arguably this makes the case against global warming as
something we must genuinely fret about. We have to be responsible, but remember
we are to have dominion. We do not serve the earth. The earth serves us. We are
to take care of it as a master is to take care of his servant. That means we
must not abuse it, but that does not prohibit us from commanding it.
Christians, according to John Stott, should avoid the
extremes of deification of the planet and the full exploitation of the planet.
We should be concerned about excessive waste disposal, deforestation, etc. Yes,
we should recycle when we can. What we should not be concerned with is the idea
that we will destroy ourselves or the planet. That is not so and the Bible
contradicts that. The end of civilization comes when the return of our Lord
Jesus to create the new heavens and the new earth, not with mankind creating
artificial intelligence that exterminates us, or wiping ourselves out through
environmental catastrophe, etc. The people who have set the world up as our god
are idol worshippers.
Christians should show their care of the planet through
their care of each other and their faithful stewardship of world resources.
Comments
I am a Catholic and I agree with Eric. We
were lucky to have Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. They both fought to
remove “liberation theology” from the Church to end the church’s involvement in
aiding Marxist takeovers. And then our luck ran out. UN Agenda 21 is an evil
plan based on the global warming scam and it is the most dangerous plan we’ve
ever faced.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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