A Biblical Christian worldview is therefore most concerned about caring for God’s creation because of his faith, not less so. The charge that Christians do not care for the earth is offensive on its face and categorically, historically, and theologically wrong at its core. A Biblical worldview caring for Creation is, however, a far cry from a pantheistic green movement. Moreover, it is not a response to populist movements within congregations, or unscrupulous attempts to placate the people who are demanding the clergy and church become more involved in ecology.

The current cultural climate is a veritable greenhouse for growing ever-mutating myths about Christians, particularly evangelicals, and their concern for the earth.^[1]The charge that there is a “huge burden of guilt”^[2] to be born by evangelical Christians concerning environmental abuses goes back several decades to the genesis of a popular concern for the environment as the cultural-political issue that we recognize today. The growth of environmentalism^[3] as a political movement,^[4]rather than a principled scientific inquiry,^[5] embraced by left-wing political groups in Western Europe,^[6] Britain^[7] and in North America^[8] crafted a public narrative based on Lynn White’s  (1907 – 1987) 1967 article in Science.^[9] This article is often used as a primer to set up Christianity as an enemy to any genuine concern for the planet. Lauren Kearns, in his essay, “Noah’s Ark Goes to Washington: A profile of evangelical environmentalism” (Social compass 44 [1997]: 349-366), framed the debate by linking evangelical suspicion of an environmentalism divorced from a Biblical fidelity and a leftist suspension of a Christian association with Republican and conservative movements that distrusted environmentalism as a major part of a larger Socialist agenda, Considering the growth of the debate, the clash of worldviews, and the resulting lack of any significant voice to speak to the movement, White concluded,

“Thus it became common belief that Christians did not care about the environment.”^[10]

White went on to say that Christianity is unable to understand to the “sacred grove”^[11] of the Redwoods, arguing that Ronald Reagan, as governor of California was a prime example of a Christian who was incapable of such ecological vision,^[12]and that “For nearly 2 millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves…” ^[13]  “For nearly 2 millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves…” He sees historic, orthodox, and particularly, evangelical Protestant Christianity, as lacking (what he appears to mean) a meaningful, ecological hermeneutic to join the environmental crusade.^[14] The classical passages that inform a cogent, coherent framework for teaching a Christian care for the Creation is insufficient or at least insufficiently taught, according to White and others. Those passages often include:

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28);

“And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15);

“The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me” (Leviticus 25:23);

“The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein” (Psalm 24:1); and

“For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19).

White rejected common interpretations of Creation as unfitting for the deeper appreciation of the ecological crisis and how to find solutions. They were simply too focused on the earth as being made for Man. He believed and argued for modeling any future “democratic” Christian understanding on the life of St. Francis of Assisi.^[15] The fact that so much of St. Francis’ life and works is inconclusive because of the apocryphal material about him was not addressed by White. He would thus take enormous leaps from sound scholarship to launch into a vision of his alternative Christian ecology platform:

“Francis tried to depose man from his monarchy over creation and set up a democracy of all God’s creatures. With him the ant is no longer simply a homily for the lazy, flames a sign of the thrust of the soul toward union with God; now they are Brother Ant and Sister Fire, praising the Creator in their own ways as Brother Man does in his.”^[16]

Robert Booth Fowler, in his The Greening of Protestant Thought ^[17]admits the growing embrace of mainline American Protestant denominations to the environmental movement, the interest that is creating eco-theologies, process theologies, and eco-feminist theologies that are contributing to the debate. Fowler also seeks to establish theological reasons why “Fundamentalists” continue to be hostile to ecological concerns.^[18] Fowler defines ‘fundamentalists” as “the minority of evangelicals who normally defend the Bible as inerrant…”^[19] Thus, the Evangelical Theological Society would be seen by Fowler and others as ‘fundamentalists” and, thus, outside of the progression of ecological progressivism. This is due, in large part, according to Fowler and others, because those who hold to inerrancy actually embrace ecological decline as a welcome sign that the End is near. Such misunderstandings are not only absolutely baffling, asserted by those who claim the high ground of objective scholarship, but belie an ideological commitment that transcends scholarship. One would have thought that such stereotypes would have long been jettisoned by the significant contributions of Christians in the teaching of stewardship of Creation. Yet, there, is the continuing rub: there are major disconnects, at the deepest philosophical, theological and existential level, that seem to obstruct any meaningful discourse.

Despite the growing concern among Christians committed to Biblical authority and supernaturalism in Creation, whether Catholic or evangelical, to address the reality of “stewardship of Creation,” or “Caring for Creation,” as 63rd Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society theme puts it, and to differentiate between competing worldview “starting points”^[20] which led to distortions of language, meaning, and goals in naming the crisis and engaging it, the resounding response of secularist points of view is to continue to believe that an evangelical and/or Biblical response is simply not genuine.^[21] This is the case in the Drew University dissertation by James Ball, re-worked as an essay in “Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith as “Evangelical Protestants and the Ecological Crisis^[22].”

“Ball divides evangelical eco-theology into four sub-strata―wise use, anthropocentric stewardship, caring management, and servanthood stewardship―of which three are genuinely pro-ecology, and one, the wise-use movement, masquerades as environmentalism but is more appropriately seen as private property rights advocacy.”^[23][24]

Although evangelical and Catholic responses to the movement range from earlier works by Francis Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man^[25], to declarations by Pope John Paul II that the “ecological crisis is a moral issue,”^[26] to editorial decisions at Christianity Today that “It’s Not Easy Being Green, the case has not been bought by the larger environmental movement. But the Time has Come for Evangelicals to Confront the Environmental Crisis,”^[27] the evangelical voices that seek to enter into conversation with the environmental movements have not won any praise from the intelligentsia of the non-Christian movements. Secular worldviews distrust Bible believing Christians as “Fundamentalists,” and Creationists who simply are mired in a primordial supernaturalism that leaves them, necessarily, out of the more important evolutionary discoveries and dialogue in the larger world, including global warming, and other eco sensitivities, or, sullied, politicized parties to a more Machiavellian approach to become more eco-sensitive in order to appeal to the populism within their pews or would be members. This cynical response to a recognition of Biblical stewardship of God’s creation is the exact response that Frazier-Crawford Boerl, and Christopher Wayne advance in their research work at St. Antony’s College,^[28]Oxford.^[29] Joseph Bulbulia summed up the attitudes of many, no doubt, when he wrote,

“In Darwin’s classic statement religion serves no adaptive function. But if Darwin wasn’t tempted to Darwinize religion, why should we? Starting in the 1990s cognitive psychologists began to seriously explore specific features of religious cognition. Following in Darwin’s footsteps, they argued that the aspects of religious cognition are most fruitfully understood
not as parts to a globally adaptive system but as spandrels of other systems. Once we understand how these other integrated, modular, information processors work, we’ll understand how they wind up accidentally generating supernatural thought as noise.”[30]

Evangelical Christianity’s voice in the environmental movement is just “noise” to the pseudo illuminati of the self-proclaimed, genuine, earth care groups. The “noise” is grating on the ears of the more self-proclaimed enlightened environmentalists and thus attempts by Christian environmentalists, like the Christian Society of the Green Cross, the Evangelical Environmental Network, and the Christian Environmentalist Association—as worthy as these ministries are of our support—are, many times, not taken seriously. Likewise, excellent Christian books like Redeeming Creation,^[31] Saving God’s Green Earth,^[32] An Earth-Careful Way of Life: Christian Stewardship and the Environmental Crisis,^[33] Cherishing the Earth,^[34] and even more theological reflections on Biblical understandings of the destiny of the earth itself (often cited by critics as one reason why genuine environmental movements cannot take “Fundamentalist” voices seriously) like Michael William’s (excellent, in my opinion) Far as the Curse is Found,^[35] appears to be only more of the “noise”  of evangelical Christian theology. This attitude of larger academic community, here demonstrated, not only distorts the voices of well meaning Christian ecologists but often causes an effect not unlike the child putting his hands over his ears so that he cannot hear the opposing views of the kid next door. Simply put, the environmental movement’s ground of being is incompatible with Biblical Christianity. Lynn White’s understanding that when Christians see the ecology through the lens of the creation mandate, the view is not only untenable for meaningful dialogue and collaboration but unworthy of it. This might remind the believer of the incompatibility that John Gresham Machen referred to in his title Christianity and Liberalism.^[36] From the environmental movement perspective, it appears clear that Christians who see the earth as made for man and fallen due to sin and crying out for redemption, as St. Paul taught, in Romans 8:19-22,^[37] is simply a theological conception that can never sync with the globalism^[38], socialism,^[39] feminism,^[40] redistribution,^[41] and even (loosely) confederated groups, including religious ones, like pagans^[42] and Wiccans,^[43] that oppose Biblical revelation in explaining the problem and any solutions for the environment, or more preferably put, Creation. Governmental policies, international, multi-national agreements, as well as private and nonprofit efforts at addressing and solving true ecological problems are forever bogged down in the incompatibility of worldviews, or, as some see it, an inescapable narrative that “…religion [is] the primary cause of ecological crisis.”^[44] It is no wonder that some Christians, like H. Paul Santmire, in his The Travail of Nature speak about “ambiguity” of a distinctive Christian theology of ecology. Thus, the publishers described his work:

“The Travail of Nature shows that the theological tradition in the West is neither ecologically bankrupt, as some of its popular and scholarly critics have maintained, nor replete with immediately accessible, albeit long-forgotten, ecological riches hidden everywhere in its deeper vaults, as some contemporary Christians, who are profoundly troubled by the environmental crisis and other related concerns, might wistfully hope to find. This is why it is appropriate to speak of the ambiguous ecological promises of Christian theology.”^[45]

We do not propose to solve the ambiguity of a Christian theology of ecology. We do not seek to solve the intractable positions of those who see Christian concerns for the stewardship of Creation as mere Machivalean moves to appease a popular environmentalism at work in the pew. We do  seek to show that a Biblically sturdy Christian worldview has long drawn from the clear streams of Biblical revelation to describe a theology of Creation. We will seek to establish a high regard for “Caring for Creation” from the a Biblical worldview of the stewardship of Creation.

A Biblical Worldview

To begin to understand the wide chasm between secular environmentalism and biblical Christianity’s understanding of stewardship of the earth, one must begin with a clear Weltanschauung.^[46] [47] Indeed, It is been written^[48] that it was the German philosopher Immanuel Kant the first introduced the word in 1906 to describe what Albert Walters calls “the comprehensive framework of one’s basic beliefs about things.”^[49]  Historic, biblical Christianity must always begin with the special revelation of God through the Scriptures. If Jesus Christ is really says he is and over 500 people testified that he lived after he was crucified and entombed than Jesus Christ We Scriptures were in errant and infallible is in fact God. This Almighty God revealed over time, as Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield put it, that he exists in perfect, eternal, communal tri-unity—three persons within the Godhead and yet one God.

A biblical worldview begins with the special revelation and understands that there is a threefold progress to the great metanarrative.  There was a supernatural creation by this Almighty God. The pinnacle of that creation was not the earth, but was in fact mankind — male and female. The first two chapters of Genesis are clearly not poetic material or mythology. Moses was a great sacred writer composing among other things Psalm 90.

However, any honest reading of the first two chapters of Genesis cannot escape the fact that Moses was recording history from a supernatural perspective, that is he was not interested in conveying scientific facts to the people, he was interested in describing the supernatural activity of Almighty God in creating. This gives us an anchor. We are not purposeless. The children of God were made for the garden. They were made far for ha eretz—the land.  Furthermore, the pinnacle of God’s creation, mankind, was placed in a special relationship with Almighty God in this stew is recorded by Moses. While calling it a covenant in theological terms we are merely describing what we read in the Scriptures from beginning to end — what is being called a scarlet thread that runs through all the metanarrative of the Bible. God made a covenant with man and in that covenant he required that man being obedient. The reward for the obedience was life. The reward for such obedience was in Eden without end. There is great emphasis in Genesis placed upon hot air it’s — the land. It is to be tended. It is to be cared for.

Man’s highest achievement is to cultivate the land. And all of this is recorded prior to the fall.  After the fall there is also emphasis upon the land. The land becomes an enemy of mankind. It is no longer a hospitable habitat. Thorns and pain now form a ruling motif within this habitat. So a biblical worldview begins with a special revelation that describes to us a threefold meta-narrative. We have advanced two of those: special creation and the fall of mankind. But the third component in this biblical worldview, so necessary for us to understand the differences between environmentalism and a biblical caring for creation, is redemption.

The redemption that Almighty God promised and has brought about and yet will bring about in an even greater way — in what George Eldon Ladd called the “cataclysmic in breaking” of the kingdom of God^[50]—was that God would provide, as St. Augustine put it, what he required. Thus in Genesis 3:15 we have a promise of one who will come to crush the head of the evil one, the serpent who led mankind astray through his temptations of woman and man succumbing to that as well. Though the heel of that one will be bruised we are told yet they head of the serpent will be crushed. This begins to work its way out as what theologians call a covenant of grace.

The covenant of works remains in effect period the issue is simply this: either mankind will find redemption in itself, bring redemption to the fallen world, and rectify the expulsion from Eden, and create a new Eden without the help of anyone — that is, clearly, without the help of Almighty God — or, there is a redemption promised by God and fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ. This one said come on to me and you will have life. This is the one who also said if you believe in me you are passed from death unto life. This is also the one who said that if you know me you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. This is also the one who said that no one will come on demand less the father draws him. This is also the one who was stapled to a cross, never denying that he was God Almighty, the supposed blasphemy which placed him upon that cross, but look down from the cross upon the very creatures he had created and said, “father forgive them, they know not what they do.” Jesus of Nazareth, the adopted son of a carpenter and the son of the Virgin Mary, anointed for priesthood by John, his cousin, the son of Zacharias, who lived in open sight of all who could write and testify to his being, he will be sick, raised the dead, and promised that he would rise again in his own death. The Scriptures testify the us from beginning to end and so we have eyewitness testimony of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In fact the apostle Paul says more than 500 people saw him alive after he had been entombed. He also said that many of those who saw him were living as if to say, “if you doubt my words go check it out with those many who saw it and who can corroborate this true story of resurrection.”  It is important to understand them that the centering point of the metanarrative of Scripture is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, his rising from the dead on the third day after he was entombed, and, this is often overlooked in a biblical worldview, the ascension of Jesus Christ to the very dwelling place of Almighty God. From thence he shall come again to judge the quick and the dead says the apostle’s Creed. This is an enormous impact and import not only for the believer but also for the world. Jesus Christ lived the life that we could never live and he died the death which should’ve been hours and this essential purpose of the coming of Jesus Christ, according to Paul in Romans Chapter 8, 1-11, forms an important link from a biblical worldview to caring for creation.

In a biblical worldview, while mankind is the pinnacle of God’s creation and the earth is created for him, as a habitat for him, the earth fell into sin as a consequence of man’s own sin. We surely know what it means for the earth to become infected with the corruption and evil of mankind. We understand what it means, whatever our political views are our understanding of scientific data, that man can pollute the very planet on which he dwells. Thus, it is not that far reached at all, though it is supernatural and must not be explained away in naturalistic terms, that the earth was wounded by the very sinfulness of mankind. In a similar way as the earth was corrupted in all of its parts, expressed by some as the role seen in both storms and floods and earthquakes as well as cancer and tragedies of all kind, including wars and rumors of wars, man and his environment is one in the fall. Yet man and his environment, the earth, ha eretz, is also one in there hope for redemption. Indeed, the apostle Paul lays forth a clear presentation of the state of things in terms of the environment or, the more biblical phrase, creation.

The apostle Paul tells us that creation is groaning underneath the weight of sin brought by mankind. Yet creation is eagerly groaning for redemption. That redemption which was brought forward through Jesus Christ is not only to redeem man but also to redeem his habitat, the creation of God, which is the land. Thus the blind, visionary, (radical) Puritan poet, John Milton (1608-1674) will not only dictate Paradise Lost to his daughters to write and publish in twelve volumes in 1667, but will come back to record Paradise Regained (in four volumes) in 1671. There is a yearning inside of creation itself, and this does not mean there is a pantheistic understanding of creation, but it does mean that there is a systematic, deep, perhaps inexplicable, drawing forth of the flour toward the sun as it were, in anticipation of a new heaven and a new earth. Thus, redemption is not only personal but redemption, in a biblical worldview, is cosmic. There is going to be in Eden restored. This is what the believer looks forward to and, in some way, creation itself strains toward.

Caring for Creation

Thus, a biblical understanding of the world around confesses a supernatural creation, a comprehensive fall that impacted not only mankind but also the earth, but that in Jesus Christ there is redemption— there is a new heaven and a new earth on its way. Whether this is a radical destruction of this earth and remaking of it, or as Albert Wolters and Michael Williams and others suggest, that is the New Heaven and the New Earth is a fiery reordering of the present earth yet with some continuity (as was before in Noah’s flood) with Eden and the world we presently know is another matter within the larger narrative and worldview to consider.  Yet, the Christian worldview clearly establishes that the earth will be redeemed.  While we live in that theological tension of “the already in the not yet”^[51] — which is the theological tension filled not only by mankind but, again, according to St. Paul in Romans chapter 8, at work within creation — we live with the teleological perspective that brings us hope and brings us a renewed Christian activism within creation. “Creation is teleological.”^[52] We are not ready to return to Eden just yet, and eaten is not fully restored, but it is on its way. That is enough to pick up the cultivating tools once again and to enter the earth with the vision of caring for God’s creation. Therefore this essay posits that a biblical worldview calls for the believer to respond to the redemptive acts of God by caring for creation. Whether that is puttering in the garden as did and, by the way, fault will be a wonderful way for him to be working when Jesus Christ came again, or whether that is a full-fledged activist the cleaning up of a polluted river.

This writer has witnessed how local government and private enterprise can collaborate to bring about a case for “Caring for Creation.” Chattanooga, Tennessee was once known as one of the dirtiest places in America.^[53]  The causes of the polluted river and the neglected downtown community could be attributed to many things, yet the observant believer, sensitive and adherent to a biblical worldview, could point to a lack of care for creation. Yet, the same worldview which brought the introspection and practical repentance also fueled the efforts of local government and local businesses, of philanthropist and educators, and, indeed, in some sense, the entire community, to “roll up their sleeves” and go to work and “cultivate the land.” Today Chattanooga has been cited as a model of what a “downtown river city” revitalization should look like.^[54][55][56] This is also an example of the response of a believer, grounded in a biblical worldview of creation – fall – redemption, who looks upon creation, whether it is forest or river or wildlife or, indeed, unstoppable reproduction of mutated cells in the human body, or the human condition, whether physiologically, psychologically, spiritually, or sociologically, and recognizes the woundedness of the fall in that condition.  Responding to the redemptive work of Jesus Christ in his own life, the believer then becomes an activist, not out of the pantheistic environmentalist movement, but out of gratitude to the creator God, to apply, in some measure, in some way, the redemption he has received to the brokenness before him.

One will note that the writer has not sought to engage issues such as population controversies, deforestation controversies, climate change, destruction or possible destruction of the Earth’s ozone, the relative impossible destructive powers of certain fuels, nuclear energy, or a host of other issues that or before the larger Christian community as it is before the larger pluralistic community. There those who are experts in several relevant fields associated with these questions, and those include religion and ethics to be sure. There are those who have much more data to discern whether these are populist movements or observable, scientific issues which demand a biblical worldview responds. I have no input for those individual topics and watch, with others, to see the debate unfold. My concern is only been — and this is a big only, if I may say so myself – to propose that biblical Christianity is not an enemy to the earth. Biblical Christianity is, in fact, a friend of the earth. A new heaven and a new earth are not here but it has been, in Christ Jesus our Lord, inaugurated. And we who are not fully restored to Eden have also experienced the inaugural saving work of Jesus Christ. In this, therefore, rather than in any pagan concept of unity of mankind and earth, we all are, in fact, united with creation.

A Biblical Christian worldview is therefore most concerned about caring for God’s creation because of his faith, not less so. The charge that Christians do not care for the earth is offensive on its face and categorically, historically, and theologically wrong at its core. A Biblical worldview caring for Creation is, however, a far cry from a pantheistic green movement. Moreover, it is not a response to populist movements within congregations, or unscrupulous attempts to placate the people who are demanding the clergy and church become more involved in ecology. It is, and it has always been, not a mythological story grounded in St. Francis, but a compelling personal conviction out of a personal encounter with the Redeemer Jesus Christ that compels believers to care for the earth. This movement is not just green. This movement has a view that there is a new heaven and a new earth coming. It’s on its way. And we are to get to work.

We are to become activists in caring for creation. This is not a green movement. This is better. This is evergreen.

Endnotes

Michael Milton is a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America and was most recently Chancellor of Reformed Theological Seminary. This article first appeared on his blog and is used with permission. 

[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]