CHRISTIANS AND THE ENVIRONMENT:THE BIBLICAL BASIS, by Tony Campolo and Gordon Aeschliman
that we have been "fearfully and wonderfully made," that we are known, even while yet in our "mother’s womb" (Psalm 139: 13). God does not live separate from us. God made us in love and continues to love us throughout our lives. As human beings we draw great comfort from this fact of God’s character and indeed we gain a sense of belonging: we are the children of God. We are not some accidental product of history or science. God created us. Our entire basis of understanding who God is begins with this fact of God. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." God is the Creator. The Bible wanted this to be the very first thing we knew about God. Everything that exists is the handiwork of God. The author of Colossians tells us that nothing has been made that was not made by God. In one sense, there are only two categories of beings in the universe. There is the Creator and there are the created. One of the reasons Christianity includes humility as a core value is because we acknowledge we are not like God—we in fact are the product of dust that was gathered together into a set of hands, fashioned into a body and then brought to life with breath of the Creator. In some ways we are just like everything else. God the Creator is an exceptionally extravagant God. Biologists, geologists, physicists, neurologists, psychologists, astronomers and chemists, just to name a few, devote all their lives trying to uncover the mysteries of the creation. The immense beauty and diversity of the rainforest, for example, is beyond the mind’s ability to capture. The billions of microbes, the millions of exchanges in the great cycle of life, the immeasurable number of species and the sheer volume of music from the singing voices of a jungle that is fully alive is a mystery and playground that will never be fully documented, never fully understood. If we accept the Scripture’s assertion that nothing exists unless God made it, then we know God personally made every leaf, flower, bird, reptile, fungus, cat, spider, smell, color and sound that inhabits the ecosystems of our world. We serve a truly magnificent Creator. The Bible is not a science textbook. It doesn’t explain all of the mechanisms that make the created order work and develop. But it does tell us God’s relationship to the created order. Not only does God create everything, but God also sustains it. The author of Colossians tells us that God lives in all the creation, sustaining it. Creation not only comes into being through the direct work of God, but it is kept alive by the direct work of God. The implication of this of course is massive. Nothing can stay alive without the direct and continuous presence of God. One way to say this is that if God took a coffee break, we and the rest of the created order would be in great trouble. We simply cannot survive without the full time attention of God. God keeps creation (and that includes us) alive by the constant renewing presence of the Holy Spirit. That’s clear enough from Scripture. And we learn from Scripture that God does more than keep it alive. God, according to the Psalmist, "loves all that he created." That’s an astounding thought, really. Not only does God love human beings, God loves everything that has come out of the creative workshop of the Almighty. The Psalmist also tells us that God desires to "satisfy the needs of every living thing" (140:16). This is an important insight into to the loving character of God. We sometimes short change God’s compassion. We insist that it is only wide enough to encompass humans. But the Scripture gives us insight into this eternal love that is so all encompassing, nothing escapes its arms. We see a shadow of this godly character in children. They can have such a pure devotion to a cat or dog or pet rat. These children haven’t been taught to despise the rest of the created order the way that we sometimes do when we get older and begin to loose our tender spirits. Children might not be wise, but they are pure hearted. And that is one reason why Jesus told his disciples that we cannot come to Christ unless we come as a child. Imagine what a good God we serve—to think that all of creation is dearly loved by this Almighty being.
Those people who are of a Christian tradition have a particularly strong sense of how much God loves the creation. The Bible opens with the story of God creating everything, and in that story we learn that God delights in all of it, proclaiming it to be very good. Sadly, God’s good, pure intentions for the creation is disrupted through the work of evil. Rather than abandon the creation, God actually returns to it—not in the form of a stroll through the Garden as was done in the days of Adam and Eve, but this time born to the world through the body of a woman and matured as a young man to the day when he voluntarily gives himself up to death on behalf of the creation. The poetic image of the Creator becoming a part of creation itself in order to save it is powerful beyond imagination. Jesus died for humans to be reconciled to himself. But more than that, as John 3:16 tells us, God died for the entire "cosmos." God’s redemptive work is on behalf of the entire creation, which according to Romans is "groaning for its day of liberation." The entire creation carries the wounds of evil, just as do our families, our bodies, our communities, our nations. And, thankfully, all the earth falls under the generous reconciling work of God. Christians have a unique role in the creation. Because we love the Creator, it would make sense that we would take care of the creation. Sometimes secular environmentalists don’t understand the Christian community. And for good reason! They are puzzled that Christians claim to have a personal relationship with the one who created everything that exists, and yet those same Christians don’t seem to bother about the state of creation. It would be accurate at one level to say you cannot be a Christian if you are not an environmentalist. God is the ultimate environmentalist, going to the point of dying on behalf of all parts of the environment. Christians, by identity, are compassionate people. Not that we always live up to that standard. But it is a core value in the Christian tradition to look out for those the Bible refers to as the "least of these," those who cannot speak out on their own behalf, those who seem to be victims of others’ exploits. The Bible always portrays God with a special sensitivity to the poor. Christians who work to save to the crumbling environment have discovered that there is a unique linkage between the earth and the poor. People of means are able to take care of their nutritional and housing needs no matter where they live (our grocery stores are never stocked with local items—we just ship in the goods we need). The poor, however, always depend upon the health of their immediate environment. They don’t have the luxury of ignoring the health of a local lake or river, because their livelihood is directly dependent upon it. There is a saying, "to hurt the earth is to hurt the poor." This is, sadly, an accurate and telling saying. Just as we cannot avoid gravity while living on the earth, we cannot avoid the other laws of the creation. When we poison waters with our factory waste, when we poison the air with our pollution, when we over work the land and rob it of its topsoil, someone gets hurt. And usually it is the poor. As the world’s cities have developed, it’s no mystery that the poor tend to live down wind, down stream and on the least productive lands. Christians, because of their love for God, have a particular sensitivity to the poor, and so their love for God’s creation includes the plight of the poor. One could say that two of the evidences of being born again are a love for God’s creation and a compassion for the poor who depend upon God’s creation. The Psalmist states that the "earth is the Lord’s—all the fullness of it" (24:1). Everything that creeps on the earth, everything that flies over it, everything that lives inside it. God never let go of Title to the Earth. It always has been the private possession of God. And so those of us who follow God would always want to treat God’s possession with great respect. (We wouldn’t expect less of our children when they are driving our cars, using our homes on weekends, and spending our money!). There’s a sense in which we are expected to use God’s creation only in ways that reflect God’s character. Yes, we need the creation for our own survival. We take from it in order to live and thrive. But we cannot use the creation in ways the damage others, just as we cannot use our bodies to damage other people. Ultimately God is not concerned about how wealthy or famous we become. God is concerned that our lives are lived in a way that reflects that the things that God loves. Did we organize our lives around the things that are close to God’s heart? Did we manipulate the earth in a way that brought life to the poor, or did we do it in a way that simply increased our wealth? These are difficult and yet important questions for a Christian to engage. In the larger picture, we human beings have to wake up in the morning with a special kind of humility. We know that we are more complex than any other part of creation. We know that we have greater comprehensive and intellectual skills. We know that we have the ability to live upstanding moral lives. These are some things that separate us from the rest of creation. But we also know that we have the unique ability to destroy the creation. We have the ability to organize our communities around the destruction of other communities. All of our intellectual, superior skills can be corralled to commit evil. Whereas creation itself does not actually commit evil (it just bears the scars of evil) we are the only species that apparently does not just bear the scars of evil, but that can actually perpetrate it against others and the rest of the creation. The knowledge of our superior structure can puff us up. But the knowledge of our ability to commit evil should generate a kind of humility in our attitude toward the rest of what God created. And there is another case for humility. We actually depend upon creation. That’s right. We cannot live our lives apart from it. For example, we need oxygen to stay alive. The oxygen we require for survival is given to us by trees and plants (and they in turn need our Carbon Dioxide). What we exhale they breathe in. What they exhale (oxygen) we breathe in for our survival. Imagine if all the trees went on strike and decided not to fulfill their biological duty. All human beings would die! We are quite literally that tentative in our existence. If the rest of creation says no to God’s intention for it, we are destroyed. There’s a mystery to these souls of ours, wrapped with a blanket of flesh. For whatever reason, even though we expect to enjoy all eternity as transcendent beings, we cannot escape the flesh in this life, we cannot insist on living separate from the rest of the created order. We need the creation to keep us alive, just as it needs our generosity and compassion to survive. And so we celebrate the creation. It is God’s possession, God’s handiwork, and as such to be respected and admired. And while we take from the creation to live good lives, we live lives that are constrained by the limits of our physical design. Together with the rest of creation we bring glory to our Creator, looking forward to that final day when the work of salvation will be complete and all things will be reconciled to the One who loves with an everlasting love. By Tony Campolo and Gordon Aeschliman Dr. Campolo is a professor of Sociology at Eastern University and President of EAPE. Mr. Aeschliman is President of Target Earth, a Christian environmental ministry.
|
|
||
|
|
One
of the more nurturing images of God presented to us in the Scriptures is
the notion