Posted by Anthony on May 12, 2009
I discovered today that a post a couple of weeks ago about Christians and the environment popped up on a Christian environmentalist blog. My post was ‘Shouldn’t Christians Care about the Environment?” and the brief response (if it was a response at all) was called ‘Self-interest makes Christians better ecologists.’
I actually couldn’t tell from the entry whether or not the blogger agreed or disagreed with my post. There is only one sentence: “Anthony suggests that the reason Christians make better ecologists is that they put people first.”
This isn’t much to go on but there was still something about it that compelled me to reply.
While I’m glad that the blogger recognized that I was not in the slightest maintaining that Christians should be indifferent to the environment, what I was communicating (I thought) was not that this is because Christians ought to put people first.
To sum up some basic points and offer some clarification that wasn’t in the original post… Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on April 29, 2009
Last week I posted an entry challenging the notion that we can save the planet. This generated some interesting comments. One person pointed out that it was his understanding that Christians should care about the environment. On this there is no dispute. Since I rarely speak on this issue I thought something more definitive is in order. Briefly.
There is no question that Christians should care about the environment. However, the infantile notion that the planet needs saving or could be saved is not what that means. This notion rests on the idea that the planet has some sort of intrinsic value, that it has the capacity to care which configuration it ends up in, and that there are things we can do for the sake of the planet just for the sake of the planet.
What is really meant by ‘saving the planet’ is ‘establishing or maintaining the biosphere in certain particular ways.’ And by this it is basically meant, ‘preserving the biosphere to reflect human interests.’ Here it might be objected that no, other interests are at stake, say for example the polar bears. But even there it is our human interests, because it is a special characteristic of humans to care about such things. This care is proper, but if we are not honest about it we are liable to be played as suckers.
The interesting thing about Christian care for the environment, especially if we take the Scriptures as our guide, is that this ‘human interest’ is front and center. Genesis 1:26 has God putting mankind in charge of ‘the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ This we can properly call stewardship and as we see from the text, the value of humans and the earth is set by God, and in this equation, the earth is placed in subject to Humanity.
Presumably, this means it is to humans to carefully manage what has been put under their care.
By ‘carefully manage’ we must understand that ‘human interests’ must be the guiding light, and as this command comes when man was yet unfallen the concern that mere selfishness would be the guiding light is probably not warranted.
Of course, some of the most strident Christian environmentalists are ones who have thrown out Genesis 1. So, I don’t know what their Scriptural basis is. Read the rest of the entry… »
