Earth theology. That phrase likely makes many conservative Christians uncomfortable.  It shouldn’t.  Whose earth is it anyway?  Does it belong to the New Agers?  Does it belong to the secular humanists?  To the pagans?  To the pantheists?  No it does not.  “The earth is the Lord’s”!

You’ll find that I’m writing with a bit more emotion today. Here’s why: I’ve been thinking lately about how I came to be involved in the creation-care movement while working for Mission India (which was then Bibles for India) in the mid-80s.  I was inspired in a negative sense by Shirley MacLaine, who was making headlines in the early 80’s with her New Age, Hinduistic preaching, book-writing, and film-making.  She and her pantheistic friends were so influential at that time that even the Sierra Club and Audubon Society were beginning to preach the same Eastern philosophical understandings.

These big conservation organizations felt they had to convince their constituents to love the creation spiritually in order to save the earth—and if the social trend was toward New Age spiritually, then they had to get on the bandwagon.  Out of that apparent mentality, the Sierra Club published the book Well Body, Well Earth: the Sierra Club Environmental Health Sourcebook, which gave readers, among other things, advice on transcendental meditation and praying to Gaia, the “spirit of the earth.”  It was full of New Age propaganda. And I was angry about that. But thank goodness, the Sierra Club finally came to its senses, in part because some Christians in the creation-care community helped to convince them that all they needed to do was give us good science, and let each religious tradition decide for themselves how it applied to their beliefs.

Please don’t get me wrong: I was not angry with Shirley MacLaine and the New Agers.  I grieve for them.  I’ve prayed for Shirley and others like her that they might be introduced to the Savior who is also their Creator.  They don’t know Him, and they are deceived.  That should concern all Christians and lead us to compassion for them.

But it should do even more.  It should compel us to inquire why we have failed to preach the good news about creation’s coming redemption.  It should make us wonder why non-Christians care about and for the earth more than we do.  It should bother us that neo-pagans and earth worshipers want to be in community with each other, want to be more humane toward animals, want to understand the spiritual aspects of human existence, want to live far less materialistically, want to live more simple lives, want to plant gardens, want to experience the wild outdoors, want to celebrate the mystery in the creation, and want to see the beauty in nature and be inspired by it to express themselves creatively in art, crafts, music, and literature. [Gaia image source]

What if these people, who are made in the image of God just as much as you and I, are closer in practice to the Kingdom than we are?  And what if we began to live more like they do and thought more about the spiritual meaning of the earth—and at the same time determined to share with them the good news about creation redeemed by the Cross and Resurrection?  What if we showed them from the Scriptures that all nature will be refreshed, restored, reunited, and reconciled to the one true God?  Is it possible that our preaching such a “well-earth gospel” might, in the power of the Holy Spirit, create another Great Awakening?

I believe it is a possibility.  But we can’t just wish it.  We have to start believing again that God cares for His earth—and then start showing those who don’t know Him that we care for suffering nature, not only because our Master made it and holds it all together, but also because we love these nature lovers.  Are they not our neighbors?

[Jesus as Creator and Sustainer image source]
[Oiled pelican rescue photo source]

Susan Drake Emmerich is one of those persons who, if you allow her in your life, will change who you are—for the better. Susan spent ten years in the federal government. As a former U.S. delegate to the U.N. and U.S. negotiator for the Department of State, she was a negotiator at the 1992 Earth Summit, Biological Diversity Convention, Global Climate Convention and the Chair of the Secretariat for the International Coral Reef Initiative. She also worked for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the World Bank, Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Interior as a Presidential Management Fellow.

I met Susan some twenty years ago when she was with the U.S. Department of State and I was trying to keep the fledgling Christian Nature Federation afloat. As founder and president of CNF, I had become a strong advocate for Christian involvement in caring for creation, moved by many factors, which included my reading of Francis Schaeffer’s important little book Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology. Susan had been influenced by Schaeffer as well. Over the years since then, our lives have intertwined in ways that affirm the wonder of God’s providence.

A major part of Susan’s story since our first meeting has been told in a PBS-style documentary that is both heart-warming and discomfiting, spiritually challenging and encouraging. It begins when she was a graduate student in Environment and Resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was looking for a dissertation topic dealing with the interconnection of environmental stewardship, faith and conflict resolution. After Larry Schweiger [now president of the National Wildlife Federation] of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) told her about the conflict between watermen and environmentalists in the faith-based communities of Smith and Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay, she knew she had her topic.

Susan’s hypothesis was that faith-based problems require faith-based solutions. She wanted to test whether a faith-based community could transform their own actions toward the environment, the economy, and their neighbors and bring them into better accord with their professed belief system. The mayor and pastors of both churches on Tangier understood the gravity of Tangier’s fishery and overall economic situation and wanted to do something to resolve the building animosity toward CBF. They granted Susan’s request to conduct research on the causes of the conflict and the social forces that could inspire change.

Swain Memorial United Methodist Church

The results of the four-month initiative were amazing. Out of a love for God and the need to be accountable for their actions on the water, more than fifty Tangier watermen and men committed to biblical stewardship by making a covenant with God called The Watermen’s Stewardship Covenant. Moreover, a handful of women took the Women’s Stewardship Pledge that addressed consumption patterns. The covenants were a public commitment to God’s principles of stewardship, adherence to civil laws and contentment as set forth in the Bible.

Faithful Christians can make a lasting difference in their communities by visibly working as stewards of God’s good earth!

KEY SCRIPTURE:
[Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross (Col. 1:15-20).

RBC’s Day of Discovery TV ministry has produced a shortened version of Susan’s story which can be viewed online here.  But be sure you watch the trailer to the documentary to get a dramatic introduction to this encouraging account.  Consider obtaining this DVD and its accompanying materials for your church or Bible study group.

I’m enjoying a new book on our relationship to the natural world: Living With Other Creatures: Green Exegesis and Theology by Richard Bauckham.  Bauckham, an evangelical Cambridge theologian, is a fellow in the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.  Here are some of his thoughts on nature and worship (pp. 12-13) ["Bedtime Prayers" by Mike Ivey Right click to see it larger]:

“Arguably, the most profound and life-changing way in which we can recover our place in the world as creatures alongside our fellow-creatures is through the theme of the worship that all creation offers to God.  There are many passages in the Psalms (e.g. Ps. 19:1-3; 97:6; 98:7-8; and especially 148) that depict all God’s creatures worshipping Him, and the theme is taken up in the New Testament too (Phil. 2:10; Rev. 5:13).

“According to the Bible, all creatures, animate and inanimate, worship God.  This is not, as modern Biblical interpreters have sometimes supposed, merely a poetic fancy or some kind of animism that endows the all creatures with consciousness.  The creation worships God just by being itself, as God made it, existing for God’s glory.  Only humans desist from worshipping God; other creatures, without having to think about it, do so all the time.  A lily does not need to do anything.  Simply by being and growing it praises God.  It is distinctively human to bring praise to conscious expression in words, but the creatures remind us that this distinctively human form of praise is worthless unless, like them, we also live our whole lives to the glory of God. . . .

“This idea of worshipping our Creator along with all the other creatures really has nothing in common with nature worship, of which some modern Christians seem to be pathologically afraid.  It is true that in the biblical tradition nature has been de-divinized.  It is not divine, but God’s creation.  But that does not make it nothing more than material for human use.  Nature has been reduced to stuff that we can do with as we wish, not by the Bible, but by the modern age, with its rejection of God and its instrumentalizing of nature.

“The Bible has de-divinized nature, but it has not de-sacralized nature.  Nature remains sacred in the sense that it belongs to God, exists for the glory of God, even reflects the glory of God, as humans also do.  The respect, even the reverence, that other creatures inspire in us is just as it should be.  It leads us not to worship creation (something that is scarcely a serious danger in the contemporary western world) but to worship with creation.  According to chapter 5 of the book of Revelation, the goal of God’s creative and redemptive work is achieved when every creature in heaven, on earth, under the earth, and in the sea joins in a harmony of praise to God and the Lamb’:

KEY SCRIPTURE:
I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!” (Revelation 5:13).

I used to be a member of the Audubon Society—in large part in order to receive the always enjoyable Audubon magazine.  My membership, of course, also gave me access to the local society meetings, which I attended for a while.  But, to tell the truth, I always left those meetings with a feeling of sadness.  I didn’t attend long enough to really develop any significant personal relationships with other members, but the impression I received was that few, if any, were followers of Christ.  All seemed to be thoroughgoing naturalists in the philosophical meaning of that word.  Nature provided them with their highest source of joy and practically functioned as their god.  And when speakers would come and talk of the decline of this or that bird species or the continuing degradation of the natural world created by careless people, gloom settled on everyone.

If nature is the highest good and you believe that nature is all there is, it’s easy to understand why general depression presses down on you.  If there is no hope beyond the material world we live in, the degradation of the earth leads to the degradation of hope.  Here’s how C. S. Lewis explained it at the conclusion of chapter nine in his book Miracles:

Only Supernaturalists really see Nature.  You must go a little away from her, and then turn around and look back.  Then at last the true landscape will become visible.  You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current.  To treat her as God, or as Everything, is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her.

Come out, look back, and then you will see: this astonishing cataract of bears, babies, and bananas [and birds]; this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, fleas, gases, tornadoes and toads.  How could you ever have thought this was the ultimate reality?  How could you ever have thought that it was merely a stage-set for the moral drama of men and women?  She is herself.  Offer her neither worship nor contempt.  Meet her and know her.

If we are immortal, and if she is doomed (as scientists tell us) to run down and die, we shall miss this half-shy and half-flamboyant creature, this ogress, this [saucy girl], this incorrigible fairy, this dumb witch.  But the theologians tell us that she, like ourselves, is to be redeemed.  The ‘vanity’ to which she was subjected was her disease, not her essence.  She will be cursed in character: not tamed (Heaven forbid) nor sterilized.  We shall still be able to recognize our old enemy, friend, playfellow and foster mother, so perfected as to be not less, but more, herself.  And that will be a merry meeting.
[Linda Elksnin painting]

That is the joy of hope that resides in the heart of those who serve and love the true and living God.  So we are indeed saddened to see the creation degraded and abused and species formed by the design and power of the Creator driven into extinction by our carelessness, greed, and over-consumption.  But because we know the Creator and we know the hope that even nature has for its redemption and renewal in the coming Kingdom, that sadness ought to act as a motivation for us to once again become the stewards of creation we were intended to be.

KEY SCRIPTURE:
The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved (Romans 8:19-24).

At long last, the evangelical ship seems to be swinging around on the issue of environmental degradation being a legitimate concern for Christians.  A few years ago Christianity Today magazine conducted an Internet poll in response to this question: “Should evangelicals lobby on global warming?”  Some 10 percent still believed there was no global warming; 18 percent felt the science was still unclear.  But, surprising to me, 33 percent said, “Yes, it is our job to care for creation.”  Some 20 percent more felt that caring about the climate was an aspect of loving your neighbor or at least caring about it as a social problem.

Also telling is the declining number of those who say, “Our priority should be evangelism.” Around 14 percent affirmed that position.  As an evangelical who writes and speaks on the wonder of creation and the care of creation, I’ve often been asked the question, “Isn’t evangelism—saving human souls—more important than caring for the earth?”

The idea that preaching the gospel should be the purpose of Christian living is probably the main reason that Bible believers call into question the validity of evangelical concern for the material creation—the earth.  The problem is that the question “Isn’t evangelism more important than caring for the earth?” is virtually meaningless as it stands.  This can be illustrated by asking another question: “Isn’t evangelism more important than good parenting?”  Whereas the first seems to call for an obvious yes, the second does not.  In fact, most evangelicals with children would likely answer no to the second question.

The reason is this:  Christians have spiritual-interpersonal responsibilities that relate to our gospel mission as members of the universal body of Christ—the church; but we also have what I call our material-creational responsibilities, which we share with all mankind (meaning that these responsibilities were given to all mankind in the beginning).  The material-creational responsibilities that all people have in common are these: being fruitful by having children and then caring for and protecting them; working so that we might obtain healthful food to eat and clean water to drink; protecting ourselves and our offspring with adequate shelter and clothing; and being caretakers of the earth and its fruitfulness so that it can continue to provide us and all other creatures God made and loves with what we need in order to live and remain healthy.

As Christians, of course, we want to be both health-promoting and healthy servants of God.  Our material-creational responsibilities are implicit in the foundational chapters of the Bible’s book of Genesis, and it can be argued convincingly from these Scriptures that these responsibilities come before our spiritual-interpersonal ones.  The reason is this: if these were ignored, very little evangelism would take place at all—simply because weak, diseased, or dead people are poor evangelists!

KEY SCRIPTURE:
Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever (1 Tim. 5:8).

Evangelical Christians commonly hold that evangelism is primarily the preaching, teaching, and sharing of the words of the gospel: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son [Jesus], that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Yet it is not likely that any of us ever spend the bulk of our time doing this.  We spend most of our waking hours carrying out our material-creational responsibilities.  And that is the way it should be.

In fact, when we carry out these responsibilities in a way that demonstrates the love of God for both the world of people and the world of nature that He created, we are “evangelizing.”  Living Christianly within the light of the gospel with its good news about the restoration of the good cosmos when Jesus returns is likely to be just as important to the cause of evangelism as proclaiming the specific words of the gospel.  Can Christians who ignore the basic material-creational mandates implied by our Scriptures—like caring for our families and for the creation—be “evangelicals” in the fullest meaning of that term?

I like the way Joseph Sittler put it:

A believer is an evangelist primarily by who he is and how he lives—not by what he says.  What he says is important; but unless his speaking tallies with what he is and does, he had better keep quiet.