“Why have we never heard this before?”

That question, edged with irritation, came from a young woman probably in her early thirties. It came near the end of a lecture I’d been giving in a Christian college adult continuing education class. She was asking why she had never heard anything like the biblical principles of creation stewardship I’d been outlining.

Her question, in fact, reminded me again of the disappointment and dismay I had first felt when I came to understand that one of the major Genesis mandates–one of the future realities of life in God’s kingdom-had been virtually ignored by the churches I grew up in and served in for much of my life as a follower of Jesus.

The Genesis mandate most ignored was the command “to work and take care of” the Garden (the metaphor for the early earth) given to us in Genesis 2:15 (NIV). Since the original King James stated that we were “to dress” and “to keep” the Garden, it’s quite possible that most preachers and teachers really did not understand the full significance of the Hebrew words for “dress” and “keep.” Those words, abad and shamar, understood in their richest connotations (according to Strong) mean that the responsibility of mankind to the earth was to work it, to till it, to serve it (as a serving master), to be husbandman over it, to protect it, to preserve it, and to save it (indeed, to “save the earth”!). This was all in the course of being “in dominion” over the creation (Gen. 1:26-31).

The future reality commonly ignored in the churches I attended was the fact of the “restoration” of the cursed creation promised by the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Paul tells us about this in Colossians 1: 20 and Romans 8:18-25. Listen to the way J.B. Phillips paraphrases this future reality:

“In my opinion whatever we may have to go through now is less than nothing compared with the magnificent future God has planned for us. The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own. The world of creation cannot as yet see reality, not because it chooses to be blind, but because in God’s purpose it has been so limited — yet it has been given hope. And the hope is that in the end the whole of created life will be rescued from the tyranny of change and decay, and have its share in that magnificent liberty which can only belong to the children of God!”

Why the evangelical churches I was a part of missed this is a mystery, since when I was a child, the Scofield Bible was the study Bible of choice. The note that Scofield made on Romans 8:22 was this: “Even the animal and material creation, cursed for man’s sake, will be delivered by Christ.” In the current conservative evangelical community, that almost sounds like heresy.

Why did that young woman and I both have a sense of dismay when we began to understand that these important truths that apply directly to our daily lives and to our glorious future had been missed or ignored? I believe it’s because of the common understanding in our circles today that we really have things pretty much figured out about how to act Christianly in the modern world. We’ve got the answers. On the issue of the meaning of the natural creation, however, we both felt that a major part of what should have marked our thinking and our living had been neglected.

It has only been in the past twenty years of my life that I have come to realize that there were many admonitions our churches and their leaders overlooked. It is my opinion that much of that neglect came from the neutralization of the biblical message by our fascination with the baubles of modernity and the materialistic benefits of the Industrial Revolution. Could what we had been calling “blessings on America” because of our supposed collective Christianity actuality have been little more than the result of self-centered, earth-consuming and damaging behavior? And maybe those “blessings” have more often than not kept us from the true blessings that come from humbleness, self-sacrifice, and obedience. Instead of caring for the Garden, have we been pillaging the Garden?

When I began to consider these questions and went back to reading what earlier Christians had said, I was amazed at how much modern evangelicals have either ignored or forgotten. There were many voices that our forebears apparently did not consider significant enough for us to question our relationship to God’s good creation.

Before the turn of the last century George MacDonald was pleading with those who would hear to attend to the beauty of the earth, not merely its utility. Listen to his reverie:

I walked home one winter’s Sunday morning after church. It was a lovely day. The sun shone so warm that you could not help thinking of what God would be able to do before long — draw primroses and buttercups out of the earth by force of sweet persuasive influences. But in the shadows lay fine webs of laces of ice, so delicately lovely that one could not but be glad of the cold that made the water able to please itself by taking such graceful forms. And I wondered over again, for the hundredth time, what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious, work of nature, always kept it beautiful. The beauty of holiness must be at the heart of it somehow, I thought. Because our God is so free from stain, so loving, so unselfish, so good, so altogether what he wants us to be, so holy, therefore all his works declare him in beauty; his fingers can touch nothing but to mold it into loveliness; and even the play of his elements is in grace and tenderness of form.

Getting to the heart of the meaning of the earth, MacDonald speaks through the main character in his novel The Curate’s Awakening:

All about us in earth and air, wherever eye or ear can reach, there is a power ever breathing itself forth in signs. Now it shows itself in a daisy, now in a waft of wind, a cloud, a sunset — and this power holds constant relation with the dark and silent world within us. The same God who is in us and upon whose tree we are buds, also is all about us. Inside, the Spirit; outside the Word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us; and when they meet, then the sign within and the longing within become one. The man no more walks in darkness, but in light, knowing where he is going.

He speaks about the sinful human urge to own: “The love of possessing a property must, if it goes unchecked, in time annihilate in a man the inheritance of the meek. . . . Only love and only God can be ours perfectly. Nothing called “property” can be ours at all. . . . All is man’s only because it is God’s. The true possession of anything is to see and feel in it what God made it for, and the uplifting of the soul by that knowledge is the joy of true having.”

Echoing those same words was the great Dutch statesman, Abraham Kuyper. Speaking of the same reality that grieved Scotsman George MacDonald, Kuyper said this:

We have heard how in Scotland three?fourths of the land is in the hands of fourteen persons, and how one of these fourteen recently bought a section in which forty?eight families lived and simply drove them off the land in order to extend his game preserve. Does not a voice in your innermost self tell you that such a disposal of land on which bread for the hungry must be grown cannot, as a matter of principle, be good, and that the lumping together of land ownership with individualistic ownership must run counter to God’s ordinances? In the Lord’s law-giving for Israel you find a whole set of special regulations for the ownership of land. The fruitful field is given by God to all the people so that every tribe in Israel might dwell on it and live from it. Any agrarian regulation that does not reckon with this explicit ordinance ruins land and people. . . . Under God we have no right of rule except in the context of the organic association of mankind, and thus also in the context of the organic association of its possessions. What the social democrat calls “community of goods” never existed either in Israel or in the first Christian community. Such an absolute community of goods is excluded everywhere in Scripture. However, Scripture excludes just as completely every illusion of a right to dispose of one’s property absolutely, as if one were God, without considering the needs of others.

One wonders how such language would sit today with those who consider private property “rights” to be sovereign. Even conservatives like Charles Colson recognize what Kuyper and MacDonald were saying. In his book The Body Colson quotes Kuyper: “[Our call] is this: that in spite of all worldly opposition, God’s holy ordinances shall be established again in the home, in the school, and in the state for the good of the people; to carve as it were into the conscience of the nation the ordinances of the Lord, to which Bible and creation bear witness, until the nation pays homage again to God.”

Colson elaborates:

We should be contending for truth in every area of life. Not for power or because we are taken with some trendy cause, but humbly to bring glory to God. For this reason, Christians should be the most ardent ecologists. Not because we would rather save spotted owls than cut down trees whose bark provides lifesaving medicine, but because we are mandated to keep the Garden, to ensure that the beauty and grandeur God has reflected in nature is not despoiled. We should care for animals. Not because whales are our brothers, but because animals are part of God’s kingdom over which we are to exercise dominion. Francis of Assisi should be our role model, not Ted Turner or Ingrid Newkirk.

In Kuyper’s day there was hope in many countries for a national turning to the ordinances of God. But the incessant march of militant materialism could not be stopped. The Great War soon erupted. Afterward, atheism marched in the streets of Moscow, fittingly drawing the Iron Curtain around the other holocaust–the genocide of millions in a nation whose only god was Mammon. In America, while the flappers danced in the streets, Christian churches were caught up in a war with religious liberalism. Old denominations crumbled and new organizations of evangelicals formed: the Independent Fundamental Churches of America, the General Association of Baptist Churches, the Conservative Baptist Association. Within the mainline Presbyterian, Methodist, and Lutheran churches the battle for the authenticity and authority of the Bible raged as well.

Perhaps it was this battle in America that diverted our attention from the fact that capitalism, though carrying a Bible and pledging allegiance to Old Glory, was also infected with materialism. Orthodox Christianity’s battle with religious modernism and the Great Depression no doubt kept many of us from hearing the warning from our own Woodrow Wilson who declared that we were caught in the web of a great economic system that was “heartless.” Not even heeding admonitions in our own nation, it was easy to miss the warnings from fellow believers in Great Britain about the damage materialism was doing to our hearts and to God’s creation. The Inklings, a group of scholars who gathered around the convictions of C.S. Lewis, were seeing some things that our church leaders should have seen. T.S. Eliot was one with an inkling about the truth. Having turned to Christ from the emptiness of the materialist wasteland, Eliot saw the specter of death in mankind’s fascination with science and technology. In 1934 he wrote in the poem “Choruses from the Rock” these words [the "Rock" being Christ]:

O weariness of men who turn from God
To the grandeur of your minds and the glory of your action,
To arts and inventions and daring enterprises,
To schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited,
Binding the earth and water to your service,
Exploiting the seas and developing the mountains,
Dividing the stars into common and preferred,
Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator,
Engaged in working out a rational morality,
Engaged in printing as many books as possible,
Plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles,
Turning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm
For nation or race or what you call humanity;
Though you forget the way to the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.

And later:

The Word of the Lord came to me, saying:
O miserable cities of designing men,
O wretched generation of enlightened men,
Betrayed in the mazes of your ingenuities,
Sold by the proceeds of your proper inventions:
I have given you hands — which you turn from worship,
I have given you speech — for endless palaver,
I have given you my Law — and you set up commissions,
I have given you lips — to express friendly sentiments,
I have given you hearts — for reciprocal distrust,
I have given you power of choice — and you only alternate
Between futile speculation and unconsidered action.
Many are engaged in writing books and printing them,
Many desire to see their names in print,
Many read nothing but the [sports] reports.
Much is your reading, but not the Word of God
Much is your building, but not the House of God.
Will you build me a house of plaster, with corrugated roofing,
To be filled with the litter of Sunday newspapers?

Another of Lewis’ friends who saw the folly of mankind’s unholy use of the earth was Dorothy Sayers. In pleading the case for a return to an authentic Christianity not burning with the fever of consumption, she quoted Eliot: “A wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and the consequence is an inevitable doom.” Sayers went on to warn us:

So long as the Church continues to teach the manhood of God and to celebrate the sacraments of [The Lord's Supper] and marriage, no living man should dare to say that matter and body are not sacred to her. She must insist strongly that the whole material universe is an expression and incarnation of the creative energy of God, as a book or a picture is a material expression of the creative soul of the artist. For that reason, all good and creative handling of the material universe is holy and beautiful, and all abuse of the material universe is a crucifixion of the body of Christ. The whole question of the right use to be made of art, of the intellect, and of the material resources of the world is bound up in this. Because of this, the exploitation of man or matter for commercial uses stands condemned, together with all debasement of the arts and perversions of the intellect. If matter and the physical nature of man are evil, or if they are of no importance except as they serve an economic system, then there is nothing to restrain us from abusing them as we choose — nothing, except the absolute certainty that and such abuse will eventually come up against the unalterable law and issue in judgment and destruction.

Dorothy Sayers also saw the evils of meaningless work:

We cannot expect a sacramental attitude to work, while many people are forced, by our evil standard of values, to do work which is a spiritual degradation — a long series of financial trickeries, for example, or the manufacture of vulgar and useless trivialities. [This was before computer games!] Perhaps if the Churches had had the courage to lay their emphasis where Christ laid it, we might not have come to this present frame of mind in which it is assumed that the value of all work, and the value of all people, is to be assessed in terms of economics. We might not so readily take for granted that the production of anything (no matter how useless and dangerous) is justified so long as it issues in increased profits and wages; that so long as a man is well paid, it does not matter whether his work is worthwhile in itself or good for his soul; that so long as a business deal keeps on the windy side of the law, we need not bother about its ruinous consequences to society or the individual.

Finally, she took on, with no euphemisms, an economic system based on greed and covetousness inflamed by modern advertising [this was during W.W. II]:

That system as we know it thrives upon waste and rubbish heaps. At present the waste (that is, sheer gluttonous consumption) is being done for us on the field of war. In peace, if we do not revise our ideas, we shall ourselves become its instruments. The rubbish-heap will again be piled on our own doorsteps, on our own backs, in our own bellies. Instead of the wasteful consumption of trucks and tanks, metal and explosives, we shall have back the wasteful consumption of [radios] and silk stockings, drugs and paper, cheap pottery and cosmetics — all the slop and swill that pour down the sewers over which the palace of Gluttony is built. . . . It was left for the present age to endow Covetousness with glamour on a big scale, and to give it a title which it could carry like a flag. It occurred to somebody to call it “enterprise.” From the moment of that happy inspiration, Covetousness has gone forward and never looked back. It has become a swaggering, swashbuckling, piratical sin, going about with its hat cocked over its eye, and with pistols tucked into the tops of its jack-boots. Its war-cries are “business efficiency,” “free competition,” ” get out or get under,” and “there’s always room at the top.” It no longer [scrimps] and saves — it launches out into new enterprises; it gambles and speculates; it thinks in a big way; it takes risks. It can no longer be troubled to deal in real wealth, and so remain attached to work and to the soil.

Well, the churches generally did not heed Sayers’ admonition “to lay their emphasis where Christ laid it.” They sailed on into the so-called happy days of the fifties building bigger and better sanctuaries that tended to seal the message in and the sinner out. With no alternative offered for the meaninglessness of materialism and the empty promises of modernity, the sixties brought chaos. Justifiably disenchanted youth tossed Molotov cocktails on the whole “establishment” of church, state, and university.

Trying to make sense of it all, a new voice was heard: that of Francis Schaeffer. Thousands of Christians pored over his books to discover the reason for unreason and to understand why Western civilization had come to such a state. At the end of the process, we all asked with Schaeffer, “How should we then live?” Much of what this philosopher/theologian said about the demise of Christianity in the West was quickly understood and accepted as the basis upon which a revitalized Church could once again make its message heard in a lost world.

Curiously, however, one of Schaeffer’s books was overlooked or, perhaps more correctly, ignored as an aberration of an otherwise astute thinker: it was titled Pollution and the Death of Man: A Christian View of Ecology. The book title and the cover itself–a photograph of a skull on a pile of dirt-likely added to its lack of popularity: Wasn’t the ranting of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden enough? Did we really need another negative message to add to our burden of bad news? We had ministries to run and families to raise; how could we be expected to be enthusiastic about another message of impending disaster?

Those who took the time to read and ponder carefully Pollution and the Death of Man (published in 1970 and just republished a few years ago) discovered, however, that its message was not just another commentary on the decline of Christianity-it was a challenge to the church to apply biblical principles to the world’s environmental crises which were primarily the result of materialism. Unfortunately, it appears that the book was published more than thirty years too soon, for only recently has the church come to the point where it is willing to examine the premises of the book–some of which now seem to be prophetic.

Among other things, Schaeffer predicted that without the Church’s participation in the ecology debate, the environmental movement would adopt pantheism as its foundational doctrine. Sadly now, we recognize that he was right. In the religious void left by orthodox Christianity’s failure to step into the fray and address environmental issues from a biblical point of view, Hinduism, Buddhism, and their modern expression in the New Age Movement soon joined with other purveyors of “earth spirituality” to make pantheism, as Schaeffer predicted, the religion of the cause.

Much of evangelical Christianity, tied as it was–and still is–to the economics of progress and prosperity, decided that “since the earth is going to burn,” Christians might just as well ignore the earth’s physical condition and concentrate instead on saving souls and ushering them to Glory “on flowery beds of ease.” Anyway, Jesus was going to return in a few years, and everything would be fixed.

Well, Jesus did not return in the seventies, nor in the eighties or nineties. And, in part because of the Church’s failure to apply the scriptural principle of stewardship to our use of the earth’s resources, the world’s environmental problems have compounded. Now we are having to relearn this important lesson: Jesus never intended the promise of His future return to be an excuse for ignoring our present responsibilities.

Listen to Schaeffer’s admonitions and observations:

On the basis of the fact that there is going to be total redemption in the future, not only of man but of all creation, the Christian who believes the Bible should be the man who — with God’s help and in the power of the Holy Spirit — is treating nature now in the direction of the way nature will be then. It will not now be perfect, but it must be substantial, or we have missed our calling. God’s calling to the Christian now, and to the Christian community, in the area of nature — just as it is in the area of personal Christian living in true spirituality — is that we should exhibit a substantial healing here and now, between man and nature and nature and itself, as far as Christians can bring it to pass.

In Novum Organon Francis Bacon wrote this: “Man by the Fall fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over nature. Both of these losses, however, even in this life, can in some part be repaired; the former by religion and faith, the later by the arts and sciences.” It is a tragedy that the Church, including the orthodox, evangelical Church, has not always remembered that. Here, in this present life, it is possible for the Christian to have some share, through sciences and the arts, in returning nature to its proper place.

Man was given dominion over creation. This is true. But since the Fall, man has exercised this dominion wrongly. He is a rebel who has set himself at the center of the universe. By creation man has dominion; but as a fallen creature he has used that dominion wrongly. Because he is fallen, he exploits created things as though they were nothing in themselves, and as though he has an autonomous right to them.

Surely then, Christians, who have returned through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ to fellowship with God, and have a proper place of reference to the God who is there, should demonstrate a proper use of nature. We are to have dominion over it, but we are not going to use it as fallen man uses it. We are not going to act as though it were nothing in itself or as though we will do to nature everything we can do. . . .

So man has dominion over nature, but he uses it wrongly. The Christian is called upon to exhibit this dominion, but exhibit it rightly: treating the thing as having value in itself, exercising dominion without being destructive. The church should always have taught and done this, but she has generally failed to do so, and we need to confess our failure.

Recently I came upon some copies I had made a few years ago of pages from a book of essays by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and some of his fellow dissidents in the early 70’s. The book is titled From Under the Rubble, printed in the US by Regnery Gateway, 1981. Some of the following quotes struck a responsive chord in me and helped to formulate my strong conviction that it is not conservative, libertarian, and/or laissez-faire economic policies that will save us, but the very personal practices of repentance and self-limitation. These are from Solzhenitsyn’s essay “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations.”

Whatever feelings predominate in the members of a given society at a given moment in time, they will serve to color the whole of that society and determine its moral character. And if there is nothing good there to pervade that society, it will destroy itself or be brutalized by the triumph of evil instincts no matter where the pointer of the great economic laws may turn. And it is open to every one of us, whether learned or not, to choose — and profitably choose — not to evade the examination of social phenomena with reference to the categories of individual spiritual life and ethics.

The end of the world, so often foretold by the prophets only to be postponed, has ceased to be the particular property of mystics and confronts us as sober reality, scientifically, technically, and psychologically warranted. It is no longer just the danger of a nuclear world war — we have grown used to that and can take it in our stride. But the calculations of the ecologists show us that we are caught in a trap: either we change our ways and abandon our greedy pursuit of progress, or else in the 21st century, whatever the pace of man’s development, we will perish as a result of a total exhaustion, barrenness, and pollution of the planet. Add to this the white-hot tensions between nations and races, and we can say without suspicion of overstatement that without repentance, it is in any case doubtful if we can survive. It is by now only too obvious how dearly mankind has paid for the fact that we have all throughout the ages preferred to censure, denounce, and hate others, instead of censuring, denouncing, and hating ourselves….

We are always very ready to limit others — this is what all politicians are engaged in — but nowadays the man who suggests that a state or a party, without coercion and simply in answer to a moral call, should limit itself invites ridicule. We are always anxiously on the lookout for ways of curbing the inordinate greed of the other man, but no one is heard renouncing his own inordinate greed. History knows of several occasions on which the greed of a minority was curbed with much bloodshed, but who is to curb the inflamed greed of the majority, and how? That is something it can only do for itself. The idea of self-limitation in society is not a new one. We find it a century ago in such thoroughgoing Christians as the Russian Old Believers. In the journal “Istina” (no. 1, 1807)… we read:

A people subjects itself to great suffering by its immoral acquisitiveness….
The true and lasting good is that which is attained by farsighted self-limitation.

And elsewhere:

Save through self-restriction, there is no other true freedom for mankind.

After the Western ideal of unlimited freedom, after the Marxist concept of freedom as acceptance of the yoke of necessity — here is the true Christian definition of freedom: Freedom is self-restriction! Restriction of the self for the sake of others! Once understood and adopted, this principle diverts us — as individuals, in all forms of human associations, societies, and nations — from outward to inward development, thereby giving us greater spiritual depth. The turn toward inward development, the triumph of inwardness over outwardness, if it ever happens, will be a great turning point in the history of mankind, comparable to the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance….

The concept of unlimited freedom is closely connected in its origin with the concept of ‘infinite progress,’ which we now recognize as false. Progress in this sense is impossible on our earth with its limited surface area and resources. We shall in any case inevitably have to stop jostling each other and show self-restraint: with the population rapidly soaring, mother earth herself will shortly force us to do so. It would be spiritually so much more valuable, and psychologically so much easier, to adopt the principle of self-limitation — and to achieve it through prudent self-restriction.

Such a change will not be easy for the free economy of the West. It is a revolutionary demolition and total reconstruction of all our ideas and aims. We must go over from uninterrupted progress to a stable economy, with nil growth in territory, parameters, and tempo, developing only through improved technology (and even technical successes must be critically screened). This means that we must abjure the plague of expansion beyond our borders, the continual scramble after new markets and sources of raw material, increases in our industrial territory of the volume of production, the whole insane pursuit of wealth, fame, and change. No incentive to self-limitation has ever existed in bourgeois economics, yet the formula would so easily and so long ago have been derived from moral considerations. The fundamental concepts of private property and private economic initiative are part of man’s nature, and necessary for his personal freedom and his sense of normal well-being. They would be beneficial to society if only — if only the carriers of these ideas on the very threshold of development had limited themselves, and not allowed the size of their property and thrust of avarice to become a social evil, which provoked so much justifiable anger, not tried to purchase power and subjugate the press. It was a reply to the shamelessness of unlimited money grubbing that socialism in all its forms developed.

So back to my student’s original question: “Why have we never heard this before?” The answer seems to be that we simply were not paying attention. We didn’t hear the wise Christian voices of the past; we didn’t hear the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking through Scripture; we didn’t hear the ever more intense groaning of creation.

And, sadly, most of us will not likely hear these voices today. One reason they will not hear the voices is that so many of our conservative parachurch ministry leaders are so loud in their condemnation of the heresies of a few environmental radicals that they are drowning out the truth about our responsibility to be stewards of the creation. I’m afraid these evangelical leaders are so enamored of the strident and often unbiblical views offered on conservative talk radio that they will never join their voices with the likes of MacDonald, Kuyper, Eliot, Lewis, Sayers, Schaeffer, Solzhenitsyn, and Carl F. H. Henry. They called, as we should call, for a return to obedience regarding the Genesis mandates and for a sincere and active longing for the restoration of all creation promised in the atoning death of our Savior and assured in His Second Coming. How much we need to come to true understanding of the role that is ours in working toward creation’s restoration promised by Jesus return.

Consider in conclusion the thoughts of Jean Mouroux penned over sixty years ago about the significance of man as the serving master-or creation’s “priest”:

Man is linked with nature in the vital, moral, and religious orders; and with her he forms an organic whole which finds its meaning and definitive fulfillment in the glory of God. But man alone is conscious of it. He alone is able to present the world to God in thought and love and to glorify God through the world. Thus he is bound up with nature, but only to rule, complete, and achieve it: he is “the animal that commands,” but commands in order to serve and do homage; and thus he is truly creation’s priest. And fraternal nature, not unhelpful, but seeking, desiring, looks up to him who alone can fulfill her desire by giving her a soul and a voice wherewith to honor her God.