C. S. Lewis was a great lover of nature and animals, and the entire body of his writings developed in thousands of Christians a great respect for the physical world—God’s general revelation. The Narnia series in particular had an obvious Edenic feel where animals and people interacted with each other in respect and worship of the lion Aslan, a type of Christ, whose death provided for the redemption of all creation (Romans 8:18ff). His science fiction trilogy also had strong Edenic symbolism with its final volume, 
That Hideous Strength, depicting animals, people, and even the planets joining together to defeat of the cruel naturalistic, atheistic, technological “machine” that had taken over the educational establishment and sought to circumvent the government. It is a striking picture of the “abolition of man” in which man’s power over nature eventually results in nature’s power over man—the biblical principle that what a man sows he also reaps.
KEY SCRIPTURE:
Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture? Must you also trample the rest of your pasture with your feet? Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet? (Ezekiel 34:18)
Lewis’ fellow Inkling Dorothy Sayers wrote several essays touching on both materialism and the abuse of the material world. In pleading the case for a return to an authentic Christianity not burning with the fever of consumption, she quoted T. S. 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. . . . 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 such abuse will eventually come up against the unalterable law and issue in judgment and destruction.
One wonders if Dorothy Sayers was indicating (perhaps unaware) the prophecy of Revelation 11:18: The nations were angry; and your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your saints and those who reverence your name, both small and great—and for destroying those who destroy the earth.
In His sermon on the mount, Jesus plainly tells us that we cannot serve God and wealth (Mammon). Much of what we have been calling God’s blessing is little more than raw wealth. J. Budziszewski comments on capitalism devoid of Christian moral values in First Things: “Even Adam Smith recognizes that the invisible hand does not work unless laborers and businessmen submit themselves to the restraints of justice, and that an interest in wealth alone will not induce them to do so. After all, if winning is all that matters, why keep the competition going at all? Why not use one’s wealth to wring special privileges from the government and so become more wealthy still? Capitalism depends on a moral spirit which it cannot supply and may even weaken; it is, in the most exact of senses, a parasite on the faith.”
I pray that all who name the name of Christ will pay heed to J. Budziszewski’s final appeal to us:
Citizenship is an obligation of the faith, therefore the Christian will not abstain from the politics of the nation-state. But his primary mode of politics must always be witness. It is a good and necessary thing to change the welfare laws, but better yet to go out and feed the poor. It is a good and necessary thing to ban abortion, but better yet to sustain young women and their babies by taking them into the fellowship of faith. This is the way the kingdom of God is built. It is not by the world that the world is moved—yet how it pulls. Ah, God, help us let go of the heights and the depths, the thrones and dominions, the powers and principalities; to be not conservatives, nor yet liberals, but simply Christians. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of Hosts.”
By failing to be that Christian witness in the marketplace we do little to keep capitalism from turning into the disease of mammonism. And if it is not addressed rapidly and aggressively, mammonism can turn fatal.
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
The greater part of the men who constitute [democratic] nations are extremely eager in the pursuit of actual and physical gratification. As they are always dissatisfied with the position which they occupy, and are always free to leave it, they think of nothing but the means of changing their fortune, or of increasing it. To minds thus predisposed, every new method which leads by a shorter road to wealth, every machine which spares labor, every instrument which diminishes the cost of production, every discovery which facilitates pleasures or augments them, seems to be the grandest effort of the human intellect. . . .
We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly. I need only mention, as an instance now very much before the public eye, the results of soil erosion—the exploitation of the earth, on a vast scale. . . , for commercial profit: immediate benefits leading to dearth and desert. . . .
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. . . .
The hippies are right in their desire to be close to nature, even walking in bare feet in order to feel it. But they have no sufficient philosophy, so it drifts into pantheism and soon becomes ugly. But Christians, who should understand the creation principle, have a reason for respecting nature, and when they do, it results in benefits to man.
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.
With new Bible-based books on caring for creation coming from Christian publishers virtually every month, one could easily conclude that creation care is a new fad for the church—and one that some folks would like to see be replaced quickly by something else. It really makes us uncomfortable to keep hearing that we may need to change the way we live so that we become more “creation friendly” by “reducing our carbon footprint.” Certainly the carbon fuel companies would like to see it go away!
“And why are we hearing about all this environmental impact stuff now?” The truth is that there have been voices speaking out for creation care and against environmentally destructive materialism from the time of Jesus, who said that we cannot serve God and money because we will hold to one and despise the other (
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 lawgiving 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. . . . 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.
Turning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm
Our life contains every great thing, and contains it in rich abundance. But the evil has come with the good, and much fine gold has been corroded. With riches has come inexcusable waste. We have squandered a great part of what we might have used, and have not stopped to conserve the exceeding bounty of nature, without which our genius for enterprise would have been worthless and impotent, scorning to be careful, shamefully prodigal as well as admirably efficient. We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through. The groans and agony of it all had not yet reached our ears, the solemn, moving undertone of our life, coming up out of the mines and factories, and out of every home where the struggle had its intimate and familiar seat. With the great Government went many deep secret things which we too long delayed to look into and scrutinize with candid, fearless eyes. The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.
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