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]

Sometimes I pester my botanist friend Lytton Musselman when we are in the field by asking him to tell me the common name of the plant he’s examining. He typically says, “I don’t know; all I need to know is its scientific name. Besides, common names are often misleading, if not totally wrong.” That fact, I learned, is especially true in reference to trees.  Today’s nature post on tree misnomers is found on the “Ambling” page of the WOC site.

One mid-summer morning in the early fifties my mom said to my siblings and me, “If I get everything done in good time today, I’ll take you kids to the lake to go swimming.” Our being too young to drive and a good swimming lake too far away to walk to, we simply had to wait on Mom and hope that she got everything done. As the day passed from the cool of the morning to the heat of mid-afternoon, our hope started to dwindle. Hope disappeared first in my two older brothers. They decided to go swimming in the gravel pit near our home, which by that time of the year had become mostly a lukewarm mudhole. The only expression of hope remaining was their swimsuits left waiting in their bedroom. [Swimming hole image source]

Norman Rockwell illustration

Those facts combined led to a Norman Rockwell moment. Mom finally got everything done late in the afternoon. When she made the long-hoped-for announcement, the older boys could not be found. I was the only one who knew where they were and informed Mom of the fact.  She was disturbed by their lack of patience, but decided to show them grace anyway (her name, in fact, was Grace). So she piled me and my next-door buddy and his two sisters into the car and drove off toward the gravel pit to get my brothers. Fortunately the pit was about fifty yards from the road, and even more fortunately I was the first to appear at the rim of the pit. I yelled out the good news to Dick and Jim just before Patty and Sharon reached my standpoint. Curiously, the boys stayed up to their necks in the brown water. After some more yelling that made me aware of the fact that their clothes were piled on the far bank, I realized that they were skinny-dipping!

Order and modesty were soon restored and the long-hoped-for excursion to the lake was realized. My brothers’ red cheeks of embarrassment were replaced by the redness caused by the fresh, deep, and cool waters of Lake Algonquin.

That incident adds clarity to this great Scripture passage on hope:

KEY SCRIPTURE:
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. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently (Romans 8:22-25).

The patience of children is notoriously short, but the hope spoken of in this Scripture has been a very long hope—one, in fact, that goes all the way back to the Fall. I heard the groaning (and complaining) of my brothers as they waited impatiently for the trip to the lake—and saw their eventual settling for a mudhole. In The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis said, “If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord​ finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” [Mud pie making image source]

We need to hold on to the hope we have been given in God’s Word. God will bring this blessed hope to a glorious fulfillment. And does it not make us joyful that “the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels” includes hope for “the whole creation”? As we begin the year 2012, let’s consider actively following the advice offered by Francis Schaeffer forty years ago by relieving some of nature’s groaning:

What we should have, individually and corporately, is a situation where, on the basis of the work of Christ, Christianity is not just seen as “pie in the sky,” but something that has in it the possibility of substantial healings now in every area where there are divisions because of the Fall. First of all, my division from God is healed by justification. . . . Second, there is the psychological division of man from himself; third, the sociological divisions of man from other men; and last, the division of man from nature, and nature from nature. In all these areas we should expect to see substantial healing. . . . 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. [Pollution and the Death of Man, pp. 68-69; Tyndale House Publishers, 1972]  [Francis Schaeffer image source]

Today’s post, by WOC associate J. R. Hudberg appears on the Ambling page.  J. R. reflects on the joy of fishing and delighting in the wonderful varieties of creatures that share God’s world with us.  You can can go directly to the post by clicking on this link: Ambling.

Given the importance of water to all of life’s processes, it’s not surprising to discover how often water, water imagery, and water symbolism appear in the Bible. What surprises many, however, is the depth of understanding about the physical nature of water demonstrated by writers of the Scriptures over 2,000 years ago.

It’s commonly believed that many of the processes, like the water cycle, were not understood until the dramatic increase in scientific knowledge beginning with the Renaissance. But some of the oldest books of the Bible indicate that knowledge about the life-supporting attributes of water has been around since ancient times. Here are some of those processes mentioned at least 1,000 years before the time of Christ:

Ecological Relationships. “Can the papyrus grow up without a marsh? Can the reeds flourish without water? While it is yet green and not cut down, it withers before any other plant” (Job 8:11-12).

Erosion And Dissolution. “As water wears away stones, and as torrents wash away the soil of the earth . . .” (Job 14:19). 21 Good stewardship of the creation is tied to our worship of the One who created it—and us.

Significance To Regeneration Of Plants. “For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender shoots will not cease. Though its root may grow old in the earth, and its stump may die in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and bring forth branches like a plant” (Job 14:7-9).

Clouds As Water Vapor. “He binds up the water in His thick clouds, yet the clouds are not broken under it” (Job 26:8). “With moisture He saturates the thick clouds; He scatters His bright clouds” (Job 37:11). “He causes the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth; He makes lightning for the rain; He brings the wind out of His treasuries” (Ps. 135:7).

Evaporation And Condensation. “He draws up drops of water, which distill as rain from the mist, which the clouds drop down and pour abundantly on man” (Job 36:27-28).

Water Cycle. “All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; to the place from which the rivers come, there they return again” (Eccl. 1:7).

Because so many of us today live and work in places insulated and isolated from the outdoors, we tend to ignore the water-related processes going on around us, unless we are caught off guard by a sudden storm, a flash flood, or a raging blizzard. The ancients, on the other hand, had an intimacy with the natural world that compelled them to have great respect for the power the Creator demonstrated by the dynamics of water. Consider this set of questions from the book of Job intended to emphasize God’s control over nature:

KEY SCRIPTURE:
Who has divided a channel for the overflowing water, or a path for the thunderbolt, to cause it to rain on a land where there is no one, a wilderness in which there is no man; to satisfy the desolate waste, and cause to spring forth the growth of tender grass? Has the rain a father? Or who has begotten the drops of dew? From whose womb comes the ice? And the frost of heaven, who gives it birth? The waters harden like stone, and the surface of the deep is frozen (Job 38:25-30).

[NOTE:  Today's post is taken from the RBC Discovery Series booklet "Celebrating The Wonder of Water."  The booklet is one in a series of five on the wonder of creation.  These booklets are ideal for travel and trekking.  They should add to your enjoyment of the creation and help you gain a greater appreciation of the depth of the Bible's celebration of the natural world: God's good earth. Follow this link to read them online and to order them.  You can obtain them without cost.]