Christian belief and environmental concern

Written by Peter Harris, February 2002, for a World Vision International publication for Rio + 10, edited by Don Brandt, and used here with kind permission of WVI.

As we consider the ways in which the Christian church has been coming to terms with the imperative for environmental stewardship in recent decades, it becomes clear that we are not in front of a simple picture. The church is rooted in cultures which are so many and so various that inevitably the issue is approached very differently by Christian people and communities around the world. Christian leaders, whether working as environmental professionals or church leaders, have concerns that are extremely diverse. The issues that face a park ranger in East Africa are a planet away from those facing a geneticist working in a lab in France. Equally the concerns of a pastor in Guinea Bissau, where deforestation and the collapse of biodiversity spell starvation and disease for the church, have little in common with those of a pastor in a wealthy suburb of the western world where materialism has all but overwhelmed any desire for sacrificial living in the Christian community. Nevertheless an authentic Christian response is always going to be formed both by changing circumstances, and in relationship to God himself, and consequently some common themes can be found. But before we look at the rich heritage of Christian belief and practice that is now leading to a renewed concern for the creation in many places, we must take an honest look at the context out of which it is developing. In doing so I will only consider that of the western world, partly because I know it best, and partly because it is western culture, whether on home ground or in some exported form, which is driving much of the current degradation of the environment taking place world-wide.

If we must begin on a sombre note, it is as well to remember the words of Rowland Moss, who as a human ecologist and a Christian was one of the first in recent times to recall the Church to its environmental conscience. He wrote in 1982 "Is the environmental challenge to ... the church but a part of the total moral challenge which is greater than the sum of its individual components?... Is the whole situation much more serious than we think (not for scientific or economic reasons, but for moral reasons) in that we are already under God's judgement?" Rowland Moss believed that our first response to the current environmental crisis should be repentance. If we accept that, it then gives us a way forward to consider the often overlooked role of belief itself in the environmental debate, and then the remarkable resources that specifically Christian belief in God can bring us as we reconsider and renew our relationship to the world around us.

Sleeping with the enemy

Sadly church history reveals time and time again the uneasy treaties that Christians have made with their times. Examples appear in a sobering parade, from the superstitious practices of the twelfth century church, to the defence of slavery or racism on the part of churches in the eighteenth century, or the aberrations of nationalism in recent history until the present. Our times and cultures can cling to us very closely, and Christians know that it is only as the Holy Spirit renews our minds, as God reveals himself in Christ and in the Scriptures, that we are delivered from being pressed into the distortions of the societies in which we live. Many contemporary western societies are determined to edit out any recognition of God as Creator from their experience of the world. So Christians can find it hard not to continue living and thinking as they used to before they came to know Christ, and it can be very tempting to construct a kind of accommodation between what has been called "practical atheism" and a Christian profession of faith. Essentially, while calling themselves Christians, they live as if there were no God in terms of their choices or preferences, their manner of life.

On the other hand, western societies share a powerful Christian heritage, and so Christians have become accustomed to the idea that being a good Christian is the same as being a good Dutchman, or Frenchman, or American or British person. But if it ever was true in the past, it is far from the case now: the time has long gone since Christian thinking exercised a wide influence on policy makers. Rather, in seeking to reconcile social consensus with Christian thinking, on many issues the Christian is more akin to a person with a foot on two ice-floes which are drifting steadily apart. Although a choice has to be made, the idea of critical evaluation is unfamiliar - western Christians are unaccustomed to thinking that we cannot simply belong to our culture and our church by the same set of decisions. Instead there is a further challenge, namely to take seriously the implications of what we believe about God and the world around us, and to apply that to a number of issues. In reality it has never been possible to be unthinking members of cultures that deny the Lordship of Christ even in times of consensus between church and state, but now the situation is absolutely evident.

Environmental issues are a prime area for these kinds of choices. Worldwide we are faced with an unprecedented and extremely rapid loss of biodiversity, (footnote to ref IUCN and roots of bio loss..) and the collapse of many ecosystems that have sustained life on earth. Straightforward Christian convictions make it impossible for the church simply to endorse the choices of a destructive culture, but in understanding the roots of the problem we will need to look deep into the soil of western beliefs. As we become aware of how those beliefs have taken shape in the development of industrial and post industrial societies, we have to recognise that among the more disastrous accommodations of the Christian church has been a well documented co-habitation with the individualistic humanism which has flourished in Europe and elsewhere in the western world for the last four or five centuries. Where this co-habitation became established it had the effect of reducing Christian thinking to a merely personal agenda, excluded from guiding social or environmental relationships, and it led to a conception of the creation as merely the raw material for economic growth. In so far as the societies that set off down this road were posited on Christian assumptions we bear some responsibility for the outcome. But in changing track we can see clearly that such a view of creation is far from being coherent Christianity, and a more biblical reading of basic beliefs will help us to discover the road back to a lifestyle that is more consistent with our core beliefs, and which will lead inevitably to a proper care of creation. Before we do so, and before we can go on to consider what those beliefs are, and where the implications of them might lead us, we need briefly to look at another authentically Christian conviction that is at variance with western assumptions about environmental issues, namely that belief itself is relevant.

The centrality of belief

For Christians, and many others, belief itself is central, and it cannot be seen merely as an optional extra for those who like to consider themselves religious. What we believe the world to be will affect profoundly how we treat it, and how we live in it. James Houston, a former Oxford University geographer, now theology professor, has written:

The world we see is the mirror image of our hearts. We perceive reality as we conceive it to be. If we have given up the hope of finding meaning in our lives, then we see the world as a desert place, a threatening wilderness. If, however, we have hope in God the Creator of all things, then we can, and shall, see it very differently.

To adapt his words, if today we are making a desert of the world we live in, it is because of the prevailing beliefs of our times. Even if some value is given to the concept of biodiversity, the usual argument for its preservation begins from our need as a human species for access to its riches, and the assumption that they must be maintained primarily for our own well being. In the disappearing flora of the rainforest, it is argued, may lie many remedies for our illnesses. That this is the significance of biodiversity is merely a belief (and a remarkably inconsistent and untenable one) but it is undeniable that as such it is central to how we are making our decisions. Even so it is extremely rare for those most concerned for the well being of biodiversity in the major world institutions to give more than token consideration to this "belief basis" despite its fundamental role in determining how we treat the world around us. There are some notable exceptions, but the debate tends to focus far more on the "how" questions than the "why" questions which are of equal and prior importance. While obvious beliefs undergird all our choices, in western society at least there is a constant and strenuous attempt to edit out the discussion of belief from the business of government, or public life generally.

A starting point for belief

Part of the contemporary Christian re-appraisal of our environmental responsibility stems from the widespread discovery that authentic Christian belief, revealed in Scripture and known in Christ the Creator, gives the most compelling basis for a way of life that does justice to creation itself. Having acknowledged that this belief has frequently been put aside in practice, and argued for the relevance of belief itself, we can now consider how a true relationship to the Creator should guide the Christian church in renewing its relationship to creation.

A created world

From beginning to end the Bible affirms that God is the Creator. This, and not the human condition, is the true starting point for both understanding and caring for the world around us. We discover who we are, and what the world is, in relationship to God, rather than the other way round. Nevertheless this understanding of God is at odds with the conviction that achieving human happiness is at the heart of the human enterprise, and thus of our environmental relationships. To say we believe in the Creator is not primarily an affirmation about us, and in our people obsessed societies, that itself comes as a big shock. We have to recognise that we are not saying "I believe in God who made me" but as the Creed has it "I believe in God, maker of heaven and earth." We are put quite literally in our place if we begin by recognising who God is, and such a recognition stands in direct contradiction to our popular assumption that we are at the centre of all things. We need to notice that it is not simply Christians who can be tempted into this humanist heresy - even those in the secular world who are concerned to re-establish the importance of the non-human environment can easily stray into overstating the final significance of people either as managers or destroyers. In Christian thinking we understand who we are first of all in relation to God, and then in relation to Creation.

Relationship with God

This then goes beyond a simple affirmation and begins to seem more important, because in Christian thinking the God who made us has revealed himself to be personal, and is himself calling us to relationship with him, and thereby to the renewal of all our relationships. A simple glance at the creation itself shows how intensely relational the whole business is, and ecology is the study of those relationships in the widest sense. Not merely can we ourselves have a relationship with our Creator, but if all around us is God's handiwork, inevitably creation itself has a relationship to him. And by virtue of being part of that same creation, albeit with a unique capacity for knowing God, we are in an inevitable relationship to creation. That relationship can either be lived out faithfully, in the context of our relationship to God, or abusively without reference to him but merely to our own wishes and needs. In contrast again to the pervasive contemporary idea that most of life is "religiously neutral", even if it can be admitted that there are some questions, which can be considered religious, a biblical perspective is that that all things were created by Jesus and for him. (footnote to Colossians) There is a theology of everything we know in time and space which themselves frame God's artefacts, and which are themselves the work of his hands. By contrast western society has offered the church a kind of golden cage where it can be left in peace to pursue the "religious life", to comment quietly on such issues as how to run religious services, or how to make new translations of the Bible, or maybe a few moral issues such as abortion. This is reckoned to be the proper sphere for believers, and it is made clear in many ways that they must never venture to enter the discussion of economics, or the environment, or the arts, or public health. In turn Christians have too often been happy enough to accept the reduced space which is offered to them for the expression of their belief, and consign the rest of life to an unbelieving pseudo-neutrality.

Rather we need to take into our minds and hearts the conviction that our relationship with God, whether lived as rebellion or belief, is fundamental to the shape taken up by all that we see around us. Creation itself becomes more fully understood as we enter more completely into a renewed relationship with God ourselves. Our reference points begin to change, and even our language. Thus we live in creation, not "the environment", or "nature," and we ourselves are in a different relationship to those around us, sharing a common created humanity, and not an identity which is fractured by nationality, or even by creed. The apostle Paul whose thinking was profoundly shaped by his understanding of God the Creator understood people as "God's offspring" happy to quote from a contemporary pagan poet to find his phrase. It is a commonplace that the disintegration of relationships of all kinds is now deeply embedded in our western societies. This disintegration extends from the destruction of community and personal relationships at all levels, to the destruction of meaningful relationship with anything we consume, from food (which appears we know not from where) to the machines we use (often produced in appalling conditions in parts of the world we never see) to the waste we produce - spirited away, but as has been pointed out by Christian environmentalist Loren Wilkinson, where in creation is "away" ? As against this individualistic and isolated existence, Christians affirm their belief in all kinds of inter-dependence and relationship simply by affirming their belief in the Creator. Of course this insight is entirely confirmed by the observations of any working ecologist or biological scientist, as created reality itself bears witness to the character of its Creator.

There is one created reality, visible and invisible Belief in God as Creator brings a further implication that we must come to terms with - namely that God made heaven and earth. For the Christian there is one created reality, visible and invisible, and any idea that only the material, or visible, is real is far from Christian understanding. Equally strange to Christian thinking is an idea, which is often part of popular Christian imagining that somehow the word "spiritual" refers to the non-material. Biblically what is "spiritual" is simply whatever is the fruit or work of the Spirit of God - who as the Psalmist understood is the Creator of, among other things, the material. " How many are your works O Lord …When you send your Spirit they are created" If we believe that "spiritual" means non-material, then of course it is reasonable to suppose that much of what we do, and all that exists around us, is of supreme indifference to God. But if we believe as the Bible insists, that matter itself is God's handiwork and is created for his glory and praise, then our relationship to it is firmly in the realm of the spiritual. God is interested in how we make our money, what we eat, what we watch on television, and how we treat the environment. These are "spiritual" issues. They are spiritual not least because as the Psalms also explain "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it."

Where or what is heaven? There isn't space here to do more than briefly refer to one final but important point about heaven. One of the most significant changes to take place in Christian thinking in recent years would seem to be a re-discovery of the biblical understanding of eternity. The burden of scripture is that creation itself is waiting, with us, for renewal, and for redemption. As John Stott has expressed it: "It would not be wise to speculate how the biblical and scientific accounts of reality correspond. The general promise of the renovation and transformation of nature is plain… God's material creation will be redeemed and glorified." Immediately this rescues creation from any suggestion of irrelevance, and the church from the heresy that you sometimes hear expressed - "Ah well, it is all going to burn up in judgement, so why should it matter what happens to it meanwhile." It is a good job that we don't treat our bodies, which are the part of the physical creation with which we are most intimately concerned, in the same reckless fashion!

The gospel is for the whole earth

But if there is an environmental implication to be drawn from the Christian understanding of heaven, there is a further important lesson to draw from the equal understanding of life on earth namely that the Christian gospel is for the whole creation. Once again it is Paul who makes it clear "That the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God." In A Rocha we are trying to put into practice that message of hope as a sign of the coming Kingdom - to make a difference to disappearing habitats and polluted wasteland, and to the injustice suffered by the human communities that depend upon them for their life. But you will notice how Paul in his Acts 17 sermon insists that the fact that God is Creator automatically means the gospel is relevant to all people as well, and confers absolute equality on all people - When Paul says "We are God's offspring." he means all created people. This insistence on human community is a vital corrective for western societies that marginalize the elderly in their adoration of youth, that are increasingly drawn to nationalism and that are built on practical racism in their overseas policies. It is the loss of our belief in God the creator in post-Christian Europe that is the root cause of a multitude of ills in our human relationships. Ironically an attempt to overcome the problem by an idealisation of the human, which in the media and the press takes a highly selective and unreal view of what the term means, only leads to further contempt for real people. Once again people find their dignity and meaning only in relation to their loving Creator God, and not in competition with the super-rich and super-beautiful.

What is our response? A response is required from us today whoever we are, whatever we believe. If we don't believe in the Creator then we must look hard at the implications of the other bleak possibilities. Do we really live consistently with the idea that we are merely an accident, and the product of unknown forces? Does environmental concern itself make any sense if we are simply part of a blindly determined process, and an unseeingly competitive struggle for survival? But if we affirm that we are living in a created world, are we ready to respond to its constant prompting to reach out for the Creator? And if we actively acknowledge that, are we ready to treat the world around us as important first of all to God himself, and not merely there to meet our needs?

So if we are Christians we face the big challenge of living in the world as Creation, of allowing Jesus Christ to redeem all our relationships in all their brokenness and complexity, so that we begin to acknowledge him as he is, the Lord of Creation, and not merely a personal saviour in some reduced private space. Then we can recognise with Paul that "In him we live, and move, and have our being." If we are not, we face the far more serious challenge of establishing any coherent or widely compelling grounds for environmental responsibility that can begin to reverse the almost universally damaging trends which are now established on every side.

Peter Harris