Adapted from an article first published in the Bridge Magazine, October 2019
What does the Bible say about the environment?
Burning Amazonian rainforest has been one of the year’s saddest environmental stories. In the first eight months of 2019, an area 25 times the size of Worcestershire was burned! What’s even sadder is that the Amazon isn’t even the world’s biggest deforestation programme. For that we need to look north and east, to Russia’s far east and Siberia, where over 50 Worcestershire’s of forest have been cleared by fire so far in 2019.[i]
Many years ago I attended a lecture in which all the harm we do to the planet was blamed on one cause: Christianity, an idea popularised by a historian called Lynn White Jr, who wrote in Science Magazine in 1967, before Christianity, “man had been part of nature”, but under Christianity’s influence (particularly in Northern Europe), humanity became the ruthless “exploiter of nature”[ii]
White points the finger at the creation story in Genesis 1 as the cause of the problem. God blesses the first people and says to them:
‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” (Genesis 1:28)
And it’s that language of filling, subduing and ruling over, which White blames our current environmental crisis on. In other words, it’s all God and his stupid follower’s fault. But I’m not convinced.
You see if White had read beyond the very first page of the Bible, he’d find a very different picture of our relationship with creation. Yes, we’re to rule over it, but not as exploiters. Instead, we’re to be stewards and explorers, holding creation in trust for God.
And over the centuries, many Christians have seen creation in this light. The theologian John Calvin, arguably the intellectual and theological force behind the Protestant Work Ethic, and therefore Northern-European prosperity, explained our rule over creation to mean
a responsible care and keeping that does not neglect, injure, abuse, degrade, dissipate, corrupt, mar, or ruin the earth.”[iii]
And many early Christians lived out that responsible care in very practical ways, perhaps best exemplified by the catholic saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals.
And whilst there have undoubtedly also been Christians who have exploited the environment, they’ve been joined by enough atheists, scientists, and people of other faiths to make it hard to blame God for everything. Does it really seem plausible to blame God alone for the Chinese business interests stripping far eastern Russian of its timber? Or is it more likely, that our rejection of God and our God-given calling to be stewards of creation has caused the damage we see around us?
So, what should Christians do to make a difference? The one-line answer is start acting like stewards! We all have a tendency to treat other people’s stuff better than our own, and stewardship means learning to see the whole world that way: cared for by us, but belonging to God, who will one day ask us to give an account of our actions. If you’re anything like me, that’s quite a worrying prospect!
So here are four simple steps we can all explore to be better stewards. They won’t solve all the world’s problems, but they’re a step in the right direction.
- Let’s use what we already have, better. Rather than treating our possessions as disposable, good stewards repair, reuse and recycle! One of my secret joys about our Breakfast Church, is that all our video games are recycled! Everything was bought second hand, or donated by people. If our games aren’t quite carbon-neutral, we are at least not strip-mining Greenland and the Congo for new rare-earth minerals!
- Let’s be responsible about new purchases. Do we really need that new car when the old still works? Do we really need that outfit that we’ll probably only wear once? How can we get better at borrowing or sharing things?
- Next, think about our travel and utility use. Our rural bus service doesn’t make using public transport easy, but we can all choose to reduce the flights we take. If Prince Harry annoyed you with his private jet holiday plans, why not sign a no-fly commitment like Flight-Free 2020? Switching to a green gas and electric supplier is another easy way to be a good steward. Through a combination of carbon offsetting and renewable power sources, our home gas and electric has been carbon neutral for a year now – and for only marginally more than the current cheapest non-eco supplier, we could find.
- Finally, we can look at ways of restoring the damage we’ve inflicted upon creation. One of the most inspiring habitat restoration stories I’ve come across in recent years is the Knepp[v], in West Sussex. Formerly intensively farmed, since 2001 this 3500 acre estate has been “rewilded”, with quite remarkable results: it’s now the home of the first pair of wild white storks to breed in the UK for 600 years. The Christian charity Arocha[vi] runs similar projects on a smaller scale, working with local churches and community groups to enhance and rewild parts of our communities.
You might not have the land to do something like that, but we can all look at ways to offset our carbon footprint by participating in tree-planting schemes. Apparently it takes 8 trees to produce enough oxygen for one person to breath for a year[vii]. What if we could all find a way to plant that many trees a year, for the rest of our lives? That would surely be good stewardship!
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[i] www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-49433767 and www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-49515462?fbclid=IwAR0vvB0gWjjG_kqcRkPY8hrpxmWfqlOFsvhmwbMQXyK9Ar5FSqCWc8AlAeo
[ii] Cited from Andrew Cameron, The Environment – a Christian Response – https://sydneyanglicans.net/blogs/indepth/the_environment_a_christian_response
[iii] John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis (Chapter 2, on Genesis 2:15)
[v] Visit Knepp.co.uk or read the book, Wilding, by Isabella Tree.
[vii] www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-many-trees-does-it-take-to-produce-oxygen-for-one-person/