Creation Care and Environmental Justice

By Maria Boccia, PhD
Professor of Pastoral Counseling and Psychology
Director of Graduate Programs in Counseling Charlotte campus

Yesterday, I was driving in my car listening to an NPR program called “The State of Things” which is produced by our local radio station at the University of North Carolina. They were describing the origins of the environmental justice movement, and interviewed the couple living in Warren County, North Carolina, who are credited with founding the movement. The story was an interesting account of their efforts to prevent their poor, predominantly black community from having a toxic waste landfill located in their community. In this story, the “environmental” aspect of the story is obvious. The “justice” aspect of this story is the way poor, and often predominantly minority, communities are exploited in this way. One aspect that caught my attention, however, which leads to this essay, was the couple’s rationale for their activism.

When the interviewer asked them what motivated them. They unabashedly declared, we are Christians, and we must take care of God’s creation. It is our duty. This was their motivation . . . . in the 1970s. As the story unfolded, their Christian commitment and how it motivated them to care for God’s creation wove in and out like a golden thread. It was a spiritual battle they were waging. It delighted me to hear this couple innocently declaring how their faith in the Creator God led them to engage in resisting the pollution of their community with toxic substances and in doing so gave birth to the environmental justice movement. All of that on NPR!

Today, I am more likely to hear evangelicals and other conservative Christians express criticism of environmental activism, and promoting development of all stripes. I’m always surprised by this, and that led me to reflect on why I find conservation issues so compelling. In my mind, it starts with the creation account. God created us in his image and gave us dominion over the creation. He placed us in the garden he had made and gave us the responsibility to tend it and cultivate it:

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

The Lord God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. . . .Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” [1]

When I was an undergraduate, I learned about ecology as a biology major, I became a Christian, and I learned about creation. The juxtaposition of these three experiences intertwined to set me on a course to be a Christian who believes in conservation, and what today has come to be known as “creation care.” Ecology taught me about the complexity of the world and the utter interdependence of each element on every other element in the environment. We cannot survive without each other. You eliminate all the wolves and the deer population grows explosively. They overgraze the forest until all the trees die. They get hit by cars and people are injured or die. They starve to death. We protect designer species like the tiger by setting aside great tracts of land, which protect all of the creatures who live in that environment, not just the tiger. As our environment goes, so goes the planet, and so go us.

As a young Christian, I learned that God made the world. Not only that, but he made us stewards of it. He gave us dominion, but that dominion was a stewardship under his sovereignty. God still is the creator of it all and the sustainer of it all. As a Christian, therefore, I realized that someday I would stand before my Lord, my God and the Creator of all that is, and account for my stewardship of the creation over which he gave me dominion. I have, therefore, always been confused by the opposition I have encountered among so many evangelicals and otherwise conservative Christians to conservation or any aspect of the environmental movement. Granted, taken to its extreme, it can be both idolatrous and ultimately destructive to the environment it desires to protect. Furthermore, our dominion as the only creature made in the image of God, includes cultivation of that creation. Therefore, my environmentalism is not a blind “leave it alone it does best when left to itself” view of the creation. God gave us the stewardship of the creation in order for us to care for it, cultivate it, and use it responsibly, knowing that ultimately we will have to give an account of our stewardship to the true owner of everything that exists. To do anything less seems to me to be both disobedient to the God who created us for this purpose, and destructive to the creation of which we are stewards and to our witness to the God we serve before the unbelieving world.

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^[1]New American Standard Bible : 1995 update. 1995 (Ge 1:26–28; 2:9-17). LaHabra, CA: The Lockman Foundation.

Reading the Bible in Light of Scot McKnight’s Blue Parakeets

By Roy Ciampa, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

If you read Christian blogs you are probably already familiar with Scot McKnight’s popular and insightful blog, Jesus Creed. I don’t always read blogs, (Christian or otherwise), but when I do, I prefer Jesus Creed… That is, whenever I go there I find good, sane wisdom. Scot McKnight’s writing is always worth your time. I just came back from a week’s vacation. I brought three books along with me and although I spent some time with the other two books the one book I read straight through (years after everyone else already read it, probably including you) was Scot McKnight’s The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2008).

I think it is a wonderful and even very important and easy book on the interpretation of Scripture. It is an easy read and is not the kind of book that is likely to persuade anyone who is already committed to a different way of reading the Bible, but for those who are not already committed to a different way of reading the Bible, who are looking for some initial guidance and/or are willing to let Scot serve as their insightful guide, this will be a very helpful book. (Scot teaches undergraduate students at North Park University and this book is filled with material reflecting that context and clearly would be very useful for students in a context like that, as well as for many other kinds of readers.) The book discusses the tendency to read the Bible as a law book or a rule book or to treat it like a puzzle, and argues for the need to understand it as God’s story in which God spoke to (and through) different people in their days and their ways.

“Blue parakeets” (a reference explained through an observation of bird behaviors at a birdfeeder in the McKnight’s yard) are texts in the Bible or questions that people ask about them that cause us to stop and think again about our understanding of Scripture and how we use it today (see pages 24-25). Scot asks us to face up to the fact that readers pick and choose (or adopt and adapt) which texts we will obey and apply (and he provides plenty of evidence that that is indeed the case) and he seeks to uncover the unwritten and unconscious process of discernment that would explain how we go about that process of picking and choosing so that we can think more clearly about what we are doing and why. Along the way the book emphasizes a number of themes that have become dear to my own heart (and which I have addressed in some of my earlier posts here), including, among other things, Augustine’s promotion of a hermeneutic of love. He also emphasizes the importance of learning to read the Bible with the Great Tradition (but not through the Great Tradition).

I am slightly uncomfortable with some of the language used here and there (like “Is this passage for today or not?”; page 25), but Scot clarifies (I think) that it isn’t ultimately about some passages being for today or not but about whether they are to be applied/obeyed/practiced today and in our culture (or in other times and cultures) in the same way as would have been expected for the original audience or if they may serve as “blue parakeets” that can lead us to stop and think and point us to something beyond the original context and inform our understanding and behavior in different ways that are also informed by the rest of Scripture and our ever-developing understanding of creation and culture. (Scot would compare and contrast “our days and ways” with “those days and ways.”)

Cutting through Time

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

Few writers capture the natural world better than John McPhee, and his 1971 book Encounters with the Archdruid is one of his best. In it, he tells the story of arch-conservationist David Brower meeting up in the field with, in turn, a mining expert, a developer, and the US head of dam-building. The last encounter involves a rafting trip down the Colorado River, which causes McPhee to reflect on one of his driving passions, geology. He is speaking of the layers of rock through which the Colorado has driven down through the millennia:

"The Tapeats Sandstone is the earliest rock from the Paleozoic Era, and beneath it the mind is drawn back to the center of things, the center of the canyon, the cutting plane, the Colorado. Flanked by its Bass Limestones, its Hotauta Conglomerates, its Vishnu Schists and Zoroaster Granites, it races in white water through a pre-Cambrian here and now. The river has worked its way down into the stillness of original time."

For some, the mere thought of process in creation, let alone the vast quantities of time needed for such processes to proceed, is enough to trigger floods of anxiety. Does this not threaten to take away the glory of God in creating the world?

Hardly. The thought of God taking his time to create is precisely what Genesis 1 is at pains to stress, however we might interpret the word “day” in the text. The fact that he might have taken more time than we expect to have brought the world into its present state simply gives us more space to contemplate his infinite majesty. Indeed, it’s hard to see how a stock phrase like “infinite majesty” can find any purchase in our minds apart from rooting it in the very large numbers provided for us by geologic time.

The point is not to pick at numbers: once we get past ten thousand years or so, we lose any meaningful existential connection to the figures. (It is like trying to measure the distance to the sun with a ruler – you are not going to get close, even if you stand on tip-toe.) The point is that the Bible invites us to think of the world as really old, and to think of God as even older than that.

There is something else at work here as well. God not only takes his time to create, he also creates a world with what Colin Gunton calls Selbständigkeit or a “proper independence”. This is not the absolute independence imagined by the atheists or Deists, but rather the meaningful existence of the creation as something other than God. This is best captured in Genesis in the account of the creation of plants: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so (Gen. 1:11).” God creates in the beginning; but he also (literally) sows the seed for the perpetuation of creation through the ages.

As we wander through God’s world then, or as we watch the Colorado wander along its course through the canyons, we should be alert both to the record of what he has done in the past, and the wonder of what he is still doing in the present. Only then will we develop the confidence that he is indeed willing and able to bring the promise of creation to its fulfillment in the ultimate future…however long he takes to do it.