Does the Bible call for Environmental Responsibility?
By Pastor Mike Freeman

MISREPRESENTED

“Nature, the world, has no value, no interest for Christians. The Christian thinks only of himself and the salvation of his soul.” Luwig Feuerbach, THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

That’s a pretty stinging indictment. But sadly it’s one that we as the church must own up to as being too true too often through the course of church history. God’s people, whether Old Testament Israel or the New Testament Church, have too often been sucked into the mold of the culture, rather than being the transforming “yeast” slowly permeating and changing the culture from the inside out.

“No longer be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you can test and approve what God’s will is — His good, pleasing and perfect will” (Romans 12:2). That’s our mission as God’s people, individually and corporately — to refuse captivity to a culture that identifies man as the measure of all things; that sees creatures and creation as disposable resources existing solely for our benefit; and holds to technology as the answer to the world’s ills.

Because the church has not consistently borne a testimony that transcends corrupt culture, but rather all too often has only mirrored it, many critics of Christianity line up pointing fingers at the church and at the Bible as only contributing to the problem or even as being the problem when it comes to the environment. The Scriptures, it is often claimed, sanction the exploitation and degradation of the earth. Some would insist that the Bible is anti-ecological, and so should be tossed aside — or at least shelved for a generation or two. If the Bible is only contributing to all of our ecological woes, why bother with it? Why not scrap the Bible and try to find inspiration from other sources?

Our contention is that this is an incorrect evaluation of the Bible. Far from promoting the exploitation and degradation of creation and its creatures at the whim and convenience of humanity, the consistent teaching of the Bible repeatedly calls humanity to caring, responsible stewardship under God over His creation. We believe the key elements of the Biblical teaching on creation and the environment are all evident in the first chapters of Genesis (Genesis 1-12).