Session 3: How the Gospel Transforms Creation

How the Power of the Gospel Can Transform our Care of Creation
Seth A. Bible, Ph.D.

•Why Creation Care?

•Perhaps some of you might be wondering why Creation Care would be included in a conference such as this one. It is highly likely that one or more of you are thinking one or more of the following thoughts:
•Aren’t environmental issues for liberal hippies?
•Can I still be a republican if I care about the earth?
•Can I care for the environment and be pro-life?
•Hasn’t Global Warming been disproven?
•Whose telling the truth?
•Why Creation Care?
•What I am suggesting this evening is that within the church we are asking the wrong questions.
•A faithful Christian witness calls for a more robust commitment to Creation Care than just recycling.
•We can love Jesus and his Creation without forfeiting our “Christian” card.
•Why Creation Care?
•Brief History
•Conservation movements of the 19th and 20th century by individuals such as John Muir, Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962), Gifford Pinchot, Henry David Thoreau, and Aldo Leopold
•Government became involved with Yellowstone National Park (1890) – world’s first national park.
•Environmental Protection Agency formulated in 1970.
•Clean Water Act (1972)
•Journals, books, and college courses all begin in the 70s
•Why Creation Care:
•Two Streams:
•Secular Environmentalists
•Naturalistic (Darwinian)
•Post-modern
•Often politically liberal
•Reject notion of God as Creator
•Characterized by the following quote from leading environmentalist: “I believe Immanuel Kant mischaracterizes human beings as essentially members of an intelligible, moral realm. On the contrary, we are intellectual, social and physical members of actual communities here in this world. Any excellence we exhibit is excellence in this world, and can only be understood in relation to our successes and failures within it.”
•Why Creation Care?
•Evangelical Environmentalism
•Christian sub-culture mentality: “Environmental issues are for hippies”
•All we need to focus on is the salvation of souls. Environmental issues distract the church from the mission of the church.
•Climate change is a political hoax
•Characterized by the following quote from the New York Times: For a couple of years, there have been encouraging signs that conservative Christians are starting to take environmental matters seriously . . . But in a recent letter, several of the most prominent leaders of the conservative Christian wing of the Republican Party . . . Told the policy director of the National Association of Evangelicals, Richard Cizik, to shut up already about global warming.”
•What Does Creation Care Have to Do with Salvation
•The Problem
•Christians do not properly understand the transformative power of the Gospel for all of Creation.
•The Solution
•Christians must recapture the holistic biblical understanding of salvation to include the healing and restoration of all of Creation (Romans 8:18-22).  Our understanding of salvation must begin in Chapter 1, not Chapter 3 of Genesis.
•The Problem
•Lynn White Jr.
•The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis (1967)
•Laid the blame of the ecological (environmental) crisis at the foot of Christianity.
•Poorly constructed argument but provided impetus for Christian scholars to engage ecological movement.
•White’s thesis was wrong because of poor hermeneutics (biblical interpretation) but he hit on something that struck a nerve in Christian circles – the church was failing miserably!
•The Problem
•Howard Snyder argues in his book, “Salvation Means Creation Healed” that the Christian church has unnecessarily split the physical and spiritual realms (neo-platonic dualism) creating a sense of apathy and neglect. He refers to this as the “hole in the Christian Worldview.”
•The Christian church has distorted the message of the Gospel to focus exclusively on individual salvation at the expense of the whole of creation.
7 Contributors to “Evangelicalism’s Worldview Hole”
•Greek Philosophy
•The Enlightenment
•Capitalism
•American Individualism
•Uncritical Patriotism
•Missing the Biblical Doctrine of Creation
•Premillennial Dispensationalism
•Greek Philosophy
•Platonic Dualism
•Physical or material world is bad
•Spiritual world is good
•Medieval Christianity – monasticism
•More Hindu that it is Christian
•Problems
•Incarnation: Christ died and rose as a physical being
•The Enlightenment: The Triumph of Reason
•Enlightenment writers claimed that reason was the key to life and understanding.
•Scientific, technological, and material foundations for today’s progressive society
•The Problem
•Laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution and population explosion which has been the primary contributors to environmental degradation
•The Ideology of Capitalism
•The engine for economic growth in “First-world countries” post enlightenment
•Building material wealth is the goal
•Resources, whatever the source, are primarily for capital gains
•The Problem
•Often exploitative (slaver labor, immigrants, natural resources, etc.)
•Goal of building wealth is not biblical
•Has God really “blessed us” or have we exploited many to our own gain?
•American Individualism
•The idea of the “Rugged Individual” (The Marlboro Man Motif)
•Entrepreneurism, the innovator, and “self-made” man
•The “Don’t Tread on Me” mentality
•The Problem
•Undermines communal nature of the Gospel
•Insulates us from true nature
•Resists all governmental restrictions that limit individual freedom or building of individual wealth
•Uncritical Patriotism
•America is God’s chosen land
•Love of country
•Ground identity in being American
•Concerned mostly with what benefits our land
•The Problem
•Arrogant and prideful to not care about the good of other countries and people groups
•Unbiblical. Period.
•Missing the Biblical Doctrine of Creation
•“Creation” is primarily about humans
•Salvation is mostly about personal renewal
•The climax of the creation event is man
•The physical world is simply there to provide analogies to help us understand the spiritual
•The Problem
•The salvation of humans is severed from the larger biblical picture of shalom and creation healed
•Premillennial Dispensationalism
•The “Doctrine”
•Arose in the 1800s and popularized by Religious Right and “Left Behind” series
•Jesus will return to earth before the millennium and society will deteriorate until we are raptured home to heaven
•The earth will be destroyed by fire (2 Peter 3:10-15)
•Salvation of souls is most important mission of the Christian church
•The Problem
•Scant Biblical evidence
•Anti-ethical to Jesus’ life on earth
•Caring for God’s creation (all issues of social justice) rendered worthless
•Hinges on misinterpretation of 2 Peter 3:10-15
•The Solution
•We must see our responsibility as Christians to the Care of the Environment as more robust than just simply recycling.
•Returning to Snyder, he writes, “Biblical teaching on creation is clear enough. But the disease of sin has so thoroughly wormed its way into all human cultures that people persistently misunderstand creation—its nature, its purpose, and God’s plan for its healing. And to misunderstand creation is to misunderstand the gospel. The gospel—the whole gospel—means much more than the personal salvation of individuals. The gospel means creation healed.”
•How Should the Church Respond
•The Church should strive to be the middle ground between Secular Environmentalists and traditional Evangelical Environmentalism.
•The Church as the “Pilot Plant”
•Francis Schaeffer wrote, “For here is our calling. We must exhibit that, on the basis of the work of Christ, the Church can achieve partially, but substantially, what the secular world wants and cannot get. . . . The Church ought to be a “pilot plant,” where men can see in our congregations and missions a substantial healing of all the divisions, the alienations, man’s rebellion has produced. . . . Now the Church, I believe, ought to be a pilot plant concerning the healing of man and himself, of man and man, and man and nature. Indeed, unless something like this happens, I do not believe the world will listen to what we have to say.” (Pollution and the Death of Man, 81, 82)
•How Should the Church Respond
•A more robust view of Creation Care will include:
•Teaching salvation as more than just a personal,  anthropocentric accomplishment by Christ.
•Creation care as a component of stewardship in the same way we teach stewardship of money, time, talents, etc.
•Creation care should be a component of our discipleship strategy and not relegated to a simple recycling program.
•Our children should be raised to have a heart that is motivated to love God by respecting his creation rather than just follow a proscribed list of recycling rules.
•We should be socially active in such local organizations as The Falls Lake Project and global initiatives such as A Rocha.

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