General - Wednesday, April 22, 2009 17:40 - 0 Comments

Weak Calvinism & Our Environmental Problems

“…God treats His creation with integrity: each thing in its own order, each thing the way He made it. If God treats His creation in that way, should we not treat our fellow-creatures with a similar integrity? If God treats the tree like a tree, the machine like a machine, the man like a man, shouldn’t I, as a fellow-creature, do the same—treating each thing in integrity in its own order? And for the highest reason: because I love God—I love the One who has made it! Loving the Lover who has made it, I have respect for the thing He has made.”-Francis Schaeffer

We are living at a time in which Christians have revived our own brand of Platonism, we must see that our view of mans relation to nature has radically impacted the world in which we live. The repercussions for our weak Calvinism are to blame for many of the environment challenges we are facing in our own country. And when I mention the environment I’m not speaking of Global Warming, per se, as much as I am how we view the ground upon which we live.”

As we continue to rape the land and misuse its resources, we are failing to tend it and keep it as God mandated. Our dominion over nature is not to be of brute-power but of symbiotic care for nature, God’s creation. God’s plan for us is that we are to use the resources of His world and care for it as His stewards. The ground then yields to us its riches which God has sovereignly chosen as the means by which we are physically, and even spiritually, nurtured. And though we receive thorns and thistles from the ground, this does not mean we are absent of its fruit. I believe God’s curse to Adam to toil and labor under such conditions are not for the mere punishment of Adam’s actions in the Garden (though it certainly includes this), but rather so that we might cry out to God for mercy as we are faced with the inability to fully bring nature under our control, though we try, and though we are redeemed.

This side of glory, we can only see in part the benefits of our labor. We are not given a 1 to 1 ratio of labor-to-harvest, but one day when the curse is removed so will the thorns and thistles which mark our work. When we are resurrected into new bodies, living on a resurrected heaven and earth, dwelling with a resurrected Jesus, we will experience work unto God’s glory and our joy in a way that has thus far been only a taste of what’s to come.

Since the plan of history is more than TULIP (Genesis 3 to Revelation 20), we can wait in hope for the restoration of all things promised to us in Revelation 21-22. This gives our work here significance because we understand the bookends of history are a perfect garden cultivated by sinless people through to the City of God in which God’s dwelling place becomes ours. We are not to simply wait around for the day of Christ’s second advent, but work as if His first advent made a difference! However, this doesn’t mean an idolatry and worship of creation either. Michael Wittmer says this:

“On the one hand, we must not so over-protect the earth that we turn it into a museum, for this would forsake our obligation to develop its raw materials. On the other hand, we must not recklessly overuse creation that we waste and pollute its valuable, and sometimes irreplaceable, resources.”

God loves His creation and intends that we, as the redeemed people of God, in a covenant community, progressing his Gospel and expanding His kingdom, work to that end. The pollution and decay of this world should not be reserved for secular concern alone, but instead it is to be an intensely Christian moral concern. As Schaeffer says:

“Why is man’s relation to nature a moral crisis? It is a moral crisis because it is a historical one involving man’s history and culture, expressed at its roots by our religious and ethical views of nature — which have been relatively unquestioned in this context. The historian of medieval culture, Lynn White, Jr., brilliantly traced the origin and consequences of this expression in an insightful article in Science last March: “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” He argues that the Christian notion of a transcendent God, removed from nature and breaking into nature only through revelation, removed spirit from nature and allows, in the ideological sense, for an easy exploitation of nature.”

Since we know the Creator of this creation, we should lead the charge of environmental concern rather than sit quietly as passengers while the ship sinks before our eyes. We are to be doing more than just “dressing up the place” or “rearranging deck chairs.” Our work is significant because that which God has made is significant. As Schaeffer rightly points out, this is about our view of nature and history, our view of culture which flows from our distinctively Christian ethics.

What we see in Evangelicalism in our day is little more than a desire to be raptured away from this frightening and wicked place with very little care for what we were created to be and to do. Schaefer continues:

“On the American scene, the Calvinistic and the deistic concepts of God were peculiarly alike at this point. Both envisioned God as absolutely transcendent, apart from the world, isolated from nature and organic life.”

We have forgotten the roots of our fathers in the faith. Instead, Protestants are more concerned about “their best life now” hoping for mere economic prosperity, rather than seeing our life and place in this world is not solely for our benefit alone. We were created and placed in this world with intentionality, to shape, tend, restore and redeem by grace what sin has ravished from Genesis 3 on.

We have become weak Calvinists and therefore experience less and less the transforming world and life view that gripped many of our fathers. If we have a low view of creation, of nature, we will turn in upon ourselves and find that our lives begin to look and feel like our view of this world. Schaeffer says:

“So if nature and the things of nature are only a meaningless series of particulars in a decreated universe, with no universal to give them meaning, then nature is become absurd, the wonder is gone from it. And wonder is equally gone from me, because I too am a finite thing.”

Schaeffer attributes the woes of thirty years ago to our over-realized view of God’s transcendence at the expense of His immanence. This problem is still with us in 2009. As Calvinists, we have sought to argue for the vastness and greatness of our God. This seemingly noble task has slipped us into a kind of reductionism that plagues much of our theology today. It’s not as if we’re saying something necessarily wrong about God and His nature, character, and attributes, it’s that we are not painting the whole picture. We are doing to God in our day what we claim Roman Catholics, Arminians, and the Postmodern Emergent types have done, and are doing, by focusing on an aspect of God, an aspect of the atonement, or an aspect of God’s work, so much so that we are left with a hyphenated Jesus, living in a hyphenated world, resulting in reduced glory for a truncated God.

We have reduced God by stripping Him of His immanence. If He is not the infinite-personal God as revealed in Scripture, He is not the Christian God. If He is not the Christian God, we are not the Christians spoken of in His word who worship Him in spirit and truth. It is obvious that our view of God will affect our view of the world He created and the people He made to inhabit it. We move against ourselves when we move against the full revelation of God. This will always result in a loss of self and a loss of nature which man was intended to relate with. As Schaeffer put it:

“What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one.”

The picture of true Christianity is to be neither one of selfish and careless exploitation nor one of indifference and non-interference. We must rethink our faith so that we can surmise our relationship of man-nature.

It sounds simplistic to say that the environmental chaos which we see in our day is owing to the Fall and man’s sin, but it is nevertheless true. Man has indeed lost “what he could be.” The ramifications of the Fall spiritually, socially, psychologically, emotionally, and environmentally can not be overstated. We would do well to recover a more robust picture of sin and the horror of it.

However, as bleak as this sounds, we must realize that history is a working out of the protoevangelion given to Eve in Genesis 3:15- “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” This means that God has planned that history would be redemptive. In other words; everything from the Fall and promise is working towards redemption and finally full restoration. God did not leave us in a state of despair and misery as orphans, but instead unveiled His plan of redemption and restoration for every generation following Adam and Eve.

Christ came into this world to accomplish the redemption promised in seedling form in Genesis 3. We are given a cosmic picture of this redemption and restoration in Colossians chapter 1:13-22- He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. 15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities–all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. 21 And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, 22 he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,

What a glorious God to give us such a vast and cosmic scope of His reclamation project. This picture of redemption should give the Christian the necessary courage to work in the promises and authority of Christ as we seek to bring His Lordship over all creation as redeemed sons and daughters of the Father. However, the Fall should sober us to the truth that we are saved only by God’s grace and not of our intellect and merit.

This should give us the necessary humility needed to speak to fallen man about their condition in an attitude of truth and love. Arrogance will turn away those that recognize there is a problem and we will lose our hearing with them to speak the solution unless we are humbled by the truth of our own sin. Courage and humility are rarely seen together, and I believe can only be held together by the Christian who understands that salvation is all of grace.

We are reminded as Christians that we have real answers to real problems. We are not to cower at the accusations railed against us by the secular world. We are to confess our shortcomings and provide hope for this world by placing the gospel on display for all the world to see:

“So we have seen that a truly biblical Christianity has a real answer to the ecological crisis. It offers a balanced and healthy attitude to nature, arising from the truth of its creation by God. It offers the hope here and now of substantial healing in nature of some of the results of the Fall, arising from the truth of redemption in Christ. In each of the alienations arising from the Fall, Christians, individually and corporately, should consciously in practice be a healing redemptive factor — in the separation of man from God, of man from himself, of man from man, of man from nature, and of nature from nature.”

Our identity as a creature is radically tied to our understanding of nature. To disregard this material world and render it meaningless is to leave us, as creatures, without meaning. Recovering a biblical Christianity in all its holistic splendor, will bring real meaning for our own lives and real hope for the world in which we live. Dr. Schaeffer summarizes by challenging our love for God:

“If I love the Lover, I love what the Lover has made. Perhaps this is the reason why so many Christians feel an unreality in their Christian lives. If I don’t love what the Lover has made — in the area of man, in the area of nature — and really love it because He made it, do I really love the Lover?
It is easy to make professions of faith, but they may not be worth much because they have little meaning. They may become merely a mental assent that means little or nothing.”

May it be that those redeemed by the Redeemer be found faithful to the truth we assent to, in the days which He has given- for His glory and our joy.