The critics

Anyone who has looked into environmentalism knows that some think Christianity is the main villain behind modern destruction of the natural world.

This view was put very forcefully in a famous 1967 article by Lynn White. White said that before Christianity, "man had been part of nature", but under Christianity's influence (particularly in Northern Europe), humanity became the ruthless "exploiter of nature". Christianity's insistence that nature is not sacred and that only human beings are in the image of God meant, according to White, that "Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects."

This article, and its very bitter tone, has shaped the attitudes of many environmentally sensitive people toward Christianity. Of course, it is easy to point to Christian people who abuse to the environment. But it may be easier than White admits to find people from other backgrounds who are equally abusive to it. More to the point, White does not really pay enough attention to the surprising environmental awareness evident within the pages of the Christian Bible.

White reacts to the way God appoints humanity to "rule' his creation in Genesis 1:28. The language here is indeed very forceful: "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground." God also allows people to use plants and animals for food (Gen. 1:29 & 9:3)

But has God therefore commanded people to rape, pillage and exploit the environment?

Certainly not!

The Bible and creation

In Genesis 2 we see the way humanity "rules'. God plants a garden, and the first humans "work it and take care of it" (Gen. 2:15). The man Adam is seen naming the animals, and the woman Eve shares in Adam's task of care.

The contrast between these first two chapters of the Bible is very striking, yet also very honest. Human beings obviously have the capacity to be masters of all they survey: as God puts it later, "The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth" (Gen. 9:2). There is no use pretending humans do not have this capacity to rule. But how is it to be used? Not by greedy exploitation, but by service to the land and to the environment.

So, the first two chapters of the Bible show the same striking oddity that we still see in humanity. On the one hand, we are the most sentient, smart, manipulative and powerful beings on the planet; yet on the other hand, we are intimately connected to it, made of its very "dust' (Gen 2:7). At our best, humanity's enormous power is given so that we may both use, and care for, our world. In this way, humans may be seen as God's "vice-regent' on planet earth, sustaining, nurturing and protecting the order and profusion that he has given to his world.

God high estimate of us as "his own image' (Gen. 1:27) is also very striking. Yet God's loving concern for his entire creation is never in question. He declares it all "very good" (Gen. 1:4, 10, 19, 25, 31); he also gives "every green plant" to all non-human life to eat (Gen. 1:30); and later, his covenant of protection applies to humans and non-human animals alike (Gen. 9:9-10). Wholesale destruction of the environment is unthinkable, because God delights in all that he has made.

Sadly of course, the Bible also pictures us not at our best, but at our worst. Humanity's desertion from God (Gen. 3) brings out the worst in us in every respect; and the rest of the Bible shows God rescuing his world from us, and us from our sin. Later in the Bible, our "greed' is called "idolatry' (Col. 3:5). Our impulse to consume the world until we ruin it is made of the same stuff, it seems, as our impulse to desert God and worship anything or anyone else but him.

These environmental themes, against the tragic backdrop of human sin and ruin, are repeated throughout the Bible. We will list just a few examples:

The ancient law of Israel had many provisions to guard the natural environment. The agrarian structure of their society made it obvious that the environment mattered. One example: "When you lay siege to a city for a long time, fighting against it to capture it, do not destroy its trees by putting an axe to them, because you can eat their fruit. Do not cut them down. Are the trees of the field people, that you should besiege them?" [Deut. 20:19] Although some concession is made in v20 to cut down some trees, there is the recognition here that human concerns do not justify wholesale environmental destruction. Similarly, various laws protect some animals (e.g. Ex. 20:10; Deut. 22:1-4, 25:4), although human "rule' of animals is never far from view.

In the Proverbs, we see again the way that created things have an order that is to be respected. "A righteous man cares for the needs of his animal" [12:10]. This order can, in some instances, remind us that we too are part of an order something bigger than us, and don't just get to invent how to live. "Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer " How long will you lie there, you sluggard?" [6:6-9] In Proverbs, real wisdom begins with knowing and "fearing' God. The wise person knows that the structures of our lives are all created, sustained and nurtured by God's just and kind rule. The wise person knows where they fit in God's world. They know how to respond to God, to others, and to God's world.

Some parts of the Bible simply revel in God's exuberant creation and abundant care of his world. At these points, the focus is off humanity and has moved to a simple celebration of God's genius. So Psalm 104 retells the story of creation from God "setting the earth on foundations' [v5] through to his giving food to all the teeming creatures of the earth [v27] and recreating them in life whenever death strikes [v30]. In Job 38-40, God himself storms into confrontation with the complaining Job, and drives home the point that there is a great deal going on in the world that humans will never know. It simply pleases God to care for animals in his own way. "Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you watch when the doe bears her fawn?" [39:1] "Does the eagle soar at your command and build his nest on high?" [39:24] God has his own way with animals, for his own good pleasure, many details of which will never be known to humanity.

The New Testament has less to say about the environment, perhaps because the Old Testament had made it all clear, and perhaps because much of it is set in towns and villages. Nonetheless, Jesus reiterates some of what we have seen. "If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out?" [Matt. 12:11]. Also, he notices God's profound and powerful ongoing care for his world [Matt. 5:45, 6:26, 10:29] " or as his apostles put it, that God "has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy" [Acts 14:17]. But there is also recognition that all is not well in a world whose "vice-regents' have turned upon their Master. Until the Lord of Creation rescues the creation, and us, from our sin, it is in "bondage to decay" and "groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time" (Rom. 8:21-22).

We should notice the Bible's overall plot. Human life in creation starts with a garden"”and ends in a city, in a renewed, rejuvenated creation (Rev. 21-22). This city has "the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river [stands] the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations." [Rev. 22:1-2] There is no sense in which the Christian's future is somehow divorced from the environment: we remained embedded in God's renewed world, embodied and material. The Christian "heaven' is not some disembodied place of spirits.

Australia today

If we were to take this biblical approach to the environment seriously in modern Australia, what would that look like?

Some people worry about the idea of a "biblical approach' because of different emphases in different parts of the Bible. But we think that God is able to use all parts of the Bible to reveal important truths to us, and so that the sum total of its various emphases can give a general position to work from"”a "biblical approach'.

We should notice that the overall biblical picture does not quite fit any of the alternatives posed at the beginning:

- Although humankind is rated very highly, the biblical picture is not anthropocentric. God loves his world, including the parts that have nothing to do with humans.

- Although animals matter greatly, they do not trump humans, who remain their "rulers'. So the Bible is not zoocentric.

- Although all living things matter, a hierarchy of sorts makes it permissible that humans and animals eat animals and plants. The biblical picture is not biocentric.

- Although the biblical authors are able to paint enormous verbal pictures of entire ecosystems, individual humans, plants and animals are still to be cared for. The Bible is not ecocentric.

To use the older language, we can say that "conservation' is too human-focused, while "preservation' does not rate humanity highly enough! Of course the Bible is, across its entirety, theocentric. All God's creation is in orbit around God; he calls it very good; he will renew the parts that humanity ruins; and he expects humanity to honour himself, each other, and the created world. There is no "environmental theory' here, just an understanding of the relative importance of things. As the "wise' person grows in their "fear' of the Lord' so also will they grow in the knowledge of how to value God, other people, and the non-human environment.

This is an extract from the SIE brochure ‘Environment: a Christian response’