Forty years ago I remember doing elementary school projects on pollution, cutting out pictures from Time and the other news magazines that came into our house.
So, why are we still facing this issue of global warming? We can't claim we didn't understand what we were doing to the environment.
And where was the church? Indeed, where is the church?
Of all the issues that gripped Christianity in my youth, I don't recall environmentalism being high among them.
It's hardly surprising then that secular society has its own sharp critique of Christianity, pointing out that at the very beginning of our scriptures, God gives humankind “dominion” over the rest of Creation.
This, they argue, is what led Western Christian society to think it could use Creation for its own ends, ultimately unbridled capitalism. While much of this is cheap rhetoric, they have a point. The philosophical underpinnings of Western society are certainly Christian.
We have been sinfully selective in applying our ethics to our conduct in the world, being complicit in pillaging the earth to gain our riches.
Add to that baggage our own culpability. For example, our buildings have a heavy ecological footprint. Newer structures may be designed for multiple uses, but many older churches are a disaster because they have only one use (worship), and that by too few people in too large a building with too high ceilings where all the heat goes.
Greening our faith is going to take considerable time and effort.
In the meantime, in place of Christianity, secularists gave us the Earth goddess, Gaia. Developed in the 1960s, the Gaia hypothesis came to prominence through the 70s. But for all its romantic allure, this theory has one overwhelming flaw: Gaia has a finite existence. In the end, everything will just dissolve into bits of dark matter floating in space.
Christians, on the other hand, have such a hopeful alternative, yet one they rarely employ.
Most of what passes for Christianity's theological approach to the environment amounts to referencing a few biblical passages about God being the creator of everything, whether it be the creation of the world in Genesis or various references in the psalms, such as Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lord's and all that therein is,” as one of the older poetic translations puts it.
The weakness of relying solely on these passages is that they leave us open to the charge (perhaps even the temptation!) of viewing the world paternalistically. Father knows best and we know what Father knows; we'll take care of it.
It also fails to integrate Creation into redemption and so into heaven, creating an unintended dualism between the stuff of this world — matter — and the stuff of the next — spiritual existence. Such a dualism has always formally been rejected by Christians and its articulation regarded as heresy. But it is nevertheless a commonly encountered belief.
The alternative is to see the Incarnation, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus as more than just a template for faithful believers. As Jesus says in the all-too-often forgotten verse John 3:17: “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.”
Christianity takes the body so seriously, that it teaches God became united to humanity in a body and took a refined (“imperishable,” as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 15) form of that body into the eternal divine life. It sees the body as integral to the human person who ultimately gets to enjoy God “face to face” without being annihilated by the overwhelming divinity.
The ancient Greek philosophers and the Hebrew people knew everything came from God and that it was therefore good. The problem was how it could return back to God as they knew it somehow must.
The unique Christian message is that it returns through the life and work of Jesus. As His “body on earth” our calling is, in some sense, to work at returning God's creation back to God.
That is a most holy calling in relation to a most holy creation.
