How does the imago Dei bear on the Christian’s responsibility toward the environment?

Question 05041.

The imago Dei is the doctrine that determines how a Christian should think about the environment, and I want to show you why it steers us safely between two very real ditches. Some believers treat ecological concern as warmed-over secular politics and dismiss it entirely. Others drift the opposite way until the natural world starts to carry a quasi-sacred status Scripture never gives it. The biblical teaching that humanity bears the image of God cuts a clear path between the two.

The Earth Belongs to God, Not to Us

Everything starts with ownership. “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein” (Psalm 24:1). We are not proprietors of the planet; we are stewards on someone else’s estate. That single truth dismantles both exploitation and worship of nature. You do not vandalise what belongs to your King, and you do not bow down to it either.

The imago Dei gives that stewardship its shape. Genesis 1:26 joins the image and the task in a single breath: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens” (Genesis 1:26). I have unpacked the image and likeness language of Genesis 1:26 elsewhere; the point here is that dominion is given to image bearers precisely because they are image bearers.

Imago Dei and Dominion

The Hebrew word for dominion, radah, means to rule, and some critics have blamed this verse for every environmental abuse in Western history. But the imago Dei defines what kind of rule is in view. An image represents the one whose image it is. Our dominion is meant to make visible the character of the God who “is good to all” and whose “mercy is over all that he has made” (Psalm 145:9). A ruler who wrecks what he governs does not represent this King; he misrepresents Him.

Genesis 2:15 fills out the picture: “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). The two verbs are telling. To work, abad, is the ordinary word for serving and cultivating. To keep, shamar, is the word used of guarding and protecting; it is what the priests later did for the tabernacle. Dominion in Eden looked like a gardener’s care, not a strip miner’s haste.

The Fall Corrupted the Steward

Why, then, is human history littered with deforestation, pollution, and cruelty? Because the image bearer fell. The imago Dei was not erased at the fall, as Genesis 9:6 makes clear, but it was defaced, and our exercise of dominion was corrupted along with everything else. Selfishness entered the stewardship. The ground itself was cursed because of Adam, and Paul tells us that “the creation was subjected to futility” and now groans “in the pains of childbirth until now” (Romans 8:20-22).

This is a point worth pausing over. Creation’s present disorder is not God’s design failing; it is the consequence of our failure. The steward’s rebellion damaged the estate. Any Christian environmental thinking that ignores sin will end up naive, and any that ignores hope will end up despairing.

What the Imago Dei Requires of Us Now

So what does faithful stewardship look like for a believer today? It looks like treating the natural world as a trust from God rather than a resource to plunder or a deity to appease. The Old Testament law is surprisingly concrete here: the land was to enjoy its sabbaths, fruit trees were spared even in wartime, and the righteous man is one who “has regard for the life of his beast” (Proverbs 12:10). God legislates against waste and cruelty because both deny His character.

For us, that cashes out in ordinary faithfulness rather than grand gestures. Wastefulness is poor stewardship. Cruelty to animals is a denial of the imago Dei’s representative role. Care for the physical world, including the human beings whose dignity stands at its centre, is part of loving our neighbour, since the poorest usually suffer first when creation is abused. None of this requires adopting any particular political programme; it requires representing the Owner well.

Where Environmentalism Goes Wrong

The imago Dei also guards us from the opposite error. Contemporary culture increasingly treats humanity as a plague upon the planet and nature as intrinsically holy. Paul diagnosed that instinct long ago: fallen people “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). When a movement values whales above unborn children, it has inverted the created order. Human beings are not one species among many; we are the only creatures made in the image of God.

That is also why despair is off the table. The future of the planet does not finally rest on human effort, and Scripture is frank about where history is heading: this present creation will give way to “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). But the promise of renewal is never an excuse for vandalism, any more than the promise of a resurrection body licenses you to ruin your health. The one who is faithful in little will be trusted with much.

Practical Wisdom Without Political Captivity

Let me address the elephant in the room: the environment has become one of the most politicised subjects of our age, and Christians rightly worry about being conscripted into agendas that carry a great deal more than creation care in their luggage. Some environmental movements are quietly pantheistic, treating the earth as a divine mother rather than a created trust. Others attach demands about population that sit very uneasily beside the biblical conviction that children are a blessing and that every human being, as an imago Dei bearer, is of more value than many sparrows. The Christian is free, and I would say obliged, to sift every such movement through Scripture, embracing what honours the Creator and declining what dethrones Him or degrades His image bearers. Stewardship is a biblical category; it does not require signing up to any party’s manifesto.

The imago Dei actually gives believers a firmer basis for creation care than secular frameworks can supply. If humanity is an accident of chemistry, then our preferences about the planet are just that, preferences, with no more authority than any competing appetite. But if the world belongs to God and we are His appointed stewards, then care for it is an objective duty, owed not to the planet but to its Owner. That grounding also sets sane limits: we protect creation because God values it, and we develop and use it because God gave it to us for food, shelter, energy, and delight. Genesis knows nothing of the false choice between exploitation and untouchability. The garden was to be worked and kept, both verbs, held together.

And the imago Dei keeps the priorities straight when duties collide. Human beings made in the image of God may never be sacrificed to an abstraction, which is why Christian creation care will always put the poor family needing affordable heat above the aesthetic preferences of the comfortable, and the unborn child above every calculation of convenience. Loving my neighbour and keeping the garden are not rivals; rightly ordered, the second is one form of the first, since the poorest neighbours suffer soonest when water is fouled and soil is stripped. Wherever you land on disputed policy questions, and faithful believers will land differently, the imago Dei fixes the two stars to steer by: the earth is the LORD’s, and people bear His image.

Perhaps the simplest test I can offer is the one I use on myself. When I walk through the countryside near home, what happens in my heart? If the beauty terminates on itself, I have slipped towards the world’s nature-romanticism; if I feel nothing and think only of usefulness, I have slipped towards the exploiter’s coldness; but if the hills lift my eyes to the One who weighed them in scales (Isaiah 40:12), the imago Dei is doing its proper work, turning a walk into worship and a steward’s survey into a son’s delight. The doctrine is not finally about recycling bins or policy papers, useful as debates about both may be. It is about representing a generous King in the estate He has lent us, until the day He makes all things new. Live in His world this week as someone who expects to give the Owner an account, and who is glad the Owner is good.

So, now what?

Ask yourself a simple question this week: does my handling of God’s world look like the God I claim to represent? The imago Dei makes environmental care neither an idol nor an irrelevance; it makes it an act of representation. Waste less. Notice creation and let it move you to worship the Creator rather than the creature. And when the groaning of this present world weighs on you, let it do what Paul says it should: point you forward to the day when the sons of God are revealed and creation itself is set free.

“For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” (Romans 8:19, ESV)