How does the imago Dei bear on the Christian’s responsibility toward the environment and the natural world?
Question 05041
Environmental responsibility is a genuinely contested area in contemporary Christianity. Some believers treat ecological concern as a form of baptised secularism — politics dressed in religious language. Others move so far in the opposite direction that the natural world begins to carry a quasi-sacred status Scripture does not give it. The doctrine of the imago Dei provides a more precise framework than either extreme.
The Earth Belongs to God
The starting point is not human rights over creation but divine ownership of it. Psalm 24:1 is unambiguous: “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.” The created order is not a commons belonging to whoever happens to inhabit it. It is the LORD’s property. Whatever authority human beings exercise within creation is therefore delegated, not inherent. This single fact reframes the entire discussion. We are not landlords; we are tenants answerable to an Owner who has set the terms of occupation.
Dominion as Representation
Genesis 1:26-28 records the commission given to humanity at creation: “let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth.” This dominion mandate has sometimes been used to justify the exploitation of natural resources without moral restraint, as though the only question that matters is what serves immediate human interests. But the mandate must be read in its full context. Human beings are made in the image of God and given dominion precisely as His image-bearers. To rule as God’s image is to rule as God Himself would rule — with wisdom, care, and regard for what is genuinely good rather than merely profitable.
Genesis 2:15 fills out the picture with two specific Hebrew verbs: “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” The verb for “work” (abad) can equally mean “serve”; the verb for “keep” (shamar) carries the sense of guarding and protecting. Taken together, they describe custodianship rather than ownership. The man serves the garden and guards it on behalf of its true Owner. That is the shape of dominion as Scripture presents it.
The Fall and Creation’s Groaning
Creation itself did not sin, yet it is bound up with the consequences of human sin. Romans 8:19-22 is among the most striking passages in the New Testament on this theme: “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Creation groans under the weight of the fall, and its redemption is tied inseparably to the redemption of the people God made to tend it.
This passage establishes something important. The creation’s present state of groaning is not its intended or final state. God’s eschatological purpose is not the destruction and abandonment of the material world but its renewal and liberation. Caring for creation in the present is consistent with its future glory, not in tension with it.
The Limits of Human Effort
The biblical framework diverges from secular environmentalism at a specific and significant point. No programme of human conservation, no political agreement, no technological innovation can undo what the fall has done to creation or bring about the renewal that creation longs for. Romans 8:21 locates that liberation in “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” — in other words, in the resurrection and the new creation that God will bring about at the return of Christ. Responsible environmental stewardship is a genuine obligation; it is not a mechanism for achieving what only God’s eschatological action can accomplish.
This guards against two errors at once. It guards against treating environmental concern as a salvific project — as if human beings, by sufficiently right choices and political will, can heal the creation. And it guards against treating the future hope of a new creation as a reason to care nothing for the present one. Both the obligation and its limits are defined by Scripture rather than by secular ideology in either direction.
The Image of God in Practice
The imago Dei means that how we relate to creation reflects something about how we understand God. The Creator looked at what He had made and called it good — six times across the Genesis 1 account. To treat the created order with contempt or carelessness is, at some level, to show contempt for the work and the wisdom of the One who made it. The Christian farmer, builder, manufacturer, and consumer does not operate outside the reach of this principle. Stewardship in the biblical sense always asks a practical question: am I handling what belongs to God in a manner that reflects His own care for it?
So, now what?
Neither a reflexive dismissal of environmental concern nor the uncritical adoption of secular ecological ideology serves the Christian well. Scripture calls for thoughtful, responsible stewardship rooted in the recognition that the earth is the LORD’s, that we are answerable to Him for how we treat what He has entrusted to us, and that creation’s ultimate renewal belongs to Him alone. The Christian’s care for the natural world is, at its foundation, an act of worship — an acknowledgement that the One who made all things is the One to whom we answer for all things.
“The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.”Psalm 24:1
