What does the Bible say about environmentalism?

Question 60031.

Creation care is one of those subjects where Christians tend to react rather than think, and the reactions come in two flavours. Some believers absorb the environmental movement wholesale and end up with a faith in which recycling has become a sacrament. Others dismiss the whole field as a left wing preoccupation for people who have nothing better to worry about.

Scripture supports neither reflex. It gives humanity a job in relation to the earth, it holds us accountable for how we do it, and it refuses to let the creation take the place of the Creator. Those three commitments together produce something rather different from what you will hear on either side.

The mandate given at the beginning

Before anything went wrong, humanity was given work to do. Genesis 1 speaks of filling the earth and subduing it and having dominion, and Genesis 2 puts the man in the garden to work it and keep it. Those two Hebrew verbs are worth pausing over. To work is abad, which elsewhere means to serve, and to keep is shamar, the word used of guarding and protecting something entrusted to you.

That is the vocabulary of stewardship rather than ownership. Dominion in Scripture is exercised on behalf of the one who actually owns the property, and the Psalms are blunt about who that is: the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. So creation care is not an optional enthusiasm for the environmentally minded believer. It is part of the original job description of the human race.

God has always cared about the land

The law of Moses is full of it. The land was to rest every seventh year. Fruit trees were not to be cut down even when besieging a city, on the ground that a tree is not your enemy. A mother bird was not to be taken with her young. Farmers were told not to reap to the very edges of the field, so that the poor and the sojourner could glean.

These are not sentimental laws. They restrain the human appetite to extract everything available as fast as possible, and they build rest and limit into the way a people uses land. Proverbs adds that the righteous man cares for the life of his beast. God notices how His creatures are treated, and creation care in Scripture is a matter of righteousness rather than of taste.

Where environmentalism becomes a religion

Here is where discernment is needed, because the movement around us often carries a full religious structure. There is a doctrine of the fall, in which humanity is the contaminant. There is guilt, and there is confession, and there is penance in the form of consumption choices, though never any forgiveness. There is an eschatology of coming catastrophe with dates attached, and there is a way of speaking about nature that treats it as a person with intentions.

Paul described the ancient version exactly, saying that they worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator. A Christian can hold to creation care wholeheartedly while refusing that framework, and should, because a religion with guilt and no forgiveness is a cruel thing to live under, and I have met young people crushed by it.

There is also the question of humanity’s standing. Some strands of the movement treat human beings as a plague on the planet, and one or two go further and argue that fewer of us would be better. Scripture will not have that. We are the ones made in God’s image and given the responsibility, and the answer to bad stewardship is good stewardship rather than fewer stewards.

But does it not all burn?

This is the objection I hear most from believers who share my eschatology. If the present order is passing away, why maintain it? The answer is that the same logic would tell you not to bother washing a body that is going to die, or educating a child in a world that will not last. We do not care for things only because they are permanent.

And the biblical picture is renewal rather than annihilation. Paul says the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption. Isaiah’s picture of the age to come is agricultural, with vineyards, harvests and a settled land. A believer who expects Christ to reign over a restored earth has every reason to treat this one as belonging to Him already.

Loving your neighbour comes into it

Environmental damage is rarely evenly distributed. The people breathing the worst air, drinking the worst water and living on the most degraded land are almost always the people with the least money and the fewest choices. That turns creation care into a straightforward question of neighbour love rather than an abstraction about the planet.

It also cuts through some of the political heat. I do not need to settle every scientific argument to know that dumping sewage into a river harms the people downstream, or that a factory poisoning a village is doing evil. Those are moral matters, and Christians ought to be able to say so without first checking which party has adopted the issue this year.

Keeping proportion

Creation care is a real duty and it is not the gospel. The command to be reconciled to God through Jesus is of a different order from the command to steward the earth, and a church which loses that distinction will eventually have activism where its evangelism used to be. I have seen denominations make that trade and they did not gain much by it.

Equally, a church which sneers at the whole subject has quietly told a generation of young believers that the Bible has nothing to say about something they care deeply about, which is both untrue and needlessly costly. We can hold the greater and the lesser in their proper order without dropping either.

What this looks like on a Tuesday

Ordinary faithfulness, mostly. Waste less. Repair rather than replace where you can. Do not treat the world as disposable, because the habit of disposability rarely stays confined to objects. Grow something. Take your children outside and teach them to notice what God has made, which is worship as much as it is education.

If you have influence in a business or a council, use it where the decisions are actually made. And keep the whole thing thankful rather than anxious, because the difference between Christian creation care and the mood of the age is that we are tending something loved by its Maker rather than managing the decline of an orphaned planet. There is more on the broader principle in what biblical stewardship is and on how creation reveals God.

What creation care is not

It is not the worship of nature, and it is not a licence to treat human beings as the problem. Neither is it a political badge, though it has been made into one by people on both sides who find it useful. Creation care in the biblical sense is simply the recognition that this world belongs to someone else and that we will give an account of how we handled it.

It is also not a substitute for the gospel, and it will not save anybody, including the person doing it. That has to be said clearly in a moment when a great many decent people are working extremely hard at something that cannot forgive them. A believer who tends the earth does so out of gratitude and not out of fear, which is a completely different way to live.

And it is not a counsel of despair. The future of this planet does not rest on whether we manage a technical fix in time. Creation care is faithfulness in a small patch of ground for a short span of years, offered to the Maker who has told us plainly what He intends to do with the whole of it, and that frees us to work steadily rather than frantically.

Nor, finally, is it a matter for one political tribe. The instinct to leave a place better than you found it, to avoid waste, to look after animals properly and to hand something worth having to the next generation, is at home in the most conservative farming household in the country. Creation care belongs to the whole church and it predates every party now claiming it.

So, now what?

Pick one thing this week rather than adopting a whole programme. Waste less food, or walk somewhere you would have driven, or take an hour to look properly at something God has made and thank Him for it. Creation care grows out of gratitude, and gratitude has to be practised.

And if you have been carrying guilt about all this, hand it over. You are not the saviour of the planet and you were never asked to be. You are a steward of a small patch of it for a short time, answerable to a Maker who is kind, and that is a far lighter load than the one the age is trying to put on your shoulders.

The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers.

Psalm 24:1 to 2 (ESV)