Skeptics, Cynics, and New York Times Bestsellers

by Jonathan Merritt


Flourish Magazine, Spring 2010

 
I’ll never forget the craze over Dan Brown’s book, The Da Vinci Code. Many Christians condemned Brown’s work as irreverent propaganda. Perhaps the book’s success contributed to this. During 2003 and 2004, it seemed every public space was painted with Da Vinci Code posters—from bookstore windows to Wal-Mart to church marquees. The book itself sold more than 60 million copies worldwide, and the subsequent movie, which landed an Oscar-winning director and lead actor, earned more than $217 million at the box office. (I’m still waiting for The Purpose-Driven Life movie to come out.)

Part of The Code ’s buzz was due to its genre: faction, which is a hybrid mix of fact and fiction. The book was a novel (fiction)—the characters and plot were completely made up—but Dan Brown carefully weaved facts and theories about Christianity and Catholicism into the story line.

During the years when The Da Vinci Code dominated conversations, many people told me that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, with whom He had a child.

In Christendom today, faction ranges from harmless gossip to hazardous false doctrine. Someone says something that you know is false, but soon the whole church is repeating it as if it were gospel. You later find out that it wasn’t true. Or you turn on your television to a televangelist’s sermon and hear something painfully unorthodox. Take a pinch of Scripture, add a heap of faulty logic and—voilà— Christian faction that contaminates the church.

Misinformation swirls around [creation care] issues. Most of it is a halfway true piece of faction with the power to divert us from living as stewards. A good example of this is the misunderstanding of dominion. The arguments for man-centered dominion contain just enough truth to be dangerously convincing.

If you are like me, you have been on a steady diet of Christian faction for some time. Until recently, I held most of the positions I’m about to discuss. I ask that you keep an open mind as I offer what I believe is a better alternative to each, even if you have championed a few of them yourself. An ancient king once said, “The first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him” (Prov. 18:17).

“Environmentalism is for tree-hugging secularist liberals”
Less than an hour before I began penning this, I decided to run up to a local sandwich shop to grab some lunch. As I entered the door, I recognized an old friend of the family that I had not seen for quite some time. Our eyes locked, and she motioned for me to come over.

“I have been reading some of your writing, and I have to tell you how proud I am of you,” she said.

I blushed and pretended I wanted her to stop flattering me.

“I just have one question: Are you really becoming a tree-hugging liberal?” she asked.

Environmentalist is a dirty word to some people. Like Trekkie , the word may be used in private but you don’t want it on a personalized license plate. For some, environmentalism is synonymous with secularism, Gaia worship, New Ageism, and politically liberal special interest groups.

It is probably the most common argument I hear from people who have corresponded with me about this issue. I was fascinated to find that one of the most common phrases in the e-mails I receive is Al Gore. I have never said I support Al Gore. I have never made any public comments about the former vice president’s work. Yet many assume that because I care about the health of our planet, I am “becoming an Al Gore.”

Al Gore has a long-standing record on environmentalism that has made headlines for decades. As a U.S. congressman in 1978, Gore chaired some of the first hearings on toxic waste cleanup, and in 1990, he was a key supporter of the Clean Air Act. Two years later, Gore released one of the few mainstream pro-environment books at that time, Earth in the Balance. The following year, Gore worked with the Big Three automakers to launch the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, an initiative with the goal of developing more fuel-efficient automobiles. While vice president from 1992 to 2000, Gore tackled such issues as safer drinking water, preservation of national reserves, and governmental tax credits for energy efficiency. Most recently, he has been the most visible advocate for climate change. His work has twice landed him on the New York Times bestseller list and scored him an Oscar, Emmy, and Nobel Prize. These are not affirmations of Gore’s work but simple facts about his involvement with environmental issues.

For a very long time, the liberal political bloc has been doing all the heavy environmental lifting. The organizations and individuals associated with this bloc often hold positions that devalue human life and accept a worldview that people are basically parasites on an otherwise healthy planet. Other environmentalists advocate for a radical animal rights agenda or support population control policies that Christians rightly reject. People whom conservative Christians oppose on other issues have traditionally championed environmentalism. We often mistrust environmentalism itself as a result.

Christ-followers find it increasingly difficult to ignore the environmental impact of their lifestyles and are beginning to feel a holy stirring as they wake up to crazy weather patterns, smoggy skylines, and disappearing forests, many Christians aren’t comfortable with others who work on these issues and are even less comfortable with their proposed solutions.  The “radical left” has commandeered environmentalism partly because the “far right” gave up the moral high ground long ago in its exclusive pursuit of other issues.

My answer is to depolarize and depoliticize environmentalism. Caring for creation is not a right-left issue, but a moral-immoral issue that the people of God have been called to address. If we remain true to God’s Word, Christians must with equanimity redeem the cause and make it our own. To leave these issues to secular environmentalists is to abandon our God-given responsibility to care for His planet.

God will not excuse our complacency because of our discomfort in partnering with individuals with whom we part ways on other issues. We must make progress where we agree and be “carefully eager about working with mainstream environmental groups.” We will be forced to develop biblical expressions of the mainstream environmental movement and offer alternative solutions to the problems we face.

Forcing environmentalism into a left-right dichotomy harms us all. If you consider yourself a conservative, you can remain a solid supporter of biblical values like the sanctity of life, but you should expand your political interests to include historically progressive issues like global poverty, human rights, and aggressive care for God’s creation. If you consider yourself more progressive, you can continue to support the political goals you find important while working with conservatives of mutual goodwill on issues like this one.

In a recent network news interview, I was asked which party I felt compelled to support as an outspoken Christian. I said, “That’s the wrong question.” The reporter was bewildered and asked for clarification. I responded, “As a Christian, I am not required to support a particular party. A better question is to ask, ‘which values am I compelled to support?’ ”

Jesus never sided with the oppressive Roman government or the Jewish politicians who were even more divided than our American politicians. Maybe Jesus knew that great faith in political parties makes it easy to lose focus on the ultimate answer to our world’s greatest problems. Let’s not be divided over our party of choice. We don’t have to be. Finding common ground on this issue rather than accepting a left-right polarity breeds hope for the realization of the divine plan.

“The world is going to end anyway”
For music lovers, the phrase “end of the world” conjures up riffs from REM’s famous rock tune. For prophecy junkies and fans of the Left Behind series, it brings visions of the rapture and apocalyptic destruction of the earth by God. Some Christians use the “end times” as an excuse to shrug off earth care stewardship. Because Scripture teaches about an approaching apocalypse, the argument goes, then issues like depletion of natural resources and loss of biodiversity are inconsequential.

“As much as environmentalists try to save the earth, their efforts will ultimately end in total failure. The Bible predicts that during the tribulation hour, the world will come to near complete ruin,” says Todd Strandberg of RaptureReady.com. “I am strongly against Christians embracing the environmental movement.”

Anglican Bishop N. T. Wright ran into this line of thinking during a recent visit to Ontario, Canada:

Many conservative Christians in the area, and more importantly just to the South in the United States, had been urging that since we were living in the end times, with the world about to come to an end, there was no point worrying about trying to stop polluting the planet with acid rain and the like. Indeed, wasn’t it unspiritual and even a sign of a lack of faith, to think about such things? If God was intending to bring the whole world to a shuddering halt, what was the problem? If Armageddon was just around the corner, it didn’t matter—and here, I suspect, is part of the real agenda—if General Motors went on pumping poisonous gases into the Canadian atmosphere.

Why worry about the future of an earth that has no future? Try applying it to another element of God’s creation like the human body: My body will ultimately be glorified, so I’ll treat it poorly in the meantime: I’ll smoke a pack of cigarettes a day because I am going to die one day anyway. Ridiculous!

Future knowledge doesn’t change our present obligations. Our stewardship responsibilities transcend our eschatology—our theology about end times. Many Christians believe that the earth will not be destroyed, but renewed and perfected. Neither scenario revokes our stewardship responsibility. I believe that one day Jesus will return to renew and restore the earth, but in the meantime, we are told to live in worship of and obedience to Him.

I struggled with this when I first started investigating creation care. Then I came across a story that I had read a hundred times, which I now applied in a fresh way. The tale is about a very wealthy man who was going away on a long business trip. Before he left, he called together his servants and divvied up his money to them:

To one he gave five talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. The man who had received five talents went at once and put his money to work and gained five more. So also, the one with the two talents gained two more. But the man who had received the one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. (Matthew 25:15–19)

When the businessman found out that the first two had taken good care of what he gave them, he was overjoyed and said, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness.” Then the businessman turned to the third servant, the one who dug a hole and buried his money in the ground. This servant hid his talent and didn’t help it grow, develop, and flourish. And how did the master respond? He became very angry and called him a “wicked, lazy servant” (Matt. 25:23, 26).

This story is, of course, one of Jesus’ most famous parables, and it teaches a very important lesson to those who claim that we can bury our obligations to this planet because Christ is going to return soon. The knowledge of a returning Master does not free us from our earthly obligations; it calls us to them.

One day, every person will be judged on all aspects of his life, and as the book of Revelation says, there will even be a time for “destroying those who destroy the earth” (Rev. 11:18). When Christ returns, He wants to find us faithfully doing all the things He asked us to do. He is going to be concerned with what we did with all His “stuff” while He was gone. Did we nurture it and help it thrive or did we simply forget about it and go about our lives? As Francis Schaeffer said, “A Christian-based science and technology should consciously try to see nature substantially healed, while waiting for the future complete healing at Christ’s return.”

When those clouds peel back and my Savior returns to this planet, I want to be caught in the act of loving people, worshiping Christ, and obeying all God’s commands, including the command to care for His creation.

“Creation care distracts us from more important tasks”
One of the most divisive environmental issues around is global climate change. It has divided politicians for decades and has recently begun dividing the Christian community. Shortly before his death, the founder of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, preached a sermon entitled “The Myth of Global Warming” at Thomas Road Baptist Church in which he addressed the issue head-on: “If I decide here as the pastor and our deacons decide that we’re going to get caught up in the global warming thing, we’re not going to be able to reach the masses of souls for Christ, because our attention will be elsewhere,” he declared from the pulpit. “That’s pretty wise for Satan to concoct.”

Christians are charged with the task of evangelizing the world, the argument goes, so we can’t let environmental issues distract us from our true mission. They say that we have to choose between evangelism and creation care, and therefore, we must pick evangelism.

We aren’t forced to choose between sharing the gospel and creation care. It is a false dichotomy. Both are possible. The very fact that the Bible tells us to do both indicates that evangelism and creation care can simultaneously be done well. A vital part of the Great Commission reaches beyond making converts to making disciples teaching them to observe all God commands, including the very first commands to steward the earth.

Creation care is a gospel issue. Shortly after several Southern Baptist leaders released a statement on creation care, I began receiving e-mails from International Mission Board missionaries telling me how relieved they were to see this. From Canada to Slovenia, from Brazil to Ukraine, I felt a virtual exhale. In many places on the mission field, our missionaries don’t begin with Jesus, whom some foreigners know nothing about. They begin with the creation (and its Creator), which we know communicates with everyone.

Creation care speaks to people in developing nations where people have a greater connection to nature in everyday life. Creation care is a bridge for the gospel in these places. But it also bolsters the gospel in the Western world where many people know of, if not respect, Jesus. People aren’t as connected with creation in these places, but they are often more familiar with Christianity. The whole world is increasingly equating an externally focused, sustainable, earth-friendly lifestyle with what it means to be a “good person.” When the world sees the Christian community perpetuating systems of wealth and waste, it damages our witness. When they see us living compassionate, sustainable lives, our witness becomes authentic and convincing.

Rand Clark planted Genesis Church in Castle Rock, Colorado, in the belief that the gospel and creation care are inextricably connected. Rather than care only for people, the ethos of his church is to care for everything and everyone in their community. During their annual event, “Spring Up the Creek,” they restore a local river that has become an illegal dumping ground. Genesis’s sports ministry pries children away from the television and connects them with the outdoors. During “Trash Bash,” congregants pick up garbage along a local highway they’ve adopted. “Cans for Clean Water” is a program in association with neighborhood associations to collect aluminum cans to be recycled. The money received from the recycling center is donated to a clean water project in Sudan.

Not only is Genesis Church obeying the creation care teachings in Scripture, it has developed a unique platform on which to share the gospel. Rand tells me that people are always asking why they do such things, which begins a great conversation about salvation found in Jesus. Just as Paul found a natural connection point with the Greek culture in Acts 17, Rand believes we can do the same thing through living as stewards in the 21st century.

What we say and how we live speak volumes about who we really are as Christians and whom we represent. A Japanese proverb says, “The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour.” And as Americans, we also have a great responsibility because of our association with Christianity. The way Americans behave is noted by others around the world, so when Americans are unruly, Christianity suffers. More is at stake than just spotted owls, snail darters, and a few degrees Fahrenheit. Our integrity, our witness, and our credibility are at risk.

My agnostic friend Don once remarked that one of the things that most discourages him from becoming a Christian is the hypocrisy of the Christian community in how it responds to social issues like environmentalism. “If you Christians truly believe that God exists and if you really believe that God made the world for everyone to live on, then why does it seem like you don’t care about preserving it?” Don once asked me. “Wouldn’t that be like destroying the playhouse your dad built for you?” I believe his analogy expresses the sentiments felt by many religious skeptics.

As Christians and as Americans, our responsibility is clearly great. We aren’t forced to choose between proclaiming the Word of God and carrying out the work God has given us to do. When done properly and proportionately, creation care serves only to strengthen the gospel.

Was Jesus Green?
As 2009 was dawning and President Obama was about to take the reins of our country, political pundits from both sides were working overtime. Every time I turned on the television or radio, they would be reflecting on the past administration, arguing about our present realities, and predicting what the future would be like under the new commander-in- chief. Among the hot-button issues that were panicking the pundits, the war in Iraq seemed to top the list. After all, the war was dragging on at a pace even Aesop would question, and Americans were beginning to get antsy. A light bulb came on over the head of my inner journalist. (It was a compact fluorescent light bulb, of course.)

I decided to write an article for Relevant magazine on how Christians should view war. Because I am not an expert on the issue, I called a good friend who teaches ethics at a well-known university. He has written books on the subject, so I figured he would be a natural starting point. My friend was helping me write the interview questions, and as he spoke, I wrote furiously. As we were about to get off the phone, he said something so simple yet so profound it embarrassed me for not having already thought about it.

“All the questions I have given you are very important,” he said. “But the most important question you can ask is, ‘Where is Jesus in your theory?’ ”

I’ve never asked that question of anyone. I have written more than a hundred articles on dozens of issues for publications in both the Christian and secular world, but I had never asked where Jesus came into the picture. In one sense, it occurred to me, every article I published until that day had fallen short.

People who are skeptical of all things green love to point out that Jesus never directly addressed environmentalism, and in one sense, they are correct. Jesus never reiterated the Genesis 2:15 charge to keep and care for the earth. He never overturned the tables of greedy developers, and not once did He rebuke a Jewish farmer for unsustainable practices. Jesus never preached a single sermon on environmental stewardship. Trust me, I’ve looked for it.

Jesus is the supreme revelation of God, He is the foundation of our faith, He is the reason for our hope, He is the greatest teacher who ever lived, and He is the basis for everything we believe. The teachings of Jesus Christ must be at the heart of any Christian paradigm. More directly, if we believe that God has a plan for our planet and we have a role to play, Jesus must be at the core of that belief. All Christ-followers should ask themselves, “Where is Jesus in my theory?” when evaluating any issue.

Should we conclude that Jesus didn’t care about this issue? Was He sending us a message through His example that there are more important things to worry about? Have we misread or overemphasized what the rest of the Bible teaches about so-called creation care?

We have to remember that Jesus came to earth in first-century Palestine where He ministered in a Jewish context. The people in Jesus’ world were acutely aware of all the Hebrew laws and Scriptures that protected God’s creation. The boys in Jesus’ day memorized the story of Genesis and all Moses’ laws at an early age. Some of the brighter ones would have memorized the Psalms, a book replete with natural imagery and content. Furthermore, first-century Palestine was largely an agrarian society in which sheer survival depended on sustainable practices and proper cultivation. Stewardship was assumed. So it isn’t fair to fault Jesus for failing to offer answers to questions that the culture wasn’t asking.

“The world of nature that we find in the Gospels is that of rural first-century Palestine,” writes Alister McGrath. “It is a world where agrarian concerns—such as the growth of seeds, the fruitfulness of trees, imminent changes in weather, and the well-being of animals—were ever-present.”

Keeping these things in mind so that we evaluate our Lord fairly, we still find that His life and ministry powerfully bolster the divine plan for our planet. Jesus aligns with creation care in at least four ways.

Jesus Is the Creator-God
We first affirm that Jesus is God, and therefore, He is eternal. He created all that we see. As Paul tells us in Colossians 1, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him” (Col. 1:15–16). The name for God in the creation account is plural, underscoring this idea. Because Jesus is the Creator-God, all the things we have demonstrated about God’s heart for creation in the preceding chapters also apply to Jesus.

Because Jesus shares the identity of God, He “stands in the same relationship to creation as anything that is said of [God] in the Old Testament.” Therefore, it is totally appropriate for us to proclaim, “The earth is Jesus’ and everything in it.” And it is also appropriate to say that when we fail to care for creation properly, it is an affront to Jesus Christ Himself.

Jesus Entered Creation
“The rest of the world grows clearer, not dimmer, in the light of Christ,” writes Philip Yancey. “God created matter; in Jesus, God joined it.” 10 God paid creation the ultimate compliment when He entered it. Jesus Christ became a carbon-based life form, a human being. It is a lofty thought: the Creator became a part of creation. The same air we breathe entered His lungs. The same ground we trod bore food that satisfied His divine hunger. Prior to his public ministry, it is likely that Jesus worked with His hands as a carpenter in a highly agricultural society. Rather than hover above creation like a gypsy over a crystal ball, God entered creation and sent humanity a powerful message.

As Alister McGrath put it:

The Christian idea of the natural order as God’s place of action and dwelling is intensified by the doctrine of incarnation, perhaps one of the most remarkable Christian ideas. In essence, the doctrine holds that God did not choose to remain in heaven, but entered into human history in the form of a human being. Rather than demanding that we ascend to God in order to be saved, God chose to enter into our world, to meet us there and to bring us home. . . . If God valued this world enough to enter into it, and dignify it with divine presence, then Christians ought to hold that place of habitation with appropriate respect.

Although the incarnation of Christ has implications for the destiny of human souls, it also implies more. Jesus’ mere presence on Earth affirms the value that God had already placed upon our planet. In other words, “Because Christ took on flesh, we believe matter matters.”

Jesus Taught with Creation
One of the things that made Jesus such a fascinating teacher was His ability to speak in simple, easy-to-understand terms. He had a knack for what writers and speakers sometimes call “putting the cookies on the lowest shelf.” It is a paradox, really, that the most knowledgeable person who ever lived and who taught the most profound truths ever pondered, was so intellectually accessible that uneducated commoners clung to His sermons.

The tool that Jesus used most often to teach was the parable. Parables are self-contained, easy-to-understand stories that teach big ideas. Through parables, Jesus often taught about His kingdom in ways that engage the imagination. It is interesting that the elements Jesus chose to communicate these things were often natural. His stories were steeped in the imagery of nature—from seeds to animals, from the weather patterns to the rhythm of the seasons. Even Jesus’ famous “I am” sayings in the Gospel of John are bathed in natural metaphors. In multiple places, Jesus likens Himself to bread, light, a vine, and a shepherd (John 6:35, 8:12, 10:11, 18:5).

I am not suggesting that Jesus embedded some deeper, mysterious environmental agenda in His parables or implying that we should read all of Jesus’ teachings through green-tinted glasses. But we must affirm that when Jesus taught with nature or compared Himself to it, He was disclosing divine wisdom.

Without first understanding the divine plan, we don’t properly understand some of Jesus’ metaphors. Take Matthew 6:28, for example. In this passage, Jesus tells us that we shouldn’t worry about how fashionably we dress because the native flowers are beautiful. This seems ridiculous unless we understand that implicit in Jesus’ metaphor is an affirmation of the beauty of nature and God’s provision as seen throughout the world. The divine plan informs the way we see Jesus’ choice of language. Without the divine plan, we’d read over Jesus’ description of the kingdom of God as a mustard seed that grows into a tree where birds can nest (Luke 13:18–19). But when we are informed by the divine plan, we conclude that Jesus draws on the world around us to teach us divine truth. In doing this, Jesus is making a powerful assumption about nature’s ability to transmit information from and about God.

Jesus Will Redeem Creation
Christian thinkers for some time have noted that when Adam sinned, it damaged humankind’s relationships with God, creation, and us. Through Jesus, all of these things are being restored and redeemed. As Colossians 1 tells us, through Christ, “God was pleased to . . . reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Col. 1:19–20).

The prophet Isaiah foretold of a day when the chaos of creation would be brought back into order, when the lions and lambs would be led by children, and the earth would be filled with the knowledge of God (Isa. 11:6–9). The apostle Paul echoes this prophecy in Romans 8:21 when he writes, “The creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay.” Indeed, one day Christ will return to fully restore and redeem all we see.

This does not mean we should sit idly by and wait for redemption. As Francis Schaeffer wrote:

On the basis of the fact that there is going to be total redemption in the future, not only of man but of all creation, the Christian who believes the Bible should be the man who—with God’s help and in the power of the Holy Spirit—is treating nature now in the direction of the way nature will be then. It will not be perfect, but it must be substantial, or we have missed our calling . . . we should exhibit substantial healing here and now, between man and nature and nature and itself, as far as Christians can bring it to pass.

The future does not provide an excuse for the present. Wars will continue until the Prince of Peace comes, but we must still pursue harmony now. Hunger and poverty will remain until the Bread of Life returns, but we must still care for those in need now. Sin will permeate this earth until the Spotless Lamb arrives, but we must preach forgiveness now. Our actions today should be driven by our knowledge of what is to come.

When asked where Jesus is in the divine plan for our planet, I confidently shout back, “Smack dab in the middle!” He stands above creation as its Inventor, He exists throughout creation as its Sustainer, He walked into creation as its Savior, and one day Jesus will return to creation as its Redeemer. “Since creation forms the platform of all God’s mission in history, as well as being the final eschatological beneficiary of all God’s redemptive intention, the centrality of Christ in that great mission of God within and for creation is clearly focused.”

There will always be snarky skeptics and cynics and people who have a vested interest in obscuring truth even when it is painfully obvious. Scripture teaches us with crystal clarity God loves this whole planet. He loves it so much, He assigned value to it. He loves it so much that He paused and took time to call it “good.” He loves it so much that He has entered into a holy covenant with it. He loves it so much that He reveals parts of Himself through it. He loves it so much that He asked us to take good care of it until He returns to redeem it. I’ve called it the divine plan for our planet, and it compels me to think differently about the world and its citizens.


Jonathan Merritt is a faith and culture writer known for tackling tough issues. His work has appeared in such national publications as USA Today, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Relevant magazine.

 


From the book GREEN LIKE GOD: Unlocking the Divine Plan for our Planet by Jonathan Merritt. Copyright © 2010 by Jonathan Merritt. Reprinted by permission of FaithWords, a division of Hatchett Book Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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