I love nature documentaries, especially those narrated by David Attenborough. Whether watching with my children or by myself, I like seeing the majesty of the snowy Alps or kelp forests.
But I’ve noticed that in recent times, nearly every somber vignette of a species struggling on the sting of survival ends with a call to motion. Viewers are beckoned to take responsibility for causing a poor animal’s plight and to think about how they’ll make things better before the species is gone endlessly.
I understand the impulse to imagine that animals’ struggles should move humans to motion. However, it’s the ethics informing the narrator’s pleas that appear a bit muddled.
By many documentarians’ admission, the species we marvel at on screen have emerged out of eons of struggles to survive and adapt to their surroundings. Sometimes, the narrators even remind us that this process has resulted in countless prior species disappearing into extinction.
Whether you suspect in a young or an old earth, in God’s hand or in meaningless physical forces guiding history, we are able to all agree that change, death, and selection favoring adaptability are features of life on earth. Witnessing it in real time makes for compelling television drama, however the moral indictment that you simply and I contribute to grave evil when one in all these species goes extinct doesn’t appear to square with the documentarians’ worldview.
What compels us to see polar bears possibly going extinct when it comes to moral right and fallacious? If we take human motion out of the equation, isn’t history affected by the bones of countless species which have gone extinct? Are not humans and their actions a part of nature?
A sturdy theology of creation care
If we listen closely, many environmentalists appear to hold ambiguous views relating to discerning between good and bad, in each utilitarian and aesthetic senses, and what’s objectively right or fallacious. If all the pieces is just a part of natural processes and there isn’t a God who says thou shalt not regarding his creation, can we are saying anything greater than that the disappearance of species is harmful to how ecosystems currently function? Can we are saying that it isn’t just sad to see these animals gone endlessly, but that it is definitely fallacious?
The basis for this seems pretty flimsy if change, struggle, and extinction are only a part of nature and there’s nothing transcendent to tell what we should do. Accordingly, I’ve often thought that calls to motion in nature documentaries add as much as little greater than sentimentality—that’s, unless we undergird them with a Christian belief in a Creator to whom we’re accountable as we live in his creation. Perhaps, then, Christians could have more to say about take care of God’s creation than many Christians and their skeptics might realize.
This is precisely the angle Andrew J. Spencer takes in Hope for God’s Creation: Stewardship in an Age of Futility. In considering how God cares for his creation and offers it value—and in considering the duty of humanity to image God well by stewarding his creation consistent with his ways—Spencer provides a sturdy theology of creation care. His book is accessible for the common reader but additionally well-researched and argued for the specialist.
Spencer appears to be just the best kind of creator to embark on such a project. An evangelical Christian ethicist who has spent much of his profession working within the nuclear power industry, he understands the scientific and public policy discourse around these issues, and puts them in conversation with orthodox Christian theological commitments.
Readers will appreciate his summary of historic and contemporary allegations that Christianity is ideologically harmful to the reason for environmentalism. Moreover, they may learn much from how he engages with particularly tricky issues like sustainable energy sources and climate change—his key argument being that Christians should embrace a “Pascal’s wager” approach that treats energy conservation and work toward sustainability as net goods, even when theories of climate change don’t play out as projected.
Additionally, Spencer’s warning against ideologically driven approaches to environmentalism that flatten complexities and justify emergency powers to remake the social order—what he calls a “big idea” approach to environmental concerns—helps contemporary Christians discern many ulterior motives which have been smuggled into the discussion.
But the book’s most important contribution is giving Christians good reasons to take care of creation in holistic and prudent ways for the sake of mission. How Spencer does this, though, needs some teasing out. It isn’t the case that he sees creation care as a part of the church’s mission per se. Rather, he sees take care of the creation as an important approach to contextualize the religion to the cultural and moral sensibilities of our time.
A recent moral currency
While Spencer doesn’t unpack this concept directly, it is vital to see how his argument suits with recent efforts to know the phenomenon of the West becoming increasingly more spiritual, at the same time as it grows less Christian.
Author Tara Isabella Burton has identified that in the present twilight of Christendom, we’re witnessing an explosion of different spiritualities. These spiritualities help impart a way of belonging and purpose within the absence of belief in God. In an age that has cut itself off from transcendent sources of truth, people still long to be caught up in something greater than themselves. Even more, they desire to be equipped with moral categories of fine and bad to assist be certain that they’re on the best side of history.
This isn’t to say that caring for the environment is only a fad that lacks any justification. Spencer presents good reasons Christians have to take care of the environment as a matter of stewardship. As he notes, Scripture affirms that Christ is the one through and for whom creation was made, and by whom all of it holds together (Col. 1:16–17).
But it’s value highlighting that, for a lot of in our society, concern for the environment functions in the identical way that public religion used to within the Christian West. Caring for the environment imparts meaning and purpose (humans must not harm nature in its natural processes), delineates clear heroes and villains (activists and enlightened scientists versus big oil and consumer culture), and provides objective means to atone for one’s sins (carbon credits, tree planting, and recycling). In this manner, take care of the environment can stir the guts and supply a typical basis for social order.
We is perhaps tempted to jot down off such elevation of the environment over human needs as a type of Neopaganism, making a god out of nature. As Spencer points out, that’s definitely a trend in environmentalism. But the insight that environmental activism is now a significant moral currency in our culture signifies that Christians must be discerning and energetic participants within the work of caring for the environment, for missiological reasons and for the sake of public witness.
This is precisely why Spencer’s work is such a timely resource. Like it or not, skeptics or those “deconstructing” their faith likely aren’t repelled because they find Christian truth claims unbelievable. Rather, the greater probability is that they find our faith and our vision of life on the earth uninhabitable. They don’t see the best way of life it fosters as actually good or desirable.
Certainly, there isn’t a fault within the actual goodness of God’s ways or what he has revealed about himself. But Christians must be sensitive to the shifting sentiments of post-Christian social imaginaries—those systems of belief we inherit from our society that shape what we discover believable or desirable.
Sober-minded hope
A friend of mine, who’s a pastor in Amsterdam, shares often about how climate change is an urgent and existentially significant issue for most individuals in his context. If Christians remain silent on the difficulty or only point fingers in calling out the idolatry of the environmental movement’s ideological excesses, they needlessly isolate themselves and the gospel from public life. Spencer’s work provides a careful way for Christians to see that they’ll each care deeply in regards to the environment and have vital things to contribute to the conversation.
To name just just a few contributions mentioned by Spencer, convictions about human dignity and take care of the poor may help temper an alternate energy absolutism—which seeks to limit developing nations from using low-cost fossil fuels to enhance quality of life. Commitments to freedom of conscience may help direct climate change solutions to be present in the liberty of the market quite than in radically reengineering society through totalitarian control. Most of all, Christianity can offer sober-minded hope in an age of environmental angst, at the same time as it forms individuals in smart habits of consumption and conservation that time to God because the giver and sustainer of life.
Readers may disagree with where Spencer lands on particular scientific questions or ponder whether there actually are conspiratorial forces at work in climate change policies. Or they might fault him for not going far enough in his proposals. Regardless, all readers will profit from his insistence that, for the sake of mission, Christianity doesn’t must be a part of our environmental problems. It offers way more to say on this stuff than our society thinks.
Dennis Greeson is dean of the BibleMesh Institute and program coordinator and research associate at Union Theological College, Belfast. He is the coauthor of a forthcoming book, The Way of Christ in Culture: A Vision for All of Life.
