Classic and contemporary excerpts.

From chaos to love

Jesus’ resurrection makes it impossible for man’s story to end in chaos—it has to move inexorably towards light, towards life, towards love.

—Carlo Carretto in The Desert in the City

Mirror of grace

My wife is … a mirror. When I have sinned against her, my sin appears in the suffering of her face. Her tears reflect with terrible accuracy my selfishness.… But I hate the sight, and the same selfishness I see now makes me look away.

… The passion of Christ … is such a mirror. Are the tears of my dear wife hard to look at? Well, the pain in the face of Jesus is harder. It is my self in my extremest truth.… The death he died reflects a selfishness so extreme that by it I was divorced from God and life and light complete.…

Nevertheless, I will not avoid this mirror! No, I will carefully rehearse, again this year, the passion of my Jesus—with courage, with clarity and faith; for this is the mirror of dangerous grace, purging more purely than any other.

—Walter Wangerin, Jr., in Reliving the Passion

What came next

All of us, perhaps, are too ready, when our behaviour turns out to have appalling consequences, to rush out and hang ourselves. Sometimes we do worse, and show an inclination to go and hang other people. Judas, at least, seems to have blamed nobody but himself, and St. Peter, who had a minor betrayal of his own to weep for, made his act of contrition and waited to see what came next. What came next for St. Peter and the other disciples was the sudden assurance of what God was, and with it the answer to all the riddles.

—Dorothy L. Sayers in Dorothy L. Sayers: Spiritual Writings

The best news

The resurrection is not only the Good News, it is the best news imaginable.

—Ray C. Stedman in God’s Loving Word

Holiday envy

Easter suffers from acute holiday envy. Its egg hunts and rabbit have never had the commercial appeal of Santa’s bounty and eight tiny reindeer. Let’s face it, cattle lowing and a baby who doesn’t cry is money in the bank compared to a homeless thirty-year-old dangling from a cross. Even labor pains are more attractive than an empty tomb.

—Joey Earl Horstmann in The Other Side (April 1993)

Power beyond “celebration”

I cannot give in to the devil’s principal, deceitful tactic which makes so many Christians satisfied with an “Easter celebration” instead of experiencing the power of Christ’s resurrection. It is the devil’s business to keep Christians mourning and weeping with pity beside the cross instead of demonstrating that Jesus Christ is risen, indeed.

—A. W. Tozer in Renewed Day by Day (Vol. 2)

On notice

Many think the Christian religion has run its course, and that the gloom of Good Friday is now settling over the long history of the church. But they are wrong. The reality of the resurrection cannot so easily be undone. In truth, it is the world of unbelievers that remains on notice of judgment.

—Carl F. H. Henry in Carl Henry at His Best

I give away books. I have to. Otherwise, I couldn’t fit into my office. Over two thousand books a year invade my personal working space. Of those, we reviewed 70 titles last year and excerpted a handful of others. While most of what comes into my office goes right back out, I would be a fool and a snob if I thought that after my winnowing I was left with under a hundred worthwhile titles per year. The truth is that there are many more books worth reviewing than get reviewed.

That is why we have our annual book awards: to showcase more of the books that are having a significant impact on the church. (For the same reason, we are planning to launch a new publication in 1995 tentatively titled The CT Review of Books and Culture.)

For the awards, we turned first to you, our readers, and back in December asked you to vote for what you thought was the best title for 1993. Looking at the top-ten vote getters (listed on this page) can tell us something about what is on the mind and heart of the church. Many of the titles communicate anxiety—we are concerned that we may be ignoring the institutional church, that we no longer value truth or theology, that we have been unduly influenced (and harmed) by psychology and marketing techniques, that heresy is creeping into our churches. At the same time, there are titles here that show evangelicals at their most confident: a refreshing, bold paraphrase of Scripture, theologically informed wisdom on Christian discipleship, and profound meditations on pain and suffering.

“Critics’ Choice” is the second category of award, in which we ask three judges in each of seven categories to read a box-load of books (donated by the publishers who nominated the titles) and rank in order their top ten picks. Looking over these lists of winners, I am struck by the quality and breadth of Christian publishing today—especially compared to the paucity of theologically conservative texts only 40 years ago. At the same time, most of these titles are addressed to evangelicals and not to the wider church or to the culture. We must be careful that in the midst of our publishing abundance we do not content ourselves with speaking only to those in our own tribe.

Finally, we wanted to look at some classics. Along with the votes for the Readers-Choice awards, we asked you to answer questions about books and authors that have shaped your Christian life.

To all the winning writers, editors, and publishers, we say congratulations. To our readers and judges, thank you. And to all, good reading.

By Michael G. Maudlin.

Why the day begins at dusk, and other biblical insights into how God works—and rests.

Many people simply cannot believe that there can be a large, leisurely center to life where God can be pondered. They doubt they can enter realms of spirit where wonder and adoration have a place to develop, and where play and delight have time to flourish. Is all this possible in our fast-paced lives?

I began asking this question out of my own life as a pastor. But I was soon asking the question out of the circumstances of my friends and parishioners, putting myself in their shoes, their ways of life, their vocations.

I decided that it is possible. It is possible because there is a biblical provision for it. The name for it is Sabbath.

An accurate understanding of Sabbath is prerequisite to its practice: it must be understood biblically, not culturally. A widespread misunderstanding of Sabbath trivializes it by designating it “a day off.” “A day off” is a bastard Sabbath. Days off are not without benefits, to be sure, but sabbaths they are not. However beneficial, this is not a true, but a secularized sabbath. The motivation is utilitarian: it makes us feel better. Relationships improve. We may even get more done on the six days than we would on the seven. But the day off is at the service of the six working days. The purpose is to restore strength, increase motivation, and keep performance incentives high.

Sabbath means quit. Stop. Take a break. Cool it. The word itself has nothing devout or holy in it. It is a word about time, denoting our nonuse of it—what we usually call wasting time.

The biblical context for understanding Sabbath is the Genesis week. Sabbath is the seventh and final day in which “God rested [sabbath] from all his work which he had done” (Gen. 2:3). We can learn from that sequence of days in which God spoke energy and matter into existence. We can also learn from the repeated refrain, “And there was evening and there was morning, one day … and there was evening and there was morning, a second day … and there was evening and there was morning”—on and on, six times.

This is the Hebrew way of understanding day; it is not ours. American days—most of them, anyway—begin with an alarm clock ripping the predawn darkness. They close, not with evening, but several hours past that when we turn off the electric lights. In conventional references to day, we do not include the night hours except for the two or three that we steal from either end to give us more time to work. Because our definition of day is so different, we have to make an imaginative effort to understand the Hebrew phrase “evening and morning, one day.”

Beginning with quitting

More than idiomatic speech is involved here; there is a sense of rhythm. Day is the basic unit of God’s creative work; evening is the beginning of that day. It is the onset of God speaking light, stars, earth, vegetation, animals, man, woman into being. But it is also the time when we quit our activity and go to sleep. When it is evening, “I lay me down to sleep and pray the Lord my soul to keep” and drift off into unconsciousness for the next six or eight or ten hours, a state in which I am absolutely nonproductive.

Then I wake up, rested, jump out of bed full of energy, grab a cup of coffee, and rush out the door to get things started. The first thing I discover (a great blow to the ego) is that everything was started hours—centuries—ago! While I was fast asleep—before I was even born—all the important things were set in motion. When I dash into the workday, I walk into a world in which God has been at work, an operation that is half over already. I enter into work in which the basic plan is already established, the assignments given, the operations in motion.

The Hebrew evening/morning sequence conditions us to the rhythms of grace. We go to sleep, and God begins his work. As we sleep, he develops his covenant. We wake and are called out to participate in God’s creative action. We respond in faith, in work. But always grace is previous. Grace is primary. We wake into a world we did not make, into a salvation we did not earn. Evening: God begins, without our help, his creative day. Morning: God calls us to enjoy and share and develop the work he initiated. Creation and covenant are sheer grace and there to greet us every morning. George MacDonald once wrote that sleep is God’s contrivance for giving us the help he cannot get into us when we are awake.

I read and reread these opening pages of Genesis, along with certain sequences of Psalms, and recover these deep, elemental rhythms, internalizing the reality in which the strong, initial pulse is God’s creating/saving word, God’s providential/sustaining presence, God’s grace.

As this biblical Genesis rhythm works in me, I also discover something else: When I quit my day’s work, nothing essential stops. I prepare for sleep not with a feeling of exhausted frustration because there is so much yet undone and unfinished, but with expectancy. The day is about to begin! God’s genesis words are about to be spoken again. During the hours of my sleep, how will he prepare to use my obedience, service, and speech when morning breaks? I go to sleep to get out of the way for a while. I get into the rhythm of salvation. While we sleep, great and marvelous things, far beyond our capacities to invent or engineer, are in process—the moon marking the seasons, the lion roaring before its prey, the earthworms aerating the earth, the proteins repairing our muscles, our dreaming brains restoring a deeper sanity beneath the gossip and scheming of our waking hours. Our work settles into the context of God’s work. Human effort is honored and respected not as a thing in itself, but by its integration into the rhythms of grace and blessing.

Sabbath extrapolates this basic, daily rhythm into the larger context of the month. The turning of the earth on its axis gives us the basic two-beat rhythm, evening/morning. The moon in its orbit introduces another rhythm, the 28-day month, marked by four phases of seven days each. It is this larger rhythm, the rhythm of the seventh day, that we are commanded to observe. Sabbath-keeping presumes the daily rhythm, evening/morning.

We can hardly avoid stopping our work each night as fatigue and sleep overtake us. But we can avoid stopping work on the seventh day, especially if things are gaining momentum. Keeping the weekly rhythm requires deliberate action. Sabbath keeping often feels like an interruption, an interference with our routines. It challenges assumptions we gradually build up that our daily work is indispensable in making the world go. And then we find that it is not an interruption but a more spacious rhythmic measure that confirms and extends the basic beat. Every seventh day a deeper note is struck—an enormous gong whose deep sounds reverberate under and over and around the daily timpani percussions of evening/morning, evening/morning: creation honored and contemplated, redemption remembered and shared.

Pray and play

In the two biblical versions of the Sabbath commandment, the commands are identical but the supporting reasons differ. The Exodus reason is that we are to keep the Sabbath because God kept it (Exod. 20:8–11). God did his work in six days and then rested. If God sets apart one day to rest, we can, too. The work/rest rhythm is built into the very structure of God’s interpenetration of reality. The precedent to quit doing and simply be is divine.

The Deuteronomy reason for Sabbath-keeping is that our ancestors in Egypt went four hundred years without a vacation (Deut. 5:15)—never a day off. The consequence: they were no longer considered persons but slaves, hands, work units—not persons created in the image of God but equipment for making bricks and building pyramids. Humanity was defaced.

Lest any of us do that to our neighbor or husband or wife or child or employee, we are commanded to keep a Sabbath. The moment we begin to see others in terms of what they can do rather than who they are, we mutilate humanity and violate community. It is no use claiming, “I don’t need to rest this week and therefore will not keep a Sabbath”; our lives are so interconnected that we inevitably involve others in our work whether we intend it or not. Sabbath-keeping is elemental kindness. Sabbath-keeping is commanded to preserve the image of God in our neighbors so that we see them as they are, not as we need them or want them.

The two biblical reasons for sabbath-keeping develop into parallel Sabbath activities of praying and playing. The Exodus reason directs us to the contemplation of God, which becomes prayer and worship. The Deuteronomy reason directs us to social leisure, which becomes play. Praying and playing are deeply congruent with each other and have extensive inner connections.

Being full by being spare

For 18 years, Monday was my Sabbath. Nothing was scheduled for Mondays. If there were emergencies, I responded, but there were surprisingly few. My wife joined me in observing the day. We made a lunch, put it in a day pack, took our binoculars, and drove anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour away to a trail head along a river or into the mountains. Before we began our hike, my wife read a psalm and prayed. After that prayer, there was no more talking—we entered into a silence that continued for the next two or three hours, until we stopped for lunch.

We walked leisurely, emptying ourselves, opening ourselves to what was there: fern shapes, flower fragrance, bird song, granite outcropping, oaks, and sycamores, rain, snow, sleet, wind. We had clothes for all kinds of weather and so never canceled our Sabbath-keeping for reasons of weather any more than our Sunday churchgoing—and for the same reason: we needed our Sabbath just as much as our parishioners needed theirs. When the sun or our stomachs told us it was lunch time, we broke the silence with a prayer of blessing for the sandwiches and fruit, the river and the forest. We were free to talk then, sharing bird sightings, thoughts, observations, ideas—however much or little we were inclined. We returned home in the middle or late afternoon, puttered, did odd jobs, read. After supper I usually wrote family letters. That was it: No Sinai thunder, no Damascus Road illuminations, no Patmos visions. It was a day set apart for solitude and silence, for “not doing,” for being there. It was the sanctification of time.

We didn’t have any rules for preserving the sanctity of the day, only the commitment that it be set apart for being, not using.

My wife kept, off and on, a Sabbath journal for the 18 years that we did this. You would not be greatly impressed, I think, if you read the sporadic entries. Bird lists, wildflowers in bloom, snatches of conversation, brief notes on the weather. But the spareness records a fullness, a presence. For Sabbath-keeping is not primarily something we do, but what we don’t do.

Last year my work changed from pastor to professor. We moved across the continent from Maryland to British Columbia. With that change it became possible to keep a more conventional Sabbath. When I enter the church now, I no longer head for the pulpit; rather, my wife and I take our places in a pew on Sunday mornings and worship with a congregation of Christians.

Outwardly, it is a radical change: instead of carrying binoculars, we hold a hymnbook in our hands; instead of listening to warblers, we listen to the choir; instead of lunching on tuna sandwiches, we feast on the sacrament. But our Sabbath in the sanctuary is in some ways not much different from what it was in the woods: we enter a world of prayer, we loosen our grip, we don’t say much; we mostly listen and receive; we set the world and ourselves aside and cultivate attentive leisure before God.

But there is one striking difference—community. We are now in the Sabbath company of children and men and women, greeting and being greeted by Africans and Canadians and Japanese. There is an element of festivity here that we never had walking alone on the forest trails.

This celebrative element has been accentuated for us in an unexpected way. After the benediction in worship, we often go home, get some bread and fruit, and walk a couple of miles to Vancouver’s celebrated beaches and sea wall to eat our lunch. The place is alive with walkers and bicyclists, kite flyers and beachcombers, grandparents and children and parents, kayaks and sailboats, laughter and games and picnicking. The outdoor playfulness always strikes a chord of harmonious response in our hearts that have been so recently tuned to prayerfulness in the sanctuary.

Vancouver is notorious for its non-churchgoing, but at least these people seem to know half of what Sunday means: “Quit your ordinary work; celebrate the creation; enjoy your family and friends!” North Americans are more used to observing obsessive Sunday shopping or addictive Sunday working among those who don’t go to church (also among some who do!). We have never before been among so many people who treat Sunday with such exuberant delight. This city plays on Sunday.

But I’m glad we don’t have to settle for only half.

Don’t believe everything you hear about the church and the environmental crisis.

You are at a neighborhood block party. Conversation is lagging—until somebody mentions “the environment.” Suddenly your problem is not keeping talk going, but keeping tempers under control.

Fueled by misconceptions, misinformation, and even showmanship, the environmental debate rages in the popular media. One side likes to quote Rush Limbaugh, who paints Vice President Al Gore and friends as “tree huggers”; the other charges “rape of the Earth.”

It is not very different in evangelical churches. When it comes to God’s creation, evangelicals want to have ardent convictions, though misunderstandings and myths get in the way. Is concern for the earth biblical? Should our theology shoulder the blame for the crisis? Is there nothing we can do to make a difference?

CT decided to take such questions to key evangelical thinkers and leaders. When the Evangelical Environmental Network offered to cosponsor a symposium, CT signed on. A dozen people representing an array of disciplines spent the better part of two days late last year hitting the issues head-on. Many of the symposium participants stayed on to help shape “An Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation.” As expected, there was plenty of vigorous and interesting discussion.

The question arose, for example, concerning whether there really is a problem. Nobel laureate Henry Kendall, professor of physics at MIT (one of the few nonevangelicals present), set the stage by reviewing quantifiable evidence. Citing studies on water resources, oceans, soil, and atmosphere, he noted that the scientific community generally agrees that all is not well.

A public-policy shaper also joined the group, putting to rest the notion that all who work for environmental causes are neopagan New Agers. Susan Drake, a former UN representative for the Environmental Protection Agency and now senior conservation adviser for the U.S. State Department, told how Christian faith guided her work in high-level, international environmental forums.

Bunyan Bryant, from the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan, showed that African-Americans are particularly vulnerable to the effects of pollution. Studies show a disproportionate number of Blacks living close to hazardous waste-disposal sites.

Contributing editor Thomas Oden, concerned that “evangelicals not allow themselves to be co-opted by an agenda that is essentially politically motivated,” urged symposium participants to think through a uniquely Christian approach to the issues.

The writers included in this CT Institute do just that. Their presentations at the symposium were particularly helpful in tackling “eco-myths.” They offer insights that are sure to keep the church’s discussion going.

In 1967, historian Lynn White, Jr., provoked a furious controversy by suggesting Christianity was largely to blame for the world’s environmental problems. His article in Science magazine, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” argued that Christianity had to shoulder such responsibility because its theology was hostile toward the natural order. White’s article has been quoted and vigorously debated ever since. Some found in White’s analysis a justification for seeing the church as the planet’s enemy.

But White’s article must first be read in the light of his self-professed Christian faith. His father was a Presbyterian professor of Christian ethics, and White himself remained a lifelong Presbyterian and a frequent contributor to church publications.

Because his article is more often referenced than read, many have missed the subtleties of his argument. White argued that ecological problems grew directly out of the Western world’s marriage between science and technology, a marriage that gave birth to power machinery, labor-saving devices, and automation. That is the first point. However, the intellectual origins of this transformation, he said, actually predate both the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth.

It was the Middle Ages, he argued—and, specifically, the medieval view of “man and nature”—that brought a decisive shift in attitude: people no longer thought of themselves as part of nature but as having dominion over nature. According to White, this ruthless attitude toward nature later joined forces with a new technology to wreak environmental havoc.

White ultimately traced this exploitative attitude to the triumph of Christianity over paganism—what he called “the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture.” Christianity, he insisted, told people that humans had a right to dominate nature, and it was therefore “the most anthropocentric religion in the world.” All this contrasted with earlier religious traditions in which every tree, spring, and stream had its own guardian spirit. By eliminating animism, he wrote, “Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference.”

White’s assessment was more complex than this résumé might suggest. He recognized that Western Christianity encompassed a variety of distinctive theological traditions, some of which—notably that of Saint Francis of Assisi—were quite reverential toward the created order. Nevertheless, he explicitly insisted that, insofar as Christianity undergirded both science and technology in the West, it bore “a huge burden of guilt” for a natural world now seeing increasing degradation.

Since the appearance of White’s article, the idea of blaming Christians for the environmental crisis has attracted a wide range of committed defenders. Max Nicholson, for 14 years director-general of the Nature Conservancy in Great Britain, for instance, insisted that organized religion in general and Christianity in particular were ecologically culpable because they taught “man’s unqualified right of dominance over nature.”

Historian Arnold Toynbee found in biblical monotheism the mainsprings of “Man’s improvidence” toward the natural order. To him, the only solution was to revert to pantheism. Similarly, educator and regional planner Ian McHarg claimed that Judeo-Christian theology produced “the tacit Western posture of man versus nature” by asserting “outrageously the separateness and dominance of man over nature.”

The prosecution falters

The arguments of White and his defenders have also been widely criticized, of course. There is much about their position that is questionable. In 1970, historian Lewis Moncrief expressed misgivings about looking for single causes for the environmental crisis. Instead of pinning blame for environmental recklessness on Judeo-Christian dogma, he argued for the significance of a range of cultural factors. Two were especially prominent: democratization in the wake of the French Revolution and, in the American context, the frontier experience. On the one hand, such developments led to affluence, changed production and consumption patterns, and problems of waste disposal. On the other hand, the absence of a public and private environmental morality, the inability of social institutions to adjust to the ecological crisis, and an abiding—if misplaced—faith in technology were the ultimate fruits of America’s frontier experience.

The work of Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan throws doubts on White’s thesis in a different way. Tuan scrutinized the environmental situation in Asia and discovered that, despite its different religious traditions, practices there were every bit as destructive of the environment as in the West. Tuan clearly showed how the “official” pro-nature line in Chinese religions, for example, was actually vitiated by behavior. Deforestation and erosion, rice terracing and urbanization have all exacted an immense toll on the environment and effected a gigantic transformation of the Chinese landscape. Nor is Tuan’s an isolated judgment. Erich Isaac speaks of the destruction wrought by Arab imperial expansionists on vast tracts of the Old World and of the devastation of central Burma by Buddhists. Such are ignored, if not suppressed, among critics of the Judeo-Christian West.

From a different perspective, the Oxford historian Keith Thomas insists that the coming of private property and a money economy led to environmental exploitation and the demise of what he termed the “deification of nature.” The “disenchantment” of the world, as he put it, was less a theological achievement than an economic necessity. Alongside the Judeo-Christian emphasis on the human right to exploit nature’s bounty, he pointed out, was a distinctive doctrine of human stewardship and responsibility toward creation. This is also the thrust of philosopher Robin Attfield. The idea that everything exists to serve humanity, he emphatically insists, is not the biblical position. This led Attfield to assert that there is “much more evidence than is usually acknowledged for … beneficent Christian attitudes to the environment and to nonhuman nature.”

God, the wise conservationist

As the rise of science and technology brought about profound environmental changes, Christian clergy and scientists alike outlined strategies to moderate damage to the natural habitat.

Concerned over wasteful land practices, John Evelyn (1620–1706), a founding member of the Royal Society and a Latitudinarian churchman, published in 1662 his famous Silva, A Discourse of Forest Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions. Here Evelyn appealed for the institution of sound conservation practices, drew attention to agricultural encroachment on forest land, highlighted the ecological problems of unrestrained grazing, and warned of dangers from charcoal mining. His was a managerial approach to the environment, adapted to the rationalizing tendencies of the new mechanical world order. Efficiency, production, management were the watchwords of this pioneer conservationist. Precisely such arguments could also receive explicitly theological support.

Thus, John Graunt presented his Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality of1662—a demographic analysis—within the context of natural theology. Graunt, using comparative population ratios, directed his readers’ attention to the high incidence of pulmonary disorders from pollution in the metropolis.

The orderliness of the world machine, he argued, attested to the sovereignty and beneficence of its Grand Architect. Humans must exercise stewardship over the natural world to ensure that they did not efface or erase the marks of its Designer. Moreover, God was seen as a wise conservationist, and people, made in his image, were to act as caretakers of his world.

The stewardship principle had already been firmly established in John Calvin’s injunction: “Let him who possesses a field, so partake of its yearly fruits, that he may not suffer the ground to be injured by his negligence; but let him endeavor to hand it down to posterity as he received it.… Let everyone regard himself as the steward of God in all things which he possesses.”

Now, in the midseventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a form of beneficent dominion surfaced in the writings of Matthew Hale and William Derham. Hale, England’s lord chief justice, wrote in 1677 that the human race was created to be God’s viceroy, and that its dominion and stewardship roles were intended to curb the fiercer animals, protect the other species, and preserve plant life. It was the task of humankind “to preserve the face of the Earth in beauty, usefulness and fruitfulness.”

Derham, a clergyman and author, believed that the Creator’s “Infinite Wisdom and Care condescends, even to the Service, and Wellbeing of the meanest, most weak, and helpless insensitive Parts of the Creation.”

The beetle’s “precious” life before God

Cultural changes during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries drove people to think about their relationship to the environment even more. In response to worldwide geographical discovery, revelations about the size of the universe, and geological reports of an immensely old Earth, thinkers began more seriously to question the idea that the world existed solely for human benefit. Some argued that the human species was one more link in the chain of nature. The seeming secularism of such realizations should not blind us to the fact that it became increasingly acceptable within the Christian church to believe that all creatures were entitled to respect and civility.

Some theologians began to see that, in the Old Testament, animals were regarded as good in and of themselves—not just for their potential service to humanity. John Flavell, a late-seventeenth-century Presbyterian divine, described the horse as his “fellow creature”; Christopher Smart, the eighteenth-century religious poet, insisted that the beetle’s life was “precious in the sight of God”; the Calvinist minister and hymnwriter Augustus Montague Toplady abhorred the digging up of anthills; and John Wesley instructed parents not to let their children cause needless harm to living things—snakes, worms, toads, even flies. So powerful, indeed, was this Christian impulse toward a new sensibility that Keith Thomas comments,

[T]he intellectual origins of the campaign against unnecessary cruelty to animals … grew out of the (minority) Christian tradition that man should take care of God’s creation.… Clerics were often ahead of lay opinion and an essential role was played by Puritans, Dissenters, Quakers, and Evangelicals.

One of the consequences of this changing sensibility was a growing sense of ecological interconnectedness. Consider the “arcadian” vision of English minister Gilbert White, whose famous Natural History of Selborne, published in 1789, recorded the natural order of the village from its bird life to seasonal change. White saw remarkable ways in which his region’s ecological diversity actually constituted a complex unity. He conceived of all this in providential terms. God had so contrived and constituted this coherent natural order that everything fitted together “economically.” Why? Because like its Creator, White insisted, “Nature is a great economist.” He found a doxological aspect to this economy: the humble earthworm’s indispensable activity in the soil bore witness to the “wisdom of God in the creation.”

Similarly providentialist, though decidedly more rationalist, was the contribution of the Swedish botanist Linnaeus (1707–78), arguably the greatest natural historian of the Enlightenment. To Linnaeus, the classification of life was nothing less than a tool for uncovering the very order of God’s creation. Linnaeus even saw himself as a second Adam, the namer extraordinaire. Divine design lay at the heart of the Linnaean project. And nowhere is this more clearly evident than in an essay he penned in 1749 on “The Oeconomy of Nature” in which he readily detected the hand of God in nature’s order. Because God was the Supreme Economist and Divine Housekeeper, the study of nature’s economy could, at once, confute atheism, justify the social order, and help humans see their creaturely position as continuous with, yet separate from, nature.

Where blame is due

To the extent that the church has failed to take concern for the environment seriously, it must accept its share of the blame. We must not substitute irritation at Christianity’s critics for serious self-criticism. But that need not keep us from reappropriating insights from Christian tradition that have been lost or suppressed. We need to cull our heritage for intellectual and spiritual resources to meet today’s environmental problems.

I have concentrated on voices within the modern Western Christian tradition. There are many earlier voices as well, such as Francis of Assisi. Committed to a life of poverty and a gospel of repentance, Francis treated all living and inanimate objects as brothers and sisters and thereby insisted on the importance of communion with nature. Some believe Francis came close to heresy in his tendency to humanize the nonhuman world and have turned to other sources.

Sixth-century monastic leader Benedict is one of those. He emphasized stewardship, insisting on integrating scholarly work with manual labor. In this he represents an early wise-use approach to the natural order. Benedict drew on ethical resources embedded even earlier in the patristic period. The commentary on the six days of Creation in the hexaemeron of Basil the Great (c. 329–79), for instance, displays a profound interest in nature. His intent, like that of his contemporary Ambrose (c. 339–79), was to illustrate the wisdom of the Creator from the balance and harmony of nature, and to insist on the partnership between God and humankind in improving the earth. Similarly, in the fourth century, Chrysostom believed that animals should be shown “great kindness and gentleness for many reasons, but, above all, because they are of the same origin as ourselves.”

One researcher scrutinized Asia and discovered that, despite its different religious traditions, environmental practices there were every bit as destructive as in the West.

All these need to be heard. It is the conceptual and practical testimony of figures like these that prompted Attfield to conclude, “Belief in man’s stewardship is far more ancient and has been far more constant among Christians” than the assaults of critics would suggest.

Attending to these hidden riches within the Christian heritage can do more than clear our name. They might well provide the impetus for changing worldwide environmental behavior. The scholar and theologian can and should take a vital role in addressing the current situation—and leading the church forward.

I am amazed to hear Christians sometimes say that biblical faith has little in common with the environmental cause. Even worse, some evangelicals fear that teaching people to enjoy and respect creation will turn them into pantheists.

My experience has been very different. For over 50 years I have been inspired and awed by God’s creation. From keeping a painted turtle in a tank at age three to caring for a backyard zoo during my youth, I gained deep appreciation for God’s creatures. Because I attended a Christian school, heard two sermons every Sunday, and had parents who not only tolerated the creatures under my care but brought me up in the way I should go, there was never any question where the natural abundance around me came from. All creatures were God’s—his masterpieces. They were the ones about which we sang each Sunday, “Praise God, all creatures here below!”

As a youth I savored Article II of the Reformed tradition’s Belgic Confession. In answering “By What Means Is God Made Known to Us?” the first part affirms, “by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe; which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to see clearly the invisible things of God.”

This theme of how creation tells of God’s glory and love is echoed throughout Scripture: God lovingly provides the rains and cyclings of water, provides food for creatures, fills people’s hearts with joy, and satisfies the earth (Ps. 104:10–18; Acts 14:17). It is through this manifest love and wisdom that creation declares God’s glory and proclaims the work of the Creator’s hands (Ps. 19:1). Creation gives clear evidence of God’s eternal power and divinity, leaving everyone without excuse before God (Rom. 1:20).

But today we often acknowledge God as Creator without grasping what it means to be part of creation. We have alienated ourselves from the natural processes. We abuse God’s creation without realizing that we thereby grieve God.

Of God’s magnificent provisions in creation, I want to identify seven. These provisions, many of which are celebrated in Psalm 104, point to the beauty and integrity of what God has made. Through the ages they have led to wonder and respect for the Creator and creation. They also magnify the seriousness of our era’s sometimes reckless disregard of our Father’s world.

Seven provisions of creation

1. Earth’s energy exchange with the Sun. Our star, the Sun, pours out immense energy in all directions, heating anything in the path of its rays. A tiny part of the Sun’s energy is intercepted by our planet. This energizes everything on Earth—all life, ocean currents, the winds, and storms.

The thin layer of gases that envelops this planet has a very important function here. This layer contains water vapor and carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” that trap energy and delay some of its return to space. Earth becomes warm—but not too warm.

The provision of these greenhouse gases—in just the right amounts—makes Earth warm enough to support the wondrous fabric of life we call the biosphere. It works very much like the glass of a greenhouse that lets sunlight in, but makes it difficult for the heat to get out. We experience this “greenhouse effect” on the sunny side of our houses and in our cars when parked in sunlight.

The Sun’s energy also contains lethal ultraviolet radiation. This can break up chemical bonds that hold together molecules and thus disrupt and destroy living tissues. Of special concern is the breaking up of DNA, the genetic blueprint of living things. Doing so can kill microscopic creatures and induce cancer in larger ones.

But here we find another remarkable provision of the Creator. For in the gaseous envelope of Earth—high in the atmosphere—we find a gas that absorbs ultraviolet light: ozone. This forms the “ozone layer” or “ozone shield.” Not much ozone is present; although it spans a layer several miles deep, if you collected it at 32 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level around the Earth, it would measure only about one-eighth inch thick. Yet that is enough to prevent most of the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation from penetrating our atmosphere.

If the biblical psalmist had known of this provision by the Creator, perhaps we would have had this verse in one of the Psalms:

The creatures that dwell in the shelter of God’s providence

rest in the shadow of the Almighty.

God covers his earth with a protective shield;

God guards the life he has made to inhabit Earth.

2. Soil and land building. Many of us know from gardening that soil can be made more productive through tilling and composting. This process also takes place unaided by human cultivation. Climate, rainfall, and soil organisms work together to make soils richer and more supportive of life. This entails a remarkable variety of cycles: the carbon cycle, water cycle, nitrogen cycle, and so on. This symphony of processes enables even bare rock eventually to support a rich fabric of living things. What a remarkable provision! It nurtures the fruitfulness of creation.

But this soil building teaches patience. It may take a century to produce an eighth-inch of topsoil. In this way the land is nurtured, refreshed, and renewed.

3. Cycling, recycling, and ecosystems. Recycling is not a recent invention. The whole creation uses and reuses substances contained in soil, water, and air. Carbon dioxide breathed out by us—and raccoons, lizards, and gnats—enters the atmosphere later to be taken up as the carbon-based raw material from which to make the carbon-based stuff of life. This is in turn transferred to the animals and microscopic life that depend upon it for food. And soon these consuming creatures return the carbon back to the atmosphere through breathing, or by their own death and decay.

Water, too, is recycled. Taken up by animals, it is released through breathing, sweating, and ridding of wastes—finding its way into the atmosphere, or through sewage-treatment plants back to rivers and streams. Taken up by the roots of plants, some is pumped up through the bundles of tubing in the roots, stems, and leaves of plants and back to the atmosphere. That moisture joins water evaporated from lakes, streams, and other surfaces and forms rain and snow that again water the face of Earth.

Thinking of such provision, the psalmist wrote,

He makes springs pour water into the ravines;

it flows between the mountains.

They give water to all the beasts of the field;

the wild donkeys quench their thirst.…

He waters the mountains from his upper chambers;

the earth is satisfied by the fruit of his work.

(Ps. 104:10–13; all Scripture quotations from the NIV)

4. Water purification. Some water percolates through the soil to the ground water below and supplies the springs that feed wetlands, lakes, and ravines; we call this percolation. In many water-treatment plants in our cities, water is purified by having it percolate through beds of sand. In similar fashion, water that percolates through soil or rock is filtered, but usually over much greater distances. The result: by the time we pull up water to our homes by our wells, it usually is fit to drink.

This is more remarkable than it may at first seem. Water is often called “the universal solvent,” meaning that it dissolves practically anything. How then could water ever be purified? Should it not always be contaminated with dissolved materials from everything through which it passes? Because of creation’s natural distillers, filters, and extractors, the answer is no. There is remarkable provision in creation for the production of pure water.

5. Fruitfulness and abundant life. Of the known flowering plants alone, there are 250,000 species—orchids, grasses, daisies, maples, sedges. And each of these interrelates with water, soil, air, and other organisms, forming the interwoven threads of the household of life we call the biosphere. When I was in ninth grade, I recall learning that there were 1 million different species of living creatures. In graduate school, I learned that it was 5 million, and today we believe it is somewhere between 5 million and 40 million. This biodiversity is so great that we have just begun to name the creatures. This is just the kind of provision you would expect from a remarkably creative Genius. “The earth is full of your creatures,” said the psalmist. “There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number” (Ps. 104:24–25).

6. Global circulations of water and air. Because of its 23.5-degree tilt, our Earth gets unequally heated from season to season. Both seasonal and daily differences cause differentials in Earth’s temperatures. This, in turn, produces temperature gradients that drive the flow of water and air from place to place.

Atmospheric and oceanic circulations are vital provisions for maintaining life. Carbon dioxide produced by animal and plant respiration and oxygen produced by photosynthesis are released to air and water. Carbon dioxide is moved around so that it comes into contact with plants that reincorporate it. And oxygen, produced by photosynthesis of plants, is similarly circulated by air and water currents. Global circulations provide the “breath” of life on a planetary scale.

7. Human ability to learn from creation. Human beings are endowed by God with minds that integrate what creation teaches us. Through observation and experiment, we are able to revise our models of the world to represent reality better. Our mental models are further nurtured and refined by the cultures we grow up in. This capability is essential for meaningful human life.

Seven degradations

Human beings can mute and diminish God’s testimony in creation. We have the ability, in the words of Revelation 11:18, to “destroy the earth.” Nearly every day now, we learn about new destructions of land and creatures. While some reports are dramatized and overstated, professional technical literature again and again describes new and increasing instances of environmental degradation. What I present here as “seven degradations” draws upon scholarly literature accepted by the scientific community. That means I have not gotten my information from government or university reports, newspapers, opinion polls, television, talk shows, or popular articles. Practically every one of these degradations is a destruction of one of God’s provisions for creation.

Eco-Crisis: Fact Or Fiction?

In the U.S., junk science has long been used to discredit legitimate research on the dangerous effects of cigarette smoking and pesticides; more recently, it has targeted tropospheric ozone chemistry, with some denying the greenhouse effect. As we avoid using supermarket tabloids to understand human relations, so should we be cautious about relying on popular media for scientific information.

This leads us to ask: How then do we know what we know? How do we discern between science and junk science? Three discerning questions can help us evaluate the issues:

• What is the underlying reason for making the argument or providing the information? If it is to make money, sell papers, keep viewers, achieve power, preserve an industry, or defend an ideology, then we need to be suspicious about whether the material is based on sound scientific footing.

• Is the argument rooted in data and analysis that have passed the peer-review process? If the information does not derive from the primary scientific literature, where peers anonymously question, correct, and sharpen analysis before results are released and published, then it is not part of the accepted (and mostly reliable) body of knowledge called science.

• Does the argument advocate not paying serious attention to a problem because information is incomplete? Scientists who pursue truth do not have all the answers; that is why they are scientists. The absence of absolute scientific proof on a given issue is not a reason for inaction or lack of concern.

When asking questions about the ozone layer, global warming, land and water degradation, deforestation, species extinction, and environmental toxification, our questions should be put to scientists who are working to know and understand these systems.

By Calvin B. DeWitt.

1. Land conversion and habitat destruction. Since 1850, people have converted 2.2 billion acres of natural lands to human use. This compares with Earth’s total of 16 billion acres that have some kind of vegetation and current world crop land of 3.6 billion acres. This conversion of land goes by different names: deforestation (forests), drainage or “reclamation” (wetlands), irrigation (arid and semiarid ecosystems), and opening (grasslands and prairies). The greatest conversion under way is tropical deforestation, which removes about 25 million acres of primary forest each year—an area the size of Indiana. The immensity of this destruction illustrates our new power to alter the face of Earth. In the tropics, we do it to make cheap plywood, bathroom tissue, hamburger meat, and orange juice, among other things, but it destroys the long-term sustainability of soils, forest creatures, and resident people.

2. Species extinction. More than three species of plants and animals are extinguished daily. If there are indeed 40 million species, then the rate may be several times higher.

3. Land degradation. What once was tall-grass prairie we now call the Corn Belt; here we grow the corn that feeds hogs, cattle, and us. In much of this prairie, two bushels of topsoil are lost for every bushel of corn produced. Pesticides and herbicides made it possible to plant corn, or any crop, year after year on the same land. Crop rotation—from corn to soy beans to alfalfa hay to pastures—has been abandoned.

4. Resource conversion and wastes and hazards production. Some 70,000 chemicals have been created by our ingenuity. Unlike chemicals made by organisms and the earth, some cannot be absorbed back into the environment. Among them are many specifically designed to destroy life: biocides, pesticides, herbicides, avicides, and fungicides.

5. Global toxification. Of the thousands of chemical substances we have created, hundreds have been discharged or have leaked into the atmosphere, rivers, and ground water. This happens through “disposal” and from vehicles, chemical agriculture, homes, and industry. Some join global circulations; DDT has shown up in Antarctic penguins, and biocides appear in a remote lake on Lake Superior’s Isle Royale. Cancer has become pervasive in some herring gull populations.

6. Alteration of planetary exchange. Earth’s exchange of energy with the Sun and outer space is fundamental to the planet’s circulations of air and water. But burning and exposing carbon-containing materials to oxygen brings rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, allowing less heat to escape to outer space, thereby enhancing the greenhouse effect. This creates global warming.

Adding to the effects of increasing carbon dioxide are other greenhouse gases, such as chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerants in our air conditioners and refrigerators. Melting snow caps, receding glaciers, and a slowly rising sea level demonstrate that Earth’s temperature has been rising very slowly over the centuries. There has been some debate on the degree to which this is happening, but that it is happening seems clear. And this rise likely will accelerate, with consequences not only for Earth’s temperature but also for the distribution of temperature across the planet, with consequent changes in patterns of rainfall and drought, and even—ironically—lower temperatures in some places in the world. CFCs operate not only as greenhouse gases. They also destroy ozone in Earth’s protective ozone layer.

7. Human and cultural degradation. One of the most severe reductions of creation’s richness concerns cultures that have lived peaceably on the land for centuries. In the tropics, cultures living cooperatively with the forest are being wiped off the land by coercion, killing, and legal procedures that deprive them of traditional lands. Their rich heritage of unwritten knowledge is being lost. Names of otherwise undescribed forest creatures are forgotten; so are uses of the wide array of tropical species for human food, fiber, and medicine.

A place for evangelicals?

Six centuries before Christ, Jeremiah described the undoing of creation: “I looked at the earth, and it was formless and empty; and at the heavens, and their light was gone.… I looked, and the fruitful land was a desert; all its towns lay in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger” (Jer. 4:23–26). Neglecting to do God’s will in the world is not new, and its environmental consequences have been known for more than two thousand years (Jer. 5:22–23, 31; 8:7).

The evangelical community has been slow to get involved in environmental issues. But it is not too late. In the early 1970s there were few evangelicals involved in world hunger. Today some of the best relief operations are done by these deliberative evangelicals. They did not just start handing out food. They got the best minds together, collected the scriptural material, and carefully planned.

That needs to happen again. Our environmental situation presents a significant opportunity. To be evangelical means to proclaim the good news. Part of our proclamation is that the environment is God’s creation. If we do not make God the Creator part of the good news, we are crippling our faith and witness. We will lose sight of what the Belgic Confession called “a most elegant book” wherein all creatures help us—and others—to see the invisible God.

Headlines trumpet news of environmental crises, with some experts claiming apocalyptic scenarios where we will either burn or freeze within a generation. Another vociferous group claims just the opposite: there is no real ecological problem, only hysterical environmentalists. Despite their divergent messages, both groups offer Christians the same temptation: to think there is nothing we can do to help the situation.

But this is simply not true. There are many strategies Christians can and should pursue to help care for creation.

One of the earliest evangelical books on the environment—Francis Schaeffer’s Pollution and the Death of Man—made one of the wisest observations: Christian households and churches need to be “pilot plants” of the new creation. There the world can see, acted out in individual lives and in communities, the healing of creation that only comes from being in fellowship with God in Christ. Eugene Peterson’s rendering of Philippians 2:15 suggests the difference we can make: “Go into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and polluted society. Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God.”

What does “good living and the living God” mean when it comes to creation? What can we do? Here are some suggestions, organized in ever-widening spheres of influence:

Individual action

First, we become aware. We learn how God cares and provides for us through creation. That means, for example, knowing where our food, water, and energy come from and where our waste products go. (There is no “away” in God’s creation.) What farms produced the food in our last meal? How were the plants grown? How far was it transported to get to our table? To what former wetland is our garbage hauled? Into what bay or river are our toilets flushed (and after what degree of processing)? What forests were pulped to produce our paper? These questions are not intended to reduce us to guilty inaction, but to make us know that it is through God’s creation that we live.

We also need to practice the principles of “reduce, reuse, recycle”—not out of environmentalist legalism but in conscious delight of being God’s free, redeemed, and responsible stewards:

We reduce, for example, because, though creation is for our use, it has worth far beyond the use we make of it. The more we learn the impact of our choices on creation, the more likely we are to learn to be content with less.

We reuse because God did not make a throwaway world. So repair the shoes or toaster to give them new or longer life. If we must bring things home in packaging, we ought to consider the second life the packages might have. And we ought to be willing to pay more for things that have a longer life.

And we recycle because God does. “To the place the streams come from, there they return again,” says Psalm 104. Increasingly, however, we have built a civilization whose residues—plastics, tires, Styrofoam™—do not fit into the created cycles. So when we must discard what we have used, we need to recycle.

To these three R’s, Christians have good reason to add two more:

We resist. Our culture often defines our value in terms of how much we consume. We need to resist this consumerism that is fed by advertising and television. Perhaps a television set is one thing we should not repair when it breaks. In few other areas can we better demonstrate “good living” and our allegiance to “the living God” than by refusing to be shaped by our consumerist culture.

But that negative choice opens up a glorious, positive one: We rejoice. The more we learn about God’s provisions for the earth, the more wonderful it seems. Isaiah’s words should describe our experience of creation: “You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands” (Isa. 55:12; all Scripture quotations from the NIV).

Community efforts

We should get in the habit of using the theological term creation instead of the more secular environment or nature. The bedrock of our action is that we are creatures, responsible to God our Creator for our use of his gifts in creation. A congregation that speaks only of “the environment” may well come to feel that its wastebaskets full of plastic-foam cups on Sunday morning offend only some politically correct fad.

We also need to broaden our understanding of the word stewardship. Inside the church, the term is restricted almost entirely to matters of money. But increasingly, it is being used outside the church to speak of our care of creation. The word opens a door to witness, for it invites the question, “To whom is the steward responsible?”

If the church is to be a model of “good living and the living God,” we also need to be aware of what our buildings and practices convey about God and the genuinely good life. All the principles of caring for creation that we practice as individuals—reducing, reusing, recycling, resisting, and rejoicing—should be evident in our corporate life as well. To recycle (or avoid) the Sunday flood of paper, to make our church buildings and parking lots available to wider use—these make for good stewardship. Ultimately, to a pagan world beginning to glimpse something of God through creation, these acts function as pre-evangelism.

Church members should also consider reducing their impact on creation through sharing. Many things that we own—from lawn mowers to vacation homes—could well be shared.

Finally, churches should resist an increasing tendency to leave God’s creative acts out of worship. Much new worship music exalts God in his majesty, but speaks very little of what he has done and made. New music in the church would be enriched if it were to follow the pattern of an old carol: “Joy to the world! the Lord is come; / let earth receive her King; / Let every heart prepare him room, / And heaven and nature sing.” That’s good theology, and good worship.

Public witness

Christians have recently begun to be more aware of their need to be politically active. We need to extend that activity to policies that influence our care of creation. It is important to shape the way our governments and economies work. We need to bring the full meaning of words like creation and stewardship into the public arena. Here are four principles for wider involvement.

• Many of the most important political decisions related to the care of creation are influenced greatly by opinions of local people. Zoning hearings to increase the density of an area, or to allow roads, industry, or power plants, invite public participation. It is important to use such forums in order to save our communities, and to do so publicly in the name of God the Creator.

• Just as we have (rightly) evaluated candidates for office on their records on such issues as abortion and attitude toward the family, we need to evaluate also their attitudes toward creation.

• A major problem in our civilization is the barrier between cities and the agriculture that supports them. (The average food item in North America is transported more than 800 miles.) This leads to ever-larger farms and ever-fewer opportunities for stewardship and contact with the creation that supports us. To remind people of their vital connection to the land, we therefore need to encourage urban gardens, farmers’ markets, and local, small-scale agriculture—and to point out (as Paul did to the pagans in Acts 14:17) that it is God who “has shown kindness by giving you rain from heavens, and crops in their seasons, and provides you with plenty of food, and fills your hearts with joy.”

• Some of the most eloquent and effective voices for the care of creation come from environmental groups in which there is no Christian presence (and often an implicitly anti-Christian bias). Christians should consider participating in such groups, both because their agenda—caring for creation—should be a Christian’s agenda, and because these organizations desperately need a Christian witness. The environmental movement is an ethic looking for a religion, and it is no surprise that many people in it have turned to native and pagan religions when no Christian voice speaks with and to them.

A few weeks ago while sorting through some files, I ran across a set of old theology notes. I had written them during my beginning days of teaching—shortly after the close of World War II. They dealt with the doctrine of Creation and included a detailed exegesis of Genesis 1–3.

My curiosity was piqued. Did I still agree with what I wrote nearly 50 years ago?

To my surprise, I did! I wrote that for man and woman to have dominion on this planet meant that we were to tend God’s creation—in fact, to make the whole of our planet into a beautiful garden, never squandering its resources selfishly, but to use all for the good of all. What’s more, I saw this responsibility for caring for the Earth not as an option but as a divine command.

As I ponder those notes, I feel a sharp sense of regret, even guilt. Why didn’t I publish those clear biblical teachings a generation and more ago? Back then I felt I had far more important things to do. But did I? In hindsight, I think I (and other evangelicals) missed a great opportunity.

Across the last several decades, both fundamentalists and evangelicals have become identified as standing on the side of selfish exploiters of the resources of our planet. While not entirely accurate, it is the image with which we are painted.

For some, this makes our gospel repulsive, which concerns me. I don’t want the gospel to be rejected for the wrong reason. After all, the gospel is our only hope for redeeming our world. The good news of what Jesus Christ has done and will do for us is the only power strong enough to transform us from selfish and wicked sinners into obedient and caring servants of God and our world.

Also, our silence has allowed something unhealthy to grow: a foolish sentiment that idolizes the natural world and that has only a warped and shrunken view of the role of humankind in our universe. The preservation of a stand of timber has become more important than the million-and-a-half human lives that are aborted each year.

Perhaps if evangelicals like myself had brought our voices earlier to the debate we might well have undercut a perverted understanding of the role and importance of human life or made our culture face up sooner to our divinely commanded responsibility to care for our planet.

I cannot turn back the clock. The earlier opportunity has passed. But it is not too late to perform the task entrusted to us by our Lord and that is ever needful: to tell of the divine wisdom of Holy Scripture—in this case, to reveal humanity’s proper relation to the universe around us.

Twilight has settled at First and Pine, across from Seattle’s Pike Place Market. Down the street, a red neon sign advertises “Live Girls.” Inside a video shop on the corner, a hand-lettered poster reads, “Beat Me, Bite Me, Whip Me, Kick Me.” The big, round Market clock looks down on a bustling scene as myriad colored lights begin to give the place a garish glow.

“Don’t quit coming,” a troubled teen begs Fishermen’s Club founder Pat Butler. “We need to know that someone cares about us.”

Most of the tourists have gone, on this weekday evening. Now the area’s indigenous street people are coming out to mingle with sailors on leave, ladies of the evening, and young folks looking for a good time.

Up at Third and Pine, a mobile police office van and three squad cars with flashing lights attest to the watchful presence of the Seattle Police Department. Gleaming condo towers on First Avenue keep uniformed security police in high profile “to foster a safe and secure environment that encourages business patronage day and night,” according to the security company’s public-relations material. Their presence may have dampened the flamboyant spirit of the area, but the materials are still there.

A one-legged man crosses the street on crutches, and Pat Butler engages him in conversation as other members of the Fishermen’s Club keep a discreet distance. After a while, they all join hands to pray with the man, and another sinner enters the kingdom of God.

Michael, an intern at the nearby Union Gospel Mission, takes the man to the mission to get him a Bible and talk about enrolling him in a resident recovery program.

Hitting the streets

It is Friday night, and once again Pat Butler, 45, a heavy-equipment operator by day, has headed straight home and into the shower. Donning a uniform of casual clothes, he finally arrives at the mission, where he prays with the other Fishermen’s Club members who are gathered there. The Fishermen’s Club, a loose-knit fellowship of men from nine area churches, is prepping itself for its ritual journey through the “ ‘hoods” of urban Seattle.

After prayer, Pat, an ex-hippie, ex-criminal, and self-professed “ex-heathen,” leads the group out in twos and threes to fish for converts on Skid Row (Seattle’s is the original) and the town’s other tough streets.

On Friday nights like this one, Pat keeps an eye out for Seattle’s growing population of “throwaway teenagers.” This city is the “grunge” capital of the world. Kids can be seen wearing a mishmash of loose-fitting, grubby clothes that seem to say, “I couldn’t care less” to the witnessing world.

Pat relates. Before becoming a Christian, he—like many of these youths—had long hair and patchy jeans. In his case, he also sported beads and rode around in a Volkswagen with flowers painted all over it.

Grunge kids hang out along Broadway, on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, a stretch of pavement Pat calls “Mardi Gras 365 days a year.” They are kids like Vinnie, whose mother took her to a grocery store parking lot when she was two and told her to go inside and tell the workers that Mom didn’t want her anymore. Leah has been stabbed 14 times. Susie was a heroin addict at age 12. She calls Pat “Dad” because she never knew her real father. After serving 26 months at the Washington Corrections Center for Women for selling cocaine, she was baptized at Christmastime and was married the following day—by Pat.

Pat has been street witnessing on and off for more than 25 years. He and his wife, Ruth Ann, strayed from God for a while and ended up in Seattle. Eventually, they returned to God and to the streets, helping found the Fishermen’s Club. Pat says, “We preach and teach Jesus and leave the peripheral issues at the door.” Probably because he so obviously loves them, the kids respond. One desperate youth told Pat, “Don’t quit coming. We need to know that someone cares about us.”

One thing seems sure: Pat won’t quit coming. In the spring of 1992, Pat was talking to several members of the Crips gang and some other nongang teens; he invited them to have pizza. “How about a Bible study, too?” they asked. They have been meeting once a month at a local Godfather’s Pizza ever since. Local police now walk through the place, amazed to see members of rival gangs actually getting along. One officer said to Pat, “I don’t know what you are doing, but please keep it up.”

Pizza, heroin, and Jesus

It is pizza night, and an anomalous bunch shows up: there are Dragon and Butterfly and Vicki and Alexis. Chris arrives in a Yellow Cab because his bike has a flat tire. Belinda, normally a regular, isn’t there—she is serving time for doing a “trifecta”: armed robbery, assault, and car theft.

“And she’s such a little bitty thing,” Pat says somberly.

Vicki, 16, is talking to Pat about being “fostered” by Pat and his wife: “I’d like to live with a dad and mom,” she says.

But when Pat asks if she can obey the rules, she thinks it over and says, “Yes, but I’d like to live with my boyfriend for a couple more weeks first.”

Pat is wearing a T-shirt reading “Soul Patrol.” He holds up a newspaper article to the group. It is about a former group member, Cecil, who was shot by a woman he raped. The group gasps in disbelief.

“You never know,” interjects Pat, “when the lights are going to go out!”

Pat has brought a guest speaker, Lief, a talk-show host on a local Christian radio station. The kids listen as the man talks about his own broken family; it registers. The ensuing conversation is earthy, basic, nothing held back. After the meeting formally ends, kids stick around to talk some more.

As many as 20 teens have received Christ by coming to one of the pizza nights. They are reeled in from lives often wracked by parent abuse or heroin addiction—legacies that are all too common in this tattered subculture.

Not too long ago, Pat and his 21-year-old daughter, Tabitha, who often ministers with him, met an 18-year-old boy and his 19-year-old sister, both of whom had been kicked out by their suburban parents. Both were heroin addicts with no place to live. Desperate, they asked Pat for help. So he took them to the Union Gospel Mission, where they have expressed a desire to get into a recovery program.

For this heavy-equipment operator, Friday nights mean hitting the streets and getting grungy. It is simply a part of who he is, though he is quick to assert he is doing nothing unusual. The grunge fisherman says, “This is not an original ministry. Two-thousand years ago Jesus went where people were and gave them living water. That’s what the Fishermen’s Club does.”

By Emmit Glanz in Seattle.

Have those “Not responsible for …” signs ever vexed you? Hang up your coat at a restaurant and there is a sign warning that the management is not responsible for your garment. Ever read the small print on your airline ticket? The airline takes no responsibility for any delays or missed connections, and if your baggage is lost, they only have to pay an amount agreed upon at a convention they held in Warsaw back in 1955. Park your car in some high-priced lot, and a sign will tell you no one is responsible for any items stolen from your vehicle. It seems no one takes responsibility for anything or anyone anymore.

Genesis does not actually say it, but I suspect there was a “Not responsible for …” sign on one of the trees in Eden. Eve was the first victim. She could not be held responsible for eating the fruit. “The serpent tricked me,” she shrugged. Adam was the second victim. “The woman you gave me offered me the forbidden fruit,” he explained to God, “and that’s why I ate it.”

Adam and Eve’s descendants—especially those in the United States—have refined victimization to a fine art and an article of faith. Doesn’t “The Devil made me do it” have the ring of modern pop evangelicalism? We do not use victimization merely to get let off; we use it to cash in. If we trip on our shoelaces and fall flat on our face in the middle of the sidewalk, we sue everybody from the public works department to the shoelace manufacturer.

If you want to get rich, invest in victimization. It is America’s fastest-growing industry. Millions make a fat paycheck by identifying victims, representing victims, interviewing victims, treating victims, insuring victims, counseling victims, preaching to victims, and, of course, being victims. Not only does it confer absolution for our stupidity and sinfulness, but it allows us to sue for treble damages. “If you have experienced personal injury,” we are assured by lawyers on TV, “you may be entitled to compensation.” Even if you stepped in front of a car when the light was against you, somebody else should pay.

Addiction used to be a growth industry, but there was a down side to it: Addiction was something you did to yourself. You drank too much, ate too much, smoked too much, gambled too much, or shot dope into your own veins. While your mother or daddy may have contributed some defective genes, ultimately you opened your mouth, your wallet, your veins, all by yourself.

Addiction did not make you look good or feel good. It was selfish. You were not simply messing up your own life but your loved ones’ as well. And it cost you dearly. You lost money, health, respect, family, and maybe your life. Victimhood avoids all that because you are blameless, and someone else owes you big for what happened to you.

Blamelessness is as American as the Constitution. Doesn’t the Fifth Amendment guarantee that no one can make you blame yourself? If so, when something bad happens to you, it cannot be your fault. It must be someone else’s.

Some sections of our country have embraced “no-fault” automobile insurance. “No-fault” elevated victimhood to a more sophisticated plane. Both the guilty and the innocent become victims, and everybody gets to collect.

Now we have arrived at the ultimate: the guilty victim. Pamela Smart made headlines when she was convicted of persuading her teen-aged lover to murder her husband, and then blamed the judge for turning her trial into a media event. Poor Pamela garnered a great deal of sympathy for the way she was treated. She captured her victimhood in a poem: “Angel eyes peer out / From behind concrete walls / where sounds of silence echo / A lonely teardrop falls / A Victim of innocence.”

Unfortunately, victimization convinces men and women who should be looking for a Savior to search for a scapegoat. After all, if I am not to blame for what I do, the Cross is much ado about nothing. How hopelessly out of date the old spiritual sounds to us. “Not my mother or my father, but it’s me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.” Victims do not need God, just a sympathetic therapist or a good lawyer.

The difficulty Eve and Adam faced was that their Creator was not a talk-show host. If they were to indulge in the forbidden fruit today, Geraldo or Donahue would feature them as victims, the serpent would be their enabler, and some lawyer would be waiting in the wings to assure them they had a strong case to bring against God for damages.

God of Pain?

Although I thoroughly enjoyed the article by Paul Brand and Philip Yancey, I tend to doubt they had anything to do with the cover title, “And God Created Pain” [Jan. 10]. Not once in the body of the article did Brand and Yancey intimate God had “created” pain and reflected: “It was very good.” Your cover title may give the wrong impression that God concocted pain because he is a sadistic, almighty Being who delights in bringing pain to his creation. To the contrary, he loved us enough to allow us the choice between obedience and sin, the sin bringing pain on ourselves.

David B. Danner

Terre Haute, Ind.

In his article, Paul Brand fails to make a proper distinction between pain as a warning signal, as in appendicitis, which is a blessing, and pain as a wearing, warring tyrant, as in terminal cancer, which is a blight.

Not once does he tell personally of having felt prolonged, excruciating pain. Wait until he does, and then he will likely change some of his opinions.

Ralph E. Ringenberg

South Bend, Ind.

Paul Brand and Philip Yancey’s article was most provocative. As a survivor of multiple cancer surgeries, a major stroke, and other life-threatening situations, I can assure you that I have never heard such love expressed as by caretakers of us disabled.

My husband has said, “One must suffer to learn to love.” I would add, “One must suffer to learn to know God and be a partner with him in this world.”

Kathleen Santucci

Moraga, Calif.

Brand’s article is, at one level, a wonderfully inspiring essay on perseverance and sacrifice, as well as a needed indictment of our pleasure-seeking culture. But it is also a flawed essay on suffering.

To build a theology of suffering on the fact that some Londoners found the period of Nazi bombing the happiest of their lives trivializes the horror of war. Polish and Dutch families hardly count the war years as the best years of their lives. And the women of Bosnia, raped systematically in a war crime of monstrous proportions, who now see their children shot to pieces in the bombardment of Sarajevo, would hardly consider this the happiest period of their lives.

Brand inspires us with his stories of graced living amid poverty and of sacrificial devotion to alleviate suffering. But he’s tragically wrong in his minimizing of evil and deprivation.

Harry Boonstra

Grand Rapids, Mich.

Delight and disappointment

I was both delighted and disappointed with the review of Jack Deere’s Surprised by the Power of the Spirit in your January 10 issue. Delighted by the above-average amount of space given to it because I believe it is one of the most significant titles of 1993, but disappointed because the reviewer struck out on two important points.

1. The title, “Dispensing with Scofield,” trivializes Jack’s argument. “Dispensing with Warfield” is what he really is dealing with—check the footnotes. I don’t think Scofield even is mentioned in the footnotes, but Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield appears on almost every page. He is a much more formidable historical adversary of Wimber. His contemporary counterpart is John MacArthur, whose head could be depicted as falling off another pedestal in Mitchell’s excellent accompanying cartoon.

2. The reviewer leaves the reader a negative impression of the book by severely overemphasizing the role of experience in Deere’s paradigm shift. How could she miss his clear statement: “This shift in my thinking was not the result of an experience with any sort of supernatural phenomena. It was the result of a patient and intense study of the Scriptures” (p. 23). The italics are Jack’s. Contradicting this amounts to little more than a public slap in the face to a recognized biblical scholar.

C. Peter Wagner

Fuller Theological Seminary

Pasadena, Calif.

A Class Act That Isn’T

The Bible says some things never change: God, love, the Word. But, based on my adult Sunday-school experience, one more item should be added to that list.

Some classes seem to live forever, honoring departed saints (“The Bertha Pickleheimer Memorial Class”) or Greek words, whose meanings have long since been ignored (“The Koinonia Class”). Acronyms were once the rage (“The JOY Class”—Jesus, Others, and You), but during the Cold War spy craze (“The Class from UNCLE”), that practice seemed a trifle silly.

Some classes are in danger of being sued for false advertising: The “Fishers of Men” hasn’t enrolled a new member since 1961, and “Grace Class” is at war with the junior-high ministry after a softball crashed through a memorial window. Maybe Grace was a teacher instead of a virtue.

Some names are more on target. “The Samsonites” class is losing its strength, and its members are losing their hair. However, unlike the luggage, that class is seldom packed. We now have classes called “Boomers” and “Busters.” I was under the impression that these were Major League Baseball expansion teams. But I’m told the references are demographic. It’s hard to predict how these new class names will stand the test of time, but at least they look good on the church’s softball jerseys.

Next Saturday, it will be a generational showdown on the ballfield when the “Boomers” meet the “Samsonites.” I expect the oldtimers to live up to their biblical namesake and jawbone the competition into confusion.

I don’t mind having someone disagree with one of our authors, but I feel this review misrepresented Deere’s book in several ways. First, the review states that “[Jack] claims to have seen fingers grow and legs lengthened.” The book never mentions any healing of fingers or legs.

Second, the review gives the impression that Jack bases his arguments primarily on personal experiences. Blumhofer states, “[Jack] leaves the reader with the impression that it is the religious experience itself that validates what he says.” These comments are particularly unfair in light of Jack’s strong attempt to argue primarily from Scripture rather than from experience.

Third, the review implies that Jack is manipulating God’s Word: “In laying aside Scofield’s grid, has Deere replaced it with another that is equally or more manipulative in its use of God’s Word?” The author is entitled to her opinion, but that opinion seems strained given the book’s strong endorsements by such people as Gordon Fee and Bruce Waltke.

Finally, the review implies that Jack has rejected Scofield and dispensationalism, when, in fact, he still considers himself to be a dispensationalist. His primary argument is against cessationists, who may be found in a variety of theological traditions.

Jack Kuhatschek

Zondervan Publishing House

Grand Rapids, Mich.

Being part of the dispensational tradition myself, I have never been able to understand why the cessationist position regarding miraculous spiritual gifts is so often credited or—in the case of your reviewer—charged to dispensationalism. Thinking that perhaps Deere himself had done this, I looked in vain throughout his book for any attribution of the source of this teaching to Scofield (as implied in the heading and cartoon) or to “dispensationalism.”

Rather, the book tended to trace this view back to the days of the Reformers with the most frequently mentioned source of more recent time being B. B. Warfield’s classic Counterfeit Miracles. Are we to assume that Warfield got his teaching from Scofield—which I am sure would be news to those in the Reformed tradition? Whether one agrees with cessationism or not, this teaching is not and has never been any more inherent to dispensationalism than to nondispensationalism.

Robert L. Saucy

Talbot School of Theology La Mirada, Calif.

The late theologian Bernard Ramm once said, “In the New Testement the movement is always from truth to experience. But it is never truth for truth’s sake, but truth for experience’s sake.” Blumhofer’s review fails to understand this basic assumption.

Pastor George Mallone

Grace Vineyard of Arlington

Arlington, Tex.

Blumhofer responds:

It seems to me that Deere’s personal testimony woven through the entire book clearly indicates that his experience challenged his understanding of truth. Writing of his early years, he states, “My practice and my beliefs were determined by the teaching of the Holy Scriptures—or so I thought. Only in recent years has the arrogance of that kind of talk become apparent to me” (p. 46). Experience drove him to the Scriptures for another look at teachings that, until then, had seemed adequate, and when his fresh look at the text corroborated his experience, he changed his mind. He admits his prior understanding of Scripture was also rooted in experience—for example, he did not believe in miracles because he had not seen any miracles (p. 102). This book is both argument and autobiography: it is instructive to ask what each of those modes of presentation—the reasoned approach and the experiential dimension—reveals. The story line constitutes a subtext that indicates the importance of experience.

The review was prepared from galleys, not the final text. If no testimonies to lengthened legs appear there, reference to such types of miracles persist—neck muscles changed (p. 70); a “dead” kidney restored (p. 127); a resurrection from the dead (pp. 204–5); an affirmation that we can ask God to restore amputated limbs (p. 128).

Deere tackles Warfield and others who have argued the cessation of miracles and spiritual gifts. Scofield mediated that point to many of the masses of Protestants who became the fundamentalists, few of whom studied Warfield, but many of whom diligently studied the notes to the Scofield Bible.

From felon to victim?

It is rather amazing that it only takes the passing of time to turn the felon into the victim [“Free Jim Bakker Now,” Speaking Out, Jan. 10]. When the judical system finally follows through, we read that requiring a convicted felon to serve his sentence is “discrimination” and “persecution.”

Is jail a hardship? Of course it is. It’s supposed to be. Does a convicted felon have the right to complain because he is subjected to the full penalty of the law while another convicted felon receives better treatment at the hands of the justice system? I think not.

Winzenburg complains that the system has treated Michael Milken better than it treats Bakker. The complaint is well-founded, but the better cure for this wrong would have been to keep Milken in jail longer, not to let Bakker out sooner.

Goldie Rotenberg

New York, N.Y.

Why don’t you contact some of the poor, elderly widows unsuspectingly bilked out of their small pension checks and ask them what they think of your opinion of Bakker’s justice? Methinks he was fortunate that some of them did not have the privilege of meting out justice to him!

Pastor Jim Evatt

Riverview Baptist Church

Greenville, S.C.

Give me a break! The last thing Christendom needs is for Bakker to hit the road again.

Pastor J. Grant Swank, Jr.

Church of the Nazarene

Windham, Maine

Questions about Dake

The damaging article in your January 10 News section, “Scholars Scrutinize Popular Dake’s Bible,” is full of untrue statements about what is in the Dake Bible: (1) Dake’s view promotes nine persons in the Trinity; (2) Dake denies the Trinity; (3) Dake’s view on the Trinity is similar to Mormon theology; (4) Dake’s writings imply “God is always dependent on a body”; (5) Dake’s view is that God “is about six feet tall, weighs about 190 pounds, and has a hand span of 9½ inches”; (6) Dake rejects “if it be thy will” prayers; (7) Dake teaches that resurrected saints will give birth to their own kind in heaven; (8) Dake says “Adam and Eve flew back and forth from the moon”; (9) The Dake Bible promotes racism. We expect an acknowledgment that such concepts cannot be found in the Dake Bible.

Annabeth Dake Germaine, Vice President

David L. Germaine, Vice President

Finette Dake Kennedy, Vice President

Finis J. Dake, Jr., Vice President

Dake Bible Sales, Inc.

Lawrenceville, Ga.

Clarification: The article about Finis Dake’s writings presented commentary by critics that was based on their interpretations and perceptions of Dake’s teachings. The statements in the letter above do not appear in the Dake’s Annotated Reference Bible or in his book God’s Plan for Man.

For example, Dake nowhere states there are nine persons in the Godhead. He does teach that each member of the “Divine Trinity,” Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, has a “personal spirit body, personal soul, and personal spirit in the same sense that each human being, angel, or any other being has his own body, soul, and spirit.” CT regets any statements that appeared to be textual quotations from Dake’s works instead of interpretation by critics.

—Eds.

Brief letters are welcome; all are subject to editing. Write to Eutychus, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188; fax (708) 260-0114.

No sooner did associate editor Timothy Morgan unpack his bags from covering Billy Graham’s Tokyo crusade, than he was off to Uganda with Compassion International for this month’s cover story on the war against HIV in Africa (see p. 70). There he visited the Rakai region, where AIDS first emerged. And there he did not find a family untouched by the disease.

For Tim, known by the CT staff as a very good cook, it was an interesting culinary transition: from seaweed and fish in the Ginza to goat-meat kabobs and fried bananas in Masaka. The adventuresome reporter even learned to eat a local bean-and-cabbage stew without spoon or fork, just using his fingers and a dense, white cornmeal cake.

Life in rural Uganda is hard, despite the beauty of the countryside. Roads are unpaved, and a fine, red dust covers everything. Farmers tend small plots of bananas or coffee bushes. And having running water depends on having human legs to do the running. While visiting a rural school, Tim saw almost all the children, down to ages five or six, walk 300 yards with five-gallon water jugs on their heads to insure the next day’s water supply.

Tim found Ugandan Christians gentle and genuine—despite being the veterans of a bloody, 17-year war and now having to face another long battle: an epidemic of AIDS. The Ugandans were not always in agreement with how to meet the HIVchallenge, but they are united in their commitment to do their best against a common foe.

Winston Churchill’s remark about Uganda being “The Pearl of Africa” may still be true. But the HIV epidemic could easily destroy this precious people.

DAVID NEFF,Executive Editor