Environmental Stewardship

Astronauts viewing the Earth from the moon’s surface gave man a vicarious look at himself and his crowded spaceship. This “giant step for mankind” has given new impetus to a critical look at our environment, a look that might well have been taken earlier, as for example when Rachel Carson published her Silent Spring in 1962. Today few are prepared to repeat the criticisms that then greeted Miss Carson’s work.

“Love for our spaceship Earth” is rapidly becoming a surrogate for the love of country. It is the young who have seen the problem most clearly, and who are today prodding our society to give its most earnest attention to environmental matters. With some of these youth, the societal prodding assumes bizarre forms; but in attempting to return at selected points to “nature” they somehow express the sense that man, in removing himself so far from nature, may find that very nature to be his judge and his destroyer.

The religious and theological bearings of the problem have come to the surface later than the purely ecological aspects. But the growing conflict of interest between the environmental issue and our present social and economic policies has involved man himself, a question of overpowering significance to the Christian cause. In our day of ecological backlash, the Evangel itself has been called into question.

I am indebted to one of my students, Dwight U. Nelson, for excellent bibliographical data on the specifically religious aspects of the question. While Christian thinkers have tended to ignore the problem as being irrelevant, secularists have brought the Christian movement to book for its alleged misuse of biblical insights into the question of man’s relation to his environment.

One is taken back, for example, by the charge leveled by Lynn White, Jr., in an article in Science (issue of March 10, 1962) that Christianity has played a negative role in the pattern of historical developments that have contributed to our current crisis. White’s thesis at this point is that in uprooting animism in the area within which it has played a controlling role, Christianity has destroyed man’s relationship to nature. As a result, the way has been left wide open for man to exploit and ultimately to destroy his environment.

Granted that this thesis is overly simplified (as anyone knows who has lived and worked in an area conditioned by animism), there is just enough of truth in it to make it painful. That is to say, Christians have tended to make much of the mandate “have dominion over” the earth “and subdue it,” and relatively little of the profound statement, “The earth is the Lord’s.”

We of the West have failed to take with proper seriousness the profound passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews, “but we do not yet see everything in subjection to him.” The tendency has been to take this as a challenge, not to a holding-in-trust of the earth, but to an unconditional subjugation of its resources. The Christian is under strong temptation to forget that man is, among other things, an element in the natural world, and that any attempt to exalt man’s welfare by the degradation of his environment must in the nature of the case be self-defeating.

The statement “God created the world and it was good” lends itself to distortion and misuse. As Richard L. Means points out in an article in the Christian Century (May 1, 1968), this Scripture “may easily be subverted into a doctrine that rationalizes exploitation of the world for immediate gain.”

It does not help us greatly to cite St. Francis of Assisi, Christianity’s shining exception to the misapplication of the doctrine of man’s role in earth-dominion. But we may learn from this medieval poet-preacher that man’s environment ought to be, not an “it” to be exploited, but rather a “thou” to which man must make vital adjustments.

It has become a commonplace to say that man’s relation to the soil has been profoundly and irreversibly altered by the coming of the machine age. The machine does tempt man to exploit nature, rather than to work with it. But it simply will not do to make the machine bear full responsibility for today’s ecological crisis. Rather, the use men make of their environment depends largely upon inner attitudes, and more especially, upon the attitude assumed toward human destiny and the ultimate destiny of man’s world.

Even thoughtful scientists are today demanding that the Church do more than merely acquiesce in a cultic faith in technology. Some are urging that Christians earn the right to criticize the scientific establishment. This must come, not by the route of some Luddite attack upon the external symbols of technology, but through the projection into society—and especially into the scientific community—of a wholly new appraisal of man’s environment—of a typically biblical view of ecology.

This position assumes, of course, that the Christian Scriptures do contain a set of valid insights into man’s environmental problem. It will build upon the rather evident fact that the potential of “pure” science for eschatological destruction has caught up with the scientific community. It will call into question the view that analytical modes are adequate guides for making decisions about the use of our earth.

The Christian should face with frank realism the fact that the biblical understanding of things must run counter to many prevailing modes of thinking. He must, for example, challenge the current stress upon purely quantitative evaluations of economic success, usually stated in terms of the annual increase in our Gross National Product. It is not only that infinite expansion is impossible within a finite order, but also that “man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”

Obviously, there is no easy solution to the current problems of environmental dysfunction, rooted as they are in centuries of thought-patterns and decades of shortsighted policies. But there must be some category sufficiently inclusive to serve as a guideline for the Christian’s thought and influence. I submit that stewardship may qualify for such a controlling role.

Taken seriously, the concept of biblical stewardship will permeate human life with the conviction that man holds his environment in trust, under God. It will remind man that abuse of his trust will bring, not only a searing final judgment from the God under whom man lives, but strong intermediate judgments in the form of impoverished lives and hungry bodies. It is in these terms that our decision-makers need to be reminded of the consequences of an outraged environment.

HAROLD B. KUHN

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