Those who pick up Saving God’s Green Earth are in for a delightful and easy read. Tri Robinson, founding pastor of the Vineyard Boise Church, passionately shares his journey and experience with creation care. This is a cookies-on-the-lowest-shelf kind of presentation, perfect for those who eschew or simply ignore the subject.
Robinson outlines God’s work in his life with respect to taking care of the earth and simply yet powerfully sounds a new call for the church to enter back into this biblical mandate. Already “green†readers and those unseasoned in creation care alike will find portions of scripture expounded in a helpful way as they discover more of God’s heart for His creation.
Through practical narrative and short scripture teachings, Robinson shows how well the Christian faith mixes with environmental stewardship. Each chapter is followed by a short vignette highlighting various Christian leaders such as Dr. Calvin DeWitt, Ed Brown and Dr. Jeffrey Greenburg, who, among others, have been living, teaching and “doing†creation care. Surprisingly, no women were mentioned in these illustrations, presumedly because no known prominent women in the field were found to highlight.
The book does not leave one completely in the hypothetical realm, but rather offers a few succinct thoughts on how to get into the action. Robinson might have expanded this section a bit more. However for church groups new to environmental stewardship, this is a great place to gather start-up ideas. Saving God’s Green Earth is a very accessible book on the topic and could easily be used in a study setting.
For more on the author and others mentioned in this article, as well as recent highlights of the church’s increased involvement in creation care, visit these sites:
www.ausable.org
www.christiansandclimate.org/
www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/green/index.html
www.savinggodsgreenearth.com
www.restoringeden.org
In a time of cultural disrepair, when many of our basic American institutions are in dire shape, when our moral house is in ruins, we need not go down the atheistic road of Environmentalism. I fear that is what is seen here.
A pagan movement, with frightening political overtones, is building. It is easy to dismiss this description as overblown. Yet it is that environmental movement which is full of the fury of disaster mentality. (See the misnamed Weather Channel for bad examples.)
The ugliness with which the movement respond to rational dissent is foreboding. (Michael Crichton’s work, for instance, on the subject. Science, he has warned, has NO place in politics.)
Oddly enough, Tom Clancy in RAINBOW SIX, exhibited well the naked and dispossed ape that drives the movement. The worship of Gaia. The seizing of the earth for man’s own heaven, the insanity of trying to possess that which is not yours.
But there is a basic Marxist drive, too. Several decades ago I first noticed that American courts of law adjudicated some suits based upon the idea that one party (usually the defendant) possessed complete control of a situation. Complete human control. One example was that the operators of (then prison) Alcatraz could be sued for not making their facility perfect. Any and all imperfections could be tried as failures, to be redressed by law. But what hubristic thought says that man can completely control a prison environment?
Man is a creature. Of, but not limited to his environment. Not in control. He did not make the environment, nor can he unmake it.
The formidable nature of that idea is frightening. If Pittsburgh has not ( and cannot) clean up its wastes, then studies will appear showing real and prospective death among the population; the courts will dictate the course Pittsburgh will take to remedy the situation. (Crichton address the bad science of many such ‘studies.’) Money will become the driving force. The people will have no say, or indeed understanding. (It will become their debt, however.)
The courts will arbitrarily seize another part of a free land and reduce it to materialistic games of greed and corruption.
It should be noted that during these recent decades of rising environmentalism, not only has American energy gluttony risen, but the taking of the countryside for ugly sprawl (growth!) has multiplied a hundredfold. (Did even our ignorant ancestors change the land as much as WE have?) Each of us can attest to the daily ugliness we pass on to our children. (“There used to a field there, a farm, a woods..”)
So environmentalism has some sanity as a science. As politics, law, or pagan religion, it substitutes irrationality in service of base desires.
Psychologists may conclude that today’s American green insanity springs from a hidden guilt over what we have despoiled. For our greed.
A young South African talked me to several years ago about his impressions of America. Too ugly, he said. Too much cities; for that is where his group had toured. Ugly cities.
Indeed the church must reassert the truth of Christian stewardship. Many American communities have a history of such.
It must oppose the idea that America environment can be ‘owned’ or adjudicated by special interests. America does not belongs to anyone, except God first.
A final note. Katrina gave many of us an insight into how rabid and dangerous the environmentalists are. The media frenzy that enveloped the disaster became mob politics which hurt victims, prevented needed aid, and frightened many in the Katrina Zone. It was unAmerican at its worst. The hurt and suffering became tools. No natural disaster has ever been so politicized first.
RJ Neuhaus penned an indirect answer to those who leave the Author of all things out of His Creation. His reminisce about New Orleans gave tribute to a strange, often corrupt, but loveable city, whose fate, during Katrina and after, lay in God’s hands. It was a gentle rebuke to those who used American citizens for their own gain.
Attempts to supplement Him are doomed.
That is the testimony we must give the paganism of the environmentalists.