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No laughing matter
A Christian, a Jew and a Muslim walk into a Salvation Army church…
No, that’s not the start of a really bad joke. It happened in March this year when Wellington City Corps played host to a public meeting of three faith perspectives on the topic ‘the care of our earth’.
There certainly wasn’t a packed house, and looking around the room I remember noticing it was a fairly elderly crowd. Without meaning to be ageist (I’m not that young myself!), I felt like a spring chicken in comparison to many in the audience.
Perhaps this was testament to how most religious people approach the issue of environmentalism in general, sadly. It’s something tangential that just a very few care about (hippies, old people, Greenies …) It’s certainly not a central concern. In this, I count myself complicit in apathy. It’s taken me almost nine months to share my thoughts on that presentation. And so I return to that March evening with a heavy heart but a convicted spirit.
Care of our earth
The meeting was billed as ‘The Care of our Earth: Three Faith Perspectives’. Those attending were invited to hear what the Abrahamic faith traditions have to say about our responsibility as human beings to care for the earth that our Creator has given us to live in.
The speakers were Dr Paul Blaschke, a Jewish ecologist from Otago University; Catherine Gibbs of the Catholic Institute; and Tahir Nawaz, President of the International Muslim Association of New Zealand.
Paul asked whether God’s instruction for humankind to have dominion (or rule) over the earth (Genesis 1:26, 28) had become a root cause of the current environmental crisis. He said that Jewish law prohibited wastefulness and wasteful consumption that damages creation, and introduced the Hebrew concept of tikkun olam, which literally means ‘repair (or healing) of the world’. This concept was a reminder that Jews are not only responsible for their own welfare, but they are also to act responsibly and ethically towards the welfare of society and the interests of the wider environment.
It was also important, he said, to remember that in Genesis chapter 2, God tells humankind to ‘tend creation’. To me, that instruction comes with the clear implication that we are meant to be the earth’s caretaker or gardener. The Māori understanding of kaitiakitanga (guardianship and conservation) has a lot to teach us in this regard. God clearly calls us to be stewards, not selfish consumers who plunder the planet’s supply.
Reading further on in Genesis to the story of Noah and the flood brought the reminder that sinful human actions do affect the world, said Paul. And although God had promised to never again send a flood to destroy the earth, this was no guarantee humans might not cause their own destructive flood.
Catherine picked up on the idea that everything in creation is connected and emphasised that love was the central force for a truly Christian understanding of creation. When it came to looking at God’s instruction to have dominion, it was important to realise this was not about ‘domination’, but subduing ourselves to God. She noted that Pope Francis had spoken strongly against consumer lifestyles that suffocated the earth and robbed the poor.
Catherine’s challenge to faith communities was to experience ‘an ecological conversion’, a change of heart and mind that accepts we have a moral duty to our neighbour and to the earth. She said a central Christian concern was the justice question of ‘what will protect and enhance human life?’
Tahir emphasised that in Islam exploitation is prohibited and sustainability is promoted, with an understanding that caring for the environment and planting for food and other purposes is actually seen as providing charity for others. Because all shared the right to share the world’s resources, it was important for people of faith to see themselves as cultivators, not destroyers. Tahir gave the example of an Islamic leader who said: ‘I was sent to teach you about the Prophet and to clean your streets for you.’
A Jewish woman in the audience said while living as part of a largely Islamic community, she’d seen evidence of an integrated faith expression in the way people cared for the environment. This was not something she had seen so strongly in the Judeo-Christian tradition, where environmentalism seemed to be regarded as an interest quite separate from one’s faith.
A lasting takeaway for me from this presentation was the realisation that if our faith is to have an impact in the world, it must not be caged and compartmentalised. We are not meant to shut our faith away in our churches, temples or mosques. Faith is meant to overflow from those spaces and be evident in the way we care for other people and for our environment.
Why don’t we care?
And so I return to the question: why don’t more people in the church care about the environment and take action against climate change?
In October, The Salvation Army’s Moral and Social Issues Council (MASIC) invited Jonathan Boston, Professor of Policy Studies at Victoria University’s School of Government to talk to the council on the topic of climate change. Jonathan is a long-time environmental activist (since he was a teenager), yet confessed to having a heavy heart that Christians are not taking more of a lead on climate change. Even more concerning was that the overwhelming amount of Christians either didn’t seem to care or were sceptics. He’d even been told that ‘creation care is not part of the gospel’.
Jonathan suggested that some of the theological roots of this disheartening reality are the church’s views on eschatology, the part of theology concerned with death, judgement, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind. Because Christians have the view that everything ends up okay in the end (God wins and we get to escape this dying world to live in a new Heaven and Earth; see Revelation 21:1), we may believe it doesn’t matter what we do in terms of caring for the environment, because the end game isn’t saving this earth or its animals anyway; it’s living in the new earth to come.
Theological views related to God’s sovereignty are another influence on the church’s apathy, he said. Because Christians rightly see God as the ruler of the universe—and also because we see that God is just and loves his people—this can influence us to believe that God won’t let anything really bad happen to us. Or if bad things do happen, it’s not for us to question what’s going on; we should simply accept this as ‘God’s will’.
This flies in the face of both human history and everyday reality. Christians have suffered—and are suffering—and it is clear that many are not afforded God’s supernatural protection. Suffering also has much to do with human cause and effect. It’s not correct to imply everything that happens must be permitted through God’s sovereign will.
Jonathan challenged The Salvation Army to allow its preaching, prayer and Bible studies to be impacted by concerns for the planet.
Pacific problems
If we want to be obedient to Christ’s teaching to love God and love our neighbour, then in this part of the world we must recognise our neighbours are facing some heavy duty climate-related issues.
In its 2016 State of the Environment Report for Oceania, Hungry for Justice, Thirsty for Change, Caritas (the Catholic agency for justice, peace and development) reminds us that 2016 saw Fiji face the strongest recorded cyclone in the southern hemisphere and that Pacific communities are losing ground to coastal erosion and flooding, disrupting food gardens, cemeteries and homes. ‘As the sea continues to rise … Caritas continues to hear more stories of whole communities moving because of these rising seas and stronger king tides,’ says the report.
Island nations like Fiji, Vanuatu and Tonga are especially vulnerable, particularly as they suffer the ‘accumulated impacts of multiple extreme events such as cyclones, drought and intense rainfall’. This is leading to malnutrition that will have long-term impacts on health and education.
The Caritas report notes that although the Paris Agreement and its unprecedented commitment to addressing climate change gave much hope in December 2015, this needs to be backed up with concrete action. ‘New Zealand and Australia are still doing less than their fair share to minimise emissions, support the most vulnerable in Oceania, and take practical steps towards inclusive, global development that cares for both the earth and the poor.’
An old Star Trek-inspired cartoon comes to mind. It’s a picture of our earth with a speech bubble coming from it that reads: ‘Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no intelligent life here!’ This is meant as commentary on the lack of intelligent reason evident across the planet on any of a range of issues and probably at any time in our history. But perhaps it also typifies the way in which many Christians contribute to the challenge of caring for the earth: we think God’s going to beam us up out of here anyway. Not my problem!
I hope fewer of us believe that’s how God sees things. And that instead we realise our responsibility as stewards and caretakers of this beautiful world. The challenges facing the world and its people require more than a simplistic or escapist application of our faith. We must not be content to walk on by while those on the other side of the road (or on some other island) retreat from the peril of rising waters.
by Christina Tyson (c) 'War Cry' magazine, 2 December 2017, pp20-21
You can read 'War Cry' at your nearest Salvation Army church or centre, or subscribe through Salvationist Resources.