Rachel Carson’s ecological study, Silent Spring, appeared in 1960, my graduation year at Meredith.
In 1970, Raleigh held its first Earth Day observance, and in January 1977, I entered Southeastern Seminary and read Carson’s book in a class. Professors Furman Hewett and Alan Neely stood in the vanguard of educators who named the health of our planet as a Christian concern, a matter of spiritual importance to God the Creator.
God’s care for the creation and its safekeeping appears in the earliest chapters of Genesis. In Romans, Paul repeats that truth, signifying the inclusion of the creation in God’s eternal plan of redemption and salvation.
It has now been nearly 62 years since Rachel Carson, visionary American biologist, warned the world that we are poisoning Earth and rendering our planet uninhabitable through toxic chemicals discharged into the air and laid down on land and water. Herbicide and pesticide manufacturers objected; fossil fuel enterprises objected and challenged Carson’s research and conclusions. Most of the rest of us just looked toward our own interests.
Climate crisis has been taken seriously, largely, only in universities, seminaries and other academic circles. Governments and individuals have ignored the subject. Businesses have avoided it. Especially those connected to pesticides, herbicidal overkill of weeds, and the dirtiest fossil fuels, like coal.
(I was glad to hear this morning, as I wrote this, that some international agreement has been reached on coal.)
But a few very rich people like Elon Musk realized that they could make a bundle of money paying attention. Enter Tesla. Welcome to electric cars, despite the profit and status motives. Cutting carbon emissions is of first-order importance.
Churches have avoided mentioning climate change. Here lies my specific concern. God cares about the misuse of this beautiful, fruitful Eden entrusted to us to “till and to keep.” Read Genesis and Romans again. My former students heard me say this in the 1980s and ’90s; my children and grandchildren (my very best students) have heard it since, and hear it often. God will bless our care for His created order. We are God’s appointed ambassadors to care, and to tell it on the housetops!
But time is running out. Can it already be too late? Whole populations are now migrating from their native homes in desperate search of water and food. Crops across the world have failed, and habitats have been destroyed, from years of drought and extreme weather disasters, caused or exacerbated by an overheated planet, by unregulated deforestation, excessive carbon and methane emissions, and other destructive misuses of our planet through decades of sinful choices by nations and individuals.
I lament that the Parana River, which I was privileged to see in 1992, as it cascaded over the Iguazu Falls, is waning now, in its life-giving support for dependent inhabitants of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina, owing to climate change.
Let us honor God’s call, and accept protection and care for water, air and soil, as a spiritual responsibility the sovereign Creator has ordained for us. Climate crisis is a spiritual crisis, a discipleship matter in need of obedient attention.
Hear the Lord’s Word in Genesis 2:15: “And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.”
The Hebrew words here translated as “dress” and “keep” in English, mean literal!y to “till” and to “protect from injury or harm.” To keep Earth means to be its security guard, as a gatekeeper keeps the property, and thereby protects those inside the gate. We have certainly tilled the land, and over-tilled it, and that excess, with other specific failures to protect our planet from injury and harm, has engendered a threat we may now be unable to extinguish.
Paul, in Romans 8:22 and 23, writes to Christians in the church in Rome: “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.”
By personifying the suffering creation, Paul recognizes and affirms God’s inclusion of all of His created order as valued and loved by the Creator, included by God in “the redemption of our body.”
Let us meditate on that divine reality and its meaning for our task ahead.
Thanks be to God.
Dr. Elizabeth Barnes is a retired professor emerita of Christian Theology and Ethics at the Baptist Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, and a resident of White Lake.
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Barnes: God intends for us to care for creation, and its safekeeping - Elizabethtown Bladen Journal
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