30 Rock, an NBC sitcom, has been entertaining me for countless hours the past few days. One of my favorite episodes from season 2, "Greenzo," makes fun of the recent environmentalism trend. Jack, the network's CEO, asks the writing team to write a couple sketches for the networks new environmental mascot, "Greenzo."
Jack explains his logic to the lead writer, Liz Lemon, saying, "He's part of our new company wide global-eco-initiative. Do you know why?"
"To save the Earth and it's resources?"
"No, to drain the Earth's resources. Don Geiss is a genius, he's pitting all the divisions of the company against each other to see who can make the most money off this environmentalism trend. I'm going to do it with Greenzo, saving the Earth while retaining profitability."
I agree with Jack, America is caught in the grips of a green revolution that started nearly 40-years ago. Hippies and pantheists led the initial charge in the 60s; they rightfully wanted to clean up the industrial revolution's act. Moreover, they wanted speak against westernized "Christian ideals" which led to so much destruction and pollution. Now, with 40-years hindsight, Christians seem to be doing more, but was there spiritual validity to the arguments of hippies and pantheists?
Lets time travel for a moment, reevaluate spiritualism of the 60s, and discover if the hippies and pantheists truly found the best way to respect and understand nature.
Pantheism (New Age, Zen Buddhism, Spiritualism, Neopaganism, Naturalism, etcetera) are any religious systems that believe, according to historian John Herman Randall, "The world was no machine, it was alive and God was not its creator so much as its soul, its life." The pantheist would say we are all God, of one essence, therefore no creature or thing, is of more spiritual value than the next. To the pantheists there is little difference between a man, a tree, and a squirrel.
During the 60s a strong academic notion emerged that the only way to protect nature was with Pantheistic belief systems. Aldous Huxley epitomized this ideal when he claimed, "Elementary ecology leads straight to elementary Buddhism."
Professor Lynn White Jr. wrote extensively on the subject. He concluded that "what people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and our destiny--that is, by religion." In his work The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis, White explained how a westernized Christian worldview led primarily to his generation's apathy about ecology. He wrote that Christians historically disparaged and abused nature because their faith system lacked a foundation to build a deep respect for nature. He uses this example, "To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West. For nearly two millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature."
White believed that God was to be found in all things. Moreover, he believed that if men saw trees as Gods humanity would no longer disrespect and abuse nature, rather respect and adore its divinity and equality of beings. For love of nature, the Pantheists led the charge against pollution. Richard L. Means picked up the rhetorical baton where White left off. He wrote that White's beliefs "should help destroy egoistic, status politics, for it helps unmask the fact that other men's activities are not just private, inconsequential, and limited in themselves; their acts, mediated through changes in nature, affect my life, my children, and the generations to come." This thought became the ultimate plea of Pantheists. They cried, even if you don't believe all things on Earth are equal, at least do it for your children's children!
And many would say we have.
In almost immediate response to articles written by White and Means, theologian Francis A. Schaeffer wrote an apologetic work Pollution and the Death of Man. With his scrupulous rhetoric Schaeffer dissected the arguments of academic Pantheists, and proposed a Christian solution to the environmental crisis of the 60s. Schaeffer conceded that the hippies and Pantheists were "right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it too, a long, long time age, before the counterculture ever came onto the scene. More than this, they were right in the fact that the plastic culture--modern man, the mechanistic worldview in university textbooks and in practice, the total threat of the machine, the establishment technology, the bourgeois middle-class-- is poor in its sensitivity to nature." Yet, he differed with the Pantheists and hippies on the solution to the problem.
First Schaeffer criticized Pantheism for being morally pragmatic. He challenged Mean's idea that we ought to do it for our children's children, by pointing out that it is still morally egoistic of humanity. How do men doing what's best for mankind escape "human egoism?" Such a plea proved that Pantheists lack a moral universal to justify their respect of nature. Schaeffer wrote that the Bible gives us the best universal upon which to build morality: the character of God the creator.
Next, Schaeffer challenged Pantheism's assertion of equality between man and nature, "Pantheism eventually gives no meaning to the particulars. In true pantheism unity has meaning, but the particulars have no meaning, including the particulars of man," so "those who propose the pantheistic answer ignore this fact--that far from raising nature to man's height, pantheism must push both man and nature down into a bog. Without categories there is eventually no reason to distinguish bad nature from good nature . . . and man becomes no more than the grass." Simply put, Schaeffer said a tree ought to be respected as a tree, because that is its created order. One should not abuse trees with deforestation, likewise one should not abuse trees by romanticizing them and treating them as humans.
We must also turn to the Church, and understand how a spiritual/secular dichotomy caused the Church's apathy toward nature. Schaeffer looks at numerous passages to point out how important the material world is to the Christ. He explains that the Lord loves his creation entirely, and we as humans should respect it, because we love God. Rob Bell explains a similar concept in his book Sex God. Bell says the way we treat a gift or creation from another human speaks to how much we love that human (this is why mothers love everything their children make). Likewise, the way we treat God's gifts and creations speaks to how we love God.
Schaeffer sums up his argument, writing "God will always deal with a plant as a plant, with an animal as an animal, with a machine as a machine, and with a man as a man, not violating the orders of creation. He will not ask the machine to behave like a man, neither will He deal with man as though he were a machine . . . If God treats His creation in that way, should we not treat our fellow-creatures with similar integrity? . . . Should I, as a fellow-creature, do the same--treating each thing in integrity in its own order? And for the highest reason: because I love God--I love the one who made it! Loving the Lover who has made it, I have respect for the thing He made." With this worldview Christians appear more equipped to fight for the environment than pantheists.
A couple questions to end with:
1. Are Schaeffer and Bell's assertions about creation biblical?
2. Is there a historical discourse in Christian literature on nature (and even grassroots environmentalism?)
3. With a new worldview on the environment are Christians more equipped to protect the environment?
4. Would changing our worldview be catering to a current cultural fad, or conforming to God's truth?
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