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I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns, whatever it is we have to manage with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations. (emphasis added)

That's more like it.

How can a people focused steadily on the last days find the theological motivation and will to steward the natural world "with a skill to leave the resources needed for future generations"?

Theologian John Haught of Georgetown University claims that Christians should not bracket their beliefs about last things when thinking theologically about the environment. There is a fear among theologians who specialize in thinking about the environment that too much talk about the End (for that matter, any talk at all) will undermine care for the Creation. But as the example of James Watt shows us, "It ain't necessarily so."

As the great German theologian Jürgen Moltmann wrote in Theology of Hope:

From first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present. The eschatological is not one element of Christianity, but it is the medium of Christian faith as such, the key in which everything in it is set, the glow that suffuses everything here in the dawn of an expected new day. … Hence eschatology cannot really be only a part of Christian doctrine. Rather, the eschatological outlook is characteristic of all Christian proclamation, of every Christian existence and of the whole Church. There is therefore only one real problem in Christian theology … : the problem of the future.

Haught says we need to think of our doctrine of last things in terms of promise. Of course, the biblical doctrine is a mix of promise and threat, of renewal and destruction, of victory for good and judgment for evil. But the promise of God's kingdom is fundamentally good news, and as a promise it carries within it some importance for the present.

Perhaps an analogy would help illuminate the dynamics of promise. If a young man gives a young woman an engagement ring, this pledge is a carrier of promise, but it is not the wedding band itself—just as the engagement is not the wedding. Similarly, our present existence is like the engagement, and the fullness of the kingdom is like the wedding. Our present environment is God's gift to us. It is not all that it will be when the "wedding" comes, but it is extremely valuable—just like the engagement ring.

I don't think any young woman favorably inclined to her suitor has ever said, "Well forget that, it's only an engagement ring. What I wanted was a wedding ring." No, you don't dis an engagement ring.

Or think of a teenager eager to learn to drive, who has just acquired a learner's permit. The learner's permit is not a driver's license. But it is what it is—a bearer of promise. What young man getting his learner's permit doesn't beam with joy? While it's not a driver's license, no teen disrespects a permit.

So an orientation toward that which is to come helps us think in terms of promise and fulfillment. And while promise isn't fulfillment, it is something precious.

Framing a discussion of the natural world eschatologically also leads toward other lines of thought we should consider:

First, knowing that the Creation as we have it is promise and not fulfillment means that we will recognize its limits and conserve it. Nature as we know it is bountiful, but not unbounded. As we have been repeatedly reminded, there are limits to fossil fuels. Even the fuels for nuclear power are seriously limited. These facts should not surprise us. The Creation is a limited thing, a provisional thing.

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July 2008, Vol. 52, No. 7