Ecology—Dying to Live Again

How can we “get a handle” on the environmental crisis? Where is the best place to begin to resolve our massive ecological problems? What is the most effective action that the average Christian can take right now?

Never before has the human race been more pressed to curb pollution. The energy that sustains us is in increasingly short supply, and only at the expense of environment can more be produced. Energy and environment are on a collision course, says William D. Ruckelshaus, head of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, “because all available fuels we have in vast quantities to produce the energy we need have an environmental negative” (current issue, Ecology Today).

What this means is that unless there is a drastic reversal of present trends, it is only a question of time until pollution becomes a major factor in our mortality rate. A new study, The Limits to Growth (Potomac Associates), based upon a computer study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, predicts complete social collapse within 100 years unless population and production are curtailed. The study uses a mathematical model of relationships between the factors upon which humanity depends to show that the end may be in sight. The experts say we need to establish a “global equilibrium.” This, they say, will require “a Copernican revolution of the mind,” the will for which has yet to be generated.

Unfortunately, many people still do not even grasp the gravity of the problem. A number of scholars scoff at the MIT study. Others question whether computers can be trusted when it comes to such dire predictions. Sometimes random samplings are more convincing—like the one that showed that the Potomac River, which produces drinking water for the nation’s capital, contains such a high percentage of coliform organisms that one cup is equivalent to half a gram of human feces.

Christians have the responsibility not only of doing much to make the public aware of how bad things are but also of showing that exploitation of resources is sinful. We must admit that even we who claim to love God have been poor stewards of his creation. Our demands, our abuses, and our neglect and indifference have contributed to today’s ecological problems.

We who believe in original sin can more readily acknowledge our guilt than others. Moderns have come to recognize the fact of evil, but they are reluctant to pinpoint it. The tendency is to depersonalize the problem-solving process, to ascribe evils not to individuals but to a system, such as capitalism or Christianity. Or to a principle such as ignorance or misunderstanding. Or simply to “defects” that further research and understanding will correct. This approach leads people to place an inordinate emphasis on how much can be achieved through collective regulation. Our politicians are given orders on which they cannot possibly deliver. The complexities are so great that no one can be sure which restrictions deserve the most priority, or even which should be established. The current debate over phosphates is a case in point. There is no convincing argument as to what should be outlawed.

To be sure, some corporate measures are necessary, and a conference on the human environment scheduled for Stockholm later this year may help to clear the way for them. But these measures need to be built upon greater awareness of our sinful bent. Our biggest pollution problem is the selfish attitude of human beings, and this is where combat should begin. We first need the will and the determination to see that God’s green earth is preserved. This was in effect what the MIT study said when it cited “two missing ingredients,” namely “a realistic long-term goal that can guide mankind to the equilibrium society and the human will to achieve that goal.”

What is particularly lacking is individual initiative. Some months ago Chrysler sent its dealers a supply of 15,000 kits that when installed on cars would significantly reduce emissions. A company official reported that although the devices cost only about $20 each, only about fifty had been sold and 13,000 had been sent back by the dealers.

Until relatively recent times, the main problem of the human race was survival in the face of untamed nature that threatened on every hand. This problem has been licked, but the very instruments that made possible the taming of nature are now a threat to human existence. The latter jam looks far worse than the first.

Human nature probably always needs a challenge. In earlier centuries man’s struggle for survival served to work off aggression. People might have killed one another off had they not been forced to work together in order to exist. Similarly, the environmental crisis may in God’s grace be used by his Spirit to restrain evil in the world.

Surely we need to mobilize all available human power to achieve an ecological turnabout. The more we squander on selfish pursuits, the more trouble we will bring on ourselves. That is why, in short, our task is to reclaim the human will.

Individual and collective sacrifice is at the heart of the matter. There are undoubtedly many parallels in nature itself worth considering, especially in spring, when the landscape comes alive. The bristlecone pine, believed to be the oldest known living thing, is a case in point. Experts put the age of specimens growing in the White Mountains of east-central California at 4,000 years. And they say that trees owe their great age in part to their ability to allow some of the tree to die so that a small part may live on in equilibrium with its harsh environment. Human beings may yet be obliged to take a cue from the bristlecone pines by getting along with less and taking fewer liberties.

Christ himself showed this principle in his death and Resurrection. He had the will to sacrifice himself so that we could live. That sacrifice was made once for all, but God’s creatures must show a similar spirit if what we call cultural progress is going to be possible. In order to live we may have to be willing to die.

This sacrifice may eventually be legislated, through trial and error and amid the prolonged turmoil that accompanies every major restriction of human activity. The Christian community could be the catalyst in the process. Even better, it could make at least some of the process unnecessary, by undertaking to educate its own constituency about its stewardship responsibility toward the environmental resources God has entrusted to us. What an example the churches could be in creating a new will in men! This might sound like a utopian dream, were it not that in the past Christianity has been the greatest motivating force the world has ever known.

Church In The Looking Glass

The first book designed specifically to prepare the Christian community for Key 73 is not what you might expect. Who in the World?, published by Eerdmans, is not a manual on evangelistic method or a spirited plea to get busy. It is rather a collection of papers that seek to “hold up the mirror of the Bible to the church.” The papers grew out of a conference called by the Christian Reformed Home Missions Board in a bold effort to determine whether today’s Church is like the New Testament Church. The reader is left with the challenge of deciding what therapy might be necessary.

The editors of the volume, Clifford Christians, Earl J. Schipper, and Wesley Smedes, are right in seeing collective re-examination as a prerequisite to hoped-for spiritual awakening in 1973. Most commentators on revival note that the evangelistic phase is always preceded by Christians’ getting their personal relationships with God straightened out. That is indeed the place to start. Equally necessary, however, is the conscientious evaluation of how current Christian togetherness stacks up in the light of God’s word.

The Wisdom Of The Wise

In one of his debates with Pharisees and scribes, Jesus called his opponents hypocrites and hurled against them the words of Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Matt. 15:7, 8; Isa. 29:13). If we turn to the context in Isaiah, we read the consequences of hypocritical, merely traditional reverence for God:

“Therefore, behold, I will once again deal marvelously with this people, wondrously marvelous; and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the discernment of their discerning men shall be concealed.”

Failure to be sincere in the spiritual realm has consequences in the temporal world of affairs: wise men make stupid decisions, counselors give bad counsel, even the supposedly prudent are unable to discern what is taking place under their very noses.

The late President Eisenhower was one of the more outspokenly religious men to occupy the White House. Under his influence, a number of symbolic gestures honoring God were made: the words “under God” were introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance, and the motto “In God We Trust,” which previously appeared only on coins, was added to United States banknotes as well. President Kennedy also was regarded as a religious man, and frequently took counsel with leaders of his own and other churches. Without casting aspersions on the sincerity of either of these men in his personal faith, we may legitimately wonder whether the increasing official prominence given to God did not cover a mass of religious indifference and moral hypocrisy at various levels of government, as well as of public and private life.

It was President Kennedy who so clearly and hopefully turned to the intellectual elite to fill his appointive offices and to guide the destinies of the nation. Yet the history of American foreign and domestic policies continued to be a melancholy record of misunderstood altruism, bungling Machiavellianism, and apparently abysmal ignorance of or indifference to the legitimate aspirations and feelings of both allies and rivals. Whatever we think about whether the United States should have become involved in Viet Nam, any historian would have a very hard time indeed finding another example in history of a great nation that has so consistently and irremediably bungled a military operation for so long a time. Whatever goals we had in Viet Nam, legitimate or not, it is hard to imagine a worse way to achieve them—unless we think our goals were to destroy America’s honor and reputation abroad and to poison her civic life at home.

Countless other examples could be cited from foreign as well as domestic policy to show that the warning that “the wisdom of their wise men shall perish” has been fulfilled. Even simple problems seem insoluble, and the most ambitious and well-planned projects produce disillusionment and failure. Faced with failure abroad, as in Viet Nam, we tend to cry, “Withdraw!” Faced with it at home, we urge, “Spend more!” Practical proposals these are, perhaps wise and even necessary ones. But the greater question remains: Can we trust our own wisdom, either individually or collectively, when the heart is far from God?

The answer the Bible gives is clearly no, and the answer of history, as we are living it daily, is equally clearly no. It is well to deal wisely with problems, but it is better to remember that the Lord demands something more of us as a people than mere hypocritical gestures in his direction: to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with him (Mic. 6:8). Otherwise our wisest men will search in vain for solutions, and will remain unable to discern good from evil.

The Nae At Thirty

Thirty years after its founding in St. Louis, the National Association of Evangelicals is returning to the same city for its annual meeting April 11–13. The NAE began in wartime, in part out of response to the pressure theological liberals were bringing upon government to inhibit evangelical chaplains, radio programs, and missionaries. Over the years other cooperative agencies have emerged to deal with such matters as Sunday schools, grade schools, overseas relief, and public affairs. The NAE has made an important contribution toward maintaining the religious freedom we have in this country and increasing fellowship and effectiveness among evangelicals.

Yet only a glance backward should be indulged, because there is still so much to be done to promote needed cooperation. The NAE was the first significant group to draw together Christians of the Mennonite movement, the holiness movement, the Pentecostal movement which had emerged in large part from it (not without strain), and the fundamentalist movement, which, as the term was then used, applied almost solely to those of baptistic and Calvinistic background, many of whom had become premillennial. But many evangelicals from these traditions still are unrelated to the NAE, and only beginnings have been made in attracting brethren from Lutheranism and the Restoration movement (Christian Churches and Churches of Christ). Black and other minority-group evangelicals are also lamentably underrepresented.

Some major trans-denominational enterprises of the past thirty years that could have been arms of NAE are not. These include major city-wide televised evangelistic crusades, campus Christian fellowships, and associations of Bible colleges, periodicals, theologians, and Christians in the professions. One wonders why NAE involvement in the U. S. Congress on Evangelism and in planning for the forthcoming Key 73 was not greater.

As the NAE begins its fourth decade, the level of evangelical cooperation is certainly higher than it was thirty years ago. But if we are able to cooperate as much as we do, then what valid excuse is there for not cooperating still more? May the NAE, under God, serve an even greater role in the years ahead in leading the way to full obedience to our Lord’s command to manifest a unity that the unbelieving world can see.

Talent On Our Hands

The vast number of idle retirees in our midst must be counted an appalling waste of a major resource. Many persons among the 20 million classed as “aged” have great talent and knowledge. Yet they have been forced into retirement, a good many with little more to do than simply wait for death. While national productivity slips and social problems pile up, these people who have much help to offer are obliged to sit on the sidelines.

The Service Corps of Retired Executives, a government agency, is trying to tap the potential present among older people. It sets up contacts between proven managers who are willing to share their knowledge and operators of small businesses and service organizations who need advice. There are SCORE chapters in 169 communities.

This kind of voluntarism, with the government serving as catalyst instead of reagent in the social process, needs to be encouraged.

Talking About God

During the last several years, a number of books have been published dealing with the possibility of knowledge of God, and especially with the question whether religious language, “God talk,” means anything. Analytic philosophers, the descendants of logical positivists, have been telling us for several decades that religious language really tells us, not about God, but only about ourselves. Obviously, where this argument is accepted, it leaves the professional theologian with nothing to say. So it is not surprising that several theologians have recently applied themselves to answering this challenge.

Half a dozen books that have crossed our desk in the last few weeks endeavor to show that the analytic philosophers have overstated their case. Painstaking and complex arguments are brought forward to show that we cannot totally exclude, on the basis of logic alone, the possibility of saying meaningful things about God, simply because he is so different from the other topics of our conversation. So far so good. It is often helpful to have a learned work to cast into the teeth of a smug skeptic when he tells us that analytic philosophy entirely justifies his position and guarantees him against any unpleasant surprises in the hereafter.

But when we ask these authors, “If we can talk about God, then what can you tell us about him?,” most of these works turn out to be very disappointing. With one or two notable exceptions, the writers sedulously avoid discussing the historic Christian conviction that God himself has spoken truly and authoritatively in the Holy Scriptures. If the Bible does contain propositional, objective truth, then—since the Bible is clearly in human language—it seems a bit foolish to go on arguing indefinitely about whether human language can possibly be so used, instead of listening to what the Bible says.

Some of our philosophical and theological writers may object, fearing that if they begin seriously to discuss the idea that we have in Scripture true and meaningful human language about God, they will be banished to the fringe of academic respectability. Very well, then, let them keep silent about it. But let them choose another topic for their earnest lucubrations. For what could be sillier than to write a volume to prove in theory that it is possible to talk about God, and then to close one’s eyes to the fact?

Is Experience The Best Teacher?

“Try it, you’ll like it,” says the adman. One of the most overrated products to be found on the philosophical market today is experience. Opinion-makers package it alluringly and tout its priority in the quest for maturity. And the hard sell for experience is by no means limited to seltzer and cigars. Public-school policies in North America seem to be reflecting more zeal than ever for the old Deweyan thesis that education begins with experience.

We disagree that experience is invariably the best teacher. Experience can be deceptive or illuminating; there are no built-in criteria for its validity. Experience must be judged by better authority, which for the Christian means divinely revealed truth.

Even in the Church, emphasis on experience appears to be making a theologically unhealthy comeback. God forbid that we should lapse back into the obscurantist mentality in which authentic spirituality is equated with being charged up emotionally.

Spiritual “highs” have their place in the life of the believer. But they should be regarded as the by-product of obedience—and not an invariable by-product. The Church is not just for kicks. It has a very sober life-and-death mission.

True Spirituality

Christians waste a lot of time and energy trying to find some magic key that will open the door to a happily-ever-after life of full obedience to God. There is no such key. Nor is there such a door!

The present aspect of salvation, called sanctification in theological parlance, is in one sense unlike the past aspect, justification. When we received the Lord Jesus Christ as our Saviour, we were eternally justified, having been born again spiritually into the family of God. We do not have to be repeatedly born again any more than we have to be repeatedly born naturally.

Sanctification is different. It is not attained in this “once for all” manner. It is like the life we live once we are naturally born. We have to live moment by moment. We have to breathe, eat, and sleep repeatedly. We do not waste time trying to find some key to eating that will enable us to get all we need for a lifetime by taking some pill at a particular moment.

For many there is, to be sure, a time in their spiritual pilgrimage when they first come to see the biblical teaching on true spirituality, and this can often have effects like a second conversion—but only because they thereafter, moment by moment, live more or less in accordance with what the Bible says.

What does it say? A good summation is Colossians 2:6, “As you have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him.” In this sense sanctification is like justification: it is receiving by faith what God has for us and what he wants to do through us because of his grace. We are not saved by grace only to be turned loose to live the Christian life as best we can. Nor is there some experience or person besides Christ to whom we are to turn (the next verse emphasizes that we are to be rooted and built up in Christ). And true spirituality, as verse 6 says, is a walk. No matter how hard we try, we can walk in our natural lives only one step at a time; so it is for our spiritual lives.

What we have said is essentially the point of Francis Schaeffer’s latest book, True Spirituality (Tyndale, 180 pp., $3.95, $1.95 pb), which we highly commend. Schaeffer does not teach anything that has not been said before. But he does communicate biblical doctrine, especially as found in Paul’s letters, in a fresh way. He speaks to the intellectual climate confronting college students and graduates today, and many of his illustrations and terms will seem strange to those unfamiliar with this climate.

Unlike many writers on this subject, Schaeffer does not imply that we can be perfect even for one moment. He is well aware of the discouragement that misguided exhorters can engender in the one who is sensitive to the pervasiveness and depth of his sin.

Unfortunately, as is common to this kind of book, Schaeffer does not go beyond the general precepts to those specific principles that we desperately need to guide us in everyday decisions. We hope such a book follows, for today’s Christians surely need all the sound guidance they can get on how true spirituality translates into proper attitudes and behavior on such matters as school busing in America, nominally religious war in Ireland, bombing in Southeast Asia, turmoil in the Middle East, and materialism everywhere. In the last analysis no spirituality is truly biblical until it affects us in both the routine and the controversial aspects of day-by-day living.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.