My recollections of the sixties are often poignant and painful—memories of protest songs and marches; of “liberation” from the establishment and its values; of a bloody, frustrating, no-win war; of naked Woodstock revelers; of unkempt, barefoot hippies storming the fences of nuclear power plants, and of radical college professors berating Christianity for bringing civilization to the eve of doomsday.

It was an agonizing time of soul-searching for the Church, and one of the important commentators of the time was Francis Schaeffer. Thousands of Christians pored over his books to discover the reason for unreason and to understand why Western civilization had come to such a state. At the end of the process, we all asked with Schaeffer, “How should we then live?” Much of what this philosopher/theologian said about the demise of Christianity in the West was quickly understood and accepted as the basis upon which a revitalized Church could once again make its message heard in a “post-Christian” world.

Curiously, however, one of Schaeffer’s books was overlooked or, perhaps more correctly, ignored as an aberration of an otherwise astute thinker: it was titled Pollution and the Death of Man (published in 1970 by Tyndale House). The book title and the cover itself likely added to its lack of popularity: a photograph of a skull on a pile of dirt. Were not the rants of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden enough? Did we really need another negative message to add to our burden of bad news? We had ministries to run and families to raise; how could we be expected to be enthusiastic about another message of impending disaster—this time from the environment?

Those who took the time to read Pollution and the Death of Man discovered, however, that its message was not just another commentary on the decline of Christianity, but it was a challenge to the Church to apply biblical principles to the world’s environmental crises. It’s subtitle reflected that: A Christian View of Ecology. Sadly, the book was published some thirty years too soon, for only since about the turn of the century have a significant number of believers come to the point where we are willing to examine the premises of the book—some of which now appear to be prophetic.

Because conservative Christianity readily attached itself to the economics of progress and prosperity and a virtually unregulated free market, and because many of those of a Dispensationalist stance [my own background] believed God is going destroy this earth utterly, it was felt by many that Christians might just as well ignore the earth’s physical condition and concentrate instead on saving souls and ushering them to Glory, as the hymn says, “on flowery beds of ease.” Others appeared to feel that since Jesus was going to return in a few years and fix things, there was little need for us to do anything.

Jesus never intended the promise of His future return to be an excuse for ignoring our present responsibilities.

Well, Jesus did not return in the seventies, nor in the eighties or nineties. And, in part because of the Church’s failure to apply the scriptural principle of stewardship to our use of the earth’s resources, the world’s environmental problems have compounded. We have had to relearn this important lesson: Jesus never intended the promise of His future return to be an excuse for ignoring our present responsibilities.

Should the Church remain indifferent to the social and environmental consequences of a worldwide free-market economy unchecked by the Christian principles of justice, compassion, equity, charity, and stewardship? Freedom, capitalism, and democracy did not make America great; it was those factors tied to biblical principles—the decline of which is now devastating our economy and our environment.

I believe we must all come to recognize what the Christian farmer/philosopher Wendell Berry articulates so well:

Charity cannot be just human. . . . Once begun, wherever it begins, it cannot stop until it includes all Creation, for all creatures are parts of a whole upon which each is dependent, and it is a contradiction to love your neighbor and despise the great inheritance on which this life depends. . . . The divine mandate to use the world justly and charitably, then, defines every person’s moral predicament as that of a steward. But this predicament is hopeless and meaningless unless it produces an appropriate discipline: stewardship. . . . Is there not, in Christian ethics, an implied requirement of practical separation from a destructive and wasteful economy?

See you outdoors!

Dean