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

Check out this YouTube video. A great pre-Christmas message!

Click on the title below:

The Advent Conspiracy

Many thanks to Bob Rowe, Karen Crepin, and Gary Fawver for their great additions to the “Wonder Kids” page.  This kind of contribution makes it just what we want it to be: a community!

It’s our desire to see the “Wonder Kids” page become a sort of community for parents, grandparents, and other caregivers where there is a good deal of idea sharing.  We have added a response box at the bottom of the “Wonder Kids” page where you can suggest ways to help children learn about God’s creation and develop a biblical worldview regarding the care of creation.

Click on the “Wonder Kids” menu item at the top of this page, and when you get there, scroll down to the bottom to find the comments box where you can make these suggestions.

On the top of the “Articles” page is a new entry titled “The Lion, the Curse, and the Evangelical.”  If you want to give it a look, click on the “Articles” menu item at the top of this page.  It will be the first article preview you see.  At the end of the preview, click on the “Read More” link to get to the full article.

Here’s a snippet from the article:

Witnessing for Christ means not only sharing God’s salvation plan for man; it also means that we demonstrate renewed appreciation and care for the natural world that God will also restore, renew, and reunite.  Simply put, nature is also going to be “born again.”  Do we hold that joyous truth in our hearts as a motivation to cherish creation’s fellow worshipers who are also recipients of God’s attention and compassion?  If we saw the other living creatures as fellow worshipers of Christ the Creator, would our callousness toward them not diminish?

Yesterday, November 13, I put up a quiz on identifying conifer cones.  Check the previous post for the photo.

Here are the answers:

1.  Sugar pine. I collected this years ago in the foothills of Mt. Lassen, the southernmost volcano in the Cascade Range located in Northern California.  It is the largest pine and can be 200 feet tall.  It’s cone is the longest: up to 20 inches!  The name comes from its sweet pitch, which John Muir liked better than maple syrup.  John had lots of good opinions, but come on—better than maple syrup?  Sugar pine provides some of the finest knot-free lumber available, but it is declining rapidly because of a blister rust.  Sad.

2.  Ponderosa pine. I actually collected this here in West Michigan, where it is not a native tree.  It is one of the most common of Western pines.  If you’ve traveled in the West, you would have seen many of these with its distinct orangish bark with dark crevasses.  It too can grow taller than 200 feet.  It’s bark has a nice vanilla smell to it.

3.  White pine. I picked this one up in a nearby natural park.  And picking it up is not what you want to do unless you have something to wash off the pine pitch that collects on the tips of all its scales.  This collection of whitish pitch makes this cone easy to identify.  It is a relative of the sugar pine and that’s why it’s cones look similar.  This was the pine that built many of the original homes of the upper Midwest.  I’ve heard it said that enough Michigan white pine was cut into lumber in the late 1800’s that you could have floored both peninsulas of Michigan with it.  Our lumber barons, the elegant homes of whom are found all over this region, were terrible stewards of this resource.  Only after 100 years are they finally coming back—but are not yet a major source of timber in Michigan.  Only one percent of the original white pine forest is left.  In its prime, many white pines also topped 200 feet in height.

4.  Giant Sequoia. This one I gathered in the mountains above Hume Lake that rests between Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks.  Of course we know this one as the world’s largest tree.   If the shape of the cone looks familiar, it may be that you’ve chatted with a US National Park ranger in uniform.  The medallion on the ranger hatband is the sequoia cone.  And the familiar arrowhead arm patch has a sequoia tree on it.  The oldest sequoia is around 3500 years old.  Imagine the history that is included in that lifespan!

5.  Douglas fir. I picked this cone up on my way to work yesterday from a small grove not far from our RBC building.  It does okay in a few spots in the Midwest, but it is primarily a Western tree—the workhorse timber tree of the US.  It is the “cadillac of Christmas trees,” being the most common tree for that use.  Its prime trees can top 400 feet—the tallest one, cut for timber in 1902, was 415 feet tall.  The cone is easy to identify as well: it has three-forked “snake tongues” sticking out from under each scale.

6.  Coast Redwood. Surprised?  The smallest cone is from the tallest tree.  I picked this one up at a redwood seed farm on Whidbey Island in Washington—right across the road from the Pacific Rim campus of the Au Sable Institute (check out Au Sable in the links menu).  Actually, most of the tall redwoods now are around 360 feet, so a few Douglas firs can overtop them; but in numbers the redwood averages out as the tallest of our trees.  The oldest one known is about 2,200 years old.  The photo above shows how the redwood cones grow at the tips of the bough.

So how did you do with the quiz?

When you consider how small the seeds of these conifers are (the seeds found beneath the cone scales) and how big the trees are, you again have to be amazed at the wonder of God’s creation.

See you outdoors,

Dean

Iguazu Falls / Terry Bidgood 2008

I believe the key element in our recovering the lost theology of nature—a loss that is evident in our often insensitive and utilitarian approach to the natural world—is to recognize that the beauty of the created world is evidence of the Creator himself.  It’s significant that in the Genesis creation account the first fact mentioned about the trees of the garden was that they were “pleasing to the eye” (Gen. 2:9). Yes, they were “good for food,” but apparently what was most striking to Adam and Eve was their beauty.

"Falls of the Kaaterskill" Thomas Cole, 1826

John Muir believed that “everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”  The value of natural beauty to the human soul was what inspired the masterful landscape painter Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of painting.  With his paintings he wanted to put people back in touch with the Creator.  He hoped his paintings would give city-dwelling admirers a yearning for the outdoors where they too could discover what he had—that “in gazing on the pure creations of the Almighty, he feels a calm religious tone steal through his mind, and when he has turned to mingle [again] with his fellow men, the chords which have been struck in that sweet communion cease not to vibrate.” Maybe that’s why I admire Cole’s paintings and not Picasso’s.  If we saw something like a Picasso in nature, we’d know at once it did not come from God’s hands!  Beauty may be nature’s most profound apologist for God.

Here’s a part of his September 13 entry that might strike a responsive chord with some:

“My good friend Waugh has an infallible cure for political disgust: ‘Asters,’ says he, ‘are always delightful and interesting, but in a political campaign, they are indispensible.  When one is thoroughly disgusted reading political speeches, he can always go out and look at asters and feel better!’

That resonated with me—especially this year.  So I’ve spent a lot of time in the old orchard these past few weeks admiring and taking pictures of goldenrod, highbush cranberry, pokeweed. . . and asters—beautiful New England asters that grace the wild and abandoned places this time of year. 

Below is a bouquet of wild asters to inspire you to go out and take the cure!

See you outdoors,

Dean