Should Christians Be Concerned About Their Carbon Footprint?

I don’t know for sure.  Maybe you do.

One danger Christians face today is the tendency to approach scientific debates theologically.  I am not talking about the creation or flood debate.  Those events are clearly related in scripture.  I am talking about scientific issues that the Bible does not address.

Galileo and Copernicus were persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church for advocating a model of the solar system that was not geocentric. The Church had decided geocentrism was a biblical truth when it was not.

The environmental debate today can become a trap for us if we are not careful.  Evolutionists and pantheists of all varieties worship nature and promote environmental issues with religious fervor.  However, we have to be careful not to take opposite positions just because of their spiritual error.

It is better to build, from the ground up, a biblical theology of science and the environment than develop a reactionary theology to something we do not like or oppose in the secular world.

A biblical worldview provides a balanced view of environmental issues that neither secular side of the debate can. These are just a few clear biblical principles that apply.

This world is God’s garden, we are His gardeners.

The command to dress and keep the Garden in Genesis 2:15, along with the observation that there was not yet a man to till the ground in Genesis 2:5 indicates not only that the world belongs to God but also that God designed the world to be enhanced by human beings.

We have the capability of making this world a better place to live.  We also clearly have the ability to make this world nearly uninhabitable.  Since the 1950’s it has been fairly clear that humanity has developed the ability to make itself extinct.  It won’t do so because biblical prophecy says it won’t, but our capacity for self-destruction and environmental destruction is real.

We do not worship nature, we are stewards of it as obedient servants of a Holy God.  It is our responsibility to manage it for His glory.

When God created this world, it was good.

I find it interesting that secular environmentalism worships nature as if it has a wisdom of its own.  It is much easier to believe that the natural world reflects the wisdom of the Creator.  In considering how to manage God’s Garden, we would be wise to understand how God created it to function.

Joel Salatin, a farmer who has become somewhat of a social media sensation, has hippie-types flocking to learn from him because he espouses a type of farming that mimics the migrations of animals in the natural world.  He is not a hippie type though.  He is a Christian who has approached farming with the assumption that a wise God created the world to function in a workable and efficient way. He has simply applied a biblical worldview to farming in what seems to be a novel way.[i]

Christians are commanded to love their neighbors.

The second of the two great commands is at the heart of Christian ethics (Mark 12:31).  I do not clean up my campsite just because I want to maintain a good Christian testimony. If that were the only reason, I would be free to trash the place when no one is looking. Love compels me to leave a place clean and neat for my neighbor who will use it next.

My neighbor might be someone that I never meet.  In a sense, future generations are also my neighbor.  This is why trashing or destroying the planet (or stealing financially from future generations through government debt) is sinful.  It is disobedience to a direct command of scripture.

Christians must embrace the truth.

All truth is God’s truth.  Believers do not fear scientific facts. The politicized nature of the scientific community today suppresses the truth for the sake of social agendas. True believers must never do this.  We do interpret the truth in the light of divine revelation and we do not believe that natural truth and biblical truth are in conflict.

What we must not do is decide one scientific position is true and then use the scripture to enshrine it. This is not only a misuse of scripture, it eventually brings a reproach upon the cause of Christ.

So, should Christians be concerned about their carbon footprint?

Well, it depends.  The Bible does not address the scientific debate regarding global warming.  Shocking, I know.

If we are truly destroying the planet, absolutely we should be concerned.  We have an obligation to be good stewards of our world and to love the generations to come.  If that means behaving somewhat like environmentalists but for completely different reasons, so be it. However, we are also interested in truth, and Christians are justifiably suspicious of scientific data that seems to have more of a political than altruistic agenda.

We also need to be careful not to assume we are experts in scientific fields because we watched a few news stories or some Youtube videos. That kind of “gotcha” social media coverage is often far from accurate.  Proverbs tell us not to be “wise in our own eyes.” (Proverbs 3:7)

“Confirmation bias” is real and we are easily deceived because we so WANT something to be true. Scientific debate is good. Godly believers have been at the forefront of scientific debate throughout history, and many of our greatest scientific discoveries were made by believers or at least by people who had a theistic worldview.

I am not a scientist.  I do not know the answer to the global warming issue.  I do think I can recognize scientific suppression when I see it.

In the meantime, I am going to tune that carburetor on the old Ford F-100 because the exhaust stinks and I do not want to gag my neighbors.

 

 

[i] Joel’s brother Art was a missionary my home church supported when I was a child.