A Rocha USA Blog

By Robert Campbell*, Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church

My children both got sick on the same night. One after the other, in about a 15 minute window. I really don’t like seeing my little one’s feeling bad. It breaks my heart. I sit there, trying to be of some comfort, when there is very little I can actually do to make it better. That is, except when they are both sick. When they both got sick, I got mad. They should have known that I was already tired that night after a long day of pastoral work. The world was a better place at 9 pm than it was at 9 am and those sick kids should have been more compassionate to their old Dad in honor of my good works. How dare they!

Of course I don’t get mad at them for their sickness, that would be ridiculous, bordering on the evil. But I don’t care about the sickness either. I care about my son and my daughter who picked up a virus and are now suffering the effects of it.

Obviously, I don’t mean that I don’t care about climate change. I most certainly do. And yet, climate change is simply the effects of the virus we are suffering. To cure a virus we must address the cause and not just the symptoms. You and I are the cause. So, rather than addressing symptoms, I am addressing you, the person whose actions are contributing to the effects of climate change and all manner of destructive impacts on our beautiful world. I care about your thinking that leads to those actions and, most importantly, I care about what you believe that enables your thinking that justifies your actions and has effects such as climate change.

Believing rightly about our world

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.” The Bible teaches that the entire universe is created by God. God alone is the uncreated creator of all things. He is distinct and independent from all of His creation. He was never created and depends upon no one for His beginning. Likewise, there is no one and nothing upon which He depends for His ongoing existence. If God had need, He would cease to be God. Do you see the implications of this for creation? If God is truly self-sufficient, the He created all things out of pure pleasure, not out of some lack in Himself. He is distinct, but certainly not disinterested. He is independent, but not uninvolved. God is distinct from both creation in general and from mankind in particular. So, while trees and oceans, snowy plovers and kangaroo rats are not equal to God, neither are men and women, boys and girls. All of us that make up this world are fellow creatures of God and under God.

Take the grove of coastal live oaks that populate the hillside near my home. How should I feel about them as one who believes in God who created all things? Maintaining a proper distinction between creator and creatures helps avoid two extremes. First, I can avoid the need to raise the tree to a semi-divine status in order to give it sufficient value to deserve respect. On the other hand, I am bound to that ancient forest as a fellow creature. God made those trees, just as God made me. The tree is good because it is a tree, not because it has use to me as a natural resource. In first honoring God as the creator of all things I also learn to honor His creation. Likewise, as I honor the oaks, I honor God.

“The Earth is the Lord’s and all it contains.” As the independent creator of all things God also owns all things. When He made it, He declared it to be VERY good, just like Himself. He also put into it a created purpose to bring about good and He intends that it will one day achieve that end in spite of the brokenness that we inflict on our world everyday. (The manner of that redemption is what Christians call the “good news.” God Himself enters in to His created world in order to take the brokenness and wrong seriously and to put the pieces back together, but that is a story for another day.) The point here is that God owns the world and retains the rights to it. All of our use, enjoyment and abuse are accountable to Him and the ends for which He created the world.

If that God owns all things, then I must bow before His ownership and seek to use the world towards His ends. Without this belief, I would be free to use the world for my own ends. I could see everything simply as a “natural resource.” But it is not a resource, it’s a tree and God owns it. It’s not “biomass,” its the flesh of a cow and God owns it. We may not take our identity from it as an “environmentalist” and we may not exploit it for our own ends. God owns the food we eat, the fuel we use to drive, and the water we bathe in. God owns it and intends that His goodness be communicated to the people around us by the way that we use it.

As you believe that God is distinct from all of creation, bowing to His ownership of all things, you will actually honor the tree as a fellow creature, just for being a tree. As you honor the tree you will honor God whose goodness is reflected in a tree much more than in a cathedral, you will find your place in the world…and you will immediately minimize the effects of climate change.

Click here to listen to the Part I- God is Owner podcast.

*Robert Campbell is Pastor of Santa Margarita Community Church, an Evangelical Free Church on the Central Coast of California. Part I, II and III of this series of essays comes from remarks delivered in the SLO A Rocha "Christian Ecology Series", March, April and May 2011 (TBA).