Today is Earth Day – or as most evangelicals call it – Sunday.
Part of the baggage that was imported into evangelicalism through dispensationalism is a low view of creation. It’s going to burn anyway, so why care about the earth, right? Wrong… here’s an excerpt from An Evangelical Social Gospel? (a great Earth Day gift – btw), which alludes to our responsibility to care for the earth. Happy Earth Day!
“This relational view of the image of God finds great support within the early chapters of Genesis. Here we find God’s vision for human vocation. First, the Triune God says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion.” That’s how it starts. Humanity comes from the community of the God-head, and is endowed with some sort of privileged status over the rest of creation. Humans are to have a limited amount of power to rule creation as God’s representative creatures. Second, God says, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.” To be fruitful and multiply connotes a co-creative function. We’ve been created with the potential to be co-creators with God. We can make stuff. We can even make more people. It seems to be God’s desire that humanity should take this creative power everywhere we can go. We must fill the earth and bring it under our dominion. Third, we are told in the next chapter God has put humans in the garden “to till it and keep it.” Our vocation isn’t just to rule over creation, but to keep it and care for it. We are stewards of creation. We should work with the earth and help it to bear the fruit that sustains life. We should not exploit the earth and its resources, but we should protect it and be its keeper. According to Genesis our vocation as human beings is threefold: we are to be fruitful and multiply; we are to fill the earth and subdue it by exercising dominion over it; we are to till the earth and keep it. These three concepts constitute the seedbed for a biblical view of human vocation.”
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