Pollution and the Death of Man

This book, by Francis Schaeffer (and with a final chapter by Udo Middelmann)* is a fairly short and readable but still very academically potent exploration of how well-exposited biblical theology can shine new and profound light of insight into the ecological crisis faced by contemporary society. I feel this blog has already delved so thoroughly into both aspects of this intersection in topics, and so this post will mostly be hyperlinked so as to maintain some degree of brevity.**

   The book places the ecological crisis into context of Christian narratives of creation, fall and redemption, and seeks to draw on scientific understanding as the powerful force that it is for explaining how things in the world work. Pantheistic naturalism and materialistic atheism are both dealt with in Schaeffer's typical aptitude for negotiating philosophical complexities, and the picture worked towards here is a hopeful and proactive one, in which people who do give a shit about our planetly home (a broad category that hopefully includes Christians, and this is gracefully increasingly becoming the case as a mainstream norm, at least in the egalitarian-liberal echo chambers I'm part of, but in churches these are never as potent in their constrictive insidious-ideological force as they are in secular activism, or further afield) try to become part of the solution;*** especially since during the reign of Christendom the church's capacity to exist as a counter-cultural alternative community which spoke truth to power was blunted by its proximity to those same powers - and even cursory surveys of historical developments of social and moral norms reveal that the Western established church does indeed have a lot to answer for in terms of helping construct and maintain a relationship between human society and the rest of the natural world which has been anything but shalom. Fortunately, the church is not a static entity, and as the vast ripples of the reformation continue to break in the rock pools of newly-changing contexts (which bring with them new challenges to the world demanding gospel-grounded responses from the church) there is always hope.

   This is a must-read for Christians with an ecological conscience so that we may better advocate the significance of stewardship to those of our brothers and sisters who 'just don't get it' yet. It would probably also be a very interesting read for people of other (or no) faiths who share these concerns about nature - as there is an unshakeable spirituality to biology, and even perspectives whose foundations you disagree with may prove to be illuminating or thought-provoking in ways you cannot foresee. Or - even if you're the hardest-cored atheist - this would be a fantastic source of ammunition for asking the kind of questions that will really make your well-meaning Christian acquaintances squirm.

* And a pair of appendix essays; The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis by Lynn White Jr. and Why Worry About Nature? by Richard Means - both of which add wholesomely and enrichingly to the discussion sketched out above.

** If you really want to know, I'm two months behind on this blog, and so am catching up with posts on a large stack of books most of which I found extremely interesting and quite relevant (some very) to my aggregate interests and attempted understandings, which is why lots of these posts are quite short, if still trying to capture with accurate sincerity my actual personal responses to each.

*** I use this term in a broad sense: the church is God's chosen vehicle of participatory work for the reconciliation of humanity and our world to His will, but by no means can or should we fully expect justice, social or ecological or otherwise, to be achievable by any other than divine means - and since to speculate as to the nature of this process is by definition to think eschatologically, there must be a degree of humility there, and clear recognition that we cannot discern the details of God's plans.
   However, we can from our understanding of His intentions and character form clear directions and intentionalities for human action - something only touched on in this book as it deals mostly with the core outline of how the issue and Scripture intersect, but fortunately there is a wealth of other books and resources about ways in which this can go further. I'm particularly excited by the growing vocality of the church in opposing exploitative and unsustainable (not to say idolatrous) tendencies implicit in the capitalist system; hopefully popular consciousness of this will extend to critique the whole ideological justifications for this economic model, and open space for imagination of grace-based forms of organisation which are far more conducive to global equality and sustainability.