Introduction

This book has one main purpose: to explore in a logical manner all that the Bible has to say about our human responsibility to care for God’s Creation, from Genesis to Revelation. Over the past decade or two there have been some excellent books written on the subject. I have listed those I have read and found helpful, at the end of this book. I have sought to take those points I consider most significant from each and put them in a logical order, allowing the Bible to provide the framework and speak for itself as much as possible. Where I have used several quotes from the one author, I have put the title of the book only in the first instance. The survival and wellbeing of the human race provides a most compelling reason for facing this issue today. However, regardless of this, it is the revelation of Scripture, what God himself thinks about his creation, that should provide the most compelling reason of all, for Christians to be concerned about it.

Before launching into this main theme of what the Bible has to say on the subject, I have thought it would be helpful to give five introductory chapters summarising the growing crisis; causes that have led us into it, the modern environmental movement and the positive and negative influences of Christianity. Although of necessity sketchy, this will provide a background, before starting on the biblical material. Some of the books listed at the end deal more fully with these issues for those who want more.

It took a number of years for the early Christians’ vision to be enlarged enough to fully include the Gentiles. It took about four hundred years for the church to sort out what the New Testament was saying about the trinitarian nature of God. It took a further eleven hundred years to clearly spell out justification by faith alone. It took another four hundred years to come to terms with the priesthood of the laity, and the gifts and ministry of the Spirit. Over the last fifty years the church has begun to take more seriously what the Bible tells us about creation. Though it has been forced upon us by the events of the last few decades, let us make sure we listen carefully to all that God is saying. As Aquinas put succinctly, “Any error about creation also leads to an error about God.”

Ian Bradley said well, twenty years ago, in God is Green: Ecology for Christians:

What we need is not, as is so often argued…a new theology of nature but rather a return to the original message contained in the Bible and preached and practised by the early Church…

Greening Christianity does not involve a grafting on to it some alien philosophy but simply restoring its original character. Indeed, it means stripping off a whole series of alien layers that have accumulated to reveal the original greenness of the Garden of Eden and the cross on Calvary.