Jesus is Lord of the environment

TROWEL & SWORD

Editorial paragraphs

Rev. John Westendorp

Mention environmental concerns and certain images immediately spring to mind: Greenpeace boats harassing Japanese whaling trawlers; woodchip loggers in our forests confronted by protesters; activists chaining themselves to bulldozers to prevent yet another piece of greenbelt being turned into commercial development.

Concerns about the environment run deep and cover many areas of life: smog in our major cities; the growing hole in the ozone layer; pollution; global warming; the extinction of species; population pressures and the finiteness of earth’s resources.

Trowel & Sword has not devoted many pages to these kinds of issues in recent years. One reason for that is that the issues are often very complex and Christians have sometimes worn ‘egg on their face’ by coming up with simplistic answers. Another reason is that within our small churches we have few who have the expertise to speak with authority on big picture issues such as global warming.

Yet having said that, we as Reformed Christians also oppose the pietistic attitude that says: This old world is going to be destroyed anyway, so our job is only to snatch souls out of hell before the final conflagration that ushers in the new heaven and the new earth. According to this view Christians have no business to be involved in ecological issues, just as we have no business to be involved in politics. All those things are then considered as “worldly”.

Instead we have always insisted that there is not a square centimetre of the universe of which Christ does not say, “This is mine!” But that means that if Jesus is Lord of all then He is also Lord of the rainforests and the whales, Lord of the atmosphere and the seas. That makes the environment very much a matter of concern to followers of Jesus. We are stewards of creation under Christ.

Furthermore, if it is our task to speak prophetically to our society and to our culture then we ought to speak out too against the forces that rape the environment and fail to honour the stewardly task over creation that God assigned to His image-bearers. That will not always be easy – the greed that exploits the environment is there in our own hearts. So as we call the world to live simply so that others can simply live, we will have to grapple with our own materialistic lifestyles.

Complexity

The complexity of environmental issues was brought home vividly in a recent episode of Sixty Minutes. A segment of the program was devoted to the Ebola virus – probably the deadliest and most contagious virus known to man.

The Ebola virus appeared on the scene rather recently and the big question is where it has come from. The most plausible answer seems to be that it has lain dormant in African jungles since creation. The host animals, that it lived in, had immunity to the virus so that it was not fatal for them. With deforestation due to population pressures many forest creatures increasingly moved into areas of human habitation thus transferring the virus to human victims who do not have immunity to it.

There is some evidence that in a similar way a fatal virus last year killed a Queensland horse-trainer. The virus is thought to have originated in Queensland rainforests and was brought into areas of human habitation by bats that had been driven into suburbia in search of food after the destruction of their original habitat.

So we have here a serious health problem that comes out of the complex mix of population growth, development and animal habitats. How do we juggle those competing interests?

Playing God?

Interestingly, the same episode of Sixty Minutes also brought out another environmental issue where the problem is not so much one of complexity. A major area of concern today is genetic modification (GM) of plants for food.

On the one hand GM has been with us for a long time. For years we have been able to buy, for example, GM corn seed that produced sweeter corn and larger cobs. The corn was a hybrid that was ‘created’ in a natural way by cross-pollination.

What is happening now though in GM foods, is not something that comes about as a result of cross-pollination but as a result of gene-splicing. For example a gene from a fish has been spliced into a tomato to produce a fruit that can stand the cold much better and that will last longer in your refrigerator.

Here a major concern is not only that the borders between the animal kingdom and vegetable kingdom are being blurred. The concern is also what may happen when the GM plants become cross-pollinated with other plants. In Canada there has already been an interesting case where a large company has taken a farmer to court because GM grain was found growing on his farm when the seed had not been bought from the company which owns the patent. He, in turn, is putting in a counterclaim that his corn has been contaminated by pollen from the GM grain on a neighbouring farm.

Perhaps the hardest thing to handle here is the arrogance that often accompanies human cleverness. The charge that many Christians make is that in these things man is playing God and that we have no right to interfere in the genetic make up of the species. Human arrogance is especially there in the idea that says that if something can be done it should be done.

While not condoning the pragmatism that argues that it’s all okay because we know how to do it, I do wonder whether in reality the matter may not be a little more complex. Maybe the arrogance lies elsewhere than in man playing God.

Long term issues

Part of the problem is that we do need to find creative ways of feeding an ever-growing world population. May we not also see then some genetic manipulation as part of what we call the ‘cultural mandate’ to subdue the earth?

An example of genetic manipulation on the above-mentioned program was that which had been done with salmon. Quite by accident the scientists had created a giant salmon that grew some five or six times heavier in the same time as an ordinary salmon. It was touted as a wonderful example of increased food production. Maybe!

The problem though is the long-term effects and that is where I am concerned about human arrogance. One of the people interviewed in the program said with confidence that he didn’t see any problems with GM grain because we’ve already had it for ten years. We need to be a little more careful and a little more humble. The difficulty is that we cannot always see the long-term ramifications of our ‘fiddling with creation’.

Some people thought that introducing the rabbit into the Australian environment would be a good thing and maybe even ten years later it was still seen as a good thing. No one would want to call that ‘playing God’. Yet, today, with the wisdom of hindsight we know that it was anything but a good move – but it’s too late and the damage has been done. My fear is that we are going to make other, bigger mistakes in the area of genetic manipulation. And when commercial gain drives the whole program we had better be even more careful.

It is because these matters are becoming increasingly common that we as Christians need to think hard and long about our attitude towards these things and not go along with the crowd that worships human cleverness. That’s also why in the coming months T&S plans to further address some of these matters.

We make a start this month. In our Meditation Albert Esselbrugge opens up the latest area of environmental concern – human genetic manipulation – and the fear that here too what can be done will be done. In our Kids’ Page Anne Groenenboom creates for our children an awareness that we are stewards of our environment. A third contribution comes from one of our younger readers. It is not often that your editor receives a contribution from our teenagers but that makes it all the more delightful when it does happen. Cathy Wilson is passionate about the environment and reminds us that we Christian can begin in our own backyards. We plan to follow up on these offerings with more contributions in the coming months.

Freedom of speech?

The Christian weekly paper, New Life, recently reported that during Macquarie University’s Orientation Week a group of students set up a stall to provide pregnancy support and to make available other pro-life information. However the group was asked to leave by security personnel. After insisting that they had legitimately booked the stall and paid for it they were reluctantly allowed to stay but under stringent conditions. They were not allowed to leave their stall area, nor were they allowed to hand out pamphlets. That was in stark contrast to other stallholders who could move about freely and who had no restrictions placed on them regarding the distribution of their literature. And not only literature either – at a stall next door people handed out free condoms.

What is troubling about this is first of all the intolerance that was demonstrated. This intolerance was not only shown by the Student Representative Council which tried to close the stall down. It was also evident in that overnight the vacant stall was vandalised – while all other stalls remained untouched. It seems that tolerance in our society is fine except when it comes to things Christian, including such matters as pro-life issues. So much for tolerance!

What is even more troubling is that this happened on a university campus. Universities have always prided themselves in being bastions of free speech. For this reason all sorts of radical groups have flourished on university campuses and student campus magazines constantly contain material that many find offensive. All of that is accepted but let young people speak up on pro-life issues and they are now persecuted. So much for free speech on our campuses of higher education!

Yet another aspect that is troubling about this is that the opponents to the pro-life stall label themselves as ‘pro-choice’. But that effectively now means only the choice to have an abortion it seems because these pro-choice folk will not allow their fellow students to even consider the alternatives. Students were effectively prevented from learning the range of support networks that are available to women who face unplanned pregnancies. Choice is not really choice when one is kept from knowing the choices available. So much for pro-choice!

Children at risk

I was amazed to read recently that here in New South Wales alone, we had 8,517 children last year living away from their homes – twice as many as eight years ago and a ten percent rise in the last twelve months. Last year more than 5,100 children entered care for periods ranging from a few days to their entire adolescence. If these are the figures for NSW alone what are the statistics for our entire nation?

The children in question have been either removed from their parents or deserted by their parents. Most are under the care of the NSW Department of Community Services (DOCS). The statistics also indicated that more children in care are remaining in care for longer periods of time.

The frightening part of the report from which these figures are taken is not just the statistics. Evidence is given that the longer these children are in care the more difficult it become for them to be integrated back into their own communities and the risk escalates of them becoming trapped in the juvenile justice system. Furthermore DOCS is now dealing with families into their third generation of abuse and neglect.

These statistics are a sad reflection of the dysfunctional nature of our society. In many instances these children have been removed from an environment of drug and alcohol addiction, violence and chronic unemployment. Often the background is a marriage break-up followed by remarriage with the children not being accepted by the new stepparent.

The only good news in the report is that nearly half of the children were able to be placed with relatives. However, the down side of that is that in such situations DOCS is able to do little monitoring in comparison with those who go into foster care, so that it is not always certain that children have been removed far enough from their abusers.

Is there anything we as Christians can do apart from throwing up our hands in horror at these statistics? Yes! We have the answer to the sin that causes such a dysfunctional society in the first place and we need to be salt and light also in these dark corners of our communities. We can do that by getting alongside dysfunctional families. More Christian young people might also train as social workers and became involved with agencies like DOCS. And what about fostering children who can no longer be at home? Recently we again had appeals for foster families from DOCS but I wonder how many Christian couples responded?

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