Why Christians Must Care About the Environment

Exploring the issue from Scripture & the life of St. Francis

The Path to the Cross. Taken in the Alps near Salzburg, Austria (Credit: Mine).

This is the first post of The Good Steward, a blog to provide a Christian unpacking of how to be good stewards of our environment through the help of such prophetic Christian imaginings as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and others. This blog will provide you with a touch of literary analysis, a touch of political commentary, and a lot of discussion around stewardship and the environment. I hope you’ll stick around and read more as it gets posted! To learn more about me, see this introductory post.

Before I dig into some of the meatier questions that inspired me to start this blog, it seems only proper to begin with some of the basic questions, like “Why Christians must care about the environment?”

While the principle of care for creation is not an item that gets much press in Christian circles (particularly when it comes to conservative Christians), it is implicitly present in scripture, and for Catholics (like me), it is one of the seven core themes of Catholic Social Teaching.

The short and quick answers are threefold, and we will unpack two of them this week, and the final one next week. First, because Scripture tells us caring for creation is part of what it means to embody the Imago Dei. Second, because great saints show us how a life apart from caring for creation is a life that fails to truly love what God loves. Lastly, recent popes and many other Christian figures have provided a prophetic witness to how the harm we cause our environment is a symptom of a much larger problem that is spiritual in nature and calls each of us to conversion in the way in which we relate to God, others, and the environment, but we will examine this next week.

“God saw that it was good”: Scripture and Creation

Biblically, our fundamental posture towards the environment ought to be one of recognizing everything on Earth as a good gift from God, since the opening chapter of Genesis gives us the refrain after each new act of creation that “God saw that it was good” (Gen. 1:4,10,12, 18, 21, 25). The intrinsic goodness of every aspect of creation, from the Sun and Moon, to the smallest animal that crawls on the ground, should dictate how we interpret the dominion given to mankind described in Genesis 1:26: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

When we recognize this dominion is related to our being made in God’s image, we see that this is a dominion given to representatives of God on Earth who is supposed to rule over it with wisdom. This is the same God who declared all things to be good, which leads one to recognize that this should be a respectful stewardship over the creation which God has given us, since everything in Heaven and on Earth ultimately belongs to God (Deut. 10:14).

Man’s dominion should be carefully exercised so as to help creation reach its fullness in a cooperative way that happens between God and Man. We see in Genesis that the Earth is unable to properly flourish since: “…the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground” (Gen. 2:5b). When man’s stewardship is joined to God’s grace that causes the grounds to be watered, then the Garden of Eden was filled with “…every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:9).

Just as in Eden, man’s cooperation was needed to help creation reach its fullness, we also see that man’s redemption through Christ’s death and resurrection also involves creation. For, just as creation was harmed by original sin, so all of creation is being caught up in the renewal of all things: “for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.” (Rom. 8:20-21). This leads us to the startling realization that all the things of this world are being renewed through Christ’s resurrection. In the New Heavens and the New Earth, creation itself will be transformed and glorified, so that — God willing — we will see all things as they were always meant to be, as they were in the garden of Eden (see Rev. 21 & 22).

From all this we see clear biblical principals: We are being called to live as image bearers of God and part of that is that we need to care for creation and respect it as something that is being renewed by God as well. Therefore, when we care for creation, we are cooperating with Our Lord’s desire that God’s Kingdom come on as “Earth as it is in Heaven” and provide evangelical witness to the world.

In the life of St. Francis

The Biblical principles described above are made incarnate in the lives of the saints, and on this point, we have no better example than St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals and ecologists.

Thomas of Celano, in his first of three early hagiographies of the great saint, described the excessive joy this view of nature gave St. Francis gained when he contemplated God in nature: “Who could tell the sweetness which he enjoyed in contemplating in His creatures the wisdom, power and goodness of the Creator? Truly such thoughts often filled him with wondrous and unspeakable joy as he beheld the sun, or raised his eyes to the moon, or gazed on the stars, and the firmament.” (First Life of St. Francis, Chapter 29). This affection for creation extended even to the smallest of all creatures, including worms: “Even for worms he [Francis] had a warm love, since he had read this text about the Savior: ‘I am a worm and not a man’. That is why he used to pick them up from the road and put them in a safe place so that they would not be crushed by the footsteps of passersby.” (First Life of St. Francis, Chapter 29).

When I first heard this story, for about four years I took care to try to remove any bug I found in my house and place it back outside where it was supposed to be, inspired by his example. This affected the way I viewed all creatures I came across, from squirrels and rabbits, to little bugs, because I more immediately intuited what I already knew logically, that God created and loved all things and therefore there is something lovely in them.

I told my wife (who is a children’s minister) about St. Francis’ love for worms and she wisely pointed out to me that this is exactly the kind of thing that small children do. Children are not consumed by hurry and rush as we are, consumed with concerns about time, efficiency & money. By exercising care for creation, St. Francis became more like a little child. Our Lord calls on us to imitate his example, for unless we change and become like little children, we will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 18:3).

St. Francis shows us how we can create a false dichotomy when discussing care for creation over and against caring for the poor or spiritual rigor. Few among the saints can be said to have cared more for the poor, lived a harsher life of asceticism, or tried harder to call people to repentance than St. Francis, yet he did not view it to be a waste of time to stop to move worms out of harm’s way. We should not view caring the environment as a waste of our time either.

Stewardship and the Meaning of Life

St. Athanasius famously wrote, “[God] became man so that we might be made god” (On the Incarnation of the Word, para. 54). In this short phrase lies the crux to the meaning of life. The divine Word of God took on a human nature, uniting humanity to the divine, and sanctifying the whole race. By becoming united to Christ through Baptism, our human nature is united to the divine nature of Christ, as well. From there we begin the long process of sanctification, so that we might become perfect as our father in heaven is perfect (Matt. 5:48). This process is often referred to in the East as theosis. In order for theosis to be complete, we need to allow God to complete a total conversion of every part of our being, so that we may become fully restored images of the One who made us.

We have seen from scripture and the life of St. Francis (who completed most of his theosis on Earth) that a part of our sanctification involves a conversion of our attitude towards nature. That we come to see God as reflected in it, and that we live in harmony with it. Care for creation is certainly not the main part. Our first call is to love God, and to love other persons, but to exercise a frequent dismissiveness of nature produces a bad spiritual habit, similar to the frequent dismissiveness of a person in need, which weighs us down and prevents us becoming what we were meant to be.

This, ultimately, is why Christians must care for the environment, for unless we develop a right relationship with nature, the relationship of a steward, we will fail to be transformed fully, and miss a small part of the call of God in our lives.

I hope you enjoyed this post of the Good Steward. Please let me know your thoughts by leaving me a comment, subscribe to be notified about future posts and please share this with anyone you think might appreciate this article!