This is an edited excerpt of the 2013 Tinsley Annual Public Lecture. 

My journey to being an aspiring eco-missiologist is a long one, and has gone through four stages. Firstly, from a young age I developed a growing awareness of and delight in the natural world, spawned by natural curiosity, education and the right sort of television. A second important stage was a growing awareness of our impact upon the natural world, which has been ongoing with the emergence in the popular mind over the past few years of an awareness of climate change/global warming. This represents the beginning of what Pope John Paul II called an ecological conversion. Yet because humans are meant to minister rather than exercise absolute lordship over creation, ecological conversion can only occur properly after conversion to faith in the Lord Jesus. What seems to be missing in the experience of many Christians is the fourth stage: recognition of our connectedness to the rest of creation and our responsibility as God’s image. This is the subject of eco-missiology and the theme of this talk.

Traditional evangelical theology has had difficulty in accommodating an eco-missiology given its views of salvation. Leon Morris identifies euangelion as a Pauline word meaning ‘the news of what God has done in Christ for man’s salvation’. Langmead observes that many Christians hold a rather apocalyptic and dualistic view where we are saved from and not with the creation; the emphasis is on going to heaven when we die, being raptured and the earth burned up. He suggests that this is due to an overemphasis on divine transcendence and Christ’s atoning work, as opposed to divine immanence and Christ as creator.

Meanwhile, we have entered into a post-Christendom phase of history in the West, one which Tom Wright describes as a pagan world much resembling the first century. Christianity stands accused of being anthropocentric and the cause of environmental abuse in the West. My own dialogue with some deep ecologists has typically been aggressive and dismissive of Christianity. Even in the academy, some theologians want to sideline or even ignore ‘grey texts’ like Genesis 1:26–28.

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Jesus

Many years ago I heard a debate at Monash University between ethicist Peter Singer and a pastor. Singer maintained that Christianity was not a useful basis for environmental ethics because Jesus cursed a fig tree to wither and die, and caused the death of a herd of swine. If we go looking for a ‘thou shalt plant trees’ command from Jesus, we will be disappointed. Instead, we need to understand where Jesus saw himself with regards to God’s unfolding narrative.

When Jesus proclaimed the gospel, what did he mean? Was it inclusive of eco-mission? Euangelion is found in the Greek Old Testament in passages such as Isaiah 40:9 and 52. In Isaiah 40, the heralding of the good news is proclaiming the forgiveness of sins (vv.1, 9), the coming of God (vv.3–5), and the gathering in of his flock, Israel (vv.10–11), i.e., the return from exile. Israel’s exile was the result of breaking the covenant with Israel’s God (Deut 28:63–68) by committing idolatry. Isaiah therefore reaffirms the superiority of the God of Israel over pagan idols (v12ff, especially vv18–20).

Hence, euangelion carried with it a world of meaning: God’s forgiveness, end of exile and political oppression, and the blessing of Israel’s God. Paul’s contention is that the salvific promises made to Israel are fulfilled in the gospel of Jesus. To suggest that Jesus (Mark 1:14–15) or Paul (Rom 1) somehow ‘spiritualise’ the word euangelion, emptying it of all political meaning, beggars belief. The contemporary secular usage is illuminating: ‘… a savior for us and those who come after us, to make war to cease, to create order everywhere …; the birthday of the god [Augustus] was the beginning for the world of the glad tidings that have come to men through him …’ [1. Wright, What St Paul Really Said. Emphasis added.

The value of this broader view of the gospel for eco-mission is firstly that people are not saved from the earth but expect to be renewed with the earth: God’s people in God’s place. Any well-thought-out resurrection theology should also make this clear. Secondly, the gospel challenges all empires, and empires tend to be inherently destructive of the environment, be they Rome or profit-driven, multinational, petroleum companies.

It is this view of the cross that makes it easier to affirm with Paul that Christ reconciles all things to himself (Col 1:20; Eph 1:10) through that suffering love, and was we shall see below, for us to suffer with creation for its redemption.

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Eco-praxis

Eco-praxis is eco-missiology in practice; action informed and shaped by the holistic narrative described above, dealing with the questions it raises and the symbols that define an eco-missiologically oriented community. So what sorts of things might this involve?

The sharing of the gospel is to be incarnational and contextual. Although the present environmental crisis requires us to rediscover the ‘deep green ecology’ of Scripture, there has always been a green subculture that requires us to be incarnational in our mission, i.e., the credibility of our witness comes not from the strength of our convictions or the thickness of our narrative alone, but from the dirt under our fingernails.

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Questions and challenges

The challenges to praxis will be to learn how to leave the four walls of our churches to embrace soil and community. Will we be willing to move church services from inside the buildings to Clean Up Australia activities, to invite others into our open spaces to till and toil, giving up some of our autonomy to the wishes of others? Are we willing to chain ourselves to trains or trees in the service of the gospel, to take up the plight of the bleating and mooing who suffer? Just as Christ surrendered his hands to nails, will we surrender ours to the soil in order to bring healing? Will we groan with creation until he returns?

Dr Mick Pope is the coordinator for Ethos: EA Centre for Christianity and Society, an environmental think-tank. He has a PhD in meteorology from Monash University and is currently enrolled in a Masters in Theology. He blogs at http://www.ethos-environment.blogspot.com

The 2013 Tinsley Lecture is presented by the Tinsley Institute, Morling College, and Global InterAction, published with permission. You can download the full transcript of the lecture by clicking here.

Top image from adotmanda on flickr, used under a CC license.
Bottom image from mightyboybrian on flickr, used under a CC license.