chapter6: The Christian View:The “Pilot Plant”
S o we have seen that a truly Biblical Christianity has a real answer to the ecological crisis. It offers a balanced and healthy attitude to nature, arising from the truth of its creation by God. It offers the hope here and now of substantial healing in nature of some of the results of the Fall, arising from the truth of redemption in Christ. In each of the alienations arising from the Fall, Christians, individually and corporately, should consciously in practice be a healing redemptive factor—in the separation of man from God, of man from himself, of man from man, of man from nature, and of nature from nature.
A Christian-based science and technology should consciously try to see nature substantially healed, while waiting for the future complete healing at Christ’s return. In this chapter, we must ask how the Christian church, believing these truths, can apply them practically to the question of ecology.
For here is our calling. We must exhibit that on the basis of the work of Christ the church can achieve partially, but substantially, what the secular world wants and cannot get. The church ought to be a “pilot plant,” where men can see in our congregations and missions a substantial healing of all the divisions, the alienations which man’s rebellion has produced.
Let me explain that phrase “pilot plant.” When an industrial company is about to construct a big factory, they first of all make a pilot plant. This is to demonstrate that the full-scale plant will work. Now the church, I believe, ought to be a pilot plant in regard to the healing of man and himself, of man and man, and man and nature. Indeed, unless something like this happens, I do not believe the world will listen to what we have to say. For instance, in the area of nature, we ought to be exhibiting the very opposite of the situation I described earlier, where the pagans who had their wine stomps provided a beautiful setting for the Christians to look at, while the Christians provided something ugly for the pagans to see. That sort of situation should be reversed, or our words and our philosophy will, predictably, be ignored.
So the Christian church ought to be this “pilot plant,” through individual attitudes and the Christian community’s attitude, to exhibit that in this present life man can exercise dominion over nature without being destructive. Let me give two illustrations of what this might involve. The first is open-face or strip mining.
Why has strip mining usually turned the area where it has been used into desert? Why is the “Black Country” in England’s Midlands black? What has brought about the ugly destruction of the environment? There is one reason: man’s greed.
If the strip miners would take bulldozers and push back the topsoil, rip out the coal, then replace the topsoil, in ten years after the coal was removed there would be a green field, and in fifty years a forest. But as it has usually been practiced, for an added profit above what is reasonable in regard to nature, man turns these areas into deserts and then cries out that the topsoil is gone, grass will not grow, and there is no way to grow trees for hundreds of years!
It is always true that if you treat the land properly, you have to make two choices. The first is in the area of economics. It costs more money, at least at first, to treat the land well. For instance, in the case of the school I have mentioned, all they had to do to improve the place was to plant trees to shield the building they built. But it costs money to plant trees, and somebody decided that instead of planting trees they would prefer to do something else with the money. Of course, the school needs money for its important work; but there is a time when planting trees is an important work.
The second choice involved is that it usually takes longer to treat the land properly. These are the two factors that lead to the destruction of our environment: money and time—or to say it another way, greed and haste. The question is, or seems to be, are we going to have an immediate profit and an immediate saving of time, or are we going to do what we really should do as God’s children?
Apply this to strip mining. There is no reason why strip mining had to leave western Pennsylvania or eastern Kentucky in its present condition. Strip mines, as we have seen, do not have to be left this way; the top soil can be bulldozed back. What we, the Christian community, have to do is to refuse men the right to ravish our land, just as we refuse them the right to ravish our women; to insist that somebody accept a little less profit by not exploiting nature. And the first step is exhibiting the fact that as individual Christians and as Christian communities we ourselves do not ravish our fair sister for the sake of greed in one form or another.
We can see the same sort of thing happening in Switzerland. Here is a village up in the mountains. It has never had electricity. The people have managed well for a thousand years without electricity. Now suddenly “civilization” comes, and everybody knows that you cannot have “civilization” without electricity, so the decision is made to give the village electrical power.
This can be done in one of two ways. They can have their electricity in about three months: just chop off everything, tear the forest in pieces, run big, heavy wires over the whole thing, and create ugliness out of what was beautiful. Or they can wait a couple of years for their electricity; they can handle the cables and the forests with more care, hiding what they need to hide and considering the integrity of the environment, and end up with something infinitely preferable. They have their electricity and the village has its beauty, and the only cost is to add two years to the thousand years that they have been without electricity. There would be some economic factors here, but the largest one is that of sheer haste.
Happily, in Switzerland in the last few years in certain places more things are being done in this direction. For example, in our village all the telephone wires have been put under the ground. This has made a very different impression: one now sees an uncluttered village in the Alps. This is so, even if the person now arriving at the village for the first time did not know the contrast to what it was previously.
One can also think of the highways—the asphalt jungle in the United States. Think, if you will, of the way the bulldozers are often used across the Swiss mountains. Almost always the scars and the ugliness are the results of hurry. And whether it is hurry or greed, these things eat away at nature.
What can be done was shown in the highway built near Castle Chillon in Switzerland. Both care and money were taken in building a bridgelike construction, high, behind and away from the castle, and the beauty of the site was not destroyed.
As Christians we have to learn to say “Stop!” because after all, greed is destructive of nature at this point, and there is a time to take one’s time.
Now all this does not come about automatically. Science today treats man as less than man, and nature as less than nature. And the reason for this is that modern science has the wrong sense of origin; and having the wrong sense of origin, it has no category sufficient to treat nature as nature any more than it has to treat man as man.
Nevertheless, we who are Christians must be careful. We must confess that we missed our opportunity. We have spoken loudly against materialistic science, but we have done little to show that in practice we ourselves as Christians are not dominated by a technological orientation in regard either to man or nature. We should have been stressing and practicing for a long time that there is a basic reason why we should not do all that with our technology we can do. We have missed the opportunity to help man save his earth. Not only that, but in our generation we are losing an evangelistic opportunity because when modern people have a real sensitivity to nature, many of them turn to the pantheistic mentality. They have seen that most Christians simply do not care about nature as such.
So we have not only missed our opportunity to save the earth for man, but this also partly accounts for the fact that we have largely missed the opportunity of reaching the twentieth century. These are reasons why the church seems irrelevant and helpless in our generation. We are living in and practicing a sub-Christianity.
There is a parallel between man’s misuse of nature and man’s misuse of man. We can this in two areas.
First of all, let us think of the sex relationship. What is man’s attitude towards the girl? It is possible, and common in the modern setting, to have a “playboy” attitude, or rather a “plaything” attitude, where the “playmate” becomes the “plaything.” Here, the girl is no more than a sex object.
But what is the Christian view? Somebody may offer at this point the rather romantic notion, “You shouldn’t look for any pleasure for yourself; you should just look for the other person’s pleasure.” But that is not what the Bible says. We are to love our neighbor as ourselves. We have a right to pleasure, too. But what we do not have a right to do is to forget that the girl is a person and not an animal, or a plant, or a machine. We have the right to have our pleasure in a sexual relationship, but we have no right whatsoever to exploit a partner as a sex object.
There should be a conscious limitation upon our pleasure. We impose a limit—a self-imposed limit—in order to treat the wife fairly as a person. So although a husband could do more, he does not do everything he could do, because he must treat her also as a person and not just as a thing with no value. And if he does so treat her, eventually he loses, because love is gone, and all that is left is just a mechanical, chemical sexuality; humanity is lost as he treats her as less than human. Eventually not only her humanity is diminished, but his as well. In contrast, if he does less than he could do, eventually he has more, for he has a human relationship; he has love and not just a physical act. It is like the principle of the boomerang—it can come full circle and destroy the destroyer. And that is exactly what happens with nature. If we treat nature as having no intrinsic value, our own value is diminished.
A second parallel may be found with man in business. We have all kinds of idealists today who cry, “No profit! Down with the profit motive!” But men do not work this way. Even communism is learning the need to reinstate the profit motive. And certainly the Bible does not say that the profit motive is wrong.
But I am to treat the man I deal with in business as myself. I am to “love” him as my neighbor, and as myself. It is perfectly right that I should have some profit, but I must not get it by treating him (or exploiting him) as a consumer object. If I do this, eventually I shall destroy not him alone, but myself as well, because I shall have lowered the real value of myself.
So, just as the girl is not to be treated as a sex object but as a person, so again I must, if I am a businessman functioning on a Christian basis, realize I am dealing with another man made in the image of God, and I must impose some conscious limitation on myself. The Christian businessman will take profit, but he will not do everything he could do in exacting all the profit he could exact.
The Old Testament is very plain at this point: “If you take a man’s cloak for a collateral, be sure to give it back to him every night, because he might be cold at night” (Exodus 22:26). Again: “No man shall take a man’s life to pledge” (Deuteronomy 24:6). That shows a very different mentality from that which often marks Christian businessmen. It may be properly called the right of private property, but it is a very different kind of right of private property. It realizes that if we treat other men in business or in industry as machines, we make ourselves machines, because we are not more than they are. Indeed, if we make other men and ourselves machines in commercial relationships, gradually this will penetrate every area of life and the wonder of humanity will begin to disappear.
Thus again, the Christian does not do all he can do. He has a limiting principle; and in doing less, he has more, for his own humanness is at stake. A girl should not be treated as a sex object to be used simply for pleasure. A man should not be treated as a consumer object simply for bigger profit. In the area of sex, and in the area of business, to treat persons as they should be treated, on the basis of the creation of God, is not only right in itself but produces good results, because our own humanity begins to bloom.
In the area of nature it is exactly the same. If nature is only a meaningless particular, is “decreated,” to use Simone Weil’s evocative word, with no universal to give it meaning, then the wonder is gone from it. Unless there is a universal over the particulars, there is no meaning.
Jean-Paul Sartre picked this up: “If you have a finite point and it has no infinite reference point, then that finite point is absurd.” He was right, and unhappily that is where he himself was—an absurd particular in the midst of only absurd particulars.
So if nature and the things of nature are only a meaningless series of particulars in a decreated universe, with no universal to give them meaning, then nature is become absurd, the wonder is gone from it. And wonder is equally gone from me, because I too am a finite thing.
But Christians insist that we do have a universal. God is there! The personal-infinite God is the universal of all the particulars, because He created all the particulars; and in His verbalized, propositional communications in the Scripture He has given us categories within which to treat everything within His creation: man to man, man to nature, the whole lot.
Now both the thing that He has made and I, who am also made by Him, have wonder, awe, and real value. But we must remember that the value I consciously put on a thing will finally be my own value, for I too am finite. If I let the wonder go from the thing, soon the wonder will go from mankind and me. And this is where people live today. The wonder is all gone. Man sits in his autonomous, “decreated” world, where there are no universals and no wonder in nature. Indeed, in an arrogant and egoistic way, nature has been reduced to a “thing” for man to use or exploit.
And if modern man speaks of protecting the ecological balance of nature, it is only on the pragmatic level for man, with no basis for nature’s having any real value in itself. And thus man too is reduced another notch in value, and dehumanized technology takes another turn on the vise.
On the other hand, in the Christian view of things nature is restored. Suddenly the wonder returns.
But it is not enough merely as a matter of theory to believe that there is a real meaning in nature. The truth has to be practiced consciously. We have to begin to treat nature the way it should be treated.
We have seen in regard to the pleasure of sex, and in the making of profit in industry and business, that man must voluntarily limit himself. He must not be driven either for greed or haste to remove all the self-limitations. Or we can put it in another way: we must not allow ourselves individually, nor our technology, to do everything we or it can do.
The animal can make no conscious limitation. The cow eats the grass—it has no decision to make; it cannot do otherwise. Its only limitation is the mechanical limitation of its “cowness.” I who am made in the image of God can make a choice. I am able to do things to nature that I should not do. So I am to put a self-limitation on what is possible. The horror and ugliness of modern man in his technology and in his individual life is that he does everything he can do, without limitation. Everything he can do, he does. He kills the world, he kills mankind, and he kills himself.
I am a being made in the image of God. Having a rational-moral limitation, not everything man can do is right to do. Indeed, this is the problem all the way back to the Garden of Eden. From the point of view of body structure, Eve could eat the fruit; Adam could eat the fruit. But on the basis of the second boundary condition of the moral command of God, and the character of God, it was wrong for them to eat the fruit. The call was for Eve to limit herself: to refrain from doing something she could do.
Technologically, modern man does everything he can do; he functions on this single boundary principle. Modern man, seeing himself as autonomous, with no personal-infinite God who has spoken, has no adequate universal to supply an adequate second boundary condition; and man, being fallen, is not only finite, but sinful. Thus man’s pragmatic choices have no reference point beyond human egotism. It is dog eat dog, man eat man, man eat nature. Man with his greed has no real reason not to rape nature and treat it as a reverse “consumer object.” He sees nature as without value or rights.
In conclusion, then, we may say that if things are treated only as autonomous machines in a decreated world, they are finally meaningless. But if that is so, then inevitably so am I—man— equally autonomous and also equally meaningless. But if individually and in the Christian community I treat the things which God has made with integrity and treat them this way lovingly, because they are His, things change.
If I love the Lover, I love what the Lover has made. Perhaps this is the reason why so many Christians feel an unreality in their Christian lives. If I don’t love what the Lover has made—in the area of man, in the area of nature—and really love it because He made it, do I really love the Lover?
It is easy to make professions of faith, but they may not be worth much because they have little meaning. They may become merely a mental assent that means little or nothing.
But I must be clear that I am not loving the tree or whatever is standing in front of me for a pragmatic reason. It will have a pragmatic result, the very pragmatic results that the men involved in ecology are looking for. But as a Christian I do not do it for the practical or pragmatic results; I do it because it is right and because God is the Maker. And then suddenly things drop into place.
There are things before me which I now face, not as a cow would face the buttercup— merely the mechanical situation—but facing it by choice. I look at the buttercup, and I treat the buttercup the way it should be treated. The buttercup and I are both created by God; but beyond this, I can treat it properly by personal choice. I act personally, and I am a person! Psychologically I begin to breathe and live. Psychologically I am now dealing on a personal level, not only with men and women, but also with the things in nature that God has made which are less than personal in themselves, and the old hang-ups begin to crumble. My humanness grows, and the modern technological pit and pendulum is no longer closing in on me.
As a result, then, there is beauty instead of a desert. The question of aesthetics is also in place. This surely is something that has importance in itself and is not to be despised. Beauty does not have to have pragmatic reasons to have value. So if we did nothing else in our Christian view of nature than to save and enjoy beauty, it would be of value and worthwhile.
But it is not only that, as we have seen. The balance of nature will be more nearly what it should be, and there will be a way to utilize nature for man and yet not destroy the resources which man needs. But none of this will happen if it is only a gimmick. We have to be in the right relationship with Him in the way He has provided, and then, as Christians, have and practice the Christian view of nature.
When we have learned this—the Christian view of nature—then there can be a real ecology; beauty will flow, psychological freedom will come, and the world will cease to be turned into a desert. Because it is right, on the basis of the whole Christian system—which is strong enough to stand it all because it is true—as I face the buttercup, I say: “Fellow-creature, fellowcreature, I won’t walk on you. We are both creatures together.”