chapter7:Concluding Chapter-by Udo Middelmann
When Francis Schaeffer wrote Pollution and the Death of Man in 1970, this short book addressed a surprisingly large number of “environmental” issues which were just beginning to break into the public discourse. As those issues began to be raised, our way of life would be questioned and various remedial actions would be demanded in public and in private. No day would pass without new and alarming details of human carelessness and irresponsible, sometimes even criminal actions.
We became aware that our survival as human beings could no longer be guaranteed. Death not in a foreign war but by our own action seemed more likely in a world of landfills, off-shore spills, toxic wastes, population explosion, and ozone depletion.
Insufficiency and efforts to conserve scarce resources are not new phenomena. Our ancestors had often fled from homelands plagued by poverty, political persecution, or poor resources. Even our parents and some of us remember recycling old metal, glass—even rags and bones. My earliest pocket money came from scavenging through ruins after the Second World War in Europe.
Yet when the warning bell was rung, calling us to save our endangered earth, memories of such responsible efforts in the past had faded. Technology was giving us more and more consumer goods at ever lower prices, and collecting, sorting, and reuse seemed itself primitive and unnecessary. The wider use of the automobile had created visual and physical distance from things thrown away. Household and industrial waste were discarded far from the places where they had been produced and consumed. “Out of sight, out of mind” made sense in a world at peace with itself.
The Western world was demonstrating its superiority through progress available to all at reduced cost. Stalin’s children had promised that their system would outperform ours in a matter of some twenty-five years; but we were well on our way to showing them that a people with material abundance would not only be better off, but would also be a light in a world of darkness.
We must put ourselves back into the hopes and feelings of that time in order to understand more fully the changes in attitude that have taken place since then. As our world has shrunk, through better transportation and communication, we have become far more aware of the threats to all of life. We are more aware that our living space, the air we breathe, and the water we drink are polluted—more so than we could have imagined during those days of unlimited growth.
My children are once again recycling; they know the value of discarded objects. They respond positively to calls for environmental responsibility. They have access to an abundance of books, television programs, and films with ecological themes. They understand that they must show restraint in consuming the resources their own children will need.
They are also more pessimistic than my generation about the future of our planet. They are more sensitive, but also more afraid and filled with guilt. They have been made to be doubtful and angry about our Western outlook on mankind and his environment. They talk more often about a spoiled and mistreated earth. They can easily identify “eco-sinners.” To their generation, the color green spells peace and survival. Bio, used as a prefix, stimulates their moral sense. Their information comes from school, from field trips, and “sensitizing” experiences. Of course they still use automobiles to go on those trips. They toss away their garbage with little remorse. Yet they are, undeniably, more aware of environmental concerns than were Schaeffer’s first readers.
Schaeffer wrote before the oil shock of 1973. He wrote in response to a nascent criticism of Christianity as the source of environmental problems. His concern was not only that a neglect of the environment would spell the death of man by a destruction of our life-support system. He was also concerned that the death of man might be brought about by the very environmental programs claiming to seek his salvation.
This greater danger has not been adequately understood. The urgency of the immediate perils addressed by many environmentalist groups have often obscured the fact that the loudest advocates of change have also wanted to change our view of the human being, and of life itself, away from the Biblical basis of our culture and our moral concerns.
These environmentalists did not limit their agenda to attack immoral acts by irresponsible people, institutions, and corporations. They went to the root of what we know as Western civilization—the value of each person under God, even in a fallen world characterized by a broken nature. Not only the acts of man should change, said these environmentalists: man’s understanding of himself should be radically redirected to a more Eastern view, where man merges with everything.
While Schaeffer addressed the physical problems of a polluted earth, he also dealt with the environmentalists’ challenges to the Bible’s teaching about man and nature. He showed that the Bible, while elevating man to have dominion, also calls him to self-examination and repentance—including repentance of his “environmental sins.” But repentance, he showed, should never lead to the abolition of the sinner. Rather, it should lead to his restoration and redirection as an individual actor in the art of life.
The Bible emphasizes individual choice and significance. Man is the crown of creation. Males and females are stewards responsible to God, not to nature. But in fulfilling that responsibility, they seek ways to improve and safeguard their earthly environment. Western culture, with its high view of individual responsibility, its drive to advance itself technologically and democratically, has its roots in the Bible.
Yet this affirmation of the significance of each individual person, rooted in the Bible and so central to the rise of Western civilization, is now blamed for all the evils of society—even though without it none of the problems would have been noticed and fought against in the first place. It is always the sensitive person who stands out of the crowd and warns against evil. For the environmentalist to deny the Biblical notion of individual worth, and to prefer the Eastern view of man, is to saw off the branch on which he sits.
The timing of the current environmental debate is interesting. Earlier warnings in this century about dangers to the environment have been heeded, and remedies often found. The history of science, including social science, is also the history of human efforts to diminish disaster. But the current debate is taking place in a time of increasing doubt about our culture’s ability to work toward solutions. The 1969 oil blow-out in the Santa Barbara Channel, the fire on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, and similar events were seen as evidence of technology and rationality having taken the place of spiritual values—evidence of a lack of moral concern in a world reduced to the pursuit of profit and technological advancement.
In reaction, the drug culture had advocated Eastern spiritual values. The Beatles and Timothy Leary had told us about the need to run from a culture of concrete, metal, oil, and pollution, to Eastern values. “Flower power” would provide for a humane dimension in a world of materialism.
External events in rapid succession fueled a fear of imminent hazard and death, in a society pampered in safety and high expectations and yet beginning to doubt its place in the global village. Biblical convictions had weakened. A shallow view of the history and geography of ideas—without a vital understanding of historic Christianity—was fostered by an increasingly more privatized faith of personal experience. The courage to struggle and to engage oneself for life was canceled by a fear of creating more problems by such a struggle. The door was opened to a fundamentally different perception of the place of man, the role of nature, and the place and value of individual life.
Industrial power alone could not win the war in Vietnam. Berkeley, Kent State, and Columbia joined Watts and the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. to demand a different salvation than Christianity—even though its teachings had for centuries brought freedom, significance, and the rule of law to mankind.
The industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had provoked the search for the “noble savage.” That search did not succeed, but now, a hundred years later, its ghost has appeared in a new garment. That ghost judges Western views as inferior because Western man repels fate and nature to give shape to human life. According to the Biblical traditional view, man is the steward of God, not of nature. He takes his orders from the Bible, not from the wind or the mountains. This sets him up as an occasional interferer, one who changes the “natural” order into “culture.” He looks for iron under every hill and copper under every mountain. He fights disease, poverty, and oblivion for individuals.
But now a new nobility is sought for man, one which harmonizes with the larger whole. God is replaced by the cycles of the year, by the dynamics of an eco-system. Man is to harmonize with the rest of nature. The individual is sacrificed for the wellbeing of a future anonymous humanity.
There were some good reasons to take stock of and to rethink our Western attitudes on environmental issues. And there have been many beneficial results to the work of the present-day nature lobby. Products are judged not only for their appearance and power to stimulate sales and provide jobs, but also for their effect on the environment. Legislation has functioned to control damage, set standards, and sensitize the public. Court enforcements, news reports, and public scandals have contributed to more responsible attitudes and practices.
Yet environmentalism has also produced a new set of problems. Competing in the world market has become more difficult, as many of our international competitors do not share our high ecological standards. There has been a moral victory of sorts, but a punitive effect for workers. Jobs have been exported to people who care less about the air they breathe.
This in turn has increased resentment of Western ideas. At the UN, poorer countries have demanded exemption from high environmental standards, or financial aid to comply with those standards, when their own worldview and nationalistic fervor were often the greatest hindrance to development and a concern for their citizens.
Once we put aside the myth of the equality of all cultures and religions, the darkness and frequent inhumanities of non-Christian worldviews become clear. An older form of pollution, resulting from disregard for human life and a resignation to natural suffering, surfaces in many native and non-Christian cultures. It is true that these cultures are sometimes victimized by the imported poison of Western technology; it is equally true that they often take in that poison willingly, for the sake of their own economic advancement and with little concern for its effect on individual human life.
Western, more developed societies need to do more to prevent the export of environmental hazards to lesser developed societies. But that restraint must go hand in hand with a reexamination of worldviews whose traditions have not lamented the loss of life, but rather have accepted it as normal— as merely one more spin of the wheel of fate.
Meanwhile, within our own cultural context the ultimate basis for action, ethics, and law also needs to be addressed. For the lack of a convincing universal morality undermines any effort to bring about a better world through more moral actions.
The immediate stimulus for Pollution and the Death of Man was Lynn White’s article “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” in Science magazine, which is reprinted in Appendix A. White—like numerous subsequent writers— sees the Christian worldview as the root of present ecological problems. Man has destroyed the environment, says White, because of the Bible’s call for man to have dominion over nature. Biblical thinking, more than the sinfulness of the individual, is the culprit, for it calls for an assertive mind-set which does not derive its instruction from nature, but from God. White fails to see how affirmative human actions, mandated by the Creator, can reshape a fallen nature. To him all such efforts are opposed to the harmony of the natural order.
Schaeffer called for repentance of our misuse of nature. But rather than identifying repentance with submission to the dictates of nature or of the community, he defines it as a willful acknowledgment of God’s truth and ways. Where modern man served but himself in his rationalistic independence, he is now called not to serve nature in its harmonious “survival of the fittest” patterns, but to return to the recognition that he is a creature before the Creator. We are God’s children, not nature’s.
Such an understanding will result in a greater concern about nature than will the programs of the materialist or the naturalist. They start with an ultimately impersonal orientation, in which man has no place, no calling. They both demand the sacrifice of human life. The naturalist sacrifices man to nature and abolishes the moral and intellectual life which alone is concerned about justice and the good life. The materialist commits suicide in the selfish, hedonistic pursuit of short-term profit. He denies any responsibility above his ability to succeed. Both pursue their goals without meaning and without reflection. Both crush human life in the end.
Schaeffer wrote Pollution and the Death of Man not only from the perspective of the Bible, but also in the context of constant prayer and reflection. He was a vastly experienced person with deep feelings and emotions. After moving to Europe from the United States in 1948, he would never again own a car, relying instead on public transport. His rest and exercise came from hiking in the mountains, following old maps and Roman trails. That contact with nature, and his work in his gardens, was added to his study of the city and of human activities over centuries and to his many trips across the world. History exhibited the world of ideas more than a conquest of land.
Schaeffer crossed the ocean by boat and objected to waste thrown overboard. During his hikes in the mountains, where Romans and Hannibal, traders and traitors, men and maidens, lovers and outlaws had hiked, he would, in the midst of the deepest philosophical discussion with students, bend to pick up a piece of trash and carry it in his knapsack to the next trash bin. He was no mere theological theoretician.
Nor was he a fanatical naturalist who objected to all modern achievements. He was forever against any survival program for nature or for an impersonal future “humanity” when that program denied the value and needs of real individuals living today.
The perspective Schaeffer gained from his study of the Bible and of history was added to by his work with people. He was intensely sensitive to the reality of having to live in a fallen world. For him, only the Biblical account of the spacetime fall of man was an adequate explanation for human suffering. And as neighbor to human beings from all backgrounds, there were for him “no little people”—since the God of the Bible had made them and called them individually. While some felt weak and bruised, Schaeffer’s effort was to strengthen them in their conviction as Christians, giving sound and coherent answers from the Bible for their most troublesome questions and doubts. He protected each person as if he or she were a temporarily bruised flower.
For Schaeffer the ecological question could not be separated from his larger concerns about man’s foolish drive toward either autonomy or oblivion. For without the Bible, there is no knowledge of man’s Creator nor of his meaning in this life. With sadness Schaeffer would relate Darwin’s admission, in his diary, that he had lost all enjoyment of nature after having proposed the theory of natural selection. There is a purpose in each particle created by God, but the particle itself does not reveal that purpose.
Frequently we are advised to consider other life-models and cultural traditions in order to escape the problems of our own culture. Schaeffer found no solace in these alternatives. To seek a state of closer identification with anything but the God of the Bible is fraught with sad results. Man is not to be wrapped into a larger eco-system. That would only prevent him from making those critical judgments about the world and himself which life in a moral universe requires of each of us.
Neither the model of the North American Indians, nor East Indian religions, nor Aboriginal views, nor Asian submission to a “way” present viable alternatives. In the actual teachings of Eastern religions and in the practices of cultures bound to their outlook about man in the cosmos, human beings have not fared well. Their mortality rates are unacceptable. Their mastery of life is often sadly insufficient. They have not produced a more balanced ecology. Where industrial pollution has not been excessive, human and social pollution from lack of sanitation, short life spans, and arbitrary legal rights have created an unacceptable and unnecessary mountain of human suffering.
Anyone who exposes himself to cultures untouched by Christian values finds out quickly that neither the human being nor nature are treated with any great sympathy. Nature suffers together with man quite unnecessarily. Whether it be the cows of India, the wildlife of Africa, the deforested mountains of Nepal, the expanding desert of sub-Saharan Africa, or the land, animals, and people in flood-prone Bangladesh, the problems are not easily labeled as either natural and therefore to be accepted, or Western and therefore to be rejected as the interference of a hostile culture. The Biblical answer that we live in a fallen world without easy solutions is the most sympathetic and concerned answer—and the only one which motivates people to resist an abnormal nature.
The myth of the noble savage has been uncovered. Man everywhere is a sinner; and he loses the contest for life whenever he suppresses the high calling to be a creature made in God’s image and sees himself rather as made in the image of nature, history, or fate. These orientations are all impersonal. None of them justify a moral concern for the environment, or even for the rights of individual persons.
This explains why movements addressing pollution as well as other moral concerns have originated in the part of the world historically most influenced by Biblical thinking. And it explains why our scientific data and eyewitness reports of the worst forms of pollution now come from the Second and Third Worlds. In Eastern Europe, after seventy years of the impersonal utopian ideology of Marxist socialism, and in many areas of the Third World which have pursued indigenous religious and nationalistic goals rather than opening themselves to a more European view of human life, the destruction of man and earth has taken on enormous proportions.
Under socialism, the abolition of private property and of rewards for personal effort have not produced a protected earth. Chernobyl is but the tip of an iceberg. Sloppy workmanship, bureaucratic legalism, untrained decision-makers, the sacrifice of people in the name of a futuristic ideology, and the emphasis on equality have left behind an immense acreage of polluted earth, destroyed forests, undrinkable water, open sewers, and deposits of nuclear waste in open range lands.
Without an informed and critical public, with only the Party determining what is moral, and when no present sacrifice of integrity and health is to be spared for the achievement of the Socialist ideal, no effort could be set free, no mind and heart sensitized to pursue environmental concerns.
A similar observation can be made concerning another impersonal ideology, though it seems kinder and more humane. When nature is viewed as the will of God, when circumstances are animated by spirits, as in African tribal religions, human death and natural pollution are accepted as a just consequence of life itself. They are not to be objected to, for there is no outside court of appeals to which the objection can be addressed. Life itself is merely a repetition of what went before, a submission to fate.
Neither indigenous nature religions, nor awakening nationalisms, nor the scientific materialism in Marxist societies can show us a better, more sensitive, more humane and caring way. We are forced back to the dynamic of free, educated, concerned—albeit evil—people. Such people recognize the challenge of their natural environment, for better or for worse. They understand that they will reap what they sow. The only adequate basis for environmental activism was laid in the teachings of historic Judaism and Christianity. The Judeo-Christian tradition is not able to prevent its adherents from making mistakes in their treatment of the environment; but it does furnish a basis for rational and valid criticism of those mistakes.
Many formerly convinced Socialists on both sides of the Iron Curtain have recognized the need for productive, creative, and therefore capitalistic societies. Only capitalism can afford making investments toward a protected earth for the sake of protecting human life.
Like converted Socialists, many from pagan backgrounds also wish to find ways of educating and liberating their people from the confines of an uncaring nature. They want to learn what makes people free and productive, creative and willing to address the needs of their neighbors. Often we fail to help such people see how much their own cultural, political, and social background is the root of the problem. But viability is not the result of nature left to itself, but of human effort to tackle problems.
Even within the framework of capitalism, of course, great foresight is necessary to foster both effort and restraint, both use and preservation, both consumption and restoration. To protect both man and nature requires a high view of human beings and of one’s own descendants. They must become and remain indisposable. Solid and reliable laws, based on a comprehensive philosophy of life and not subject to democratic whims under short-term goals, must reflect this high and long-term perspective. Only in the Bible do we have a basis for such a high view of the worth of individual men and women.
Only the context of Biblical thinking sustains an outrage about, and a deliberate effort to solve, perceived problems. It is one of the deep ironies of our day that objections against a Biblical view of man are raised the loudest by those who daily benefit from the efforts they wish to abolish. They look for a kinder and more humane model and suggest to have seen it in a Socialist view of man, or in Eastern religion’s denial of self.
They confront those who, after centuries of suffering, exploitation, religious and political bondage, and too much immaterial spirituality or ideological rhetoric, desire nothing more than a dry bed, enough food and health, and a future for their children. The first lot seeks a future that breaks with the present. The second seeks to break with the past simply to have a present.
The dream of socialism has been punctured. It cannot be sustained. It has no innocence after brutalizing millions for decades. Neither can pagan religions provide for human life. They give neither salvation nor life-support. Only the Bible has ever been able to provide both hope and present possibilities for human beings. The Bible teaches us that the very concern for life, including life threatened by a wasteful and exploitative use of nature, is a concern for individual life now. We care because, according to the Bible, the individual person matters. We produce more food, better health, broader education, wiser government, better-informed media, safer tools, and better laws because individual people matter. For that same reason we vote, discuss, warn, and preach. Neither socialism nor non-Christian religions have ever produced or embraced such concerns. Neither has delivered the good life for its citizens, not even an ecologically good one.
The Bible’s story about Adam and Eve working, even against the sweat of the brow, to produce life for themselves and their children is the rightful response of people who care in a fallen world. They did not resign themselves, did not accept the status quo. They understood that their calling was to live. Dominion over the earth includes dominion over selfishness, exploitive attitudes, and false ideas. People cut down the groves Lynn White talks about because these trees were the focus of a hideous, inhuman, and deadly religious philosophy. They fought lies, because the truth was worth knowing.
The Bible speaks God’s word against both human autonomy and resignation. It judges and calls for accountability, but it also encourages and calls for creative action. It speaks loudly against the materialism of modern man in his frivolous selfishness, lack of concern for future generations, and lack of understanding of the limits of nature. But it also bursts the limits imposed by those who see nature itself as the limit. To these, the Bible speaks of man’s intellectual and moral ability to create resources, efficiency, and a pattern of responsibility which will free us from the fears of the naturalist and the resignation of the spiritualist.
Where the God of the Bible has informed the heart and mind of man, natural limits have been pushed back. God challenges our faculties. The Bible shows us that we are not sticks or stones in the wheel of history, but people made in God’s image. Our history is not only filled with tragedies of human sin and shortsightedness—it is also a reflection of great efforts, both moral and technical, to reject the limits. Need produces not only moral guilt, but also a moral courage to overcome limits. Limits are not only warnings; they are also challenges. They provide evidence not only of human failings, but also of human abilities. Man is the greatest resource.
Obviously, believers in the God of the Bible have often failed to live up to their high calling as caretakers of God’s creation. Much criticism of our Western culture’s handling of the environment is both valid and necessary. And where change has been produced, we are the better off for it. Waste is reduced; new resources are discovered and used. When that criticism is directed against the worship of things, the pursuit of personal affluence and security, it is well placed. But the criticism is not often enough raised against what is truly wrong in human actions. It is raised rather, as Schaeffer pointed out again and again, toward the philosophic foundation of the only truly humane society—toward the God of the Bible and His Word. Using wastefulness as the accusation, the verdict of the ecologist often does not call for restitution, but for the life of the Defendant. His existence, not his alleged crime, is judged. The problem will be solved by killing the accused!
Such suggestions can only come from polluted dreams of those who embrace visions of a pure nature more than work towards life-supporting efforts. A moral effort can only have the living person as a focus, not an uninhabited paradise. Where nature sets the terms for human existence, each person will be treated “naturally”; i.e., without respect for real needs arising out of life in a fallen world.
Man is called to creatively confront the results of a fallen world, not to abandon himself to those results. He can do this courageously when, rather than seeing himself as out of tune with an impersonal, uncaring “Mother Nature,” he sees himself as being loved by the God in whose image he is made. Nature, no less than man, suffers under the tragic results of the Fall. That is why Adam had to plow against thorns and thistles in order to put food on the table. And that is why the Bible speaks of the need to live not only by bread, nuts, and berries, which nature might provide. Instead, every word from the mouth of God is to give direction, correction, and encouragement. That word tells us of iron under every mountain and copper under every hill to be used. That word alone tells us of a reality not readily apparent in the ebb and flow of time, the normality of being, the naturalness of birth and death.
That word is truth, life, and the only way to truly love our neighbor enough to put up a fight for his spiritual . . . and physical . . . survival. We must address his real needs and work towards substantial solutions for the sake of his life, even if it means changing the face of nature.
For the death of man can not only result from a polluted earth, but also, and much sooner, from the acceptance of a worldview which does not treasure the life of persons. For too long have millions been denied basic improvements in the human condition because of ways, faiths, and religions that reduce man to particles of a cosmic “one” and offer nothing but death. The Bible uniquely directs us to live.