Caring for Creation

In March 1967 the American historian of medieval technology Lynn White Jr. published a short essay in the journal Science called The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis. It became one of the most widely cited essays ever written on religion and the environment. White argued that the modern domination of nature by science and technology grew in the soil of the Latin West, and that its roots were religious. Genesis, he said, taught that the world was made for human use and that humans stand above nature rather than within it, and so Christianity, especially in its Western form, was in his phrase the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. Christianity had, he argued, destroyed the old pagan sense that groves and springs had their own spirits, and with it the restraint that sense had imposed. He concluded that since the roots of the trouble were religious, the remedy must be religious too.

Two things are worth noticing before anyone answers White. First, he was not attacking the faith from outside in the way he is often remembered; he wrote as someone who cared about the church's tradition, and his proposed remedy was a Christian one. He held up Francis of Assisi, who preached to the birds and called the sun his brother, as an alternative Christian vision and proposed him as a patron saint for ecologists. In 1979 Pope John Paul II did in fact name Francis the patron saint of those who promote ecology. Second, White's essay is a historical argument, and a historical argument can be tested by history. That is where most of the replies have gone.

The replies came from several directions. Historians pointed out that serious environmental damage long predates Christianity and has happened in many places where Genesis was never read: deforestation, soil loss and the salting of irrigated land are recorded in ancient Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean and China. If dominion theology caused ecological destruction, it is hard to explain why so much of it happened without that theology. The historian Peter Harrison has argued that for most of Christian history the dominion of Genesis 1 was read chiefly as a moral and spiritual matter, and that the reading of it as a licence for the technical mastery of nature became prominent only in the early modern period, with writers such as Francis Bacon. On that account White found a real strand in Western Christian thought but mistook a late reading for the original meaning.

Others replied from the text itself. Francis Schaeffer's Pollution and the Death of Man (1970) argued that the Bible gives a stronger basis for care than paganism does, because the world is God's good creation and humans are creatures alongside the other creatures, answerable to God for what they do. The farmer and writer Wendell Berry granted that Christians have often behaved badly toward the land, but argued that the Bible is not the culprit: a reader who takes seriously that the earth is the LORD's will treat it as borrowed. Richard Bauckham, in Living with Other Creatures (2011) and elsewhere, has pressed the point that scripture places humans within a community of creation in which the other creatures praise God on their own account, as in Psalm 148 and Job 38-41, and do not exist only for us.

It is fair to say plainly where this argument has come to rest. Very few Christian scholars now defend the reading of dominion as permission to use the earth without restraint, and very few historians now accept White's thesis in its strong form. But the replies do not let the church off. White was right that Christians in the West often did read Genesis as a licence, and that the church's preaching on creation was for a long time thin. The honest conclusion is the one Berry reached: the fault lay less in the text than in its readers, which is a reason to read it again more carefully.

Genesis 1:26 says God made humanity in his image, after his likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth itself. Genesis 1:28 adds the command to fill the earth and subdue it. The Hebrew verbs are strong. Radah, to rule, is used of kings and of masters over servants. Kabash, to subdue, is used elsewhere of bringing land under control (Numbers 32:22, Joshua 18:1) and in a few places of forcing a person into submission. Any honest reading has to begin by admitting that these are words of power. Genesis does not picture the human creature as one animal among others with no special charge.

But the words sit in a context, and the context shapes them. In the ancient Near East, the king was often called the image of a god: the living statue through whom the god's rule was made present. J. Richard Middleton, in The Liberating Image (2005), argued that Genesis takes this royal language and gives it to every human being, man and woman alike (1:27), so that all humanity is God's royal representative on earth. If that is right, then human rule is a delegated rule, exercised on behalf of another, and it is measured by the character of the One who delegated it. The God of Genesis 1 does not exploit what he made. He looks at it and calls it very good (1:31), and he gives food to the animals as well as to humans (1:30).

Israel's scriptures also tell us what good rule looks like. Psalm 72 prays that the king will 'vindicate the afflicted among the people' (72:4) and spends its length on his care for the poor and needy. Ezekiel 34:4 condemns shepherds who 'ruled them with violence and cruelty,' using the same verb radah, and Leviticus 25:43 forbids an Israelite to rule over a fellow Israelite harshly. So the Old Testament itself distinguishes good rule from tyranny, and it measures rule by the welfare of the ruled. Read that way, dominion over the earth is not a licence but a responsibility, and a ruler who wrecks what he rules has failed at the very thing he was given.

Genesis 2:15 then says the LORD God placed the man in the garden 'to cultivate and keep it.' The first verb, abad, means to work or to serve; it is the ordinary word for tilling the soil and also the word for serving God in worship. The second, shamar, means to keep, guard or watch over. Together they describe someone who works the ground so that it bears fruit and protects it from harm. Gordon Wenham, in his commentary on Genesis (1987), noted that the two verbs appear together for the Levites' service of the tabernacle (Numbers 3:7-8), and argued that Eden is pictured as a sanctuary and Adam as something like its priest. The suggestion is widely accepted and also debated in its details; the basic point, that the man's work in the garden is service and guarding, does not depend on it.

Three more threads complete the picture. The earth remains God's: 'The earth is the LORD's, and the fullness thereof' (Psalm 24:1), and of the land of Israel God says, 'it is Mine, and you are but foreigners and residents with Me' (Leviticus 25:23). The law restrains destruction even in war: an army besieging a city must not cut down its fruit trees, 'because you can eat their fruit' (Deuteronomy 20:19). And the New Testament places all creation within the work of Christ. All things were created through him and for him (Colossians 1:16), and through him God was pleased 'to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven' (Colossians 1:20). The earth is not a stage that will be thrown away after the play. It is part of what God made, loves, and means to redeem, which is the subject of the fourth lesson in this module.

Christian traditions name this calling in different ways. Many evangelicals use the word stewardship: the earth is entrusted to us as a manager is entrusted with his master's estate, and we will give account. Some, Bauckham among them, think stewardship still sounds too much like a manager standing over the property, and prefer to speak of kinship or of a community of creation, in which humans have a special role but stand among the other creatures rather than above them. Catholic teaching, especially since Pope Francis's encyclical Laudato si' (2015), speaks of integral ecology, the conviction that care for the earth, care for the poor and the health of human society cannot be separated. These are differences of emphasis within a shared conviction: the world is God's, it is good, and humans will answer for how they have treated it.

A Christian ethic of creation has to begin with what is actually happening, and for climate change that means the science. The most thorough assessment available is the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, known as IPCC AR6. The IPCC does not do its own research; it gathers scientists from many countries to assess the published research and summarise it, and the summaries are approved line by line by the world's governments. AR6 came in four main parts: the physical science (Working Group I, August 2021), impacts and adaptation (Working Group II, February 2022), the reduction of emissions (Working Group III, April 2022), and a Synthesis Report (March 2023).

On the central question the report is direct. The Working Group I summary opens: 'It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.' It estimated that the global surface temperature in 2011-2020 was about 1.1 degrees Celsius higher than in 1850-1900, and that this warming is driven mainly by greenhouse gases released by burning coal, oil and gas, together with deforestation and other land use. The national academies of science of many countries have said the same in their own statements. On this point it is fair to say that the scientific question is settled in the way such questions get settled: not by a vote, but because the evidence from many independent lines points the same way and no rival explanation accounts for it.

The report is equally careful about what is less certain, and a student should know this too, because honesty about uncertainty is part of telling the truth. AR6 attaches a confidence level to its statements. It is very confident that hot extremes have become more frequent and intense, and that heavy rainfall has increased over most land areas where good records exist. It is less confident about changes in some other things, such as drought trends in particular regions or the number of tropical cyclones, though it judged it likely that the share of the most intense cyclones has increased. How much the earth will warm for a given rise in carbon dioxide, which scientists call climate sensitivity, was assessed as likely between 2.5 and 4 degrees Celsius for a doubling of carbon dioxide, with a best estimate of 3. That range is narrower than in earlier reports but it is still a range, and the future also depends on choices not yet made.

What matters most for this course is who bears the cost. The Working Group II report estimated that roughly 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in places highly vulnerable to climate change, and the Synthesis Report noted that the communities which have contributed least to the problem are among those most affected. Africa, home to around a sixth of humanity, has produced only a few percent of the carbon dioxide emitted since industrialisation began. Yet farmers who depend on rain, fishing communities on low coasts, and the urban poor without cooling or drainage are the ones most exposed when the rains fail, the floods come or the heat rises. In January 2025 the World Meteorological Organization reported that 2024 was the warmest year on record, around 1.55 degrees above the pre-industrial level. One year above 1.5 degrees is not the same as passing the long-term goal of the Paris Agreement (2015), which concerns averages over decades, but the direction is clear.

Notice what the science does and does not tell you. It tells you what is happening, why, how sure we can be, and roughly what different paths of emissions are likely to bring. It does not tell you what a government should do, how fast, at whose expense, or what should be traded against what. Those are questions of justice, prudence and priority, and they are where Christians who accept the science disagree. Keep the two kinds of question apart. A student who hears a disagreement about policy and concludes the science must be in doubt has made a mistake, and so has a student who hears the science and concludes the policy must therefore be obvious.

Christians who hold scripture's authority agree that the earth is God's, that the poor matter to him, and that waste and greed are sins. They disagree, often sharply, about what follows for policy. Two main positions are set out here as their best defenders would state them, followed by what they share and where the real argument lies.

The first position holds that rapid reduction of emissions is a direct demand of love for neighbour. Its defenders include the Evangelical Climate Initiative, whose statement Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action (2006) was signed by more than eighty American evangelical leaders; the Lausanne Movement, whose Cape Town Commitment (2010) calls care for creation a gospel issue within the lordship of Christ; Pope Francis, whose Laudato si' urges the world to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor; the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who has called damage to the natural world a sin; and the Canadian atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical whose book Saving Us (2021) argues that Christians should act out of care for people. Their argument runs like this. The harm is real and falls on the poorest first. Those who caused the most harm have the most duty to stop it and to help others adapt. Prudence counsels acting before the worst outcomes are certain, as a wise householder insures his house. And the prophets' charge against those who 'join field to field until no place is left' (Isaiah 5:8) applies to those who profit from damage others must pay for.

The second position holds that the first duty to the poor is to help them escape poverty, and that this requires affordable energy, which for now largely means fossil fuels. Its best-known evangelical voice is the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which takes its name from the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship (2000) and whose founder and spokesman is E. Calvin Beisner, and the theologian Wayne Grudem, one of the endorsers of the Alliance's Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming (2009), has argued a similar case in his Politics According to the Bible (2010). Many leaders in the global south, Christian and not, make a version of the same argument in their own terms. Their reasoning runs like this. Hundreds of millions of people, most of them in Africa, still have no electricity, and the cheapest and most reliable energy available to them is often coal, oil or gas. Wealthy countries grew rich on that energy; to tell poor countries not to use it is to ask the poor to pay for the habits of the rich. Wealth itself makes people safer from floods, droughts and storms, and the death rate from natural disasters has fallen greatly over the last century as societies have grown richer. So, they argue, the most loving policy is growth, adaptation and innovation, not costly limits that fall hardest on those with least.

Honesty requires three further statements, and they cut in different directions. The Cornwall Alliance has also disputed the science itself, arguing that human-caused warming is modest and its effects manageable or even partly beneficial, and Grudem has said he is not persuaded that burning fossil fuels will cause catastrophic warming. On that point it is a minority position at odds with the IPCC's assessed findings and with the statements of the major scientific academies, and a student should know that. But the policy argument about energy and the poor does not depend on doubting the science, and many people who accept AR6 in full hold it. Likewise, many who take the first position do not ask poor countries to forgo development; they argue that the rich should cut first and fastest and should pay for clean energy in poor countries, an approach often called a just transition. And the second position's central complaint is not imaginary. Wealthy governments and development banks have at times moved to stop financing gas and other fossil-fuel projects in poor countries while still using those fuels at home, and African leaders have objected publicly; in 2021 Nigeria's then Vice President Yemi Osinbajo argued in the journal Foreign Affairs that such bans would crush Africa's development, and that gas must be allowed as a transition fuel. The two positions are therefore closer in some places than their loudest voices suggest.

Where they genuinely disagree is over questions that are partly factual and partly moral: how fast clean energy can become cheap and reliable for the poor; how much present cost is justified to reduce future harm, and whether people not yet born should count equally with people now living; whether governments, markets or local communities are the right agents of change; and how much weight to give to the risk of very bad outcomes that are possible but not the most likely. Faithful Christians weigh these differently. This course does not settle them for you. What it asks is that you state the other side's case as well as its defenders would, that you keep the science and the policy distinct, and that the poor stay at the centre of whatever you conclude.

There is also a great deal that both positions would gladly do together, and much of it lies within the reach of a local church. Planting and protecting trees, guarding water sources, reducing waste and burning, teaching soil-saving farming, preparing for floods and droughts, and caring for those who lose crops or homes are acts of love that do not wait for anyone's government. The Christian conservation organisation A Rocha, founded in Portugal in 1983 by Peter and Miranda Harris, now works in many countries on exactly this kind of local care. The theology of Genesis 2:15 is first lived not in a parliament but in a field.

This module gathers the questions of the whole track toward a single place: the case study you will write in the final lesson. Each lesson in the module adds a page to your casebook. This one asks you to open a case on the ground under your own feet.

Start a fresh page and give it a title that names a real creation question in your setting. It might be the cutting of trees for charcoal, sand mining from a riverbed, rubbish burned or dumped near homes, a stream that has become dirty, land that floods more than it used to, a factory or mine whose waste reaches the water, or a debate in your church about whether such things are any of the church's business. Choose one you know something about and can find out more about.

Then write four short paragraphs. First, the facts: what is happening, as accurately as you can find out, and what you do not yet know. Ask someone who works the land or has lived there long, and if you can, look for a report from a government office, a university or a reputable organisation. Second, the people: who gains from what is happening and who loses, and especially who among the poor, the old, children or farmers bears the cost. Do not write anyone's name; describe people by their role. Third, scripture: which of the texts in this lesson speak to the case, and how. Fourth, the options: what at least two different faithful Christians might say the church should do, each stated fairly.

Finally, write one thing your church could do in the next month that both positions in section 4 would support, such as a tree planting, a clean-up, a sermon on Genesis 2:15, or a visit to families affected by flooding. Keep the page. You will return to it in the final lesson, and you may choose it as the case you work through the whole method of the track.