Care for creation Christians’ calling

By Kurt Armstrong and ChristianWeek | August 18, 2010

When I was a kid, I thought it didn't matter what I threw out the car window or burned in the garbage bin. I knew Jesus was coming back to rapture me away before He burned up this old Earth. Matter didn't matter; God only cared about my soul. Steven Bouma-Prediger's book, For The Beauty of The Earth, is for people like me.

Bouma-Prediger argues that God really does care about the world, not just about eternal souls, and that from page one of Genesis through to the closing words of Revelation, scripture makes it clear that matter matters.

This book is not a litany of bad news about the global-scale botch-job we humans have done in "tending the garden of creation," nor is at a browbeating to make us think and live more carefully. Rather, it's a deep, thorough theology of creation care, one that calls Christians to incarnate God's own love for what He has created. "My central claim is simple," he writes: "authentic Christian faith includes care for the earth. Earthkeeping is integral to Christian discipleship."

Bouma-Prediger doesn't use doom-and-gloom statistics to try to scare us into loving the stuff that God loves too. Instead, he methodically builds a sound theological argument to persuade our minds, move our hearts and stir us to action. He acknowledges many of the ecological arguments against Christendom, including the famous Lynn White thesis which argues that Christianity paved the way for science and technology, which then led to industrialization and today's growing environmental catastrophes. Bouma-Prediger doesn't flat-out dismiss the criticisms, but he doesn't take them all at face value either. He weighs and evaluates the criticisms, and then points to other explanations too: materialist philosophy, economics, Christianity's easy acceptance of Western values.

This is an important and timely book. For Christians already involved in the wide range of creation-care practices, it offers sound biblical theology to stand on. And for Christians who still think it's more important to think about how to get to heaven than to try to look after the earth, Bouma-Prediger clearly wants to change their minds.

This isn't really an optimistic book, but it's not dire and gloomy either. It is deeply hopeful. If David Suzuki and Al Gore don't motivate you to take creation seriously and treat it lovingly, this book might help change your mind and hopefully, your life.