Since Lynn White’s 1967 essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Christians have often been on the defensive regarding their approach to the environment. Admittedly, Christians, including evangelicals, have often lagged behind other voices in the culture that sounded the alarm over the extent of environmental degradation that our modern industrial society has spawned even as economic progress and general human health have increased.

There were a number of notable attempts to correct and encourage Christian thinking on environmental matters. Francis Schaeffer’s Pollution and the Death of Man (1970) was a clarion call in the wake of the first Earth Day. He challenged Christians to take the lead in creation care as a result of the biblical mandate to have dominion and care for the earth. As environmental awareness rose in Christian circles through the 1970s, the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship sponsored research and several books, culminating in the development of the Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies.

Beyond Stewardship: New Approaches to Creation Care (edited by David P. Warners and Matthew K. Heun, Calvin College Press, 2019), the latest effort from the Calvin Center, attempts to take a matured environmental approach that reflects the development of thinking over the last few decades. Of the twenty-two contributors to the book, nineteen are associated with Calvin College as graduates, professors, or students.

The book draws from historical Christian perspectives on care of the creation as well as from contemporary, mainstream environmental thinking. This attempted synthesis highlights a tension for Christians. We desire to glean the best from mainstream environmentalism while also bringing true Christian salt and light to bear on the situation. In this attempt, Beyond Stewardship at times departs significantly from sound Christian doctrine.

Dominion versus Kinship

In the preface, the authors echo Schaeffer from decades ago with the questions, “Why isn’t the broader Christian church leading the way?” and “Why haven’t Christians been more engaged in creation care activities?” The introduction’s author critiques the traditional environmental term “stewardship” as an unhelpful invention of the earlier twentieth century, as never being found in Scripture, and as being too anthropocentric and consumption-oriented to be helpful. The authors accurately note that human sinfulness is an extreme encumbrance to realizing the divinely assigned creation mandate to care for the Garden, to be fruitful and multiply, and to subdue the earth. However, after the introduction, the biblical term “dominion” is never mentioned in the book, due to perceptions that abuses of human dominion have rendered the term unhelpful. The stated objective of the book is that the conception of humans as stewards should be replaced with the conception of humans in kinship with the rest of creation. Dominion and the idea of improving creation (subduing the earth) are seen as hopelessly limited by human finitude and sin.

Here they run off the biblical rails. Our finitude was part of human identity at the time the creation mandate was given and is not to be considered an encumbrance, but rather part of the created order. Replacing earlier technologies need not be solely the result of sin. Improvements and iteration would conceivably have been part of expanding human dominion even if the Fall had not occurred.

The call for us to lament over human impacts that irreparably harm God’s good creation is appropriate. However, the call to embrace kinship with the rest of creation apart from a biblical understanding of human dominion, flourishing, and development as a delight to God is not convincing. For example, the claim in chapter 3 that “Scripture does not call us to use and manage creation, rather it calls us to intimate kinship with it,” is weak. Scripture clearly puts humanity in a different category than the rest of creation.

When considering the sacraments, the author of chapter 3 indicates that “we can give thanks to the sources” of the elements “for their participation in the holy moment.” This idea, unhinged from human exceptionalism as imago Dei, strikes frightfully close to animism or pantheism, neither of which have especially good records of environmental stewardship. The author of the chapter is correct in pointing out that radical protection and preservation is part of the human calling, but he fails to acknowledge that human creative development that expands the qualities of the Garden to make God’s good creation better is part of that.

Chapter 4’s author notes that earth’s supportiveness is not automatic, and that life has become more precarious because recent human activities have disrupted trustworthy planetary conditions. However, this overlooks the idea that human dominion has made human life much less precarious than in former times. Even the animals and plants under our charge often find life much less precarious than without it. Sin abounds, to be sure. However, a farm, as an expression of human dominion, demonstrates that cows, cats, dogs, and chickens can live in peace.

The authors of chapters 5 and 6 do a fine job of reminding us of humanity’s profound and inescapable connectivity to and dependence on the rest of creation, down to the microbes that beneficially inhabit our bodies. The authors clearly expound on the incarnation of Christ, who, as they claim, undoubtedly housed microorganisms as humans always have. They argue that overemphasis of human importance has led many to a view of stewardship that is too anthropocentric. However, the call to retire the term “stewardship” in favor of “earthkeeping” may miss the point. Abuses of a good term may require revisiting true biblical definitions, but merely switching terms without such definitional care would be useless.

The authors of chapters 8 and 9 challenge us to consider our kinship with other animals as exemplified by Adam’s naming of the creatures. Chapter 8’s author suggests that God is more concerned about the workload of caring for the garden than about Adam being alone. While one can appreciate the desire to see animals as created beings, the emphasis is hard to justify considering the biblical rejoinder, “there was not found a helper fit for him” (Gen. 2:20). Chapter 9 examines the transformation of a city girl who finds herself on a relative’s farm. She is struck by the farm family’s utilitarian approach to the well-cared-for livestock, but in the end, she desires to see them not as resources for humans but as joint members of the created order. In response, she becomes vegan. The implication that eating less meat is the higher moral ground is less informed by a biblical perspective than by the modern sentimental environmental zeitgeist.

How to Best Address the Environmental Crisis?

The remaining chapters make a better case for a biblical perspective as modern society attempts to address modern environmental concerns. The author of chapter 10 shows how some societies overestimate their ability to manage ecosystems, causing Dust-Bowl-like destruction, while others have been able to take a more restorative or sustainable approach. The author appreciates John Wesley Powell’s desire to understand the interdependent relationship between humans and nonhuman systems that requires patience, humility, and the acceptance of limits. This attitude is much preferable to the hubris of a “we know best” approach to stewardship. Chapter 11 deals with “environmental racism,” perhaps better stated as economic elitism, that doesn’t take the needs of less advantaged communities into proper consideration. Hence, intercity communities near industrial sites or poor rural communities often suffer degradation and health concerns that would not be tolerated in more privileged communities. Chapter 13 somewhat rehabilitates the concept of stewardship by stressing that humans are not a weed species that the world could do without, but part of the created order who can restore and improve God’s creation. However, developing a mindset of commitment to place, á la Wendell Berry, is difficult in our transient, mobile society. Perhaps such a mindset could be developed with a heightened sense of understanding our world as a gift, laden with inherent value as described in chapter 14.

Beyond Stewardship has many challenging ideas that can help address the modern environmental crisis. However, there is a mix of true Christian thinking and a modern environmentalism that smacks of sentimentalism, idealism, and unhealthy preservationism. The biblical ideas of filling the earth with humans (Gen. 2) to the point of swarming (Gen. 9), or filling Judea with returned diaspora until there is no room for them (Zech. 10:10) is lost on those who either do not understand what it means to be imago Dei or those who choose to de-emphasize it. Christians always must fight the temptation to be syncretistic with their greater culture. This is as true for us today as in times past. When we read Beyond Stewardship, we must ask: who is influencing whom?

The author is professor of biology at Grove City College and elder at Covenant OPC in Grove City, Pennsylvania. New Horizons, November 2020.