The Dilemma of an Adventist
Environmentalist:
Is this World My Home, or Not?
By Dr. A. G. Schwarz
Southwestern Adventist University
Keene, TX
Earth – Our home in the universe
Spacecraft
• Spaceship designed to
sustain life by careful
engineering
• Complex systems generate
oxygen, carry & maintain
food supply, clean & recycle
water
• Resupply from earth (space
stations)
Spaceship Earth was engineered by God
Free ecosystem services:
• Cleanse water
• Regulates water supply (storage
& release)
• Cleanse air (replace oxygen)
• Regulates atmospheric
composition
• Recycle wastes
• Stores nutrients
• Provides food for humans
• Pollination services (⅓ of crops
need animal pollinators)
More ecosystem services
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Protects crops from pests
Provides fiber
Resilience to disturbance (reforestation, etc.)
Provides other useful products (medicines, nonfiber building materials)
Soil formation
Protects soil from erosion
Influence & regulation of climate
Aesthetics
Recreation
Earth is hurtling through space, but
where are we going?
• Earth is home to nearly seven billion of us.
• It sustains life without resupply from
elsewhere
• More complex than a man-made spacecraft.
• It provides us with all that we need for life.
• Perhaps that’s why we think of it as beautiful.
What else could we want from our home?
• We are all together on spaceship earth,
hurtling through space, but where are we
going?
Christians know where we are going!
• We – especially Adventists, are going to heaven!
• Yet the quality of our existence on earth is threatened
by
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–
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our numbers,
depletion of resources,
fouling of air and water
prospect of global climate change
• Should we care that the life support system on
spaceship earth is under threat?
Some places I could call home
Midwest US & Canadian prairie
provinces – wheat fields
Washington state – temperate
rainforest
More places I’ve lived
China – rice paddies
Africa – banana plantation
Nu’uanu Pali cliffs - Hawaii
Responses to environmental
challenges (among Christians)
1. License to Exploit Mankind should act quickly and take from
the earth as fast as possible in order to “finish the work”.
Environmental concerns do not matter.
2. Benign Neglect Do nothing because in light of Christ's soon
return, preservation of the environment is useless.
3. Internal Conflict Internal conflict between the advent that
will take us “home” (to heaven) and a desire to part of the
environmental solution.
4. Green Religion A quasi-religion with “sins” of wasting
resources like water or electricity, or failing to recycle.
Seeks to save the earth from environmental destruction
(= salvation by environmental good works).
5. Sensible Stewardship The earth belongs to the Lord and that
our role is stewardship, or God's managers, placed here to
act in his image, just like we will do in the earth made new.
Purpose of this paper
• The purpose of this paper is to show the religious dimensions of
the environment, and
• To support stewardship of the earth as the best possible position
• “The nations were angry; and
you wrath has come. The
time for judging the dead . . .
and for destroying those who
destroy the earth.” Rev. 11: 18
NIV
“Sensible Stewardship”
• Humans DO have unique ethical
responsibilities toward our
environment.
• Acceptance of the challenge of
stewardship, not greedy exploitation,
neglect or indecision.
• Stewardship (not exploitation) calls for
managing the Lord’s earth in His image.
Stewardship after the fall
• In the beginning our 1st parents were stewards.
• At the Exodus, God reminded the children of Israel that
the earth belonged to Him (Ex. 19: 5).
• Many laws in Leviticus governed relationships with
land & animals; evidence that the Hebrews were to
resume stewardship after slavery. (Lev. 1: 1-9; 18: 2430; 20: 22; 25: 1-7; 25: 8-23; 26: 3-6, 32-35, 40-42).
• After 40 years of wandering, a new generation was
reminded that the earth belonged to the Lord (Deut.
10: 14), and they were reminded against greed with
respect to their relationship to wild animals (Deut. 22:
6, 7).
Stewardship: Present
• We retain the role of steward.
• Hebrews saw themselves as part of creation
• Modern worldview has us apart from & superior to the
creation
Cultivated
land (%)
Stewardship: Future
• We are not always good stewards
because we have not internalized
that we are part of the creation.
• We now have a wide variety of
sophisticated tools to aid in
environmental management.
• If we truly feel at home in the
ecosystem, we will not use them to
more efficiently express greed.
• It is time for us to internalize our
role as God’s stewards (managers,
caretakers) of the global
ecosystems that form our life
support system.
Acknowledgement of our God-given
role as stewards
• The creation needs stewards to
act in God’s image.
• Environmental stewardship is
like health care.
• Human health has an
environmental dimension.
• As a church, we have had an
impact on global health.
• I think we should educate for
environmental stewardship
Three Advents
1. Simeon & Anna recognized Jesus as
the Messiah when he was a baby
(Luke 2: 21-38)
2. Today, Adventists await the 2nd
coming
3. Will we look forward to the 3rd
coming of Christ with just the same
longing as the other two?
Creation is Groaning
For the creation waits with eager longing for the
revealing of the children of God . . . creation
itself will be set free from its bondage to decay
and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the
children of God. We know that the whole
creation has been groaning in labor pains until
now; and not only the creation, but we
ourselves . . . groan inwardly while we wait for
adoption, the redemption of our bodies. Rom.
8:19-23 NRSV
Imagination . . .
• Acknowledgements: Southwestern Adventist
University
• This presentation may be freely distributed.