Environment and Climate - Jubilee Spring 2020

SPRING 2020

Editor

RYAN ERAS EICC Founder

JOSEPH BOOT

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Joe Boot 5

The Constant Gardener Joe Boot

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Climate Concerns meet the Gospel Ted Fenske

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Golgotha: The Turning Point of History John Hultink

30 Does Christian Creation Care

Undermine the Pro-life Movement?

E. Calvin Beisner 40

Book Review: George Marden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture John Bellingham

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JUBILEE EDITORIAL: ISSUE 27

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JOE BOOT JOE BOOT is the founder and President of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and the founding pastor of Westminster Chapel in Toronto. Before this, he served with Ravi Zacharias as an apologist in the UK and Canada, working for five years as Canadian director of RZIM. Joe earned his Ph.D. in Christian Intellectual Thought from Whitefield Theological Seminary, Florida.

His apologetic works have been published in Europe and in North America and include Searching for Truth, Why I Still Believe and How Then Shall We Answer.

His most noted contribution to Christian thought, The Mission of God, is a systematic work of cultural theology exploring the biblical worldview as it relates to the Christian’s mission in the world. Joe serves as Senior Fellow for the cultural and apologetics think-tank truthXchange in Southern California, and as Senior Fellow of cultural philosophy for the California based Centre for Cultural Leadership. Joe lives in Toronto with his wife, Jenny, and their three children, Naomi, Hannah, and Isaac.

THERE ARE FEW THINGS that the mod-

ern state is not willing to regulate out of existence in our era, but some time ago I came across an example that really caught my attention. In 2016, in the great state of California (where else?), a law was passed to regulate cow flatulence.1 Globally, taxes are increasingly being proposed on milk and meat to reduce cattle populations. Apparently cows with bad gas are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions (methane and carbon) which are to blame for pretty much everything these days, from poverty to international terrorism to hurricanes. We hear such claims so often that whenever we read of a significant phenomenon effecting the earth’s ecosystem, most readily assume it is another piece of evidence for catastrophic manmade global warming – or to use that panacea for the world’s problems, climate change.

This oddity happened recently when I was watching a wildlife documentary with my children and learned a very interesting and troubling fact: 45,000 square miles of arable land on the planet are being lost to desertification each year. Which is to say, at present, every year, about 45,000 square miles of land on earth becomes desert.

By the end of the century, that’s a lot of desert and potentially means a lot of displaced people, especially in Africa, central Asia and Australia.

As I expected, the commentator on this program implied that ‘climate change’ was responsible for desertification. So, on this occasion I took some time to look into the insinuation and found that this documentary’s view of the subject is far from the settled truth. Carbon dioxide and methane emissions are not, in themselves, the cause of desertification. On the contrary, increased levels of greenhouse gases have helped boost green foliage significantly in the world’s arid regions for decades, lengthening growing seasons in northern areas so that global green coverage is greater today than it was in the 1970s. So if not greenhouse gases, what is creating deserts? It is soil degradation that creates deserts.

If this sounds like a trivial point not suited for non-scientists, think of it in these terms: at a more basic level, it is a failure to observe God’s

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law and norms for land, crops and herds that turns once-good fertile land into desert, and it is this disobedience which in the end can starve and displace peoples. Environmental science shows that in temperate and sub-tropical climates which have a rainy season and a dry season, the vegetation holds moisture in the soil between the seasonal rains. However, if the soil degrades to a point where vegetation is no longer growing, then the moisture quickly evaporates and the land becomes dry and arid. The dilemma has been described this way: In seasonal rainfall environments we find a mass of vegetation grows each year during the growing season…. Of the annual growth of vegetation, a very high percentage dies at season’s end and has to decay to cycle the nutrients, retain the carbon and clear the way for the following season’s growth. These are the environments in which we find the large herding herbivores and the pack-hunting predators and this was not by chance. In these environments it is essential that a high proportion of the annual vegetation, once dead, be consumed by herbivores and converted to dung and urine partly broken down for micro-organisms to complete the task…. The role of the predator was an essential one in this complex whole. The fear of predation kept many herbivore species concentrated and as no animals like to feed on their own concentrated dung and urine, they kept moving. Movement kept plants from being nibbled to death in overgrazing and overbrowsing and thus helped maintain both vegetative mass and diversity of the entire community. The trampling of concentrated animals also assisted decay and the maintenance of covered and broken soil surfaces for better moisture penetration, aeration and life.2

This describes a remarkable balance within creation. If wild herds are reduced, domestic mobile herds of grazing animals need to replace them to aerate soil and fertilize land. In other words, Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

Editorial: Issue 27

bio-integrated farmsteads are needed which do not exhaust the land with crop monocultures and which observe a rest for the land and cattle to allow time for soil to recover and herds to graze and fertilize the land – this is what God’s law-word requires (Leviticus 25). God the Creator’s agricultural laws are not arbitrary; they specifically allow for a rejuvenation of the land so that proactive, healthy ecosystems can flourish indefinitely.

Without obedience to God’s law for the land, man overhunts, robs the soil of its fertility by over-grazing and over-farming, and undermines his own well-being. The land God was promising to the Hebrews in the older testament was flowing with milk and honey because bees, plants and animals were productive in a healthy, balanced system. So, for agriculture to be healthy and not destructive we need to observe God’s law and norms. Where we fail to do so, we turn the world into a desert and blight our future.

We cannot agree with today’s eco-warriors who claim that productive man is the problem, that he is a virus on the earth, and who glibly demand fewer people and livestock and less productivity.

It is not man himself who is the problem from the scriptural standpoint. The garden sanctuary of the earth (Gen. 1-2) and the Sabbath were made for man, the pinnacle of creation, wherein he was to display God’s care, rule and glory (Mark 2:27).

Without man to tend and keep it, all the earth would be a boundless wilderness, inhospitable, out of kilter and comparatively non-productive.

It is certainly true that there are all kinds of ecological problems in the earth that the sin (i.e. lawlessness) of man is responsible for. There are serious pollution issues to be faced, over-fishing, over-hunting and over-farming and many other problems that require responsible care and conservation. Moreover, as Christians we are to be agents of the restorative and renewing life of the gospel in every area of life, and this includes caring for our environment and being good stewards of the vast resources of the world that Christ has created. In fact this commission was given to hu-

Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

man beings from the beginning (Gen. 1:26-28) and it must be taken seriously – it has never been rescinded. Thus the answer to these problems is not getting rid of man (the Lord’s gardener), but getting rid of lawlessness – the restoration of man’s calling to obedience. The remarkable thing is that desertification in nature is actually reversible by obedience to God. What is true in the realm of agriculture finds its parallel in all areas of human culture. Sin and disobedience to God’s law and norms create a cultural wasteland where people end up destroying their own well-being (Prov. 8:36). We live in a time in the West of cultural desertification. To extend a potent metaphor, if the cultural soil of our time is not aerated, fertilized and seeded by God’s people by means of a full-orbed gospel, Christ’s church walking up and down upon it, our culture will no longer be able to retain the moisture of truth and will break down.

It is interesting that Christ’s new humanity are often likened to a flock of sheep. We graze on God’s goodness, grace and kindness every day. If we are sheep who hear the master’s voice calling us to our task then we will be thoroughly aerating the soil of cultural life by transformative engagement, sowing the seeds of the kingdom and fertilizing that soil by our constant involvement within all aspects of culture. Without us, what kind of soil will our society become? According to Christ, gospel seed that falls in shallow soil on the path or on a dry stony place cannot take proper root and bear fruit.

Of course as Christians we cannot govern the hearts of men or compel an obedient response to the gospel, but we can be diligent in preparing the ground of culture with the truth and life of the Word so that the seeds of the gospel can be scattered into a culturally aerated and fertilized place.

We can worship and serve, care and steward all things in obedience to Christ and his Word, bringing glory and honor to his name and so setting forth the beauty and fruitfulness of a life lived in Christ. We can fulfill our cultural mandate and the

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Great Commission. We can pursue true righteousness and justice, real cultural beauty, which the Bible calls the kingdom of God. Moreover, as we live in obedience to God’s word-revelation, those around us will be blessed and flourish because of the faithfulness of God’s people.

Without the aerating activity of the people of the second Adam, our fellow human beings in the grip of apostasy will eventually starve culturally, for they will turn all aspects of life into a desert by sin and lawlessness. But according to Scripture the gospel turns the valley of Baca into a place of springs (Ps. 84:6). The Bible is replete with images of deserts or parched lands bursting into life with rivers, streams, fertility and plenty when God acts on behalf of and through his people (Ps. 78:16; Isa. 43:19; Rev. 22:1-2). As we participate in cultural life in terms of God’s Word, the desertification of culture is reversed and God’s kingdom life returns and grows. The cultural desert of our time can become a place of springs by the power of the Holy Spirit working through an obedient people. We have an obligation as Christians to leave this world richer and more fruitful than we found it (Matt. 25:14-30).

The survival of our present civilization depends on the gospel of a restored and renewed creation and our abiding faithfulness to God’s revelation.

In a word, obedience is green!

John Bellingham reviews the classic work of scholarship, George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture.

My own article, The Constant Gardener, seeks to encapsulate the underlying commitments of the Ezra Institute and of Jubilee by explaining some of the distinctives of reformational thinking. When we understand God as the creative, productive, cultivating Maker of all things, then we can begin to appreciate our own calling as His image-bearers, to participate in the reconciliation of all things to God. 1 Ben Rosen, “A new California law is going after one of the single biggest greenhouse gas emitters,” Business Insider, September 20, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/ california-regulating-cow-farts-greenhousegases-2016-9.

2 Allan Savory, “Holistic Resource Management: A Conceptual Framework for Ecologically Sound Economic Modelling,” in Ecological Economics, 3, 1991 (181-191).

IN THIS ISSUE Ted Fenske articulates the worldview of environmentalism, noting key areas where it stands antithetical to the biblical worldview, but also areas and activities where the Christian cultural mandate aligns with environmental concerns.

Cal Beisner exposes the double-speak employed by certain environmental activist groups who appeal to Christians by attempting to twist the meaning and extent of what it means to be ‘pro-life.’

Just in time for Easter, John Hultink examines the Golgotha exchange between Christ and the criminal on the cross, providing a corrective to the common identification of “paradise” and “heaven,” and drawing out the full implications of the meaning of Good Friday.

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Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

The Constant

GARDENER

The value of reformational thinking

REFORMATIONAL THOUGHT IS DISTINCTIVE

The Ezra Institute is a confessional Christian think-tank engaged in scholarship and intensive biblical worldview teaching and training, exploring cultural apologetics, Christian philosophy and mission theology as they each grow out of that worldview – all in intimate relation to the central thrust of Scripture, the kingdom of God. As such, I am often asked about what characterizes or distinguishes our thinking about these issues within the broad rubric of evangelicalism.

Why would someone invest their time or finances in our programs and resources in view of so many more readily familiar choices? This is a fair question and one that I hope to answer in this article.

The term we have chosen that best describes the orientation of our thought is reformational due to our debt to the leading thinker of the sixteenth century Reformation, John Calvin and the many who built consistently on that foundation – especially the Dutch Kuyperian and English Puritan traditions – and our conviction that Christian thinking must always be in reform in terms of God’s Word and geared toward cultural reformation within God’s world.

I have never tired of observing that the word ‘culture’ shares a common root with such earthy words as ‘cultivate,’ and shows up in words like ‘agriculture,’ ‘horticulture,’ and so on. When it comes to human culture, the question is not whether we will shape culture, but what kind of society will we cultivate. That is to say, as imagebearers of God, we are inescapably cultural creatures. We have been placed in this world as in a garden, to tend, develop and care for it. It only remains to be seen whether we cultivate it in a godly or a rebellious way. In what follows I hope Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

to show how reformational thinking understands and pursues the human cultural task in imitation of the original Gardener and as an offering of praise to the living God. REFORMATIONAL THOUGHT IS MORE THAN THINKING ABOUT THINKING

It is of primary importance to point out that reformational thought is not simply concerned with analytical thinking as such, but with what living life to the full is all about – for that is why Christ, who is at the root of our thought, was made manifest (John 10:10). Consequently, reformational thinking is not interested in a narrow, intellectualized faith or scholastic, rationalistic apologetics. Though we must obey Christ’s command to love God with all our mind (Mark 12:30), it would be a mistake to regard intensive and focused reflection on the full implications of God’s Word-revelation as an abstract, speculative intellectual exercise bearing little relationship to life in the real world and the everlasting matters of Christ’s kingdom. Christian thinking worth the name does not terminate with tweed jackets, dusty libraries, pipes and slippers or high-brow essays crafted for bohemian scholars living in academic echo chambers. On the contrary, our view of reality is very much concerned with every aspect of real life as God has created and is redeeming it through His Son. Rigorous, philosophically oriented thinking in the grip of Scripture is an act of faith and obedience directed toward the reconciliation of all things to God.

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JOE BOOT JOE BOOT is the founder and President of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and the founding pastor of Westminster Chapel in Toronto. Before this, he served with Ravi Zacharias as an apologist in the UK and Canada, working for five years as Canadian director of RZIM. Joe earned his Ph.D. in Christian Intellectual Thought from Whitefield Theological Seminary, Florida.

His apologetic works have been published in Europe and in North America and include Searching for Truth, Why I Still Believe and How Then Shall We Answer.

His most noted contribution to Christian thought, The Mission of God, is a systematic work of cultural theology exploring the biblical worldview as it relates to the Christian’s mission in the world. Joe serves as Senior Fellow for the cultural and apologetics think-tank truthXchange in Southern California, and as Senior Fellow of cultural philosophy for the California based Centre for Cultural Leadership. Joe lives in Toronto with his wife, Jenny, and their three children, Naomi, Hannah, and Isaac.

REFORMATIONAL THOUGHT SHUNS IDOLATRY AND OBSERVES THE LIMITS OF THOUGHT

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The Constant Gardener

Greeks, Christians frequently tend to be suspicious of anything that smacks of philosophy (lit. “love of wisdom”) as indicative of man’s effort to trust ultimately in his logical-analytical thinking as an alternative source of certainty to faith in Christ and His Word. This suspicion of pagan philosophy is well justified. The intellectualism of the classical Greeks saw man’s reasoning capacity (and indeed thought itself ) in almost divine terms, to the point that intellectual contemplation was regarded as the highest kind of life, manual work was despised and the abstract ideas of the philosophers qualified them, in their minds, to be philosopher-kings governing the unsophisticated masses.

In contrast, our perspective is that the most fundamental and foundational questions of life cannot be answered by man’s theoretical reasoning alone. Confronted with the great ‘boundary’ questions of life (i.e. the origin of all things, the nature of the cosmos, the basis of truth and meaning, the ground of the relationship of unity and multiplicity in reality etc.,) our analytical capacities alone are helpless. We stand in need of revelation and the kind of certainty that is rooted in faith in Christ and His Word. That Word concerns all of life in all its meaning-sides, diverse relationships and structures which come to focus in the heart of the human person – the religious root of our being. So, reformational thought is oriented toward the totality of life and is not restricted to any one function of it (such as analytical thinking), while recognizing the limitations of human understanding in grasping that totality.

One of the wisest men who ever lived, king Solomon, well understood the inadequacy of human theoretical inquiry: Who is the wise person, and who knows the interpretation of a matter?... When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe the activity that is done on the earth (even though one’s eyes do not close in sleep day or night), I observed all the work of God and concluded that man is unable to discover the work that is done under the sun. Even though a man labors hard to explore it, he cannot find it; even SPRING 2020

if the wise man claims to know it, he is unable to discover it (Eccl. 8:1, 16-17).

What this inspired Hebrew philosopher seems to be describing here is the human inability to fully comprehend, to grasp in a manageable concept, the unity and totality of God’s work; which is to say, we cannot intellectually tie neatly together the meaning-fullness of all of God’s works in creation and human culture by mere logical inquiry. As Solomon writes again, “I resolved, ‘I will be wise, but it was beyond me. What exists is beyond reach and very deep. Who can discover it” (Eccl. 7:2324)? We simply cannot independently discover the work God has done from beginning to end (Eccl. 3:11). This is because, from a scriptural standpoint, we are creatures fully embedded in the creation we are investigating. We cannot lift ourselves out and above it. The root and transcendent unity of meaning lies beyond creation in the triune God. The origin, purpose and significance of our abiding yet changing cosmos in the fullness of its meaning is not uncovered by analytical human inquiry, it must be revealed to the heart by the living God. As a result, our reformational thought is rooted in the power of God and His revelation.

REFORMATIONAL THOUGHT RECOGNISES A PRIMARY RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE

This does not mean we cannot have a total view of life that is all-encompassing. The grand narrative of the Christian faith revealed in Scripture is indeed a total story rooted in the creation of all things by the living God. But this comprehensive view is not humanly constructed from analytical thought. Rather it is grounded in the givenness of primary faith knowledge which contains true, inescapable and irreducible ideas that we cannot manage without because they form the indefinable categories of all our thinking – life, love, beauty, energy, motion, logical distinguishing and more. This intuitive ‘idea’ knowledge is like a skylight shedding light upon life from above even when we can’t fully comprehend that revelatory knowledge in comprehensive concepts. This faith knowledge includes biblical ideas like the human heart as the invisible centre of our person; God’s eternal relationship as trinity; His creation Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

The Constant Gardener

of all things from nothing; His providential government of all things by His law-word at every moment in all creation; His covenantal love for and redemption of His creation; His everlasting truth and justice; the realm of heaven and angels and demons. We cannot fully comprehend these truths and they are not inferred from other beliefs but are part of the givenness of God’s revelation to us and in us.

This real knowledge goes beyond our ability to fully grasp in simple concepts. Yet this primary, practical, religious knowledge given in creation and in Scripture is the real foundation for every other kind of knowledge. So reformational thought is not a form of ‘rational theology’ for a Christian intelligentsia, constructing an independent knowledge of God and the world from theoretical inquiry. It is founded in acknowledgement of God’s revelation of Himself.

REFORMATIONAL THOUGHT IS CONFESSIONAL

This recognition means that reformational thought is confessional, because its foundation is the Christian confession of faith as it seeks to answer the big questions of life. Stated broadly as a world-and-life-view, that confession can be summarized as the creation, fall (in Adam) and redemption of all things in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. In the language of Scripture, we confess the all-pervasive reality of the kingdom of God. This knowledge is not a development of professional theologians but constitutes the first principles of Christian life and thought.

The coherence of the rich diversity of creation we experience every day is given to us in the divine order of creation (Gen. 1:20-31), and the unity of that coherent diversity in creation is the transcendent fullness of all things given and created in Christ Jesus (Col. 1:15-17; John 1:1-3). Christ is the origin who contains all things (Eph. 1:23; 1 Cor. 3:19-23; Eph. 2:10) so that the rootedness of creation in Christ is the most important feature of the creation in its essence. This same Christ is the destination of all creation, for He is reconciling all things to Himself (Col. 1:19-23) and will one day liberate the totality of creation, which Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

holds together and consists in Him (Col. 1:17), from its subjection to futility (Rom. 8:19-23). To abstract our thinking from this faith foundation in any area of life is the essence of secularization and the spiritual uprooting of reality.

At the same time, reformational thinking emphasizes that every other worldview is, by definition, equally characterized by a religious confession, because all answers to questions of origin, meaning, unity and destination within creation are answered by a conscious or unconscious non-Christian or Christian faith perspective. All worldviews are inescapably religious and a conscious articulation of an attitude to life or ‘ethos’ at the spiritual root of human existence. The Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd called this ethos “...this a religious ‘ground motive.’

This means that in Christian apologetics, the contest is not between ‘science’ and Scripture, or ‘reason’ and faith – with Christians struggling on the backfoot to show that despite their faith they are still ‘rational.’ Rather, faithful apologetics recognizes a confrontation between religious worldviews, between different philosophies of life. The task of apologetics in reformational thinking is to show that in every area of thought and culture, apostate faith is destructive of meaning, truth and life because it takes a meaning aspect(s) or entity within creation and absolutizes it to divine status as a substitute origin and root of meaning. This produces hopeless contradictions and antinomies, making human experience unintelligible and unlivable if consistently applied. All sciences and human thinking is undergirded by one religious motive and worldview or another and only the Christian standpoint is one that does not self-destruct under its own weight.

primary, practical, religious knowledge given in creation and in Scripture is the real foundation for every other kind of knowledge.”

REFORMATIONAL THOUGHT IS NOT ABOUT MAKING EVERYONE A THEOLOGIAN

This confessional basis does not mean that reformational thought tries to privilege the science of theology or apologetics over other disciplines and vocations. Theology is an important subject and vocation but is only one among many equally imSPRING 2020

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The Constant Gardener

portant fields in which to study, work and serve God in terms of a Christian world-and-life-view grounded in a scriptural confession. Theology as a science is the human theoretical interpretation of revelation and faith, it is not revelation itself.

God’s revelation is God revealing Himself in creatures – that is, in creation, in the Bible, in man himself (Rom. 1:19) and supremely in Christ who is the firstborn of creation, both God and man. His revelation is the norm and normative content of our faith.

Biblically, to have true faith is to believe, trust and serve God with the whole of our being (Heb. 11:4-12; Luke 10:27; John “...all of us, not just 14:15). Without revelation, there is the theologian, no possibility of faith because faith, have access to the function of believing (Heb. 11:1), is always oriented in response to divine God’s revelation to revelation. As such, faith is actually guide our believing, a constitutive aspect of being human. thinking, acting and Those who reject God’s norm for faith living.” have not stopped putting their faith somewhere, nor have they lost their faith function, they have simply reacted to revelation by placing their faith elsewhere. Faith remains the guiding function in all of our lives. It gives form and shape to all we are and do because it refers us to the religious root of life, concentrated in the heart.

Now, while reformational thought is not seeking to turn everyone into theologians, it is concerned with authentically understanding and expressing our faith in all disciplines and areas of life in terms of God’s scriptural norm for faith. True faith is worked out and developed by practicing faith (not just hearing lectures or sermons) because believing grows by doing, by applying, by testing, trial and error (Jas. 1:22; 2:18-26). This means that whether we are bankers, butchers, homemakers, heart surgeons, midwives, truck drivers, carpenters or investors, our life and work is shaped and directed by our faith as we respond to God’s revelation in obedience or disobedience. We have a response-ability by virtue of our humanity, and all of us, not just the theologian, have access to God’s revelation to guide our believing, thinking, acting and living.

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REFORMATIONAL THOUGHT SEES MAN AS GOD’S IMAGE-BEARER WITH A CULTURAL TASK

The scriptural distinctives of genuine faith make it abundantly clear that human beings have a real-world task as God’s image-bearers, called to reflect His will, purpose and character back to the rest of creation (Gen. 1:26-27). In the biblical world-and-life-view, a certain dynamic has been written into creation because all things are created from, through and unto God (Rom. 11:36; Acts 17:28). Everything is oriented toward the maker (origin) of all things in total dependency, the One in whom everything consists and is brought to its destination (Rev. 22:13). This includes man himself who occupies a unique and royal station within creation.

This privileged position is rooted in Christ. Man is an image of God and of Christ (in whom he is created). The first man, Adam, was created as head of the race and in himself represented and comprehended the unity of all human beings who would come from him. Scripture is clear that we were in Adam who was ‘son of God’ (Luke 3:38; Rom. 5:12). Thus, in an important sense, we are royal representatives of God the Son and we too were in paradise and fell into sin in Adam. It was here we fell from our original unity in Christ.

It was and is man’s creaturely bond with the human nature of Christ (the last Adam) in the depth dimension of the heart which brings us into His central position in creation (Ps. 8). As Andree Troost explains concerning this mystery, “In Christ man participated in Christ’s unitary and root position, of which the revelation of Col. 1:15-17 says that Christ is the first creature and that all things have been created in Him and also exist in Him.” Redeemed humanity’s royal role is thus bound to Christ’s identity for we are joint heirs (Rom. 8:16-17; 1 Pt. 2:9; 1 Cor. 15:22). If we fail to recognise this, we entirely miss the religious root of cosmic reality and our place in it (Heb. 2:10-12). We then end up living much of life as though Christ did not exist, as though we are not in Him, and as if He is not of central relevance to our life in the world and every discipline.

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The Constant Gardener

Reformational thought further recognises that the task given to us in Christ is to participate in His ministry of reconciliation (John 20:21-23) – the reconciliation of all things to God. If we truly are in Him, not just by virtue of creation, but also of redemption by rebirth and faith, this ministry is inescapably bound to us (John 14:12; 2 Cor. 5:17-18; Eph. 2:6-7). Christ is the true vine, God is the gardener, and we are the branches called to remain in Him and bear fruit (John 15:1-8). In a broader sense the whole world is God’s garden (Matt. 13:38) and He is restoring paradise and glorifying His creation through the renewing work of Christ (2 Cor. 5:17; Rev. 21:5).

The cultural task is thus illustrated beautifully for us in Scripture in light of creation as the garden of God. For the Son was there from the beginning (Prov. 8:22-31) and walked with the man He had formed in the cool of the day in the world’s first garden that the Lord Himself had planted (Gen. 2:7-8). Adam and Eve’s task was to tend and keep the garden and to have dominion in the earth (Gen. 1:28; 2:15; 2:18, 21-24). This meant working in and watching over what God had made, turning creation into a God-honoring and glorifying culture.

Because of sin and rebellion our first parents were forced to leave the garden the Lord had planted to struggle in a creation now subjected to futility. But at the same time, God made a promise to send the Son of man, the seed of the woman (Gen. 3:15), the root of Jesse, the true vine, the last Adam, to restore the garden and fellowship with the divine gardener. To that end (Gal. 3:16), He called a royal-priestly people in Abraham (Ex. 19:6) and promised them a taste of paradise restored in Canaan, a land flowing with milk and honey (Ex. 33:3), if they were obedient. But due to rebellion that garden was also forfeit.

At last, the first Gardener, the Lord of the vineyard enters His garden again to walk with men – this time as a Son of Adam, born of a virgin. He entered the garden of Gethsemane and yet His disciples slept, once again leaving the divine Gardener alone in His garden as He knelt and offered up prayers and supplications with strong cries and tears (Heb. 5:7). There He confronted the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

death which He had pronounced on His loved ones in the first garden and then went out to taste the bitterness of death for everyone (Heb. 2:9).

At the cross a remarkable exchange occurs concerning God’s garden, the restoration of paradise.

One of the criminals crucified next to the Lord, now under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit asks, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus replies, “I assure you: Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:4243). Here, the kingdom of God and paradise are synonymous. Christ explicitly reveals that on this very day the paradise, lost in the garden of Eden by the first Adam, is being reinstated by the last Adam. Soon thereafter Jesus cries out, ‘It is fulfilled’ (John 19:30). It is at this very time that all of the Father’s requirements for redemption and the restoration of creation are fully met and Jesus’ specific promise to the converted criminal is realized. At that very instant, in Christ, all God’s people in history had their passports stamped for resurrection life in paradise restored. Scripture records that at this precise moment, the curtain of the temple (itself an image of the garden of Eden) was torn in two from top to bottom (Matt.

27:51), ensuring the believers direct access to God, even as Adam and Eve had enjoyed direct access to Him. Paradise is thus again accessible to the people of God, the children “He entered of faith. As a result, we are given the asthe garden of surance, “I will give the victor the right to Gethsemane eat from the tree of life, which is in God’s and... There He paradise” (Rev. 2:7).

Near the place our Lord was crucified was another garden with a new sepulchre in which no-one had ever been placed. There He was buried alone. On that glorious morning of death’s defeat, Mary wandered into the garden tomb and mistook the Lord for the gardener as He walked there in resurrection power (John 20:15)!

confronted the death which He had pronounced on His loved ones in the first garden and then went out to taste the bitterness of death for everyone.”

Now, the great Gardener has been exalted and is seated at the right hand of God, pruning his vines and bringing all things into subjection (Ps. 8; Heb. 2:5-12). Yet there is more. Reformational thought recognises that in Christ, we are raised up and seated in the heavens, participatSPRING 2020

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ing in Christ’s ministry, rule and authority as He subordinates everything to Himself (Eph. 2: 6, 10). As such, the same Lord walks with “On that glorious us again as His people, by the Spirit.

God is in Christ, reconciling the world morning of death’s to Himself and we are in Him restored defeat, Mary to our calling to cultivate creation into wandered into the the garden of God. Jesus called this garden tomb and cosmic garden the Kingdom of God, mistook the Lord and we are entrusted with the gospel for the gardener as (good news) of this kingdom.

He walked there in resurrection power.”

Reformational thinking is therefore enthralled with the marvel, mystery and privilege of our royal-priestly calling to represent the covenant love, will and purpose of God to all creation, in every sphere of life and thought, delighting in the Lordship of the constant Gardener.

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C L I M AT E C O N C E R N S meet

THE GOSPEL THE WORLDVIEW OF ENVIRONMENTALISM

Climate concerns are widely viewed as the defining issue of our time, and environmental injury our greatest threat. The media is inundated with dismal forecasts of overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and impending catastrophic global warming. It’s hard to have missed the widelybroadcast images of a scowling Greta Thunberg delivering her scolding message of environmental shame. And it seems that every earthquake, hurricane or wildfire, no matter where they occur on the planet nor the circumstances, all get attributed to climate change as the cause. In short, the environmental movement has captured the imagination and fears of this generation. So, although I’ve spoken in the past to the important issues of environmental health, including to government representatives, this essay is less a review of the potential health dangers of environmental pollution, and more of a warning of the present dangers of the worldview undergirding the environmentalist movement. My goal with this paper is to first compare and contrast the Christian ethic of environmental stewardship with the secular worldview of environmentalism, and then to highlight aspects of the environmental movement that we as Christians can support in good conscience, and aspects that we need to oppose.

As a worldview environmentalism is hardly benign. It differs from Scripture at several critical points with important implications for how we understand reality, how we know things, and how we are to live our lives. Fundamental to a properly understood Christian environmental ethic is the Creator/creature distinction and the doctrine of humankind’s creation in the image of God. As such, the Christian metaphysic is based upon the biblical revelation of God as Creator, Sustainer, Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

and Governor of the universe, and humankind as the pinnacle of creation – God’s opus magnum.

By contrast, environmentalism displaces the God of the Bible for a pagan view of reality in which nature is personified, and humankind reduced to just another animal species. In so-called “deep ecology,” the earth itself is divinized, depicted as a self-regulating single organism in which the organic and inorganic components of the planet evolved together in harmony to maintain its continued habitability. Unlike the Creator/creature distinction set out in the Bible, in the worldview of environmentalism, no such separation exists; all is one. Referred to as Gaia theory – named after the Greek goddess who was considered mother of living things and sustainer of life – this view posits a living system, which automatically controls all things, including global temperature, atmospheric content, and ocean salinity, so that “life maintains conditions suitable for its own survival.”1 The creation doctrine of Imago Dei refers to the imprint that God has placed on the human soul, and provides the biblical explanation for our unique attributes, such as reasoning, and our sense of morality. This sacred stamp is what renders human life precious and set apart from all other living things. So, while Christian stewardship seeks to harmonize the fulfillment of the needs of all creatures, it nonetheless places human needs above non-human needs in terms of superiority and priority, particularly when the two are in conflict. By contrast, environmentalism insists upon biological egalitarianism, in which all life forms are given equal value, and even inanimate objects, such as rocks, have inalienable rights. In this view, human beings are lowered in their worth, and plants and animals elevated. As animal rights activist, Ingrid Newkirk summarized, “A rat is a pig is a dog is

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TED FENSKE Dr. TED FENSKE is Fellow for Medicine and Public Christianity with the EICC. He is Clinical Professor with the Division of Cardiology at the University of Alberta, staff cardiologist at the C.K. Hui Heart Centre, and an executive member of the Christian Medical/ Dental Society. Ted is a regular contributor to the Canadian Journal of Continuing Medical Education, Perspectives in Cardiology, and several other scholarly journals, as well as contributing to FOCUS magazine, the Christian Medical/ Dental Society publication on the intersection of Christian belief and medical practice. He has given numerous talks in public forums on a broad range of topics, including Christian apologetics, countering euthanasia, theodicy, gender confusion, and addressing the gay gospel. Formerly from Vancouver, he is the proud father of three sons and content to call Edmonton ‘home,’ where he is actively involved with his wife in the Christian community and Young Adult ministry. In his spare time, Ted enjoys playing guitar, skiing, and running marathons.

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a boy. They are all animals.” Taken to an even further extreme, this same sentiment asserts that “Whales are people, too!”2 Ironically, by negating the biblical affirmation of the human person’s unique role in creation, this view eliminates the very rationale for human stewardship and care for the environment.

But even more concerning, such an anti-biblical position sets the stage for the maltreatment of humankind. As E. Calvin Beisner cautioned, “The quest for the humane treatment of beasts by lowering people to the level of animals only leads to the beastly treatment of humans.”3 This was exemplified to the extreme during the reign of terror in Nazi Germany. Their Blut und Boden (blood and soil) environmental campaign to systematically cleanse the landscape took on a horrifying life of its own, culminating in the atrocities of the Holocaust.4 As image-bearers, we have been given a creation mandate to both populate the earth and exercise dominion over all aspects “Ironically, by of creation. The command to “be negating the biblical fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28) affirmation of the wasn’t merely a suggestion, nor a human person’s time-sensitive recommendation to be unique role in repealed after the attainment to a cercreation, this view tain global population. “Children are eliminates the very a gift from the Lord; they are a reward from him” (Ps. 127:3), both now and rationale for human for all time. By contrast, at the heart stewardship and care of the environmental movement is for the environment.” the assertion that humankind is the root cause of environmental injury, and overpopulation one of the greatest threats to planetary health. As English broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough has widely proclaimed, “We are a plague on the Earth,” warning that “either we limit our population growth, or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.” Consistent with this sentiment, it’s been claimed that “the greatest thing anyone can do to help the future of the planet is to have one less child.”5 In the worldview of environmentalism, human life is cheap. Children are seen not as a gift from God, but a threat to the environment, SPRING 2020

and large families not a reward to be celebrated, but a menace.6 The No-Future-No-Children pledge campaign that has swept our nation, in which young women and girls have vowed to refrain from having children until environmental conditions improve, gives testament to the profound influence of such destitute assertions.

To make matters worse, it’s increasingly claimed that our most effective carbon offsetting means is through promoting abortion programs.7 Reminiscent of the ancient pagan worship of Moloch, with its demand of child sacrifice to secure environmental favor – the worldview of environmentalism holds that the salvation of our planet necessitates the killing of our unborn.

Under this banner of eco-sustainability, international development agencies are increasingly funding more overseas abortions, and favouring abortion facilities ahead of quality maternal care programs.8 Our euthanasia-on-demand practice in Canada presents a similar concern. With the numbers of medical-assisted deaths (MAID) rising annually in our nation, it’s no stretch to imagine the environmental movement, with its fear of overpopulation, promoting MAID as a form of carbon-offsetting as well.9 Recognizing both the flimsiness of the MAID safeguards, and the extremely vulnerable state of those making the request, the spectre of euthanasia as a population-reducing method becomes apparent. Of utmost concern, then, is that one of the primary targets of environmentalism seems to be people, in general, and the most vulnerable members of our society, in particular.

In his best-selling book from the 1960s, The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich voiced concerns of an impending population explosion, predicting societal upheaval with worldwide catastrophe and famine. Despite his alarmist tone and inaccurate forecasts, his writing is still lauded as a pivotal work for implicating head count as a significant contributor to environmental injury.

The other key factors he underscored as causing planetary injury were the affluence of a society and their degree of technological development.

Providing a formulaic expression for these three influences, he popularized the equation, i = pat, where i represents the sum of environmental injury, p our global population, a represents Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

Climate Concerns

the role of affluence, and t stands for technology.10 Armed with this conceptualization, the environmental movement has swung into high gear, calling for a collective global response to radically rein in each of these supposedly harmful contributors. Using a socialist agenda, environmentalists are demanding not only a reduction in the planet’s population, but also a restructuring of global wealth distribution and a stifling of technological advances, particularly in developing countries. These directives contrast sharply with the biblical creation mandate, which encourages people to both populate and cultivate the earth.

The cultivation which was commanded in Genesis, of course, doesn’t mean to lay waste or to destroy. Although Francis Bacon rightly observed that “The world was made for man..., not man for the world,” it wasn’t made for man to abuse.

Rather, we’ve been placed on earth to “work it and take care of it (Gen. 2:15). Central to a Christian environmental ethic, then, is a balance between the freedoms we’ve been blessed with and the responsibility to use our freedoms rightly. To creatively have “dominion over all things” (Gen. 1:28), we need to have the freedom to express our identity as the image of God, including the ownership of possessions and private property.

This freedom was never intended to be without license, but always God-directed. Just as the right relationship between God and the Israelites was reflected in the health of the land, so too is our present care of the environment a tangible reflection of our love and devotion to God.11 Since we are innately sinful creatures, our activities must be continually kept in check by God’s laws of life. We are to “rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Gen. 1:28), within the godly limits set out in Scripture. With these parameters in mind, our task is to cultivate the earth and promote technological developments, so as to improve the standard of living for all people, and foster conditions conducive for abundant life. The environmental movement regards such endeavors as injurious to the planet.

Consequently, environmentalism seeks to restrict human freedoms and halt technological developEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

ments, thereby impairing creative approaches to environmental stewardship and recovery.

The worldview of environmentalism further diverges from Holy Scripture in terms of the forecast for humanity’s future. Rather than appreciating that our global difficulties are “Central to but temporary, and anticipating “a new heaven and a new earth…where there will a Christian be no more death or mourning or crying environmental or pain, for the old order of things has ethic, then, is a passed away” (Rev. 21:1-4), environmenbalance between talism holds to a bleak here-and-now the freedoms understanding of our present-day circumwe’ve been blessed stances, and an even bleaker outlook as to with and the what lies ahead for humankind. Dismissing biblical eschatology as nursery room responsibility to nonsense or whimsical wishful thinking, use our freedoms the worldview of environmentalism conrightly.” fines itself to what’s inside the box of our material world and predicts that our species’ trajectory is en route to oblivion.

Swept up in this fervor, contemporary media reverberates with the warning that unless rash measures are immediately undertaken to curb population expansion and hold back technological developments, humankind is destined for imminent annihilation. This ‘sky is falling’ mantra has permeated every corner of our culture, from elementary-school classes to entrepreneurial business practices, and the sphere of medicine included. Even prestigious scientific journals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine, have dedicated whole sections to climate crisis and health.12 Heavy on editorial and light on evidence, these commentaries do little more than parrot the popularized doomsday rhetoric, couched in scientific jargon. Many environmentalists go even further by claiming that our time has run out, and predict a “climate genocide” regardless of how immediate or radical the attempts taken to alter our present course.13 By rejecting God as Creator, Sustainer, and Governor of the universe, environmentalism is left in a bereft state of fear, holding onto an impoverished secular view of our final destiny. As William Ralph Inge wisely observed, “We can only say that secularism, like other religions, needs an eschatology, and has produced one.”

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THE BIBLICAL STANDARD

Holding to a biblical worldview, we can certainly agree that life as we know it has an end date. The difference, of course, is that Scripture details that this end will occur in accordance with God’s providential plan, and independent of mortal man’s shuffling about, be it with wasting and polluting or madly recycling and imposing carbon taxes. The salvation of us and our world isn’t dependent upon carbon reduction, but has been secured for us by Christ’s atonement on the cross.

“He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17), including the environment and climate change. There is a place for fear, to be sure, but not a fear “Even though the of environmental disaster, rather a fear worldview of of the Lord. environmentalism

is misdirected and opposes biblical truth on many levels, there are important areas of overlap between the two worldviews.”

The Christian ethic of environmental stewardship and the popular uptake of environmentalism are two very distinct entities. Although their activities overlap to some extent, they each represent different worldviews with stark dissimilarities (Table 1). It’s important to keep these in mind and not get lulled into thinking that our efforts to care for God’s creation are superimposable with the agenda of the environmental movement. We don’t want

to unwittingly fall prey to the devil’s schemes.

There is such a powerful inclination to appropriate beliefs from the secularizing culture around us that we need to keep shaping and testing our worldview against Scripture. We need to heed the warning of the apostle Paul, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ” (Col. 2:8).

ASPECTS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM TO CHAMPION

While there are critical aspects of environmentalism that need pushback from the Christian community, there are some activities that Christians can participate in with a clear conscience to the glory of God. Even though the worldview of environmentalism is misdirected and opposes biblical truth on many levels, there are important areas of overlap between the two worldviews. Prudent resource utilization, proper waste management, and genuine desire for ecological conservation, as examples, all align squarely with the Christian environmental ethic and represent shared concerns.

Appreciated in this way, these contact points can function as an opportunity for us to witness to a confused and fearful generation the creative and life-giving aspects of environmental stewardship.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

CHRISTIAN ENVIRONMENTAL ETHIC

Divinization of Nature

Creator/creature distinction

Biological Egalitarianism

Imago Dei

Population reduction

Populate earth

Limit development

Creative dominion

Global socialism

Freedom & responsibility

Doomsday predictions

Eternal plan Table 1. Environmentalism vs. Christian Environmental Ethic

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Climate Concerns

Modeling contentedness and thanksgiving, as a counter to corporate consumerism, might be a good starting point. Although sometimes displaced or overshadowed by other action items in the waste pyramid – refuse, reuse, recycle, recover, repurpose, reclaim… – reducing our personal buying and consumption should rank paramount in our care for creation. As such, Sabbath-keeping, and not shopping, should occupy our Sundays.

Our eyes should be set on things above, storing treasure in heaven, and not toys in the basement.

As well, since good work is currently being done to reduce landfill waste, recycle useable materials, reuse salvageable items, and repurpose outdated products, we need to roll up our sleeves and get involved, too. After all, “those who aren’t against us are for us” (Luke 9:50).

As image-bearers who share in the responsibility for the godly stewardship of creation, this is no time to just sit back and criticize. We need to be defined by what we are for, and not just by what we’re against. There’s no reason why we can’t take part in, and even lead, waste-wise development projects, and spearhead efforts to reduce pollution and prevent landscape desolation. In so doing, we can build credibility in society as “doers of the Word” (Jas. 1:22) and help to harness the energies of the environmental movement, providing a godly direction that will both protect the planet and foster human flourishing.

ASPECTS OF ENVIRONMENTALISM TO COUNTER

In areas where the Christian environmental ethic is being shut down or under attack, we must be prepared to provide a defense, “yet do so with gentleness and reverence” (1 Pt. 3:17). The panicked doomsday predictions whirling about in the media are a case in point. These frantic forecasts of the environmental movement need to be challenged, and for numerous reasons. For starters, they don’t represent scientific consensus.

Although newspaper headlines are rife with environmental doom and gloom, claiming that the world is facing a climate emergency of historic proportions due to global warming from manderived greenhouse gas pollution, not all climatologists agree.14 The criticism is related in part Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

to the over-reliance on computer models, which often fail to represent real-world temperature trends. In addition to the introduction of a warm bias related to the absorption of heat radiation from urban concrete, and causing a significant proportion of the observed warming, it’s not actually as warm today as the models anticipated.15 Challenges caused by cloud cover on global temperatures have resulted in the predicted trend projections being significantly warmer than observational data sets. As Yogi Berra once joked, “It’s tough to make predictions… especially about the future.” In fact, contrary to climate model estimates, extreme high temperatures have been shown to be declining in the USA rather than increasing.16 So as it stands, it may be too early to get rid of our Canada Goose jackets and long johns, after all.

Furthermore, human activity is not the only cause of climate change, and perhaps not even the most significant one. Using proxy data to reconstruct past climate conditions, paleo-climatologists have determined that climate change is not a new phenomenon, but has occurred repeatedly as part of natural cycles over the course of time.17 In the Middle Ages, for example, global temperatures were reckoned to have increased distinctly enough that Norse explorers were able to settle previously uninhabitable areas of Greenland.18 By comparison to this Medieval Warming Period, global temperatures significantly declined during the Renaissance era, in an epoch “The panicked referred to as the Little Ice Age. Although doomsday temperatures warmed up again afterpredictions wards, in the 1970s a global cooling was whirling about in all the buzz, with many scientists predicting an approaching ice age. This concern, the media ... need coinciding with the oil embargo and conto be challenged, sequent energy crisis of the time, created and for numerous no end of alarm and apprehension.19

reasons. For starters, they don’t represent scientific consensus.”

These cycles have been shown to oscillate from a few years to several decades and even longer, and correlate with solar irradiance rather than CO2 levels.20 As far as our present warming cycle, solar radiation has been estimated to account for two-thirds of the increase in the earth’s average temperature.21 So, despite the hype and hysteria generated by

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currently rising CO2 levels, global temperature seems to march to a different drummer, largely indifferent to the makings of man. The fact that this information seems at odds with “As Patrick Moore, popular reporting merely betrays the Greenpeace environmentalist agenda being foisted founder said, “The upon our society. As Patrick Moore, Greenpeace founder said, “The enenvironmental vironmental movement abandoned movement abandoned science and logic somewhere in the science and logic mid-1980s… Political activists were somewhere in the using environmental rhetoric to cover mid-1980s.” up agendas that had more to do with class warfare and anti-corporatism than with the actual science”22 With this in mind, it’s important that we don’t get caught up in the maelstrom of present panic, but keep in mind that God is good – all the time – and “test everything, and hold onto the good” (1 Thess. 5:21).

An additional reason to challenge the doomsday predictions is the harmful levels of anxiety generated by such forecasting. The ripple effect of this type of reporting on mental health is far-reaching and can include psychological stress, existential anxiety, grief, and despair and can lead to clinical depression and even suicide. The term eco-anxiety has recently been coined to describe the condition of those who suffer from “a chronic fear of environmental doom,” and ecophobia as a “heightened state of concern over the environment causing significant impairment.” 23 According to the American Psychological Society, there has been a sharp increase in people seeking help for climate-related depression and suicidal ideation, and looking specifically for “climate therapy.” With 800,000 suicides worldwide reported annually, and twenty times that number attempted each year, the spectre of an eco-anxiety surge in the population could be devastating, particularly for youth and young adults who seem most vulnerable.24 Studies of school-aged children indicate that the majority “expressed fear, sadness, and anger when discussing their feelings about environmental problems… and shared apocalyptic and pessimistic feelings about the future state of the planet.”25 Even Greta Thunberg, the Shirley Temple of environmentalism, who was recognized as 2019 Time Magazine Person of the Year for her enviSPRING 2020

ronmental activism, supposedly suffered in this way.26 Of course, since the ecological concerns of adults get easily passed on to their children, the students’ negative feelings about the future of the planet should be of no surprise. However, rather than encouraging environmental involvement, these states of eco-anxiety can lead to conflict avoidance, fatalism, disengagement and resignation. In this way, the doomsday reporting, intended to promote environmentalism, may even backfire and cause children’s participation in environmental stewardship and conservation to actually diminish. As parents, friends, mentors, and role models, we have an important role to play in countering this type of thinking in the vulnerable young people within our circles of influence. It’s critical that children and youth know they have purpose independent of their contribution to environmental protection, and value irrespective of their carbon footprint.

Beyond the doomsday forecasting, another aspect of environmentalism that needs pushback is the restriction of technological progress in developing countries. Stemming from the indoctrination that human enterprise and development are fundamentally incompatible with environmental protection, opposition is being launched by environmentalists that may threaten advances in human welfare for the poor.27 Bent on reducing CO2 emissions to prevent destructive global warming, environmental lobby groups are calling for a severe restriction on energy use, and bullying Western governments to withhold modern sources of energy in developing countries.28 In the name of eco-justice, they are using rhetorical terms like climate terrorism and carbon terrorism to raise opposition against certain so-called unsustainable agricultural practices used in the developing world. However, rather than improving the environment, such opposition will likely only retard the adoption of more productive and environmentally friendly practices in developing countries, and unfairly condemn them to a state of perpetual poverty.

While there are valid concerns that pollution emission and concentrations are increasing in developing economies, it’s important to understand that the benefits of declining disease and mortality Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

Climate Concerns

rates, along with rising health and life expectancy that result from this development, far outweigh the environmental harm. What’s more, the increase in pollution emissions seen during early economic development need not continue ever upwards, nor to the same extent as occurred in the West.

Although there is a relationship between environment health and economic development – with environmental degradation worsening as modern economic growth occurs – this trend reverses with increasing per capita income. Similar to the demographic transition that occurs when population growth rates slow down and eventually decline, as health and survival rates improve, environmental improvements tend to follow development. Moreover, it’s possible in our current era to expedite this environmental transition.

Much has been learned in terms of waste-wise resource management, and significant inroads have been made towards environmental protection. Improvements in air quality, for example, have contributed to measurable boosts in human health and life expectancy in North America.29 Even eco-aloof China has demonstrated capacity to lessen their environmental impact. Despite the fact that their emissions continue to exceed all other nations, a number of air-quality improvement strategies, first implemented for the Beijing Olympics, have resulted in significant and lasting air-quality improvements.30 Given the opportunity, developing countries could learn these lessons and reduce pollution levels while they continue to develop economically. By adopting ready-made environmental protection technologies, it’s possible that these improvements could even occur earlier and at lower levels of economic development than in countries that advanced in former times. Since wealthier economies are cleaner, affluence and knowledge are the best antidotes to pollution, not eco-policing and restrictive environmental policies.31

– others need to be challenged, and still others outright opposed. Rather than getting caught up in the climate change fear and frenzy of our day, we need to lean on the Gospel and be reassured of God’s providential plan.

Doomsday predictions are nothing new. In 1894, for example, the headlines of the London Times warned that “in 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of “...the doomsday manure.”32 Of course, such forecasting reporting, intended failed to consider Henry Ford’s tinkering to promote on the combustion engine, nor begin to environmentalism, fathom the giant automobile industry that may even would effectively replace horse transportation. Likewise, today’s climate alarmists backfire and fail to consider the immense role of envicause children’s ronmental stewardship and the very real participation in possibility of innovative environmental environmental reconciliation. Human beings aren’t just stewardship and polluters but have a creative imprint.

The way forward is not by restricting, policing, punishing, taxing, boycotting, and clutching onto some evaporating status quo, but by boldly stepping into the challenges of the future, using all of our God-bequeathed gifts to the best of our abilities, and “fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:2). In so doing, we must never forget that “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it, the world and all who live in it” (Ps. 24:1). The planet is ours to protect, undeniably, but also those who inhabit the planet, including the unborn, the frail, the anxious, and the poor. Since we are the salt and light of the world, our environmental mandate to steward creation must not forsake the vulnerable, so that “in all we do, we do for the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31).

CONCLUSION

1

The unbridled cultural embrace of environmentalism in the West has raised many important concerns that need addressing. While some should be championed – such as prudent resource utilization and proper waste management

2

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conservation to actually diminish.”

John Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford University Press, 2016).

“Whales are people too: Are we ready to see them as equals?” Readers Digest. July 2012, 26.

E. Calvin Beisner. Where Garden meets Wilderness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).

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4

Frank Uekoetter. The Green and the Brown: a History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (Cambridge University Press,) 2006.

5 Wynes S, Nicholas KA. “Environmental Research Letters,” Vol 12 (7), 2017.

6 John Guillebaud, Family Planning and Reproductive Health, University College, London 7 Avery Saklad, “Abortion and Climate Change,” in The Dartmouth, last modified May 21, 2019, https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2019/05/saklad-abortion-and-climatechange.

8 “UK taxpayers are biggest funders of global abortion giant,” The Christian Institute, last modified August 27, 2019, www.christian.org. uk/news/uk-taxpayers-are-biggest-funders-ofglobal-abortion.

9 “Fourth Interim Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada,” Government of Canada, published April 2019, www.canada.ca/en/ health-canada/services/publications/healthsystem-services/medical-assistance-dyinginterim-report-april-2019.html.

10 Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb: population control or race to oblivion? (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968).

11 Chris Wright, “A Christian Approach to the Environment,” in Transformation. Vol. 16, No. 3, (July 1999), p 81-86.

12 https://www.nejm.org/climate-crisis.

13 “Too late to avoid global warming catastrophe,” 300.org, https://sites.google.com/ site/300orgsite/too-late-to-avoid-global-warming.

14 Michael J. Oard. Frozen in Time: the weather book and life in the Great Ice Age (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2004).

15 RC Balling, “Observational surface temperature records versus model predictions,” in Shattered Consensus: the true state of Global Warming (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, 50-71).

16 Dr. John Christy, U.S. House Committee on Science, Space & Technology, 2 Feb 2016 17 Loehle, C, McCulloch, JH. “A 2000 Year Global temperature reconstruction,” in Energy & Environment, 2008(19), 93-100.

18 Michael J. Oard, “Is Man the Cause of Global Warming?” in Jubilee, 2014. Spring edition; 4-10.

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19 “How to Survive the Coming Ice Age: 51 things you can do to make a Difference,” in Time, April 8, 1977.

20 Hoyt, DV, Schatten KH. The Role of the Sun in the Climate Change, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

21 Scafetta N, West B. “Is climate sensitive to solar variability?” in Physics Today 2008, 61 (no 3); 50-51.

22 Interview with Patrick Moore. “Dr. Truth,” in New Scientist. December 25, 1999. Issue 2218.

23 Whitmore-Williams SC, Manning C, Krygsman K, Speiser M. “Mental health and our changing climate: impacts, implications, and guidance,” Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2017.

24 “Suicide data,” World Health Organization, last modified 2016, www.who.int/mental_health/ prevention/suicide 25 Journal of Environmental Education 2012 Vol 43 (1).

26 Queally, Jon (19 December 2018). “Depressed and Then Diagnosed With Autism, Greta Thunberg Explains Why Hope Cannot Save Planet But Bold Climate Action Still Can”. Common Dreams.

27 Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation (https://cornwallalliance.org) 28 Easterbrook, G. A Moment on the Earth: the Coming Age of Environmental Optimism, (New York: Penguin, 1995), 582-585.

29 Pope CA, et al. “Fine-Particulate Air Pollution and Life Expectancy in the United States. N Engl J Med” 2009; 360:376-386.

30 “A review of 20 Years’ Air Pollution Control in Beijing,” UN Environment Programme, https:// www.unenvironment.org/resources/report/ review-20-years-air-pollution-control-beijing.

31 Robert A. Sirico, “Environmental stewardship in the Judeo-Christian tradition, environmental stewardship in the Judeo-Christian tradition: Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant wisdom on the Environment,” Acton Institute, last modified April 17, 2000, https://acton.org/public-policy/ environmental-stewardship/theology-e/environmental-stewardship-judeo-christian-traditi.

32 Ben Johnson, “The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894,” Historic UK, last modified 2015, https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great-Horse-Manure-Crisisof-1894.

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JOHN HULTINK JOHN HULTINK is a Niagara-based entrepreneur. He was a student of Evan Runner at Calvin College, and since those days has been heavily invested in the development and spread of Reformational Christian education and publishing. John and his wife Jenny have three children and many grandchildren.

Golgotha:

The Turning Point of History “And he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ And he said to him, ‘Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise’” (Luke 23:42-43).

A REMARKABLE REVELATION

What happened on Golgotha that first Good Friday? What did Jesus’ descent into Hell and death accomplish? It is a question of momentous importance, yet I contend that the cosmic, historyaltering significance of the revelation disclosed in the dialogue between Jesus and the converted criminal has been trivialized into a few words about going to Heaven when we die.

The converted criminal spoke only nine words to Jesus (both in Greek and in English). Yet those few words set the heart ablaze, especially if understood correctly in the context of Christ’s response. In those few words the criminal accomplished two objectives: (i) he made a plea: “Jesus remember me,” and (ii) he made a declaration: “Jesus, you are coming into your kingdom.” The cross is focused on the definitive manifestation of the kingdom of God. Jesus, in this brief dialogue, emphatically declared to the criminal that on this first Good Friday the two of them would enter Paradise. What a momentous declaration!

But what does Jesus’ declaration about Paradise purport to say? Today in Paradise with Christ? Is the criminal going to a Paradise like the Garden of Eden? Is the act of crushing Satan’s head promised four thousand years earlier (Gen. 3:15) not understood to be the crowning achievement of God’s plan of deliverance? And is the crushing of Satan’s head not a prerequisite to enable believers to return to Paradise? Will the criminal this very day re-enter Paradise? Is this what Jesus is promising the converted criminal as He hangs alongside him on a cross?

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The possibility that Paradise could be regained, and that humanity could regain eternal life along with renewed access to the tree of life, certainly was not obvious to most Older Testament believers. Nor was access to the tree of life obvious to most believers who were alive when Jesus walked on the earth. And judging by the study Bibles and commentaries I have read, as well as the sermons I have heard throughout the past sixty years, neither is the reality of Paradise in the here-and-now obvious to believers living today.

This lack of awareness of the presence of Paradise in the here-and-now is sanctioned by identifying Paradise with Heaven.

Are Paradise and Heaven one and the same thing?

A return to Paradise was the gospel message Jesus was conveying to this criminal in response to his declaration that Jesus is coming into His kingdom. Is that not what “coming into your kingdom” represents—the return to Paradise?

And was not the criminal declaring that through His work on the cross Jesus was coming into His kingdom? Even if the criminal himself did not understand the full implications of what he was saying? Is this not a biblical truth, that the only place on earth where the Kingdom of God is manifested in all its glory and perfection is in Paradise? In effect, I maintain that Jesus’ declaration on the cross must be understood as follows: Today, you will cross over from a culture of death into a culture of eternal life. Even as your life is slipping away (John 5:24), you may die in the knowledge that the doors to Paradise have once again opened.

Through the will of My Father and through the powerful working of the Holy Spirit, you have today come to faith in the only true God and His Son, Jesus Christ, and that faith is eternal life (John 17:3). And Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

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that faith gives you passage into the new Paradise of God. I, Jesus, will open the door to Paradise this afternoon. It will happen at that moment when I shout: ‘Mashelem! It is fulfilled’ [John 19:30].

Today, on this first Good Friday, you and all those who believe in Me and My work on this cross will enter Paradise. Even now in a small way, in your sinful flesh, and finally, at the resurrection, when you receive your spiritual bodies, Paradise will be manifested in all its splendour and glory (Rev. 21, 22).

This is an astonishing implication. Have the shadow and the reality of death blanketing the entire universe since the Fall receded? Has the Suffering Servant this day, through His cosmic sacrifice on the cross, performed the great feat of forcing the shadow and the reality of death back all the way to that dreadful day of Adam’s Fall in the Garden? Has Paradise indeed returned?

Has the shadow of death in truth receded to that moment in time when Adam was still free to eat from the tree of life, when death was a warning and not a reality?

A REMARKABLE DIALOGUE

A most remarkable dialogue takes place between two people dying alongside each other, each hanging on his respective cross. In a few sentences it captures the weal and woe of the entire human race and of a groaning creation. This dynamic dialogue will forever change the course, the meaning, and the potential of history until the end of time. The promise of God’s permanent return to earth, to a restored Paradise (Rev. 21 and 22), was first made to a criminal hanging beside Jesus on a cross on Golgotha. What an unbelievable transformation!

Earlier in the day these two criminals together heaped insults on Christ (Mark 15:32). The testimony of this godless behaviour is carefully confirmed by Matthew who writes: “In the same way the robbers1 who were crucified with Christ also heaped insults on Him” (Matt. 27:44). The two were both sons of the Devil. But one of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

two criminals shortly before noon turns like a leaf on a tree. He is transformed from blasphemer to prophet. When later the unconverted criminal again begins to taunt Jesus, the converted criminal rebukes him. After prophetically declaring Jesus to be innocent of any crime, he turns to Jesus and implores and proclaims: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” This man is not inquiring about passage to Heaven for himself. He is prophesying that Christ will inherit His kingdom. Where does this man acquire such cosmos-altering insight into the nature of reality? This is a subject of conflicting views among theologians.

How could this man possibly know that Christ’s death on the cross was not the end of the story?

That Jesus would return from the grave? How could this man know that God would exalt Jesus to His right hand? Where did he obtain his insight into the meaning of the words of Mark 9:1?

“This man is not This verse is one of the most-discussed in inquiring about the whole of Mark’s Gospel. These words passage to Heaven had been spoken earlier by Jesus Himself: “There are some standing here who will not for himself. He is taste death before they see the Kingdom of prophesying that God come with power.” Words announcing Christ will inherit the beginning of the end of Satan’s reign.

His kingdom.”

Words that would translate into Satan’s expulsion from Heaven, and thereafter into a mighty outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the conversion of thousands. How did this criminal know any of this while hanging on his cross?

The only biblical explanation for this man’s remarkable insight is what Christ once said of Peter: “…this was not revealed to you, Peter, by man but by My Father who is in Heaven” (Matt.

16:18). God enabled this criminal to become a Christian, and having attained that wonderful new status, the Father then deputized this former slave of Satan to speak words of promise, of love, of comfort, and of blessing to His Son on the cross. No one knew better than Jesus that the conversion of this criminal and the promise of a kingdom originated with His Father.

First the request: “Remember me, Jesus...” Ask and it will be given. And then the proclamation: “…when you come into your kingdom.”

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The Holy Spirit inspired this converted criminal to petition Jesus to remember him when Jesus received His realm (the cosmos) as King.

The definitive receiving of the kingdom of God, not a passage to Heaven, stands at the heart and at the core of this exchange between the criminal and Jesus. This dialogue on the cross changes the dynamic of history. Today, you will enter with Me into Paradise. What an incredible revelation and what an incredible proclamation from one dying man to another.

This incredible dialogue marks the turning point in history. It voices the fulfillment of 4,000 years of God’s promises, and represents the prelude to God embracing sinners from every nation on earth.

The other figure hanging on the cross, and a party to this brief but cosmos-transforming dialogue, is Christ, Who immediately recognizes the full import of the conversion that this criminal has experienced. And Jesus “Ironically, by realizes Who brought this deathbed conversion to pass. It is the wondernegating the biblical ful initiative of a loving Father Who affirmation of the thereby lovingly embraces His sufferhuman person’s ing Son on the cross shortly before unique role in He abandons that Son to Hell. The creation, this view Father has come to the cross and has eliminates the very enabled this sinner to turn in faith to Christ (John 6:44). Christ, in turn, rationale for human transforms this criminal’s life of sin stewardship and care from “red like scarlet” into a life that for the environment.” is as “white as wool.” Christ will present this murderer on the Great Day of resurrection with a splendid white robe to wear when he attends the great wedding feast of the Lamb.

But here and now in this remarkable exchange on the cross on a hill called “The Skull,” with death stalking both of them, Christ will reveal to this criminal and to all those who will listen, the true nature of His mission on the cross this day. The Father of Jesus has made this possible by deputizing a terrorist to declare that God’s Son is innocent and that God’s Son will inherit His Kingdom with power. And in its most perfect manifestation the kingdom of God is found in Paradise as Jesus declares from the cross.

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The words of Christ’s response are the most profound, the most universal, the most liberating, the most joyous and the most gracious expression of life ever uttered by one Man to a fellow human being. In response to the criminal’s inspired declaration, enabled by His Father, that Christ is about to come into His kingdom, Jesus replies with words that will resonate from that day onward and transform history: “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Did Jesus actually intend to say in “Paradise” and not in “Heaven,” as many theologians would later contend? Did Jesus draw a parallel between the coming of His kingdom and the re-establishment of Paradise on earth? The very same Paradise to which Adam and Eve were denied access? In response to the criminal’s prophecy that Jesus is indeed coming into His kingdom, Jesus responds that on this very day the criminal will be with Jesus in Paradise. How is that possible? God blocked access to Paradise with the cherubim and flaming sword. The converted criminal is on his way to the grave, and so is Christ. On what biblical basis can exegetes insist that upon their death, both Christ and the criminal will go to Heaven?

Did Jesus not emphatically say to Mary after His resurrection, “Do not hold me for I have not yet ascended to the Father” (John 20:17)? These words must be treated with authority. And so too must the words recorded in Luke 24:51, where we read: “While he was blessing them he left them and was taken up into Heaven.” Jesus went to Heaven forty days after His resurrection.

What then does Christ mean when He tells the criminal that together they will enter Paradise?

And not simply enter Paradise, but enter Paradise on this very day. Doesn’t Christ simply mean to say what most study Bibles, commentaries, and sermons say, namely that together He and the converted criminal are going to Heaven that day?

No! Christ knows the Scriptures. He knows the difference between Heaven and Paradise. He created both. Paradise was made for mankind and belongs to the earth. After Adam’s Fall the tree of life was not removed from earth. Instead, it was guarded by the cherubim. On the cross, Paradise on earth once again became accessible in a small way to sinful believers. Heaven is home to God Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

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and to the angels. If Christ had meant to convey to the converted criminal that together they were going to Heaven on Good Friday, He would have said so; He knew the word for “Heaven.”

In this world-transforming exchange between these two figures, the criminal makes the incredible declaration that Jesus, though humiliated and hanging helplessly on an instrument of death, will yet be exalted and will yet come into His Kingdom. The exchange between Jesus and the criminal is all the more striking when we reflect on the chilling reality that before day’s end, both will have died. Each will be placed in their respective graves. What then will become of their grand dialogue about Jesus coming into His kingdom and a return to Paradise? This much is certain from Scripture. On this first Good Friday, both Jesus and the criminal went to their respective graves. Christ with a spear thrust in His side, to confirm His death, and the criminal with a pair of broken legs to hasten his.

As far as the disciples and those who loved Jesus are concerned, this was a sad ending to a wonderful story. The disciples, the relatives, and friends derived no comfort from the thought that Jesus and the criminal were now with the Father in Heaven. If that is what they believed, why would they grieve?

What now are we to make of Jesus’ claim that He and the criminal entered Paradise that very day?

Or is it exegetically warranted to teach that Paradise really is Heaven, as so many study Bibles and commentaries and sermons and books on the subject assert? How often do the hymns we sing claim that we are Heaven-bound? If that is indeed true, we have to confess that on Good Friday Jesus and the converted criminal went to Heaven, biblical evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

REMARKABLE MISREPRESENTATIONS

Was Jesus simply careless in His choice of words on the cross? Why did He use an uncommon word like “Paradise” if He was in fact referring to Heaven? Jesus employed the word “heaven” on numerous occasions during His ministry. He taught us to pray to His Father in Heaven. He Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

taught us that God’s will is to be done on earth as it is in Heaven. And if He meant to say that He and the criminal would both be in Heaven that day, why didn’t He just say so? It was a perfect opportunity to reveal to believers that Heaven is their destination upon death. But He didn’t.

“...is it exegetically warranted to teach that Paradise really is Heaven, as so many study Bibles and commentaries and sermons and books on the subject assert?”

It is not a trivial consideration. In important respects, equating Heaven and Paradise has closed our eyes to the cosmic significance and wonder of what Christ achieved for the Father and for us on the cross. And it has coloured our understanding of the interim (the time between human death and resurrection). It has also deprived us of the joy of experiencing Paradise in a small but significant way here and now in our sinful flesh. A more biblical understanding will open Scripture and help us come to a better appreciation of the biblical expression “in Christ.”

This includes an explanation of what Scripture means when it uses the expression “to fall asleep in Christ.” Scripture places great emphasis on our need to understand what it means when it teaches that the entire creation has its rootedness “in Christ.”

Before we examine what we believe Scripture actually teaches about Jesus’ promise of being in Paradise, let us survey what the various commentaries, study Bibles, books, and sermons have to say.

STUDY BIBLES, COMMENTARIES, SERMONS AND BOOKS

In spite of this biblical emphasis, literature from across the theological spectrum does not follow suit. The majority of study Bibles, commentaries, and sermons teach that we go to Heaven upon death as disembodied souls to carry on life there.

Consider just a small sample.

The NIV Study Bible notes: “In the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the OT) the word ‘paradise’ designated a garden (Ge 2:8–10) or forest (Ne 2:8), but in the NT (used only here [Luke 23:43] and in 2 Co 12:4; Rev 2:7) [the word ‘paradise’] refers to the place of bliss and rest between death and resurrection (cf. Lk 16:22; 2 Co 12:2).”

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The commentary is certainly correct that the word “paradise” has come to mean a place of bliss between death and resurrection. And in that context the use of the word “paradise” always means “heaven.” Because we interpret the words that Jesus spoke to the criminal about “paradise” as meaning “heaven,” this text has become the key Bible verse that has “Because we interpret misled millions of Christians to bethe words that Jesus lieve that Heaven is their disembodspoke to the criminal ied destination immediately upon about “paradise” death. To avoid misunderstanding let as meaning me state at the outset that the Bible “heaven,” this text does teach that upon death believers go to be with Christ. But that is a has become the key more complex issue.

Bible verse that has

misled millions of Christians.”

The New RSV Study Bible informs the reader that: “Paradise, originally a royal garden, the Garden of Eden in the Septuagint, and later as here, is a synonym for heaven.”

But as we have seen, in Scripture, the use of the word “paradise” has nothing to do with Heaven. The Bible carefully distinguishes between Heaven and earth and Paradise. The meaning of Paradise is best understood based on what Scripture teaches about Paradise beginning in Genesis. Paradise is always of the earth. It is the home and the place where Adam, in perfect fellowship with God, was to execute his cultural mandate. And earth is the place we will inhabit at the resurrection.

Consider also the commentary on Luke 23:43 in the ESV Study Bible, which states: Paradise is another name for Heaven, the dwelling place of God and the eternal home of the righteous (cf. 2 Cor. 12:3; Rev. 2:7). The Septuagint uses the same Greek word to refer to the “garden of Eden” (cf. note on Gen. 2:8–9). Jesus’ words therefore may hint at a restoration of the intimate, personal fellowship with God that existed in Eden before the fall.

This “hint,” which in truth should be a blast from a trumpet, sends the reader in a biblical direction.

As we will see.

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The widely respected Dutch commentary, the Korte Verklaring, also falls in line designating Paradise as Heaven. According to Dr. S. Greijdanus, the criminal went to Heaven with Jesus within hours of the time that they had their conversation on the cross.

John Wesley, in his Explanatory Notes, writes that Paradise is “the place where the souls of the righteous remain from death till the resurrection.

As if he had said, I will not only remember thee then, but this very day.”

In his commentary on Luke 23:43, D. L. Moody writes: “In the morning [the criminal] is condemned by men as not fit to live on earth; in the evening he is reckoned good enough for heaven.”

In his sermon entitled: “The Dying Thief in a New Light,” Charles Spurgeon writes: “Still, I think he has the best of it who is converted, and enters heaven the same night… Why is it that our Lord does not emparadise us all?” (Note: I love Spurgeon’s sermons. My contrarian point is that on the cross Christ did emparadise us all— both the living and the dead!)

In the book Home by Elyse Fitzpatrick, a popular Christian author, we read that: Although we don’t have as many details as we might want, the Bible clearly teaches that at our death we go from earth to Paradise, and then come back to the renewed earth in our resurrected bodies as citizens of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21).2

In his classic treatment of the subject, Randy Alcorn, in no fewer than 530 pages, introduces a novel understanding of the relationship between “Earth,” “Heaven,” and “Paradise” in his book entitled Heaven. In the book’s Preface, Alcorn writes: Examining the table of contents will give you a good feel for this book. In part I, “A Theology of Heaven,” I will explain the difference between the present Heaven (where Christians go when they die) and the ultimate, eternal Heaven Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

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(where God will dwell with his people on the New Earth).3

Derek Prince, in his book War in Heaven, writes in line with what others have been saying that: Paradeisos (Paradise) is the Greek word for a “garden.” It describes God’s garden in Heaven. Paradise is the ultimate destination of all sinners who have truly repented and who have persevered in the life of faith.4

Almost everywhere Christians turn for help in understanding Luke 23:43, they are told that “heaven” and “paradise” are one and the same.

But the Scriptures teach that this is not so. There can only be negative consequences when we fail to biblically distinguish between Heaven and Paradise. What then of the majestic wonder of Christ regaining Paradise on the cross? What then of the majestic wonder of the worldwide resurrection when Jesus Christ returns in glory?

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HEAVEN, EARTH, AND PARADISE

The confusion resulting from failing to distinguish carefully between Heaven, Earth, and Paradise is enormous. This confusion is the result of Christians being influenced by a pagan worldview and reading into the Bible what is not there. It is also the result of an inadequate biblical cosmology.

How then does Scripture distinguish between Heaven and Earth and Paradise? Each of these entities is the result of a creative act of God. God actually prepared the Garden of Eden for Adam (Gen. 2:15). The Garden of Eden was indeed Paradise on earth, although prior to the Fall the entire earth was Paradise. The entire earth proclaimed God’s glory.

The most amazing thing I have ever heard someone say about Heaven was during my first year in college. I heard it from a professor in philosophy class, H. Evan Runner. Runner taught that any philosopher who fails to acknowledge or understand the relationship between Heaven and earth Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

will never come to a correct understanding of created reality. God created the world in Christ (Gen. 1; John 1). Without knowing Christ you’ll never understand created reality. You may “know” that the chemical formula for water is H2O. But you won’t know “that all things hold together in Christ” (Col. 1:16). Just imagine what would happen if Christ who, by the power of His creative Word upholds the entire creation, did not hold all things together? Imagine the chaos that would result in a universe that unfolds, and continues to unfold, like next spring’s tulips, according to the principles of naturalism.

Imagine the catastrophe if H2O did not hold together. What if H2O became just H (hydrogen) and just O (oxygen)? All water would disappear from the earth. In water’s place, only gasses would remain. No rivers, no lakes, and no oceans. No flowers. No animals. No people. No creation!

Christ holds H2O together by the power of His will (Rev. 4:11). And if He likes, He can turn H2O into a premium wine. One of the reasons some Christian academics are calling themselves “theistic evolutionists” is that these scholars have no biblical grasp of, or belief in, the relationship between Heaven and earth. According to “Almost everywhere them, Jesus Christ plays no credible role in Christians creation. but according to Scripture, Christ rules and upholds the universe from Heavturn for help in en. He is the Alpha and the Omega. That understanding is, He encompasses the entire alphabet of Luke 23:43, they creation and history. He is the Beginning are told that and End. The first Adam could have shared “heaven” and in that wonderful rule as head of creation “paradise” are under Christ if he had not succumbed to the wiles of Satan. The Bible clearly teaches one and the same. that all things cohere in Him. But the Scriptures It is essential, as Christians, to integrate biblical revelation with our empirical knowledge. Empirical knowledge provides us with the insight on how to build an airplane, but it provides no insight into the relationship between Heaven and earth. It is blind to recognizing Christ as the Creator and Sustainer and Redeemer of the universe.

teach that this is not so.”

Men of faith like Herman Dooyeweerd (1894– 1977), D. H. Th. Vollenhoven (1892–1978), SPRING 2020

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Andre Troost (1916–2008), Willem Ouweneel (b. 1944), and Danie F.M. Strauss (b. 1946) acknowledge the relevance of Scripture for coming to grips with the world of academia. They have come to understand the importance of the biblical ground motive (the pillars) of what Scripture teaches about Creation, Fall, and Redemption, and that these foundational truths form the basis of a Christian philosophy and theology that will help to propel all of our understanding.

My one goal in this article is to articulate a biblical understanding of the exchange that took place between Christ and the criminal at Golgotha.

Such an understanding will contribute “Adam’s sin resulted to experiencing the joy of going to be in ... lost control with Christ at the time of our death over creation, rather than embracing a pagan belief in resulting in misery our soul’s migration to Heaven, about which Scripture says nothing. And our and pain and sorrow understanding of the biblical teachings and death, as well as of Christ’s role in the creation of Heava sinful tendency to en, earth, and Paradise is important in wrongfully that context.

blame God.”

THE PARADISAL NATURE OF GOLGOTHA

Heaven and earth and Paradise are a unity. They are all created by Christ; they are all related.

Adam’s sin in the garden went a long way toward destroying that unity. Adam’s sin resulted in the loss of a faith that was larger than a mustard seed.

Thereby he lost control over creation, resulting in misery and pain and sorrow and death, as well as a sinful tendency to wrongfully blame God. Golgotha happened to wipe away that misery.

Golgotha happened to restore Paradise. We, who in the flesh stand to one extent or another in Satan’s service, are the problem. God in Jesus Christ is the answer. Christ is here on Golgotha today to restore the unity and the harmony of His Father’s creation. On the cross, as the noontime darkness of God’s terrifying abandonment approaches, Christ tells a criminal that this very day he will be with Him in Paradise. This cosmos-transforming declaration of Jesus Christ may not be trivialized.

The ekklesia, by and large, has mistakenly understood the essence of that cosmic event to mean that when we die we go to Heaven as disembodied souls, who somehow resume their earthly exSPRING 2020

istence there. This trivializes the paradisal nature of Golgotha, and neutralizes the resurrection.

THE FATHER WEIGHS IN ON GOLGOTHA

The witness of Scripture to the reality of what Christ achieved on the cross is overwhelming.

The powerful testimony that the Father gives at the cross confirms that Paradise has indeed returned. It is at the Father’s request that Jesus goes to Golgotha to pay the ransom for the sin of the world. It is the Father who arranges that Jesus is accompanied by two high-profile criminals, probably associates of the terrorist, Barabbas. It is the Father who inspires both Matthew and Mark to record that upon their arrival on the cross, these two criminals stand in the service of Satan.

Then, close to noon and just prior to abandoning Jesus to Hell, the Father publicly transforms one of the two criminals. The Father proceeds to deputize this former antagonist who is then inspired to proclaim that Jesus is innocent. Jesus is on the cross at the Father’s behest, but not for His own sin. The criminal does not yet know it, but Christ knows that the criminal’s prophecy will find its fulfillment in a few hours. That is, when He emerges from Hell (that is, when the punishment of abandonment by His Father is over).

That separation ends forever that afternoon, when Jesus shouts: ‘Mashelem! It is fulfilled!’

It is important to remember that before Jesus shouts this exclamation of His victory over death and Hell and Satan, He declares: “I am thirsty.”

Jesus is about to announce salvation for the world. Paradise is once again a reality. Jesus desires the strength to be heard clearly.

Jesus requests a drink. Not any old drink. Christ’s blood was about to be identified as the blood of the Lamb of God. Note carefully how this request for a drink is recorded by the apostle John. Jesus requests a drink, and the soldiers comply. They soak a sponge in wine vinegar and then put it on a stalk of the hyssop plant. Note how the Father looks after all the details. During their deliverance from Egypt, Israel is instructed to take a bunch of hyssop, dip it into the lamb’s blood and put some of the blood on both sides of the door frame. For Israel it was the hyssop branches, for Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

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Christ it is the hyssop stalk. The parallel between Israel’s Passover and what is transpiring on the cross is unmistakable. Israel, if obedient, was on its way from slavery to a land of milk and honey under God’s gracious rule. Christ was about to announce with power that the entrance to Paradise was once again accessible under His Father’s gracious rule.

THE FATHER’S ACTIONS AT THE CROSS CONFIRM OUR RETURN TO PARADISE

How do we know many of the commentators are mistaken and access to Paradise is regained after Jesus dies on Golgotha? The reason we can be so certain that the cross is focused on reclaiming Paradise is the Father’s response to the claim His Son shouts from the cross: Mashelem! It is fulfilled. The Father concurs. The Father’s response then confirms the paradisal nature of the work Jesus has just completed, in a most dramatic and obvious manner. The Father employs the forces of nature to make the announcement of His Son’s victory over death. The announcement is made with great fanfare. Jesus’ declaration: “It is fulfilled!” communicates to believers of every generation that the requirements to set the sinner free have been fully met by His sacrifice on the cross. And the Father confirms that this is indeed the case by what happens next.

Jesus is no sooner dead than the Father acts. The Father’s response to Jesus’ death is nothing short of amazing in its execution. One translation states “at that moment” and another writes “Behold.”

There is no time-lapse between the moment of Jesus’ death and the Father’s response to that death.

In the next breath God commands the forces of nature–which are His servants and His to command–to respond to what has just transpired on the cross. There is an earthquake (Matt. 27:51).

Not a minor undertaking. Not easily ignored.

The earth shakes. The rocks split. The Father is in effect heralding to the world: I am delighted with My Son. As a result of the work He fulfilled on the cross, this day Satan stands condemned.

My Son did not falter in His assignment. My Son looked death in the face and conquered. He destroyed the power of the kingdom of Satan. He crushed the head of the father of lies. My Son Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

has set the prisoners free. He has come into His kingdom of righteousness. Observe carefully, all you people, as I give you two unmistakeable signs that the work My Son has performed on the cross this day is of a paradisal nature. Did He not promise the criminal on the cross this very day that they together would experience the return of Paradise? The return of intimate, unencumbered personal fellowship with Me this day.

Yes, Satan stands condemned! Charles Wesley has carefully articulated in moving words the newness of life achieved: No condemnation now I dread; Jesus, and all in him, is mine!

Alive in him, my living Head, and clothed in righteousness divine.

Bold I approach the eternal throne, And claim the crown, through Christ, my own.

Amazing love! How can it be That thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

Because of Golgotha you may again lay claim to the crown of life. Because of Golgotha you may now claim an eternal interest in your Saviour’s blood.

Life reigns. Even in your cancerous bodies.

And, yes, even as you pray and fight to rid yourself of a growing dementia. And battle with divorce. Jesus must remain in Heaven until the time comes for God to fully restore everything (Acts 3:17). That time will come.

But when He comes, He will come in great power and great glory. At that time of His return, God will finally ban Satan from the earth. Death has been conquered. Eternal life awaits. The gate to Paradise is open once again. It was opened at the price of Jesus’ life.

“The reason we can be so certain that the cross is focused on reclaiming Paradise is the Father’s response to the claim His Son shouts from the cross.”

The ruin and destruction, the cancer, the drownings and divorce are man’s doings, not God’s. God gave mankind a beautiful garden and, in many respects, mankind turned it into a garbage dump. Think of the wonder behind the technology of the Internet. And then think of how Satan has turned it into an instrument of pornographic destruction.

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You must be patient. History must run its course.

The number of children the Father is calling to Himself is not yet complete. The victorious Son will return. Then the cancer and the dementia and the divorce and the drownings will come to an end. Never again will anything be cursed.

Meanwhile, we have been given yet another sign of the return of Paradise. Christ has ascended to Heaven and is seated at the Father’s right hand from where He holds your life in His hands.

When He arrived in Heaven with the scars of the cross on His body, Michael the archangel threw Satan and his minions out of “The Father is in Heaven. No more accusations against effect heralding to the those whom the Father loves. Ten days after the ascension God gave yet world: My Son looked another sign of Paradise: the senddeath in the face and ing of God the Holy Spirit to live in conquered.” your hearts. He will guide you in all things. “Be faithful to the end. To all those who overcome [the evil one] I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in Paradise of God” (Rev. 2:7).

This exhortation remains true in our day. When Satan, the great dragon, saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child… Then from his mouth the dragon spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent. But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowed the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth. Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring – those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus (Rev. 12:14-17). Remember what Jesus said when He was on earth: a disciple is not greater than his Master. They persecuted Me, they will persecute you also. You must endure to the end.

And again, remember the warning in the closing words of Revelation 13: The beast also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, so that they would not SPRING 2020

buy and sell unless they had the mark, which is the number of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom.

Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of man. That number is 666. It is the number of man without God.

Now, what about these verses? Christians are already being “numbered” in China, in India, and in many Muslim countries. They are dying as martyrs. And what about AIDS and the deadly coronavirus and the little boy who drowned in his parents’ pool? Is this Paradise? We don’t have all the answers. Neither did Job. But Jesus has since gone to Golgotha. And God is sovereign.

Reflect on this: Jesus died on the cross. Tradition teaches us that all the disciples save one died a martyr’s death. My namesake, my dear little grandson, John Christian, died when he was only 6 months old. He never lived to experience whatever beauty life on earth by God’s grace may still have to offer us. In light of this can we really call this Paradise?

Yes, we can! Why? Because we still live in a sinful world. Life on a broken planet is more tolerable for some than it is for others. But God will test no one beyond their endurance. God is gracious and God is good. Satan may be conducting himself like a roaring lion knowing his time is short.

Nevertheless, God is in control. Dying is not the worst fate than can overtake us if we die in Christ Jesus. I will see my grandson again. And he will see me. On a renewed earth. We are the ones who opened Pandora’s box when, in Adam, we joined Satan in his rebellion against God. A rebellion Jesus quelled on the cross.

After the storm comes the sunshine. To those who are victorious, who remain faithful to the end, an eternity of bliss lived in a life of glory beyond measure awaits them in Paradise (Rev. 2:7).

Thank you, Jesus, for going to Golgotha. Paradise on earth? Yes, as it breaks through the clouds in shadow form. The curtain is torn. Many dead have been resurrected. Satan has been thrown out of Heaven. The Holy Spirit has come to earth.

Yes, Paradise is breaking through.

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Golgotha

“Then I heard a voice from Heaven say, ‘Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on. ‘Yes’ says the Spirit, ‘they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them’” (Rev. 14:13). Why Golgotha? So that Christians can go to Heaven? Or so that Jesus could reclaim the cosmos for His Father and for the believers?

1 Plural; the word for “robber” in the original Greek can mean “terrorist.” In any event, the criminals were crucified for committing a capital offense, not some petty theft. In all likelihood they were compatriots of Barabbas, who had been condemned to be crucified with them. But Christ took his place.

2 Elyse Fitzpatrick, Home: How Heaven and the New Earth Satisfy Our Deepest Longings (Ada, MI: Bethany House, 2016).

3 Randy Alcorn, Heaven (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2004).

4 Derek Prince, War in Heaven: God’s Epic Battle with Evil (Grand Rapids: Chosen Books, 2003), 13.

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E. CALVIN BEISNER E. CALVIN BEISNER, Ph.D., is President, Founder, and National Spokesman of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

Former Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Social Ethics at Knox Theological Seminary and of Interdisciplinary Studies at Covenant College, he is the author of over fifteen books, including Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future (1990), Man, Economy, and Environment in Biblical Perspective: The 1992 Staley Distinguished Christian Scholar Lectures at Covenant College (1994), Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate (1997), What Is the Most Important Environmental Task Facing American Christians Today? (2008; rev.

2014), and Is Capitalism Bad for the Environment?

(2018), as well as books in Biblical studies, theology, and apologetics.

D O E S C H R I S T I A N C R E AT I O N C A R E U N D E R M IN E

The Pro-Life Movement?

‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’

—Humpty Dumpty

a dead baby, or to (not therapeutic procedures intended to heal but) experiments on embryos that also produce dead babies.

Ever looked up “pro-life’ in a dictionary?

PLAYING HUMPTY DUMPTY WITH THE TERM ‘PRO-LIFE’

Merriam-Webster defines it tersely: “opposed to abortion.’1 Collins defines it in two slightly different ways: in American usage, “opposing the legal right to obtain an abortion’; in British usage, “(of an organization, pressure group, etc.) supporting the right to life of the unborn; against abortion, experiments on embryos, etc.”2 The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “supporting the belief that it is immoral for a pregnant woman to have the freedom to choose to have an abortion (= an operation to end a pregnancy) if she does not want to have a baby” or “opposed to the belief that a pregnant woman should have the freedom to choose an abortion (= the intentional ending of pregnancy) if she does not want to have a baby.”3 On Wikipedia, ‘pro-life’ redirects to ‘Anti-abortion movement’, which begins, “Anti-abortion movements, also referred to as pro-life movements, are involved in the abortion debate advocating against the practice of abortion and its legality. Many anti-abortion movements began as countermovements [sic] in response to the legalization of elective abortions.” Significantly, it immediately adds, “Abortion is defined as the termination of a human pregnancy accompanied by the death of the embryo or fetus.”4 So in standard English usage—American and British alike—‘pro-life’ describes opposition either (most commonly) to abortion, a procedure that, if it achieves its intended purpose, produces

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Yet some Christians dedicated to ideas they express by terms like ‘creation care’ and ‘stewardship of creation’ apply the term ‘pro-life’ to other concerns entirely. The ‘Catholic Climate Covenant’ asserts ‘Creation Care is ProLife.’5 Ben Lowe, organizer of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, says, We believe that life is sacred, so when we say we’re “pro-life,” we believe we need to care about our human life from what some people have called from the womb to the tomb. We are concerned about abortion, and we realize that it’s a very complicated issue that Christians haven’t always engaged in a way that’s very loving or very thoughtful. But we’re concerned about all factors, including environmental factors, that affect human life.6

Cheryl Bridges Johns argues similarly in an article published on the website of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church.7 Ronald Sider, author of the best-selling Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, says creation care is part of being “completely pro-life.”8 The Mennonite Creation Care Network claims its position on creation care is “pro-life’ and lists sixteen Christian organizations that do likewise.9 This article will focus on just one organization: the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), one of America’s better known and more influEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

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ential ‘creation care’ organizations.10 Two Google searches on January 28, 2020, for ‘pro-life,’ the first restricted to EEN’s main website, creationcare.org, and the second restricted to another of EEN’s websites, eenetwork-een.nationbuilder. com, turned up 141 and 26 hits, respectively. A search for ‘abortion’ restricted to creationcare.org turned up just one hit—to a page that seeks to broaden the meaning of ‘pro-life:’ “For most of us being pro-life is more than simply being antiabortion, it’s about defending life from conception until natural death.”11 A search for ‘abortion’ at eenetwork-een.nationbuilder.com turned up no results. So it seems that for the Evangelical Environmental Network, ‘pro-life’ means “defending life from conception until natural death” (emphasis added).

But a look at the 166 other uses of ‘pro-life’ on EEN’s website suggests something quite different. Ironically, the very first hit for ‘pro-life’ led to an article titled “Significant commitment made to reduce methane from existing sources.”12 The article reproduced a statement by EEN President Rev. Mitchell Hescox that applauded what it called ‘positive leadership’ from then-U.S. President Barack Obama and his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “to develop regulations for methane pollution from existing oil and gas resources.” It continued: As pro-life Christians, we have a special concern for the unborn.… We want the unborn and those yet to be born to have a world free of dangerous climate change. Yet today from or [sic] natural gas infrastructure large amounts of methane are being released, a climate pollutant 86 times stronger than carbon dioxide at trapping heat over a 20 year timeframe.

And it is what we do over the next 20 years that will determine whether our struggle to overcome climate change will be won or lost. That is why reducing methane pollution is morally strategic.

Hescox began by quoting a White House statement that Obama had made the announcement in a joint press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Obama was then and Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

is now a staunch supporter of abortion rights.

Trudeau in 2011 described himself as ‘personally opposed’ to abortion but believed “nobody should tell a woman what she should do with her body.” 13 By June, 2014, he had come to insist that all Liberal Party members of Parliament would be “required to support a woman’s right to choose in any vote on the subject.”14 And in October 2019, Trudeau said his views had ‘evolved:’ “I no longer feel like I can or need to say that I’m against abortion. That is not for me, as a man, to say.”15 Hescox’s statement was posted March 10, 2016.

At the time, neither Obama nor Trudeau could by the wildest stretch of the imagination have satisfied the standard definition of ‘pro-life’. Yet “This article will Hescox chose to begin his statement with a quotation that featured both of them focus on just one prominently, to applaud Obama and the organization: EPA’s action, and to justify that by explicthe Evangelical itly stating EEN’s ‘pro-life’ ‘concern for the Environmental unborn.’ Is that not at least a little strange?

But perhaps this odd triangulation is to be explained by the effect of the regulation Obama announced restricting methane emissions.

Might that restriction be described as ‘prolife’? Certainly not in terms of the standard usage established above: opposition either to abortion or to experiments on embryos, both of which produce dead babies, the first intentionally, the second inevitably even if not on purpose.

Network (EEN), one of America’s better known and more influential ‘creation care’ organizations.”

‘PRO-LIFE’: OPPOSING INTENTIONAL KILLING, OR ACCIDENTAL HARM TO HEALTH?

Hescox seems to be working with a much broader definition of ‘pro-life’ in mind. For him and EEN generally, it appears to mean anything in support not merely of human life but of human health.

That this is so is clear upon examining many other uses of ‘pro-life’ on EEN’s websites.

EEN has conducted a ‘Pro-Life Clean Energy Campaign’ for years. The page describing the initiative16 reads: Pollution harms the unborn, causing damage that lasts a lifetime. Dirty air and water SPRING 2020

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has serious consequences for the health of our children and other vulnerable populations like the elderly. This is why pro-life Christians must lead the charge on clean energy, and why the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) will organize half a million pro-life Christians to participate in our Pro-Life Clean Energy Campaign.

It includes a petition that begins: As a pro-life Christian, I believe pollution harms the unborn, causing damage that lasts a lifetime. Dirty water and air have serious consequences for the health of our children and other vulnerable populations, like the elderly.

So, I ask my Governor and other elected officials to support a plan for clean electricity that will: free our children from pollution by relying entirely on clean electricity from renewable resources like wind and solar by 2030; defend our freedom to create our own electricity from sunshine, without fees championed by monopolistic utilities; free our communities from regulations that prevent us from joining together to create our own electricity; and free businesses from such regulations so that they, too, can create and sale clean electricity.

“...abortion and experiments on embryos cause death—abortion intentionally and experiments on embryos inevitably.

But what EEN is concerned about here is not death but undefined and unquantified ‘damage’...”

Two things should stand out to attentive readers. First, abortion and experiments on embryos cause death—abortion intentionally and experiments on embryos inevitably. But what EEN is concerned about here is not death but undefined and unquantified ‘damage’ (whether catastrophic or barely detectable) to ‘health’—damage that is not intentional but accidental. Both of those differences are morally significant. Both also serve to exclude EEN’s concern about pollution from what can legitimately be called ‘pro-life.’

Closely related to EEN’s ‘Pro-Life Clean Energy Campaign’ have been its cam-

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paigns on ‘Methane Pollution’17 and ‘Mercury Pollution.’18 The page on methane says: For years EEN has been helping pro-life Christians oppose pollution from our natural gas infrastructure, especially methane and volatile organic compounds or VOCs. Why? It’s simple — because they harm human health, especially the unborn. The leaks, venting, and flaring from the natural gas industry spew out smog precursors, as well as other toxic pollutants and cancercausing agents like benzene. Studies have shown that smog, VOCs, and air toxics have a disproportionate impact upon life in the womb; for those near production sites the emissions have been linked to birth defects, pre-term births, and lowbirth-weight babies, who are at greater risk of infant mortality, ADHD and asthma, among other things. In addition, methane is [a] highly potent greenhouse gas, 86 times stronger than CO2 at trapping heat over a 20-year timeframe. This is crucial, because it is the next 10-20 years that will determine whether we keep the world safe from catastrophic climate impacts.

Note again here: the expressed concern is that methane emissions ‘harm human health,’ not because they kill. And even the ‘greater risk of infant mortality’ EEN alleges to be associated with methane and VOC emissions from natural gas wells is precisely that—a risk (and a tiny one at that, more than offset by the home heating that prevents thousands of deaths during cold snaps or the electricity that powers the life-saving equipment of hospitals), not an inevitability. And neither the health effects nor the mortality risk is what natural gas producers intend. They intend the home heating, the electricity, and thousands of other benefits, many directly contributing not only to improved health but also to longer lives, that come from our use of natural gas. Here again, EEN positions one of its campaigns as ‘pro-life’ when it meets neither of the defining criteria of ‘pro-life:’ opposition to procedures that don’t merely reduce health but actually kill, and that do so at least inevitably and, for abortion, intentionally.

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We find the same in EEN’s mercury campaign. Its main page contains a statement by Hescox that begins, “As a pro-life organization we are thankful for the leadership Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) is providing on mercury pollution. Her bill to establish a monitoring system, the Comprehensive National Mercury Monitoring Act, recently reintroduced, is an important part of protecting our children from mercury pollution.… Our commitment to Jesus Christ compels us to do all we can to protect unborn children from mercury poisoning. It is a pro-life concern, plain and simple” (emphasis added). The page also features a video in which a woman says: Oftentimes faith communities get very captured by the conversation of ‘how many pregnancies are terminated every year in the United States.’ There’s a sobering statistic that says that 1.2 million children are lost to terminated pregnancies every year in the United States.19 One of the pieces we forget as people of faith is some of the other very shocking statistics that are out there, namely, the fact that currently 700,000 children every single year are born with dangerously high levels of mercury in their blood. 700,000 children means that 1 in 6 children are born with high levels of mercury in their blood. If a parent wants to do everything she can to give her children the best start in life, this is scary.

Women accumulate mercury poisoning by eating simple foods during their pregnancies, one of which is fish. When I became pregnant my doctor told me to make sure fish was part of my diet, because of the Omega 3 and the health benefits of eating fish. At the same time, this advice came with a stern warning. It said, “Don’t eat fish more than once a week or you could potentially endanger your child.”

Every state in America has a mercury catch warning, which means that many of the fish caught in the rivers and the lakes and the streams in those states have dangerEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

ous levels of mercury and are potentially unsafe to eat. Decades ago my parents and my grandparents didn’t have to worry about these sorts of things. Now it’s shocking to me as a parent that I have to worry about eating something as simple as fish. … I’ve never met a parent who didn’t worry about something that they wanted to happen in their child’s life. But honestly, worrying about what fish we eat should not be something that we have to worry about.

We as parents can do something about this, something very simple. You can log on to creationcare.org and check out the ‘End Mercury Poisoning’ pledge. It’s a simple bit of action that you can take to tell your elected officials that this matters, that they can take action to keep the “...EEN presents levels of mercury in our air and in our not intentional and water safe enough for the developinevitable killing ing hearts and minds of our children.

Shortly I shall examine the accuracy of some of the claims here. First, however, let us keep our focus on the dubious framing of this as a ‘pro-life’ concern. Here again, EEN presents not intentional and inevitable killing but unintentional risk of reduced health (through an activity not only intended to serve human health and life but also highly effective at it) to perhaps 1 in 6 children, as a ‘pro-life’ concern, carefully framed as analogous to concerns about abortion.

While 1.2 million pregnancies are terminated every year, the argument goes, 700,000 children ‘are born with dangerously high levels of mercury in their blood.’ By that understanding of ‘prolife’, she might as well oppose pediatric corrective heart surgeries because some, though intended to save a child’s life, fail, and the child dies.

but unintentional risk of reduced health ... as a ‘pro-life’ concern, carefully framed as analogous to concerns about abortion.”

FOLLOW THE POLITICS—AND THE MONEY: EEN’S AIM IN REDEFINING ‘PRO-LIFE’

And here again the Evangelical Environmental Network praises a politician (Collins) for supporting this ‘pro-life’ concern despite the fact that in 2017 she was one of only two Republicans to SPRING 2020

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vote against a bill that would have outlawed abortion after 20 weeks20 (the age at which infants in the womb are known to feel pain).

This was not a new tactic for EEN, either in 2016 when it applauded pro-choicers Obama and Trudeau, or in 2018 when it applauded Collins, or in 2011 at the start of its mercury campaign. In that year EEN ran radio, television, and billboard ads in nine states and the District of “What lies behind Columbia that clearly implied that this Orwellian those who supported the EPA’s proredefinition of ‘proposed new limits on mercury emissions from power plants were ‘pro-life,’ or at life’? Two possible least ‘sensitive to pro-life concerns,’ explanations stand and those who didn’t weren’t. Senators out. First, the Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin (both rhetorical move could D-MI) both had 100% pro-abortion be political ... Second, voting records in the 110th Congress EEN’s funding (2007–2008). Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe (both R-ME) and sources might be David Pryor (D-AR) all had 78% proinvolved.” abortion voting records. Yet EEN’s ads gave voters the impression that all were pro-life or ‘sensitive to pro-life concerns’ because they supported EPA’s proposed new mercury limits.

What explains this? What lies behind this Orwellian redefinition of ‘pro-life’? Two possible explanations stand out. First, the rhetorical move could be political, designed to make conservatives, usually skeptical or suspicious of environmentalism, more receptive, especially because it links environmentalism with religion and morality.21 Second, EEN’s funding sources might be involved. I’ve not been able to unearth where the funding for the ad campaigns came from. (E&E News’s Greenwire reported that the radio campaign alone cost EEN $150,000.)22 But EEN received a $50,000 grant in the summer of that year from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund “to elevate the voice of the evangelical community in its efforts to protect the Environmental Protection Agency”23 (the primary activity of which, insofar as EEN paid attention to it, was to impose new regulations on mercury emissions from power plants). And Rockefeller Brothers (which also gave EEN $200,000 in 2009 to support its global warming campaign) is a longSPRING 2020

time supporter of abortion on demand24 as a means of population control.

CHECKING EEN’S FACTUAL CLAIMS

Now let us turn to the accuracy of the claims. We begin with what ought to have been an easy statistic for EEN to check: the claim “that 1.2 million children are lost [note the present tense] to terminated pregnancies every year in the United States.” EEN produced the video around 2011, when it launched its mercury campaign. While the number of abortions in the United States rose from about 1.2 million in 1978 to a high of over 1.4 million in 1990, it fell after that. The last year in which it reached ~1.2 million was 1997, fourteen years before EEN produced the video.

By 2011 it had fallen to 730,322. (By 2016, the last year for which data are available, it had fallen further, to 623,471.)25 Might EEN have had in mind not the number in the most recent year but the average since Roe v. Wade? Even if that were so, they got it wrong: the average number of abortions per year 1973–2011 was 1.07 million.

Any abortions at all are of course lamentable. But one wonders: if EEN exaggerated this number and failed to do a simple fact check, does it handle other factual, statistical claims—particularly those that are more difficult to ascertain—similarly?

The answer to that question is yes. Consider these four additional factual claims in the video: that (1) 700,000 children, 1 in 6, every year (2) “are born with dangerously high levels of mercury in their blood’ (3) caused by their mothers’ consuming fish, many of which from every state “have dangerous levels of mercury and are potentially unsafe,” and (4) her “parents and grandparents didn’t have to worry about these sorts of things.”

HOW MANY VICTIMS?

First, how many children actually are (or in the years leading up to 2011 were) born with what EEN calls “dangerously high levels of mercury in their blood?” The truth, as documented in the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation’s technical research paper The Cost of Good Intentions: The Ethics and Economics of the War Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

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against Conventional Energy,26 by environmental economist Dr. Timothy Terrell, is that not 1 in 6 but about 1 in 1,000 American babies is exposed to mercury at a level above the EPA’s ‘reference dose’ of 5.8 parts per billion. That is, EEN has exaggerated the rate at which infants in the womb are exposed to what it calls “dangerously high levels of mercury in their blood” by 167 times, from the true 0.1% to the false 16.6%.

HOW MUCH HARM?

Second, is that level of mercury exposure actually ‘dangerous’ to however many infants actually are exposed to it? Again as Terrell demonstrated in The Cost of Good Intentions, no harm has been detected at any level below 85 parts per billion (over fourteen times higher than the ‘reference dose’)—a level studies indicate is not found in any American babies. Even at that level, the observable harm is not death or even grave impairment but a temporary, almost undetectable delay in neurological development—so small it’s overshadowed by normal variation, is less than one IQ point, and disappears in nearly all affected by age seven. Indeed, Terrell points out: the risk of exposure to methylmercury caused by mercury emissions from US electric utilities is…so low that the proposed EPA rule is not likely to have any substantial positive impact on human health. In fact, the overall impact could be substantially negative, given the costs (discussed below).

While the EPA’s proposal for mercury is supposed to reduce emissions by about 24 tons a year, EPA’s own estimates are that reducing emissions even by as almost twice as much (41 tons) “is unlikely to substantially affect total risk.”27 WHAT’S THE FISH STORY BEHIND CLAIMS OF HARM?

Third, do pregnant women pass on “dangerously high levels of mercury” to their unborn children by consuming fish from every state with “dangerous levels of mercury” that are consequently “potentially unsafe?” To quote Terrell again: Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

The alarmism evident in some of the evangelical literature on mercury is often based on hair-trigger ‘fish advisories’ issued by government agencies. The same EEN fact sheet displays a map indicating that mercury advisories exist in every state (as of 2008). For those who are unaware of the actual risks behind the advisories, it is easy to overestimate “...the EPA itself the danger. Overall, the risk, even admitted in 2011 in freshwater fish, seems to be 28 quite low. that its new

Jon M. Heuss, an authority on the technical basis for air quality and emission standards frequently called on to report on his research to the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, the EPA Clean Air Science Advisory Committee, and other government agencies, warned in 2003: Advisories are meant to be protective in nature so even one sample above the triggering level (which varies from state to state) is enough to consider an advisory. There are several different kinds of advisories that range from restricted consumption of some types of fish for sensitive sub-populations to commercial fishing bans. Because of the wide range of types of advisories, statistics on the number of advisories or even the fraction of water covered by advisories are not particularly helpful in estimating the extent of mercury contamination.29

mercury limits— the ones support for which EEN called a ‘pro-life’ concern—would be ‘unlikely to substantially affect total risk.’”

Indeed, the EPA itself admitted in 2011 that its new mercury limits—the ones support for which EEN called a ‘pro-life’ concern—would be “unlikely to substantially affect total risk.” And that was not its estimate for the population as a whole but for a vanishingly small number (so small EPA didn’t even estimate it): 1% of a hypothetical population of pregnant, subsistence fisherwomen, specifically, those who consume over 300 pounds of self-caught fish per year—and all those fish have to come from the very highest mercurycontent freshwater sources in the country.30 SPRING 2020

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WHEN DOES ‘PRO-LIFE’ MEAN ‘PRODEATH’?

One last point about EEN’s claim that supporting enhanced restrictions on mercury emissions is ‘pro-life’ deserves to be made. As we have seen, Terrell noted, “the proposed EPA rule is not likely to have any substantial positive impact on human health. In fact, the overall impact could be substantially negative, given the costs.” Why is that? Terrell explained: Economists have estimated the relationship between a decline in income and the loss of life that will result. One study indicates that a life is lost, on average, for an income decline of $10 million to $15 million. Another approach indicates that it takes a $17 million income decline to result in one lost life.31

At the time of EEN’s mercury campaign, it was estimated that implementing the EPA’s proposed new mercury regulation would cause electricity rates nationwide to rise by an average of 11.5%, or about $42.5 billion. Divide that by $10 million or $17 million per life, and you get 2,500 to 4,250 extra deaths per year.32 Ironically, then, by EEN’s definition, it was more ‘pro-life’ to oppose the regulation than to support it.

DID EARLIER GENERATIONS HAVE IT BETTER?

Fourth, did the parents and grandparents of the woman in the video not have to worry about such things? The speaker doesn’t specify the time periods she had in mind by reference to her parents and grandparents. She appears in the video to be something on the order of 35 to 45 years old, so let’s assume for the sake of argument that she was born sometime from 1966 to 1976, and let’s assume that her parents were born about 30 years earlier, 1936 to 1946, and her grandparents another 30 years earlier, 1906 to 1916. What were air and water pollution in America like then? Getting data for so long ago isn’t easy, but we can at least get the general idea.

We begin with air. The EPA reports33 that from SPRING 2020

1990 to 2011 national concentrations of the 10 key air pollutants fell dramatically: lead by 9%, carbon monoxide by 82%, nitrous oxide by 80% (annually) and 56% (hourly), ozone by 5%, PM2.5 by 18% (annually) and 29% (24-hour), PM10 by 63%, and sulfur dioxide by 49%. (All of those declines continued form 2011 through 2018.)

But might 1990 have been a high point in air pollution for the United States, and the speaker’s parents and grandparents enjoyed much cleaner air before—even cleaner than in 2011? Indur M. Goklany, an economist with the U.S. EPA and Department of Interior, wrote in his book The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet, that “Composite nationwide air quality data from the EPA and its predecessor agencies show that ambient air quality for each of the traditional air pollutants (i.e., PM, which is also an indicator for soot and smoke, SO2, O3, CO, NOx, and lead) has been improving for almost as long as such data are available.”34 He specifies that “SO2 peaked in 1963,” PM in 1957, CO in 1970, and NOx from the late 1970s. “Particulate levels, which had been in decline since the 1940s, fell an additional 15 percent just between 1957 and 1970…”

But what about mercury, EEN’s main concern?

Timothy J. Sullivan and co-authors report in “Air pollution success stories in the United States: The value of long-term observations,” published in Environmental Science and Policy in 2018, that “mercury emissions and deposition decreased substantially from a peak in the 1980s.” They went on to document declines in all the major air pollutants.35 What of water quality in the United States? Obtaining solid long-term summary data is more difficult for water pollution than for air pollution, because water bodies are far less integrated than air. But a major study completed in 2018 by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley examining data from 240,000 monitoring sites from 1962–2001 found, “The 1972 Clean Water Act has driven significant improvements in US water quality, according to the first Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

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comprehensive study of water pollution over the past several decades.… Most of 25 water pollution measures showed improvement,” as Science Daily reported.36 (Interestingly, however, the study also found that “costs of the Clean Water Act consistently outweigh the benefits.”)

The general picture of long-term trends in air and water pollution in the United States is clear. Most pollutants’ concentrations began falling well before EEN’s speaker was born, and their levels were much higher in her grandparents’ and even her parents’ child-rearing years than in her own.

CONCLUSION

In 2012, more than 30 prominent leaders of America’s pro-life movement endorsed the joint statement, “Protecting the Unborn and the ProLife Movement from a Misleading Environmentalist Tactic.”37 In it they said: Recently some environmentalists have portrayed certain of their causes as intrinsic to the pro-life movement. The tactic often involves appealing to a ‘seamless garment’ of support for life, or to being ‘consistently pro-life’ or ‘completely pro-life.’

As leaders of the pro-life movement, we reject that portrayal as disingenuous and dangerous to our efforts to protect the lives of unborn children.

The term pro-life originated historically in the struggle to end abortion on demand and continues to be used in public discourse overwhelmingly in that sense. To ignore that is at best sloppy communication and at worst intentional deception.

The life in pro-life denotes not quality of life but life itself. The term denotes opposition to a procedure that intentionally results in dead babies.

In stark contrast, most environmental causes promoted as pro-life involve little threat to human life itself, and no intent to kill anyone. For example, even Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

if one grants the exaggerated numbers and harms claimed by the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) in its recent quarter-million-dollar advertising campaign that claimed, ‘being pro-life means protecting the unborn from mercury pollution’, mercury exposure due to powerplant emissions does not kill infants.

Consequently, calling mercury pollution and similar environmental causes pro-life obscures the meaning of pro-life. And thanking politicians with 100% proabortion voting records (even some who support partial-birth abortion) for their ‘pro-life’ position because they supported restrictions on mercury emissions, while rebuking some with 100% pro-life voting records because they opposed or didn’t support the new restrictions, as EEN’s campaign did, will confuse voters, divide the pro-life vote, and postpone the end of abortion on demand in America.

This doesn’t mean we should ignore environmental risks. It does mean they should not be portrayed as pro-life.

Genuinely pro-life people will usually desire to reduce other risks as well—guided by cost/benefit analysis. But to call those issues ‘pro-life’ is to obscure the meaning of the term.

“This doesn’t mean we should ignore environmental risks. It does mean they should not be portrayed as pro-life ... to call those issues ‘prolife’ is to obscure the meaning of the term.”

Two fundamental principles distinguish truly pro-life issues (like abortion, euthanasia, and embryonic stem cell research) from environmental issues. First and foremost, truly pro-life issues are issues of actual life and death, while environmental issues tend to be matters of health.

Second, truly pro-life issues address actual intent to kill innocent people, whether the unborn, the gravely ill, or the aged, while environmental issues do not.

If environmental advocates still want to support mercury-emission reductions or other environmental causes, let them do SPRING 2020

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so honestly and above board. But they should not promote those causes under the pro-life banner. That is at best badly misinformed, at worst dishonest.

11

We call on environmentalists to cease portraying such causes as pro-life and join us in working diligently to reduce and end abortion on demand in the United States…

The statement was justified then. It is justified today. It is time for the Evangelical Environmental Network and other creation-care organizations to repent of this deceptive tactic.

1 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pro-life#h1.

2 https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/pro-life.

3 https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/pro-life.

4 ‘Anti-abortion movement’, Wikipedia, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_movement.

5 “Care for Creation is ProLife,” Catholic Climate Covenant, https://catholicclimatecovenant. org/teachings/creation-care-prolife.

6 Madeline Thomas, “Pro-life equals pro-planet for this green evangelical leader,” Grist, December 26, 2014, https://grist.org/living/ pro-life-equals-pro-planet-for-this-green-evangelical-leader/.

7 Cheryl Bridges Johns, “If You’re Pro-Life, You Should Be Pro-Earth,” International Pentecostal Holiness Church, General Superintendent’s Office, August 20, 2019, https://iphc.org/ gso/2019/08/20/if-youre-pro-life-you-shouldbe-pro-earth/.

8 Ron Sider, “Being Completely Pro-Life,” Evangelicals for Social Action, undated, https:// www.evangelicalsforsocialaction.org/beingcompletely-pro-life/.

9 Mennonite Creation Care Network, https:// mennocreationcare.org/not-alone/.

10 That EEN’s practice is widespread among ‘creation care’ advocates is, however, clear.

A Google search for the terms ‘pro-life’ and ‘creation care’ together on January 28, 2020, brought 8,890 results. See also Jordan WoodSPRING 2020

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15 16

ward, “Creation Care Is a Matter of Life”: The Rhetoric of Pro-Life Evangelical Environmentalism (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University, Master’s Thesis, 2017).

Caution: attempting to open the following link generates a warning that the site is unsafe. In addition, while my Google search <abortion site:creationcare.org> on January 28, 2020, returned the following link as its only hit, the same Google search repeated the next day failed to turn up any hits. A DuckDuckGo search for the same on January 29 also failed to turn up any hits. Searching for the quoted text on January 29 instead turned up no hits on Google, but DuckDuckGo did return the link.

Again attempting to open it brought the warning. But both Google on January 28 and DuckDuckGo on January 29 displayed the quoted text beneath the link. The link is https://www. creationcare.org/epa_halts_protections_for_ our_children, to an article titled ‘EPA Halts Protections for Our Children’.

The original hit in response to the search <‘prolife’ site:creationcare.org> had the link http:// www.creationcare.org/tags/pro_life, which gave an ‘Error 404: Not Found’ response. But by searching for text that showed up under that hit, ‘Statement by Rev. Mitch Hescox: “Today in a joint press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau”’, I came to the article, ‘Significant Commitment Made to Reduce Methane from Existing Sources’, March 26, 2016, at https://eenetwork-een.nationbuilder.com/significant_commitment_made_ to_reduce_methane_from_existing_sources, a site controlled by EEN. Catharine Turney, “Trudeau says his personal stance on abortion has ‘evolved,’” CBC News, October 4, 2019, online at https://www.cbc. ca/news/politics/trudeau-abortion-personalbeliefs-1.5308987.

Canadian Press, “Justin Trudeau Says Abortion Stance Policy Applies to All Liberal MPs,” June 18, 2014, online at https:// www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/06/18/justin-trudeau-abortion-stance_n_5509380. html?utm_hp_ref=ca-justin-trudeau-abortionstance.

Turney, “Trudeau says his personal stance.”

“Pro Life Clean Energy Campaign,” Evangelical Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

Christian Creation Care

Environmental Network, https://creationcare. org/what-we-do/initiatives-campaigns/pro-lifeclean-energy-campaign.html.

17 “Methane Pollution,” Evangelical Environmental Network https://creationcare.org/what-wedo/initiatives-campaigns/methane-pollution. html.

18 “Mercury Pollution,” Evangelical Environmental Network, https://creationcare.org/what-wedo/initiatives-campaigns/mercury-pollution. html.

19 Source: ‘Abortion statistics in the United States’, Wikipedia, online at https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_United_States.

20 “What Yesterday’s Vote Says About Your Senators,” Family Policy Alliance, last modified January 30, 2019, https://familypolicyalliance. com/issues/2018/01/30/what-yesterdays-votesays-about-your-senators/. The page lists no year of publication; the page source indicates it was first published January 30, 2018 and updated July 6, 2019.

21 Ben Rosen, “Could making climate change a ‘pro-life’ issue bring conservatives on board?,” Christian Science Monitor, May 2, 2017, https:// www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2017/0502/ Could-making-climate-change-a-pro-life-issuebring-conservatives-on-board.

22 “Evangelicals run ads urging lawmakers to back EPA regs,” E&E Daily, http://www.eenews.net/ eed/2011/12/01/2.

23 This information used to be available on the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s website at http:// www.rbf.org/grant/11531/evangelical-environmental-network-0. It has since been removed.

24 Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008).

25 Source: ‘Abortion statistics in the United States’, Wikipedia, online at https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_United_States.

26 Timothy D. Terrell, The Cost of Good Intentions: The Ethics and Economics of the War on Conventional Energy (Chattanooga, TN: Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation), 2011, online at http://www.cornwallalliance. org/docs/Cost_of_Good_Intentions_1.pdf.

27 Terrell, Cost of Good Intentions, 15.

28 Terrell, Cost of Good Intentions, 16.

29 Jon M. Heuss, Critique of the United States Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

Public Interest Research Group’s June 2003 Report Entitled “Fishing for Trouble: How Toxic Mercury Contaminates Our Waterways and Threatens Recreational Fishing” (Annapolis, MD: The Annapolis Center, 2003), 6.

30 United States Environmental Protection Agency, Technical Support Document: NationalScale Mercury Risk Assessment Supporting the Appropriate and Necessary Finding for Coal and Oil-Fired Electric Generating Units (Washington, DC: Environmental Protection Agency), 2011, http://www.epa.gov/ttn/atw/utility/pro/ hg_risk_tsd_3-17-11.pdf#page=59.

31 Terrell, Cost of Good Intentions, 18–19.

32 E. Calvin Beisner, “EEN’s Machiavellian Mercury Campaign Threatens Pro-Life Movement,” Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, December 21, 2011, https:// cornwallalliance.org/2011/12/eens-machiavellian-mercury-campaign-threatens-pro-lifemovement/.

33 “Our Nation’s Air,” United States Environmental Protection Agency, https://gispub.epa.gov/ air/trendsreport/2019/#introduction.

34 Indur M. Goklany, The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2007), 137.

35 Timothy J. Sullivan et al., “Air pollution success stories in the United States: The value of long-term observations,” in Environmental Science & Policy 84 (2018): 69–73, https:// www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/ S1462901117312352.

36 “Clean Water Act dramatically cut pollution in US waterways,” Science Daily, October 9, 2018, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181009115102.htm. For the full study see David A. Keiser, Catherine L. Kling, and Joseph S. Shapiro, “The low but uncertain measured benefits of US water quality policy,” PNAS 116(12) March 19, 2019: 5262–5269, https://www.pnas.org/content/116/12/5262.

37 “Protecting the Unborn and the Pro-Life Movement from a Misleading Environmentalist Tactic: A Joint Statement by Pro-Life Leaders,” February 8, 2012, https://cornwallalliance. org/2012/02/protecting-the-unborn-and-thepro-life-movement-from-a-misleading-environmentalist-tactic-2/.

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JOHN BELLINGHAM JOHN BELLINGHAM is a Pastor at Rosedale Baptist Church in Welland, and an ordained minister in the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches.

Before coming to Rosedale he was a missionary in Montreal with Campus Crusade for Christ. John was born and raised in the Niagara Region along with his wife Leslie. John and Leslie have three children: Daniel, Christina, and Carey.

John graduated from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago (MDiv), and in 2014 he completed an MA in Historical Theology from McGill University.

book review:

FUNDAMENTALISM & A M E R I C A N C U LT U R E George Marsden in his classic book Fundamentalism and American Culture has provided a fascinating account of the historical, theological and social factors that contributed to the American religious movement known as “fundamentalism.”

Marsden is not primarily concerned with contemporary self-professing fundamentalists, but rather with those of an earlier era who did much to shape American evangelicalism as we know it today. Although ‘fundamentalism’ stood in the legacy of earlier American evangelicals, Marsden insists that it must be viewed as a “distinct version” of evangelicalism that was characterized by close ties to the revivalist tradition of the Second Great Awakening and a distinctive militancy against the liberal theology known as “modernism” which emerged during the late nineteenth century.

ity had been significantly affected by revivalism and widespread spiritual awakening. American religion was characterized by a strong commitment to Christian education and an optimistic postmillennial eschatology which was practically manifested in widespread social activity. Marsden places great importance on the pervasive influence of “Scottish Common Sense Realism” on evangelicalism, especially through the influence of the Princeton theologians. This philosophy held that the human mind was capable of knowing the real world directly and thus was capable of discerning truth. When used in conjunction with the inductive scientific method of Francis Bacon, scientific discoveries were widely held by American evangelicals to confirm the truths of Scripture when evaluated according to common sense and reason.

Throughout the book, Marsden resists the temptation to oversimplify or over-generalize and thus significantly modifies the previously formulated ‘social’ and ‘theological’ interpretations. His main thesis is that fundamentalism is not merely a passing “social aberration,” but rather is a movement deeply rooted in the earlier American evangelical tradition with its own distinct set of beliefs. Marsden focuses on three major motifs: firstly, the connection of fundamentalism with its evangelical heritage, secondly, the tendency of fundamentalists to waver between seeking reform within the denominations and separation from them and thirdly, the ambivalence of fundamentalists toward culture and intellect. The book is arranged chronologically, and Marsden carefully connects key figures, and social and theological factors to the development of the fundamentalist movement.

The introduction of Darwinian Evolution in the 1870s therefore presented a novel challenge as many academics began to view scientific discovery as a refutation of biblical revelation. Some theologians such as Charles Hodge held strongly to their philosophical moorings and dismissed Darwinism as incompatible with biblical truth.

Increasingly, others such as Henry Ward Beecher sought to reconcile science and Christianity with a new philosophy of “Idealism” which posited that science was concerned with objective facts whereas religion was concerned with subjective experience. This new philosophy in combination with a corresponding “New Theology” or “modernism” that originated from biblical scholars and critics in Germany began to find a place first in American pulpits and later in American seminaries. Theology was increasingly viewed as a malleable entity rather than a fixed set of “eternally valid truths” (p.25). Marsden demonstrates that the philosophical shifts of the late nineteenth century began to cause a rift in American evan-

Marsden’s analysis begins at the close of the Civil War, maintaining that American ChristianSPRING 2020

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Book Review

gelicalism where former friends and comrades in the gospel became enemies.

It was during this time that D.L. Moody rose to prominence as an outstanding American evangelist. Marsden describes Moody as a transitional figure who contributed much to the development of fundamentalism without fully subscribing to its ideals. Moody brought the longstanding tradition of American revivalism with its emphasis on holiness, and combined these with a strong adherence to biblical inerrancy, premillennialism and dispensationalism, which were to become theological trademarks of many fundamentalists. Whereas Moody emphasized pragmatism and pietism, his successors, especially R. A. Torrey, emphasized intellectualism, especially in their dogmatic emphasis on dispensational premillennialism, which Marsden cites as the “most distinctive intellectual product of emerging fundamentalism” (p. 44).

This largely pessimistic approach to eschatology stood in stark contrast to the longstanding American postmillennial optimism. Marsden suggests that this new eschatology was adopted partly in reaction to liberal interpretations of the Kingdom which clung closely to postmillennial optimism. Dispensationalism also claimed to embrace a more ‘literal’ (and Baconian) interpretation of Scripture, and helped explain the moral and theological decline that many theological conservatives observed in their society.

The Keswick holiness movement is highlighted

by Marsden as a major contributing factor in the emergence of fundamentalism. Keswick holiness rejected the Wesleyan notion of perfectionism while maintaining its emphasis on the power of the Holy Spirit for witnessing and service. Marsden maintains that proto-fundamentalists prior to 1890 were actively engaging in social activity and openly cooperating with other holiness groups such as the Salvation Army. He postulates that the emergence of the liberal Social Gospel in the 1890s caused the “great reversal” during which time many conservative evangelicals reacted by withdrawing completely from any direct social activity. The overall effect of Keswick theology on the fundamentalist movement according to Marsden was to replace earlier postmillenEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

nial optimism for cultural and social progress, now intimately associated with liberalism, with premillennial optimism for personal victory and progress in holiness.

In the years leading up to World War I, controversy regarding modernism was heating up in both Northern Presbyterian and Baptist denominations. According to Marsden, the common enemy of modernism helped forge unlikely alliances between pessimistic, conservative dispensationalists and optimistic non-dispensationalists.

Marsden points to the publication of The Fundamentals from 1910-1915, as a tangible expression of this cross-denominational cooperation. This widely distributed series of tracts attempted to defend conservative evangelical doctrine against the errors of liberalism without endorsing some of the more divisive doctrines such “Marsden as dispensationalism and premillennialism demonstrates that that separated Baptists from Presbyterians. the philosophical Marsden notes that the anti-modernist shifts of the late movement at this stage of development lacked the aggressive militancy of later nineteenth century fundamentalism. began to cause a Marsden believes that the characteristic militancy of fundamentalism in the 1920s developed largely as a result of the culture shock associated with WWI. The most radical premillennialists entered the war with distinct pacifist views, but soon began to associate the German atrocities with Darwinism, and the liberals who tolerated it. This realization transformed the views of premillennialists who emerged from the war with a renewed zeal for the preservation of American society that brought them closer in line with postmillennial Presbyterians and intensified their resolve to battle the destructive teaching of evolution. Fundamentalist coalitions took shape within the Baptist and Presbyterian denominations at this time and premillennialists formed the interdenominational World’s Christian Fundamentals Association to further their agenda.

rift in American evangelicalism where former friends and comrades in the gospel became enemies.”

Fundamentalist advances in the 1920s began to stall in the Northern Baptist denomination which Marsden explains by their hesitancy to adopt a formal creed by which to expose and SPRING 2020

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discipline liberals within their ranks. The advance continued intellectually in the Presbyterian Convention with the publication of Christianity and Liberalism in 1923 by J. Gresham Machen of Princeton.1 Soon however, the Presbyterian advance also began to founder. Marsden explains that the American tradition of tolerance prevented more moderate conservatives from joining their fundamentalist brothers in expulsing liberals. In addition to the undercutting effect of the moderates, the highly publicised Scopes trial of 1925 dealt a fatal blow to the progress of the movement. The fundamentalists, represented by William Jennings Bryan, were made to appear foolish in the public eye through their attempt to battle evolution in the courts. In the wake of this defeat, the more extreme fundamentalists abandoned the denominations they were unable to reform. More moderate fundamentalists continued the struggle for reform from within their denominations.

Although the fundamentalist movement had largely disbanded, Marsden traces their ongoing influence in twentieth-century Ameri“Marsden explains can evangelicalism through the Bible that the American school movement, publications and radio and television exposure. Marsden tradition of contends that fundamentalism extolerance prevented pressed itself in three major forms, first more moderate in growing fundamentalist contingenconservatives cies within the major denominations, from joining their secondly in various Pentecostal and fundamentalist immigrant denominations, and thirdly in schismatic fundamentalist denomibrothers in expulsing nations. The first two groups preferred liberals.” to take the term “evangelical” while the third maintained the “fundamentalist” badge. In this way, Marsden shows that fundamentalism has contributed much to the shaping of contemporary evangelicalism in America.

Marsden’s evaluation of fundamentalism as a movement rooted in earlier American evangelical traditions such as revivalism and Calvinism, and his emphasis on the ongoing impact of the movement on twentieth-century American evangelicals, is a very helpful correction to the overly simplistic “social” interpretations of earlier historians such as Stewart Cole who viewed SPRING 2020

fundamentalism in terms of a short-lived, antiintellectual reaction to a rapidly changing society.

In this respect Marsden’s use of the term “movement” to describe fundamentalism is in itself corrective. Marsden’s treatment is also a necessary revision of the “theological” interpretations of later historians such as Ernest Sandeen who defined the movement in overly narrow theological terms and largely ignored the social influences that impacted the development of fundamentalism. Marsden has steered a course between these two extremes and has in the process contributed significantly to this discussion.

Particularly helpful in correcting Sandeen’s interpretation is Marsden’s evaluation of the social impact of World War I in the development of fundamentalist militancy. His use of primary sources from both liberal and conservative periodicals in demonstrating the radical transformation of premillennialists from pacifists to patriots is particularly cogent. In defining the movement theologically, Marsden avoids overgeneralizations and provides a well nuanced evaluation that recognizes the importance of premillennial dispensationalism, while also highlighting the significant contributions of non-dispensational fundamentalists such as Machen, Bryan and Shields. His discussion of Machen and the Presbyterians clearly shows that Fundamentalism was not merely a movement of bigoted antiintellectuals as many assume, but was rooted in a distinct intellectual tradition that valued both science and philosophy. Marsden’s continuous referral to Common Sense Realism and the inductive scientific method of Bacon contribute to an understanding of the intellectual underpinnings of this movement which could otherwise appear to be anti-intellectual.

Marsden seems to insinuate in the context of this discussion that Common Sense Realism gave rise to the concept of biblical inerrancy (pp. 5657), attributing its popularization (or perhaps its origin) to Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge and Benjamin Warfield (pp. 112-113) and referring to their view of Scripture as “peculiar” (p.

116). Although perhaps Marsden is correct in his contention that the word “inerrancy” was popularized at Princeton it seems impossible to assert Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity

Book Review

that this concept arose as a result of Common Sense Realism, since the apostle Paul constructs a theological argument on the assumption of inerrancy (Gal 3:16).

Marsden’s book is an informative and enjoyable read. His chronological arrangement of the discussion is helpful in understanding the gradual progression of fundamentalism which at times is very complicated. His separate discussions of events that transpired within the Baptist and Presbyterian denominations, and his discussion of overarching interdenominational happenings among premillennialists are useful in getting a sense of the scope of the modernist controversy in America.

Marsden has aptly demonstrated that fundamentalism transcends a mere “social” or “theological” definition and he has argued convincingly that this movement was deeply rooted in earlier American evangelicalism and that it has profoundly affected contemporary evangelicalism.

1

See Nate Wright’s review of this book in Jubilee Spring 2019.

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