Creation and Stewardship

Genesis 1.27-28 says,

“So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’”

Referring to that passage of Scripture, I came upon a wonderful quotation from Father Robert A. Sirico in Environmental Stewardship in the Judeo-Christian Tradition regarding the way we should treat the environment from a biblical perspective:

“In our modern times, however, this biblical vision of the relationship between God, man, and nature is muddled by two false views. The one sees the natural world as the source of all value, man as an intruder, and God, if he exists at all, as so immanent in the natural order that he ceases to be distinguishable from it. The other places man as the source of all values, the natural order as merely instrumental to his aims, and God as often irrelevant. Genesis presents a radically different picture of how the world is put together.”

Discussions on the environment become highly charged and highly politicized in today’s climate (think global warming), and often the issue is painted as if there are only two options: either the protection of the environment is most important issue, or it isn’t important at all. The biblical perspective of stewardship falls between those two extremes, and is the position that Christians should seek to embrace.