God Is Green

Climate change and environmental issues are undoubtedly the most important consideration of the moment for our planet. It is important that Christians get involved. I have just read Ian Bradley’s God is Green. Bradley very clearly states the necessity of our Christian involvement – “if Christians fail to speak out and act on the most important issue of our time we will not only have lost an enormous missionary and pastoral opportunity but we will have failed the human race and the planet. We will also have failed the triune God.”

Bradley is rightly clear, citing a strong Biblical basis, that God is concerned with the whole of creation. “The Bible clearly proclaims God to be lord of the cosmos as well as lord of history, involved in an active relationship with the whole of creation and not just with the human part.”

It is important to recognise that God created things to be in balance. Its diversity is both wonderful and necessary. Bradley puts it like this – “The emphasis on diversity is maintained in the story of the Flood where Noah is commanded to take with him in the Ark two of every kind of living creature and in the covenant that God makes after the flood not just with humans but with all living things. It is reinforced with particular power in the Psalms and in the Book of Job which point to the pleroma or fullness of God’s creation and proclaim that every part of it has a significance and importance to God in its own right and not just for its usefulness to humans. It is a key theme of the wisdom literature which reinforces the message of the opening chapter of Genesis of the goodness and value of all creation in God’s sight: ‘You love everything that exists and nothing that you have made disgusts you, since, if you had hated something, you would not have made it’ (Wisdom of Solomon, 11:24).”

We therefore do well to get engaged in ecological concerns and to do the little we can to make a difference. Yes, it is true, using some further words from Bradley, that – “Christians urgently need to come back to the realisation, and the Biblical revelation, that God is Green, deeply concerned for the whole of creation and calling us to share and act on that concern.”