Re: [asa] Creation Care

David -

You may know C.S. Lewis' essay "The World's Last Night." What should Christians do, he asks, if they knew (somehow) that tonight would be the world's last before the return of Christ? & his answer is essentially that they should stay at their posts and work in their vocations. The ER nurse should be in the ER because there will be people who are hurt and scared even in the world's last night. The air traffic controller should be in the control tower because there will be people who need to get home even in the world's last night.

It seems to me that that resolves the dichotomy you're trying to pose. We are called to be God's representatives in caring for creation & should do that, even if we think that the parousia is near - & a fortiori since we actually have no idea when it will be.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: David Opderbeck
  To: Rich Blinne
  Cc: Randy Isaac ; asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Monday, January 22, 2007 10:05 AM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Creation Care

  This
  is where the ASA (and Evangelical Environmentalists in general) have
  the greatest value in that we can possibly be more effective

  This is good. Another perspective that it seems to me needs to be brought into this is a broader eschatalogical and missiological one. Speaking anectodally, certainly from my own spiritual DNA, there can be an inclination to dismiss a long-term problem like this from a sort of fuzzy sense that this can't be a priority for the Church in light of what Christ commissioned the Church to do before his return -- make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:19). We can haggle over specifics of eschatology, but certainly a major theme of the New Testament is that our ultimate hope for peace and restoration of right relationships among people, between people and God, and between people and the rest of creation, lies in the return of Christ.

  It seems to me that the Gore camp is "religious" about climate change in the sense that global warming is their eschaton. Either people will respond to the threat and usher in a sort of millennial kingdom of technological harmony, or they won't and thereby humanity will be decisively judged. We know this is wrong. Neither final peace nor final judgment will come until Christ returns and the Kingdom of God is fully established.

  Instead of making warming into a new eschatology and turning the response to warming into our new mission, how do we develop a distinctly Christian response to man-made warming that places it within an authentically Christian eschatology and prioritizes appropriately it within an authentically Christian missiology? (Maybe -- I'm sure -- there are some good books on this out there that I haven't yet read).

  On 1/22/07, Rich Blinne <rich.blinne@gmail.com> wrote:
    On 1/22/07, David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is the kind of articles that are always in the premier journals.
> When you review the literature as Randy and I have you do not find the
> apocolyptic predictions which could not survive peer review but the
> more moderate defensible positions like above. BTW, the modest
> increases such as above IS the consensus.
>
> Thank you Rich, Pim and Randy for helping clarify these things for me. Now,
> if modest increase scenarios are the consensus, would we agree that alarmist
> popularizers such as Al Gore are misrepresenting the science and disserving
> the public? Does the climate science community welcome Gore et al. or run
> the other way?

    This is where there is not a consensus. Some like the scientists who
    run the Real Climate blog see Gore as mostly accurate and certainly
    more accurate than the deniers. Other like the "heretics" cited in the
    NY Times you quoted believe that Gore's overheated rhetoric is
    unhelpful. I tend to side with the latter.

    You have raised a valid point in that none of the mitigation
    strategies have zero cost and thus should be evaluated as such. This
    is where the ASA (and Evangelical Environmentalists in general) have
    the greatest value in that we can possibly be more effective at
    balancing the cost of the problem vs. the cost of the "solution"
    focusing on how this would effect the world's poor. The scientists
    have spoken. Now it is the time for the engineers to speak. This is
    already happening. The 21st Annual Meeting of the Rocky Mountain
    section of the ASA has invited two distinguished engineering
    professors, Dr. Bernard Amadei and Dr. Walter L. Bradley, to discuss
    solar/wind/biomass energy technologies, energy conservation, clean
    water and microenterprise for developing countries. The title of the
    meeting is "Science and Technology with a Human Face".

  --
  David W. Opderbeck
  Web: http://www.davidopderbeck.com
  Blog: http://www.davidopderbeck.com/throughaglass.html
  MySpace (Music): http://www.myspace.com/davidbecke

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Received on Mon Jan 22 10:47:12 2007