October 20, 1999
'There are no technological
solutions' for environment
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___WACO--Christians must help the world see Earth's salvation will not be found in technology, speakers said during an Oct. 10-11 conference on Christianity and the environment at Baylor University.
___"There are no technological solutions," said Max Oelschlaeger, a leading environmental author who teaches at Northern Arizona University. "More than anything else, the ecological crisis is a crisis of the inner spirit."
___Technological and secular approaches to solving the environmental problem "have notmade significant headway," Oelschaeger said, because they fail to address the root problem.
___He described his own journey from being a secular environmentalist who saw religious faith as a hindrance to a newfound awareness that only through faith in God could he correctly understand environmental issues.
___"Religious believers are the last best hope to avoid disaster," he said.
___Another speaker cast the same issue in terms of idolatry.
___"The most prevalent idolatry of our time is techno-messianism," said Dan McGee, professor of religion at Baylor, referring to the notion that technology will solve every problem.
___Idolatry, McGee said, is "taking something good and treating it as if it were God; taking the partial and making it the whole."
___Amid a world that increasingly looks to technology for salvation, Christians should consider how to be good stewards of both theology and technology, he said.
___This impacts the discussion of ecology, McGee and other speakers said, because a proper understanding of creation begins with an acknowledgement that only God can redeem his creation from its corrupted state.
___"We must understand redemption to eternal life as not only a human hope but a destiny to be shared with all life," said James Nash, a United Methodist minister who serves as a lecturer and business consultant on environmental issues.
___To make this case, he and other speakers referred to New Testament passages such as Romans 8:19-22, which says: "The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time."
___Evangelical author and speaker Tony Campolo picked up this theme as well, asserting, "The salvation of God is for all creation."
___All the earth is God's good creation, but creation is fallen just as humans are fallen because of sin entering the world, Campolo said.
___Yet God still loves all creation and longs to redeem it, he added, citing John 3:16 as one evidence. Where the well-known verse says "God so loved the world," the word "world" refers not just to humans but to the cosmos, Campolo said. "God loves it all."
___One of God's solutions for dealing with creation involves a concept of limits on consumption, speakers said throughout the conference.
___"Limits exist for many reasons. One of them is to check evil," Oelschlaeger said. "Such a sense of limits can only come from a godly understanding of creation. ... A biblically based sense of limits is essential to reclaiming the creation."
___Limits are necessary because God has created a finite amount of natural resources, speakers said. And once those resources are polluted, killed off or used up, humans do not have the capability to recreate them.
___"Remember, extinction is forever," said one speaker.
___The people who most need to understand a sense of limits are Americans, speakers said frequently, citing various statistics to illustrate how Americans use a share of the world's natural resources disproportionate to their percentage of the population.
___"The resources used by one person in the United States will support 14 people in Bangladesh," said Larry Lehr, a range ecologist who teaches at Baylor. "Does God love me more than he does a guy born across the river in Mexico? ... What are our responsibilities for our brothers and sisters around the world? Are humans accountable for our waste?"
___Frugality is "the most feared and neglected norm" in modern American society, added Nash. Yet it is one of the oldest known virtues and lies "near the heart of Christian ethics."
___Christianity should "revolt against the sacred values of the gluttonous society," Nash urged.
___Placing limits on consumption and pollution should be a spiritual mandate for another reason as well, speakers said.
___"When we abandon moral structures, it's the poor who suffer more," said Robert Gorman, executive director of Catholic Social Services for the diocese of Houma/Thibodaux, La. "The greatest predictor of environmental hazard sites is race and income."
___Campolo said he is an environmentalist largely because of his concern for the poor. "When we talk about who's going to suffer as a result of environmental degradation, without a doubt it's the poor who are going to take it in the teeth."
___And if all the talk about responsibility and limits and sacrifice in caring for creation make people feel guilty, that's good, Campolo said. "People who are affluent in the midst of a world of suffering ought to feel guilty."
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