Creation Care Discipleship

Love, love, love this book. Steven Bouma-Prediger carefully discusses Creation Care, exploring the Biblical and Theological perspective of ‘earth-keeping’ and looking at ecumenical views from all Christian corners. These views included some from my favourites (Wendell Berry and Richard Bauckham) and some from people I had never heard from before (Eastern Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew 1). I particularly enjoyed the discussion of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si.

The author carefully unpacked his terms, and it was interesting to see why he had settled on the term ‘earth-keeping’, exploring some of the baggage and assumptions that go with words like ecology and stewardship.

This week, I heard a Christ follower say there was no need to pay attention to ‘the Greens’ as the earth would be destroyed soon anyway. I was glad to have already read what Steven Bouma-Prediger thought about this way of thinking. I would recommend this book to any Christ follower, not just those interested in Creation Care, but those who don’t care about creation at all. One thing I would also enjoy reading would be a companion volume of practical applications of the topics discussed, from churches and individuals.

This is a difficult book to rate, because it's broken down into several sections, and there is, in my estimation, a stark difference in quality between sections. The first portion of the book, building the case that ecology should rightly be a concern for Christians, is largely solid. There are some hints of leftism floating in the background, but the actual focus of this portion of the content is mostly solid. It's interspersed with personal stories in a manner that feels rather jarring, though. The teaching is good, and the stories are good, but they don't feel well-integrated, so it's awkward the way the book alternates between them. It would have been smoother, in my opinion, to have separated these altogether instead of trying to intersperse them. Four to four-and-a-half stars for the content here and four to four-and-a-half stars for the stories, but loss of a star for the awkward way they're woven together.

Unfortunately, in the latter portions, the book goes off the rails and lands solidly in the morass of "woke" leftism I feared from a book on this subject. There are some good things in this section, but you have to wade for them through the murk of standard liberal leftism with a "Christian" label slapped on top, and a degree of ecumenism that disregards heresy.

We're asked to jettison the biblical terms "stewardship" and "dominion" because they've been abused, rather than recovering their proper use. (I do also appreciate the author's preferred term, "earthkeeping," but encouraging the abandonment of biblical language is never a good thing.) It's chock-full of evolutionary assumptions and unquestioning support of the mainstream narratives. Environmentalism is made out to be one and the same with rejection of racism and "social injustice."

While justice, rejection of racism, and "earthkeeping" are, indeed, all important, there's a wholesale adoption of liberal thinking there that's both often unbiblical, and virtually always lacking nuance. For instance, the author judgmentally speaks of Christians having their "gas guzzling SUVs" parked at church as no better than the world with their gas-guzzling SUVs at the office on Monday -- but you can't transport your family of seven to church in a compact commuter vehicle. The author's comment lacks all sense of context.

While he rightly points us to the importance of our worldview, we don't effectively see him look to the Bible as the source of his, but tip into the opposite ditch, adopting wholesale the worldview of radical leftists and pagan cultures. I would have preferred to see a careful, thoughtful examination of what elements of those worldviews are good and right -- and why they're good and right according to Scripture -- along with an acknowledgement of where ours is good. Instead, we're left with one more resource with an overarching attitude that reads like, "everything that ever came from Christians and white people is totally evil and everything that came from non-white pagans is the ultimate ideal." This is not what I want to read in a Christian book.

For all of those faults, this might still have been a more helpful resource had it been more practical. Apart from a few brief ideas almost in passing, there's little here that informs an everyday reader of how to take practical action. The author wants us to think differently -- which is good and important -- but also lambasts us for lack of action and then doesn't suggest what actions we might reasonably take. There are some good principles early on ("wild nature should be preserved, cultivated nature should be well managed, and fabricated nature should be designed with self-sufficient energy and waste systems"), but most readers are going to be left wondering what that actually looks like.

All in all, three stars because this fell short of expectations.