Pollution and the Death of Man
January 29, 2010
Although originally published in 1970, Francis Schaeffer’s Pollution and the Death of Man continues to offer insight into biblical creation care and the Christian worldview. In his words:
“If God treats the tree like a tree, the machine like a machine, the man like a man, shouldn’t I, as a fellow-creature, do the same — treating each thing in integrity in its own order? And for the highest reason: because I love God — I love the One who has made it! Loving the Lover who has made it, I have respect for the thing He has made.”
(Francis A. Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man, Ch. 4)
The following review of Pollution and the Death of Man appears on the Apologetics Resource Center blog. A few paragraphs of that review appear below the link:
http://www.arcapologetics.org/blog/2006/04/francis-schaeffer-speaks-to-problem-of.html
“When the man Francis Schaeffer is thought about, his great books that detail how true biblical Christianity answers the problem of man usually also come to mind. The God Who is There, Escape From Reason, He is There and He is Not Silent, and later on, How Should We Then Live are some of his dominant and most influential writings. But tucked away in an obscure corner of any complete Schaeffer library is his thinking on ecology, a topic most Christians rather enjoying ignoring, perhaps because we have a taste for beef and chicken, and we find little time for recycling or protecting endangered species. In fact, environmentalism is often associated with left wing liberal types and organizations such as PETA, thus to protect the environment, oddly enough, has a non-Christian flavor to it in our modern day.
Schaeffer, in his wisdom, begs to differ. In this short treatise, he offers the only lasting solution to the current ecological crisis, namely, a solid stance on the Christian worldview. He points out in the first chapter, however, that not all agree that this is so. He refers to an article written by Lynn White Jr., who emphatically declares that the problem is Christianity itself, with its belief that man has “dominion” over the earth, and thus deduces that he can treat it any old way that he pleases; that is, he has the right to “despoil nature.” Of course, this is a terrible interpretation of the dominion mandate given in the first chapters of Genesis, and Schaeffer goes on to show White’s error.
A major part of Pollution and the Death of Man is spent demonstrating that other worldviews are insufficient in providing an intellectual base for protecting the environment. Chapter 2 is a lengthy presentation revealing the inadequacies of pantheism to provide the needed foundation for keeping the planet clean. Schaeffer summarizes the problem:
‘What I am saying is that a pantheistic answer is not just a theoretically weak answer, but it is also a weak answer in practice. A man who begins to take a pantheistic view of nature has no answer for the fact that nature has two faces: it has a benevolent face, but it may also be an enemy. The pantheist views nature as normal. There is no place for abnormality in nature, in this view…If we accept this romantic and non-Christian mysticism, the difficulty is that we have no solution for the fact that nature is often not benevolent.’”
You can read the follow review here.
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Lynn White’s paper published in Science in 1967 is, without doubt, the most influential piece on Christianity and ecology written in the 20th century. For excellent studies of White’s thesis and the evangelical response to it see the following:
David Kenneth Larsen, God’s Gardeners: American Protestant Evangelicals Confront Environmentalism, 1967-2000. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago Divinity School, 2001.
Joseph K. Sheldon, Rediscovery of Creation: A Bibliographic Study of the Church’s Response to the Environmental Crisis. Edited by Kenneth E. Rowe, Metuchan, NJ: American Theological Library Association and the Scarecrow Press, 1992.
Mary Aline Duitsman, “Ecology and Theology: Christian Responses to Lynn White Jr.” M.A. California State University Northridge. 1987.
Larsen calls White’s paper the “Silent Spring” of environmental theology (p. 54). His treatment of White begins in chapter 2, p. 39. His excellent review of Schaeffer’s response to White begins on p. 60. He recognizes that Schaeffer’s short book represents the first extended evangelical response to White and that Schaeffer rightly accepted the failure of Christians to live their theology in relation to God’s earth and his creatures. He defended the Bible and Christian theology but did not try to defend Christian behavior. He also rightly notes that Schaeffer misrepresented Richard L, Means’ article, “Why Worry About Nature,” published in the Saturday Review, December, 1967. Schaeffer wrongly alleged that Means was promoting pantheism. Means wrote a letter to Schaeffer about it, but Schaeffer never responded.
Larsen also comments that the evangelical response to ecological problems has generally followed the culture (p. 78). This “showed that evangelicals are not so much separate from their culture as they are a product of it” (p. 79). What are the implications of this historical reality for 21st century Christian eco-ethics?