Pollution and the Death of Man E-Book

Francis A. Schaeffer

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Francis A. Schaeffer's Timeless Assessment of a Modern Ecological Crisis  From the time of creation, God placed the earth in our care. Since then, humans have had a strained relationship with the ecosystem. We have often misused resources and polluted the water, air, and land. But if God's plan for redemption includes the earth, we must be good stewards of his creation now. With environmental threats increasing, how should Christians respond? This classic work by Francis A. Schaeffer looks at modern ecological crises through the lens of theology and Scripture. Renowned for his work in applied philosophy and theology, Schaeffer answers serious philosophical questions about creation and ecology. He concludes that we must return to a profoundly and radically biblical understanding of God's relationship to the earth, and of our divine mandate to exercise godly dominion over it. - A Christian Classic: Written by renowned philosopher Francis A. Schaeffer - Cultural Analysis from a Biblical Perspective: Looks at modern ecological threats through the lens of theology and Scripture - Educational: Includes appendices on "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis" by the late American historian Lynn White Jr. and "Why Worry About Nature?" by the late sociologist Richard L. Means 

Leseprobe

Thank you for downloading this Crossway book.

Sign up for the Crossway Newsletter for updates on special offers, new resources, and exciting global ministry initiatives:

Crossway Newsletter

Or, if you prefer, we would love to connect with you online:

“In this insightful little book, Schaeffer provides a well-considered theological context for environmental discussions. Christians will differ in particular applications of the principles he expounds, but few will deny that he provides the right framework.”

Fred Zaspel, Executive Editor, Books at a Glance; Pastor, Reformed Baptist Church, Franconia, Pennsylvania

“I first read this book over fifty years ago at university. I was a newly converted Christian and Francis Schaeffer was all the rage. The book spoke to an issue as fresh today as it was then—the ecological crisis facing planet earth. Our culture lacks an understanding of origins, purpose, and destiny, and all three are necessary in order to address the issue of saving planet earth. A doctrine of creation fueled by humanity’s moral responsibility as God’s image bearer and driven by the certainty that the cosmos is going to be renewed and transformed is the only culturally relevant idea to properly address the current crisis. Schaeffer was correct then and remains correct today. A massively prophetic book that speaks to our time. Christians should heed what it says.”

Derek Thomas, Senior Minister, First Presbyterian Church, Columbia, South Carolina; Chancellor’s Professor, Reformed Theological Seminary

“This book is a remarkably sane approach to environmental concerns. Man’s alienation from God leads to other alienations and ruptures, including our failure to responsibly exercise dominion in this world. As Schaeffer shows, Christ overcomes these divisions so that Christians are the world’s true environmentalists who take seriously our responsibility to care for God’s creation. How can we, in Christ, exercise godly dominion in this world? This easy-to-digest book is just the answer.”

Mark Jones, Senior Minister, Faith Reformed Presbyterian Church (PCA), Vancouver, British Columbia

Pollution and the Death of Man

Pollution and the Death of Man

Francis A. Schaeffer

Afterword by Udo W. Middelmann

Pollution and the Death of Man

Copyright © 1970 by Francis A. Schaeffer

This edition © 2022 by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Originally published in the USA under the title:

Pollution and the Death of Man, by Francis A. Schaeffer

Copyright © 1970 by L’Abri Fellowship

This worldwide English edition © 2022 by Crossway (a division of Good News Publishers) with permission of L’Abri Fellowship. All rights reserved.

Cover design: Jordan Singer

First printing with new cover 2022

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible. Public domain.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the authors.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-7695-9

Library of Congress Number 92-74125

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2022-01-06 01:23:49 PM

Contents

1  “What Have They Done to Our Fair Sister?”

2  Pantheism: Man Is No More Than the Grass

3  Other Inadequate Answers

4  The Christian View: Creation

5  A Substantial Healing

6  The Christian View: The “Pilot Plant”

Afterword

    Udo W. Middelmann

Appendix A: The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis

    Lynn White Jr.

Appendix B: Why Worry about Nature?

    Richard L. Means

Notes

Bibliography of Other Books

General Index

Scripture Index

Chapter One

“What Have They Done to Our Fair Sister?”

Some time ago when I was in Bermuda for a lecture, I was invited to visit the work of a young man well-known in the area of ecology. His name was David B. Wingate. He was especially known for his efforts to save the cahow bird from extinction. The cahow is a little larger than a pigeon and breeds only on a very few islands near Bermuda, just off the main island. Wingate struggled for many years to increase the number of these birds.

As we went around visiting the nests, we were talking together about the whole problem of ecology. He told me that he was losing ground in his battle, because the chicks were not hatching in the same proportion as before. If they had continued at the previous rate, he would have been well on his way to success. Instead, he found that fewer and fewer were hatching. What was the reason? To find out, he took an embryo chick from the egg and dissected it. Its tissues were found to be filled with DDT. Wingate was convinced that this accounted for the drop in the hatching rate.

The startling thing about this is that the cahow is a sea-feeding bird; it does not feed anywhere near land—only in the middle of the ocean. So it is obvious that it was not getting its DDT close to shore, but far out in the Atlantic. In other words, the use of DDT on land was polluting the whole area. It was coming down through the rivers, out into the ocean, and causing the death of sea-feeding birds.1

When Thor Heyerdahl made his famous voyage in the Kon Tiki, he was able to use the ocean water quite freely; but he later said when he tried to cross the Atlantic in a papyrus boat, the ocean water was unusable because of the large amount of rubbish.

A man in California very vividly pointed out this serious problem. He erected a tombstone at the ocean-side, and on it he has carved this epitaph:

The ocean born—[he gives hypothetical date]

The oceans died—A.D. 1979

The Lord gave; man hath taken away

Cursed be the name of man.

The simple fact is that if man is not able to solve his ecological problems, then man’s resources are going to die. It is quite conceivable that man will be unable to fish the oceans as in the past, and that if the balance of the oceans is changed too much, man will even find himself without enough oxygen to breathe.

So the whole problem of ecology is dumped in this generation’s lap. Ecology means “the study of the balance of living things in nature.” But as the word is currently used, it means also the problem of the destruction man has brought upon nature. It is related to such factors as water pollution, destructive noise levels, and air pollution in the great cities of the world. We have been reading and hearing of this on every side from all over the world.

Near the end of his life, Darwin acknowledged several times in his writings that two things had become dull to him as he got older. The first was his joy in the arts and the second his joy in nature. This is very intriguing. Darwin offered his proposition that nature, including man, is based only on the impersonal plus time plus chance, and he had to acknowledge at the end of his life that it had had these adverse effects on him. I believe that what we are seeing today is the same loss of joy in our total culture as Darwin personally experienced—in the area of the arts and general life, and in the area of nature. The distressing thing about this is that orthodox Christians often really have had no better sense about these things than unbelievers. The death of “joy” in nature is leading to the death of nature itself.

In the 1960s and early 1970s when there was a profound interest in the philosophic basis for life and the problems of life, this sort of anxiety was even being expressed in the area of pop music. The Doors had a song called “Strange Days” in which they asked, “What have they done to the earth . . . to our fair sister?” And they answered: “Ravaged and plundered . . . and dragged her down.”2

At any rate, people everywhere began to discuss what could be done about it. An intriguing article by Lynn White Jr., on “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” was published in Science magazine.3 White was a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles.

In his article he argued that the crisis in ecology is Christianity’s fault. It is a brilliant article in which he argued that although we no longer are a Christian world, but a post-Christian one, nevertheless we still retain a “Christian mentality” in the area of ecology. He said Christianity presents a bad view of nature, and so this is carried over into the present-day, post-Christian world. He based his allegations of a “bad view of nature” on the fact that Christianity taught that man had dominion over nature and so man has treated nature in a destructive way. He saw that there is no solution to ecological problems—any more than there is to sociological problems—without a “base.” The base of man’s thinking must change.

In ecology in the 1980s there is not much writing or discussion on the basic philosophies underlying the consideration of ecology. This is parallel to the lack of philosophic pornography, philosophic drug-taking, philosophic films, etc. However, in ecology, as in these other areas, the thought-forms of the 1980s were laid in the earlier period of the 1960s. At that time there was much serious consideration, writing, discussion, and expression concerning the worldviews underlying all these areas.

People are now functioning on the ideas formulated in that earlier period—even though those so functioning do not consciously realize it.

As Christians, we should know the roots in order to know why those who speak and act against Christianity are doing so, and in order to know the strength of the Christian answer in each area. If we do not do this, we have little understanding of what is occurring about us. We also do not know the strength of what, as Christians, we have to say across the whole spectrum of life.

The articles of Lynn White and Richard Means from the later part of the 1960s are, I think, still the classic ones concerning the area of ecology.

Modern man’s viewpoint in the post-Christian world (as I have dealt with in my previous writings) is without any categories and without any base upon which to build. Lynn White understood the need of a base in the area of ecology. To quote him: “What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and our destiny—that is, by religion.”4 Here I believe he is completely right. Men do what they think. Whatever their worldview is, this is the thing that will spill over into the external world. This is true in every area, in sociology, in psychology, in science and technology, as well as in the area of ecology.

White’s solution was to ask, “Why don’t we go back to St. Francis of Assisi?” He contrasts St. Francis with what he saw as the “orthodox view” of men having the “right” to despoil nature. “The greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history, Saint Francis, proposed what he thought was an alternative Christian view of nature and man’s relationship to it: he tried to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule of creation.”5

Both our present science and our present technology, according to White, are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our problem of ecology can be expected from them alone. He said that technology is not going to solve the problem because it is powered with its view of dominion over nature, which equals limitless exploitation.

Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny. The profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point out a direction. I propose Francis as a patron saint for ecologists.6

The discussion of this was picked up and carried further and aroused much interest. In the Saturday Review of December 2, 1967, Richard L. Means, who was associate professor of sociology at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, quoted White and extended White’s concept by essentially asking, Why not begin to find a solution to this in the direction of pantheism? In fact, he tied this call for a solution based upon pantheism into what he called the “cool cats” of the generation in their interest in Zen Buddhism. He is saying here, Wouldn’t it be a solution if we just said, We’re all of one essence?

So here pantheism is proposed as an answer to our ecological dilemma. But is it an answer at all? That is a question we must now consider.

Chapter Two

Pantheism: Man Is No More Than the Grass

Why not try to find a solution to this in the direction of pantheism? Here we find a use of the concept of pantheism by a Western scientist, a sociologist, in his effort to solve modern man’s problem in relationship to the saving of nature—i.e., the ecological problem. This man seemed to be trying to use pantheism in a very specific way—not as a real, religious answer at all, but merely in a sociological or a scientific, pragmatic way.

Richard Means’s article was entitled “Why Worry about Nature?” Means begins the article by quoting Albert Schweitzer: “The great fault of all ethics hitherto has been that they believed themselves to have to deal only with the relation of man to man.”7 He thus quoted Schweitzer as saying ecology is a problem of ethics, but that man’s only concept of ethics has been “man to man.” Later Means said, “The notion that man’s relation to nature is a moral one finds very few articulate champions, even among contemporary religious writers.”8 He proceeded to refer to Harvey Cox’s book, The Secular City. Cox, of course, is a very liberal theologian and at that time a proponent of the God-is-dead theology. Means said that even with Cox, “the city is taken for granted and the moral dimensions of Cox’s analysis are limited to man’s relations to man within this urban world, and not with the animals, the plants, the trees, the air—that is, the natural habitat.”9It should be remembered that much modern theology is in the direction of pantheism, and thus Means’s suggestion of a pragmatic pantheistic base for solving our ecological problems fits naturally into the climate which reaches all the way from the vague pantheism in much popular thinking today to the theological faculties.

Means went on to refer, interestingly enough, to Eric Hoffer, who was a popular American folk philosopher. He was a longshoreman who said many really profound things and had become very popular indeed with intellectuals. “Eric Hoffer, one of the few contemporary social critics who have met head-on the issue of man’s relationship to nature, has warned in these pages of the danger of romanticizing nature.”10 Romanticizing means that one looks at nature and projects into it man’s reaction. So one would look at a cat and think of it as though it were reacting as a man reacts. Hoffer very properly warned against this. However, his solution (according to Means) ends like this: “The great accomplishment of man is to transcend nature, to separate one’s self from the demands of instinct. Thus, according to Hoffer, a fundamental characteristic of man is to be found in his capacity to free himself from the restrictions of the physical and the biological.”11 In other words, Hoffer was really not proposing that we should come to terms with nature (not as far as Means understood him anyway). What Hoffer was saying is that man has to transcend nature.

It should be said that it is correct to reject the romanticizing of nature as an answer or a solution. First, nature, as it now is, is not always benevolent; and second, to project our feelings and thoughts into a tree would mean that we would have no base upon which to justify cutting down and using the tree as a shelter for man.

Those who are familiar with Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine (Macmillan, 1968) will recognize Hoffer’s ideas to be merely a more poetic form of his concept. Koestler, along with Adler (The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes [Fordham University Press, 1967]) and Michael Polanyi of Oxford, attacks the classical view of evolution, at least pragmatically; these men were united as far as saying that it is leading us in the wrong direction. But Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine came up with the final solution by pleading with science to make a pill to bring together the upper and the lower brain. For Koestler, the lower brain deals with the instincts and the emotions, and the upper brain deals with the intellect and reasoning. According to Koestler, the real problem lies in the separation of the two. The point to be made here is that Hoffer’s idea of man’s “getting on top of” his nature in order to free himself from the restrictions of the physical and the biological is, interestingly enough, in the direction of Koestler’s concept.

Reverting to Means’s article, he went on to ask and answer an important question. Remembering that he was proposing the thesis that man’s relationship to nature is a moral and not just a scientific crisis, his question and his immediate answer provide a brilliant snapshot of modern man: “What, then, is the moral crisis? It is, I think, a pragmatic problem.”12

Here was a remarkable combination of phrases; the moral dissolved into the pragmatic. He started off with a moral crisis, but suddenly all one is left with is a pragmatic problem.

It involves the actual social consequences of myriad and unconnected acts. The crisis comes from the combined results of a mistreatment of our environment. It involves the negligence of a small businessman on the Kalamazoo River, the irresponsibility of a large corporation on Lake Erie, the impatient use of insecticides by a farmer in California, the stripping of land by Kentucky mine operators. Unfortunately, there is a long history of unnecessary and tragic destruction of animal and natural resources on the face of this continent.13

Of course the pressure becomes greater on a world scale, and he was certainly right in pointing out that there is a serious problem. But that does not change his problem of dealing with the problem! He wanted a moral base on which to deal with the ecological problem, but soon all he had is the word moral. And what he was left with was the pragmatic and technological.

As one faces the growth of population, the ecological problem becomes even greater. In Switzerland, an excellent example was beautiful Lake Geneva and the difference since we came to Switzerland thirty-two years ago—a major difference. Happily, the Swiss have, at great expense, begun to clear up Lake Geneva, but the growth of population on its shores required a major effort. Left to itself, the lake could not have cared for the population growth.

As the pressure gets greater worldwide, upon what basis, different from the one we have employed in the past, are we to treat the nature which is our environment and upon which our life in this world depends? As the Sierra Club calendar for 1970 put it, “The moon, Mars, Saturn . . . nice places to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.” Human life depends on the uniquely balanced environment of this world.

Means went on to talk about the passenger pigeons, of which there were once many in the United States; but they had become extinct. The same could be said about the seal industry.

The trouble is, however, we do not seem to learn very much from these sad happenings, for (to the anguish of men who have thrilled to the images, created by Herman Melville and the great white whale) such marine scientists as Scott McVay believe that commercial fishing is endangering the whale, the last abundant species in the world. For those more inclined toward a cash nexus, there goes a profitable industry.14