by Zach Maloney
The Helwys Society Forum is pleased to have Zach Maloney contributing a special interview this week. Zach is the Pastor for Christian Education at Tippett’s Chapel FWB Church in Clayton, North Carolina. He is also a graduate student in ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Southeastern Seminary happens to be home to one of the premier ethics programs among evangelical seminaries. One of their professors, Dr. Mark Liederbach, recently co-authored a book (along with Dr. Seth Bible) entitled True North: Christ, the Gospel, and Creation Care (B&H Academic, 2013). Zach has had the privilege of studying under Liederbach, and so with this unique vantage point he has provided us with this interview.
You can listen to the audio here:
Or you may read the transcript below.
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Zach Maloney (ZM): There was a time (and it still may even be the case now) when talk of the environment elicited certain stereotypes. However, you argue throughout your book that Christians should be calibrated under this God-given moral course known as “true north.” Explain what you mean by this phrase and its relevance to ethics as a whole.
Mark Liederbach (ML): My perspective, and I believe it is really borne out clearly by Scripture, is that when you start with the doctrine of God as the beginning point of theology you’re asking the question, “Who am I in relation to God?” Much of modern ethics is just simply asking the question, “Who am I in relation to myself?” But we who believe that there is a God and that that God creates didn’t just create willy-nilly, but actually created us according to a planed purpose. In ethics that’s called a “telos” or a final end for which we are created. So, if it’s true that God has pointed us in a direction, then I have just borrowed the term true north to use a compass metaphor to say I want to be guided towards true north in everything I do.
So scripturally what that would mean is if God created me for His glory, then my life needs to be pointed back to God in order to give Him the glory He is due. I’m calling this metaphor true north. That would then mean that my theology has to translate into the way I live, and that is what the definition of ethics is really all about. It is theology driving the way I live. For us in particular, we would want to specify more that it is a biblically, faithful theology that drives us to live in a way that responds to God as an act of worship in everything we do.
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ZM: You mention early in the book that two misguided motivations lead Christians debating environmental ethics. One is the “Chicken Little” approach, and the other, the “Ostrich approach.” How do these two manifest themselves in the church?
ML: Yeah, I will go ahead and start with the “Chicken Little” approach. Right now, modern science and modern media combining together have tried to put together a lot of environmental models that claim that we have global warming. To speak to that for a minute, nobody disagrees that global warming is happening. In other words, you can be extremely conservative or extremely liberal, but all you need to do is look at the scientific data and you will see that the world is warming up. So the question isn’t really global warming as such, but rather what is the cause of global warming.
There is a lot of science and media attention given to the idea that humans are causing all of the global warming to take place through our non-care for the environment. So there are those that will run around and say, “the sky is falling”— maybe even quite literally in terms of the world coming to an end because we have treated it so poorly. To use a different metaphor, if we are on spaceship earth, spaceship earth is running out of energy and room than the earth is going to collapse. So the chicken little approach is to be under crisis all the time.
The ostrich approach is the folks that will say, “Oh, those are just a bunch of tree hugging hippies and if you believe that, you are probably adopting a liberal moral stance and if you believe in God at all, it’s probably some pantheistic idea of God.”
So we’re trying to moderate between these two and explain, let us not let the crisis or the denial drive us (chicken littles or ostriches sticking your head in the sand). Instead, let us think in terms of if God created this world, then this world is His; if it is our Father’s world, then I want to care for my Father’s world that will honor and please Him. This is going back to the first question—the way I care for God’s stuff tells me a lot about how I care for God Himself.
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ZM: One of the dangers that might come along with environmental ethics is operating under a moral system that can make the environment an idol, like we just spoke about. The approach resembles that of a pantheistic religion that says the created order takes on a divine nature. How do we adhere to a theocentric view in which the Triune God of creation is central?
ML: It is primarily through Hindu and Buddhist thought that has snuck its way into western thinking. In Hindu thought in particular, this idea of the Atman and the Brahman that we are just small manifestations of one greater reality—this comes out of the Star Wars trilogy. We are all part of one grand force. They call this the Brahman or some kind of God. So what that would mean is that if a tree is manifesting a life-force that is part of this bigger picture of God, then I need to take care of the tree because in some ways I’m taking care of God. And if I’m connected to God, then in some ways I am taking care of myself. Pantheism implies that everything is God, and yet nothing in itself is God. There has been a ton of that in environmental ethics kind of thinking.
But we as Christians would make the real clear case that the God of the Bible tells us in the beginning that He is the one Who creates. John chapter 1, Hebrews chapter 1, and Colossians chapter 1: all these passages tell us that Jesus is the person of the Trinity Who is the Creator of the world. So going back to the previous question, if God is the one Who creates the world, and Jesus Himself has done so, and as Philippians 2:11 tells us, all of us will bow our knees before the Father, then there is a sense in which you cannot be a true environmentalist unless you are a good Christian and Jesus is central to everything you do. Environmental ethics by nature has to be Christo-centric. In other words, if I care about Jesus as the person I am trying to become like, then I will care for the creation in the same way that He would, so things stay theocentric.
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ZM: One of my favorite parts of the book is where you unpack Genesis 1:28 and present a “worship mandate” standpoint. I wanted to read a quote from the book. You say,
Genesis 1:28 is not – emphatically not – an ecological mandate. It is a worship mandate! The preeminent thing on God’s mind was that all of creation – both human and nonhuman – would reach the heights of their existence by worshipping him and therein finding joys unimaginable. Would that mean they would rightly care for his planet? Certainly. Was caring for the planet his ultimate concern? Certainly not. The primary calling and task of the human being is not care for the garden but worshipping the Creator of the garden [1].
In light of this, what are the implications of this worship mandate, and what does this look like for human beings created in the image of God?
ML: This is why I love theology. I love how theology drives ethics. Again we are returning to this theme where it is all for God’s glory, and that is my primary place on the planet. I am going to be faced in my life, in my time, and in my culture with certain crisis issues or context where this comes into play. In the 1970s early in that decade we had the Roe v. Wade case. It was then that abortion became a central issue for Christians to be concerned about. We have gun control issues and wars. Well, if I’m not careful I can let each one of those specific issues become that which I am ultimately about—“I need to solve social justice issues.”
We want to care about those issues greatly, but what’s beautiful is that if we are supposed to live to the glory of God, then every issue is important to God. And for me to champion one over another, it may be a reflection of my gifts or interests, but in terms of the most important thing, well, 1 Corinthians 10:31 says we bring everything under the Lordship of Christ. I think the implications of the worship mandate is that there is no part of my life, nor any part of culture that does not need to be drawn back into a pattern or direction of worship of God. So it means that as an image bearer, I have to work on my personal faith so that I am rightly ordered, then I began to work through that in my culture and try to rightly order my culture.
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ZM: Okay.
ML: Sound like our mid-term, or final? Laughs.
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ZM: Laughs. Ethics is often seen as a moral exercise, but as you and others have shown, it is profoundly theological. How would something like ethics relate to eschatology? A lot of environmental views seem to be predicated on a brand of eschatology. How would you describe this relationship?
ML: I take a little different tact than most people would expect with a question like this. Some may have a dispensational point of view in which they have a dispensation where things are going to end fairly soon (Most dispensationalists tend to think that way). And when the end happens and Jesus returns, the trigger for Jesus returning is that we preach the Gospel to all nations. So sometimes what that can do is it can make our evangelism motive not the care of creation—in this case human creation, but souls that need to be rightly ordered to God. It may be that I start doing evangelism and reaching all the ends of the earth because I want to get off this planet. So it can have a subtle shift in my motivation to do evangelism and how I care for people. It doesn’t have to, but that has been one critique against certain kinds of eschatology.
Along with that, there have been those who from a dispensational point of view (and I am not trying to chunk them under the bus), but there are those who would say that because of that, caring for the planet does not matter because it is all going to burn anyway. They are referring to the 2 Peter passage, in my opinion misquoting that passage—to suggest that all is going to burn up and the Lord will bring something totally new instead of recreating that which is currently here. So I think sometimes eschatology can have massive implications on that.
What I try to do is bypass the particular forms of amillennialism and premillienialism and just simply ask the question: “In the end of all time, who wins? And what does that mean?” I would suggest that the Scripture tells us in the beginning God appointed all things to Himself, and in the end they will again all be pointed to Himself. So I think the proper eschatology question for this is to say, “Where are all things currently being pointed by the head of creation?” And that is Jesus. So us as image bearers restored, our job is to say, if in the end times all things are to give glory back to God, then eschatology-wise that becomes my incentive that every part of this creation-order gives God glory, and if I have breath, I am working on that happening.
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ZM: In understanding the stewardship mandate and the fact that creation will not be fully restored until Christ returns, what advice would you give to someone trying to develop specific creation care initiatives and practices in their homes, churches, or workplaces?
ML: Basically I would say it really does matter how we act locally for two reasons. It matters because on a personal sanctification level it helps with my holiness for me to be thinking about how I care for God’s creation. If He cares for it, then I need to care for it. I was walking across the campus today, and I saw trash on the ground. I think that dishonors the Lord. So on a sanctification level, I don’t want anything to dishonor Him. So as I clean up my moral life, I can also clean up my planet. Not quite the same thing, but I think it’s related to one another. I do think it is important for us to realize that we are polluting the planet. I don’t think it’s as bad as many people say, but I think it’s far worse than many people say.
So it is important for us to recognize that if we want people in third-world countries to have clean water, it might not be good for us to be dumping all of our nuclear and extra waste in their water systems. It’s important for us to be thinking about how we care for other humans, as well as the planet itself. All of these things are related. What this then means is that we practice locally to care for the planet but we practice to care for our own souls.
I think that in churches and homes you can change your light bulbs. You can cut down on water use. In our own church we grow a garden at our church and give some of the food to the poor in the neighborhood and that then teaches us new things about how we care not only about God’s planet, but God’s people. These do not have to be separate from evangelism. In fact, at our church we use it as a means for getting people to our church that would otherwise not come so that we can share the Gospel with them. I think the either/or mentality is where the danger arises. We care for the planet and we care by doing evangelism.
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ZM: Just one final question: the Helwys Society Forum gives a lot of attention to how the Christian tradition has worked through and expressed specific theological concerns. Is there a key voice from the tradition that contemporary evangelicals should be listening to who want to understand the doctrine of creation better?
ML: I saw this question earlier, and I was thinking about a lot of different answers to that. Hopefully any basic theological textbook: Millard Erickson, Lewis & Demarest, Wayne Grudem, and John Frame. Any of these guys are going to give you a solid foundation on the doctrine of creation. Charles Ryrie for those that may be dispensationalist. On my own personal level, the two figures that have probably been most influential on me on the doctrine of creation would be St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Those two are digging back further into tradition—little bit harder to read. But what they both do is ground all of their ethics in this understanding of Who God is and what God created. And for me what I’ve done is go a little further back in time to get the answer to that question.
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ZM: Thanks so much for your time. And I hope that Forum readers will benefit from the insights of your book.
ML: You’re welcome.
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[1] Mark Liederbach and Seth Bible. True North: Christ, the Gospel, and Creation Care (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2012), 71.
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