Terracide and Mending Creation

 

 The evangelical magazine Christianity Today has been going back through its editorials and essays to consider what it got wrong and right through the decades. There is an admission that they often got it wrong on issues of civil rights. I gave up on CT in the 80s, despite wanting to stay connected because of evangelical roots. I felt that they had missed the boat on gender equality and gay rights (still do). They also seemed to have a suspicion of theology which honoured Creation because it might be pantheistic. I was heartened, though, to see an editorial from April 23, 1971, almost exactly a year after the first Earth Day.

As the current team describes that editorial, after arguing biblically that “to fail to respect life and all other environmental resources is to demean creation and to violate biblical principles of stewardship,” it concludes with a bracing word:

The task is staggering. We are talking here of terracide, the stupid, senseless murder of the earth, man’s killing himself by killing the environment on which he depends for physical life. Were Christians of today to take on the challenge of persuading men to change, they would be performing the greatest work in the Church’s history.

 This was actually prophetic, other than the male language, and nearly 50 years later the term "terracide" is more fitting and to the heart of our ecological crisis than it was then. I wish I could read the entire editorial and the Christianity and the Environmental Crisis articles that went with it. 

The phrase "to fail to respect life" made me think of the United Church's addition to the New Creed of 1968, adding the words "to live with respect in Creation" as an affirmation of our human role as faithful stewards of the Earth. 

I appreciate CTs courage in looking to the past with a degree of humility. I also applaud those who took what was a bold stance in addressing the "terracide" and the great work of Creation care.