A crowd of about 35,000 had gathered near the Washington Monument during a cold blustery Presidents Day weekend in the midst of an unusually mild winter to prod the Obama administration to take actions against climate change. The largest climate action rally in American history had been scheduled for noon on a Sunday, not exactly a time chosen with regular church-goers in mind—though, undoubtedly, for some present the environmental cause would be the closest thing to a religion in their lives.
I carried a sign that declared “Jesus is Pro-Planet” in 175-point type. I have no hesitation about the truth of the statement. Paul makes it clear in Colossians 1 that, through Christ, God is indeed reconciling to himself “all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven,” and that this is good news for “every creature under heaven.”
As C.S. Lewis noted in Mere Christianity, the true cosmic nature of Christ’s atonement is difficult for our inwardly focused minds to fathom but “there are strange, exciting hints in the Bible that when we are drawn in [to Christ], a great many other things in Nature will begin to come right.”
Francis Schaeffer made a similar point in his important Pollution and the Death of Man, a neglected manifesto for Evangelical environmentalism: read more
