I’ve read a couple of books by Francis A. Schaeffer, and heard/read much about him, so when I saw his book Pollution and the Death of Man at a thrift store, I bought it and put it at the top of my reading pile. I finished it about a month ago. Today I’ve finally gotten around to writing a review. My verdict: 3 stars only; not recommended to others.
The book dates from 1970, at the height of the early environmental movement. Shaeffer was living in Switzerland at that time, and looked from afar on that movement in the USA. He attempted to write a Christian response to these issues. As always Schaeffer’s writing is clear and easy to read. My problems with the book, which keeps me from rating it higher and recommending it to others, are:
1) poorly stated premises and intent.
2) no clear conclusions drawn, i.e. what then should Christians do.
3) over-reliance on two magazine articles, to refute them.
The book I have is a paperback, published in 1992 by Crossway Books. It includes an added chapter to what Schaeffer originally published, written by “Udo Middleman”, as well as reprints of the two articles. The book itself, that is the material provided by Schaeffer, is less than 100 pages.
As I read that material, I had a hard time telling the difference between what Schaeffer declares is the way things are, as opposed to how he suggests it ought to be. This led to some confusion. The book appears to have been written to refute claims in the two articles from the late 1960s which said that, at least in part, Christianity was to blame for the environmental crisis, what with their “have dominion over the earth” mentality. Not so, says Schaeffer. A Christian is a steward of the earth, a protector, and should act accordingly. That is the gist of what I took away from the book.
Some excepts and comments:
So pantheism is not going to solve our international ecological problem. Lynn White’s position [one of the articles] is not going to solve it because it is obvious in practice that man really does have a special role in nature that nothing else has. And, third, a Platonic view of Christianity is not going to solve it.
He came close to losing me with his discussions of pantheism and Platonic views. I had to plow through this part, the only part of the book that was difficult to understand.
The value of a thing is not in itself autonomously, but because God made it. It deserves this respect as something which was created by God, as man himself has been created by God.
I agree with this completely. The creation of all things by God is what gives them value. Nature has value because it was created by God and forms a vital part of what man is.
He made me as I am, with the hungers of my spirit and my body. And he has made all things, just as he has made me. He has made the stone, the star, the farthest reaches of the cosmos. He has done all this!
Again, I agree. Well stated, Mr. Schaeffer.
It is the same when we have dominion over nature: it is not ours. It belongs to God, and we are to exercise our dominion over these things not as though entitled to exploit them, but as things borrowed or held in trust. We are to use them realizing that they are not ours intrinsically. Man’s dominion is under God’s dominion.
Again, well stated. This is the closest Schaeffer comes to stating a solution to environmental problems.
…a truly Biblical Christianity has a real answer to the ecological crisis. It offers a balanced and healthy attitude to nature, arising from the truth of its creation by God. It offers the hope here and now of substantial healing in the nature of some of the results of the Fall, arising from the truth of redemption in Christ.
This is a good summary, although it really offers no specifics for how a Christian should deal with the environmental crisis, if indeed in 2015 it is still as dire—or if it is worse—than it was in 1970. Schaeffer may have been trying to make his book timeless, but in so doing he lessened the value of it by presenting no practical solutions.
For here is our calling. We must exhibit that on the basis of the work of Christ the church can achieve partially, but substantially, what the secular world wants and cannot get.
A valid statement, I think, though I’m not sure he has really made his point in the book.
When we have learned this—the Christian view of nature—then there can be a real ecology; beauty will flow, psychological freedom will come, and the world will cease to be turned into a desert.
This is perhaps a stretch. So i agree with his somewhat soft conclusion, that the Christian should be a steward of all that God has given us. This includes nature and the natural environment. Schaeffer spends too much time on visual pollution and the spoiling of the picturesque beauty of nature’s appearance, rather than on the structural aspects of environmental degradation.
The bottom line is: The book isn’t bad, but I suggest you not waste your time on it. Find a better book dealing with environmental protection. I don’t plan on reading this a second time, and so it will go in my giveaway pile.