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I've been thinking about how Christians think about land, especially here in the Bible Belt. I wonder if somewhere along the way we started confusing the fact that this world is temporary with the idea that what we do to it doesn't really matter.
I grew up hearing a lot about the end times. This world is temporary. Jesus is coming back. Our real home is somewhere else. I'm starting to wonder whether we sometimes took the Christian belief that our lives here are temporary and drew the wrong conclusion. Knowing that our time here is limited doesn't excuse us from responsibility for what we do while we're here.
I don't know how much of that mindset came from dispensationalism and end-times theology specifically, or whether those ideas simply reinforced something that was already part of our culture. But I do think there has been a strain of Christian thinking that looks at an earth that will ultimately pass away and asks why we should be so concerned about preserving it. If everything here is temporary anyway, why worry so much about what happens to a mountain, a forest, a river, or a piece of farmland a hundred years from now?
The more I think about it, though, the less Christian that reasoning actually seems to me. Our bodies are temporary, but we're still supposed to care for them. Money and possessions are temporary, but we're still accountable for how we use them. Our lives on earth are temporary, but Christianity certainly doesn't teach that what we do with those lives doesn't matter.
And stewardship isn't some modern idea we've tried to attach to Christianity. It's there at the very beginning of the Bible. One of the first things God gave man to do was work the land and care for it. Before there were governments, economies, property deeds, or arguments about development, there was land, and humans were given a responsibility to be stewards of it. Long before the Bible tells us anything about how the world ends, it tells us about our responsibility to live in it and care for creation.
That idea also makes me think differently about property rights. I strongly believe in the right to own and use private property, but having the legal right to do something and deciding it is the right thing to do aren't necessarily the same question. Stewardship asks something more of us than what we're legally allowed to do or what will make us the most money. It asks us to consider what our choices leave behind, including consequences we may never live long enough to see.
Maybe Christian beliefs should make us more concerned with protecting this planet, not less. If we really believe we are stewards rather than ultimate owners, then our responsibility should extend beyond our own lifetime and include what we're leaving behind. Maybe we've spent so much time thinking about how the story ends that we've overlooked something important about how it begins. The Bible doesn't begin with humanity being told that creation is disposable because it won't last forever. It begins with God creating it, calling it good, and giving human beings responsibility to care for it.
