Clean Hands, Dirty Oil

Tomorrow I'll present my recently completed research project on ecology and faith to a group of theology students at Briercrest Seminary. In many ways, this presentation marks the culmination of a half year of reading, thinking and writing about what a distinctly Christian position on the environment might look like. The specific question my project asked was: "To what extent should the local church's witness to the gospel include a biblically grounded response to contemporary ecological issues?"

After six months of studiously asking this question, my hopeful answer is: Certainly more than it currently does.

No doubt it’s tomorrow’s presentation that has me thinking so much these days about Bishop Luc Bouchard. He's the Catholic Bishop of St. Paul, Alberta, who made news last month for speaking out on the environmental issues surrounding the oilsands development in northeastern Alberta.

Alberta’s oilsand industry produces more than a million barrels of oil a day. It also produces a motley crew of environmental controversies: the pools of toxic sludge that no one knows what to do with, the depletion and contamination of water tables, and the destruction of sensitive boreal forest ecosystems. As a Christian leader, Bishop Bouchard stands convinced that the "integrity of creation in the Athabasca oilsands is clearly being sacrificed for economic gain."

In an online pastoral letter, he calls on the 55,000-some Catholics in his diocese to act on their faith in response to these environmental concerns. "The present pace and scale of development in the Athabasca oilsands cannot be morally justified," he writes. "Active steps to alleviate this environmental damage must be undertaken."

The specific environmental and economic issues surrounding the oilsands are complex, but Bishop Bouchard's actions challenge me more generally. As I prepare to share my modest conviction with a group of Protestant/Evangelical theology students that the Faith actually includes some kind of ecological responsibility after all, here's a Catholic leader wading into controversy with his insistence that Christians simply cannot ignore the moral implications of the human exploitation of God's creation.

My own study of the Bible convinces me that as we say "Here I am" more and more deeply to the call of the gospel, we will naturally and inevitably become aligned to the environment in a way that promotes its good. In one of my most loquacious moments, I put it something like this: "We must see the Gospel of Jesus with renewed eyes-- the truly good news about the Creator's immanent reign through him over a redeemed humanity, the good news about the reconciliation between God and the world accomplished in his atoning death and victorious resurrection, the good news about the new-creation shalom and healing made possible through his poured-out Spirit-- for in the rays of light refracted by the multi-faceted gem of this gospel proclamation, we find the motive, the impetus and the spiritual resources for a healed and healing relationship with the rest of God's creation."

Wordy, but true.

May God renew our eyes.

And may he enable us to see the real answers to environmental crises that our faith in Jesus inevitably contains.