What do marriage, childbearing and childrearing, economic development, and environmental stewardship have to do with each other?

More than you might imagine!

Consider those topics in reverse order.

First, environmental stewardship is each person’s responsibility to use and sustain the earth. Note those two words together: use and sustain.

Many environmentalists tend to consider only the latter, and they have a skewed perception of what it means: keeping the earth pretty much in its natural state.

The Bible, instead, teaches (Genesis 1:28) that we are to transform the earth, not by paving it all over with WalMart parking lots but by enhancing its fruitfulness, beauty, and safety from what they would naturally be to even greater heights. That’s true sustainability!

And such sustaining includes using what we find around us in the earth—using and transforming it. In Deuteronomy 8:7–10, Moses told the people of Israel:

the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing out in the valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper. And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.

Mining, agriculture, and manufacturing—all implicit in this passage—are good things in and of themselves. They should be done with care so as to maximize their benefit and minimize their harms, but they are not to be rejected.

Second, good environmental stewardship—maintaining a fruitful, beautiful, and healthful environment—is costly. If you’re worried about putting food on the table, clothes on the back, and a roof over the head, you don’t think much about, and can’t spend much on, preventing air, water, and solid waste pollution, or protecting ecosystems and the species that live in them.

Hence, environmental stewardship depends in part on a productive economy, one in which people prosper.

Third, as theologian Wayne Grudem and economist Barry Asmus point out inThe Poverty of Nations: A Sustainable Solution, a prosperous economy depends on having people who produce things.

That means there must be children who grow into productive adults. Children who learn the moral duties, the mental disciplines, and the physical skills necessary to produce more than they consume in their lifetimes.

Fourth, as Grudem and Asmus point out, healthy marriages, built on a firm understanding that God made humans in His image as male and female (Genesis 1:27), are crucial to raising such children.

That’s part of why I was delighted to read an outstanding address, “Man, Woman, and the Mystery of Christ,” by Dr. Russell Moore, President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Dr. Moore delivered the address at the Vatican just a few days ago. It beautifully weaves together Biblical teaching about sexuality, marriage, and the gospel.

It reinforces Asmus and Grudem’s point, in The Poverty of Nations, that “The type of family that is most conducive to economic development is one that has both a father and a mother.”

And there’s good news here. As they report, “This is an area in which many poor countries already do much better than many wealthy countries. … Poorer countries that still have stable family structures should count this as a valuable asset and should seek to protect the family against cultural influences that would tear it down.”

 

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