Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate

If you want to understand the evangelical environmental movement, its strengths and its weaknesses, and how you can play a constructive role in promoting Biblical earth stewardship—enhancing the fruitfulness, the beauty, and the safety of the earth to the glory of God and the benefit of your neighbors—you’ll find Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate a great resource!

In the last three decades of the 20^th century, spurred in part by Francis Schaeffer’s Pollution and the Death of Man, many evangelicals began taking seriously the challenge of providing a Biblical perspective on environmental stewardship. Unfortunately, many uncritically embraced claims of doom and gloom from the broader environmental movement, and some also misunderstood the Bible’s teaching on humanity’s relationship to the earth.

In the early 1990s, politically liberal scientists like Marxist Carl Sagan linked hands with theologically liberal churchmen and, with massive funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and other Leftwing foundations, created the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, with four branches: Jewish, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, and evangelical Protestant. The quasi-socialist Evangelicals for Social Action, led by Ronald Sider, launched the evangelical branch under the name of the Evangelical Environmental Network, which for the ensuing 25 years has consistently sought to promote environmental stewardship aligned with the mainstream environmental movement.

In Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate, Dr. E. Calvin Beisner traces the history of evangelical environmentalism and offers constructive criticism of its worldview, theology, Biblical interpretation, ethics, politics, science, and economics, highlighting its strengths and recommending ways to strengthen its weaknesses. He then sets forth a new vision of creation stewardship with greater fidelity to the Bible as well as better grounding in science and economics. Along the way he discusses debates over population growth, resource depletion, air and water and soil pollution, ozone depletion, acid rain, global warming, and more. Avoiding the opposite errors of anthropocentrism and antihumanism, he sets forth an environmental ethic with God at the center, humanity next, animal life next, then plant life, then the non-living environment, with awareness of the interdependencies of the last four circles and their utter dependence on God.

The title picks up on the Biblical distinction between garden (where mankind started out) and wilderness (where mankind was called to spread, and which we are called to subdue and rule), but also alludes to evangelicals as representative of a garden while the broader environmental movement is the wilderness into which they have ventured.