Theology of Creation

I recently saw the movie "An Inconvenient Truth." I think that all Christians should see this movie. I think it because Christians need to know, or realize, the destruction that is happening to the earth. This is precisely because the earth is God's "gift" to us. Not to mention that our very survival may depend on it.

I am admittedly an academic and a scholar. Due to this, I found the real argument of the movie to start in one spot. This spot is when Gore talks of taking a survey of 956 scholarly articles (out of specialty journals) and seeing what they said about global warming. This is because in popular media and outlets, the issue is so questioned. Well, out of the 956 articles, 956 took global warming to be a fact. That is 100 percent. Folks, that is as close to a sure thing as it gets.

Gore then goes onto talk about how the levels of carbon dioxide in the air now are reminiscent of those levels found just before the last ice age (this is known through some fancy scientific work in Antarctica - I question scientific methods and still found this rather convincing). Essentially, all the emissions that G8 countries let into the air coupled with the destruction of many forests, especially rain forests, leads to this.

This also means that glaciers are melting. For this, Gore shows pictures of glaciers actually melting over the past 30-50 years. It's quite astonishing. And, if some of these glaciers melt fully, then there could be some pretty heavy destruction, like Nepal being wiped out, along with parts of India and Bangladesh. This does not even get into the melting of the polar ice caps, which is also occurring.

There is much else in the film, and I really implore whoever may stumble across this to see it.

However, the movie is not about giving facts and I would do a major disservice to the movie if I just gave the facts of the movie. The goal of the movie is to change. Gore (and scientists) believe that we have not crossed the point-of-no-return. There is still time to change and help the earth to begin to recover, but we must change now.

For Christians, this means actually taking the issue seriously. I am convinced that many Republican Christians could be standing in a foot of water in Colorado and still say that global warming is a myth of the left. So, it is time to stop giving them any lip service. They obviously are not the experts, nor do they have any idea what is going on. So, just ignore them.

Also, they are to be ignored, because even if global warming is not true (which I am 100% convinced it is), it is the call of God upon God's people to actually take care of the earth. The earth is God's gift to humanity, but humanity is also God's gift to the Earth. Humanity is given the task, by God, to take care of the Earth. We are to be the "good shepherds", taking care of the home that has been given to us by God. To be told not to or that by doing this we are disobeying God is nonChristian and to buy "hook, line, and sinker" into an anti-Christian ideology.

So, I say, be Christian. Live in communion with God through God' s gift to us by being God's gift to the Earth.

This week President Bush declared his approval of a Constitutional Amendment which says that homosexuals cannot be married in the United States. I find this amazing.

What amazes me about this is the timing of the call and publicity for this amendment. We are roughly five months away from the next set of elections. The summer is a major time for campaigning and fundraising. Bush and the right know that they need money and support to keep control of the government through Congress. I think that they are now using homosexuality as the pawn to bring in this money and support.

I also think it is a ploy to get people out to vote and to vote for conservative Republicans. This is because the homosexuality debate is a tipping card. Like abortion, whichever "side" one is on is constitutive of how one votes for leaders. However, I think abortion has lost the power it once had on voters because abortion rates, while dropping under Clinton, have risen again under George W. Bush. (Funny. It is under the president who vehemently opposes abortion where abortion takes place more often. I think this has a direct link to the structures that Bush has set up)

What most angers me about this though, is that evangelicals are the pawns in this game. For the next few months, evangelical churches will begin to preach against homosexuality. They will give "calls" asking congregants to stand up against the sin that is homosexuality. "God" will become the ideal political structure that opposes homosexuality and calls us to live up to this ideal of standing against homosexuality. The argument will be that it is homosexuality who is the sinful structure threatening to destroy America.

What we will not here though is the God who is the ideal political structure calling us to share our goods with one another, like the early church in Acts. We will not hear the God that calls us to "turn the other cheek" and "pray for our enemies"; who commands Peter to drop the sword. We will not hear about the God who calls us to give the poorest and sickest in society. These are not the moral issues that we will be "called" to commitments for. We will be called to vote for those who stand against this God and the work that this God wishes to do.