If you have loved your red-letter editions of your Bibles in which you can easily pick out the highlighted words of Jesus, then you’re gonna love this! TIME reports this week that The Green Bible has hit the shelves of your local book store. This time instead of Jesus’ words being highlighted, more than 1,000 verses related to nature stand off the page in a pleasant shade of forest green.
This no joke. It is the next big thing in the Evangelical world. On that note, doesn’t it always seem like Christians are a couple steps behind the rest of the world? Anyhow, according to Evangelical eco-activist J. Matthew Sleeth “creation care is at the very core of our Christian walk.”
The Green Bible, while a fine attempt to provide insight into what the Christian Scriptures have to say about the environment, seems like yet another distraction from what is actually the “core of our Christian faith.” It symbolizes what so many other well-intended Christian movements have done in the past. Instead of focusing on the Gospel we pick something that is objectively good but penultimate (the environment, community, moral behavior, etc.) and promote it as the ultimate goal or point of the Christian message. These other causes are inevitably easier for people to rally around because they are things that are less offensive than the message of grace for sinners. They continue to promote us as the primary actors rather than God. Frankly, we do not like to hear that we are passive recipients of God’s active grace.
The truth is that the taking care of the environment (“creation care”), building community, being moral people, and so on are all very good things, and it is not wrong to desire them for the world. However, they are not and can never be the point of Christianity. Rather, they need to be seen in their proper place; they are the fruit of the truly ultimate message of the Bible, which is the cross of Jesus Christ where we sinners are forgiven, accepted and loved by God.
I think I will stick with my red-letter Bible.
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COMMENTS
6 responses to “The Green Bible”
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what did tutu say in his intro?
When I first heard about this, I really thought it was from the Onion. . . . sigh
Hahaha I was reading the blurbs on the back cover and found this:
“This is exactly what the Church needs at this critical time.”
— Richard Cizik, vice president for Governmental Affairs, National Association of Evangelicals
Don’t get me wrong, I love the environment and we have a compost bin and I eat the lettuce from our neighbour’s garden and we make an effort to recycle…but I’m not 100% sure that this is “exactly what the church needs” right now…!
Note also that it’s in the oh-so-pc NRSV translation, where everytime the greek text reads “brothers” or “men” it’s translated as “brothers and sisters” or “people”.
Hi, my name is Dustin and I work with a Christian environmental organization called Christians in Conservation: A Rocha USA. I noticed that you mentioned Dr. Matthew Sleeth in your post, and I thought that you might like to know that our organization sponsors him as a “creation care evangelist.” We would love for you to check us out at our website, en.arocha.org/usa. You might also be interested in reading Dr. Sleeth’s book on creation care, “Serve God, Save the Planet.” He was a website for it at http://www.servegodsavetheplanet.org