A Rocha
Micah continued to struggle to find employment, and it was not until late December when his first paycheck arrived. By that time, what resources we had saved whilst in America had dwindled to naught in the second most expensive city in the world. Around Christmastime, we had been forced by economic necessity to move once more, this time to Southall, in west London. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
A Rocha was an organisation which had come to us highly praised by two professors at Wheaton College. Peter Harris, the founding visionary and international head, had come to speak at Wheaton somewhat before Micah’s graduation.
A Rocha, to borrow liberally from their mission statement, is an international, Christian organisation dedicated to showing love to all of God’s creation through small, local projects of ecological conservation, environmental education, and advocacy. Begun by an Anglican minister in Portugal in the 1980s, this organisation has blossomed across many countries and not a few continents, brining to the Church catholic an opportunity to live out the doctrine that ‘the Earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it.’ For us, it provided the first right-headed conceptualisation of a Creation deserving of our study and stewardship. Though studying Environmental Science (to be precise, Environmental Science in Global Context) at Wheaton College for four years, I had somehow missed that one vital step. Not to say that the absence of this gap was in any way a fault of the sage faculty of that venerable institution, but was due entirely to my wrong-headed anthropocentric theology. The earth was created as the blissful abode of the human creature, the species thereof existent for the sake of that one, pinnacle species. Steeped in this unexamined a priori, I sought fruitlessly to reconcile an innate desire for the preservation of the earth and its species, and an unsubstantiated conviction of the intrinsic value of each species, with any sort of robust ideological edifice capable of enduring the onslaught of modern anthropocentric machinations, which came from within the church no less than from without it.
And this is that hinge upon which it all turned: the purpose of the created world, human and non-human, is for the glory and reverence of the Son of God. As it is written,
‘He is the image of the invisible God, the Firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things were created by Him and for Him.’
Until this one striking reality dawned upon my dim and uncomprehending mind, I could find no more motivation for Christian stewardship than a watery, humanistic pragmatism which would preserve species for their value to Man.
Until our acquaintence with A Rocha, I somehow feared that any reconciliation between my Christian faith and my innate desire for the preservation of the Creation, would involve a precipitous descent from orthodoxy. But in this reconciliation I was instead brought from heresy into orthodoxy. For to pretend that the purpose of the Creation is for the glorification of Man is to embrace that ancient and dark heresy by which civilisations are destroyed, for it is to set up Man in the place of God. It seems to me that there are any number of Christians who feel some tepid wish to care for the world around them, but are unable to articulate to themselves or others why this is of any great importance, and consequently doubt the enterprise altogether.
In October of 2003 Micah was finally employed as the Community Projects Officer of A Rocha Living Waterways, the flagship project of A Rocha UK, which was based in Southall, west London.
I am appending an audio file here which is a talk given by Peter Harris at Regent College in British Columbia. The file size is large but well worth the time.
A Rocha was an organisation which had come to us highly praised by two professors at Wheaton College. Peter Harris, the founding visionary and international head, had come to speak at Wheaton somewhat before Micah’s graduation.
A Rocha, to borrow liberally from their mission statement, is an international, Christian organisation dedicated to showing love to all of God’s creation through small, local projects of ecological conservation, environmental education, and advocacy. Begun by an Anglican minister in Portugal in the 1980s, this organisation has blossomed across many countries and not a few continents, brining to the Church catholic an opportunity to live out the doctrine that ‘the Earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it.’ For us, it provided the first right-headed conceptualisation of a Creation deserving of our study and stewardship. Though studying Environmental Science (to be precise, Environmental Science in Global Context) at Wheaton College for four years, I had somehow missed that one vital step. Not to say that the absence of this gap was in any way a fault of the sage faculty of that venerable institution, but was due entirely to my wrong-headed anthropocentric theology. The earth was created as the blissful abode of the human creature, the species thereof existent for the sake of that one, pinnacle species. Steeped in this unexamined a priori, I sought fruitlessly to reconcile an innate desire for the preservation of the earth and its species, and an unsubstantiated conviction of the intrinsic value of each species, with any sort of robust ideological edifice capable of enduring the onslaught of modern anthropocentric machinations, which came from within the church no less than from without it.
And this is that hinge upon which it all turned: the purpose of the created world, human and non-human, is for the glory and reverence of the Son of God. As it is written,
‘He is the image of the invisible God, the Firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things were created by Him and for Him.’
Until this one striking reality dawned upon my dim and uncomprehending mind, I could find no more motivation for Christian stewardship than a watery, humanistic pragmatism which would preserve species for their value to Man.
Until our acquaintence with A Rocha, I somehow feared that any reconciliation between my Christian faith and my innate desire for the preservation of the Creation, would involve a precipitous descent from orthodoxy. But in this reconciliation I was instead brought from heresy into orthodoxy. For to pretend that the purpose of the Creation is for the glorification of Man is to embrace that ancient and dark heresy by which civilisations are destroyed, for it is to set up Man in the place of God. It seems to me that there are any number of Christians who feel some tepid wish to care for the world around them, but are unable to articulate to themselves or others why this is of any great importance, and consequently doubt the enterprise altogether.
In October of 2003 Micah was finally employed as the Community Projects Officer of A Rocha Living Waterways, the flagship project of A Rocha UK, which was based in Southall, west London.
I am appending an audio file here which is a talk given by Peter Harris at Regent College in British Columbia. The file size is large but well worth the time.
Peter Harris on Creation and Gospel
posted by Ingalls | 07:00
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