Ep. 016: Creation Care

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the indoubt podcast, where we explore the challenging topics that young adults often face each week. We talk with guests who help answer questions of faith, life, and culture. Connecting them to our daily experiences and God’s word for more info on indoubt visit indoubt.ca or indoubt.com.

Isaac Dagneau:

Hey, welcome to indoubt, my name is Isaac. I’m one of the hosts at indoubt. As well as, one of the pastors at North Valley Baptist church in Mission, British Columbia, Canada. Glad you’re with us today for this episode of indoubt.

Isaac Dagneau:

Now, the first book of the Bible is called Genesis as I’m sure some of you know. It’s an extremely important book in the Bible. Not only setting the foundation for redemption history, but also shedding light on the beginning of the world as we know it. For example, as some of you may have already read it, Genesis chapter one speaks of God creating the earth, the land, the seas, vegetation, animals, and of course, humanity as well. And near the end of the chapter, the narrator writes this “And God saw everything that he had made and behold it was very good.” It’s Genesis chapter one verse 31. There is a very goodness in the created world that we see and experience around us. After making humanity, God said something to them, that’s very important for us to grasp in Genesis one verse 28. The narrator writes, “And God blessed them” that is man and woman. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Isaac Dagneau:

This dominion that humanity is being given is not to be used to dominate, but to rule over the world well. As men and women, we are made in God’s image, meaning we are made to reflect the goodness, the love and the righteousness of God. So as we subdue and have dominion on the earth, we are to do so in a good, loving and righteous way. Not a way that merely meets our selfish cravings. This brings us to the issue of creation care which is what this episode is all about. I had a conversation with AJ Swoboda some years ago now, and we want to send it out again. AJ, who is not new to indoubt is a professor and author coming from Oregon, who’s put some thought into creation care. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this conversation that I had with AJ Swoboda on the subject of creation care.

Isaac Dagneau:

I’m over Skype today with AJ Swoboda. He’s a pastor down in Oregon, and I actually met AJ about A month ago. He came up to a college actually where I went to Bible College at Pacific Life Bible College up in Surrey near Vancouver. And he, I was interested in going because apparently there was this kind of creation care night, kind of talking about Christian environmentalism a little bit. And my wife and I were interested so we went, and I met AJ for the first time and I’ve really enjoyed the session. So I’ve asked him if he wants to come on the podcast here and he said, okay. Hey AJ.

AJ Swoboda:

Hey Isaac, it’s great to be with you.

Isaac Dagneau:

Thank you so much, I’m happy for you to be here for the listeners and actually for myself as well, why don’t you just tell us just kind of in a brief form kind of who you are? You’re a pastor, teacher, father, you know.

AJ Swoboda:

Well, I live here in Portland, Oregon in the states and I’m married to my wife Quinn and my son Elliot who’s four years old is here too. And we have three chickens and we live in kind of urban Portland and I have the privilege of pastoring a church called the Theophilus. And I, what kind of wonderful little urban community followers of Jesus here. And I do quite a bit of teaching as well, so I teach at George Fox seminary and Fuller seminary as well. And I do some work, run a nonprofit called Blessed Earth Northwest which is an organization that helps Christians more particularly kind of evangelical, more conservative Christians really begin to think practically and creatively around the creation care conversation. And that’s give a bit of my work to that as well. So I have a full but exciting life. There’s no absence of good stories, indeed.

Isaac Dagneau:

It sounds like that kind of mixed in with teaching at seminar and then having three chickens, you do everything pretty much. It sounds like.

AJ Swoboda:

Listen, I wouldn’t be an effective professor if I didn’t have chickens, Isaac.

Isaac Dagneau:

I’m guess there’s dozens of sermon illustrations from those three chickens.

AJ Swoboda:

Probably, my church would tell you too many. Certainly.

Speaker 3:

That’s awesome. So you wrote a book, I don’t know how long ago it was. Can you … on eco theology?

AJ Swoboda:

I think we’re talking about introducing evangelical eco theology which is a textbook that I co-authored with two other scholars. Came out about two and a half years ago and it really is a first of its kind. It’s a textbook for evangelical Christians on the topic of creation care. Although, I have written a couple of other books on creation care as well. My dissertation, my PhD dissertation was actually the very first ever systematic theology of creation care from a Pentecostal charismatic perspective. And then I subsequently edited a volume called Blood Cries Out, which looks at Pentecostals and creation care. So I’ve done quite a bit of writing in the area and that book introducing evangelical eco theology was really a first of its kind. The first solidly evangelical textbook that’s intended actually for the classroom on the topic.

Isaac Dagneau:

For those who don’t know it actually for myself as well. Can you kind of define eco theology? I think it’s a term that lots of evangelicals I’ve never heard of.

AJ Swoboda:

Eco theology is a word that maybe alienates some better than builds bridges. But it, eco theology was a word that was kind of coined in the 1970s as a general term for any kind of theological discourse or biblical studies that deal with ecological issues. So easy it would be the same as pneumatology it’s the study of the spirit eco theology is the study of environmental theology. It’s just a broad category for a variety of things that deal with environmental theology which since the 1960s and 1970s has really become almost a cottage industry. I mean, there are a whole set of theologians and biblical studies, professors and academics and who deal with this issue of environmental theology, which is an area of study that really the church needs to engage in more substantively.

Isaac Dagneau:

Actually, just that last thing you said that they need to do that. Cause when I look around at up kind of just the cultural evangelicalism that we live in, at least in kind of Western society, I don’t hear a lot of the talk of the environment and how Christians need to be involved. You don’t hear a lot of that. And it’s funny because like right away God establishes in Genesis one that he made us in his image and then right away they need to be a part of taking care and tending to creation. So if we can just jump straight in and the first question for you is what does it mean for a Christian, say you’re young adult Christian, what does it mean to the idea of work the garden have dominion subdue the earth? Those kinds of things.

AJ Swoboda:

That’s a great question. So first of all, Isaac you hit the nail on the head and that is first of all, the Bible begins with a good creation. So God makes this creation and he loves it. Everything that God looks at it goes good, good, good, good, very good. God, when he creates, he takes a step back and he says, Ooh, that’s good. That’s good. That’s good. I was sitting with a professor friend of mine from Western seminary a couple of weeks ago for lunch and we were eating this Indian food and it was just incredible. And he looks up at me and he sort of just said it out of the blue without even thinking about it because he goes, it didn’t have, food doesn’t have to taste this good. And I looked at him, I said, actually, that’s really true.

AJ Swoboda:

When God created food, it didn’t to be this good. When God created the world, he didn’t have to make it this beautiful. But the fact that it does taste as good as it does, that Indian food can taste as good as it does that. The world looks as beautiful as it does is evidence of a really good God. And that’s the beginning of creation. I mean, and that’s narrative plays itself out through the whole Bible of God’s incessant love for the whole world. For God so loved the cosmos is not merely about human beings. God loves the whole world because the whole world, when God made it was good.

AJ Swoboda:

But secondly, that not only is the creation good, but God has intimately created an environment in which we are interrelated to the creation around us. God placed Adam and Eve in the middle of the garden, not just to sit there and watch and pay attention and walk through the garden. God actually gave him a job. He said, “Tend and care for this garden.” That’s a command that God gave to Adam and Eve. I would argue, God continues to put on to us today to tend and care for the garden that he has made. So there’s a sense of which God made it good, but God also created us to live in a relationship to it where it depends on our work for it to be sustained.

Isaac Dagneau:

Okay. Yeah, that’s good. So that kind of work though, you obviously when you’re reading Genesis, you kind of have the idea of it. Being very, kind of guarding or tending, you’re kind of farming, you’re creating irrigation networks and all that kind of stuff, but for us living in a society in which we live today, how does that kind of translate?

AJ Swoboda:

Well, certainly that can be one thing to one person and another thing to another person. It just in terms of translation, I actually think one of the worst ways for us to translate the text in Genesis is to you use the word dominion. And the reason is that word has the idea of, we almost put creation in its place, or we rule over it like an oppressor does. If we’re going to talk about dominion, I think it should be a dominion of service, that we care for creation as servants not as ruthless Kings.

AJ Swoboda:

But in terms of what that looks like for every single person and that’s different for everybody. For me, what that means is I pastor a church of people that love Jesus and love their Bibles. And I want to teach them what it looks like to live lives that are sustainable that honor God’s creation. That creates space for the poor, to be able to eat, that where people in our church know how to garden their own food and all those sorts of things. That for me, is a task that I know God has given to me.

AJ Swoboda:

For another, their task is to learn how to start recycling. For another, it’s to start driving less. Paul talks about things that control us, our addictions and the things that we give ourselves over to that have dominion over us. And when you look at most of our lives and we’re addicted to fossil fuels, it’s literally an addiction. Could we live our lives, not being addicted to having to have a bigger car or a bigger house. This is for some of us it’s just simply living simpler, but I think for every single person that’s different.

Isaac Dagneau:

Well, that’s good. So why do you think then? Why are so many North American Christians, and I don’t want to just, I don’t want to make an overgeneralization, but a lot are just kind of apathetic towards the environment?

AJ Swoboda:

That’s a great question, Isaac. I would say there’s probably two answers to that question. The first is, as Westerners, we tend to be much more disconnected from creation than the rest of the world. Many of Westerners live in cities. Many of us live in urban contexts where we aren’t forced to actually have to live in the context of a scary incredible majestic creation. We live in the city, we’re isolated, we have a controlled environment. So, that may be number one.

AJ Swoboda:

And the second thing that immediately comes to mind is more often than not we don’t actually see the consequences of our environmental decisions, whereas often the poor pay the largest price for our decisions. So that would mean we consume too much food and the downside is the poor don’t get food. We consume too much energy, the poor don’t can’t afford it. We consume too many goods, the poor can’t purchase things on their own. And so often as Westerners who tend to be much more affluent and have a lot more resources, we sort of, are protected from, we are protected from seeing the consequences of the decisions that we make.

Isaac Dagneau:

That’s good. It’s just the first point you made I just, I thought of watching planet earth, which is, I love watching planet earth, partly because of David Attenborough, the narrator. But anyways, it’s funny because when I watched that since I’m so disconnected and unfamiliar with creation, I’m almost feel like, is this all like CGI? Is this real stuff? And it’s well yeah. It’s just that first point I think is really, it’s really important is that we just, we sort of were disconnected from creation almost.

AJ Swoboda:

It’s ironic that in my opinion, Paul is saying in Romans one, he’s saying, for all creation are the invisible qualities of God. What I think Paul is saying, is he saying that you can’t truly look at creation and not see God. You look at creation and you begin to see God which is why, here in Portland, one of the guys who does evangelism as effectively as he does. His number one tool is he just takes inner city kids on hikes and they see creation and they see the stars and they believe in God.

AJ Swoboda:

I mean, God created creation to be his number one evangelistic tool. And when you disconnect yourself from the creation there is an element of God that is missing from your life. Like not that God has left you, but it’s like ripping pages out of your Bible. I mean, you can read your whole Bible and rip the book of John out and you’re going to be missing out on a lot of really important things about who Jesus was. And when we never spend time in creation, it’s like we’re ripping pages out of the Bible. We are ripping out of our experiences, things that God has created us to see him in.

Isaac Dagneau:

In saying that, in the same way that you as a pastor encourage and sort of help push your congregation to say, do some of the spiritual disciplines, whether that’s fasting or taking time to solitude. Would you also say you’d encourage them to like go off and do hikes or this or that and spend time in creation?

AJ Swoboda:

Yes, absolutely. We, every year, as a community, find a one discipline that we are horrible at, that we want to learn to do together. And one of the disciplines we’re doing this year, it’s actually the discipline we’re spending together as a church is we’re learning about the principle of Sabbath keeping, which is so integral for the long-term sustainability of anybody’s life. And one of the things that we tell people to do on Sabbath is to get outside, go spend some time in the great outdoors.

AJ Swoboda:

Jesus, we read the life of Jesus in the narrative, the gospel narratives and Jesus is not only always spending time outside, but he’s always talking about the outdoors. His parables are about the outdoors. He talks, he has organic metaphors that he uses all the time. So much of what Jesus talked about required that we understood what creation looks like. In fact, look at the Bible’s metaphors for the holy spirit, wind, fire, breath, all of the things, a dove, all of the descriptions of the holy spirit are all organic metaphors that you have to be able to get outside to see in order to understand what Jesus is talking about.

Isaac Dagneau:

That’s a really good point, that’s awesome. So some people, I can think of some Christians, some of my friends who are Christians and they’ll go on Netflix or whatever and they’ll watch a documentary. That’s a secular documentary about activism in regards to the environment and stuff like that and they kind of come out of that very overwhelmed, anxious, don’t know what to do. They start to get very anxious about what they need to buy, what they need to eat and they almost kind of even push it on other people. Someone like you, who sort of knows the gospel and knows that is first and foremost yet also has a heart for creation. How can you, how would you speak into those people that kind of get anxious about those kind of things?

AJ Swoboda:

That’s a great question, Isaac. Well, first of all, two things immediately come to mind. The first would be that Jesus actually tells us that we don’t have permission to be anxious. Paul tells us be anxious about nothing and that seems to me nothing is a big category. Be anxious about nothing. That’s funny. How can you not be anxious, but also be attentive to be living in fateful ways towards creation? What’s brilliant about the gospel and what’s brilliant about the Christian story and Christian narrative is that it is the one approach towards caring for creation that does not require us to become really weird documentary ecoterrorists who run around like scared that the whole world is going to fall apart and die. The truth is the earth is going to die no matter what we do. There’s not one physicist out there who would say the earth is eternal.Everything is going to die. We don’t need to be anxious about the fact that the earth is going to die. It is going to die. We’re not anxious about that.

AJ Swoboda:

So number one, Paul would say, we’re not called to be anxious about anything. But the second thing would be, I go to the book of Ecclesiastes. And Ecclesiastes he says, “That with all wisdom comes great sorrow.” And that is that whenever somebody actually has a lot of wisdom that means when somebody knows a lot, there’s a price to pay. There’s a lot of difficulty and toil that comes with great wisdom. People would call that in the environmental community or people, sociologists would actually call that compassion fatigue. And compassion fatigue is that thing that happens when you learn something or you learn too much about the world or you learn something that is scary. And then all of a sudden you start shutting down and losing all hope. It’s what happens when you start reading the paper day after day after day, and you start seeing what’s going on in the world and you just come to a point where you realize there’s just too much going on. I can’t do anything.

AJ Swoboda:

To actually know what’s going on in the world is really scary, Isaac. It’s very scary to know where your M&Ms come from. It’s really scary to learn what happens when we, where a lot of our bananas come from, where our phones go when we’re done using them, those things they’re scary. But I don’t, I cannot embrace any form of Christianity that does not lead us into truth. And Jesus is the way the truth and the life and it Christian, we should never use the gospel to be ignorant of what’s going on in our world. It is always the gospel that causes us to want to know what’s going on so that we might bring the hope of Jesus’s resurrection into it.

Isaac Dagneau:

Cool. That’s that’s awesome. Thank you so much, AJ. That was awesome. Hey, so moving over now to the latest book you’ve just written, it’s called the Dusty Ones: Why Wandering Deepens Your Faith. Actually to our listeners, AJ was kind enough to send me a copy and I’ve been able to read, or the first chapter, which was extremely engaging. It kind of gave you a trajectory of what AJ was going to get out in the book. But then I also flipped and I read one random chapter and he’d probably tell me, AJ would probably tell me that it’s probably not the best idea, but I did. And I really enjoyed it. It was called Losing Jesus is chapter 10 and it was incredible.

Isaac Dagneau:

I had a question for you about it as well. You kind of into the listeners as well in this chapter, kind of talks about feelings and how we, some people kind of have this idea that feelings are sovereign over our lives and that they kind of lead us into the truth. Whereas in this chapter, you’re kind of talking about how it’s not all about our feelings. There needs to be the feelings that are experienced by knowing the truth. Can you just speak into this a little bit? And also your last illustration was so profound about Mary and Joseph losing Jesus. I was wondering if you could just kind of tell that to our listeners as well. I found it very profound.

AJ Swoboda:

Well, feelings are important. God gave us feelings for a reason. I want to be very cautious to say that because if anybody’s listening to this and I don’t want what I’m about to share, to be interpreted in any way, shape or form. That God doesn’t care what you feel or that you shouldn’t care what you feel you should care because your feelings are important. Those are created by God, but they’ve never been created by God for us to put at the seat of ultimate authority in our life. Our feelings are not the guiding principle by which we determine what is good or bad in our existence. I think in our culture there are two narratives that are taking place.

AJ Swoboda:

There’s the narrative on one side that says truth is outside of ourself and it is our job to find it and to discover it and integrate our lives into that truth. It is not that we are truth. It is that there is truth and we are called integrated, integrate our lives into it. And I think there’s a contrasting narrative that says that truth is within us. And that is that it is our job to actually find the truth that is inside of us. We become the basis of truth and ultimately it’s not about integrating into something else. It is about self discovery that is that truth is within us.

AJ Swoboda:

And ultimately I think that the Christian story says in a way, a little bit of both, it says that God is beyond us and God is beyond us, but God is also with us. God is Emmanuel. God is present with us, but God is beyond us. It’s really dangerous when we say truth is just within us. And we self discover because that basically means that we’re at the whim of our feelings and everything that we feel becomes the basis of truth. And the minute we are Orthodox into ourselves, the minute we become our own basis of truth, we’ve lost our way because at that stage, nobody else can be right. We are ultimately always right. And that is the Supreme place of arrogance to say, I am ultimate orthodoxy.

AJ Swoboda:

And so feelings are important, but they are not the end all be all. We should pay attention to them. They aren’t our ultimate guide, but we should listen to them. And there’s a dangerous sort of, I don’t know, there’s I can tell you this, Isaac, there are a lot of times in my life that my feelings lead me astray. There are times that I come home from a long day at work where I do not want to be a father and I do not want to be married anymore. And I don’t know too many people that have not felt those things at some point in their life. If I was to obey those feelings, my marriage and my fatherhood would be done a long time ago.

AJ Swoboda:

And I talk about in the book, I talk about losing Jesus. And that is that Mary and Joseph go to Jerusalem one day and accidentally forget about Jesus for three whole days. That is in my opinion, that whole narrative is just right. It’s right. It’s just, it’s filled, fertile. It is fertile ground for understanding our own story. And that is that there are going to be times for every single one of us that we’re going to lose Jesus. We’re going to forget him somewhere. We’re not going to, he’s not going to be, we will lose him in Jerusalem at some point. And I talk in the book about some creative ways to find them again, that actually sort of reconnect to them.

Isaac Dagneau:

That’s awesome. And quick, I should have asked this before, but this book in the quick two sentence summary is for who? For which Christian?

AJ Swoboda:

It’s for any Christian that is walking through a season of wandering. When you read the story of the Bible, there are all of these wandering stories. God’s people wandering, people individually wandering, and we have for too stinking long assumed that if somebody is wandering, it is a result of sin and it is not always a result of sin. There are times in the Bible that God is actually the one that, and this year it’s wandering and wants it for his people because it is in wandering with God that we actually discover our true love for God. And so basically the whole point of the book is for anybody that’s wondering.

Isaac Dagneau:

Cool. That’s awesome. Thank you so much AJ. That was excellent. Did you have any other final thoughts before we wrap this up?

AJ Swoboda:

No, it’s great being with you. And I hope that my writing can be helpful for anybody. It’s just been great being with you. Thanks for having me, Isaac.

Isaac Dagneau:

Well, thank you so much AJ. That was Professor and Author AJ Swoboda. AJ has written a number of books, including the Dusty Ones, Subversive Sabbath which we actually had AJ on the show to talk about the Sabbath and that’s episode 113, if you want to go check it out. And his latest book called After Doubt: How to Question Your Faith Without Losing It. You can head on over to ajswobodawrites.com to find out more about AJ and to check out his books. Again, that’s ajswobodawrites.com.

Isaac Dagneau:

Well, you’ll be listening to indoubt engaging views on life, faith, and culture. We want to help you, our listeners follow Jesus Christ by engaging some of the most important issues in life, faith and culture. If you have been impacted by indoubt, whether this episode or a past episode, we’d love to hear from you, or maybe you have a question for us, or perhaps a suggestion for a topic or a guest we should have on the show. Message us. You can go to indoubt.ca, if you live in Canada or indoubt.com, if you live in the states and click the contact button and fill in the message form. We look forward to hearing from you. Well, that wraps up this week’s show. We hope you can join us next week as we hear from Trevin Wax on cultures, myths and the gospel. We’ll see you then.

Speaker 1:

Thanks so much for listening. If you want to hear more subscribe on iTunes or Spotify, or visit us online at indoubt.ca or indoubt.com. We’re also on social media. So make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Isaac Dagneau:

Hey, this is Isaac. One of the hosts of in doubt, a ministry of good news global media. Is it possible that being a Christian young person could be any more complicated than it is today? How do we make right choices and decisions when so many opinions around us seem contrary to what it means to live for Christ? At indoubt, we hope to help make sense, biblical sense of those difficult choices, decisions, and the complexity of faith, life and culture in 2021. So join us every week for another challenging conversation. And our response as God’s people, for everything in doubt, visit indoubt.com. And if you’d like to help us continue to offer this program, you can make a gift of any amount at indoubt.com or by calling +1 844-663-2424.