14 Dec 2009, Silver Spring, Maryland, United States
Victor Hulbert/ANN staff
Should Christians be concerned about caring for the environment? The president of the Seventh-day Adventist world church, Jan Paulsen, says "yes," in a video released on YouTube, coinciding with the Copenhagen Summit.
Jan Paulsen, Seventh-day Adventist world church president, comments on the Christian's responsibility to care for the environment in a recent YouTube video. Watch the full video here.
"Quite fundamentally, caring for the environment goes back to our [Adventist] earliest beginnings," Paulsen said.
The archbishop of Canterbury said he thinks Christians should be concerned about climate change. Leaders of the Church of England joined 16 other senior officials from the United Kingdom at Westminster Abbey December 6 for a "stop climate chaos" march.
He is one of many Christian leaders around the world watching proceedings at the current Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen. In a March lecture he stated that "religious communities are failing profoundly in what is expected of us in energizing a response to climate change in society."
He added that "we are near a tipping point" of global warming "and that the church, and other religious communities, are not doing their part to lead the world against it."
Many Christians do not regard the issue of manmade global warming as a significant issue. A Barna research report indicated that only 33 percent of Evangelicals in the United States consider global warming a major problem. Additionally, Australia's legislature recently struck down a carbon limit and China and India have pulled out of the Copenhagen conference.
"Unfortunately I'm not too optimistic that anything dramatic is going to come out of [the Copenhagen summit]," says Samuel Soret, chair of the Department Environmental & Occupational Health at the Adventist Church's Loma Linda University School of Public Health.
"Hard decisions that are binding should be made on curtailing emissions and sorting out issues between developed and developing nations," Soret says. "Climate change is probably one of the most serious health iniquities in the history of humankind."
Though a climate change skeptic, British Adventist Pastor Paul Lockham says he focuses on being a creationist, whose job is to "tend" to the earth.
"Without being too radical I do seek to do my bit. We are called to be stewards of God's creation, not museum keepers, nor wrekers."
Others take a different view. "I am wondering how much of an impact we can really make as 'Christians' knowing what the end of the world will be," says scientist Peter Walton, a global warming skeptic.
"There are innumerable papers and talks by top scientists that completely demolish the weak science behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and its sponsor the United Nations Environment Program," he adds.
But Walton pushes the argument in a different direction, quoting the sentiments of author Michael Crichton, who spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. in 2005, saying we "are not morally justified to spend vast sums -- trillions of dollars -- on this speculative issue when finally, and most importantly, we can't predict the future, but we can know the present."
Walton quotes from Crichton's lecture in which he stated, "A child is orphaned by AIDS every 7 seconds and fifty people die of waterborne disease every minute." Walton argues that this does not have to happen, and calls for a refocusing of priorities.
Whether climate change is a reality or not is the subject for rigorous debate. Miroslav Ostrovljanovic, a media student at London's Kings College, said "God said at the creation that humans are supposed to take care of creation. That isn't changed because we know the world will end."
Victor Pilmoor, treasurer for the Adventist Church in Britain, pondered on the climate summit in the light of Genesis 1 and Colossians 3 in a recent worship talk. "The Adventist position should be clear: Our covenantal responsibility as stewards of creation predates sin and its consequence. We show respect for everything that God has given us, regardless of the science," he said.
Debate on global warming notwithstanding, the world community, represented by some 70 country leaders meeting in Copenhagen, is expressing a concern that global society must consider decisive and different course of action on global warming and related issues.
"It's not only the governments that need to do their part. The issue of improving our stewardship of the environment is a personal, individual responsibility as well," says Rajmund Dabrowski, Communication director for the Adventist world church. "As for respect of creation, as a Christian I should be restrained in the use of the world's resources, and balance my wants and needs."
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Source: http://news.adventist.org/2009/12/adventist-leaders-co.html
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