To arrogate to oneself the right to dictate the lives of billions of people is hubris bordering on blasphemy. That, however, is what a group of prominent evangelical Christian ministers are doing.
-------------------
Recently a group of evangelical Christian ministers issued a document called “Statement of the Evangelical Climate Initiative: Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action” in support of Al Gore’s “Earth in the Balance.”
They declare that, “In the United States, the most important immediate step that can be taken at the federal level is to pass and implement national legislation requiring sufficient economy-wide reductions in carbon dioxide emissions through cost-effective, market-based mechanisms such as a cap-and-trade program.”
Even if we accept this falsity, action in the United States alone will be the proverbial drop of water in the ocean. The vast bulk of alleged greenhouse gas pollution occurs in China and India. Effectiveness will necessitate regimenting the entire world.
Implicitly our evangelical ministers accept the proposition that humans can supplant God’s dominion over the earth’s weather conditions. They state unequivocally, “Christians, noting the fact that most of the climate change problem is human induced, are reminded that when God made humanity he commissioned us to exercise stewardship over the earth and its creatures.”
This is presumption of the highest order. It is like a gnat demanding that Mt. Everest stand aside and allow him passage.
There is no definitive evidence that global temperatures are “human induced.” Over the millennia, to the contrary, swings between ice ages and warm periods correlate with the activity of the sun’s eruptions of energy.
The Evangelical Climate Initiative belongs in the arena of socialism known as the Social Gospel, which flourished at the end of the 19th century through the 1930s. Social Gospel embraced the avowed aims of socialism, which sound similar to the results that flow from the Bible’s Golden Rule. The similarity ends there: Social Gospel is atheistic, materialistic, and collectivistic, i.e., the antithesis of the individuality of Christianity and religious Judaism.
One of the Social Gospel’s principal exponents, Rochester Theological Seminary’s professor Walter Rauschenbusch, said of it, “Whatever the sins of individual Socialists, and whatever the shortcomings of Socialist organizations, they are tools in the hands of the Almighty.......Socialism is one of the chief powers of the coming age......God will raise up Socialism because the organized Church was too blind, or too slow, to realize God’s ends.”
The man-made global-warming hypothesis is, like other aspects of socialism, a collectivist doctrine. It doesn’t call on individuals, as Jesus Christ did, to look into their hearts, to repent their sins, and to follow Him. Instead, it calls for a Teutonic, statist approach of the sort advocated by Immanuel Kant: the idea that individuals have no role in society other than to follow society’s dictates, that the role of government is to make individuals conduct themselves in accord with the government’s master plan.
To borrow a phrase from the Nazi-era Lutheran Minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who lost his life by staying in Germany and preaching against Hitler’s National Socialism, the Evangelical Climate Initiative is “cheap grace.” It requires no personal thought, no personal repentance, no personal act to follow Jesus, but simply going with the politically-correct Hollywood, mainstream-media flow.
The evangelical ministers preface their statement with a quotation from Paul’s letter to the church in Colosse: “For by Him (Christ) all things were created: things in heaven and on earth.” (Col. 1:16). Ironically, in the epistle to the Colossians, Paul is warning them against the blandishments of an heretical sect, the gnostics, who claimed special knowledge that would lead to human salvation without the intercession of Jesus Christ. Socialism itself is a modern-day form of Gnosticism in its claim to special knowledge by an intellectual elite who uniquely understand the so-called laws of history and who know how to control society in ways that will perfect humanity here and now on earth.
And the greenhouse-gases part of the global-warming hypothesis is right down the middle of the road to socialistic materialism, i.e., the hypothesis that everything observed in nature is the result solely of mechanical actions of tangible, material factors, a process in which there is no room for spirituality, morality, or God.
Our evangelical ministers may sincerely believe that supporting the UN’s socialist ideologues is good policy, but they apparently fail to recognize that implementing something like the Kyoto protocol for the whole world will result in putting humanity into an economic straitjacket that will stop improvement of living conditions for Asia’s billions of people and force a reduction in the standard of living for everyone in the Western world. It will be just as benevolent and effective as Soviet Communism was.
Visit MoveOff Network Members
Back to summary...
