Josh, in your earlier post about eschatological straw men and a similar post on one of your other 20 blogs, you ask if your experience with dispensationalists promoting creation stewardship is aberrant. I would say without question, yes. The examples you give of dirty water and dirty air are of concern to everyone because they are immediate harms. No one is ambivalent about such things for no more reason than plain self-interest. There’s nothing inconsistent about a person who believes in the imminent return of Christ to also support smog reduction, protections for safe drinking water, and hygiene controls in slaughterhouses.

I think your defense of dispensational eschatology with respect to creation stewardship is based on a conflation of immediate and local threats to health and life with larger ecological issues. Dispensational premillennialism, because it asserts belief in the imminent return of Christ, is marked by the idea that society cannot (and for many, should not) be reformed in any real sense before the return of Christ. I grew up immersed in a community of an earlier generation of dispensationalists, and I assure you, there was no value placed on social, cultural or ecological reforms that required long-range vision and sustained commitment (except “winning” the nuclear arms race). Since the 1990s, I think it is fair to say that dispensationalists are not a monolithic group, and their views about what Christians should do in and for society vary much more than they used to. But the popular apocalypticism by which dispensationalism is best known is still predominant, and its influence extends beyond those who explicitly adhere to it.

Classic dispensationalism, and the popular apocalypticism connected with it, does not believe in the restoration of creation but in its destruction, and that destruction is an event to celebrate. According to them, creation is slated for a death by annihilation, not a transforming resurrection. Creation is an impediment to redemptive history and does not figure in God’s plan to consummate all things in Christ. This is very easy to document, and with the notable exception of William Radke, is standard fare.

Wright’s claim about the effects of Left Behind eschatology on long-term and global environmental problems is correct, in my view. If you look at the spate of books in the early 1970s published by confessional and reformational authors, you find a marked contrast to the view of creation articulated in popular apocalypticism that began to be disseminated in the mass market at the same time.

Reformed types generally believe that God is in covenant with creation (Gen 8-9, Rom 8, Col 1, Rev 21). This places responsibility on His covenant people and gives them work to do. As early as 1970, Schaeffer wrote Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology. In 1971, Concordia professor of biology John W. Klotz wrote Ecological Crisis: God’s Creation and Man’s Pollution. In 1972, Henlee Barnette, a Southern Baptist, wrote The Church and the Ecological Crisis. These works, among several others, initiated an ethical discussion among Christians that dispensationalists either ignore or deride. Tom Sine calls the apocalyptic outlook of dispensational theology a “corrosive fatalism,” and in my experience, that is correct. Since most dispensational evangelicals are also politically conservative, the theological impetus is tangled up with the general suspicion toward agendas that are associated with liberals. This is why among Reformed types you find more debate about what is to be done in terms of planning, policy and action, but a basic consensus that whatever we do, our mandate is to “let the earth rejoice.” As servants of the Lord, we are here to seek God’s shalom among the nations and creation in the name of our King. It does not demand either optimism or pessimism about concrete results, and certainly not idealism or all-or-nothing triumphalism. But it does demand that our hearts be shaped by God’s law for these things, and sets our faces in a specific direction according to what we understand of His revealed will.

So I don’t disagree with you that dispensationalists, like all other rational human beings, want to remedy acute problems of pollution that have immediate and local consequences. Clean air, clean water, safe food. The usual stuff that concerns your immediate health and life. (I will leave aside the question of whether the near unanimous uncritical support for laissez-faire economics and industrial growth by evangelicals contributed to those acute environmental problems arising in the first place.) But I do disagree with you that dispensationalists have a theology of creation or politics that compels them to care about global crises that require long-term sustained attention and remedy. That includes, for example, the climate, deforestation, desertification, and species extinction.