February 19, 2008
if Dallas Theological Seminary released a statement approving the destruction of the mountains in West Virginia, that would tremendously help your case. [etc.]
Yes, that would help my case. It would also be ridiculous.
A factual claim, such as dispensationalism causing the destruction of the environment (...)
But this is not the factual claim I and many others have made. No one that I know of, even Lynn White, was claiming that dispensational eschatology prompts its believers to approve of ecological destruction, much less actively engage in that destruction. You are requiring that I prove that they are involved in a “sin” of commission; I am only arguing, and I think Wright was only claiming, that they are involved in a “sin” of omission. They do not think that global and complex, long-range problems fall under the Christian’s responsibility as stewards of creation, and I would challenge you to find me one who does prior to 2000. On the contrary, insofar as they accept that these might be real processes, they are interpreted as more signs indicating Christ’s imminent return; thus to expend prayer, thought, and resources in seeking solutions is equivalent to working against God’s purposes. And yes, I’ve heard and read people make exactly this argument although I can’t provide a citation for you immediately (wouldn’t be hard to find with a small investment of time. I can point you to plenty of secondary literature that makes the same claims and you could check their primary sources). Passive resistance to action makes a problem worse by creating systemic disregard and immobility. Historical examples abound. It is not itself an efficient cause, it exacerbates the efficient causes.
Lastly, I did not deny that there is an apocalyptic vision of the end times, nor even that it might be the dominant vision of the end times in Scripture. That is why I tried to carefully qualify ‘apocalyptic’ with ‘popular’, which amounts to misunderstanding the apocalyptic vision of Scripture. And nothing I wrote asks you to take a different view of death, its reality, its evil, nor the gain for the believer that comes from death. Fatalistic? No way. Moreover, your counterexample of the Biblical testimony about death makes my point. The dispensational view is that creation is under a death sentence and will be annihilated, to be replaced by substitution. Humans are the only created beings not annihilated. But I don’t think this dichotomy is biblical (Col 1:15-20, Rom 8:18-23, Rev 21). God does not undo the curse of death and sin by elimination or annihilation. He remakes, restores and resurrects.
For brevity’s sake, I am speaking in generalities, and I know that there are exceptions to this outlook, especially in the last 10 years and among the minority view of progressive dispensationalists.












