Opderbeck on "Just Passing Through"

Seton Hall law prof David Opderbeck, an evangelical, offers this response to my "Just Passing Through" post:

This reflects an interesting tension in the evangelical community right now.  I think the "just passing through" sentiment is indeed a hindrance to environmental stewardship in the large segments of the American evangelical community that are tied into premillennial dispensational theology.  Premillennial Dispensational theology, as popularized in the "Left Behind" novels, posits distinct historical breaks in the manner in which God deals with people.  Currently, in this system, we live in a time when the Church's primary mission is evangelization.  This time will end immanently when Jesus returns to remove the Church from the earth (the "rapture").  A seven year period of judgment will follow the rapture (the "tribulation").  After the tribulation, Jesus will return again with the Church to physically reign from David's throne for 1000 years (the "millennium").  At the end of the millennium, people will again rebel and the earth will be destroyed, along with all the rest of the existing creation, to be replaced by an entirely new heavens and earth. For many premillennial dispensationalists, environmental stewardship merely distracts the Church from its primary mission of evangelization and is in any event fruitless in light of the coming tribulation.

In contrast, a growing number of American evangelials have embraced a more classically Reformed understanding of creation and eschatology.  In this view, part of the Church's present task is to participate in the redemption of all creation.  Under at least some versions of this Reformed understanding, this task will be completed at Christ's return, at which time the present earth will be transformed into its final eschatological state as the home of God's resurrected people; the "replacement" view of creation in eschatology is rejected.  Thus, "creation care" today is in some sense a way of participating in the process by which all of creation is being redeemed in Christ.  See, for example, the eschatological thrust of the "Evangelical Declaration on Creation Care" published by the Evangelical Environmental Network.

Yet another version of Christian environmentalism is rooted in process or quasi-process theological views about creation such as those promoted by Ted Peters and John Polkinghorne.  In Ted Peters' view, for example, the "omega point" of creation is the end of an evolutionary process by which God is bringing all of creation towards a harmonious telos.  You can hear echoes of Teilhard de Chardin here.  This sort of view is outside the mainstream of American evangelicalism, but some U.K. and American evangelicals involved in faith-and-science discussions are attracted to it.