Some time back, I realized that no matter how much I read and talked, I would never be quite certain whether Ehrlich or Simon is right -- whether population is an appalling dilemma or nothing to worry about.
I came to this conclusion when reading a statement from a group of eminent scientists alerting the world to the dire nature of population growth. One Nobel prize-winning physicist spoke fiercely on the subject. I asked myself, how does he know? Does his study of subatomic particles give him competence to judge the hundreds of ecological studies that are published every year, the computer analyses of economic growth? Even a scientist who is expert in one of the many fields touching population growth probably only knows firsthand the very narrow area of his expertise - say, soil erosion in a district of Kenya.
When I’ve probed why such people believe population is a fundamental problem, they usually come back to the same basic belief or world-view that started Malthus in the first place. If one million people have a problem, two million people will have twice as much of the problem, and ten million people may have ten or even a hundred times as much of the problem. That is common sense. By some markers, though -- food production and resource scarcity -- common sense has been incorrect.
I concluded that philosophical assumptions or “intuitions” have shaped the debate about population at least as much as scientific data have. For this reason, and because decisions about children are so sensitive, it is important for Christian theology to join the fray. Theology does not enable us to settle the argument between Ehrlich and Simon. Nowhere in the Bible does it say how many people can safely live on the earth, or even if a limit exists. But Scripture can help shape the way we think and respond to population. It can give us a world-view that helps us avoid the stubborn extremes of interpretation.
Unfortunately, when you search the library databases for theological reflections on population, you find almost nothing. This is not a subject to which great -- or even little -- theological minds have given attention.
Some theologians have written about ecology but even here, biblical reflection has just begun.
Population begs for biblical reflection. A Christian world-view will give us both precepts to guide the way we think and a mandate that calls us to action. I would suggest several principles:
Family planning belongs to families. Throughout Scripture, from Adam and Eve though Abram and Sarah, from Jesus’ birth to his blessing the wedding at Cana, and even in Paul’s references to the church as “brothers and sisters,” the family is regarded as fundamental. Its actions can be moral or immoral,
as Scripture also testifies, and a family cannot exist independent of other authorities, notably the church. Still, the family has authority in its sphere of action. The choosing of children is surely part of this sphere.
Whatever we do regarding population should honor families and their authority. We can begin with basic justice: treating families of poor countries as we would want to be treated ourselves. I have wondered: What would be the reaction of American Christians if, one day, ordinary contraceptives were outlawed? What if the young couple on their honeymoon, the middle-aged couple working through menopause, the thirty-something couple with three children pondering four, simply could not get diaphragms, pills, vasectomies? We would consider it an offense against our ability to plan family life.
We ought, then, to consider it good for these gifts, which enable us to extend God’s blessing of dominion into our own family life, to be available to people around the world. We should unabashedly support family planning when it is done with respect and care for human dignity. Surveys suggest that there are millions of families around the world who lack the access to birth-control methods that they would like.
I have also wondered: How would we like it if each state, county, town of our own nation was given a population target? What if that goal worked its way into neighborhoods and into doctors practices, such that a couple received phone calls asking about their plans for offspring, a woman with two children was invited to meetings that urged her to be sterilized, and a third pregnancy was officially questioned? We would consider that, too, an offense against our ability to plan family life.
We ought to be wary, then, of statistical targets, and any program that begins with the assumption that government knows best.
Human beings have, each one, an irreducible value. We cannot in any way view humanity as a pest species. When I lived in Kenya, which had at that time the highest birth rate in the world, I had a conversation with a university-educated friend of mine about children. My wife and I had just had our first child, and we wanted to know whether breast-feeding in public would offend people.
“No,” our friend said. “In fact, it would be good. People would be surprised that you want to be so close to the baby.”
“Why would that surprise them?” I asked.
“Well, you know, we tend to think that white people don’t like children.
“But why would you think that?”
He thought a while. “Maybe because you people brought birth control, and since you don’t want to have children, you probably don’t like them.”
In a certain way, Kenyans are correct. We do not like children to inconvenience us. We do not like them to disrupt our careers or our marriages or our financial plans. We do not like them, then, in the way most Kenyans do. For Kenyans, as far as I can understand it, babies are just good. They are, at a fundamental, unexplainable, nonfunctional level, filled with blessing.
That Kenyan attitude is not far from Scripture’s. Certainly God loves us not because we are convenient or useful to him, but because we are.
Since humans are created in the image of God, and since God sent his only Son to save them, we know that humans are to be loved. That puts some population positions out of bounds. We cannot, like the Chinese government, abuse and harass individuals because their personal hopes for family conflict with the
bureaucracy’s plans. Each baby should be welcomed into the world, even if he is poor -- especially if he is poor. We must resist the kind of mentality that treats people as units or numbers or “problems.” Family planning should be an exercise in love, not fear.
A filled earth is God’s intended blessing. God’s first words to humanity were, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the ,sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Gen. 1:28).
The first of these overlapping callings, “Be fruitful and multiply,” is sometimes seen as a straightforward endorsement of a growing population. But it is not, really, quite that; it has to be understand in its context, following after an identical blessing to the sea creatures and the birds (Gen. 1:22). They, too, are to be fruitful and multiply. “Increasingly we people are occupying the land to the exclusion and extinction of the other creatures,” Calvin DeWitt writes in his foreword to Susan Power Bratton’s “Six Billion and More”. “This leads us to ask, Does our God-given blessing of stewardship of creation grant us license to deny creatures God’s blessing of fruitfulness and fulfillment?’”
Clearly, no. Filling the earth, subduing it, and ruling over its creatures can be and should be in harmony with other creatures. That is how God intended it, for one blessing will not cancel out another. The story of Noah
further shows God’s concern for the animals’ existence, and humanity’s agency in preserving them. All creatures are meant to be blessed -- to be fruitful and multiply -- together.
Is there, then, a limit to our “fruitfulness”? At the CHRISTIANITY TODAY conference on population, Calvin DeWitt held out an empty glass and had a participant pour it full of water. “Keep pouring,” he said, while the glass overflowed onto the carpet. “Keep pouring.” He was making the point that “filling” implies a limit, and that “overfilling” is something else again.
Some have said, tongue in cheek, that the command to fill the earth is the only one that humanity ever fully obeyed.
That implies, however, a one-time, completed obedience. “Filling the earth” is, in fact, an ongoing process. History shows that humanity has filled the earth many times -- at many different levels of population. In fact, all known history shows humanity filling the earth, while our population grows larger and larger. That is because humanity, unlike all other creatures, transforms the earth so it supports more of our numbers and evidences more of our creativity. An analogy perhaps closer to the truth -- and more astonishing -- would be a thimble, which, when filled, becomes a cup, which becomes a tumbler, which becomes a pitcher brimming full.
At one time in prehistory, anthropologists say, humans had spread to virtually every part of the globe -- something no other species can do -- and the earth could barely support their hunting and gathering.
Then came a greater role for agriculture -- a development driven, some believe, by the population pressure of a full earth. “None of the major human cultural and intellectual achievements,” Clive Ponting comments in his Green History of the World, “would have been possible without the development of agriculture, and a food surplus capable of supporting artists, builders, architects, priests, philosophers and scientists.” Humans learned how to subdue the natural processes of plants and animals, to bring their rhythms
into harmony with ours. A thousand subsequent inventions -- driven, some say, by population pressures -- made agriculture more productive.
The Industrial Revolution represented another huge, multifaceted leap in the power of humanity to fill the earth. Malthus, who predicted misery because human numbers would always increase faster than food production, had the great misfortune to prophesy just as this great transformation began. Food -- and every other human product -- greatly outstripped population, even as population grew far faster than ever before.
Then, for no obvious reason, population growth slowed or stopped wherever the Industrial Revolution had progressed -- first in Europe, then in America. People could have continued to increase-they had food. No government forced, or even encouraged, people to stop having children. No modern birth-control methods were available when lower birth rates first began. Once again, in Western societies, at least, the earth was filled.
A filled earth is not an unambiguous blessing. It has brought with it many careless and callous deeds as human power and presence has increased. Nevertheless, Genesis makes clear that, from the beginning, human presence and dominion were meant to be part of God’s blessings for his creation. God’s intent is that the earth become a garden. We tend to conceive of human endeavors as inevitably in conflict with the rest of creation, particularly with those elements that are wild. This habit of thought is particularly characteristic of Americans, who live with such ugly urban sprawl and glorious wilderness. Surely, we think, God’s world should be more like Yellowstone than Los Angeles.
There are other vistas to be scan, however. On my way to and from India, I traveled across Holland by train -- crisscrossing the country, thinking and talking about population. Holland is one of the most densely populated nations on earth -- more densely populated than India, than China, even than Japan. It is also beautiful. The train shoots by green velvet fields, neat woods, canals, farms, towns, and small cities. I saw lovely orderliness, the signs of care, everywhere in the land.
Nowhere in this full country does it seem crowded. Holland remains a farming nation, and almost everywhere you go you are near the fields. The Netherlands is the world’s third-largest exporter of agricultural product, I was told.
“God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland,” an old quip has it. Holland is the premium example of nature transformed, the way in which humans change their environment as surely as birds build nests. Half of Holland is on land once under water.
Yet the Dutch still place a premium on untrampled space. ‘“We know that wilderness is relative,” Henk Jochemsen, a Christian ethicist, told me, “but we know we need a certain wildness without making an absolute of a specific situation.” Possessing such a tiny, full land, the Dutch are aware that wilderness is something they must plan. They do, taking scrupulous care of their woods and wetlands.
“There are... wild woods and mountains, marshes and heaths, even in England,” Aldous Huxley wrote. “But they are there only on sufferance, because we have chosen, out of our good pleasure, to leave them their freedom.” Today that is true everywhere in the world, not merely in Holland. Humans have dominion.
We have not done our best by this transformation. Still, the transformation of the earth remains a blessing in God’s intention. Wilderness, in the old, wild form, was not friendly to humankind. The word wilderness occurs scores of times in the Bible, and most of the meanings are derogatory. Sometimes, oddly, the Old Testament judgment of a land sounds like a conservationist’s dream, Calvin Beisner points out, such as Isaiah 34:11-15: “The desert owl and screech owl will possess it; the great owl and the raven will nest
there,” it begins, describing the utter lack of human inhabitants. To Isaiah, it was a curse, not a blessing.
But the word garden is always positive in Scripture: it reflects the caring attention of humans. Holland is like a garden, suggesting the possibility of true harmony between humans and the rest of creation. Of course, there are many kinds of garden: Wyoming can be one, and Holland another. Gardens can include territory and creatures that are quite wild. It is for us, the gardeners, to ensure the most harmonious way for God’s creation to flourish.
Still, humans have shown, repeatedly, their potential for savagery. On this beautiful planet, “filling” may sometimes seem unblessed, but we must find the way to make the blessing show. The way is not through less dominion, but through more loving dominion.
In tending and caring for our disordered garden, we must see that its beauty and usefulness are preserved and increased. We must ensure that its creatures, both plant and animal, have space and conditions to flourish. And we must make sure that the human creature, in his creative rule, also has space and conditions to flourish.
(continued in #3724)
