Journal: Journal for Baptist Theology & Ministry
Volume: JBTM 19:1 (Spring 2022)
Article: Multiplication Or Management?: Tension And The Creation Mandate
Author: Ryan Rindels

Multiplication Or Management?: Tension And The Creation Mandate

Ryan Rindels

Ryan Rindels serves as pastor of First Baptist Church Sonoma in Sonoma, California.

Note: A version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society on Nov. 18, 2021, in Fort Worth, Texas.

In Paul Schrader’s transcendental thriller First Reformed (2017), Ernst Toller, pastor of a historic Dutch Reformed church in Snowbridge, New York, is asked by a parishioner, Mary, that he talk to her husband, Michael. He is a climate activist recently released from prison, and he wants Mary to have an abortion. The young man explains to Toller how global warming has brought the planet on an irreversible path of ecological collapse. “How do you sanction bringing a little girl into the world,” he asks, “where that little girl grows up and she looks you in the eyes and says, ‘you knew this all along?’” Toller expresses sympathy for Michael’s concerns, conceding that “man’s great achievements have brought him to the place where life as we know it may cease in the foreseeable future, yes, that’s new. . . . We are rational people, we want answers . . . and if humankind cannot overcome its immediate interests enough to ensure its own survival, you’re right, the only rational response is despair.”1 After recounting his son’s death in the Iraq War, Toller advises, “I can promise you that whatever despair you feel about bringing a child into this world cannot equal the despair of taking a child from it.” Soon after that, Michael commits suicide. The remainder of the film witnesses Toller’s wrestling with the legitimacy of Michael’s environmental concerns and their existential implications. On the verge of committing an act of terrorism, Toller heeds the advice he initially gave to Michael, not on rational evidence, but out of love for Mary and her child. The narrative of First Reformed engages a subject of serious

JBTM 19:1 (Spring 2022) 4

concern for many in the twenty-first century: the value of potential human life in a context of heightened environmental consciousness.

Until relatively recently, the injunction to “increase and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it” would not only make theological sense to Jewish and Christian readers of the Hebrew Bible but appear as a rational course shared by cultures across the world.2 Concerning expansion, the principal concern was thus how a society could support its inhabitants’ most basic needs, not if it should grow. People groups and their respective cultures faced the problem of sustaining existing populations, malnutrition being ...