Like many people, probably multitudes, I’ve been following the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power facility in Japan. Just this morning, the morning of March 28, 2011, it has been announced that the level of radioactivity in the water within the facility has risen to new levels, and that radioactivity is seeping into the water and soil around the plant. There is also some question about whether or not plutonium has entered the environment. Tests are underway.

I’m not going to continue this essay with a diatribe against nuclear power. I think that nuclear power can contribute to the well-being of our global society. It could, if the newest generators are of an advanced fourth and fifth generation design, and if the engineers and politicians plan these installations as if their lives depended on their safety and reliability.

Unfortunately, the crisis at Fukushima is going to make it extremely difficult, if not impossible in a political sense to proceed with plans for civilian nuclear power, at least in the near future.

There is a larger issue here, and it’s a theological one. All theological issues, if they are not just abstract, are also existential. God has given us this wonderful world to inhabit, and has granted us the status of stewards. This is a most gracious trust of His, because our previous stewardship didn’t work out very well. We were sacked from that job, and expelled from the premises. And for good reason, it seems, judging from the way we’ve been handling this job. Let’s look around us. Look, for instance, at Fukushima. What are we doing?

We were expelled from Eden, because He knew very well what would happen if He let us stay.

 

IF NOT TO HELL

 

Suppose that God had let them stay

In Paradise for one more day,

No sword of fire at the wall

For their betrayal and downfall

 

To see one day and then the next

Development of intellect,

Plow and harrow and the seed,

The pulling out of Eden’s weeds

 

The felling of the tree of life

A house for Adam and his wife,

Lumber made of good and evil

To build a barn and feed the devil

 

Smoke and coal and slag of lead,

Euphrates tunneled from its bed

That on the newly crumbled fields

They plant their factories of steel

 

Able Cain, his sacrifice

Fortifying Paradise,

Garrisons and shouts and stamps

Of guards in concentration camps

 

Armies mustered then deployed,

The New Jerusalem destroyed

And more Jerusalems to come

By clashings of plutonium

 

Did the Lord God not foresee

What trouble there would never be

In Paradise if he expelled

Them to the world if not to hell?