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?
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