Ben Myers at Faith & Theology has a post that may be trying a bit too hard to be contrarian, poking fun at the “Green Bible” recently published by Harper Collins. This version of the NRSV is printed on recycled paper with a cotton/linen cover and features green-lettered passages that deal with themes of the earth or creation and contains essays on environmental topics from Christian figures like N.T. Wright, Pope John Paul II, and others.

I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, I deplore both niche Bible marketing and “green” consumerism. On the other hand, too many American Christians still have a very individualistic and anthropocentric understanding of the Bible’s message. So, if this version inculcates some awareness of “green” themes in the Bible, is that so bad? For example, a Bible study organized around “green” passages could be a fruitful thing for a congregation to pursue.

Myers quotes a piece from First Things by Alan Jacobs (not online) that suggests the Green Bible is trying to force the message of Scripture to serve a pre-approved secular agenda. But I think a better way of looking at it is as using something akin to Paul Tillich’s method of “correlation” in theology. To oversimplify greatly, this involves bringing our deepest questions into contact and conversation with the gospel message. It’s only now that we see ecological devastation being wreaked around us that we’re beginning to realize that this is something the Bible speaks to. This isn’t imposing an alien secular perspective on the Bible, but allowing the Bible to illuminate issues that weren’t as relevant to our forbears (largely because the human capacity for wrecking the environment was constrained by technological limitations). That doesn’t mean that the biblical message will line up neatly with the agenda of modern environmentalists, but the current focus on the environment can allow us to see aspects of that message that we may have overlooked.