On theology, wonder, responsibility, and the long work of helping people see creation as gift, witness, and calling.
The questions below were drawn from a conversation with David Chase about why he started Redeeming Earth, what drives his passion, and what he believes the church has both neglected and uniquely to offer at this moment in history. His answers are edited for clarity but reflect his voice throughout.
Redeeming Earth Editorial
It really comes down to two things. The first is simple awe. I look around at the created world and I'm amazed. There's a wonder that hits you when you actually slow down and look. The second is Scripture. What I read in the Bible about creation, about who made it and why, has shaped the way I see everything.
Those are my two starting points: my eyes and God's Word. Both of them point in the same direction.
My starting point is distinctly different from many voices already doing good work here. I have to begin at Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning, God." That's not a rhetorical starting point; it's the only starting point that makes sense of everything else. And then just a few verses later: "Let us make man in our image." In those opening lines of Scripture you have the entire blueprint for life and relationships.
I'm a Trinitarian Christian. I believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And I believe that all of reality flows out of relationship, between persons, and between persons and creation. That shapes everything about how I approach this.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
I believe life is fundamentally structured around four relationships, and you can trace each of them through Scripture. The first is our relationship with God. That's salvation, the most foundational question any person faces. The second is our relationship with ourselves: who we believe we are, how we were made, what we're called to do. I'd call that sanctification.
The third is our relationship with others: with our neighbors, our communities, the world. That's the call to service. Jesus said the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve. Martin Luther put it simply: God doesn't need your good works, but your neighbor does. All we have is service throughout the relationships.
The fourth is our relationship with creation: with the natural world entrusted to our care. That's stewardship. And that fourth relationship is where Redeeming Earth focuses most intensely, though it can never be separated from the other three.
It is bold, and I want to be careful here, but I also think it's true. Scripture has been more influential in shaping Western culture than most people give it credit for. And that cuts both ways. Where we've interpreted it well, it has produced extraordinary good. Where we've interpreted it poorly, the damage has been real.
The Hebrew word for "keep" in Genesis 2:15 is shamar, the same word used in the priestly blessing: "The Lord bless you and keep you in Numbers 6:24." In that context, it carries the sense of tender care, protection, love. It's the image of a shepherd with a flock, a priest with a congregation. It is not the language of dominance or extraction.
But over centuries, the words subdue and dominion from Genesis 1:28 — "subdue the earth and have dominion over every living thing" — became the interpretive center of gravity. Stripped of their context, those words were read as a license to conquer and extract rather than to shepherd and protect. This is the point Lynn White was making in 1967. The idea that humanity stands over creation rather than within it, responsible for it. And that bad theology produced real consequences: for creation, and honestly, for people too. The same interpretive moves that justified environmental exploitation often justified the exploitation of other human beings.
I think we have to correct that, not by abandoning Scripture but by reading it more faithfully. Better hermeneutics. Understanding the language, the context, the original audience, the author's intent. The text has always pointed toward care. We just need to read it that way.
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”
The audience I'm most focused on is evangelical and conservative Christians, people who, frankly, have been the most resistant to creation care conversations. And I understand why. This space has become deeply politicized. For many people on the right, caring for creation signals that you're joining the other team. And because of that, a lot of Christians have checked out of the conversation entirely.
But here's what breaks my heart: if anyone should be leading the charge to care well for creation, it should be the people who believe God made it. We claim that this is God's handiwork. We claim that every creature declares His glory. And yet we've largely ceded that ground.
I want to speak into that. I want to reach people who might never respond to activist framing but who would respond to wonder. To the extraordinary ingenuity encoded in nature. To the clear biblical mandate to be faithful stewards. That's a large population, and it's one that most environmental protection organizations are not reaching.
Biomimicry is, at its core, the practice of learning from nature's designs to solve human problems. The secular world uses the phrase "imitating nature's genius." I prefer to say imitating God's genius, because nature didn't design itself. The genius was put there.
It becomes a pathway for people who might not respond to "care for creation because it's the right thing to do." Biomimicry makes a different case: nature is extraordinarily useful. It has been engineering solutions for many years that we are only beginning to understand. The moment you start to see that, you have a very practical reason to preserve it.
One of my favorite examples, and likely the best known, is the Japanese bullet train. Engineers had a serious problem: a sonic boom whenever the train exited a tunnel, caused by pressure buildup. The solution came from a bird-watching engineer who noticed how the kingfisher dives into water without a splash. They redesigned the nose of the train after the kingfisher's beak. They modeled the underbelly after the penguin, and the pantograph after the silent wings of an owl. The result was quieter, faster, and 15% more energy-efficient. Nature had already solved the problem.
Ants, termites, bees, whales, sharks... the created world is full of designs we haven't begun to exhaust. If for no other reason, that's a compelling case to not let species go extinct, to not clear cut the forests, to not scrape the ocean floor, to not destroy coral reefs. We are burning the library before we've read the books.
“Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.”
The circular economy is essentially the application of biomimicry principles to how we design our systems and economies: regenerative rather than extractive, designed for renewal rather than disposal. And it maps almost perfectly onto what we see in Scripture.
God built the original economy on regenerative principles. The Sabbath year for the land in Leviticus: let it rest, let it restore. The instruction in John 6 after the feeding of the five thousand: "Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted." These aren't proof texts; they reflect a deep pattern in how God designed things to work.
The good news is that an enormous amount of serious research has already been done in this field. It doesn't need a Christian label to be true or valuable. Good science is good science. Our job is to learn from it, apply it, and help people see it through the lens of faithful stewardship.
I want to see the church reclaim its role as the premier steward of creation, not because it's politically fashionable, but because it flows directly from who we believe God is and what we believe He made.
We carry a unique responsibility. We are, by most accounts, the species with the greatest capacity for both creation and destruction on this planet. That comes with a weight. The way I'd put it is this: we should care for every square-inch of creation the way a good pastor cares for a congregation, with attentiveness, tenderness, and a sense of sacred responsibility for what has been entrusted to us.
Redeeming Earth exists to create the on-ramps: through wonder, through Scripture, through biomimicry, through practical application, to help people get there. To notice, to marvel, to learn, to change, and eventually to lead. That's the journey I hope to walk with people.
“For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.”