The Theological Structure of the World
Planet Earth is in the early stages of a sixth mass extinction event. Climate scientists and thought leaders have long known about this looming crisis. European nations are beginning to struggle with climate change’s sweeping potential. And in recent months, the American public is finally awakening to the dire prospects of living on a warming planet.
Since around 2014, climate change has moved from being an “issue” to being a crisis. This is because geologists have made popular the fact that our planet has undergone a handful of weather change upheavals millions of years ago that have been disruptive enough to send a shocking percentage of living species off into extinction. Once an animal species has died out it doesn’t come back. New life forms evolve. Mass extinction events are like massive original factory resets. Everything, or almost everything, starts over from scratch. Most animals and plants are not permanent residents on the earth. They live, often for tens of millions of years and then disappear. Planet Earth is like an indifferent host. It supports thousands of living things, which rise and pass away.
The climate crisis raises fundamental questions about the mysteries of human life. Global warming confronts humankind with the prospect that it might join the dinosaurs and thousands of un-heard of animals as “fellow passengers to the grave.” With global warming we’re suddenly wondering whether Mother Earth is all that nurturing. Are Homo sapiens really so special? What does God think of all of this? Or is there a God to care or not care about human collapse?
This crisis also forces us to ask with urgency where we can go for answers. Scientists have led the way in providing the numbers and charts. Their conclusions are compelling. We’re beginning to see some psychologists discussing climate disruption’s emotional impact. Novelists, artists, and social scientists, are putting pen to paper. Some of them counsel a dignified despair. Many, including senior high students, are both terrified and motivated. They plead for a massive awakening and response. Not surprisingly, most people are “concerned,” but not enough to take even minimal lifestyle steps that could be the beginning of a response to what is shaping up to be a massive human tragedy.
The one group that has been among the slowest to respond is the Church. Its prime resource, the Bible, has been largely overlooked as a source of insight and reassurance. This is surprising because church goers supposedly look to their faith for information about life’s big questions. Who is God and how are we related to God? The Bible is seen as a moral yardstick that nourishes lives of ethical rigor. But now that we have a problem truly of biblical proportions we are floundering for lack of a biblical perspective.
One area about which the Bible has much say has to do with the character of the earth itself. Is the Earth and human life on earth an accident of circumstances which really don’t mean anything? Is the planet expendable? Businesses sometimes appear to be treating the planet like a soft drink container, something to be drained and discarded. Scientists, especially those with the long view of the geologist, see the planet as elegantly beautiful in its deep rhythms and patient adherence to inviolable laws. Environmentalists reverence the earth and its life forms, but their affection is rooted in sentimentalism, which is often not broadly shared by the public or even fellow environmentalists
What does the Bible say and what can people who revere the biblical outlook on life derive from the scriptures in the face of this unfolding climate catastrophe? This essay will dwell on this question.
More precisely, it will examine the role and vocation of the World as the Bible presents it. The Bible has much to say to 21st century readers about faithful responses to threats, God’s leadership over and ownership of the world, and the ultimate destiny of the planet and the people and creatures living on the planet. These must be explored elsewhere. Here we will look at the Old Testament’s understanding of Creation beginning with the elegant first week as laid out in Genesis 1. We will see that God’s continuing relationship with the world has a creational character, which begins to enrich our own understanding of how God might be active today as that same creation is being altered by human activity and climate change.
The Creation Story: Genesis 1.1-2.4a
The Bible’s first verse covers a lot of ground:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1.1)
If nothing beyond this verse were said about Creation, a first-time reader might think that the work of creating was finished. What follows this verse, however, are a series of divine acts that are mostly ways that the Creator works with what he has already created. Put differently, the first verse is like dumping all the tinker toys onto the floor in a disorganized mess. The subsequent verses depict organizing and building with the tinker toys in order to construct something. It’s as if the creating of the jumbled mess—the watery chaos—is a mysterious divine act of bringing something out of nothing. After bringing everything into existence the organizing and naming of it ensues. God makes stuff. Then he sorts and organizes. He even delegates: “Let the earth put forth vegetation…the seas can bring forth living creatures.”
People are created. Their creation comes as a culmination of the creative process, on the sixth of seven days. It’s clear by their position in the sequence of things and the amount of words that are devoted to their vocation, that humans are important. Humans are made in the Creator’s “image and likeness,” which is to say that they are God’s stand-ins in the created world.
Of course, much more could be said about the first chapter of Genesis. This overview is skipping mountains of insight that can be gleaned from these timeless verses. We want to pay attention to two themes, however, that are important to hang on to.
First, God’s creative work is mostly organizing chaos. (Genesis 1.2-2.3) We’re looking at the Creation story for insight into the disruption of the natural balances because of human activity. Noticing that God brings chaos into order is important.
Second, God does the organizing in historical, rather than mythological, time.
More on that:
We’ve already seen that the arranging and organizational aspect of the creation story is told as if it happened in history or in the ordinary course of events in the world. Even the created earth and water participate in the organizing part of the work. (Genesis 1.11,12, 20, 24, and 28)
It’s helpful to notice two verbs in Genesis 1 that the text uses to describe God’s activity. The first is to create. The Hebrew verb for to create is only used when God is the subject. In the first chapter of Genesis, God creates the “heavens and the earth,” some of the creatures and human beings. Much more frequently used is the Hebrew verb translated to make. This verb describes what people also do when they work. The implication is that the divine activity of creating or bringing something out of nothing is present but of secondary importance in this text when compared with God’s making work, an activity that has the same quality as human making or human work.
Now, I’m aware that I’m skipping much material. Beginning in Genesis 2.4 the Bible gives us another creation story that doesn’t comfortably harmonize with the first one. It’s in this story that God creates Adam, then Adam and Eve, and finally their misdeed in eating the forbidden fruit. What is important is that Adam and Eve bear children who bear children. And from the Creation stories, with no interruption, the history of world begins. Most traditional creation myths are just that…myths. By this I mean that the creation happens in non-historical time, which exists independently of subsequent history. In traditional creation myths, the world is created in special enclosed time before a more ordinary time that is disconnected from the sacred beginnings. It appears to me that Bible makes special effort to have the creation, or at least the organizing part of creation, merge or be the beginning of all subsequent history.
One way that the Bible makes the organizing part of the creation part of the subsequent history is to link creation and history with genealogies (Genesis 4.17-22). People who read the Bible very literally have been able actually to count the years back to Adam and Eve and the creation itself and calculate that the earth is about 6000 years old. The text of the Bible invites this kind of speculation, but not just to satisfy curiosity or disprove Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The Bible intends to locate God’s creative activity in the course of history.
Traditionally, theologians in all religions work in two categories, creation and redemption. Creation, as we know intuitively is making the stuff of the world, or the stage on which the work of redemption is played out. Redemption is the divine activity of repairing the world or saving it. There’s an implied sequence. First creation, then redemption. In biblical thought, creation and redemption merge. Put differently, God’s creative activity may not have ceased once he had “created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1.1) If God creates in the course of history, maybe creation-like events can happen or be happening again and again. Creation may not be complete. And as a matter of fact, instances of recognizable creation language crop up in a number of important places throughout the Old Testament. In these texts the characteristic language of Genesis 1, namely the spirit-wind, organizing, and so on, sparkle in the narrative hinting that God’s activity is creational activity.
Victory at the Sea
One strong and surprising presence of God’s creative activity is at the Red Sea in the Book of Exodus. The Hebrew people, through miracle after miracle, have finally been freed to leave Egypt. They have been rescued from the Pharaoh’s massive chariot blitzkrieg. God has opened the waters of the Red Sea allowing the newly freed Hebrews to escape. Then, just as the Egyptian charioteers begin charging through the divided waters, the creator God slams shut the passage way.
Then comes a grand celebration. The Bible records a song of triumph and thanksgiving lifted up by Moses: (Exodus 15.1-19)
Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song
to the Lord:
‘I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.
2 The Lord is my strength and my might,
and he has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him,
my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
3 The Lord is a warrior;
the Lord is his name.
4 ‘Pharaoh’s chariots and his army he cast into the sea;
his picked officers were sunk in the Red Sea.
5 The floods covered them;
they went down into the depths like a stone.
6 Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power—
your right hand, O Lord, shattered the enemy.
7 In the greatness of your majesty you overthrew your adversaries;
you sent out your fury, it consumed them like stubble.
8 At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up,
the floods stood up in a heap;
the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.
9 The enemy said, “I will pursue, I will overtake,
I will divide the spoil, my desire shall have its fill of
them.
I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them.”
10 You blew with your wind, the sea covered them;
they sank like lead in the mighty waters.
11 ‘Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?
Who is like you, majestic in holiness,
awesome in splendour, doing wonders?
12 You stretched out your right hand,
the earth swallowed them.
13 ‘In your steadfast love you led the people whom you redeemed;
you guided them by your strength to your holy abode.
14 The peoples heard, they trembled;
pangs seized the inhabitants of Philistia.
15 Then the chiefs of Edom were dismayed;
trembling seized the leaders of Moab;
all the inhabitants of Canaan melted away.
16 Terror and dread fell upon them;
by the might of your arm, they became still as a stone
until your people, O Lord, passed by,
until the people whom you acquired passed by.
17 You brought them in and planted them on the mountain of your own
possession, the place, O Lord, that you made your abode,
the sanctuary, O Lord, that your hands have established.
18 The Lord will reign for ever and ever.’
19 When the horses of Pharaoh with his chariots and his chariot drivers went into the sea, the Lord brought back the waters of the sea upon them; but the Israelites walked through the sea on dry ground.
The language of this song of praise harks back to Genesis’ first chapter, especially the repeated reference to wind that God blows at the waters (Exodus 15.8,10). Just as the Spirit-wind organized the chaotic waters in “the beginning,” so now does that familiar wind organize the waters that finally close off the Hebrew people from the reach of Pharaoh the enslaver. This time we see a new dimension to the wind’s action.
This text introduces a new dimension to the idea of continuing creation. God’s creating activity not only brings order to the non-human world, it also is arrayed against injustice. Creation is value-laden. By this point in the Exodus story, the reader is well-aware that God is taking the side of the Hebrew ex-slaves. And once they are safe on the other side of the Red Sea, forever free from slavery, they realize that their deliverance is at the hand of the same Creator. Even more profound is the insight that deliverance is somehow a creative activity. The God who organized the evil chaos in the beginning still organizes evil chaos in the cruelty and violence of the Egyptian empire.
The Praises of Israel
Creation motifs thread their way through the Hebrew Bible and then turn up again powerfully in the New Testament Book of Revelation. Another example comes from Psalm 89:
Let the
heavens praise your wonders, O Lord,
your faithfulness in the assembly of the holy ones.
6 For who in the skies can be compared to the Lord?
Who among the heavenly beings is like the Lord,
7 a God feared in the council of the holy ones,
great and awesome above all that are around him?
8 O Lord God of hosts,
who is as mighty as you, O Lord?
Your faithfulness surrounds you.
9 You rule the raging of the sea;
when its waves rise, you still them.
10 You crushed Rahab like a carcass;
you scattered your enemies with your mighty arm.
11 The heavens are yours, the earth also is yours;
the world and all that is in it—you have founded them.
and his throne endure before me like the sun.
37 It shall be established for ever like the moon,
an enduring witness in the skies.’
This psalm celebrates David’s enthronement and the permanent establishment of his dynasty. It’s on the foundation of this covenant that the whole idea of the Messiah is built. In the Old Testament, covenants between God and God’s people were the building blocks of Israel’s society and specialness. Notice that covenants appear as part of God’s creating work. Rahab here is not the famous harlot of Jericho who helped Israel.
To understand the creational element here one must be familiar with a somewhat obscure reference to Rahab. Rahab is the name of a sea-beast or embodiment of watery chaos. The implication is that as God establishes David’s dynasty, he also is advancing creation by defeating the spiritual power of chaos. In this political move, God brings greater and greater order to the world.
Creation shows up in the worship or praises of Israel. Psalm 98 is a prime example of Israel’s joyous praise of its Lord, YHWH. Of particular interest are the final verses:
7 Let
the sea roar, and all that fills it;
the world and those who live in it.
8 Let the floods clap their hands;
let the hills sing together for joy
9 at the presence of the Lord, for he is coming
to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with equity.
The image of the waters lifting up a raucous tribute to God is a powerful picture of once-rebellious chaos now joining the rest of creation in worshipping God.
Psalm 104 paints a breathtaking picture of the creation as joyously beautiful and fruitful and worthy of Israel’s praises. The reason for this is stated in the first verses, which re-present the first days of creation:
1 Bless the Lord, O my soul.
Lord my God, you are very great.
You are clothed with honor and majesty,
2 wrapped in light as with a garment.
You stretch out the heavens like a tent,
3 you set the beams of your chambers on the waters,
you make the clouds your chariot,
you ride on the wings of the wind,
4 you make the winds your messengers,
fire and flame your ministers.
5 You set the earth on its foundations,
so that it shall never be shaken.
6 You cover it with the deep as with a garment;
the waters stood above the mountains.
7 At your rebuke they flee;
at the sound of your thunder they take to flight.
8 They rose up to the mountains, ran down to the valleys
to the place that you appointed for them. (Psalm 104.1-8)
Later in the psalm earth’s living creatures are pictured as receiving all they need out of a praise-worthy creation that has been tamed and transformed by God’s creative powers.
You make springs gush forth
in the valleys;
they flow between the hills,
11 giving drink to every wild animal;
the wild asses quench their thirst.
12 By the streams the birds of the air have their habitation;
they sing among the branches.
13 From your lofty abode you water the mountains;
the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.
14 You cause the grass to grow for the cattle,
and plants for people to use,
to bring forth food from the earth,
15 and wine to gladden the human heart,
oil to make the face shine,
and bread to strengthen the human heart. (Psalm 104.10-15)
Chaos as Evil
Unfortunately, God’s ongoing creational activity of establishing covenants and standing as the object of Israel’s praises does not always move forward in making the world and the living things better and better. Sometimes human wickedness, which appears to be an element of chaos, reverses the process. Concurrent with God’s creation work is what I’ll call de-creation.
The most compelling examples of a de-creation process are exposed in the narrative about the plagues that afflict Egypt just before the empire ejects its Hebrew slaves. The first seven chapters of Exodus describe Egypt’s escalating oppression of the Hebrew peoples who have become state slaves. Moses arises as God’s appointed leader to lead the people out of their bondage. But the Pharaoh needs to release his state slaves, the Hebrew people. He eventually does so through God’s imposition of 10 increasingly crushing “plagues,” or ecological disruptions. These make life so difficult for the Egyptians that they are glad to get rid of their Hebrew population. The plagues, 10 in number are as follows:
- Blood Ex. 7:14–24
- Frogs: Ex. 7:25–8:15
- Lice or Gnats: Ex. 8:16-19
- Wild animals or flies: Ex. 8:20-32
- Pestilence of livestock: Ex. 9:1–7
- Boils: Ex. 9:8–12
- Thunderstorm of hail and fire: Ex. 9:13–35
- Locusts: Ex. 10:1–20
- Darkness for three days: Ex. 10:21–29
- Death of firstborn: Ex. 11:1–12:36
Without analyzing the plague tradition thoroughly, we can easily see several themes. First, all of these misfortunes strike the modern reader as natural occurrences. Another way of looking at them is to see them as a progressive rolling back of the creational order that was established with God’s victory over the chaotic waters in Genesis, the biblical book that comes immediately before Exodus. The de-creation process culminates with a shutting down of the light. (Exodus 10.21ff) This is an action that reminds us of the creation of light on the first day of creation. Egypt eventually buckles under the tenth and last plague, namely the plague death of the firstborn humans and animals.
The narrative of Israel’s liberation is a spiritual struggle between God’s creation of the world and the resurgence of chaos embodied by the injustices and cruelties of Egypt. Bible does not explain exactly how creation and chaos are interacting with the precision of a physicist. But the reader realizes that Egypt’s practices of slavery and idolatry have disrupted the natural balances and beauty of the land and life forms. Slavery in Egypt was an offense against the Creator and Creation, which God had been busy making more and more good, true, and beautiful. In a land where people are mistreated primordial chaos gushes forth. Everyone suffers. And God then triumphs by creating freshly.
It’s hard not to think of God’s giving of the 10 commandments as a re-creational counter-action. The pregnant correspondence of 10 plagues which kill and 10 laws which save is tantalizing. These laws, together with their elaboration by Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy are similar to a national constitution. Once established in Canaan, the Hebrews will use the laws to re-imposed order, predictability, even-handedness, and equality among all people. The promise to the wilderness wanderers is that if they live by these standards their society will flourish because the land will flourish. This promise is stated in creational terms:
If you will only obey the Lord your God, by diligently observing all his commandments that I am commanding you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth; 2all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the Lord your God…The Lord will make you abound in prosperity, in the fruit of your womb, in the fruit of your livestock, and in the fruit of your ground in the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors to give you. 12The Lord will open for you his rich storehouse, the heavens, to give the rain of your land in its season and to bless all your undertakings. Deuteronomy 28.1-2; 11-12a
The Genesis Flood
A second, well-known text illustrates this creation-de-creation dynamic. By the sixth chapter of Genesis, humanity had become thoroughly corrupt. The biblical text does not elaborate on the sins of people. It’s evident, however, that the purposes God had in mind for God’s creation were far from being fulfilled. And the result, the Flood, again looks to the modern reader like a “natural” consequences or a de-creation process ensues. The Bible describes God as bereaved by the waywardness of his creatures and permits/sends a de-creational catastrophe, namely the Flood.
Of particular interest is the Bible’s description of the mechanics or hydraulics of the deluge.
In the six-hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. 12The rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights. (Genesis 7.11-12)
It’s easy for us to dismiss images of fountains bursting forth or heavenly windows opening as merely Bible expressions for “lots of rain.” But geysers of water from under the earth and waters pouring down from the heavens presume the layout of the world as described in Genesis 1. In the first days of creation, God pushed the waters apart horizontally and vertically. The resulting void became the dry space that would contain the habitable world. Now in the Genesus Flood Story, God is withdrawing God’s sustaining hand. This abandonment permits the chaotic waters to flood the space where the world was supposed to be flourishing.
My point here is that the Genesis 6 flood and climate scientists’ worst case projections are eerily similar.
Other Instances of this Principle
There are several instances sprinkled throughout the scriptures where human sin merges with the chaos, which is the creator-God’s ongoing opponent. A lesser-known story, that of King David taking a census is a good example. Census-taking in the ancient world was considered evil in the ancient world, a form of governmental overreach.
Under pressure, David orders a census and then faces God’s judgment, which curiously is a seemingly unrelated consequence, a pestilence (2 Samuel 24).
Jonah, the prophet, trying to evade God’s call, books a sea passage to the faraway city, Tarshish. The creational language is unmistakable in Jonah 1.4: “But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up.” Later, the embodiment of chaotic waters, the sea monster, does the Creator’s bidding by transporting Jonah to the place where he has been called to serve.
In the New Testament Jesus proves to possess the Creator’s powers over storms at sea. And, scandalously, Jesus teaches his followers that they also possess such power. Jesus, for example, chides frightened disciples for not calming a storm without his help. Later, Jesus urges Peter to walk on water by dint of his faith in the Father.
Summary
What have we established?
- The biblical presentation of God’s work of creation is not bringing new things out of nothingness, but taming and arranging chaos.
- Organizing chaos is more like the theological category of redemption than creation. God’s creative work has the character of fixing, improving, controlling, beautifying, sustaining and the like.
- God’s creative (which looks like redemption) activity does not cease in Genesis but continues through the Hebrew Bible and presumably through history. Creation images such as wind and waters crop up throughout the Hebrew Bible.
- Chaos along the way is revealed to be evil or as close to evil as the Old Testament gets. In the post-exilic period into the New Testament the prime embodiment of evil is Satan.
- Human injustice and apostasy appears to take the side of or equates to chaos. Sometimes chaos presses back at God’s creative work as when Egypt mistreated the Hebrews. The ensuing chaos took the form of ecological disruption.
- The Old Testament’s dominant image of redemption is God’s continuing creation or continuing ordering of chaos.
None of these insights are verifiable or falsifiable by scientific method. They stand as propositions along with the reality of God, our own image of God character, the efficacy of prayer, and so on. They must, in other words, be taken by faith to cast a light on the nature of our world.
Creation and Climate Change
This said, these insights yield 4 additional implications for Christians living in a time of climate change.
- Climate change and global warming are spiritually significant. These are something Christians need to be talking about in church. The discussion should be an exploration into what Creation is saying to us and what we must do in faithful response.
- God continues to work in the world and has not abandoned it in a fashion associated with Deism or as some denialists assume. Despair is not appropriate.
- There is a deep connection between justice and the health of the world. Scientists share this understanding. Climate breakdown is not about chemistry. It’s about greed oppression, and poverty. It is the task of the Church to explore, expose, and repent of its complicity with creation damaging injustice.
- The Earth belongs to God. We deceive ourselves when we think that land occupancy or ownership, national boundaries, and other human divisions of the natural world supersede God’s sovereignty over all things.
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