What the Creation Stories Can Say About Global Warming

Why aren’t people more frightened by climate change? Why is humanity so slow in taking steps to avert a coming catastrophe?

One explanation is the idea that climate change is too big for our brains to hold.  Humans have never faced an overheated world.  We see a Garter Snake in the flower bed, and we jump back, our hearts pound as adrenaline automatically runs through our veins.  We can certainly react to the threat of snakes.  We inherited such weariness from our parents.  They got it from their parents.  Now snake-fear lives in our brains.  Our bodies know how to deal with snakes. 

Protecting ourselves from the upward creep of the CO2 count in the atmosphere, which wraps the planet in a heat trapping layer of air, which increases the average temperature a few degrees, which will make the planet uninhabitable in several decades, is not embedded in our DNA.  

According to a recent Pew Survey, climate is down the list of peoples’ worries, well behind other crime and the economy.

What astonishes me, again according to Pew, is that Christians are less concerned about the climate than the rest of the American public.  The traditional keepers of higher truth, the message of redemption, and a coming kingdom are blase in the face of weather apocalypse.

The expression, “…problem of biblical proportions,” replays in my thoughts.  If ever there was a problem of biblical proportions, it is the inexorable upward creep of the thermometer in the summer.  And there is almost nowhere a compelling biblical response. 

I recently read that to halt the warming, people will need a “new consciousness.”  That sounds right.  I can think of no better way for a new consciousness to take hold than if the thousands of church congregations were to start talking about it. 

I’m not talking about another church program fad like parenting classes or chair aerobics.  I’m thinking of an every Sunday discussion of the biblical view of the world’s role in the Creator’s plan, the creational vocation of humanity, why the world is in trouble, and what a faith remedy looks like.  I’m thinking that a changed consciousness would see creation fused with other essential themes like sin, redemption, social justice, hope, and love. 

And, to the point of this essay, Christianity’s change of consciousness can happen.  It can happen because a robust theology of creation lives in the Bible. 

And the reason it hasn’t happened yet is because theological thought-leaders have ignored it. 

Let’s Begin with the Thought Leaders

Pastors and their congregations live in a churchy neighborhood.   The neighbors include the denomination, seminary, popular theology, popular books, clergy celebrities, music and so on.ongregations and their minister leaders are pick up a lot of their ideas from the neighborhood.  In other words, churches look to their right and to their left in their neighborhood to see what others are doing to increase donations, recruit parishioners to staff the nursery or oversee the interfaith food bank.  Ministers are forever scanning popular Christian books and Christian celebrities for ideas.  Sometimes fashions sweep through churches sweep through the seminaries and denominations. 

One of the fashions that has not caught on is a fresh interest in the story of creation or the ways that the Creator’s activity runs through the Bible.

The problem is not lazy parish ministers.  Their seminary professors also have overlooked creation and what it implies about the value of the world, where the cosmos is headed and what people need to be doing.  This neglect permeates colleges and seminaries and the various divisions of the Church—Catholicism, Protestantism, Evangelical, Orthodox.

The Eclipse of Creation

A half century ago, several scholars who specialized in the Old Testament, suddenly recognized that they hadn’t been reading the Bible’s stories of the Creation carefully enough.  Despite all they knew about ancient history and primitive languages, they had skimmed over the stories of God’s creation of the world.

In those days, the new environmental movement had just burst into the public’s attention.  The first Earth Day and the Environmental Protection Agency got their starts within six months of each other.  

Leading theologians such as Bernard Anderson, Terence Fretheim, and George Hendry turned their attention to under-appreciated creation texts in the Bible.  There followed a small publishing boom of books, which preserved their discoveries.

All these scholars acknowledged that creation’s importance in the Christian world had been “eclipsed” to use George Hendry’s expression.

Terrence Fretheim’s opening words of his God and World in the Old Testament are representative of a sentiment that many thinkers echo in their writings about biblical creation in the 1960s and 1970s.

The importance of creation has often been underestimated by church and academy. Indeed, we can speak of the “marginalization of creation” in biblical and theological study over the course of much of the twentieth century (and before). Only in the last generation or so have significant efforts been made to recover a proper role for creation in biblical-theological reflection.[i]

Not surprisingly, this historic neglect of the Bible’s creational dimension takes institutional character in popular piety and church practice.

What Does the Neglect of Creation Have to Do with Climate Change?

The impact of Christianity’s centuries long glossing over creation goes beyond the individual congregant.  The habit of leaving biblical creation theology fallow creates a society-wide void in its evaluation of the world around it.

Enter Lynn White, a venerable scholar and theologian who taught Medieval Technology at UCLA in the mid-1960s.   White authored an essay for “Science” magazine titled, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.”  The essay, which is a lively read, connects people’s theology of creation and their treatment of the world.  Western culture, meaning Christian Europe and the United States, with its proprietary idea of the world accounts for its outsized negative impact on the environment.

White says this essay that biblical religion sees the world as humanity’s toy.   We feel permission to exploit nature.  And the climate crisis, beginning with the ecological crisis that surfaced half a century ago, are the result. 

White makes these 6 statements about Christianity’s belief about the created world:

1. Progress is perpetual and guaranteed
2. The visible world, as opposed to the spiritual world, had a distinct beginning
3. God planned creation for humanity’s dominance and rule
4. Humans, made in God’s image, are above nature
5. God wills for humans to exploit the world for human benefit
6. Humanity is superior to the natural world

Lynn White, the scientist and above group of Old Testament scholars, were bumping into each other.  The scholars were saying that we’d overlooked creation.  And White thought that the world’s idea of creation encouraged destructive behavior.

What Does the Bible Say About Creation?

With a sense that they and the church had glossed over creation, the Old Testament scholars set to work.  In the mid-1960s, Bernhard Anderson, then of Drew Seminary, gave a series of lectures which grew into the influential book Creation Versus Chaos.  In this book, which I review here, Anderson wrestles with fascinating problems such as the question of where Genesis creation narratives come from.  He explores how the Old Testament progressively entangles creation language with the signal events in Israel’s salvation history.  Anderson’s most interesting chapter dealt with the way that creation illuminates the idea of evil and how it became personified in a personality, the Devil, only after the Exile. 

The German scholar, Claus Westerman produced a book length theological reflection on Genesis’s first three chapters, simply titled Creation.  In this volume Westerman draws fresh insight into not only the divine nature but that of God’s human creations. 

The most complete and readable volume that came out of the publishing boom on creation was Terence Fretheim’s, God and World in the New Testament (2005).  Fretheim takes a narrative approach to the Old Testament.  His book is mostly free of the complexity of Mesopotamian and Egyptian mythological materials that influenced the Old Testament scribes and editors.  Unfortunately, this source background also complicates interpretation and make some of the earlier work by Anderson and the German scholars technical and intimidating for lay readers. 

In refreshing contrast, Fretheim reads the biblical text’s surface meaning and brings a flood of insight from it.  I read Fretheim with the constant embarrassing question, “How did I miss that?” 

How Did I Miss That?

I recently put together and handed out to an adult class the following page-length copy of Genesis’ first chapter.  I color highlighted several of the text’s often-missed words or verses.  The point of this handout is to emphasize that we’ve missed a great deal about creation in the Bible. 

Each of these color-marked items works like the flags that the surveyor pushes into the ground to mark buried pipes and cables.  The flags say, “something important is in this spot and if you dig, you’ll find it.”     The color highlights on this sheet locate overlooked aspects of creation theology that adjust and add to our idea of what the Bible teaches about the world. 

In the Beginning

For example, Genesis first verses are uncertain.  The Hebrew syntax of the first sentences can be translated in 3 or 4 different ways.  Now I’m raising a technical issue that requires fluency in Hebrew to understand.  But one doesn’t need to know a word of Hebrew to see how English Bible translations of the first couple of verses have changed.  For years I’ve relied on the good old Revised Standard Version (1952) as my working Bible translation.  In 1989 the RSV was updated and titled, the New Revised Standard Version.  Compare their renderings of Genesis’ first words:

1. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.”  (RSV)
2. 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. (NRSV)

Now someone comparing these may not notice that there is a change.  Even if we detect it, we may think anything of it.  The second version softens the absoluteness of God creating everything from nothing.  It opens the door for interpreting the words to mean that the heavens and the earth were already in existence when the Creator got started with creation. 

For decades, I have heard and preached that God created everything out of nothing, creatio ex nihilo.  Seeing the Creator as starting with nothing and speaking the whole creation into existence gives the impression of an all-powerful, all transcendent, all controlling God. 

I imagine a team of scholars deliberating about this change.  They have concluded that the old and venerable words of the RSV give a slightly incorrect impression and presenting new wording is more faithful to the original. 

I don’t want to give an impression that the “eclipse of creation” is the result of fine points of Hebrew syntax.  There are other surprises that are in plain view. 

The Importance of Word

I’ve heard preachers and teachers say that the Creator spoke everything into existence.  This viewpoint underscores the Creator’s power.  All God needed to do was to speak and everything obediently popped into being. 

I call this the “poof” view of creation.  A “poof” creating God works from outside the world making things in a manner unlike the way humans make things.  Human level making needs preexisting stuff that human hands manipulate to make something new.  The “poof” creating God creates from nothing or ex nihilo.

Genesis’ creation accounts have some out-of-nothing creation.  But much in the creation stories is about God working with pre-existing material, pushing water aside or drawing animals and humanity out of the ground, or using Adam’s rib as pre-existing material from which God shaped the woman. 

The prevalence of the ordinary crafting of things as humans create suggests at least two things about the Creator’s nature. 

First, creative activity unfolds in historical time rather than in a mythic time before time.  Traditional peoples, such as the kingdoms that bordered Israel, had creation stories that envisioned their world being set up in a preliminary time phase before regular history got underway. 

Biblical religion tweaked this mythological time framework.  Instead of the sequence of first, creation then redemption, the Bible tells of creation and redemption unfolding in tandem through history, with God working in companionship with humans to advance the creator’s work. 

Second, God’s work within creation emphasizes the divine intimacy in even the intricate details of everything that happens in creation.

God Does Not Create Alone

For my entire adult life, I never noticed that God delegates quite a lot of the creative work to creation itself:

Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. 12The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good.

A few verses later God assigns to humanity responsibility not only to create more humans, but also to exercise some kind of management over the rest of creation.  In Genesis 2 God appears to be in a cooperative relationship with humanity.  One thinks of a couple doing the dishes in the kitchen.  The husband with the dish towel must wait until the woman washes them before drying.  To gain access to a cabinet the wife must stop what she is doing on the counter to step aside.  The couple talks, “Should the glasses be stored here or here?” 

The scene in the second chapter reflects this kind of cooperative job sharing that humans do daily.  The creation of plants is delayed because there was no rain and significantly no humans to till, or better, serve, the ground.  God makes animals to fulfill the human need for companionship, but leaves that job unfinished because the man needs to name each animal. 

The mental image of Creation by divine decree gives way to a less determined process of cooperation and even trial and error.  Yes, even error.  God creates animals as the human’s companions.  And the animals prove insufficient.  It is then that God divides the human itself and makes a couple. 

The Creation of Heavenly Bodies

Scholars have puzzled over the fact that God created light on the first day, but the creation of heavenly bodies, the sources of light, must wait for the fourth day.   Not surprisingly, I never preached a sermon about the planets and the stars, nor have I ever heard one.  The ancients saw the heavenly bodies as gigantic clocks and calendars rather than sources of light.  The fourth day of creation proclaims God’s creation of time itself. 

Whatever the interpretation of the heavenly lights, Genesis 1 sees creation as a process that unfolds over time.  While it may be good, it is not complete and perfect. 

Again, this observation about the work-like character of creation challenges the image of an all-powerful and all-knowing God making everything appear with a poof.  As it turns out, images of creation thread through the Bible.  Humanity must discharge its responsibility as co-creators with God.  And the general impression is that Creation is an open project. 

It’s All Good

On six occasions in Genesis 1, God declares what he has made is “good.”  Biblical religion is fundamentally positive, and God sets a tone of love for all he has created. 

A useful point of comparison is Manichaeism, a religious outlook that assigned goodness to what was spiritual and negativity to what was material.  Put bluntly, the Manichean’s world was filthy and dark. 

Manichaeism was popular in the centuries that followed the rise of Christianity and found its way into all religious communities.  A typical Manichaeism attitude was for the adherent to withdraw from earthly pleasures and prepare for an after-death ascent through heavenly spaces to a higher-than-earthly existence.

The biblical Creation accounts reject this good-bad binary.  That the world is good blocks biblical people from rejecting any part of the world as dispensable.  This attitude of prizing the created order extends to animals and all tribes and peoples. 

The Animals

Take, to give a single example, the status of animals.   Even after years of reading the Bible, I had little idea of what my faith thought about the non-human living world.  I had never put together the fact that God made both humans and animals on the sixth day of creation, that Noah’s Ark rescued mating pairs of all animals, that judgment falls on animals as it does on humans, and that created things will inherit a glorious destiny. (Colossians 1.15-20).

The Other Creation Stories

Let’s move to Genesis’ second chapter, which while not on the color-coded chart also bristles with significant insights.  The first is that there is a second creation account.  Genesis gives us back-to-back creation stories.   Much as there are four gospels and at least two Old Testament accounts, the Deuteronomic history and that of the Chronicler, Genesis 1.1-2.4a and Genesis 2.4b-2.25 constitute two centers of information about the world’s character.  

Many scholars insist that the story in Genesis 2 existed in oral form in Solomon’s time, almost a thousand years before Christ.  The Seven Days account (Genesis 1), on the other hand is more recent, arising in the Second Temple period, say in the 400s BCE.  At some point, editors decided to package the two accounts side-by-side in the final version of the Pentateuch, even though they don’t tell the same story or convey the same sequence of creative acts.   If the reader stands Genesis 1 and 2 side-by-side, they don’t harmonize, a fact that weakens the reader’s sense that the Bible has one authoritative version on how the world came to be. 

The fact that tradition has given us more than one creation story invites us to read them as elaborations on one another.  One way to think of Genesis 2 is to look at it as an elaboration on Genesis 1.26-28.  Genesis’ first creation story in chapter 1 wraps its arms around the whole cosmos.  It’s universal viewpoint gives a vista that sees all things and certainly all humans and animals as central to God’s concern.  Genesis 2, in contrast, pictures the Creator working in intimate relationships. 

Wrestling with the presence of two creation stories in Genesis opening chapters puts us in a position to see that creation stories crop up in numerous places throughout the Bible, even in the New Testament. 

Proverbs 8.22ff for example supplies a new theme, namely wisdom, in the reader’s idea of the created world’s character and destiny:

²² The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
   the first of his acts of long ago.
23 Ages ago I was set up,
   at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
24 When there were no depths I was brought forth,
   when there were no springs abounding with water.
25 Before the mountains had been shaped,
   before the hills, I was brought forth—

Job 38.1ff again is rich with information about creation, some of which expaneds the picture that Genesis gives.

I’ve begun to compile allusions to creation throughout the Bible and my current count stands at 186.  What does one make of the Bible’s frequent mention of creation, which is like a thread that runs from Genesis to Revelation?  I’ll venture one answer.  Creation is ongoing.  God didn’t stop creating or finish creating at the end of Genesis 2. 

Put differently, redemption incorporates creation.  The quintessential moment of redemption in the Torah is when the Red Sea opens to allow the enslaved Hebrew people to pass into safety.  The text of Exodus 15 makes it clear that creation, with its characteristics of newness, order, life-enhancment, is present in this central miracle or redemption. 

The Creator Makes Mistakes

Once humanity enters the picture any sense that the world is a pristine and ideal place begins to erode.  First, it appears that the sequence of creation with bare ground and no rain and no farmer (Genesis 2.5) hints at some discombobulation in the sequence of things.  Several verses later, the story takes a concerning turn when God plants trees and, on pain of death, forbids Adam from eating from one of them.  

Following this prohibition, the Creator decides that his human creation is lonely.  The companionship between man and the Creator is insufficient.  To meet the human’s need, the Creator brings forth animals and commissions the human to name them.  While the animals are great friends, there is still a void for the human.  God solves this continuing loneliness by surgically removing a bone from Adam and using it as the basis for a new kind of human—the woman. 

The tactic of dividing the man and building a mate succeeds spectacularly.  Nevertheless, it takes a couple of tries to get the loneliness problem solved, which does not go as smoothly as say, making by decree light and habitable space in the first chapter. 

I imagine someone who does well in school, is successful in the work world, liked by all and a model parent.  Life looks easy for this person until their third child is born.  The third offspring brings out the worst in her parents.  In every other life situation, the parent commands personal resources to solve the most harrowing of problems.  Except one.  Even into her adulthood, the third child keeps her parent off balance and humbled.

Something like this happens with the Creator, who by degrees moves from being transcendent and powerful into being humanlike.  By Genesis 6 the entire human world has succumbed to wickedness and violence.  And humanity’s creator is grief struck and regrets having started the world in the first place (Genesis 6.6-7).

Conclusion

I’m haunted by Lynn White’s article, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis.”  What I’ve written here, in essence, is a response to White’s genius.  I’m not surprised that his essay, written in 1965, has continued as a honorary resident in the footnotes of research papers and doctoral dissertations ever since. 

This is because he got one glorious thing right: what we believe in our hearts about creation drives our behavior.  It animates our work.  It inspires what we love and how we worship. 

But Lynn White failed spectacularly to clarify one thing.  When he enumerated the Christian ideas that drove the Western Civilization’s dominating attitude towards the world, he wasn’t talking about biblical ideas.  He was talking about faulty assumptions passed down through generations of Church history. 

What I’m saying in this essay is that even a cursory look at the Bible’s first pages with its gems of insight overturns the force of White’s assertions.  Christianity indeed as White states boldly is the problem.  The plain reading of the actual words and ideas of the Bible is the remedy.

Creation and Climate Change

I recently reviewed what the Westminster Confession of Faith had to say about Creation.  I was surprised to see that the word “creation” appeared only twice in the document.  Further, the confession made no effort to explore the characteristics the biblical texts in Genesis or beyond. 

I cite Westminster because it enjoys the reputation of being the most influential creed or confession in the New World.  Put plainly, Westminster represents the character of Protestantism in the vast world of Reformed and Evangelical churches. 

And Westminster says next to nothing about Creation.

It uses creation as a pretext to credit to God long lists of extreme attributes—omnipotence, omniscience, sovereignty and the like.  At the same time, Westminster’s treatment of creation burdens humanity with a pile of accusations.  The whole thing comes off as a parental-type scolding of an errant teenager, whose main problem is lack of respect.  This confessional elevation of the Creator into a transcendent realm of perfections and power is matched by a slap down of individual humans as ignorant, wicked, and without excuse. 

To quote the heart of the confession’s passage on Creation:

It pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for the manifestation of the glory of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, in the beginning, to create or make of nothing the world, and all things therein, whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days, and all very good.

After God had made all other creatures, he created man, male and female,2 with reasonable and immortal souls,3 endued with knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness after his own image,4 having the law of God written in their hearts,5 and power to fulfill it; and yet under a possibility of transgressing, being left to the liberty of their own will, which was subject unto change.6 Besides this law written in their hearts, they received a command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil;7 which while they kept they were happy in their communion with God,8 and had dominion over the creatures.

A thoughtful consideration of the actual text in Genesis, as we have done in this post, gives us a different image, not only of the Creator, but of humanity, and the non-human world as well.  Created things in Genesis are utterly valuable and the object of God’s sustained attention.  Humanity, though it seems sometimes to side with disorder in a betrayal of its vocation as co-creators, also carries God’s image.  God charges people to care for not only humanity but also animals and the non-living world.  Additionally, people equipped to work with God in renewing the world. 

Further, the God of Genesis and the Old Testament for that matter, is a bundle of emotions.  If humans are made in God’s image then we can learn about God by looking at people.  In Christian reflection the idea of God being visible in Jesus Christ lays the groundwork for seeing God as also visible in each human person and in humanity in general.  God delights in the fresh made newness of the world, feels crushed by the man and women’s mistrust and gullibility in the garden, has second thoughts about the whole creation project, feels anger by the cruelty of people, and weeps at his creatures’ self-destructive wickedness. 

As we recover a text centered, biblical view of creation, we receive tools which can contribute to a new consciousness necessary to enable humanity to cease plundering both nature and the poor.  The world is precious because it’s precious to God who works in countless ways to bring it to full restoration and splendor.  We have responsibility to join God in God’s ongoing creative work. 

That outlook should be the passionate heart of the Christian church’s proclamation to a world drowning and burning because of the same—to use Genesis’ language–wickedness, corruption, and violence which led to the Flood.

Finally, as we ponder the complexity and scope of our climate problems, we can enjoy the assurance that God has always worked brilliantly in chaos and that created beauty and goodness will never stop appearing.

---

[i] Fretheim, Terence E.. God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation . Abingdon Press. Kindle Edition.