The Climate Crisis is Like Creation Running Backward
The celebrity eco-activist, Bill McKibben came up with this idea that the creation of the world could be thrown into reverse and humanity could return to pre-creation chaos as it is described in the first chapter of Genesis. He expressed this idea in 2011. The more I think about it the more profound it becomes.
The image of running Genesis backward reminded me of how the old black and white football game tapes that the coach would run forward and then backward, forward and backward. The football was “snapped”, and the black and white players would disappear into chaos. Then, by the magic of the coach’s projector, the players would run backwards and recompose themselves in the neat lineup along the line of scrimmage.
Transfer this image to global warming and our increasing alarmingly climate crisis. As humanity’s quest for wealth extracts more and more from the natural world the planet’s exquisite balances are knocked askew.
The best-known example of this disequilibrium would be carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Over millions of years, our planet established a constant state of CO2 molecules in the air. The number of molecules was about 280 parts per million. I’m oversimplifying for clarity. At 280 ppm, Carbon Dioxide supports green plant and regulates sunlight both coming in and bouncing out. CO2 acts like the glass in a greenhouse. The more CO2, the greater its heat trapping ability.
All burning releases CO2, including the burning on a cellular level of our own metabolism. The burning of coal and oil releases much, much more CO2. Before about 1750, Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere could comfortably regulate the added CO2 exhaled by all the people and animals on the planet. But when factories and later cars began belching out tons and tons of the molecule CO2’s parts per million number began to creep up.
In the late 1950’s, scientists had learned how to measure that parts-per-million number and discovered that carbon dioxide had crept over 300 ppm. Later in the 1970’s, when the number was cruising along at about 325 ppm, scientists began to realize that greenhouse gases could change the weather. In the late 1980’s scientists detected statistically what they anticipated. The world’s climate was getting warmer.
Warming, even by a degree or two, is a form of disequilibrium, which sets off a readjustment of several key elements in the biosphere. Warming prompts drought, shrinking of polar ice, flooding in low-lying places, fire, deforestation, and a shifting of plant hardiness zones. It’s like the football game tape. Instead of being neat and orderly, elements in the earth’s sphere of life all running off on their own chaotic path.
Bill McKibben’s remark about running Genesis backward links the out-of-balance character of climate change with religion, with the story of Creation. Think about the first couple of chapters in the Old Testament book of Genesis. These describe how God made everything. The Bible devotes one verse, the very first one, to describing the creating of the world. “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth…” When I say “creating” I’m thinking about bringing things into existence out of nothing. I think of children pouring the Legos out of the box onto the floor. All the Legos they will use to build are strewn on the floor.
Then God arranges the chaotic mess, like children assembling Legos into cars and buildings.
The organizing takes 6 days. First, light happens. Then water is pushed and held back. Stars and planets are put in their places. And various beasts and birds arise to populate the life-space carved out of the chaos.
We need to see this organizing character of the creation story to appreciate McKibben’s insight. Climate change is a process of disorganization. The earth we inherited was a marvel of balance and order. When we read that 87% of the insects in Germany have just disappeared, we’re really looking at a loss of balance. Disorganization. What is killing insects in Germany is pesticide overuse. Farmers want to increase crop yields. So, they spray. The spraying kills some insects. But the core problem doesn’t get better. The next year they spray more. Suddenly there’s a lot of insecticide around. It runs into the streams and makes the soil a killing zone for other living things. A vicious cycle ensues. McKibben’s word, “de-creation” turns out to be a surprisingly good way to describe the process of people throwing nature out of balance.
Genesis has run backward before in a surprising setting, namely, in the Bible itself. De-creation may be an unfamiliar word, but the idea of creation getting out of whack and devolving into chaos is a biblical theme. Almost at once after the Creator in Genesis finished his work, a deluge swallows up God’s beautifully ordered work and almost all is lost in a watery chaos. This, of course is the Genesis Flood or the Noah’s Ark story. The careful reader of Genesis will notice language in that Genesis Flood story that signals “de-creation.”
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 forty days and forty nights. —Genesis 6.11-12
Notice that water doesn’t simply come down as rain or as a flood flowing in horizontally. The water gushes up from below and pours down from windows in heaven. This image of waters filling the living space reminds us of the description of the waters being pushed up and down in Genesis 1:
6And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” 7So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. –Genesis 1.6-7
Additionally, the stylized descriptions of the animals in the Flood Story reminds the reader of Genesis 1. There are “birds of the air, creeping things, and male and female.” The verbal echoes of the Creation story make it clear that this is a story of the undoing of God’s work. Or better, this is de-creation and recreation. Suddenly, I’m reminded of the football players running forward and backward.
By the way, we must acknowledge some problems with the Genesis Flood story. Critics are justified in their complaint that the story appears to be a tale of a capricious God who throws a huge temper tantrum. This anger results in a huge flood which brings the death of most of the living world. The casual reader of Genesis might take one look at the Flood Story’s destruction and violence and simply throw out the whole story, or the whole Bible, thinking it to be a relic of a violent past featuring a violent God.
I contend that the Genesis Flood story is still useful as an example of de-creation. Let’s read more carefully. First, God’s motivation is not entirely negative. God weeps and laments over what has happened to Creation. There is something vulnerable and touching here. Walter Brueggemann in his commentary on Genesis writes:
[Genesis 6.6] shows us the deep pathos of God. God is not angered but grieved. [God] is not enraged but saddened. God does not stand over against but with his creation. Tellingly, the pain [God] bequeathed to the woman in 3.16 is now felt by God. Ironically, the word for “grieve” is not only the same as the sentence on the woman, but it is also used for the state of toil from which Noah will deliver humanity (5.29). p.77Not only is the Creator bereaved with the direction the Creation has taken, but God labors with Noah to save at least some of the living things. After the deluge, God promises in the Rainbow Covenant that God will never allow de-creation to go as far as it did in the instance of the Flood.
But what about God’s seeming temper tantrum? Why would God destroy what God had just made? My response is to invite the reader into a deeper exploration of the thought of the Old Testament. First, there’s no devil in the Old Testament. Unlike the figure of Satan who stalks Jesus throughout his ministry, the Old Testament has no arch enemy as a foil for God’s plans. Bad occurrences can’t be blamed on the Devil. When dreadful things occur, God himself is the agent of the mischief. I’m thinking of Jacob wrestling with a mysterious figure, who looks suspiciously like God in disguise. In Job there is a Satan who causes great loss and suffering. But what’s interesting is that Job’s woes are pre-authorized by God in a wager with the devil.
Back to the Genesis Flood and de-creation. In the Noah’s Ark story, the balance of creation is upset by human malfeasance. By sin. The suffering that follows, namely the flood, can be seen as something God allows as a natural consequence of human villainy.
Let me try to restate then what is happening in Genesis 6 and 7. God creates the world by organizing chaos. God holds back the chaotic waters creating a living space for all plants, animals, and humans. And then humanity disappoints God who in turn lets the created order revert to its uncreated chaotic state.
And now to a grand generalization about the Old Testament. The primary tension isn’t between good and bad. It isn’t tension between God and sinning people. It isn’t between God and the Devil. It isn’t between different parties and factions. It isn’t about God’s people versus other nations.
The primary tension is between the Creator and Chaos.
This pattern of creation-sin-de-creation-creation repeats and threads through the Old Testament. In the Book of Exodus, the Israelites find themselves as slaves in Egypt. Egypt is the Bible’s textbook example of a society, which takes a path which it entirely counter to God’s nature or yearning for the world.
So as the struggle of the Israelite state slaves intensifies, we see creation unraveling in the form of the 10 plagues. Each of the plagues—red water, fleas, flies, frogs, plague and so on– is an ecological disruption. Here we see the cycle of creation-sin-de-creation-creation.
In the case of the Exodus the drama plays on. God parts the Red Sea’s waters to allow the Israelites to escape the Pharoah’s chariots. This act is an obvious reenactment of the original division of waters in Genesis’ first chapter. The waters of the Jordan River will part once again to allow Israel to enter Canaan. This again is a creational gesture. Even the waters of baptism may have an element of Creation.
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 set up for ever like the moon,
an enduring witness in the skies.’
This psalm celebrates David’s elevation as the King of Israel and the permanent establishment of his dynasty. The Davidic covenant joins with the covenant with Noah, the covenant with Abraham. In the Old Testament, covenants between God and God’s people were the building blocks of Israel’s society and specialness.
The point I’m trying to make here is that even in a seemingly unrelated event, the establishment of David and his descendants as leaders of Israel, there creeps in a creational note. In some deep way, God is ordering the chaos when a dynasty is set up in Israel.
To understand the creational element here it helps to be familiar with the somewhat obscure reference to Rahab. Rahab here is not the famous sex worker of Jericho who helped Israel as they entered the Promised Land. Rahab here in the 89th Psalm is the name of a sea-beast or embodiment of watery chaos. The implication is that as God sets up 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.
The reader of the Old Testament repeatedly runs into this pattern of creation-sin-de-creation-creation. This leads me to re-emphasize a core theme in the Old Testament. The main drama of the Old Testament isn’t a conflict between God and the Devil or good and evil. The main drama is the fundamental conflict between Creation and Chaos. The grainy black and white film of the high school football players is evocative of this drama. The players run forward then backwards then forward again.
The pattern of creation and de-creation is not something we discovered when we began in the late 1950’s to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Climate change is eerily like a core drama in the Bible. Certainly, global warming and extinction are topics Christians need to be talking about in church. Not only does the Bible illuminate what humanity is going through in this period, which we’ve dubbed the “Anthropocene,” but what science knows about climate may give us new interpretive tools to understand the biblical stories.
One key learning from the Old Testament is that even in the face of de-creation, 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.
Further, there is a connection between justice and the health of the world. Scientists nowadays have hit upon this truth independent of the biblical testimony. Climate breakdown is not about chemistry or physics gone awry. It’s about greed, oppression, and poverty. Go back to the story of Israel languishing in Egypt. Under the false god of the Pharaoh who has impressed people into slavery, Egypt begins to fall apart ecologically.
The church needs to proclaim this insight. Our world is marching into the ecological abyss because of human wickedness, greed, domination by the elite. It’s gotten to the point that animals are dying off at alarming rates and the poor nations are languishing in fires, floods, drought, and famine. It is the task of the Church to explore, expose, and repent of its complicity with creation damaging injustice.
Finally, 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.
Bill McKibben has given us a gift with one word and a short phrase. Genesis is marching backwards. We are in a process of de-creation. Our work is cut out for us.
