The Recovery of Creation
When the magnitude of the climate problem finally sank in for me in 2017, I didn’t have any idea what my Christian faith had to say about it. That’s an embarrassing admission from a retired parish minister who has preached and taught for my entire adult life.
For years, I’ve been hearing about climate change and its dire potential. But for some reason, the warming of the planet never grabbed my attention. That the planet was warming seemed to be a problem that I could relegate to the “not urgent” category.
What finally sank in in 2017, was that the world was hurtling toward an unstoppable cataclysm. The word “extinction” entered my imagination. I couldn’t wriggle out of the chilling thought that I was leaving to my grandchildren a fatally damaged planet. I had lived with ample food and material things. I’ve traveled, slept without fear, seen national parks, and beheld no small amount of natural beauty. But these pleasures were already beginning to totter, especially in the developing world.
Surely, faith would speak to this crisis, even though I wasn’t hearing other ministers preaching it. Nor was I reading or preaching about it myself before I retired in 2016. In 2015, Pope Francis issued his massive second encyclical, Laudato si’, which made alarm over climate a mainstream concern. But Francis’ did this innovative work in the Catholic world so it hadn’t found its way into my consciousness. I was living in the Southern Bible Belt. Christians here are the least likely people anywhere to be concerned that humanity had exploited, extracted, and consumed its way into a calamity of truly “biblical proportions.”
So in 2017 being hit with the collapse of the biosphere, the world’s life support system, I found myself in a faith crisis and an intellectual challenge.
In my initial confusion over climate apocalypse, I did have two intuitions.
First, I was certain this was an important faith issue, even though I couldn’t say exactly how. And…
Second, I was certain that churches could be powerful forces for mobilizing response.
My Quest
Since that 2017 wake-up moment, I’ve been on a personal quest to make clear to myself and to teach in my church what Christian faith does have to say about the warming planet. Hopefully finding a Christian stance on climate would reveal how I and my fellow Christians can respond.
Some thinkers have speculated that the climate crisis is too big for most people even to contemplate, much less react to. Animals and plants can be going extinct before our eyes or climate refugees can be trekking towards Europe, and still, we can’t perceive that these are the result of a more fundamental problem, namely that the planet is burning.
If only preachers could say something about it!
How about just talking about climate in a religious education class? Wouldn’t such conversations help move the climate crisis beyond the technical arena of science and the sound bites of partisan politics?
Admittedly, such a conversation would take some forethought by church leaders. There is no verse or section of the Bible that addresses climate change explicitly.
“Thou shall not release more greenhouse gasses than you offset,” would have been incomprehensible to the writers of the scriptures.
The Bible does, however, explore mega-problems like the destruction of Israel and Judah at the hands of conquering empires. The New Testament focuses on Christ’s saving work of Christ. It proclaims the arrival of a new order—the Kingdom—in the world. Within these sweeping acts of God’s love, he includes of not only humans but all living things, even all created things.
Isn’t ironic that we love the expression “problem of biblical proportions” but it doesn’t occur to consult the Bible for insight into such problems?
Five years have passed since my climate wake-up.
My hunch that faith had something to say about our crisis has proven to be abundantly true. Among my discoveries is that many others are on the same quest.
For example, theologian Catherine Keller published, Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances which says that we may be in an Apocalypse and that may be okay. Additionally, preaching professor, Leah Schade compiled, Rooted and Rising: Voices of Courage in a Time of Climate Crisis. Like so much else related to climate, Christianity’s response is late and small. But at least something is moving.
So what am I learning? The early fruit of my quest has yielded at least four significant ways that the Bible sheds light on the crisis we’re in.
- The Old Testament, particularly the prophets, has a vivid sense of the way catastrophe naturally follows when people and especially leaders allow the weak and poor to languish in an unfair social order.
- The Bible frequently mentions that redemption includes animals and certainly all peoples. I hadn’t noticed this before 2017.
- There are good reasons to see Jesus’ sacrificial death as not only redeeming for select human beings, but the whole of humanity, the whole of the living world, the whole created order!
- The apocalypse in the Bible’s last book is an eerily clear window into the crises we’re facing right now and the destiny of the whole of what God has made.
Enter Creation
My greatest discovery is that I had much more to discover.
Each of the above areas of biblical insight that has cast a revealing light on climate has also hinted at something more fundamental and grander, something I have never appreciated until the last several months.
That “something” is Creation itself. And by “creation” I mean not the simple presence of rocks, trees, and cities, but a theology or assessment of the world.
From the beginning of the human experience, traditional peoples have told stories about how their world got started. Scholars say they’ve told creation myths.
The point of these stories is to affix value to the world and to identify the calling of the people who inhabit that world.
It’s not too simplistic to say that the Creation stories in the Bible serve the same function. They teach us not only that the world exists and was made by God, but also offer hints about how and why it was made and where it is headed.
What I’m learning is that the how, why, and where has dropped out of Christianity’s consciousness at least in our generation, which in turn would explain why global warming’s potential to destroy the living part of creation has significantly escaped the church’s attention.
Significantly, But Not Entirely.
In 1971 George Hendry, an American theologian, recently elected as the president of the American Theological Society, offered these words in his inaugural address as president: “Not only is creation in eclipse in contemporary theology; it has ceased to play any significant part in popular piety.”
To restate: If theology consists of a fundamental binary, creation and redemption, then to say that creation has disappeared is a momentous claim.
This sweeping assertion followed on the heels of the first Earth Day and President Nixon’s establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency the year before. As the world was discovering “the environment”, academic theologians were turning their attention to what faith had to say about the world.
And they found that it was saying far less than it could.
What followed over the next several decades, mostly the 80s and 90s was a publishing boom of books that dealt with Creation.
As I write this, I’m looking at a little pile of paperbacks sitting in front of me. Most of them are out of print, pulled from library shelves, or selling for pennies on Amazon. They were written by venerable Old Testament scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. And they are a mine of insight about the earth’s value, God’s creative presence and humanity’s calling to help establish a new creation.
| Author | Title | Year |
| Westermann, Claus | Creation | 1974 |
| Anderson, Bernhard | Creation in the Old Testament | 1985 |
| Anderson, Bernhard | Creation versus Chaos: The Reinterpretation of Mythical Symbolism in the Bible | 1987 |
| Barr, James | Biblical Faith and Natural Theology: The Gifford Lectures for 1991 | 1991 |
| Simkins, Ronald | Creator and Creation: Nature in the Worldview of Ancient Israel | 1994 |
| Levenson, Jon | Creation and the Persistence of Evil | 1994 |
| Brown, William P. | The Ethos of the Cosmos | 1999 |
| Loning, Zenger | To Begin With, God Created: Biblical Theologies of Creation | 2000 |
| Garr, Randal | In His Own Image and Likeness: Humanity, Divinity, and Monotheism | 2003 |
| Fretheim, Terence | God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation | 2005 |
| Anderson, Bernhard | From Creation to New Creation: Old Testament Perspectives | 2005 |
| Steck, Odil Hannes | World and Environment | 2008 |
| Fretheim, Terence | God So Enters into Relationships That . . .: A Biblical View | 2020 |
And I knew nothing about this movement. When global warming loomed up as a terrifying prospect, I never suspected that the Bible had so much to say about it.
And as far as I know, the parish church world where I was a minister and popular piety didn’t know either.
Creation is Hard
I’m imagining a reader of this essay thinking that it is impossible to miss creation. Just look around. We see a beautiful world in which the drama of God’s work saving people is played out.
Creation is a given. What’s to miss?
Here’s how I would approach that question. Think again about those two theological spheres: creation and redemption. Redemption deals with the remedy or restoration of a broken situation. In biblical religion, the vocation of Israel and later, the ministry of Jesus Christ are usually considered aspects of God’s redemption of the world.
Creation deals with God’s work in bringing all things and all people into existence in the first place. It’s the creation side of biblical faith that may appear to be finished.
But what I’m learning is that we’ve moved much too hastily in seeing creation as finished and secondary. We know that the world exists and is the stage on which we live our lives. Creation is where the drama of salvation is played out.
But what is Creation’s destiny? Is it like elaborate packaging that is discarded after a few elect believers are evacuated off to heaven? Or does God have a relationship with the animals and planets and peoples other than Israel and the Christians who followed them?
Also, what is creation’s character? Is it good or evil? How does the creator continue to relate to what he has created?
What I am proposing is that Christianity has so emphasized redemption—mostly the restoration that comes through the life and sacrifice of Jesus—that the character and destiny of the created world have fallen away.
In turn, what I’m proposing, together with a chorus of theologians and Old Testament scholars is a move back to creation as an important part of biblical faith and as a resource that sheds a revealing light on the mess we’re in with global warming.
The Ranch
I don’t remember when I first thought of this image, the image of the Ranch. Imagine a huge ranch like the giant spreads in the American Southwest or in Australia.
This imaginary ranch is big enough to enclose a variety of terrains. It has mountains, plains, and forests. In turn, our ranch can support all kinds of activities. Maybe there is horse breeding, cattle grazing, oil drilling, recreational camping, crops, and pastures. Imagine further that the family who owns the ranch lives in a large home on a corner of the property with a vegetable garden. At any given time, the family probably occupies itself in one or two activities on their ranch. They may be cultivating their cattle herd or pursuing a logging operation.
One day one of the children in the family may take a hike or mount a horse and ride into the mountains on their family’s property.
The mountains prove to be beautiful and a wonderful adventure. Maybe the family member resolves to build a cabin or personal retreat in a scenic spot. The child may just as easily have ridden to a place where black oil is seeping out of the ground and get excited about setting up an oil well.
As generations come and go, the occupants of the ranch may emphasize a variety of pursuits and allow others to fall into inactivity.
The Diversity of Biblical Faith
Biblical faith is much like the ranch. Christians in one generation can only inhabit a few of their faith’s great principles or traditions. Other important principles or traditions of faith fall away from attention due to a necessary neglect.
The church can only pay attention to a few aspects of its faith and must leave to its children or successors to discover or re-discover others.
But before launching into hasty conclusions about pastors’ obtuseness and congregations’ shallowness, we can take comfort from the fact that even the most incisive academics were surprisingly slow to recognize that creation had dropped out of their working theology. If churches have not caught up with the professors, the professors themselves recognized the “eclipse” of creation amazingly slowly.
One little remark by Old Testament scholar, Terence Fretheim, shines a powerful light on creation’s “eclipse:”
“It took some time before I fully realized that creation is a much more fundamental substratum of Old Testament theological reflection than most scholars imagine.”[1]
How We Managed to Minimize Creation
Like a good Agatha Christie mystery novel, there are multiple suspects who may be responsible for creation’s demise. I’ll name 4:
- The Old Testament itself. Such a small portion of the Bible is dedicated to the story of the creation of the world, maybe as little as the first two chapters. The conclusion that biblical religion is about being rescued from sin is implied by the relative amount of ink that is devoted to the redemption side of the creation-redemption binary. What readers miss is that the words and images used in Genesis 1 and 2 are sprinkled throughout the Bible. The creational dividing of water crops up in several places, notably in the parting of the Red Sea and Jordan River. The superficial reading of the Bible and the preaching pattern of only discussing a few verses at a time prevents Christians from noticing themes, like creation, threading through multiple books, and even the two testaments.
- Old Testament Scholarship. This is a complex one which is ably discussed here.Put simplistically, German theologians seeking a theological response to the natural (blood and soil) theology of Nazism, affirmed that the heart of the Old Testament was redemption and that the theological first book was Exodus, which describes the rescue and formation of Israel. This outlook has lingered in academic Old Testament studies and was only set aside with the rise of Creation theology.
- The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy. Scientific developments in the 19th century, notably Darwin’s writings about natural selection and the scientific study of literature, created a monumental crisis of faith for Americans in the early 20th century. There seemed to be at that time an intractable conflict between scientific accounts for the development of the planet and life forms and the biblical idea that God created everything. The level of emotion and conflict evident in such media events as the Scope’s Trial and the split in the faculty at Princeton Theological Seminary overshadowed any close sensitive reading of the Bible’s creation accounts. That God made everything became a weapon to be used to defend Christianity against the perceived encroachment of science. Even today, for a Christian to be interested in “creation” is perceived as a signal of interest in creationism.
- The New Calvinism. In 2009, Time magazine listed Calvinism as one of the 10 ideas changing the world. The year before Collin Hansen published Young, Restless, and Reformed describing the evangelicalism’s surging interest in Calvinism. Calvinism is a religion of absolutes: God’s totalizing sovereignty, which knows everything and directs everything. The Calvinistic (Reformed) outlook focuses on predestination, which insists that God has determined everyone’s destiny as saved or condemned even before God created the first thing. As it turns out, a nuanced theology of creation moves in the opposite direction. A careful read of Genesis’ first two chapters gives us divine attributes of omnipotence and omniscience that are much less absolute. Further, the scope of redemption in Creation theology moves beyond the reformed preoccupation with personal salvation.
So, when George Hendry says to a gathering of theologians that they’ve forgotten Creation and that popular piety has forgotten it, such a discovery is both jarring and believable.
What Difference Would It Make If We Paid More Attention to Creation?
So, I’ve said we’ve neglected creation, or more accurately a biblical theology of creation. What is to be learned if we start to focus on it?
It turns out that the first two chapters of Genesis bristle with details that appreciably change how we typically think of the world. For example, it’s not entirely clear that the Creator brought everything into being ex nihilo, out of nothing. Neither is it explicit that God created alone. Genesis 1.11 and 1.20 suggest that the earth and seas participated in the creation process.
Genesis 1.27 not only hints at other participants in creation in the word “us,” but also ushers in humanity whose vocation is primarily creational. Humans become namers of the animals in Genesis 2, a task that God had in Chapter 1. The fact of 7 days hints at creation as a process. The ambiguity of the divine pronouncement of the world’s goodness, as opposed to perfection, offers a tantalizing hint that maybe there is creation work yet to do.
Beyond Genesis’s first two chapters, the Bible is sprinkled with creational language that suggests that creation or the defeat of creation is an ongoing drama. The Genesis Flood, for example, seems to be a comprehensive rollback of God’s creative work.
Each of these points—and there are many more—deserves careful consideration. This work has been brilliantly done by Old Testament scholar, Terence Fretheim whose work merits a prominent place in the scholarly awakening that I discussed at the beginning of this essay.
What Moving Creation Out of the Shadows Means Today
Here’s what I’m saying in a few sentences. Christianity—churches, theologians, and popular devotional practice—have gotten into the habit of emphasizing redemption over creation.
We’ve become humanity-centered and consigned the rest of creation to the status of a backdrop.
Some Christian groups insist that God’s concern extends only to a few people or even just the souls of the elect. In the last few decades, a growing number of theologians and biblical scholars have worked to renew biblical religion’s embrace of God’s work as the Creator. The environmental crisis in the 1960s and 1970s and now the climate crisis have laid bare the church’s impoverished view of the world. And more positively, careful study of the scriptures has revealed that creation plays a much more profound role in the Bible than we’ve commonly known.
One expression that biblical scholars use sheds much light on this recovery of creation. Creation gives us a “new horizon.” A horizon is the limit of our view. Now if we look back we see that the beginning of the story is not the deliverance from Egypt, but the creation of the world. If we look forward, we see that the future is not a few souls being evacuated off to heaven, but the restoration of creation. We can extend the horizon metaphor by suggesting that even when the story of deliverance is intense and vivid as when God rescues his people at the Red Sea, there is an understructure of ongoing creation also at work. In that instance, God is still bringing order to chaotic waters.
Fome Final Thoughts
If what I’m trying to say is true, the implications are immense.
I’ll give three:
- Much study is needed beginning with the first two chapters of Genesis. It’s humbling to admit that I’ve never noticed that Genesis might not support the idea that God created from nothing or that he created alone. Neither had I noticed that Creation while “good” is not perfect and unfinished. How much more explicit biblical material is there to be discovered and digested?
- A fresh understanding of biblical materials leads to adjustments in one’s theology and personal faith. The simple principle that God intends to redeem all that God creates deprives us of the intellectual crutch of damnation. The circle of God’s concern goes beyond me and my crowd or the limited number of people who seem to be on their way to heaven. Suddenly, animals, non-Christians, and inanimate objects all have value and some kind of relationship with their creator and this insight needs to be incorporated into our working faith. Within the Christian world, Universalism, orthodoxy, open-relational, and process thinking look pretty insightful to those studying creation. Beyond Christianity, Judaism, and possibly Buddhism both get a boost from creation theology. The Augustinian-Calvinist thread in Christianity fares poorly as creation rises in prominence.
- Christian mission, ethics, and spirituality are energized by the insight that God continues in an intimate relationship with creation, brings order to chaos, and works with people toward the restoration of all things. Creation theology provides vivid answers to the question, “What is God doing right now.”
- And since we began with the climate crisis, I’ll end there. The living world is collapsing because the developed, industrialized societies have disregarded the world’s divine origin and destiny. Clearly, the church has been seduced by a market-centered social order that sees the world instrumentally. By that I mean that we are in the habit of seeing nature only in ways that support economic growth and the wants of elites. Even science holds a greater reverence for nature and its intricate balances. The time has come and passed for biblical faith to break with a social order bent on plundering and discarding what God has made and continues to make in our midst.
[1] Fretheim, Terence E. God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation (Kindle Locations 85-86). Abingdon Press. Kindle Edition. 2005.
