At the Dawn of the New Creation

Christian theology in the West seems at a loss in dealing with the environmental crisis that threatens our earthly home. The medieval mind conceived of all things, including one's own body, as comprised of four elements: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. A person was a part of these, and they of that person. But the modern Western mind studies these elements as a detached observer, even predicting their future. Those I predictions are ominous.

Earth--the thin strata of soil supporting our life--is being diminished far more rapidly than it is being replenished. Erosion washes soil away, chemicals burn it out, urbanization buries it under pavement, strip mining tears it apart, rural gentrification turns it into luxury turf, and cash cropping colonizes it to satisfy the tastes of the rich rather than the hungers of the poor.

Water--which brings the earth to life and flows through our bodies--is being drained away dramatically enough to make the cover of Newsweek. Sixty-one billion gallons per day soak into the ground from the sky; 82 billion gallons are withdrawn from ground water each day and used with a faith which seems to assume that turning a faucet manufactures H20.

Air--which covers the earth with a protective shield and moves in and out of our bodies with each life-giving breath--is being invaded with poisonous wastes. Because they rise up in smoke, we think the wastes rise away from us not to return. But return they do, as smog, acid rain, and other noxious pollutants.

Fire--that which burns material to transform its energy into work as well as waste--has been employed by modern societies at such an accelerated rate that the supply of most combustible materials is now measured in decades rather than centuries. The economic engine of those societies, built to burn cheap fuel fast, now sputters, misses, and stalls from the burden of increasing shortages and escalating prices of traditional sources of energy. The possibility of improving life in impoverished societies by relying on the engine of affluent economies has become a mockery.

Modern Christian theology finds itself largely speechless in the face of this picture. Secular environmentalists, philosophers, historians, and naturalists put theology on the defensive by laying the blame for the deterioration of earth, water, air, and fire at the trampling feet of the church. They charge that the church's encouragement of human dominion over nature, its rejection of animism, and its disregard for the material in favor of the spiritual have initiated a disastrous cleavage between nature and humanity.

Unlike civil rights, Vietnam, and the bomb, opposition to environmental degradation has found no easy or natural alliance with the church, liberal or conservative. The response which the church has offered--apart from the crass theology typified by Interior Secretary James Watt in suggesting he is following a biblical injunction to "occupy the land"--has attempted to apply ideas of justice and stewardship regarding the use of the earth's resources. These responses, while valuable for their sensitivity and intention, seem weak and lacking. The emphasis remains on the use of resources by humanity, rather than on the relationship between humanity and the created order. Stressing the biblical call for good stewardship can degenerate quickly into an appeal for better management. Our relationship to the created world remains locked in managerial terms marked more by detachment and calculation than by involvement and participation.

Why has the church's voice on environmental concerns been so muted? Why has its theology appeared so ill-equipped to deal with environmental challenges?

Part of the problem, it seems to me, lies not so much with theology and the Bible as with the evolution of the modern worldview and its influence over all things, including theology.

Today we commonly think in ways and categories which we assume to be the way people have always thought about their world. But that is not the case. The outlook of the modern Western mind is radically different from the medieval outlook, or that of biblical times. And this difference in outlook--our way of understanding the world today--colors and distorts the way we think other people at other times understood their world.

Let me explain in generalizations that beg for forgiveness from any historian, but which may help us understand what has transpired in the way we think. The modern mind has its roots in detachment of the person from the phenomena of the world in order to objectively observe and understand them and thereby gain control. Thus, Francis Bacon established the scientific method, Rene Descartes extended mathematics into understanding nature's functioning, and Isaac Newton mathematically explained the laws of motion. The mechanical paradigm of the world that emerged removed God as the explanation of and force within the functioning of the world.

Developed further, this way of thinking about the world led to an entrenched materialist view of reality. At its core the world consists of particles, arranged in various ways and functioning according to certain laws, which constitute the objects--some with life and some without--that we see, observe, and interact with. Even though physics today repudiates such a view, it still retains a popular hold on modern understanding.

Once Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and others liberated God from running the world of nature, John Locke set God free from the task of upholding government and society. Natural reason and self-interest would suffice, which was heartily condoned and blessed by Adam Smith in constructing an economics without God.

Philosophers still struggled for a proper domain of God, principally in humanity's hopes, desires, and historical destiny. But Louis Feuerbach severed those from God, claiming they were mere projections. And Karl Marx proceeded logically with an agenda of history and destiny dependent upon humanity's "reality" rather than its illusions. Charles Darwin, a contemporary of Marx, removed God from creation itself. The immediate popularity of his ideas was due in large part to the evolving desire of the modern mind to answer the question of ultimate origin non-theistically.

A last refuge for God was sought in the human psyche--our feelings, emotions, and inner self. But Sigmund Freud banished God from that domain.

Thus the modern mindset in its understanding of the world, nature, reality, history, and the self has peeled away the necessity and the assumption of God's existence or of God's relationship to anything that matters.

This is not to suggest that the contributions of such seminal thinkers lack any truth, validity, or value. Those contributions are evident. But we must be honest in saying that the modern mind, developed over the past few recent centuries, has constructed a view of reality and life as if God is not.

From this perspective, we tend to think that enlightened minds merely discarded the belief in God as a practical matter, for it no longer seemed necessary. But that view is far too simple and culture-bound. What changed fundamentally was one's relationship to the world.

The medieval mind assumed that the appearance of things in the world were representations of a deeper reality, but a reality to which a person was also related. Perceiving phenomena involved participation in them. Thus, phenomena seen or experienced were regarded as appearances of a reality which included the person perceiving them. That accounts, for example, for the easy interplay of what the modern mind calls the "real" and the supernatural, or superstitious, in the painting of medieval art.

All that was radically changed by the scientific revolution, and the evolution of the modern mind. The self was seen as separate from the world, and the world was seen as the sum total of particles which could be observed, analyzed, and controlled. The intrinsic participation of the person in the phenomena being observed was simply denied, and the world "out there" was externalized and objectified.

Against the backdrop of this mindset, modern theology has attempted to make God understandable on a seemingly godless stage.

This is not to suggest a wholesale return to the medieval worldview. There is no normative culture in history free from its particular idolatries. However, we should recognize how thoroughly the modern age has captivated our thinking, alienating us from the earth and suffocating a biblical understanding of humanity's intended relationship to creation.

Given this understanding of the evolution in conscious thought, criticism of the church's response to the environmental crisis is suddenly thrown into a different light. It was not Christianity which instituted the division of humanity from nature, giving impetus to the free reign of technology over nature, with its lamentable results. That division is rather the consequence of the modern mind freeing itself from a religious perspective and setting out to manipulate and control the events of nature and the world.

Yet contemporary Christian theology has had very little to say about what the environment's relationship to ourselves and to God might be. We must still ask further what accounts for this silence.

Faced with the pressure of modern thought eliminating the assumption of God as the starting point, theology has been largely reactive. Fundamentalism drew the battle line between the Bible and Darwin. The result was that Darwin came to be regarded as inspired, if not inerrant, by all who were not fundamentalists.

Those who believed in the Bible found little success in challenging the modern worldview and gradually lost interest in conclusively refuting it. Rather, their faith was known and experienced in almost exclusively personal terms. God saved them from the world. Worldly came to mean sinful. Society around them seemed hostile to fundamentalist Christianity, and they took refuge in God's judgment of the world and God's salvation of their souls.

Though this stance, of course, was not historically unique in the church's history, its adaptation to the modern age has had a striking influence on fundamentalist and evangelical thinking. A radical separation between the material and the spiritual fractured the worldview of many Bible-believing Christians. And naturally, they read this outlook back into the Bible.

The modern age declared that reality was only matter, and that only it mattered. Evangelicals, in response, decided that if matter was only matter, then it didn't matter. Once the scientific modern view had emptied the world of God, fundamentalist Christian faith saw little reason to save the world.

Liberal Christianity, on the other hand, did want to save the world, while at the same time trying to accommodate Christian belief to what the modern age was declaring fact and truth. Its agenda sought to locate God in the evolutionary progress of human history. The gospel became social rather than "otherworldly" and spiritual. Faith in God became faith in the ability of the social order to evolve into the kingdom of God. But as the 20th century unfolded, those tenets became increasingly suspect and dubious.

Karl Barth then entered the scene with a theology of crisis and the Word that shattered liberal Protestantism and dramatically shaped the contours of contemporary theology.

Barth asserted that the initiative in Christian faith is always with God, not with humanity. God reveals, God addresses, God acts, God saves. This initiative of grace judges, humbles, and devastates humanity's idolatrous attempts to know God, please God, or be like God. The Word of God addresses humanity over-against human culture, history, and activity.

Barth stressed that the contemporary age--indeed, any age--cannot know God through reason, through the observation of the natural world, or through a faith in the progress of history. He decisively rejected natural theology, the view that humanity's reason applied to understanding the natural order leads to a knowledge of God. God transcends us and the world; God is beyond our human ability to manipulate; God comes to us through saving grace.

This stance was critical when applied by Barth to the state, politics, and culture. The attempt of humanity to see God's spirit expressed in a given culture, and to use God for sanctifying a state's political order was utter idolatry, in Barth's view, and fraught with the most terrible consequences. Barth and his followers witnessed this in the rise of National Socialism in Germany, and they formulated the, Barmen Confession and the Confessing Church in response.

However, by so accentuating God's separation from the world, Barth's neo-orthodox theology seems to offer little point of contact for relating environmental concerns to the imperatives of Christian faith. Despite its very significant contribution to contemporary Christian thought, Barthian theology focused only on God's relationship to humanity. Therein lies its inability to respond to the environmental challenge. In its fervency to reject natural theology, Barthian theology has deprived the Christian of any basis for constructing a theology of nature.

It may be that the countercultural critique inspired by Barth, which casts biblical judgment on consumerism, industrialization, urbanization, technology, and militarism, holds the seeds of a theology which affirms the environment as God's good creation. When Jacques Ellul was asked why he stayed at the University of Bordeaux, he replied, reportedly, that it was because he so enjoyed the landscape of the French countryside. Yet no theology of creation has yet been articulated by those who are recovering the over-againstness of the gospel to culture in our time.

How then might we proceed in constructing a theology that recovers a biblical message to mold and guide our relationship to creation, in the face of environmental peril? Let me simply suggest five points which might help push our reflection toward this goal.

Nature and God
First, the Bible speaks of no radical separation between the material and the spiritual. The cleavage assumed to exist between humanity and nature is a product of modern Enlightenment thought rather than the Bible. The Bible does not even have a word for what we mean by "the world of nature." The biblical writers did not conceive of nature as an autonomous realm without relationship to humanity or to God. There is no word in Hebrew for "nature." The biblical view, in the clear words of theologian Joseph Sitler (Nature and Grace), is that "nature comes from God, cannot be apart from God, and is capable of bearing the 'glory' of God."

The evidence from scripture is abundant: "The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein," says the psalmist (Psalm 24:1). Likewise, "The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork" (Psalm 19:1). Throughout the Old Testament we find hymns witnessing to God's glory in the creation and relationship to it. One of the most moving is Psalm 104 which, speaking of the earth's creatures, concludes:

All of them look expectantly to thee
to give them their food at the proper time;
what thou givest them they gather up;
When thou openest thy hand, they eat their fill.
Then thou hidest thy face, and they are restless and troubled;
When thou takest away their breath, they fail
(and they return to the dust from which they came);
But when thou breathest into them, they recover;
Thou givest new life to the earth.
May the glory of the Lord stand forever
And may [God] rejoice in [God's] work!
(Psalm 104:27-31 NEB)

As Christians, we never will be able to fully understand creation by positing a "world of nature" existing independently from God and detached from ourselves. Such a position is an affront to the modern mind and method, but one that is necessary.

Second, the Bible does not give humanity a sanction to dominate nature which justifies reckless, wasteful, or selfish exploitation of the environment.

The startling fact is that the Bible speaks rarely about the concept of humanity's dominion over other aspects of the creation. Only two references are found, Genesis 1:28 and Psalm 8:5-6. These have been the proof texts of the industrial age's attitude towards the resources of creation. Adam Smith and Karl Marx alike have regarded nature as nothing more than the warehouse supplying the raw materials for the transformation of society and history.

Other texts, though stronger and more coherent in their message about humanity's relationship to nature, have been overlooked, ignored, or suppressed from modern consciousness. The creation account in the second chapter of Genesis, with its emphasis on tending and serving the earth (Genesis 2:1-25), prohibits any exclusive understanding of unbridled mastery over nature as the message of Genesis. The thrust of the creation story shows instead how humanity's life is intrinsically woven into the fabric of God's creation.

But more significantly, both Genesis verses mentioning humanity's dominion see humanity created in the image or likeness of God. Genesis 1:26 reads, "Let us make man in our image and likeness to rule the fish in the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all wild animals on earth, and all reptiles that crawl upon the earth." Psalm 8, reflecting on creation and wondering about the human person's significance in the. face of creation's wonders, answers, "Yet, thou hast made him little less than a god, crowning him with glory and honor. Thou makest him master over all thy creatures." Then the psalmist echoes the Genesis list of oxen, wild beasts, birds, and fish.

The concept of humanity's dominion over other parts of creation occurs only in the context of humanity's creation in God's image. Thus humanity exercises this dominion only as God would--God who creates, sustains, upholds, and is glorified in all creation. That seems quite different from supposing that humanity's dominion is a justification for, say, strip mining. The "war against nature" mentality so evidenced by the effects of modern technology would seem to be the opposite of humanity's dominion over nature in the likeness of God.

The Fall disrupted not only humanity's relation to God, but also its relationship to God's creation. Construing dominion to mean having all power over creation reflects the desire to be "like God" and the central fact of sin and the Fall. Sin began, after all, with humanity deciding to ignore God and do what it pleased with God's creation.

Third, in the experience of the people of Israel with the land, we find a model of the promise and peril in humanity's relationship to creation.

The Old Testament is not merely the revelation of God's dealing with his people abstractly or existentially. It is the holy record of the relationship between that people, the creation, and Yahweh. Relationship to the creation focuses around the land. Old Testament scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann (The Land) goes so far as to say, "The Bible itself is primarily concerned with the issue of being displaced and yearning for a place.... Land is a central, if not the central theme of biblical faith."

Crucial to the Old Testament story is that a particular portion of creation--the land--is promised as God's gift. It is the domain of Yahweh, entrusted to the people only because of Yahweh's faithfulness to them not because of their power or coercion.

But the warning of the prophets is that the land has a seductive power. The temptation is to cling to it, possess it, manage it, rule over it, and own it--to treat it as though it were one's own domain, rather than to cherish it and only tentatively hold it as Yahweh's gift.

The kings typically wanted to accumulate and control the land, which prompted prophetic warnings. A central illustrative story is that of Ahab and Naboth in 1 Kings 21. Two conflicting views toward the land and creation are revealed. King Ahab proposed that he buy Naboth's vineyard. But to Naboth it was unthinkable to sell the land of his inheritance, the land given, through his forefathers, by Yahweh. At Jezebel's prompting, Naboth was killed, and Ahab confiscated the vineyard. Elijah went to Ahab pronouncing the word of the Lord: "Have you killed your man and taken his land as well?" (1 Kings 21:19). Then Elijah pronounced the Lord's judgment on Ahab. The prophet Micah pointed out the sin of coveting of the land, attempting to possess creation for one's own power and aggrandizement: "Shame on those who lie in bed planning evil and wicked deeds and rise at daybreak to do them, knowing that they have the power. They covet land and take it by force" (Micah 2:1-2).

The gift of land to the people of Israel was conditional, dependent upon living within that land as if it were Yahweh's and they were Yahweh's people. But because they forgot this, choosing instead to possess the land as if it were their own, they lost it. That is the judgment announced by Jeremiah.

Israel's relationship to the land can portray humanity's relationship to creation. Saving that creation and our place within it can come only by treating it as God's gift rather than our possession.

Fourth, in the New Testament, the work of Christ's redemption is extended to the creation.

Christ not only restores and reconciles our relationship to God, he also restores our broken relationship to creation. Indeed, only the modern mind would suppose that these were not interdependent.

This theme is not absent from the Old Testament by any means. Isaiah 11, for example, depicts a harmony between the creatures of creation--the wolf, the lamb, the lion, the leopard, the calf--when the earth is "full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea" (Isaiah 11:9).

In John we read that through Christ "all things came to be; no single thing was created without him" (John 1:3). The involvement of Christ in creation means, for the New Testament, that the work of Christ's redemption is extended to all creation.

Moving passages in Paul make this involvement explicit. In the first chapter of Colossians, for example, we read concerning Christ that:

His is the primacy over all created things. In him everything in heaven and on earth was created, not only things visible but also the invisible orders of thrones, sovereignties, authorities, and powers; the whole universe has been created through him and for him. And he exists before everything and all things are held together in him.... Through him God chose to reconcile the whole universe to himself, making peace through the shedding of his blood upon the cross—to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven, through him alone. (Colossians 1:15-20)

Ephesians carries the same message. God's hidden purpose is that "the universe, all in heaven and earth, might be brought into a unity in Christ" (Ephesians 1:10).

In Hebrews 2, we read the passage from Psalm 8. However, the writer then explains that humanity has failed the task of dominion, but that we see Jesus, "who for a short while was made lower than the angels, crowned now with glory and honor" (Hebrews 2:9). The meaning is that Jesus is to carry out the reign over all creation. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul further applies this same point to Christ. Old Testament references about creation being subject to God and hopefully, in God's image, to humanity, are proclaimed to mean that all creation is subject to Christ.

Most stirring of all is Paul's passage in Romans 8. Culminating Paul's most thorough and brilliant explanation of the work of God's grace in Christ, he declares:

For the created universe waits with eager expectation for God's children to be revealed. It was made the victim of frustration.... yet always there was hope, because the universe itself is to be freed from the shackles of mortality and enter upon the liberty and splendor of the children of God. (Romans 8:19-22)

Christ's death and resurrection reconcile us not only to God but to creation. Our new life in Christ consists of a restored relationship to both God and creation. We as people in the body of Christ, and all of creation, move toward the fulfillment and wholeness intended for everything through Christ.

There is no need to restore a natural theology in this framework, asserting that God is revealed in nature without or apart from the incarnation of Christ. Rather, we can construct a theology of and for nature, and of creation since, in Sitler's words, "the hand of God the Creator, which is the hand of the Son, should be seen, following the Incarnation, also in nature." We begin with the grace of God in Christ, but move from there to Christ's presence and work of redemption in all creation, making all things new.

Fifth, the resurrection of Christ's body means emphatically that this world, the stuff of our bodies and of this earthly creation, is transformed, renewed, and fashioned into a new creation through God's power and grace. We are not delivered from this world, nor are we simply assured of a greater spiritual reality lying beyond this world. Rather, the resurrection means that the power of sin and death is defeated and overcome in this world, at the heart of the creation.

Our new life in Christ has its roots and bears its first fruits within our own broken and mortal lives. Likewise, the new life in Christ for all creation begins with this creation, within its mortal brokenness. Moreover, these are not separate spheres of Christ's redemptive activity, as though humanity and nature are disjointed. It is the one activity of restoring all things in the universe into unity with the Creator.

Those who have fought the hardest to preserve the truth of the bodily resurrection of Christ as a doctrine would do well to realize the meaning of this belief for a theology of creation, especially in a time of environmental emergency.

The body of Jesus--the earthly life of the incarnate son--triumphed over the power of sin and death and offers the promise of new life to the whole of the created world. I think of John's account of Jesus on the shore while the disciples are out fishing once again after the crucifixion. He is on the beach, beside the sea, with a fire, cooking breakfast. The disciples come, and he serves them fish and bread. Earth, water, air, and fire are integrated, whole, and redeemed. Christ then said to those that loved him, "Follow me."

He invites us all to breakfast with him at the dawn of the new creation.

Wesley Granberg-Michaelson lived in Missoula, Montana, and was a part-time associate for global resources and environment for the Reformed Church in America when this article appeared.