The Horizontal Relationship Of Humans To Other Creatures As Fellow-Creatures

The interpretation of Genesis 1:26–8 isolates it from the rest of Scripture and from the relevance other parts of Scripture may have to understanding the human relationship with other creatures. We have made a start in remedying that by looking at ways in which that text’s context in the Torah helps us to understand what the human dominion means. We have also seen, from Job, that the Bible contains a powerful antidote to

the hubris engendered by an arrogant and exaggerated view of ourselves as wielding some kind of godlike sovereignty over the rest of God’s creation – as though it were our creation, not God’s. God’s answer to Job puts us in our place as a creature among other creatures and in a cosmos that has its own meaning and value independently of us.

In order to develop further the sense in which we need to complement the idea of dominion with a much stronger sense of co-creatureliness, we shall introduce two further biblical themes that deserve our attention alongside the Genesis dominion. These themes help us to put the Genesis dominion itself in its place as one of several ways in which the Bible understands humans to be related to the rest of creation.

Crucially, these two themes develop are meant for the horizontal relationship of humans to other creatures as fellow-creatures. They help us to balance the vertical with the horizontal.

The first theme is ‘humanity within the community of creation’.

The Bible fully recognizes the extent to which nature is a living

whole to which human beings along with other creatures belong, sharing the earth with other creatures of God, participating, for good or ill, in the interconnectedness of the whole. In Genesis 9, the covenant God makes after the flood is not only with Noah and his descendants but also with every living creature:

it is for the sake of them all that God promises there will never again be a universal deluge. But the great creation psalm, Psalm 104, is probably the most effective biblical portrayal of God’s creation as a community of creatures.

In some ways Psalm 104 resembles Job 38 – 39. Both begin with poetic evocations of God’s initial creation of the world, more like each other than either is like Genesis 1, and both move smoothly from there into a panoramic view of the parts and members of creation. Both deny humans a place of supremacy or exceptionality. But Psalm 104 puts us in our place in the world in a much gentler way than God’s answer to Job. Here there is no sense that human hubris needs shattering.

Rather there is a sense that within the praise of God for his creation we fall naturally into the place he has given us alongside his other creatures.

In Psalm 104 we see creation as a community of many living creatures, each with their place in the world given them by God their Creator, each given by God the means of sustenance for their different forms of life. It is a wonderfully diverse creation, and within this diversity humans appear simply as one of the many kinds of living creatures for whom God provides. What gives wholeness to this reading of the world is not human mastery of it or the value humans set on it, not (in contemporary terms) globalization, but the value of all created things for God. This is a theocentric, not an anthropocentric world. God’s own rejoicing in his works (v. 31) funds the psalmist’s own rejoicing (v. 34), as he praises God, not merely for human life and creation’s benefits for humans, but for God’s glory seen in the whole creation. In a different way from Job’s, the psalmist is taken out of himself, lifted out of the limited human preoccupations that dominate most of our lives, by his contemplation of the rest of God’s plenitude of creatures.

Psalm 104 is one of several biblical passages that state that God provides for all living creatures (Ps. 147:9,15–16; Job 38:19–41; Matt. 6:26). In these passages there is the implication that the resources of the earth are sufficient for all, provided creatures live within created limits. This theme of God’s provision was taken up by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, when he compared humanity with the birds and the wild flowers (Matt. 6:25–34). Here we find that Jesus has very much made his own the psalmist’s understanding of the world as a common home for living creatures, in which God provides for all their needs. The consequence Jesus draws – from the psalmist’s vision of the world to advice on how his disciples should live – is that we need have no anxieties about day-to-day material needs, but should live by radical faith in the Father’s provision for us. Because the generous and wise Creator takes care of all these things for us, we are free to give our attention instead to seeking God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness in the world.

Jesus holds up for us the example of the birds, for whom God provides, as he does for all his creatures. But Jesus adds a reflection not in the psalm: ‘Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them’ (Matt. 6:26). Interpretations of this verse have varied from supposing that Jesus contrasts the birds, who do not work, with people, who do – if God feeds even the idle birds, how much more will he provide for people who work hard for their living? – to, alternatively, supposing that Jesus compares the birds, who do not work, with his disciples, who do not work either. The point is probably neither of these. Rather it is that, because the birds do not have to labour to process their food from nature, but just eat it as they find it, their dependence on the Creator’s provision is the more immediate and obvious. Humans, preoccupied with the daily toil of supplying their basic needs, may easily suppose that it is up to them to supply themselves with food. This is the root of the anxiety about basic needs that Jesus is showing to be unnecessary. The way humans get their food allows them to focus on their own efforts and to neglect the fact that, much more fundamentally, they are dependent, like the birds, on the resources of creation without which no one could sow, reap or gather into barns. The illusion is even easier in modern urban life. But the birds, in their more obvious dependence on the Creator, remind us that ultimately we are no less dependent on the Creator.

Of course, Jesus was speaking of basic needs. The presuppositions of his theology are very far from the wasteful excess and the constant manufacture of new needs and wants in contemporary consumer society. Jesus intended to liberate his disciples from that anxious insecurity about basic needs that drives people to feel that they never have enough. But in our society that instinctive human anxiety about having enough to survive has long been superseded by the drive to ever-increasing affluence and obsessive anxiety to maintain an everrising standard of living. It is this obsessive consumption that is depleting the resources of nature and depriving both other species and many humans of the means even to survive.

Belonging to the community of creation must for us mean living within limits, and the psalmist and Jesus assist us to do so, both by reminding us of our place within the community of God’s creatures and by encouraging us to recognize God’s caring provision for all his creatures.

The Praise of God by All Creation

Arguably the most profound and life-changing way in which we can recover our place in the world as creatures alongside our fellow-creatures is through the biblical theme of the worship that all creation offers to God. There are many passages in the Psalms (e.g. Ps. 19:1–3; 97:6; 98:7–8; and especially 148) that depict all God’s creatures worshipping him, and the theme is taken up in the New Testament too (Phil. 2:10; Rev. 5:13). According to the Bible, all creatures, animate

and inanimate, worship God. This is not, as modern biblical interpreters have sometimes supposed, merely a poetic fancy or some kind of animism that endows all creatures with consciousness.

The creation worships God just by being itself, as God made it, existing for God’s glory. Only humans desist from worshipping God; other creatures, without having to think about it, do so all the time. A lily does not need to do anything specific in order to praise God; still less need it be conscious of anything. Simply by being and growing it praises God. It is distinctively human to bring praise to conscious expression in words, but the creatures remind us that this distinctively human form of praise is worthless unless, like them, we also live our whole lives to the glory of God.

It is indeed distinctively human to bring praise to conscious expression in words, but the Bible does not make of this the notion that the other creatures somehow need us to voice their praise for them. That idea, that we are called to act as priests to nature, mediating, as it were, between nature and God, is quite often found in recent Christian writing, but in my view it intrudes our inveterate sense of superiority exactly where the Bible will not allow it. Rather than supposing that other creatures need us to enable them to worship, we should think of the rest of creation assisting our worship. In Psalm 148, which is the fullest example of a psalm in which all creatures are called upon to praise their Creator, the praise begins with the angels and descends, through the heavenly bodies and the weather, to the creatures of earth, reaching humans only at the end of the whole movement. This order is not designed to make us inferior to all the other creatures, but it does give us the sense of a cosmos of creatures glorifying God already, before we ourselves join in. There is a whole universe of praise, a continuous anthem of glory, happening all around us if we choose to notice it. Attending to it can catch us up into the praise of the God who created all things and is reflected in all his creatures.

The key point is that, implicit in these depictions of the worship of creation, is the intrinsic value of all creatures, in the theocentric sense of the value given them by their Creator and offered back to him in praise. In this context, our place is beside our fellow-creatures as fellow- worshippers. In the praise in which we gratefully confess ourselves creatures of God there is no place for hierarchy. Creatureliness levels us all before the otherness of the Creator. It would be very good if we could restore to our Christian worship today something that was more common in the Christianity of the past: ways of consciously situating our own worship within the worship that all our fellow-creatures constantly give to God. Nothing could better restore our sense of creatureliness, and our recognition that the rest of creation is not mere material for us to use by making it into something more useful to us, but a creation that exists for the glory of God, as we are called to do.

This idea of worshipping our Creator along with all the other creatures really has nothing in common with nature worship, of which some modern Christians seem to be pathologically afraid. It is true that in the biblical tradition nature has been de-divinized. It is not divine, but God’s creation. But that does not make it nothing more than material for human use. Nature has been reduced to stuff that we can do with as we wish, not by the Bible, but by the modern age, with its rejection of God and its instrumentalizing of nature. The Bible has de-divinized nature, but it has not de-sacralized nature. Nature remains sacred in the sense that it belongs to God, exists for the glory of God, even reflects the glory of God, as humans also do. The respect, even the reverence, that other creatures inspire in us is just as it should be. It leads us not to worship creation (something that is scarcely a serious danger in the contemporary western world) but to worship with creation. According to chapter 5 of the book of Revelation, the goal of God’s creative and redemptive work is achieved when every creature in heaven, on earth, under the earth and in the sea joins in a harmony of praise to God and the Lamb (5:13).