CREATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

CREATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The Bible starts with the powerful proclamation: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1). We proclaim this truth every time we recite the opening words of the Apostles’ Creed:

“I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth.”

This must be our starting point for any discussion of creation and the environment. Creation reveals God as “the heavens proclaim his righteousness and all peoples see his glory” (Ps 97:6; see also Rom 1:20).

As Creator, God is both distant from his creation and in an ongoing relationship with it. Understanding this helps us to avoid two errors. The first is pantheism, which sees God everywhere and in everything. Pantheism confuses the Creator with creation. The other is dualism, which sees God as having no continuing relationship with created life. But the Bible teaches that although God is transcendent, and thus apart from the world, he is still immanent, that is, intimately involved in the real world he has created. Psalm 104.5 affirms that he is the one who has “set the earth on its foundations”. Paul states that “all things” are created by God in Christ, who continues to hold “all things … together” (Col 1:16-17).

Human beings are given a special place in God’s creation because we are made in his image. Unfortunately, we Christians have sometimes been only too happy to assert this while forgetting that with privilege comes responsibility. We have sometimes used God’s command to Adam and Eve to “rule” or “have dominion” over the earth (Gen 1:26) to legitimise arrogant exploitation of nature. Critics claim that such emphases have resulted in an anthropocentric (humancentred) attitude. No wonder some Westerners have been leaning towards Hinduism and Buddhism, which they see as more biocentric (nature-centred) and therefore ecologically sensitive.

But we should be neither anthropocentric nor biocentric; we should be theocentric, acknowledging that the one in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) has assigned us the responsibility of caring for his creation. “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” (Ps 24:1). We are only caretakers. This relation between humanity and God’s earth is something that must be central to our environmental concern. Jeremiah underlines God’s ownership:

“With my great power and outstretched arm I made the earth and its people and the animals that are on it, and I give it to anyone I please” (Jer 27:5).

The other Christian teaching we must never forget when thinking about the environment is the adverse effects of the fall. We cannot simply celebrate God’s glorious creation and ignore the fact that creation has been affected by human sin. But the fall has not totally obliterated the goodness ascribed to creation by God. And, the fall does not give us any right to dismiss the present world and creation as evil and remain apart from it while we await a future renewal. We need to work to counter the environmental degradation caused by human sinfulness.

We must do our part, but must also recognise that God has planned the final restoration of this fallen creation. In Romans 8:20- 21, the Apostle Paul refers to creation being liberated from its bondage to decay. This is generally understood as a promised reversal of the curse that creation was subjected to as a consequence of human sin (Gen 3:17-19). In the book of Revelation, the Apostle John foresees “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev 21:1).

In working to restore the environment, we need to recognise that God has not given us a haphazard assembly of organic and inorganic matter, natural energy and resources. Creation consists of ecosystems that are intricately woven together in interdependent cycles. The survival of all of creation depends on protecting these interdependent relationships.

We are called to be stewards, protecting this intricately planned world God has entrusted to us. Even more, we are called to be “responsible stewards” (Gen 2:15; Matt 25:20-21; 1 Cor 4:2; 1 Pet 4:10). Responsible stewardship demonstrated through God’s love will result in practical actions to promote sustainable living as well as right attitudes towards the environment. As Bible-believing Christians, we are called to care for creation in order to protect, conserve and bring healing to our wounded world.

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Green Theology: Why Try to Preserve Biodiversity?

Why Try to Preserve Biodiversity?

Every day there are millions of interactions in nature that are essential for a healthy, functioning planet. Losing even a small species can have massive impacts on ecosystems and on humans. Environmentalists who advocate conservation, seeking to persuade others of its importance, tend to accumulate a variety of arguments, some of which may appeal to some people, others to others. This is a reasonable strategy in view of the fact that widespread support is necessary if the earth’s biodiversity is to be preserved to any significant extent. But perhaps the impression is too often given that most people are only going to be convinced by appeals to self-interested pragmatism, whereas these environmentalists themselves owe their passion for preserving biodiversity to other kinds of consideration.

There are, of course, many reasons why much of the natural world is useful to us. There are also good arguments to the effect that there are probably many benefits to us of which we are as yet unaware. Since a third of prescription medicines have been produced from chemical compounds found in plants and fungi, especially those of the tropical forests, it is more than likely that many of the thousands of species unique to very small areas of habitat in the rainforests – those that are disappearing daily before they can be discovered – will prove of pharmaceutical value in time, provided they survive.

However, the most recent trend in argument for conserving biodiversity is prompted by the recognition that it is economists who really run the world. One has the impression that for many environmentalists this is a sad recognition, born of disappointment. For some environmental scientists admitting that it is not scientists who rule the world is a bitter pill to swallow. Others are disillusioned idealists who have transformed themselves into hard-nosed players in the capitalist global marketplace.

In any case, we hear increasingly the slogan that people only value what they can put a monetary value on. It has spawned the extraordinarily ambitious attempt to evaluate the benefits of the biosphere, in other words to put a market price on what are called ecosystem services.

Ecosystem services are the direct and indirect services provided by ecosystems. Take, for example, the humble dung beetle, whose services to humanity we probably do not often think about. Dung beetles are invaluable to cattle-farming. ‘They prevent fouling of forage, promote dung decomposition into useful plant fertilizer, and reduce the populations of pests and flies.’ According to my source the ‘value of this service amounts to $US 380 million annually at 2006 prices’.[1] But in many cases it is not just the contribution of one species that counts, but the services of whole ecosystems. Forests soak up a lot of the CO₂ we emit. They remove pollutants from the atmosphere. Vegetation and soil biodiversity reduce flooding and release clean drinking water. Released in October 2010, the UN’s report known as TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) calculated that the real cost of damaging nature is at least ten times greater than the cost of maintaining the ecosystem as it is so that we can reap the associated benefits.

For example, setting up and running a comprehensive network of protected areas across the world would cost US$45 billion a year globally, but the benefits of preservation within these zones would be worth US$4–5 trillion a year. This report trumps the Stern report which did the same thing for climate change. TEEB claims that the financial case for preserving biodiversity is even stronger than the financial case for tackling climate change.

There are problems with such calculations (even if we could really suppose that they are more than wild guesses). Although they seek to play economists at their own game, for them to make any difference within the free market requires a revolution in the ways humans – not to say corporations – think about and do business. According to another report only two of the world’s hundred biggest companies believe that declining biodiversity is a strategic threat to their businesses.There is also a question about what kinds of biodiversity would benefit from taking these reckonings seriously as the basis for conservation. Consider the flagship endangered species, those that easily engage many people’s concerns.

Would it make any significant difference to the ecosystem services if the Yangtse river dolphin, the giant panda or the tiger disappeared? Even if one threw the profits of tourism into the calculations, would the monetary value of the ecosystem services be appreciably affected?

It is sometimes pointed out that these species, at least, have ‘existence value’ for many people. In other words, people just feel good about knowing such creatures exist, even if they never see them. What this really means is that people recognize intrinsic value in these creatures.

They recognize that it is good that such creatures exist, much as the Genesis creation account does. But the prevalent discourse that requires everything to be put into terms of human benefit and interest states this in the form of a value for people – existence value. It is somehow good for us that such creatures exist. As an attempted appeal to self-interest this seriously distorts the fact that people are actually recognizing some objective good, something that is good in itself and for its own sake, whether any of us feel good about it or not.

Here the believer has a big advantage, because the world of Genesis 1, for example, is not a human-centred world in which everything has to be justified as somehow in the interests of humans, but a God-centred world in which everything created has value for God. God’s appreciation of the natural world and all its members as good bestows intrinsic value on his creatures. That is also where human worth comes from.

I do not mean that believing that God values other creatures leads us to recognize value that we would otherwise, if we did not believe that about God, not recognize at all. I think, on the contrary, that people do recognize intrinsic good in other creatures, especially when it so to speak overtakes us, jolts us out of our more familiar egocentric attitude to the world – when, for example, the beauty of a landscape strikes and absorbs us, when the majesty of a tiger enthralls us, even when the cuteness of a giant panda charms us, when we marvel at the

intricate design of the smallest and ugliest of insects seen under a microscope.

For whereas many of us most of the time are not particularly entranced by the majority of the members of ecosystems – the

bugs and the microbes, the algae and the molluscs – they all have their admirers and inspire passionate interest in the scientists who specialize in them. What belief in God and God’s valuing of all his creatures can do for us is to draw us out of the egocentric perspectives that so often prevent us from attending to the manifold worth of other creatures.

Attending to God should enable us to attend more to his creatures and vice versa. As creatures of God the creatures are literally priceless and we degrade them by setting a price on them. Compare how we think of other humans. In a commercial world we may set some sort of price on the services other people perform for us but we do not set a price on the existence of other people. The economic arguments for conserving biodiversity, even if we decide they are needed in a world controlled by economists, are nevertheless regrettable and misleading because they reinforce the human-centred illusion that everything else has value only if we think it has value for us and marginalize the real intuitions of intrinsic worth that all of us actually have. It would be better to foster such intuitions and to use them to challenge the world-view of the economists.

There is a more adequate way to think about the so-called ecosystem services. It is not just that the natural world does a lot of things for us, but that we ourselves belong to the natural world. We depend on the intricate web of planetary life just as other creatures do. Because we have spread ourselves so widely and developed such complex and demanding ways of life we are even more intimately interconnected with everything else than most creatures are. We are even more dependent on the health of the whole biosphere than many other creatures are. Destroying any more of the biosphere than we have done already will not just cost us a lot, as though it were just a matter of financial profit and loss. We shall impoverish human life in

the process of impoverishing the planet.

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[1] Ken Thompson, Do We Need Pandas? The Uncomfortable Truth about Biodiversity (Dartington, Devon: Green Books, 2010), p. 59.

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Green Theology: CREATION DOMINION THEOLOGY

CREATION DOMINION THEOLOGY

Humans have ‘dominion’ (caring responsibility) for other living creatures

The idea of dominion, an enormously influential idea historically and variously interpreted over the centuries, is what more than anything else has tempted people who knew the text to forget their own creatureliness, to set themselves over the rest of creation as though they did not belong to it but could do as they wished with it, even remake it to their own design.

But this is only possible if we take it out of its biblical context –, when we have learned a great many other things from the Bible about the relationship of humans to other creatures.

Dominion is a role within creation, not over it. Other creatures are first and foremost our fellow-creatures, and only when we appreciate them as such can we properly exercise the distinctive role that the Genesis creation narrative gives us in relation to other creatures. It is not the only way we relate to other creatures, but it is a distinctive one.

There is no need here to labour the point that the dominion should be understood as a role of caring responsibility, not exploitation, because this is now widely agreed. The point I do wish to labour is that it is a responsibility for fellow-creatures. Since Genesis depicts it as a kind of royal function, the rule of a king over others, it is worth recalling the only passage in the law of Moses that refers to the role of the king in Israel (Deut. 17:14–20). There it is emphasized that the king is one among his brothers and sisters, his fellow-Israelites, and should not forget it, should not accumulate wealth or arms or indulge in any of the ways kings usually exalt themselves above their subjects.

Only if they remember their fundamental solidarity with their people will kings be able to rule truly for the benefit of their people. Similarly, only when humans remember their fundamental solidarity with their fellow-creatures will they be able to exercise their distinctive authority within creation for the benefit of other creatures.

Finally, in our present context it is very well worth pondering the fact that the most obvious example Genesis itself provides of the exercise of the dominion is Noah’s preservation of all the species of earth in the ark.

Dominion begins from appreciating God’s valuation of his creation

A significant aspect of the Genesis 1 six-day creation account is that before we humans read of our responsibility for other living creatures we are taken through a narrative of creation that stresses God’s delight in each stage of his work. We are invited to share God’s appreciation of his creation before we learn of our distinctive role within it.

It follows, surely, that our approach to exercising dominion should be rooted in that fundamental appreciation of the created world as God has made it. We may then be less inclined to spoil it in our attempts to reshape it.

Dominion is to be exercised in letting be just as much as in intervention

Over the centuries people got used to thinking of the human dominion over other creatures as activity. It got to the point in the modern period where the human task came to be conceived as constant, ongoing activity to transform the world into one that would suit us much better than the natural world does. The result is that in fact there is little if any part of the planet that has not been to some extent affected by human activity, and we have all too slowly woken up to the fact that there is a lot we would really like to preserve as it is, because the natural world has value that does not require our constant interference to improve it.

In this situation it is vital that we re-conceive the Genesis dominion as a matter of letting creation be, at least as much as it is a matter of intervention. In fact, this aspect is really rather clear in Scripture itself if we consider those parts of the law of Moses that prescribe Israel’s ways of relating to the land of Israel and its other living creatures. We should recall the sabbatical institutions – the weekly Sabbath, when no work was to be done, even by domestic animals, and the Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee, when the land was to be left fallow and not farmed.

In the Sabbatical Year, fields, vineyards and orchards were to be left to rest, the produce not gathered, so that ‘the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat’ (Exod. 23:11; cf. Lev. 25:7). Even within the cultivated part of the land of Israel, wild animals are expected to be able to live. We could see this as a kind of symbol of respect for wild nature, reminding both ancient Israel and ourselves that dominion includes letting nature be itself.

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Green Theology: To fill and to subdue the earth

Humans to fill and to subdue the earth (land), but not at the expense of other creatures.

This point of discussion is one of the famous passage about the role of humans in creation in Genesis 1, where God says to the newly created human pair: ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth’ (Gen. 1:28).

The two had to cooperate in order to complete the task of filling the world. God made Adam and Eve differently physically so they couldn't finish the mission on their own. Similarly, in order to have a large number of children, both would need to cooperate on an emotional, spiritual, relational, and societal level. Both a mother and a father were necessary for the creation and upbringing of children in God's perfect plan. Even though single parenting is widespread nowadays, the situation is frequently difficult and calls for assistance from friends and family.

It's crucial to remember that God's instruction to procreate and multiply is typically seen as a personal directive to the heads of the human race (Adam and Eve, as well as Noah and his wife). God would permit some couples to be infertile without requiring everyone to "fill the earth" or have as many children as possible. God calls some people to stay childless and unmarried, while others are incapable of producing children (1 Corinthians 7:8).

God not only gave Adam and Eve the ability to populate the planet, but also to work and conquer it. The definition of "subdue" in the original Hebrew is "to make subordinate, dependent, or subservient." The concept of subduing the earth is actively controlling it with physical force or effort, cultivating it to make it fruitful and life-sustaining rather than destroying it.

The Lord made everything for us, but it is our responsibility to manage it. He wanted us to endeavour to keep chaotic situations from ruining the planet and making it worthless. In order to support themselves and serve the Lord, Adam and Eve had to make use of God's creation. "The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it" (Genesis 2:15) is how God assigned us the duty of caretakers in addition to the privilege.

Humans are endowed with "every see bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it" by God. 

You will be able to eat them (Genesis 1:29).  In the Garden of Eden, people were vegetarians, but after Noah's day, God expanded their diet to include animals (Genesis 9:3).

One of the main purposes for which humans were created was to serve as God's representatives throughout the globe and to reign over everything in His name. This was demonstrated when the Lord commanded Adam and Eve to fill the land and tame it (Psalm 8:6; 115:16). In order for us to represent God on earth, we were created in His image. And in order for us to have a connection with Him, we were created to be like Him. God loved having a personal relationship with us and wanted to bless us with His wonderful creation from the beginning.

It is not often well enough noticed that this command refers to two rather different matters. It refers first to the relationship of humans to the earth, secondly to their relationship to other living creatures. The latter is the dominion, and we will come to it under the next heading. Having dominion over other living creatures is not the same thing as subduing the earth.

‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.’ Humans are not alone in being told to be fruitful and to multiply and to fill. The fish are to multiply and fill the sea, the birds are to multiply on earth (1:22), and although the text is not explicit we must assume that the creatures of the land are also to be fruitful and multiply. Only humans are told to fill the earth and to subdue the earth – and in their case the two activities go closely together. Only by means of agriculture were humans able to fill the earth, to live in at least a large proportion of the available land space. To subdue the earth is to take possession and to work the soil in order to make it yield more food for humans than it would otherwise do.

But what about all the other land animals? Are humans to fill the earth at their expense? Are humans supposed to supplant them? God’s words to the humans continue in this way:

See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food. (Gen. 1:29–30)

Why does God tell humans that he has given every plant for food for the other living creatures? Why doesn’t he say this to the animals themselves? It is not because they cannot understand him, for in verse 22 he has already spoken to the sea creatures and the birds. Surely it is because humans need to know this. They need to know that the produce of the earth is not intended to feed them alone, but also all the living species of the earth. 

Humans are not to fill the earth and subdue it to the extent of leaving no room and no sustenance for the other creatures who share the earth with them. God has given them too the right to live from the soil. So the human right to make use of the earth, to live from it, is far from unlimited. It must respect the rights of other creatures. Once again, we come up against the biblical fact that we are one creature among others, and that that is how God intended it to be.

 

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Green Theology: SOLOMON AS NATURALIST

SOLOMON AS NATURALIST

According to 1 Kings 4:33, King Solomon was a well-known naturalist with a broad understanding of botany and biology, including animals, birds, reptiles, fish, and flora ranging from hyssop to Lebanese cedars. As an early scientist, his knowledge was based on firsthand observation and research of the natural world.

Among Solomon's primary characteristics as a naturalist are:

Botanist and Zoologist: He was a zoologist who classified fish, animals, birds, and reptiles as well as a dendrologist (specialist in trees).

Scientific Research: His research went beyond theory to include in-depth observations of the ancient Near East's flora and fauna, categorising everything from the tiny hyssop growing in walls to the massive cedars of Lebanon.

Nature Wisdom: Solomon's capacity to "speak" about nature suggests a thorough comprehension of ecological systems. His work, which predates Hellenistic botany, is occasionally recognised as an early forerunner of scientific sciences.

Scope of Knowledge: He lectured about these topics in addition to simply observing them, probably imparting information about their traits and possible therapeutic applications.

The Basis of Wisdom: His exploration of God's works through nature is characterised as a crucial part of his divinely bestowed wisdom.

King Solomon is the Bible’s pre-eminent example of wisdom. In the biblical narrative God gives Solomon his exceptional wisdom (1 Kgs. 3:3–14), and if Solomon’s wisdom failed him when it came to ruling his subjects and assembling his harem, it was signally expressed in other ways that made him an international reputation and brought even the queen of Sheba from the proverbially wise East to test Solomon’s wisdom and marvel at it (1 Kgs. 4:29–34; 10:1–13).

The passage in 1 Kings that concerns us now is this:

God gave Solomon very great wisdom, discernment, and breadth of understanding as vast as the sand on the seashore, so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt. He was wiser than anyone else, wiser than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, Calcol, and Darda, children of Mahol; his fame spread throughout all the surrounding nations.

He composed three thousand proverbs, and his songs numbered a thousand and five. He would speak of trees, from the cedar that is in the Lebanon to the hyssop that grows in the wall; he would speak of animals, and birds, and reptiles, and fish. People came from all the nations to hear the wisdom of Solomon; they came from all the kings of the earth who had heard of his wisdom. (1 Kgs. 4:29–34) Evidently much of Solomon’s wisdom concerned natural history. He was interested in flora as well as fauna. In the Bible’s capacious understanding of wisdom, these things evidently have a positive and important place.

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