Archives: Articles

Orthodox theology makes much of the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm. In the words of Kallistos Ware:

Such a claim may sound absurdly anthropocentric. Who are we, mere specks in a vast universe, the accidental products of a process that far exceeds us and, even in earthly terms, only one among a myriad of life forms, who are we to dignify ourselves with such a central role in the ordering of things? Yet the inescapable truth remains that all our knowledge of the cosmos is our knowledge, filtered through the medium of our own minds and expressed in terms ultimately derived from our own thoughts and experience. The alternative may be even more arrogant. The quest for completely objective knowledge and the supposition that we can somehow give an account of the universe from some independent nonhuman standpoint fly in the face of the facts. Our perspective is, and always remains, human. To say this is not to deny that we can achieve in some fields of knowledge a high degree of objectivity. Nor is it to deny that the totality of things is much greater and more mysterious than our minds can grasp. There is a proper sense in which knowledge, like prayer, ends in silence. But insofar as our knowledge admits its human limitations, the claim that microcosm and macrocosm are related, and may reflect one another, is not absurd.

The theological basis of the claim rests, as Kallistos Ware makes clear, on the belief that humanity is created in the image of God. If this is true of humanity then it must in some sense extend to the whole cosmos because Christ, the perfect image of God, is also in St. Paul’s thought the agent and fulfillment of creation.

These are high and abstract thoughts, which may seem very distant from the main concerns of this book. I state them without argument as a prologue to some thoughts about sacramental theology, because sacramental theology itself may seem an absurdly narrow route along which to tackle practical questions about the environment. But if small things can reflect large ones, it may not be such a bad route after all. An eleventh-century Chinese administrator is said to have complained about Buddhists: "When they try to understand what is lofty without studying what is lowly, how can they have a proper understanding of what is lofty?"

I have no wish to make exclusive claims for sacramental theology. For some Christians the sacraments form only a small part of their religious experience. For others, among whom I include myself, they lie at the heart of Worship. They hold together in a unique manner the inner relationship with God and the Outer relationship with material reality, reaching out to embrace a universe whose meaning is finally disclosed in Jesus Christ. In the sacraments microcosm and macrocosm meet.

Sacramental theology centers on the perception that items of material reality -- water, bread, and wine -- can be given a new meaning and status by being brought within the saving action of God in Christ. This is both a revelation and a transformation. The true potential of bread, for instance, Is revealed by its transformation into a means of communication with God. This is beautifully summed up in the ancient offertory prayer:

The prayer is a subtle balance between recognizing God’s gift, acknowledging our human role in developing and using it rightly, and accepting its potential as a conveyer of God’s own reality. Bread, at once the most basic and ancient of foods, is also the human product that perhaps more than anything else, made possible the civilized world. This fundamental support of life, says the prayer, will reveal a new level of meaning, made possible and actual by God’s own involvement in material reality through Christ.

Behind the prayer lies a theology of the incarnation and, more immediately, the discourse on the bread of life in the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel. Whether the author of the Gospel meant this to be his substitute for an account of the Last Supper need not concern us here. The point is that it is impossible to read it now without seeing the bread as the body of Jesus given for the life of the world in a eucharistic context. But it is significant that it is not confined to a eucharistic context. The bread given by Jesus is not just contrasted with ordinary bread, profoundly important though that is, but with the manna eaten for forty years by the Israelites in the wilderness. In other words even miraculous food, food that had saved a nation from starvation, food that lay at root of its self-understanding as a people saved by God, even this was not to be compared with the bread now promised. The "bread from heaven" is no incidental feature of life with Jesus. Its meaning spreads out to embrace the totality of relationship with him. "I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If a man cats of this bread, he will live for ever" (Jn. 6: 51). And it points beyond Jesus himself. "I am" in the sentence "I am the bread of life" picks up and echoes the most profound and mysterious title of God, "I am that I am (Ex. 3:14).

Some of those who have no doubts about the value of the sacraments in their proper liturgical context find themselves uneasy when sacramental theology appears to "take off" in an apparently illegitimate fashion and to claim sacramental significance in everything. The process of widening sacramental horizons has already begun in John 6, which is why I have used it as the basis for my exposition. It fits well with a theology of worship and of the church which interprets them as expressing on a small scale and in an explicit way truths, often hidden, about what God is doing in the whole human drama. To think like this is not to ecclesiasticize everything. In fact, precisely the reverse. Church and sacraments are the making visible of what is already there but might otherwise remain unrecognized.

The essential point is that material reality is shown to be capable of bearing the image of the divine. It rests on the staggering claim that this is what happened in Jesus and what constitutes the truth in the doctrines of the incarnation and of salvation. Thus what happens to water, bread, and wine when they are used as vehicles of God’s grace is no isolated miracle. All matter shares this potential, and specific sacramental actions, which themselves belong within a specific historical, theological, and liturgical context, are the God-given means by which this truth is safeguarded and made known.

They are not the exclusive means, however. Thomas Traherne in Centuries of Meditations, saw the same truth as part of a childlike vision of the world before the distortions and separations of adult consciousness take over:

At a much lower level of awareness there can be a sense of the goodness. or meaningfulness, or value of the world, which forms part of many people’s basic religious awareness, even if it is only glimpsed in fleeting moments. What such experiences tend to lack, though, is the complex interplay between what God has given and what human beings must do, and the illumination that comes from setting individual experience within a developed and subtle religious tradition.

I contend, therefore, that the sacraments themselves remain one of our best clues as to how we should treat the world aright, and in what follows I sketch out in a preliminary fashion how this might help the environmental debate.

The Recognition Of Potential

What might it mean to live in practice as if anything or everything might become a vehicle of divine grace?

Perhaps it is easier to start by imagining the opposite, a universe in which anything or everything is ripe for exploitation. The essence of such a regime is that human needs and desires are sovereign, and the stuff of the world can be bent to human purposes with no respect paid to what it is in itself or what it might become within the purposes of God. In the sacramental vision the world is seen as created by God, owned by God, and ultimately finding its fulfillment in God.

Paradoxically the practical consequences of these two visions may not always be very different. Rubbish, for instance, may be seen as a resource by the sacramentalist who is concerned not to dismiss anything as mere waste, as well as by the commercially minded entrepreneur who sees that there is money to be made from it. Deep motivation may be one thing, but seeing a problem as an opportunity is not confined to those who share a particular philosophy of life.

Equally, there may be very different motives for wishing to preserve, say, a forest or an animal species. Long-term prudential considerations can provide reasons for holding back even within a general philosophy of exploitation. An attempt to recognize and respect divine potential might take various forms. It might include, for instance, respect for the evolutionary process as the means whereby in practice most of the potential within the living matter of the universe has so far been released. To let a forest be, or to protect a species, is to acknowledge that they still have within them a greater potential for life, growth, and development, and that their being may therefore form part of the larger purposes of God in using evolution as a means of creation.

Alternatively there might be a more direct respect due to them for what they can reveal of God in being themselves. This is a difficult idea to carry through into practical programs. To let everything be, to respect its right to be itself, and to allow it to develop in its own way, would, if carried to extremes, make human life impossible and negate our own creativeness. Forests also have the potential to become fuel or furniture or agricultural land, and some of the greatest human achievements have resulted from seeing a potential in things that was decidedly not a consequence of letting them be.

Human beings have interfered decisively and irreversibly in many kinds of animal breeding, often bringing out latent potentials that have been hugely to our benefit. We now stand on the threshold of wielding far greater genetic powers, with incalculable consequences for the future. This need not be mere exploitation, though with such powers available the dividing line between drawing out potential and arrogantly trying to play God may be a narrow one.

The key religious insight would seem to be that, whether things are let be or whether they are developed by human ingenuity for human purposes, they belong to God and not to ourselves. There is a respect due to them, an awareness of human limitations, a fine balance to be struck between penitence for what we have done to God’s world in the past and hopeful creativeness for the future.

Sacramentally such an attitude would seem appropriate toward inanimate things, at least toward things of a certain complexity, as well as toward living creatures. A flowing stream, a clear sea teeming with life, a mountain landscape, surely deserve respect and care despite the large subjective element that enters into our appreciation of them. They can be treated in specific ways that still further reveal their potential. The great eighteenth-century creator of English landscapes, Capability Brown, earned his nick-name for his skill, not in imposing his will on a recalcitrant nature, but in drawing out its aesthetic capabilities. A sculptor carving a particular stone or lump of wood may describe this work in similar ways; the finished object is somehow seen as being already there in the natural formation of the raw material, waiting only to be revealed. An engineer may see a valley as waiting to be dammed, a chasm as waiting to be bridged, an ugly and unhealthy swamp as potentially a place of beauty and usefulness. Such actions can in their own way become secular sacraments, an enhancement, a liberation of what is already there, a transformation that does not violate a thing’s essential nature.

I fully admit that such a way of speaking creates acute difficulties for those who are more used to seeing the universe as a torrent of change. "Essential natures" do not have much place in evolution. Clearly, by itself the recognition of potential is not enough. But sacramentalism is also about God’s work complementing and giving substance to ours in a world still in process of creation.

The Need for Cooperation

The offertory prayer speaks of bread "which earth had given and human hands have made." Cooperation with natural processes, working with the grain of nature rather than against it, is now part of the conventional wisdom among conservationalists. Can the sacramental context add anything significant to this already familiar idea?

The eucharist is a complex act of giving and receiving in which the worshipers as well as God are both givers and receivers. At its highest it is a mutual exchange of love. But all this is set within the context of what God has already done. Despite the mutuality, therefore, the key word is response. In the exchange of love "we love because he first loved us" (I Jn. 4:19). Sacramental action is thus essentially a matter of cooperation rather than co-creation. As human beings we share a role with God in drawing out the divine potential of the world, but only because God has already himself taken the decisive steps.

The theme of cooperation receives further emphasis in the communion, which forms the climax of the whole. There can be no true giving and receiving with God unless others form a part of it. As those who are themselves loved by God, worshipers caught up in this action are commanded and enabled to love their fellow human beings. And this communion with others spreads still further to embrace "angels and archangels and all the company of heaven." The microcosm of love and mutuality in response to the love of God experienced by those engaged in sacramental worship ultimately has to include the macrocosm.

But how far should this mutuality spread? Should it for instance include battery hens? There is an evolutionary case for including battery hens in some kind of relationship with human beings as very distant cousins, and this common membership of the community of life constitutes some kind of moral claim, albeit not a very strong one. If the sense of community goes further than this, if it is possible to hold that at a very rudimentary level there can and should be a cooperative relationship between human beings and hens, the moral claim is strengthened. If, to put the point more strongly, God gives hens a being of their own and values them prior to their usefulness as a cheap source of food, then the hen’s point of view as a partner in this larger communion begins to assume some importance.

Admittedly it is not easy to know what a hen’s point of view is, but in the case of battery hens there would seem to be a fairly simple test. In a battery the human element in the relationship with hens so dominates the conditions of life that the possibility of co-operation virtually disappears altogether. The hen is reduced as far as possible to machine-like operation.

Animal husbandry at its best has always contained an element of cooperation.

Even when the relationship ends in death it can be marked by respect for the life taken. The rituals surrounding animal sacrifice in cultures where sacrifice was the almost inevitable preliminary to eating meat witness to the seriousness of taking life, unpleasant though some of the rituals were. Here again the theme of communion with the life sacrificed can perhaps help modern Westernized consciousness develop a different feel for the products of industrialized scientific agriculture. Organic farming, for instance, may not fulfill the quasi-scientific claims for it, but may have moral and spiritual benefits for societies that see the need to develop a more sensitive relationship with the natural world.

The limits of cooperation become all too evident, however, when there is a mosquito in the bedroom. Letting things be themselves, discerning their point of view, looking for the divine potentiality in what is lowly, cannot become a recipe for the passive acceptance of whatever befalls us. Our human place in God’s purposes is to cooperate with him in the process of creative change. Sacramental thinking points to a world which has to be redeemed before it can truly reveal the face of God. There is an inescapable element of struggle, discrimination, suffering, and tragedy in the process, and any theological approach to ecological issues that belittles or ignores these is hopelessly unrealistic. Hence, my third and final heading.

Transformation by Redemption

The sacraments are sacraments of Christ’s death and resurrection. Suffering and the transformation of suffering belong to their very essence. This is plain from the New Testament account of their origins.

Sacramental theology has no excuse, therefore, for underrating the extent to which the divine potential of the world is denied, frustrated, distorted, defaced, and ignored. Nor need it shrink from accepting that the very means of creation through evolution entails conflict and suffering. Sacramental awareness is not at all the same as sentimentality. The perceptions of divine glory in a world capable of bearing God’s image have to be matched by the belief that God bears the weight and suffering of his own creation on the cross.

All this is basic Christianity. To interpret the cross in the light of the sacraments can help to strengthen the bridge between the redemption of human sin and suffering and the redemption of the rest of creation. St. Paul’s language about creation "groaning and travailing" (Rom 8:22) and "waiting for the redemption of the sons of God" (Rom 8:23) is another way of expressing the same link.

To put it in sacramental terms has an advantage in that it can suggest a means by which the link is actually operative. The sacraments entail human cooperation with divine initiative, a cooperation which is essentially priestly. This is so whether we think in terms of the priesthood of all believers or the representative priesthood of individuals within the body of the church. The point is that there is a human role whereby, under the grace of God and in the midst of an ambivalent and partially evil world, ordinary things can be offered, consecrated, broken, and transformed as a means of anticipating heaven on earth. The priestly role of all human beings toward the world of nature entails a similar offering through prayer and through the recognition that all belongs to God already, a similar transformation by the release of new potential and by the discovery that even in the world of nature there can be glimpses of heaven on earth.

Implicit in this priestly role is the dual character of human life as belonging to the world of nature yet transcending it. The priest is a mediator, and our common human priesthood as cooperators with God in his creation entails coming to terms both with our createdness and with our God-relatedness. There are other ways of expressing this within Christian theology. The description of human beings as both "beasts and angels" is perhaps the most famous. But the link between sacramental theology and priesthood makes the idea of mediation particularly apposite.

As ourselves part of the process that has to be offered and transformed there is no room for arrogance or for the exploitative mentality which assumes that the created world is ours. But as those who also stand on the godward side of the process, and who dare to describe ourselves as "made in the image of God," we also have a responsibility not simply to accept the world as it is but see and pursue its possibilities for revealing more fully the glory of God. All our environmental thinking has to take place between these two poles. And the value of a sacramental approach to it lies in the richness and diversity of images, rooted in common Christian experience, such a theology can provide.

Works Cited

Peacocke, A., and G. Gillett. Persons and Personality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.

Traherne, Thomas. Centuries of Meditations. I. New York: Harper and Row, 1960.

Recently I was present at a special function at our presidential palace. Zail Singh, the president of India, bestowed a privately endowed honor on one of our most creative friends of nature: Sunderlal Bahuguna. Bahuguna is well known and written about, both in India and abroad. He initiated the Chipko movement, which has been an important factor in awakening Indians to the environmental question, particularly the importance of conserving the forest trees in the Himalayan region.

The mindless and tragic decimation of the Himalayan forests was the result of the government’s thoughtless felling of trees in that region. It resulted in heavy soil erosion, desertification, and climate change. After trying many ways of stopping the government, Bahuguna finally launched the "Embrace [chipko] the Trees" movement. He trained the village people to go and embrace a tree as the government workers came to cut it down. The people understood Bahuguna’s goal and took on the concerns of the movement with enthusiasm. The highest government officials had to make major decisions to reduce the cutting of trees, decisions that would have been politically impossible without the Chipko movement.

Bahuguna is a simple Gandhian. At this function in his honor he said publicly that he was ill at ease on the green lawns of the presidential palace; he wanted to be back among the forest trees and the mountain people. He accepted the award bestowed on him very reluctantly, but expressed happiness that in the process the movement was being recognized.

In his acceptance speech Bahuguna presented three principles for the environmental movement which have stayed in my mind:

1. Nature is to be worshiped, not exploited.

2. One who takes less from nature and society should receive greater respect than one who takes more.

3. There is a world inside a person that is richer and more worthy of cultivation than the outside world.

Bahuguna is a Hindu; I am a Christian. As such I must reflect on these principles further rather than accept them at face value. And it is in this context that I seek, trusting in the grace of God and in the power of the Holy Spirit, to examine three passages from the New Testament in order to frame my own principles for the environmental movement. In what follows I will offer my own translation of each of these passages and then discuss the three basic ecological principles I extrapolate from them.

I

For I regard the troubles that befall us in this present time as trivial when compared

For a long time now we have been conditioned to understand the redemption in Christ primarily -- and too often exclusively -- in terms of personal salvation. A basic requirement for a healthy Christian approach to the human environment seems to be a shift of gears in this regard.

What is a "person" whose salvation Christ effects? A person exists only in relation -- in relation to other human persons (his or her father and mother, to begin with) and to nonhuman realities (light, air, water, food, and so on). It is not possible for a person to come to be or to grow without relation to other persons and things. The earth and the sun as well as other people are essential parts of our existence. Without them we cannot exist. Both the Pauline and the Johannine witnesses in the New Testament strongly affirm this redemption of the whole creation -- cosmic redemption, if you like, of the participation of all creation in the liberation of humanity from the bondage of sin and death. This strongly contradicts the Gnostic-Hellenic-Hindu notion that is most characteristically expressed by Plotinus, the so-called founder of Neoplatonism in the third century:

In this tradition the body is the source of bondage and evil. Unfortunately this tradition is also very strong among Christians, who -- like Hellenists, Hindus, and Neoplatonists -- believe that the soul alone is to be saved and that the body and other material objects, whether living or non-living, do not participate in or benefit from the redemption in Christ. This Gnostic influence in Christianity is what has pervaded our understanding of the Old and the New Testaments. Why do we magnify the prophetic and underplay the priestly? We prefer the prophetic because it fits better with our Gnostic temperament, which despises the material and the corporate, the sacrificial and the ritual, and prefers to focus on the individual soul and the prophetic word. I will come back to this point later, but here we only need affirm what St. Paul and St. John so strongly affirm, contrary to the Gnostic-Hellenic-Hindu tradition, and in the true spirit of the Hebrew Scriptures: that the whole creation -- not just a few human souls -- has been redeemed and reconciled in Christ.

Human beings have existed and do exist only as integral parts of a system that includes sources of sustenance -- meat, grains, and vegetables -- as well as sun and earth, light and water, air and fire. To make a false distinction between nature and history, to limit the presence and action of God to history, to deny God’s action in nature -- these cannot be regarded as Christian.

Nature, in the way in which we use it, is not a biblical notion. Nature (physis in Greek) in the sense of nonhuman self-existent reality does not occur in the Old or the New Testament; it is a concept alien to the biblical world. Insofar as the word nature refers to something as it exists by itself, it is contrary to the Johannine affirmation that not a thing came into being without Christ the Logos. If the Hebrew Scriptures use the word nature, it is only in the Book of Maccabees, and there it puts the word in the mouth of a Greek (Antiochus) rather than of a Hebrew.

In fact, there is no Hebrew word for nature. Hebrew uses "creating" (bara) as a verb, but it seldom uses beriah, a feminine noun, to refer to the whole creation. It does not make an entity out of creation, though it recognizes the act that produces and sustains the creation. The Hebrew Scriptures may make all the trees of the wood rejoice (Ps 96:12) and ask the trees and animals to praise the Lord (Ps 148), but they do not speak about nature or the creation as an entity representing the whole created order. The New Testament also does not speak of nature as the ensemble of created entities. If it uses the word nature (in expressions like physis, physikos, kata physin), it is to distinguish between natural and unnatural or natural and artificial (see Rom 1:26, 27; 2:27; 11:21, 24), or to speak about what is spontaneous or connatural. It can speak of our being partakers of the divine nature (in 2 Pt 1:4, theias koinonoi physeos literally means "sharers in the nature of the Godhead"), but not of any nature existing independently of God.

Neither is the noun history a common biblical notion. Certainly the Bible does not know a God who acts in "history" but does not act in "nature"; it does not distinguish nature from history, as we do. A historia is a carefully researched narrative of a series of events, not a realm of exclusively human or divine action unrelated to nature. The noun historia does not occur in the Hebrew or Greek Scriptures. The verb historeo occurs once (in Gal 1:18), but it is used to mean "visit."

We have seriously distorted the biblical perspective on redemption by introducing alien categories like nature and history into it, and by understanding redemption only in terms of souls and persons. In reacting against the exclusive emphasis on personal salvation, liberalism and neo-orthodoxy fell into the trap of false categories, claiming that God acts in history but not in nature, and that history rather than nature is the realm of God’s revelation. These emphases can be traced to a Gnostic bias that detests nature and sacrament as material, but can see history and word as somehow nonmaterial and (therefore?) spiritual.

A new understanding of the redemption in Jesus Christ will then have to take into account at least the following: (a) personal and corporate salvation; (b) spiritual reality and material reality in the creation and in the incarnation; (c) the created order as the object and field of the redeeming order; and (d) the human person as integrally related to the whole cosmos. When we keep these relationships in mind, we will have a picture of our own faith that will facilitate a more respectful approach not to nature but to the created order as a whole. The continuity between the order of creation and the order of redemption, rather than their distinction and difference, should be the focus of our interest. Humanity is redeemed with the created order, not from it.

II

He, Christ, the Beloved Son, is the manifest presence (icon) of the unmanifest God. He

A Christology based on this principle will not conceive of a Christ as somehow other than the created order. Today much of Christology sees Christ as being separate from the world, from culture, and so forth; we try to affirm the lordship of Christ over world and culture by conceiving even the incarnate Christ as somehow totally distinct from the created order. We then think of him as Lord of the world, Lord of the church, and so on. In the more individualistic versions of Christology-soteriology, some make him sole mediato between the person and God. This perception involves three realities: God, Christ, and the individual. God is there, the individual is here, and Christ stands in between. And the world and the church are fourth and fifth realities.

This kind of disjunctive thinking has to give way to an integral and participative way of understanding Christ. Jesus Christ is not an abstract or "purely spiritual" entity. He is incarnate. He took a material body, becoming part of the created order while remaining unchanged as one of the three persons in the Trinity who is Creator. He is one of us. He is fully consubstantial with us.

As Christians we are united with him in an especially intimate way. By baptism and by faith he has incorporated us as members of his body. By participation in his body and blood, we grow to be integral parts of him. Once he had a human body like ours. In fact, he still does -- though it has already been transformed and resurrected and is therefore no longer subject to the ordinary laws of our physics, which govern only mortal bodies and material objects. But he has chosen to have a larger body, partly in heaven (that is, beyond the horizon of our senses) and partly on earth. We belong to that body as a whole, but particularly to the earthly part of it. Christ is always with us, the members of his body, particularly as he continues to fulfill his ministry as high priest of creation and as prophet and servant to the world.

Christ incarnate is a human being, consubstantial with all other human beings. He did not become simply an individual human person or a Christian. He became humankind -- male and female. He assumed the whole of human nature, and now there is no humanity other than the one which Christ took on -- our humanity, in which all human beings participate, whether or not they believe in Christ, whether or not they recognize the nature of their humanity. This aspect of the Redeemer’s relationship to the whole of humanity, independent of human faith, is seldom fully recognized by Christians and its implications worked out. No humans are alien to Christ. whether they be Hindu, Muslim, Communist, or Buddhist. They share in Christ’s humanity in ways that we have to spell out elsewhere. They are not members of the body of Christ, but they are not unrelated to Christ.

Christ the Incarnate One assumed flesh -- organic, human flesh; he was nurtured by air and water, vegetables and meat, like the rest of us. He took matter into himself, so matter is not alien to him now. His body is a material body -- transformed, of course, but transformed matter. Thus he shares his being with the whole created order: animals and birds, snakes and worms, flowers and seeds. All parts of creation are now reconciled to Christ. And the created order is to be set free and to share in the glorious freedom of the children of God. Sun and moon, planets and stars, pulsars and black holes -- as well as the planet earth -- are to participate in that final consumption of the redemption.

The risen Christ is thus active, by the Spirit, in all three realms: in the church, in the whole of humanity, and in the cosmos. Each of these relationships is fundamentally different, but all are real and meaningful to Christ, the Incarnate One.

Our theology’s weakness has been its failure to recognize the wider scope of the redemption beyond the "individualized soul" or the person. Liberalism still spiritualizes the incarnate Christ by confining his actions to so-called history, as if that were a realm in which nature and the material elements of creation were not present. We must move beyond personal salvation to declare and teach the three basic dimensions of the redemption.

III

At the source-spring of all, the Logos is and was. The Logos is God vis-à-vis, and the

There is no need to elaborate these points. The act of creation is a corporate act of the three persons of the Trinity. God’s relation to plants and trees, to air and water did not begin with the redemption in the incarnate Christ. Not a single thing exists that did not come into being without Christ and the Holy Spirit, including the primeval water over which the Spirit was hovering at the time of creation (Gn 1:2). Neither art nor literature, neither mountain nor river, neither flower nor field came into existence without Christ and the Holy Spirit. They exist now because they are sustained by God. The creative energy of God is the true being of all that is; matter is that spirit or energy in physical form. Therefore, we should regard our human environment as the energy of God in a form that is accessible to our senses.

We have already discussed the relationship of the human environment, of the whole cosmos, to the redemption. It is a redeemed cosmos that we meet in our environment, and as such it is worthy of respect.

It is the final apokatastasis, the fulfillment at the end, that still needs to be stressed. The consummation, which Paul calls anakephalaiosis, means adding up everything (Eph 1:10) -- that is, the consummation of the whole created order in Christ. Take the three numbers 5, 7, and 14. When one adds them up, one gets 26. At first it may not be obvious that the three smaller numbers are contained in the larger number, but they are there; they are not lost. Analogous to this is the process in the final apokatastasis, about which Peter preached in Solomon’s Portico in Jerusalem. There he talked about "Christ Jesus, whom the unseen realm must keep until the times of the final restitution of all things, about which God spoke through the mouths of his holy ones the prophets from ages ago" (Acts 3:21; my translation).

The Christian understanding of the status of the world, of all life and of inorganic matter, is determined by these three factors:

The whole created order comes from God the Holy Trinity, is redeemed by the incarnate Christ, and will be brought to fulfillment after transformation by the same Christ and by the Holy Spirit, the perfecter of all.

REFUTING BAHUGUNA

Now that we have explored these three basic Christian principles, we are in a position to look again at Sunderlal Bahuguna’s three principles. As for his first principle, Christians cannot say that nature is to be worshiped and not exploited. Christians would say that the created order (not nature) is to be respected as the order that has given birth to us, sustains us, and will still be the framework for our existence when the whole process of creation-redemption has been consummated. We respect the created order both because it comes from God and is sustained by him, and because it is the matrix of our origin, growth, and fulfillment as human beings. But we do not worship the creation; worship is reserved for the Creator. We have to tend the creation, use it for our own sustenance and flourishing, but we also have to respect it in itself as a manifestation of God’s creative energy and cooperate with God in bringing out the full splendor of the created order as reflecting the glory of the Creator. Bahuguna’s second principle -- that one who takes less from nature is to be more honored than one who takes more -- is also dubious from a Christian perspective. Simplicity of life is a high value, but enforced poverty is not. And the poor are to be respected not because they take less from nature but because they are friends of God and the victims of injustice. Christians can choose from two lifestyles: the simple life à la John the Baptist, who lived on locusts and wild honey in the desert, and the fuller life of our Lord, who prayed all night and worked all day, but who ate and drank with others. Neither of these lifestyles would, however, justify the mindless affluence of our consumer society. To impose austerity on a society may be unwise, but it is even more unwise to impose affluence on a nation through hidden per. suasion and to make some people more affluent than others. In taking what is given by nature, we should be careful to give back to nature what it needs to maintain its own integrity and to supply the needs of the future.

Bahuguna’s third principle -- that the individual’s inner life is more worthy of development than the outside world -- is also wrongheaded. Christians need not despise or reject the outer world in order to develop the inner world. And we should not think of the inner world as an individual realm. Rather, we should think of it as the unseen, the heavenly, that which lies beyond our senses. It is a different perception, one that Paul talks about when he says, "If then you have co-risen with Christ, seek the higher things, where Christ now is enthroned at the right hand of God. Meditate on and will the heavenly realities, not the earthly ones" (Col. 3:1-2; my translation). We should not speak of the inner world but of the final fulfillment that is already present in the realm beyond our senses, and that now moves our world as its norm and goal. Even when we are thinking about the environment or socio-economic and political life -- ta ano phroneite, we should focus our minds and wills on the higher realities (not the inner), which must be manifested in the earthly realities -- now partially, but in the end, fully.

Relating covenant to justice and peace is a task already initially embraced both theologically and in the practice of the churches today. The same, however, cannot be said about the integrity of creation. For the most part, our churches have been inattentive to the growing threats facing the life of the creation. And our theological and biblical understandings often have minimized and ignored the significance of God’s creation when expressing the meaning of Christian faith.

Our challenge, then, is to relate the insights of the Christian tradition to the crisis that today threatens the essential integrity of the creation. In so doing we can discover neglected yet empowering dimensions of God’s covenant. Moreover, we can call upon the members of our church communities to respond through covenanting for the very survival and renewal of the gift given in God’s creation.

God’s Covenant Embraces the Creation

This is the biblical truth that forms the foundation for upholding the integrity of creation and provides the basis for the church’s response to the perils threatening the life of the world.

God’s action as Creator did not consist simply of God making the world. Rather, as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, God chose the creation. Through grace alone, God identified the world as the beloved creation. "For God so loved the world. ."

Within most Christian thought and particularly in Reformed theology, covenant has been understood as God’s promises to humanity. Biblical scholars have revealed the nature of covenant agreements in the world of the Hebrew Scriptures. This background has led to insights concerning the various ways in which covenant was understood by the people of Israel. In some cases covenant promises between God and a people were seen as conditional, and dependent upon appropriate responses. Another tradition came to stress the abiding and unconditional character of God’s covenant. Yet, most all such reflection has assumed that the scope of covenant is only God and humanity.

That limited perspective has contributed to the church’s inattention to the crisis facing the world’s environment. The assumption that God’s promises extend simply to humanity has left little roam for regarding the creation as central to the message of Christian faith. This has allowed an anthropocentric bias to dominate our interpretation of the biblical message. Further, attitudes that sanction the ruthless domination of nature have been theologically tolerated and even strengthened from the view that God’s promises and covenant have no practical relevance for the earth.

Our fresh and hopeful discovery, however, is that the biblical message resounds with declarations of the creation as God’s loved possession and gift. The promises of God, and the work of redemption in Jesus Christ, encompass the whole created order. Moreover, the creation is a partner in covenant with God. In fact, the covenant tradition biblically is linked to the creation from the earliest prehistory to the future promises of a new creation.

Christian faith today faces the critical task of renewing its theological tradition through recovering the central place of creation in the biblical message. The community of believers is confronted with the clear calling to participate in the heart of the struggle throughout the world to uphold the integrity of creation. The realities that jeopardize life on this planet make clear that our response is imperative if our hope in God’s promises is genuine.

A Fundamental Breakdown at the Heart of the Ecological Crisis

At the heart of the global ecological crisis lies a fundamental breakdown in the modern world view of Western culture. Since the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, Western culture came to assume that humanity had both the right and duty to dominate nature. Objective, scientific knowledge became an absolute value. And the purpose of such knowledge was to exercise power over the creation. The view of life became secularized;we came to understand the world apart from any reference to God. The creation became "nature" -- raw materials that existed only to be given value through exploitation.

The pragmatic benefits of these developments for civilization are remarkable in many ways. Humanity has been afforded protection against many ancient threats to life. However, this mindset now is presenting humanity with more curses than blessings. Technology has become a social drug. We are addicted to technological solutions to any problem. Power seems the same as truth. Thus we split the atom because we could do it. Instead of solving problems, that action gave humanity the godlike power of life and death over created order.

Modern humanity has become too confident in its own power and has trusted far too deeply in its dominance over the creation. It has constructed a world view that places human power and glory at the center of the universe. We have become like gods, masters over creation’s destiny, and ready to demand any sacrifice for our enjoyment -- even the destruction of the environment upon which all life depends.

This same mindset also results in the domination of women by men. A hierarchy of values justifies not only the exploitation of nature but identifies female characteristics with nature; both are regarded as weaker, and become subject to male mastery and oppression. The same mistaken biblical interpretation that justifies the rule of men over women also blesses man’s unbridled exploitation of creation. Moreover, this stance of mastery over nature has justified the oppression by white people of others who, like women, have been treated as "lower" and associated with nature as objects for exploitation.

Therefore, if the Christian tradition is to play some part in upholding the integrity of the creation in our own time, we must recognize the depth of our challenge. Rather than simply acknowledging immediate environmental problems that need remedy, our task is confronting the basic modern mindset that spawns and rationalizes environmental ruin. This requires nothing short of the power of the gospel.

The message of new life in Jesus Christ overturns the values and cultural assumptions that lie at the foundation of modern ecological ruin. We are called to conversion; such conversion frees us from the ways of thought and life that are hastening the earth’s destruction and calls us through the Spirit to live in ways that protect and nourish the gift of God’s creation. The power of the gospel beckons us to confront the economic, cultural, and technological assumptions that are destroying life on earth and offer a vision for upholding the creation.

Early Reformed Theologians and the Universal Scope of the Covenant

Bullinger maintained that God’s covenant did not originate with Abraham but was renewed. Covenant began with Adam and Noah. Zwingli also argued that the covenant was one whole, reaching to the entire human race, and then to the people of Israel through Abraham. Karl Barth underscored the broad scope of the covenant as understood by such early Reformers, and pointing ultimately to the intended destiny of all humanity.

In Calvin, the kingdom of God is portrayed as the special end and goal of the creation. Thus, creation and redemption become united. In this truth. we can understand how humanity’s destiny is fully linked with the destiny of creation itself.

The promises of the covenant, then, find their foundation in God’s steadfast relationships to the creation. Indeed, the first explicit biblical reference to God’s covenant comes in the story of Noah, and establishes the creation, not only humanity, as a partner m the covenant with God. When the creation, with all of its life, is reestablished as Noah and all the animals come forth from the ark, God’s covenant is announced. And it is a covenant with "every living creature," a covenant God describes as "between me and the earth" (Gn 9:13). To underscore the promise, the integrity of the earth’s cycles, "seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night" is also assured (Gn 8:22); as the Lord promises, "I will never again curse the ground" (Gn 8:21). Five times in the ninth chapter the scope of this covenant is repeated, extending to "all living things on earth of every kind." And the rainbow is described by the words of God as the sign "of the covenant between myself and the earth."

In other expressions of God’s covenant promises in the Hebrew Scriptures, the place of creation remains prominent. The Abrahamic covenant (described in Genesis 15 and 17), for example, involves the land, given as God’s gift to his descendants. Indeed, in the later giving of the law, the Sabbatical and Jubilee laws rest on the proper treatment of the land, to allow the just sharing of its fruits. The Mosaic covenant at Sinai, often regarded more as a covenant conditional on the actions of the people of Israel, also encompasses God’s relationship to all the creation. In Exodus 19, before the ten commandments are given, the Lord reminds Moses that "all the earth is mine" (v.5). In the account of the same events in Deuteronomy 10, when Moses sets forth God’s requirements to "fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments" (w.12-13) he then immediately declares, "Behold, to the Lord your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it" (v.14).

Following the Noahic and Abrahamic covenants, the tradition of the unconditional covenant also found expression in the promises to the throne of David. Seen initially as God’s guarantee to rule through the Jerusalem kings in the line of David, this covenant finds affirmation in God’s reign over all creation. The justice and righteousness at the foundation of David’s throne rest upon God’s intention to bring shalom, and right relationships, in all the creation. The "Royal Psalms" refer continuously to God’s power to rule and accomplish divine intentions in all the world. Rightly understood, kings were to serve as the servants upholding and preserving such dominion in the creation, because it all belongs to God.

This underscores the links between covenant and shalom. Covenant implies a rightly ordered relationship, whether between people, with God, or with the creation. In the biblical view these relationships become inseparable. Shalom is the vision of the harmony, fulfillment, and fellowship among God, humanity, and the creation; its result is justice, peace, and the integrity of creation. In the understanding of covenant we discover God’s pledge of faithfulness, intention, and grace to bring about shalom in all that is created.

Establishing such right relationships, and a legitimate order, is initiated through God’s identification with the weak, poor, and oppressed. This theme resounds through the pattern of biblical covenants, revealing a movement of solidarity with what is broken, outcast, and rejected. And this pattern extends to the creation. For in the midst of its brokenness and suffering, resulting from "nature" being exploited, we discover that God’s solidarity extends to the creation itself, longing for its liberation and wholeness.

Covenant, then, portrays God’s predisposition toward humanity and all creation. Simply because of the grace of God, all that God has created becomes loved, chosen, and destined for glory.

God’s intention for the creation, underscored by covenant, provides the basis of hope for creation’s destiny. For the people of Israel, such hope became refined and purified through the experience of exile and desolation, which shattered their self-aggrandizing dreams. In this time the vision of the prophets returned again to covenant and creation.

In the later part of Isaiah the prophet sets forth the vision of God’s work of renewal and salvation. And that vision finds roots in the faithfulness of God’s covenant promises. God’s work as creator and ruler over all the earth is sounded with fresh power to the people. And the redemptive work of God results in a cosmic renewal and transformation. God’s righteousness upholds and brings new life to the whole of creation.

Thus, biblical faith comes to place its hope for the fulfillment, healing, and renewal of creation in the covenant promises, which look to God’s redemptive activity. We hear the power and expanse of this hope in Hosea’s words:

And in that day, says the Lord, I will answer the heavens and they shall answer the earth; and the earth shall answer the grain, the wine, and the oil, and they shall answer Jezreel; and I will sow him for myself in the land. And I will have pity on Not pitied, and I will say to Not my people, "you are my people"; and he shall say, "Thou art my God" (Hos. 2:18-23).

God’s Covenant Promises Find their Full Expression in Jesus Christ

The depth of God’s grace -- the faithful, long-suffering, sacrificial love of God -- is fully embodied in God’s Son. And in the saving and redeeming work of Christ all creation finds its promise of fulfillment and glory.

Christ announced and inaugurated the kingdom of God. This kingdom consists of the full reign of God in the world, a reign that restores right relationship among God, humanity, and the creation. Shalom finds its expression. A new order, divinely initiated, breaks into history. And in this all, the initial promises of covenant with creation and humanity become manifest in the life of the kingdom of God.

Thus, the New Testament builds on this foundation, which integrates creation into the work of God’s redemption. God’s role as creator and sustainer is ascribed to Jesus Christ in understanding the incarnation. John says of Christ, "All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made" (1:3). Colossians repeats this description with this worshipful declaration: "In him all things were created, in heaven and on earth . . . all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together" (1:16-17).

When the work of God’s redemption in Jesus Christ is discussed by New Testament writers, the reconciliation achieved through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ extends to the creation. The Colossians passage, for example, continues by declaring, "For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things" (1:19-20). This is the same "all things" that were created through Christ. Several other New Testament passages underscore how Christ’s defeat of all the rebellious powers results in the restoration of God’s purpose and intended order in all the creation.

God’s saving activity once expressed legalistically through the commandments and laws from Sinai now is embodied through the one commandment of love demonstrated in the life of Jesus. And the foundational scope of the covenant, embracing the whole of creation, is taken up in Christ, the source and reconciler of all things, who initiates the new creation. This is celebrated in the eucharist, the feast which acknowledges our belonging to this new covenant relationship as the body of Christ and opens all life to the promise of new creation.

Response to God’s Covenant Actions

The initiative of God’s covenant actions always asks for response. Faced with the crisis confronting the life of creation itself, the church today is compelled to offer to the world a decisive commitment for preserving the integrity of creation as a witness to the promise of God’s love. In covenant, the solidarity of God with the created world is declared as an everlasting promise. What is chosen as God’s own must now be embraced in solidarity by God’s people.

The church’s response to creation is rooted, above all, in gratitude. Even in the midst of the calamitous destruction inflicted on the created order by human sin, we still can receive God’s creation as the gift of grace. This grace sustains all life, momentarily, through air, water, land, and energy. It opens humanity to the possibility of fellowship with God and to the potential of justice and peace in relationship to others. From God’s covenant with creation we discover and receive all life as gift. And our response is one of joyous gratitude and praise to God’s glory.

Such gratitude compels resistance. As the church, our response to God’s covenant with creation must certainly place us in stalwart resistance to all that breaks the integrity of creation, all that treats the earth as an object for our possession rather than God’s gift, and all that subjugates the creation to destruction and ruin rather than saving the creation through fellowship with it. Such resistance brings the power of the gospel to convert the most fundamental attitudes and values in modern culture, which has assumed that the creation can be severed from its belonging to the Creator, and which has placed its highest goal as the industrial and technological exploitation of the earth rather than its preservation.

In Romans we read that all creation longs for liberation from the bondage imposed on it by human sin. And in this longing the creation looks to "the full manifestation of the children of God" (Rom. 8:19). For the creation and the children of God are to share together in the kingdom of glory. This is the divine intention of God’s covenant action through history.

The church is called to participate in the liberation of creation through entering into fellowship with it in response to God’s grace. And here, the struggles for the integrity of creation and for justice and peace all become indivisible parts of one whole.

The creation hungers for its transformation and freedom promised by God. In its suffering, the creation is waiting for the church -- waiting for the people of God to embrace, protect, and renew the world as God’s well-loved gift. Creation exists to give God glory and honor. Its possession by God is the ground of its final destiny and sustains the church’s response in covenant for a renewed creation.

Threats to Survival

By the end of this century the greatest threats to the survival of life on earth may well arise from the destruction of the God-given environment. What can guide the church in its response to this momentous crisis? How can the church witness to God’s covenant promises intended for the creation?

First, the church must identify concrete issues threatening the integrity of creation, which must be addressed, and cannot be ignored, for the sake of enabling the ongoing gift of life. The following are examples, interrelated to one another.

The Greenhouse Effect

A dramatic rise in the temperature of the earth over the next few decades, which scientists now say could occur, would result in global catastrophe second only to nuclear war. The church must join with other groups to urge governments of industrialized countries to reduce the burning of fossil fuels by at least fifty percent in the next twenty-five years. Alternative, renewable energy resources throughout the world must be encouraged as essential to global stability. Sustainable agriculture less dependent on chemical fertilizers -- another cause of the greenhouse effect -- must be aggressively promoted. In short, the churches’ mission to the world must now include the saving of the world’s climate and atmosphere.

Deforestation

The devastation of tropical forests throughout the world poses critical threats to peoples within the third and fourth worlds, increasing erosion of irreplaceable soil, creating greater water shortages, and contributing to drought and desertification. Further, deforestation is the chief cause of species extinction, as well as adding to the greenhouse effect. Curbing such deforestation, and planting trees, can be a vital form of the church’s witness for preserving creation’s integrity.

Acid Rain

The contamination of atmosphere, particularly from the burning of fossil fuels, has already destroyed forests and lakes, as well as human lungs, in many regions of the northern hemisphere. Crossing political and ideological barriers as it is carried in the atmosphere, acid rain is spreading through many parts of the globe. The church can encourage international cooperation as well as changes in energy policies, which are required for preserving air that gives life rather than death.

Population Expansion

The issue of global population cannot be considered in isolation from questions of lifestyle and consumption of resources, cultural realities, and prospects for economic justice. But neither can the population issue be ignored by the church. Even with reductions in the maldistribution of global resources, the unprecedented expansion of population over the next few decades will stretch the carrying capacity of the earth to its breaking point. Population growth must become an ethical and theological issue addressed by our churches.

Unlimited Economic Growth

Industrialized societies continue to believe that they can grow economically without any limits. The so-called developing societies often aspire to these same goals. Yet, scientific analysis, as well as practical common sense, make clear that the limits to the earth’s resources impose constraints on the level of economic development. The church must encourage the search in modern societies for new understandings of economic life that are rooted in ecological realities. Biblical wisdom underscores the inescapable harmony between human economic welfare and the integrity of the created order. Our world today stands in critical need of such a prophetic and saving message.

Yet, before our churches consider the nature of our witness within society concerning the integrity of creation, we must examine the shape of our own lives as believing communities. The initial steps we must take in response to God’s covenant with the creation are those that would bring our own corporate lives more faithfully under the Lordship of Christ’s reconciling presence, upholding all the creation.

Some concrete measures can be suggested. Our churches own large amounts of land, for church buildings, camps, and schools as well as for investment purposes. How well do we demonstrate the gift of God’s creation on lands that are in our control? What form of witness do we make through the ways in which we tend, nurture, and cherish those portions of land entrusted to us?

Similarly, our buildings, including their architectural design and their use of energy, are expressions of our witness. Certainly there are vast differences of geography and wealth among the member churches in the ecumenical family. Yet we all share the responsibility of relating our material Structures to our spiritual beliefs. In a time when the actual survival of many people will depend on radical shifts in the world’s patterns of energy consumption, churches can be salt and leaven within their societies through the ways we conserve and use energy resources.

Beyond any doubt preserving the integrity of creation will require dramatic changes in the lifestyles particularly of those living in the North and the West. And the changes in personal patterns of consumption by Christians need the support of the gathered church community. Responding to God’s covenant with creation will deepen our understanding of being called into the covenant community, living in love, interdependence, and sharing with our sisters and brothers in Christ’s body.

For any of these responses to take root in the lives of our member churches, a strong emphasis must be given to the biblical and theological teaching we offer at all levels concerning God’s creation and humanity’s relationship to the environment. Though these themes resound in the Bible, we have ignored and neglected them. Heresies have often taken their place. We deny the goodness of the material world and suppose that spiritual realities can be separated from worldly existence. We assume that biological life suffers under God’s curse rather than God’s blessing, and we fail to see how ongoing decay and death in the natural world bring forth new life. We don’t believe that God’s redemptive action in Jesus Christ reaches out to the whole creation or that new life in Christ can restore a healing relationship to the earth. In all these ways and more our churches stand in need of God’s word and truth.

God’s covenant with the creation offers the world the true hope for the preservation of its life and invites the response of God’s people. Preserving the integrity of creation must become for our churches in the years ahead a central part of our witness and life in our societies.

The subject with which we are concerned is the spirituality of the earth. By this I do not mean a spirituality that is directed toward an appreciation of the earth. I speak of the earth as subject, not as object. I am concerned with the maternal principle out of which we were born and whence we derive all that we are and all that we have. In our totality we are born of the earth. We are earthlings. The earth is our origin, our nourishment, our support, our guide. Our spirituality itself is earth-derived. If there is no spirituality in the earth, then there is no spirituality in ourselves. The human and the earth are totally implicated each in the other.

Not to recognize the spirituality of the earth is to indicate a radical lack of spiritual perception in ourselves. We see this lack of spiritual insight in the earlier attitude of Euro-Americans in their inability to perceive the spiritual qualities of the indigenous American peoples and their mysticism of the land. The attack on these spiritual qualities by Christians constitutes one of the most barbaric moments in Christian history. This barbarism turned upon the tribal peoples was loosed also upon the American earth with a destructive impact beyond calculation.

The fragility of the earth has not yet impressed itself upon us. The crassness of our relation to the earth cannot but indicate a radical absence of spirituality in ourselves, not the lack of a spiritual dimension of the earth. The opaqueness is in our understanding of the earth, not in the earth’s structure which expresses an abiding numinous presence. The earth process has been generally ignored by the religious-spiritual currents of the West. Our alienation goes so deep that it is beyond our conscious mode of awareness. While there are tributes to the earth in the scriptures and in Christian liturgy, there is a tendency to see the earth as a seductive reality, which brought about alienation from God in the agricultural peoples of the Near East. Earth worship was the ultimate idolatry, the cause of the Fall, and thereby the cause of sacrificial redemption by divine personality. Thus, too, the Christian sense of being crucified to the world and living only for the savior. This personal savior orientation has led to an interpersonal devotionalism that quite easily dispenses with earth except as a convenient support for life.

We can produce Christian spiritualities that function in a certain isolated context without regard for the larger society. But such redemptive spiritualities are not liable to be effective in our present world. They speak a rhetoric that is not available for our world, or, if it is available, widens rather than lessens the tragic inner division between the world of affairs and the world of divine communion. They do not offer a way of interpreting the inner life of the society itself in a rhetoric available to the society. They do not establish an understanding of that authentic experience in contemporary life oriented toward communion with creation processes. Indeed, they do not recognize that the context of any authentic spirituality lies in the creation myth that governs the total life orientation.

Creation in traditional Christian teaching is generally presented as part of the discussion concerning "God in himself and in relation to his creation." But creation in this metaphysical, biblical, medieval, theological context is not terribly helpful in understanding the creation process as set forth in the scientific manuals or the textbooks of the earth sciences as they are studied by children in elementary or high school, or later in college.

These classroom studies initiate the child into a world that has more continuity with later adult life in its functional aspect than does the catechetical story of creation taken from biblical sources. This schoolroom presentation of the world in which the child lives and finds a place in the world is all-important for the future spirituality of the child. The school fulfills in our times the role of the ancient initiation rituals, which introduced our children to the society and to their human and sacred role in this society. The tragedy is that the sacred or spiritual aspect of this process is now absent. It is doubtful if separate catechetical instructions with their heavy emphasis on redemptive processes can ever supply what is missing.

It may be that the later alienation of young adults from the redemptive tradition is, in some degree, due to this inability to communicate to the child a spirituality grounded more deeply in creation dynamics in accord with the modem way of experiencing the galactic emergence of the universe, the shaping of the earth, the appearance of life and of human consciousness, and the historical sequence in human development.

In this sequence the child might learn that the earth has its intrinsic spiritual quality from the beginning, for this aspect of the creation story is what has been missing. This is what needs to be established if we are to have a functional spirituality. Just how to give the child an integral world -- that is the issue. It is also the spiritual issue of the modern religious personality. Among our most immediate tasks is to establish this new sense of the earth and of the human as a function of the earth.

We need to understand that the earth acts in all that acts upon the earth. The earth is acting in us whenever we act. In and through the earth spiritual energy is present. This spiritual energy emerges in the total complex of earth functions. Each form of life is integrated with every other life form. Even beyond the earth, by force of gravitation, every particle of the physical world attracts and is attracted to every other particle. This attraction holds the differentiated universe together and enables it to be a universe of individual realities. The universe is not a vast smudge of matter, some jelly-like substance extended indefinitely in space. Nor is the universe a collection of unrelated particles. The universe is, rather, a vast multiplicity of individual realities with both qualitative and quantitative differences all in spiritual-physical communion with each other. The individuals of similar form are bound together in their unity of form. The species are related to one another by derivation: the later, more complex life forms are derived from earlier, more simple life forms.

The first shaping of the universe was into those great galactic systems of fiery energy that constitute the starry heavens. In these celestial furnaces the elements are shaped. Eventually, after some ten billion years, the solar system and the earth and its living forms constituted a unique planet in the entire complex of the universe. Here on earth life, both plant and animal life, was born in the primordial seas some three billion years ago. Plants came out upon the land some six hundred million years ago, after the planet earth had shaped itself through a great series of transformations forming the continents, the mountains, the valleys, the rivers and streams. The atmosphere was long in developing. The animals came ashore a brief interval later. As these life forms established themselves over some hundreds of millions of years, the luxuriant foliage formed layer after layer of organic matter, which was then buried in the crust of the earth to become fossil formations with enormous amounts of stored energy. One hundred million years ago flowers appeared and the full beauty of earth began to manifest itself. Some sixty million years ago the birds were in the air. Mammals walked through the forest. Some of the mammals -- the whales, porpoises, and dolphins -- went back into the sea.

Finally, some two million years ago, the ascending forms of life culminated in the awakening human consciousness. Wandering food gatherers and hunters until some eight thousand years ago, we then settled into village life. This life led us through the neolithic period to the classical civilization which has flourished so brilliantly for the past five thousand years.

Then, some four hundred years ago, a new stage of scientific development took place which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, brought about human technological dominance of the earth out of which we had emerged. This stage can be interpreted as the earth awakening to consciousness of itself in its human mode of being. The story of this awakening consciousness is the most dramatic aspect of the earth story.

The spiritual attitude that then caused or permitted humans to attack the earth with such savagery has never been adequately explained. That it was done by a Christian-derived society, and even with the belief that this was the truly human and Christian task, makes explanation especially harsh for our society.

Possibly it was the millennial drive toward a total transformation of the earth condition that led us, resentful that the perfect world was not yet achieved by divine means, to set about the violent subjugation of the earth by our own powers in the hope that in this way the higher life would be attained, our afflictions healed.

While this is the positive goal sought it must be added that the negative, even fearful, attitude toward the earth resulting from the general hardships of life led to the radical disturbance of the entire process. The increasing intensity shown in exploiting the earth was also the result of the ever-rising and unsatiated expectation of Western peoples. Even further, the natural tensions with the earth were increased by the Darwinian principle of natural selection, indicating that the primary attitude of each individual and each species is for its own survival at the expense of the others. Out of this strife, supposedly, the glorious achievements of earth take place. Darwin had only minimal awareness of the cooperation and mutual dependence of each form of life on the other forms of life. This is amazing since he himself discovered the great web of life. Still, he had no real appreciation of the principle of intercommunion.

Much more needs to be said on the conditions that permitted such a mutually destructive situation to arise between ourselves and the earth, but we must pass on to give some indication of the new attitude that needs to be adopted toward the earth. This involves a new spiritual and even mystical communion with the earth, a true aesthetic of the earth, a sensitivity to earth needs, a valid economy of the earth. We need a way of designating the earth-human world in its continuity and identity rather than in its discontinuity and difference. In spirituality, especially, we need to recognize the numinous qualities of the earth. We might begin with some awareness of what it is to be human, of the role of consciousness on the earth, and of the place of the human species in the universe.

While the scholastic definition of the human as a rational animal gives us some idea of ourselves among the biological species, it gives us a rather inadequate sense of the role we play in the total earth process. The Chinese have a better definition of the human as the hsin of heaven and earth. This word hsin is written as a pictograph of the human heart. It should be translated by a single word or phrase with both a feeling and an understanding aspect. It could be thus translated by saying that the human is the "understanding heart of heaven and earth." Even more briefly, the phrase has been translated by Julia Ch’ing in the statement that the human is "the heart of the universe." It could, finally, be translated by saying that we are "the consciousness of the world," or "the psyche of the universe." Here we have a remarkable feeling for the absolute dimensions of the human, the total integration of reality in the human, the total integration of the human within the reality of things.

We need a spirituality that emerges out of a reality deeper than ourselves, even deeper than life, a spirituality that is as deep as the earth process itself, a spirituality born out of the solar system and even out of the heavens beyond the solar system. There in the stars is where the primordial elements take shape in both their physical and psychic aspects. Out of these elements the solar system and the earth took shape, and out of the earth, ourselves.

There is a certain triviality in any spiritual discipline that does not experience itself as supported by the spiritual as well as the physical dynamics of the entire cosmic-earth process. A spirituality is a mode of being in which not only the divine and the human commune with each other, but we discover ourselves in the universe and the universe discovers itself in us. The Sioux Indian Crazy Horse called upon these depths of his being when he invoked the cosmic forces to support himself in battle. He painted the lightning upon his cheek, placed a rock behind his ear, an eagle feather in his hair, and the head of a hawk upon his head. Assumption of the cosmic insignia is also evident in the Sun Dance Ceremony. In this dance the symbols of the sun and moon and stars are cut out of rawhide and worn by the dancers. The world of living moving things is indicated by the form of the buffalo cut from rawhide, and by eagle feathers. The plant world is represented by the cottonwood tree set up in the center of the ceremonial circle. The supreme spirit itself is represented by the circular form of the dance area.

So the spiritual personality should feel constantly in communion with those numinous cosmic forces out of which we were born. Furthermore, the cosmic-earth order needs to be supplemented by the entire historical order of human development such as was depicted on the shield of Achilles by Homer and on the shield of Aeneas by Virgil. Virgil spends several long pages enumerating the past and future historical events wrought on the shield of Aeneas by Vulcan at the command of Venus, the heavenly mother of Aeneas. All these cosmic and historical forces are presently available to us in a new mode of appreciation. The historical and the cosmic can be seen as a single process. This vision of earth-human development provides the sustaining dynamic of the contemporary world.

That there is an organizing force within the earth process with both physical and psychic dimensions needs to be acknowledged in language and in imagery. It needs to be named and spoken of in its integral form. It has a unified functioning similar to the more particular organisms with which we are acquainted. When we speak of earth we are speaking of a numinous maternal principle in and through which the total complex of earth phenomena takes its shape.

In antiquity this mode of being of the earth was indicated by personification. "Earth" itself designates a deity in Hesiod and in the Homeric hymns. This personification is expressed as Cybele in the Eastern Mediterranean and as Demeter in the Greek world. Biblical revelation represents a basic antagonism between the transcendent deity, Jahweh, and the fertility religions of the surrounding societies. There is a basic effort here to keep the asymmetry in the relationship between the divine and the created. In the doctrine of the Madonna in later Christian history there are many passages indicating that Mary was to be thought of as the Earth in which the True Vine is planted and which had been made fruitful by the Holy Spirit. Probably it belongs to the dialectics of history that direct human association with unique historical individuals, the savior and his mother, had to develop before any adequate feeling for the mystique of the earth could take place. Perhaps, too, full development of redemption processes was needed before this new mode of human-earth communion could find expression in our times.

However this may be, a shift in attention is now taking place. Several things are happening. The most notable single event is that modern science is giving us a new and more comprehensive account of our own birth out of the earth. This story of the birth of the human was never known so well as now. After the discovery of the geological stages of earth transformation and the discovery of the sequence of life in ancient fossil remains by Louis le Clerc, James Hutton, and Charles Lyell, came the discovery of the emergence of all forms of life from primordial life forms by Charles Darwin, presented in his Origin of Species in 1859. While Darwin saw the human appearing only out of the physical earth, Teilhard de Chardin saw the human emerging out of both the physical and the psychic dimensions of the earth. Thus the whole burden of modern earth studies is to narrate the story of the birth of the human from our Mother the Earth.

Once this story is told, it immediately becomes obvious how significant the title Mother Earth is, how intimate a relationship exists, how absolute our gratitude must be, how delicate our concern. Our long motherless period is coming to a close. Hopefully, too, the long period of our mistreatment of earth is being terminated. If it is not terminated, if we fail to perceive not only our earth origin but also our continuing dependence on our earth-mother, then our failure will be due in no small measure to the ephemeral spiritualities that have governed our own thoughts, attitudes, and actions.

In this mother-child relationship, however, a new and fundamental shift in dependence has now taken place. Until recently the child was taken care of by the mother. Now, however, the mother must be extensively cared for by the child. The child has grown to adult status. The mother-child relationship needs to undergo a renewal similar to that in the ordinary process of maturing. In this process both child and mother experience a period of alienation. Then follows a reconciliation period when mother and child relate to each other with a new type of intimacy, a new depth of appreciation, and a new mode of interdependence. Such is the historical period in which we are now living. Development of this new mode of earth-human communion can only take place within a profound spiritual context. Thus the need for a spirituality that will encompass this process. As a second observation concerning our newly awakening sense of the Earth, we could say that a new phase in the history of the madonna figure of Western civilization has begun. Association of the Virgin Mother with the Earth may now be a condition of Mary returning to her traditional role in Western civilization. Her presence may also be a condition for overcoming our estrangement from the earth. In the Western world the earth known only in itself as universal mother is not sufficient. It must be identified with an historical person in and through whom earth functions in its ultimate reaches. Phrases referring to Mary as the Earth are found throughout Western religious literature. Whether this is anything more than a simple rhetorical device needs a thorough inquiry at the present time. But whether or not this relationship is given in any extensive manner in prior Christian literature, it is a subject of utmost importance for our entire civilizational venture. Few, if any, other civilizations were so deeply grounded in a feminine mystique as the medieval period of Western Christendom. A vital contact with this earlier phase of Western civilization is hardly possible without some deep appreciation of its feminine component. Thus we cannot fail to unite in some manner these two realities: Earth and Mary. In Western Christian tradition earth needs embodiment in an historical person, and such an historical person needs an earth identity to fulfill adequately her role as divine mother.

A third observation is that emergence of the new age of human culture will necessarily be an age dominated by the symbol woman. This, too, depends on the identification of woman with the earth and its creativity. Woman and Earth are inseparable. The fate of one is the fate of the other. This association is given in such a variety of cultural developments throughout the world in differing historical periods that it is hardly possible to disassociate the two. Earth consciousness, woman consciousness; these two go together. Both play a stupendous role in the spirituality of humans as well as in the structure of civilizations. Our alienation from the earth, from ourselves, and from a truly creative man-woman relationship in an overly masculine mode of being, demands a reciprocal historical period in which not only a balance will be achieved but even, perhaps, a period of feminine emphasis.

A fourth observation I would make is to note our new capacity for subjectivity, for subjective communion with the manifold presences that constitute the universe. In this we are recovering the more primitive genius of humankind. For in our earlier years we experienced both the intimacy and the distance of our relation with the earth and with the entire natural world. Above all we lived in a spirit world, a world that could be addressed in a reciprocal mood of affectionate concern. This is what gave rise to sympathetic magic as well as to the great rituals, the majestic poetry, and the awesome architecture of past ages. Nothing on earth was a mere "thing." Every being had its own divine, numinous subjectivity, its self, its center, its unique identity. Every being was a presence to every other being. Among the more massive civilizations, China gave clearest expression to this intimacy of beings with each other in its splendid concept of Jen, a word that requires translation according to context by a long list of terms in English, terms such as love, goodness, human-heartedness, and affection. All beings are held together in Jen, as in St. Paul all things are held together in Christ. But perhaps an even better analogy is to say that while for Newton, the universal law of gravitation whereby each particle of matter attracts and is attracted to every other particle of matter in the universe indicates a mere physical force of attraction, the universal law of attraction for the Chinese is a form of feeling identity.

For this reason there is, in China, the universal law of compassion. This law is especially observable in humankind, for every human has a heart that cannot bear to witness the suffering of others. When the objection was made to Wang Yang-ming in the fifteenth century that this compassion is evident only in human relations, Master Wang replied by noting that even the frightened cry of the bird, the crushing of a plant, the shattering of a tile, or the senseless breaking of a stone immediately and spontaneously causes pain in the human heart. This would not be, he tells us, unless there exists a bond of intimacy and even identity between ourselves and these other beings.

Recovery of this capacity for subjective communion with the earth is a consequence and a cause of a newly emerging spirituality. Subjective communion with the earth, identification with the cosmic-earth-human process, provides the context in which we now make our spiritual journey. This Journey is no longer the journey of Dante through the heavenly spheres. It is no longer simply the journey of the Christian community through history to the heavenly Jerusalem. It is the journey of primordial matter through its marvelous sequence of transformations -- in the stars, in the earth, in living beings, in human consciousness -- toward an ever more complete spiritual-physical intercommunion of the parts with each other, with the whole, and with that numinous presence that has been manifested throughout this entire cosmic-earth-human process.

One or two remarks by way of preamble may be helpful in preventing misunderstandings. This paper is descriptive and interpretative; it is an attempt to convey my understanding of the views of nature found in the biblical writers. It is not intended to draw normative conclusions for our own attitude to nature or our treatment of it. It is, therefore, primarily a religio-historical essay, not one in "biblical theology." The most I have allowed myself by way of contemporary application is to comment at various points on which of our current attitudes and policies seem compatible with the biblical view under consideration, and which do not. Secondly, I have called the paper "Biblical Views of Nature" because I do not believe there is any one view held by the whole range of biblical writers. Any single view which incorporated all their various insights, assuming such a synthesis could be made, would be a theological construct of our day, not something properly called biblical. This is not to say, of course, that there are not themes and beliefs which the biblical writers share in their approach to nature, but the differences are as important as the common assumptions. Again, however, I have allowed myself to draw attention to some of these common (or majority) assumptions, since these can be helpful in any attempt to compare biblical views with those from other sources.

The writers of the Hebrew Scriptures, unlike ourselves, did not have an immense stock of universal or semi-abstract terms. While this limited them in some directions -- philosophy and metaphysics, for example -- it also saved them from a certain woolliness of thought to which we are peculiarly liable. Thus, the lack of a word corresponding to our term was in some respects a handicap: but it also safeguarded them against lumping together things that have no obvious business together and against being taken in by such phrases as "communing with nature," or "nature, red in tooth and claw." What they saw when they looked around them was not some undifferentiated global category but particular things -- mountains, seas, rivers, crawling animals, oak trees, birds, the sun and moon, and so on. Their nearest approach to an all-embracing word for their environment was ‘erets, the earth. The title Friends of the Earth they might have understood; nature-lover would have required some explanation.

How far are humans involved in nature, and how far have they distanced themselves from it? The basic elements of this question can be found scattered in the Hebrew Scriptures. Humanity is part of the panorama of nature. Psalm 104 places humanity with great artistry in the context of all the other teeming life of the earth. If the human is the final figure to be painted in, and therefore in some sense special or climactic, this is very much understated (v. 23). In the same way, in the older creation story (I) in Genesis 2:4b-25, both man and the animals are formed out of the soil. Here, in a strange fashion, the original fusion of supposed fact and faith-image, after an interim period of being dismissed by the religious mind as purely symbolic and crudely so, becomes in our day once again the vivid symbol for a faith-interpretation of literal fact. Genesis does not go as far as the following quotation, but the germ of the idea is there:

Nevertheless, even this older creation story is concerned predominantly to stress the distinctness of man from the rest of creation. Birds and beasts may share a material origin with man, and even a divine artificer, but they are not adequate companions and partners for him (v. 20). Only another human being, formed out of his own living substance, can be that (vv. 21-23). It is this unique kinship, so the story claims, which explains the all-surpassing force of the bond between man and woman (v. 24). The superiority of man to the animals is further emphasized by the incident of man’s naming of all the living creatures. This act has two important implications. First, to give a name to some other being is to claim and exercise sovereignty over it. So a parent names his newborn child, an overlord his vassal (2 Kgs 24:17). True, man gives a name to his wife at her first creation (Gn 2:23), implying the male hegemony characteristic of the biblical world, and reasserts his authority over her, in accordance with God’s judicial verdict after their joint offense, by giving her a new name (3:20). But the first of these two names, the generic woman (‘issa), emphasizes that woman is the only creature who belongs in the same category as man (’is).

Second, there is the strong conviction of the whole ancient world that a true name expresses the nature and controls the destiny of its owner (cf. Gn 35:16-18, for example). By giving animals the truly appropriate name for each (Gn 2:19), Adam proves that he has insight into their true nature. This at once puts him on a different plane from them. He is a creature nearer to God than they, for he shares some at least of the insight which enabled God to create them in the first place. So the giving of names to the animals by man is a sign of actual superiority and legitimate authority over them on his part -- not the absolute superiority and authority that belong to God alone, but real nevertheless, even if relative. By this act of sovereignty Adam proves that none of these other creatures is a "helper fit for him" (vv. 18, 20); and paradoxically the act of naming by which he claims authority over his wife is also a recognition of her essential equality with him. That this is the correct reading of the story is confirmed by the divine sentence passed on Adam and Eve for their offense in eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Because man has rebelled against his proper overlord, God, his own subjects are to rebel against him. The tillage of the earth was once within his strength and its fruits were all beneficial (2:15); now it is to yield less, and that only to unremitting labor, and some of its produce will be worthless for human consumption (3:17-19). Similarly, the woman who upset the order of things by persuading her husband to disobedience loses the relationship of a free subordinate partner and becomes his servant, driven by a compulsive attachment (3:16). In all this, too, it is possible to discern the traits of kingship in the portrait of man, expressed not only through the naming ritual but also in the ancient cultic symbolism of the tending and watering of the tree of life, a sacral duty of the king.

In the later creation narrative (P) in Genesis 1:1-2:4a, man’s supremacy is spelt out categorically, though here, be it noted, the sub-plot of male superiority to the female is eliminated. This is not to be taken as implying equality of the sexes in the writer’s mind, merely that in the context of the relation of man to nature, all human beings share in the distinctive superiority of their species in the created order. In this story man’s supremacy is given technical theological expression, peculiar to this writer and his school. Man is "in (God’s) image" and "after (his) likeness" (Gn 1:26-27). The exact meaning of this phrase has been endlessly debated. There may be influence from the Egyptian formula, according to which the pharaoh is the "image of Amun-Re," in which case there are viceregal overtones, made explicit in v. 28. But the Hebrew and Egyptian phrases are not truly parallel. Much more certain is the implication that man is the nearest visible pointer to what God looks like (cf. Ez 1:26). The interesting question is: How far is this similarity thought to go below the surface into the realm of understanding and character? To some degree it must do, since it is improbable that any writer would make God give even a shadow of his own unique likeness to a Creature that had nothing in common with him; and this common-sense conclusion is confirmed by the fact that God entrusts to man dominion over his new and wonderful earth and its other inhabitants.

The major difference between this creation story and the older one, so far as our present subject is concerned, is that in Genesis 1 the theme of a common material origin for man and animals is suppressed altogether. The writer seems to have held a view, instanced elsewhere in the ancient world, that the earth and the sea themselves "brought forth" their various inhabitants (vv. 20-21, 2425), but he has combined this with safeguards against any divinization of earth or sea by insisting simultaneously that in fact God himself "created" (v. 21) and "made" (v. 25) the creatures these primordial entities generated. The resultant picture is that all animal life was produced either by the earth or the sea as a result of God’s creative edict and operation. There is a very careful gradation upward from the production of plant life (vv. 11-12), where God issues the creative fiat, "Let the earth put forth vegetation, . . ." but is not said to have "made" or "created" what is put forth. The writer seems to be saying that animal life, whether on land or in the sea, is more marvelous than mere plant life, and, although issuing from the womb of the earth and from the waters, required a special operation of God to bring it about. Then in the case of man we take yet another step upward. Here the divine edict and activity are everything; no intermediate creative source is named. Man is presented as created by God directly, and the question whether he too came from the earth is at least passed over in silence. It is possible that Psalm 139:15 draws on a myth that man was "earth-born." If such a view was current, then the writer of Genesis 1 has deliberately snubbed it. As for the fact that God is said both to "create" (v. 27) and to "make" (v. 26) man, there do not to the present writer seem to be solid grounds for finding here two distinct theological concepts. As is well-known, the verb ‘bara’, "create," is found in the Hebrew Scriptures only with God as subject. The significance of this is hard to assess. The word is used only by the Priestly Writer, Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Second and Third Isaiah, Amos, Psalms, Malachi, and Koheleth. With the exception of Koheleth, who is late and therefore drawing on an already established usage, all these sources are strongly priestly in character (the Amos instance comes in a formal hymnic doxology which may or may not be the prophet’s own work). Since the Hebrew Scriptures are, to all intents and purposes, the only Hebrew literature of their period that we possess, it is precarious to argue from evidence that bara’ was an exclusively theological terminus technicus with no secular use. Etymologically it has been linked with an ancient South Arabian verb meaning "to build," and with a verb in the dialect of Socotra meaning "to bear, bring forth." The absence of more standard ANE parallels suggests that it might have been a fairly esoteric word, entering Hebrew through a specialized channel of some antiquity. (There may just be some significance in the fact that Levi, the priestly gentilic, is also, in one view, related to a South Arabian word for a cultic official.) On balance, the most likely view seems to be that bara’ simply means "to build" or "construct," but that it came into the Hebrew as part of the sacral vocabulary of priestly circles and may already at its importation have had by convention an exclusive link with the deity. What we are not justified in doing on the basis of known usage is to read into bara’ anywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures later metaphysical understandings of the idea of creation, such as creatio ex nihilo, which is not the sense of Genesis 1:1f. and is indeed not found in Jewish religious writing until 2 Maccabees 7:28, where there is undoubted Hellenistic influence. In the end, therefore, there is no reason to see any substantial difference of meaning between "create" and "make" in Genesis 1. The collocation of the two words at the end of the Priestly creation story (Gn 2:3) is a sonorous full close for the stylistic effect. Nevertheless, with regard to our main point it seems clear that by stressing the direct divine activity involved in the making of man, and by omitting any reference to physical stuff out of which man is formed, this writer is intentionally minimizing that which is common to man and the rest of the animal world. The only common bond is the theological one: both are the works of God and created to fulfill the particular purposes he has in mind for them.

It is clear, however, that humanity’s purpose and role is a unique one. Man in Genesis 1 occupies much the same high place in the scheme of things as he does in Psalm 8: "Yet thou hast made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honour. Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea" (vv. 5-8). To our ears such words sound very like the most blatant human imperialism toward the rest of nature, as does the divine commission to man in Genesis 1:28; and in modern times they may have fostered such an attitude and been used as a divine "exploiters’ charter" to justify it. But what in their biblical context did they originally imply?

One connection of this type of language is with the institution of kingship. Under the influence of Mesopotamian models, even quite petty kings in the ANE seem to have used cosmic iconography to express their status and authority. Solomon’s throne, with six steps and a curved back (1 Kgs 10:18- 20). symbolized universal dominion; and the embroidery on the collar of the later high priests, which was probably zodiacal and signified the whole cosmos, was almost certainly taken over from royal robes of earlier times (cf. Wis 18:24a). "Kingship came down from heaven," the ANE believed, and part of the mystique of kingship was that every king was God’s viceregent on earth. One of a king’s most important duties was to ensure fertility and prosperity by his obedience to the gods and by his observance of the yearly rituals. We can trace thinking of this kind at many points in the Hebrew Scriptures; for example, in the famine sent on Israel for the wickedness of Ahab (1 Kgs 17:1); or conversely, in a text like Psalm 72, where unimaginable abundance is to be a mark of the reign of the ideal ruler. The conditions pictured in this psalm -- for example, the king’s worldwide sovereignty (v. 8) -- certainly never obtained in any actual reign; but the psalm is nonetheless not just a dream of an indefinite future. Verse 1 refers to an actual king; it is a prayer, perhaps used at the coronation, that the vision painted in the psalm may come true in this king’s reign. Primarily, therefore, the "man" and "son of man" of Psalm 8 is also the king, whose sacred office endows him with the resources of divine power not just over his human subjects but over all other creatures within his domain; and it is only his sins which cause this power to be withheld. Later this correlation between righteousness and prosperity was to be democratized, and the magical element confined to the direct action of God; in the final versions of Deuteronomy, for example, the responsibility for righteousness is laid on all Israelites equally, and abundance is God’s reward for this. But there is also another line of development, which continues to use the figure of the individual ruler. As hopes set on actual rulers are falsified, so longing grows more intense for a ruler who will measure up to God’s standards. Under such a king all the anomalies of man and nature will be ironed out, and harmony and abundance will reign. The most famous instance of this hope in Hebrew Scriptures is Isaiah 11:1-9.

By a common feature of human mythical thinking, however, paradise in the end time is thought of as the recreation of a primeval paradise at the dawn of creation, the lost "golden age." Thus we find a small but significant detail common to both Genesis 1 and the eschatological vision of Isaiah 11: the vegetarianism of the creation. Animals eat grass and man eats grains and fruits (cf. Gn 1:29-30 and Is 11:6-7). It is not possible to decide for certain whether the prophetic vision of the end time is consciously drawing upon paradisal traditions of the Urzeit, or whether a passage like Genesis 1 owes something to the prophetic imagery. Both no doubt derive along their respective routes from a long, complex, and interwoven traditional history. (Awareness of a link between the eschatological fulfillment and the primal paradise story shows in the words of Isaiah 65:25, "and the snake [shall eat] dust," a reapplication of Isaiah 11:6f.) What we can say is that the basic assumptions of the Israelite view of history work out in two very different shapings of the whole historical sequence in the priestly and prophetic perspectives. Both are acutely aware of human sin and the disruption it has imported into the whole created order. The prophet, however, is interested primarily in the resolution of this discord in the new age God is going to inaugurate, the world in which righteousness is going to be achieved and peace and well-being reign. The priest sees God’s goal as something much more immediately manageable; namely a world where life is regulated by the God-given law, and any margin of failure is covered by cultic atonement. Consequently, though recognizing the imperfections of the present, he does not look for any radical reformation of it. The time -- which must be a reality at some point -- when God’s ideals are fully realized is in the primal past. Then all things were "good, very good" (Gn 1:31). The future which the prophetic vision desiderates, and the past, which the priestly theodicy presupposes, are, therefore, inevitably very close to one another in character; both speak of a way the world ought to be, but is not. And both link this ideal condition with the right exercise of kingship, either that of the perfect Israelite ruler or of the human species in its cosmic vocation. But the "dominion" promised to man in Genesis 1 or Psalm 8, and the government expected of the ideal Davidic ruler in Isaiah 11, are poles apart from the kind of right to egotistical exploitation that the words superficially suggest to our ears. They are in essence a perfect obedience to the will of God, which respects the divine order in nature and is rewarded by nature’s recognition of man as the greatest of God’s creatures and its provision of a sufficiency of food for all flesh (cf. Ps 145:15f.). If this vision has anything to say to our present situation, it is certainly not to ratify the extermination of species or the ruthless greed that exhausts precious natural resources for short-term profit. On the other hand, it would be overly simple to claim the Hebrew Scriptures in support of our modern study of animal life or the work of environmental conservation, since it is clear that neither priest not prophet thought the order of nature as we now see it to reflect God’s intentions, either original or ultimate, for it.

We referred just now to the general Israelite assumption that human sin was the factor that had disrupted the cosmic order. The Torah expresses in a number of ways the idea that man declined drastically from the standards of the golden age. The story of Cain and Abel (Gn 4) is one; the decline in the normal length of human life, another (cf. Gn 5 with 10:10-26 and 47:9). (This later feature is another link with the late prophetic vision of restoration in Isaiah 65:17-25, already mentioned, where some improvement in longevity to a norm of 100 years is promised: v. 20.) Another mark of decline of more direct relevance to our present subject, is the change in the divine laws of life after the flood. The new start for the human race, embodied in Noah and his family, is marked by a divine covenant, modeled ultimately on the treaties imposed unilaterally in some ANE empires by suzerains on their vassals, consisting of promises by the overlord and obligations laid upon his subjects. The promise is that never again will God destroy all living things by a flood (Gn 9:8-17; the older version of the story has the same promise, though not in covenant form: 8:21-22). It is interesting and important that this covenant is made not just with man but with all living creatures (five times repeated: 9:10, 12, 15, 16, 17) and indeed with the earth itself (9:13). The new laws of life (9:1-7) replace the ordinances established at the creation and modify them in significant respects. No longer is man’s food to be fruit and grains only: "Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you green plants, I give you everything" (9:3). (This license is qualified for Israel later, when they are granted the higher insight, denied to the nations, of the distinction between "clean" and "unclean" animals. Christianity’s rejection of this distinction is thus of great symbolic importance for her universal mission.) The flood and the subsequent new start for the world are thus used as an opportunity to switch from the theoretic "golden age" to the conditions actually obtaining; and one of the saddest features of this change is the degradation of relations between humans and animals from their first created beauty. The language of Genesis 9:1-2, when compared with the phrasing of 1 :28f., betrays at once the poignancy of the writer’s feelings: "The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered." The language is that normally used of a conqueror slaughtering a routed army or sacking a fallen city. Man has become the enemy of all living things.

The Hebrew Scriptures, then, do nothing to justify the charge that they bless an exploitative, humanly self-centered attitude to nature. They recognize man’s preying on nature as a fact, but characterize that fact as a mark of man’s decline from the first perfect intentions of God for him or as a defect to be eradicated in God’s perfect future. This is in tune with another notable feature of the Hebrew Scriptures, namely that they are permeated with what we can only call an affectionate and admiring approach to nature. We have already noted the supreme example of this in Psalm 104, but instances are to be found in other psalms that are not, as is that one, modeled on already existing foreign poetry (cf. Pss 19:1-6; 65:10-13; 84:3; 136; 148). The same attitude is particularly evident in the wisdom literature, with its many similes from observation of animals, weather, plant life, and so on. We also find a kindred spirit in some of the prophets, where the faithful obedience of nonhuman creatures to the divine will is contrasted with the faithfulness and perversity of men: "Even the stork in the heavens knows her times; and the turtledove, swallow, and crane keep the time of their coming; but my people know not the ordinance of the Lord" (Jer 8:7). This admiration of nature finds its climax in the book of Job, where the wonders of the natural order are used for a didactic purpose unique to the Bible, and possibly in all ancient literature: to make the point that humanity’s whole attitude to the created order is wrong, because it is totally egoistic, totally anthropocentric. If humans were to stop even for a moment to consider the universe as it actually is, they would see that by far the greater part of it has no relevance to them at all. If God created Behemoth and Leviathan, it assuredly was not for humanity’s benefit (chaps. 40-41); it must have been for some purpose opaque to humans, who can think only in terms of themselves and their situation. Such creatures glorify God in their existence according to rules far beyond our ken; God made them and delights in them for their own sake, not for some ulterior usefulness to us as human beings. The same point is made in a rather different way by drawing Job’s attention to the seemingly idiotic behavior of certain animals such as the ostrich (39:13-18) or to the apparent pointlessness of certain phenomena, such as the brief spring rains, which cause a short-lived carpet of tiny flowers to appear in the desert (38:26-27). Why have flowers where there is no one to admire them? Man did not arrange any of these; if it had been left to him, he never would have done! But God did arrange them. We are left to draw our own conclusions either that God is daft, or perhaps that we with our purely human-conditioned "wisdom" take far too narrow and short-sighted a view to reach any genuine understanding of reality. This is not to say that a sound and sensible way of dealing with nature is not a part of the wisdom appropriate to humans, and as such itself a gift of God (cf. Isa 28:23-29). Not only is this accepted; it is in fact one particular application of a more general principle developed in the Hebrew Scriptures, which is of some importance for our subject. This is the principle that by observing the way in which nature functions we can arrive at moral guidance for human life. In the Hebrew Scriptures this is not taken beyond the most obvious instances; for example, the world is made in such a way that the lazy are likely to starve, and therefore it is wrong to be lazy. But significantly, such conduct is held to be wrong not just in a pragmatic sense but also in a theological one. For, as with everything else in the Hebrew Scriptures, such thinking has an extra dimension, the omni-relevant fact of God. Since it was the wisdom of God that made the world, God must have had some purpose in every detail of its ordering and must therefore have intended laziness to be dangerous. Hence diligent and sensible work can be said to be something God both commands and commends, and sloth something God condemns. There are, then, in the Hebrew Scriptures elements to justify a pragmatic, science-based ethic, at least in some such general terms as these: What by observation we discover really to work best, both for man and for other creatures, is something that loyalty to God requires us to put into practice. Even the point about what is best for other creatures, which may seem very modern, is not without foundation in Hebrew Scriptures in such passages as the law against taking the hen-bird as well as the eggs from the nest (Deut 22:6), or this saying from Proverbs: "A righteous man has regard for the life of his beast" (12:10), where, be it noted, the quality that makes a man considerate of his working animals is not prudence or good business sense but "righteousness," a point all the more significant when we remember that in the Hebrew Scriptures one of the marks of righteousness is not mere evenhandedness but active favor to the weak and deprived.

One reason why the attitude in the Hebrew Scriptures to nature is more sympathetic and comprehensible to us than that of some other ancient people is that for a good many of the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures, though not all, nature had been, to use a modern term, substantially demythologized. An example may clarify the point. In the Ugaritic texts of the mid-second millennium occurs the following passage: "If thou smite Lotan, the serpent slant, Destroy the serpent tortuous, Shalyat of the seven heads

" The name Lotan is the Canaanite equivalent of one that appears many centuries later in the Hebrew Scriptures, and to which we have already referred, namely Leviathan, who is also a sea-monster. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Leviathan plays a number of roles. In Psalm 74 he is, as in Ugarit, many-headed, and also an enemy of God. (By the process known as historicization his destruction is linked with the Israelites’ crossing of the Red Sea at their Exodus from Egypt. A similar association of the killing of the sea-monster with the Exodus occurs in Isaiah 51:9-10, but here the monster’s name is Rahab, a mocking name in the Isaiah tradition for Egypt, cf. Is 30:7.) In Isaiah 27:1 we have mention of "Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent," another very close parallel to the Ugaritic text, but here the monster symbolizes cosmic evil, to be overthrown by God at the eschaton. In striking contrast to both these uses of the Leviathan figure, however, are Psalm 104 and Job 41. In Psalm 104 Leviathan is a pet with whom God enjoys playing in his leisure moments (v. 26); in Job he is the greatest of all God’s creatures, "king over all the sons of pride," and is cited simply to crush the anthropocentric conceit of Job. If we try to date these passages, we find no steady theological trend. A majority vote of scholarly opinion would probably give this sequence: Psalm 104 -- Psalm 74 -- Isaiah 51 -- Job 41 -- Isaiah 27. In other words, running side by side we have the sea as something evil and something good, and the monster as a supernatural evil being, a symbol of anti-God forces, and a magnificent testimony to God’s wisdom and power.

The theological background to this ongoing activity of demythologizing that developed in certain quarters in Israel may be analyzed very crudely and briefly as follows. The basic premise of Israel’s faith is that her God is stronger than anything or anyone, and for this to be so, she found, it was necessary for God to be radically distanced from natural phenomena. Other nations in the ANE had advanced, it is true, well beyond the stage of a simple-minded identification of gods with natural forces or objects. But they were trapped in the morass of polytheism; one of the reasons for this was that the traditional associations of various deities with particular phenomena -- the sun, the moon, the stars, storms, vegetation, the sea, and so on -- meant that the obvious multiplicity of nature kept getting in the way of their struggles to apprehend the unity of the divine. By a kind of inspired bigotry the Jews, however, succeeded where all others failed. By holding fast to the thesis that God was supreme, in the teeth of all those disasters such as exile and persecution, which seemed to prove the contrary, they found themselves forced to treat everything -- nature, humanity, and history -- as subordinate to God, indeed as God’s instruments, even when the uses to which God put them proved morally inscrutable. This has two very important consequences for the attitude of the Hebrew Scriptures to nature. First, nature is progressively depersonalized and demythologized: "Who makest the winds thy messengers, fire and flame thy ministers" (Ps 104:4). It is no longer the manifestation of supernatural beings but now for the first time actually merits the name nature, though, as we have said, the Hebrew language did not have that concept at its disposal. The climax of this process in the Hebrew Scriptures is the book of Ecclesiastes (Koheleth), which our own outlook on the world finds remarkably sympathetic. Second, following on from this, humans lose their numinous dread of nature. Nature can still frighten them, but only by virtue of being stronger than they in a natural way, from which they may need God to rescue them, but which they recognize as being in principle a strength they can understand and in many cases do something about.

We may summarize the main points emerging from the utterances of the Hebrew Scriptures about nature as follows:

(a) For the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures, the determining factors in thinking about nature, as about every other subject, are the all-controlling rights and power of God. "The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof (Ps 24:1); this can be carried so far even as to have practical consequences for human social organization, as in the principles underlying the law of Jubilee, that no human being can ever own land outright but must be regarded as a tenant installed by God (Lv 25:1-34).

(b) Under this overall sovereignty of God, humankind does have a position of control over nature, which is approved by God and which is meant to be exercised in a spirit of respect and responsibility. Skills and technology of all kinds may be admirable, but the tyrannical or greedy use of human power over nature is a failure deriving from human sin, not from God’s intention in creation.

(c) Humanity’s proper control over nature is made possible because the realization that God is One and Supreme, and therefore transcendent, effectively desupernaturalizes the world, ridding it of superhuman personal power, whether divine or demonic, and placing humans in a position to use their powers rationally in dealing with nature.

(d) Nevertheless, nature is not to be evaluated simply in terms of human needs and interests; to think that it is, is simply a mark of folly. God created the greater part of the world for its own sake -- a point that comes home even more strongly to us, with our knowledge of the infinite universe -- and wisdom consists fundamentally in recognizing this and the limitations it imposes upon us. Technology may explore and exploit nature, but it will never discover the way to wisdom (Job 28). The truly wise person never imagines that he or she knows fully what God was about in creation.

(e) Since God, however, has a moral and rational character, humans must in the end submit to things as they are, as a genuine revelation, so far as they can grasp it, of ultimate goodness and wisdom. Hence the careful and comprehensive observation of nature will yield indications for human behavior, which were part of God’s intention in creating in the first place and which therefore have the status of moral imperatives for humans. We must ultimately be guided by respect for the intricate character and needs of the natural order.

(f) If we are so guided, then we may hope even to improve the condition of nature, which does not as yet embody God’s character as human beings have come to know this through their communion with him. Nature is not perfect; there is a work of salvation to be done in it, as well as in humanity, as part of God’s eschatological purpose, and this salvation is part of human responsibility for nature.

In contrast with the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament has relatively little to say about nature. The reasons for this are some fortuitous, some sociological, but some are inherent in the nature of the primitive Christian community and its world view. The fortuitous reasons arise purely from the scale and character of the New Testament material. To start with, the volume of the New Testament is only thirty percent of that of the Old. The bulk of its contents falls within a period of forty years, and the outside limits of its dating bracket only a century, compared with the nine centuries between the earliest and latest passages of the Hebrew Scriptures. The New Testament is the work of a relatively small community with highly selective interests, whereas the Old is the product of a whole nation’s wider issues and situations. Hence it is no surprise to find in the Hebrew Scriptures far greater diversity of literature than in the Christian Scriptures. There is nothing in the New Testament, for example, to parallel the large collections of "observations on life and the world-order," which we call the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Scriptures, or its extensive range of liturgical poetry, or the detailed corpus of its laws on what we would regard as secular matters. The very types of material, therefore, in which an attitude to nature might be most likely to be reflected are precisely those missing from the New Testament.

Sociologically, it is hard to escape the impression that most of the New Testament writers are urbanized, compared with the predominantly agricultural orientation of the mind of the Hebrew Scriptures. The gospel material, especially in the teaching of Jesus, with its use of images from nature and husbandry, is nearest to rural society and to the world of the Hebrew Scriptures; James is thought by some scholars to be addressed to the Palestinian church. But otherwise there is little sign in the writers of any attention to nature; their audiences, where known, are almost exclusively urban. While it is true that this would not have been as strong a distinction in the Roman world as it is in our own megalopolitan culture, nevertheless it is probably fair to say that nature was not one of the things in the center of the mental focus of the early Christians; this is partly related to their sociological classification.

There were, however, other reasons, inherent in the earliest church and its gospel that conspired to minimize concern with the question of human attitudes to nature. The first was the approach of primitive Christianity to scripture. For Christians of the first century, the Hebrew Scriptures were the Bible, the only inspired word of God. It might be thought that this would have awakened some interest at least in all the various subjects with which the Hebrew Scriptures deals, but one overriding factor prevented this. The first Christians were interested in the Hebrew Scriptures primarily as a vast source book of predictions, some clear, some enigmatic, of the coming of Christ, his nature, life, death, resurrection, redeeming work, and heavenly glory, and of the mission and destiny of the church. The literal sense of any passage was, in most cases, of much less importance than its prophetic meaning, which had to be disentangled by allegorical or typological exegesis. Nor were they interested on the whole in the total range of an argument or the total message of a book. These are characteristically modern ways of using scripture. For them, every verse, sentence, or phrase could be taken, out of context if need be, and its reference to Christ extracted by what seems to us at times over-ingenious exposition, but which, given the thought-forms of the day, simply sprang naturally from their exuberant and untiring obsession with the gospel. Given this situation, it can be seen that many of those elements in Judaism that we have been considering were effectively blanked off from early Christian consciousness.

Second, there is the fact that the Christian message was initially a gospel of personal salvation. It impinged on ordinary life only at the points of religious belief and personal morality. The criticism of much present-day Christian preaching as being too much concerned with these two things instead of having something to say on corporate or global issues must, if it is to be both honest and helpful, face the fact that in the foundation (and still authoritative) documents of the church precisely these were the overwhelming dominant concerns. Christianity was from the start a religion of individual faith and morals, its corporate consciousness related not to membership of humankind but to membership of the elect community drawn out from the human race by its response to the gospel. The question whether anything which is specifically Christian, yet of wider import, can develop from this basic character is, of course, a general concern of the church today. But it was not ever thus. The members of the church at Corinth received much instruction from St. Paul, but none of it was directed at the matters we are considering. Indeed, when St. Paul does happen to mention a relevant text from the Hebrew Scriptures -- "You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain" (Deut 25:4) -- he does so simply to apply it by a kind of allegorical interpretation to the economic support of those who preach the gospel. No doubt St. Paul was not anti-oxen, but he is quite clear that God would not waste valuable inspired wordage on such a subject: "Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Does he not speak entirely for our sake?" (1 Cor 9:9-10).

The third and perhaps most important of all reasons is, of course, that the earliest Christians felt themselves to be those "upon whom the end of the ages has come" (1 Cor 10:11). The "form of this world" was passing away, the new age was about to dawn; and it was a serious question what would happen to the bodies of those who had not yet died when the last day came, and so could hardly be resurrected (1 Cor 15:51). Since, therefore, the created order did not have long to run, there was no incentive to develop a constructive long-term attitude to nature as it was. It is to their successors of the second generation that we have to look for most of the modest amount the New Testament church has to say on this issue.

Turning now to this positive side, we note first that the underlying tonality, so to speak, of the New Testament is the same as that of the Old; namely, the created order is God’s work and as such is good. In the gospels God’s providential care extends to the most insignificant of animals, and the beauty of flowers springing up in the fields of Galilee is greater than that of Solomon in all his glory (Mt 5:6 = Lk 12:24; Mt 10:29 = Lk 14:6; Mt 6:28f.). There is no food that is unclean; impurity is a moral quality (Lk 7:19). In his parables Jesus assumes care and concern for animals, even if only in illustration of his main point (Lk 13:15; 15:4; Mt 12:11 = Lk 14:5). In St. Paul the wonders of the creation are sufficient in themselves to lead the open and rational mind to God (Rom 1:20). He accepts, despite his rigorous Jewish upbringing, the insight of Jesus that nothing is in itself unclean (Rom 14:14; cf. Acts 10:9-16, 28; 11:5-10); in discussing the question of meat offered to idols, while respecting the tender consciences of the more scrupulous brethren, he makes it clear that for himself, with his robust Jewish monotheism reinforced by the revelation of God in Christ (1 Cor 8:4-6), there can be no problem, for "the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it" (1 Cor 10:26-28). This fundamentally affirmative and confident attitude to the creation is reinforced by the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (Heb 11:3), which, as we noted, was not available to the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures, emerging as it does in the intertestamental period. In the Acts of the Apostles we find the classic position again clearly stated: "The living God made heaven and earth and sea and everything in them. In past ages he allowed all nations to go their own way; and yet he has not left you without some clue to his nature, in the kindness he shows; he sends you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons, and gives you food and good cheer in plenty" (14:15-17). In the same work there are signs of a very positive theology of the natural order developing with the assimilation of the Middle Platonist thought of Hellenistic Judaism: God the Unknowable, who created the world and everything in it, is not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move, in him we exist, indeed, "We are his offspring" (17:23-24, 27-28).

Nevertheless, even though the basic tonality, to pursue our metaphor, is that of the major key, it is shadowed from time to time by more somber material in the minor. This is a reflection of the pessimism and anxiety afflicting the Mediterranean world around the turn of the era. In Judaism it found expression in that apocalyptic despair that in certain circles regarded the whole of the present created order as beyond redemption and looked for a cataclysmic irruption of God to establish a new order from which evil would be banished. The wide dissemination in the Near and Middle East at this time of dualistic faiths, the staple of that religious phenomenon loosely labeled Gnosticism, was another manifestation of the same malaise; while in Hellenism many suffered from a "sense of helplessness in the hands of fate" which made them "wonder whether it is possible to be at home in the world at all." Because the world had become "a hostile, alien place," they turned to astral cults. "The lower world was not centered in itself, but was under the control of the stars. . . . Hence, in the last resort all activity here is trivial and meaningless, and if it seems to be independent, that is mere illusion" (Bultmann, chap. 2).

These contemporary trends are reflected in the New Testament, partly in vigorous reaction against such beliefs, not by denying the reality to which they referred, but by claiming that in the gospel men were delivered from helpless subjection to that reality. Thus, in such passages as Galatians 4:3, Colossians 2:8,15, and Ephesians 6:12, Christians are exhorted to enter into the freedom Christ has won for them, and to fight against the domination of the hypercosmic powers. Again, in Romans 8:9-22, Paul seems to echo the Stoic views of the aging of the world, as well as the Jewish apocalyptic conception of its subjugation by evil powers responsible for human sin and the disruption of nature. But he puts all this in a new theological perspective. The passage presents notorious difficulties of translation, but certain convictions of Paul stand out. If God was ultimately responsible for the universe’s state of frustration, nevertheless this was always imposed within a context of hope: "The universe is itself to be freed from the shackles of mortality, and enter upon the liberty and splendor of the children of God." In other words, the kind of transfigured, eternal existence promised to humanity in the resurrection of Jesus is to have its counterpart in the transformation of the cosmos. The groans of the universe, then, are not the expression of hopeless anguish; they correspond to the cries of a mother in childbirth, they are the pangs of bringing forth a new order. It is true that the general diagnosis of the cosmic situation is not very different from that made by many other sects and schools of thought at the time. The Pauline tradition does not say, "This is rubbish! All this talk of deep-seated corruption and bondage to Fate throughout the created order is nonsense." On the contrary it is taken very seriously; all that Christianity claims is that it has a better answer to the crisis. But that answer is not a program for redeeming the world of nature as well as the human soul, so that they can then live in harmony to create the kingdom of God on earth as it is, but a spiritual liberation of those men and women who believe in Jesus as the prerequisite of a total remaking of the cosmos by God’s Spirit and in God’s own time. The book of Revelation, with its vision of a new heaven and a new earth (21:1), is the logical culmination of this approach.

As time went on a more optimistic note became discernible, chiefly in opposition to the false asceticism characteristic of the dualistic sects. Thus 1 Timothy 4:3-4 commends the right use of God’s gifts in the order of creation. And there was one theological concept in particular in the later New Testament writings that offered a theoretical foundation for a more affirmative attitude to nature. This was the idea of the cosmic Christ. In various forms the conception was developed that the pre-existent divine Christ was himself the divine agent in creation, and that the existence of all things was upheld by him. We find this in such diverse writings as Hebrews (1-3) and Colossians (1:16f.), but the best-known instance is the prologue to the gospel of John (1:1-4). The implications of this idea for a theology of nature are not, of course, worked out in the New Testament itself, but, obscure as the thought-forms undoubtedly are to us, there does shine through them a conviction that the whole universe, could we but see it, is in its essential nature in harmony not merely with some unknown divine power but specifically with God as revealed in Jesus, and that therefore there must be some modus vivendi between humans and nature which, even if not yet attained, is in keeping with all that is best in both.

In seeking for any kind of theology of humanity and nature, the Christian cannot but be grateful that his or her Bible does not consist merely of the New Testament. Even the final point, that of the cosmic Christ, would be virtually unusable were it not built on the world-affirming monotheism of the Hebrew Scriptures. But in conclusion can we see in the Bible as a whole insights that are not present in either Testament by itself? What cannot be ignored is the unresolved tension between the theological view that puts all the weight on God’s wisdom in creation and the excellence of the cosmos thus created, on the one hand, and the theology which thinks eschatologically and looks to God primarily to redeem the cosmic order, on the other. The cosmic Christ concept can be used with either emphasis. Teilhard de Chardin employed a version of it eschatologically: in Christ is revealed "le Dieu d’en-avant," the telos appropriate to an evolving creation, which in humanity has at last attained the self-determining freedom of reflective beings. What the Old and New Testaments together seem to say is that on their understanding of God the character of the primordial and the eschatological must be the same; there must always have been in God from the beginning that which is needed for him to be Savior in the end. Creation and redemption are two expressions of the same Ultimate Being, its power and wisdom and love, even though the "mystery" of this Being was for long ages hidden and has been definitively revealed only in Christ and in the developing understanding of existence of which he is the source. The diptych of the creation story in Genesis 1 and the Isaianic vision of a new and perfected cosmos finds a counterpart in the New Testament terminology applied to Christ: he is "the first and the last" (Rv 1:17); he exists "before everything"; in him "everything was created," and "all things are held together in him" (Col 1:16f.). But at the same time, "the whole universe has been created for him," and "through him God chose to reconcile the whole universe to himself" (Col 1:16, 20). He "is its origin," but also destined "to be in all things alone supreme" (Col 1:18); he is the one who "himself receives the entire fullness of God" (Eph 1:23), but who also descended to our world and ascended again" so that he might fill the universe" (Eph 4:10). Underlying this kind of language is without doubt a view of redemptio as redintegratio, the recovery of an original perfection that has been lost; this is the synthesis that seeks to reconcile the incompatibles of the priestly theology, for which Eden is something lost, and the prophetic, for which it is something that has never been found. Our own greater knowledge of the history of the universe puts us firmly on the side of the prophetic. But theologically we may still find the instinct of the New Testament synthesis significant, that in God himself there is a fullness and perfection that is unchanging and outside space and time, and that it is this which makes God the proper telos for a creation in which the mystery of that fullness is unpacked only through the ages of the evolutionary process, which passes through a series of increasingly critical stages and is now precariously poised in a dependence on the rational response of free creatures. Insofar as the crucial factor for the future of nature on this planet at the moment is humankind, the New Testament claim that the reconciliation of the universe is made possible through Christ has distinctive meaning. In Jesus, as portrayed in the Gospels, we see certain basic attitudes, which may seem overly simple but are in fact adequate foundations for an approach to nature. The first is a conviction that the natural order need not be written off as in bondage to evil -- the apocalyptic view -- but contains both clues to the nature of God (Mt 5:45) and conditions within which we can learn to be authentic children of our Father in heaven. The second is his equal conviction that we never shall so learn without a repentance, which among other things learns to trust the existence with which we have been endowed as the gift of one to whom we can say, Abba. These basic attitudes do not assume that nothing can be done to improve nature -- no countryman would ever be so silly anyway -- but they do presuppose a readiness to learn from nature and to be content with the limitations that even at maximum development it still cannot but impose upon us. The tendency of human beings here as in so many other fields is to say not, "What can be done?" but, "What do I want?" and to seek to extort that from nature, whether it is feasible or not. Our responsibility toward nature cannot be fulfilled simply by developing our positive and creative skills; it also involves denying ourselves and taking up the cross daily. All we can do will not be enough of itself to turn earth into paradise, but that after all is something for which we have to wait upon him who is both Alpha and Omega. The new heaven and earth are not of a kind to be evolved on our drawing boards; all we can hope for here are images and foreshadowings of them.

Works Cited

Bultmann, Rudolf. Primitive Christianity: In Its Contemporary Setting. Trans. Reginald Fuller. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980.

Griffiths, Bede. Return to the Centre. Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1976.