Bible and Ecology

Front matter

The Laudato Si’ Integral Ecology Collection

An electronic version of this book has been made freely available as part of the Laudato Si’ Integral Ecology collection. The collection is curated by Laudato Si’ Research Institute at Campion Hall, Oxford, working with Knowledge Unlatched (KU). The aim of the collection is to make scholarly works on integral ecology freely available to academics, students, activists, church leaders, and the wider public in order to provide resources to help address today’s most pressing socio-ecological challenges.

The collection has been generously funded by the following institutions:

Preface

Chapter 1: Stewardship in Question Chapter 2: Putting Us in Our Place Chapter 3: The Community of Creation Chapter 4: Where the Wild Things Are Chapter 5: From Alpha to Omega

Index of Biblical References

Index of Authors

PREFACE

This is a book about the Bible’s understanding of the place of humans within the rest of God’s creation. I use the word ‘ecology’, as is now common, in the rather general sense of the interconnectedness of all things, living and inanimate, on the planet. The biblical writers did not, of course, know what recent science has taught us about the ways in which these complex interrelationships work. (We ourselves are doubtless only near the beginning of this contemporary journey of scientific understanding, which is steadily revealing more and more aspects of the delicate web of creation within which we belong.) But the Bible does evince a strong sense of the interconnectedness of all creatures and relates this to their common dependence on God their Creator. The phrase ‘community of creation’ in the subtitle of the book refers to the kind of vision of creation that the Bible, read as a whole, offers us. It highlights our commonality with other creatures, our dependence on them as well as our significance for them, in a life in which all creatures exist for the glory of God.

Much recent reflection on the human relationship to the rest of the creation has focused on the notion of stewardship, which I take to refer to a vocation of caring responsibility for other creatures. This is part of the biblical picture. But I think that to be adequately understood it needs to be set within the wider vision of the community of creation. We need to realise more fully the biblical sense in which humans are fellow-creatures with other creatures. Stewardship (or ‘dominion’, the biblical term) is a role within the larger sphere of community relationships, which it does not exhaust. Major difficulties in the concept of stewardship can be overcome when we recognise this. We need to expand our biblical horizons beyond Genesis 1, important as that is, and begin to learn from the rich resources the rest of the Bible provides for understanding the place of humans within the rest of God’s creation. We shall discover there other major themes that are just as important as dominion, such as the praise that all creatures, ourselves among them, offer to their Creator.

While writing this book I have, of course, been deeply aware of the massive ecological crisis in which we are all currently living. I have not, however, attempted even a brief summary of this contemporary context in which all Christian thinking about creation must be done. This is because it is well known and has been described and analysed by others much more adequately than I can do.' However, one point about it is worth making here. Recently, and understandably, the focus has been overwhelmingly on the issue of climate change. But this is only the most threatening aspect of a deep crisis in the human relationship to the rest of nature that stems from the modern technological project of mastering nature. While, despite the overwhelming evidence, some people are still sceptical about climate change, there can be no doubt about the extent to which humans have been thoughtlessly and rapidly exhausting the resources of the earth or about the extinction of species on a vast scale as a result of human destruction of their habitats. Modernity inculcated ways of thinking about the human relationship to nature that have proved disastrous. The debate about climate change, important as it is, has perhaps been in danger of deflecting attention from these other problems and their deep roots in fundamental attitudes. For Christians, it is imperative that we return to the biblical sources of our faith and rediscover the community of creation.

I have been working on the ideas in this book for many years. But the opportunity to develop them into the kind of shape they have in this book came when I was invited by Sarum College, Salisbury, to give the Sarum Theological Lectures in Salisbury Cathedral in 2006. I entitled them ‘Beyond Stewardship: The Bible and the Community of Creation’. This book is a very much expanded version of them. I am grateful to David Catchpole and his colleagues at Sarum College for inviting me, for making my stay in Sarum enjoyable, and also for their patience over the period when I have taken so long to get them into publishable form. I am also grateful to many people, too many to name, who have discussed these issues with me and helped to clarify my thinking by responding to the presentations, in oral or printed form, in which I have developed my ideas over the years.

1 See, for example, Michael Northcott, The Environment and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapters 1—2. See also the recent, interdisciplinary collection of essays: Robert S. White ed., Creation in Crisis: Christian Perspectives on Sustainability (London: SPCK, 2009), a product of a workshop organised by the Faraday Centre in Cambridge. In my judgement, Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (London: Viking (Penguin), 1990), remains a classic in its thoroughgoing revelation of the way the human relationship to the rest of ‘nature’ has changed in the last half-century.

Introduction

How should Christians read the Bible in an age of ecological disaster? How does the Bible construct for us the relationship of humans to the rest of creation? The most popular current answer to these questions is the notion of stewardship. As Christopher Southgate puts it: “That human beings are called to be stewards of creation tends to be the default position within ordinary Christian groups.’!

We are concerned here only with Christian theological use of the idea of stewardship. The term ‘stewardship’ is also now heard in purely secular discourse about environmental issues, but this secular use, because it leaves aside reference to God, in fact deprives the notion of stewardship of most of its Christian meaning. The main point of the term, in Christian usage, is the steward’s responsibility to God. Secular use of the term deprives it of this essential theological content.

As a fairly representative, short statement of what human stewardship of the non-human creation is taken to mean, I have taken the following from a report published in 1991 by the Board for Social Responsibility of the General Synod of the Church of England:

We all share and depend on the same world, with its finite and often non-renewable resources. Christians believe that this world belongs to God by creation, redemption and sustenance, and that he has entrusted it to humankind, made in his image and responsible to him; we are in the position of stewards, tenants, curators, trustees or guardians, whether or not we acknowledge this responsibility. Stewardship implies caring management, not selfish exploitation; it involves a concern for both present and future as well as self, and a recognition that the world we manage has an interest in its own survival and wellbeing independent of its value to us ... Good stewardship requires justice, truthfulness, sensitivity, and compassion.”

The main value of the stewardship model of humanity’s relation to the rest of creation has been to provide a strong alternative to the idea of the human role in creation as domination and exploitation. Rather, this human role, when defined as stewardship, is one of care and service, exercised on behalf of God and with accountability to God. It can hardly be contested that the stewardship model has had an enormous influence for good in giving Christians a framework within which to approach ecological issues with concern and responsibility.

However, in my view, the stewardship model also has distinct limitations that consist more in what it does not say than in what it does, or in what it suggests without necessarily requiring. A review of criticisms of stewardship may appropriately begin with James Lovelock, famous for his Gaia hypothesis, who has dismissed the idea of stewardship as ‘sheer hubris’.*

CRITICISMS OF STEWARDSHIP: (1) STEWARDSHIP AS HUBRIS

Lovelock makes this point most fully in his recent book, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back — and How We Can Still Save Humanity.? It is not surprising that his criticism of stewardship relates closely to his idea of Gaia, and so it will be helpful first briefly to explain that idea. Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis is a scientific theory, and he rejects responsibility for the way it has been adopted into New Age religious contexts. On the other hand, he does encourage a more than merely scientific, dispassionate attitude to Gaia, arguably amounting to a religious approach (‘there is a deep need in all of us for trust in something larger than ourselves, and I put my trust in Gaia’’). But Christian suspicion of the idea of Gaia on the grounds that it entails some form of nature religion exaggerates the problem. Simply as a scientific theory, it requires no particular form of religious stance, any more than the Darwinian theory of evolution does. However the natural world is understood, in scientific terms, to work, it is possible to elevate natural processes to divine status and ethical normativity, but it is also possible to treat them as aspects of the way the transcendent God has created the natural world.

Lovelock’s theory is that the whole Earth system, which Lovelock calls Gaia — comprising both all life on Earth and the material environment — behaves as a single system, like a living organism.’ It is a self-regulating system that automatically controls such things as the global climate and the composition of the atmosphere in such a way as to maximise their capacity to form a comfortable environment for life. Gaia is a self-regulating system that operates to sustain the habitability of the Earth. Lovelock admits that he is far from a full understanding of how it works, but the theory has accumulated evidence and adherents since he first propounded it, even if most conventional scientists remain sceptical. We cannot enter scientific debate about the validity of the theory here.”

Lovelock takes the Christian idea of stewardship to mean that humans are in charge of the whole Earth and its destiny. He fully takes the point that this human role is understood to be not exploitative, but responsible and caring. But he claims that it is ‘flawed by unconscious hubris’. Humans have ‘neither the knowledge nor the capacity to achieve’ the goals envisaged by this notion. ‘We are no more qualified to be stewards or developers of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners’.'°

Stewardship, he concedes, might make some sense if Gaia turned out not to be true. Then we should have to do our best to manage the Earth. But if Gaia is the case — if the Earth is a self-regulating system — then stewardship is a hubristic attempt to do what Gaia is designed to do, what Gaia has been doing for millions of years before humans came on the scene, and what Gaia can do very much better than we can.!!

One does not have to adopt the Gaia hypothesis to find this kind of criticism cogent. The claim that humans simply do not have the knowledge or the power to be stewards of the Earth, i.e. to manage it for the best, is also made by Clare Palmer, along with other criticisms, in a devastatingly critical attack on the idea of stewardship in environmental ethics:

To be a successful steward, either in the feudal or the financial sense, it is necessary to understand that which is being controlled. But the natural world is not like an estate, nor like money in this respect. It is composed of complex ecosystems and atmospheric conditions that we do not understand and cannot predict.

She does not mean we can do nothing about, for example, climate change, but that the control we have is partial and‘we must see it in the context of the many things we do not know and perhaps will never know’.!?

This kind of criticism of the notion of stewardship makes a strong case. °? It can be very dangerous to overestimate one’s power to achieve or to control things. Arguably, the ecological crisis of the last few decades has its roots in generally well-meaning scientific and technological projects whose benefits seemed obvious but whose catastrophic effects were not foreseen. The whole of the modern scientific-technological project of dominating nature and exploiting its resources for the good of humanity presumed that total mastery of the Earth’s natural processes was within human grasp. It exaggerated what was known and turned a blind eye to what was not. On a small scale, this need not be disastrous: one can learn from mistakes and nature has the resources to repair the damage. But the bigger the scale, the more dangerous it becomes. And in the face of all the examples that should have taught humans this lesson, the optimistic progressivism that stakes everything on achieving total control survives. It is alive and well among the technophiliacs who assume that we shall be able to create a technological fix for climate change and every other danger that comes along, as well as the biotechnologists and the artificial intelligence people who dream of a world in which technology has taken over from evolution.

Lovelock appropriately refers to the idea of a ‘technological fix’ for climate change as ‘breathtaking hubris’.'* Even if it were possible, do we really want to be in charge of such things as climate change? Lovelock says:

The more we meddle with the Earth’s composition and try to fix its climate, the more we take on the responsibility for keeping the Earth a fit place for life, until eventually our whole lives may be spent in drudgery doing the tasks that Gaia had freely done for over three billion years. This would be the worst of fates for us and [would] reduce us to a truly miserable state, where we were forever wondering whether anyone, any nation [the USA? China?] or any international body could be trusted to regulate the climate and the atmospheric composition. The idea that humans are yet intelligent enough to serve as stewards of the Earth is among the most hubristic ever.!°

Others would point to an even worse danger: that developing technology in this direction, technology so smart and so powerful it could manage tasks as formidable as the global climate, will lead to the point where technology in the form of artificial intelligence will take over from us, either replacing us or modifying human nature itself to the extent of creating a new species. This is the posthuman future envisaged by the technological futurists (many of them actually working in bioengineering or in the development of artificial intelligence). It may seem odd to find it in the vicinity of the notion of stewardship, but there is a real connection. If stewardship requires total control of the Earth’s processes, only posthumans will be equal to the task.

Thus one major problem about the modern Christian idea of stewardship of creation is this: if it means that humans consider themselves to have controlling charge over the Earth, then it is indeed hubristic, consciously or not, since the facts of human knowledge and power do not measure up to such a role. The concept of stewardship is usually represented as an interpretation of the human dominion over other creatures granted to humans by God in Genesis (1:26 and 28). It is, we should remember, an interpretation, which says more than the text indisputably does. In order to discuss the text without pre-judging issues of interpretation, and since there is no doubt that it uses the notion of ‘rule’, I shall call what God gives to humans in Genesis 1 the human dominion. Does this dominion, as presented in Genesis 1, entail total control over the rest of creation on Earth, or mandate a project to achieve such control?

For a start, it is well worth observing that this ‘totalising’ reading of the dominion is a peculiarly modern one. No one before the early modern period read it in that way. Medieval western Christians, for example, supposed it to refer to the kinds of use of other creatures and the environment that were normal in their time: farming, hunting, building, mining and so forth. They did not suppose that Genesis 1 set humanity a task of achieving total control over the Earth. Total control obviously belonged to God alone. The totalising interpretation of the Genesis dominion is typically modern in its aspiration to reject all limits on human power and activity, to throw off all the constraints of nature, to remake the world according to human design, to become in fact some kind of god over the world. It was Francis Bacon, in the seventeenth century, who hijacked the Genesis text to authorise the project of scientific knowledge and technological exploitation whose excesses have given us the ecological crisis. The modern project of domination is indeed hubristic in that it aspired (and for technophiliac progressivists still aspires) to the kind of control that had always been thought to belong to God alone. '°

Christian thought about the world, drawing on its biblical sources, has normally supposed that all human action takes place within the larger framework of divine providence, which may work to limit the effects of our evil or to prosper the effects of our good actions. It has also supposed that there are structures of order inherent in creation as God has made it that humans violate at their peril. Whatever dominion or stewardship might mean it must belong within those limits. If James Lovelock is right about Gaia, I see no difficulty at all in seeing the self-regulating Earth system as part of the order of creation within which humans must live.” Of course it can do the job better than we can: God has designed it to do so. So science and good theology may combine to require a more modest, more limited understanding of the human dominion than the hubristic and dangerously exaggerated notion that has been with us for the last four centuries. We need to cut the dominion down to size. In the present chapter, we shall attempt that by observing carefully the limits on dominion that the Bible itself sets and the qualifications of dominion that the Bible itself gives it. Interpretation of the dominion has gone wrong when Genesis 1:26 and 28 has been isolated as the only part of Scripture used to define the God-given relationship of humans to the rest of creation. We need to put it back into a much larger context of the rich resources of scriptural treatment of the human relationship to other creatures.

CRITICISMS OF STEWARDSHIP: (2) STEWARDSHIP EXCLUDES GOD’S OWN ACTIVITY IN THE WORLD

This second criticism is a more theological parallel to the first. It alleges that the notion of human stewardship neglects God’s own continuing involvement with his creation. Extreme advocates of stewardship have even suggested that God has entirely delegated his governance of the world to humans. This is supposed to be the meaning of the fact that, in Genesis 1, God created humans on the sixth day of creation, at the end of all his acts of creation, and then rested on the seventh day. With the creation of humans God had nothing more to do himself, having put the world into the hands of humans, and so could now rest. Such a view is even more subject to the charge of hubris than those discussed in the previous section. It states outright that humans assume the role of God in relation to the world.

Such a conclusion can be reached most easily in a secular context in which God is for all intents and purposes dead. In the absence of God, whether resting or dead, humans must play God and exercise a divinely powerful and extensive dominion over creation. But of course this is not the biblical view. God is constantly active in his creation in ways that have nothing to do with humans as well as in ways that do. Humans should care for creation within the context of God’s own caring for it, not in place of God’s caring for creation.

CRITICISMS OF STEWARDSHIP: (3) STEWARDSHIP LACKS SPECIFIC CONTENT

A different kind of problem is that stewardship has proven to be a very flexible term. Once we get beyond the rather general ideas we have already noticed, there are a whole range of different understandings of what our stewardship of the Earth actually requires of us. For example, is it a hands-on or a hands-off job? When the idea of human stewardship of the Earth was first used in the seventeenth century, especially by the lawyer Matthew Hale, it went with a very high view of the need for human intervention in the rest of creation for creations good.'* Nature would run horribly wild if humans were not there to keep it in order.'? For many environmentally minded Christians today, on the other hand, stewardship is mainly a matter of preserving creation from human damage to it — letting nature be itself, intervening only to protect, not to improve.” Stewardship is about preserving, not changing.

There are very different evaluations of wilderness in play here. For seventeenth-century people, wilderness was a waste and a mess that needed clearing up and putting in order. In the modern period too, nature has often been viewed as something sadly unfinished until humans set about improving it.” On the other hand, for environmentally sensitive contemporary people, it would seem that wild nature can do perfectly well without us. Intervention is likely to spoil it, not improve it. But then again, there are enthusiasts for biotechnology who see the Genesis dominion as a mandate for scientists to take control of the evolutionary process, to bring nature to new stages of development it has not yet reached, and cannot without us to transform it technologically.” So the notion of stewardship as such offers little guidance as to how we should relate to nature beyond exhorting us to seek the good of other creatures as well as of ourselves. But what is that good?

Stewardship certainly implies that the rest of creation somehow needs us. But why, and how? In a contemporary context one could easily imagine that the rest of creation would be much better off without us humans. It is we who have made such a mess of the world. It is our unstoppable interference, our arrogant assumption that we can improve nature, that has destroyed so much of it. One illustration Christopher Southgate gives of how humans might contribute to the healing of nature, instead of its destruction, is ‘a reduction of extinction’, i.e. of the extinction of species, though he admits that this ‘would take a great deal more wisdom as well as a great deal more knowledge than we currently possess’.?° But how significant is this in the context of contemporary ecological disaster? Doubtless we humans could preserve a few species that might, apart from us, die out (species have been going extinct continuously since life began on Earth). But, in practice today, it is hardly possible to distinguish those rather few naturally occurring extinctions from the much larger number of species that have died out or are in danger of dying out because of human activity. (Global warming will bring about the extinction of vast numbers of species.) We humans are surely in practice the only competitors that count.

So it is hardly surprising that many Christian advocates of stewardship today see stewardship as a matter of protecting nature from harm by humans, and repairing the damage humans have done to it. This view of stewardship implies that it is a task that is only needed because we humans are in the world. Without us, creation would get along perfectly well (and did so, of course, for millions of years before we came on the scene),* but, since God wanted to put us here, nature now needs us to protect it from us.

An analogy might be: suppose you tell a child to tidy their room; the room does need tidying, but only because there is a child there who makes it untidy.” Is human stewardship of the Earth like that? Such a modest account is attractive but I find it difficult to believe that the dominion in Genesis 1 means no more than that. On the other hand, the more positive interpretations on offer tend to sound highly unrealistic to anyone who is properly aware of how destructive our relationship with creation really has been in the modern period. In this context, ideas of humans as co-creators with God or co-redeemers with God”? are nothing but red rags to bulls. Whatever might be said of them in the abstract, in the context of the modern technological project of total domination of nature they pander to the hubristic modern aspiration to the role of gods over the world. Whatever the rest of creation may need from us, it is certainly not the tyranny of pretended divine power. I have long found the question ‘why should the rest of creation need us?’ the hardest question about the meaning of the Genesis dominion and the human relationship to the non-human creation.”

CRITICISMS OF STEWARDSHIP: (4) STEWARDSHIP SETS HUMANS OVER CREATION, NOT WITHIN IT

The fourth criticism of the notion of stewardship — one that is central to my aims in this book — is that it depicts the relationship of humans to other creatures in a purely vertical way, without a corresponding horizontal dimension. By that I mean that it places us above creation, in a sort of hierarchy:

God | humans non-human creation

The notion of stewardship does not encourage emphasis or reflection on the fact that humans are also creatures, rooted like other creatures in this earthly home that we share with them. Stewardship puts us in authority over, but not in community alongside and with other creatures.

Another aspect of this limitation is that the stewardship model is a one-way relationship, in which humans rule and care for creation, but creation is merely the passive recipient of our work. A broader picture of a community of creatures in which we participate will open up reciprocal relationships, recognising our fundamental dependence on other creatures and the benefits they give us.

In my view, it is the exclusive focus on a vertical relationship to the rest of creation — whether it be called rule or dominion or stewardship or even priesthood — that has been one of the ideological driving forces of the modern technological project of dominating nature. Modern western people, beginning with the Renaissance, forgot their own creatureliness, their embeddedness within creation, their interdependence with other creatures. They sought to liberate themselves from nature, to transcend their own dependence on nature, and conceived themselves as functionally gods in relation to nature.’ While stewardship avoids the themes of domination, exploitation and re-creation that fuelled the modern project, it retains the purely vertical relationship. This by no means simply invalidates it, but it is a limitation that suggests that the stewardship model by itself could be a perilously one-sided model for a relationship so complex as the human relationship to other creatures.”?

CRITICISMS OF STEWARDSHIP: (5) STEWARDSHIP TENDS TO ISOLATE ONE SCRIPTURAL TEXT

Finally, a criticism that leads directly into what I shall do in the rest of this book. It is that the idea of stewardship depends for its biblical support on the same single scriptural locus as the talk of rule or dominion: Genesis 1:26 and 28. Admittedly, the location of this text in the Bible highlights its special significance: it is connected with the very creation of humans. For a canonical reading of Scripture, Genesis 1:26 and 28 can certainly not be left aside. But nor should it be lifted out of the rest of Scripture. Too often this text has been isolated from its context in the canon of Scripture. A major aim of this book is to place the Genesis concept of dominion within its wider biblical context, indicating both the ways in which it is interpreted by other texts and also that it is one theme among several that the Bible uses to speak of the place of humanity within creation. It will open up some of the rich and diverse resources the Bible as a whole offers us for thinking about our human relationship with the rest of creation and for responding to the ecological destruction of our time and the ecological threats of the future.

However, it will be useful to begin by reconsidering the passage in Genesis 1 on which the whole discussion of stewardship ultimately rests. We need to place the commands to ‘subdue the Earth’ and to ‘have dominion’ over other creatures in their context in the Bible’s opening account of creation in seven days (Gen. 1:1—2:4), and to reconsider their meaning within that context.

UNDERSTANDING GENESIS 1: (1) THE SIX DAYS OF CREATION

Genesis 1:1—2:4 uses the biblical notion ofa week, in which there are six days for working and the seventh day for rest, as the framework for an account of creation in which God creates on six days and rests on the seventh. The passage is carefully and intricately structured, and much of the meaning is embodied in the structure. The following diagram explicates the most important elements in the structure of the six days narrative: