God's garden planet Caring for creation goes beyond stewardship Imagine Earth is the Garden of Eden, not difficult for us who’ve seen photos of it taken from space by astronauts—a spectacular blue globe in the midst of a vast darkness, a world of water and a web of life. This Earth, our home, is God’s garden planet. Our faith has this vision: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son ...” (John 3:16). God has come into the midst of the evils of human life, by Jesus’ death and resurrection, to forgive sins and, so, to forge what can be a new beginning for every human creature.  Even more, faith envisions that by that same divine intervention in Christ, God inaugurates a new beginning not just for the Earth but for the whole universe—for the sake of peace on Earth here and now, and for the sake of peace in the entire cosmos, then and there, one great and glorious day when all things will be made new (Revelation 21). If this vision of faith is true, as I believe it is, how are Christians to live on this garden planet today as God originally intended? The Scriptures give us clues about how God originally intended humans to be in nature and to live with nature. In Christ we are called, as renewed creatures, to be in nature and to live with nature in three related, but distinct, ways. It starts with stewardship, in a new-old understanding, and moves us into the new responsibilities of partnership and “honorship.” Stewardship as shepherding Biblically interpreted, stewardship tells an important truth about one of the ways we human creatures, who have been restored in Christ to the life of faith that God originally intended for us, may faithfully live with nature. We can cautiously re-read Genesis 1:26: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” That text has often been read as offering humans free reign to do what they please with nature. “Dominion” has been understood as “domination.” But that interpretation doesn’t take into account the text’s biblical context. After many years of wrestling with this text, I believe it’s best read in the method Martin Luther recommends—letting Scripture interpret Scripture. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul writes: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:1-2). Created in God’s image, we are to imitate, or image-forth, the love of God in everything we do. Which God? The God confessed by texts like Genesis 1, as theologian Walter Brueggemann has argued, is the “shepherd-king,” the caring God. Sheepherding by a good and wise shepherd may indeed be the most suggestive biblical image we have for good or responsible stewardship. The Bible gives us this image: creative intervention in the Earth for the sake of building up a just and sustainable human community. One example: Cutting down the rainforests is neither good stewardship nor wise. It damages the planet’s “lungs” and often forces indigenous peoples who had lived sustainably in and with the rainforests for centuries into economic servitude. Another: Designing cities that offer housing for all and neighborhoods where walking is possible and encouraged, that are powered by renewable energy sources, and that rely mainly on their own bioregions for food and other necessities is both good and wise stewardship. Partnership as protecting Partnership is a way of being with nature that shifts our attention to caring for the needs of nature itself. We learn this from a close reading of the second creation story, beginning in Genesis 2:4. Why was the human creature placed in the garden? Most people who know the Bible will give the wrong answer, more often than not, because of what now is regarded as a fundamentally mistaken, traditional translation of Genesis 2:15: that God took the newly created human and placed that creature in the garden “to till it and keep it.” This familiar translation wrongly suggests that God placed the human creature in the garden to use it as a means of production and to own it. On the contrary, biblical scholars today say a more accurate translation is “to serve and protect it.” So the concept of partnership emerges, with the understanding that humans are placed on the Earth as partners with—not lords over—all the creatures of nature. The Noah story is a beautiful narrative of this partnership. Noah took not only his family but two of every kind of living creatures with him on the ark—the unclean and the clean, the wild and the domesticated. He cared for and protected all these creatures, not just those needed by his family. Honorship as beholding It’s not a household word, “honorship.” Actually, it’s not even a word—but we need such a term if we are to give a full account of the biblical understanding of our relationship with nature. We can take our cue from the resonance of the words of the fourth commandment: “honor your father and your mother.” Scripture also calls us to honor heavens above and their virtually infinite glories, the mountains and the streams that gush forth from those heights, the forests and the fields and the seas and the creatures who dwell therein, and, above all, the lilies of the fields. Lutheran theologian Joseph Sittler taught us to see things this way. He argued forcefully, and often provocatively, that Christians are called to honor the integrity of nature. He recommended that Jesus’ beloved teaching about the lilies (Matthew 6:28) be translated, “Behold the lilies of the field,” rather than the traditional “consider.” “I am called upon in such a saying,” Sittler said, “not simply to ‘look’ at [something else], but to ‘regard’ things with a kind of spiritual honoring of the immaculate integrity of things which are not myself.” This kind of beholding is what I call honorship. It invites stepping back from God’s creatures, near and far—contemplating them, wondering at them, giving thanks for them and resolving to let them be in their own God-given niches. It presupposes that God has God’s own purposes for all the creatures of our cosmos, not just us humans—from the lilies to the galaxies, from the rainforests to the black holes—purposes we may, at most, only dimly understand. We hear testimony to this honoring in many Psalms, especially songs of praise like Psalm 29, which celebrates the thunder and lightning of God in the mountains. And then there’s Psalm 104, which is a paean of praise for all the creatures that God has made, including the lion that comes out after dark, seeking its prey from God at a time when humans have retired to their protected place, and the great sea monsters, which the psalmist says God has created to “rejoice in” or to “play with.” Job also is full of references to the great creatures of the wild for whom God cares in their own right, apart from the human world. Imagine God rejoicing in the virtually infinite energy storms of the cosmic black holes or playing with the billions and billions of galaxies in our known universe. That is the scope of the psalmist’s imagination and Job’s too. As new creatures in Christ, we who have been freed to be the humans God originally intended us to be can lift up our eyes to the hills and join in the praise of all creation. If this is God’s promise for us—that in Christ we are renewed creatures free to live with the whole world of nature as God first intended humans to live, what are we to do once we have been claimed by this vision of good stewardship, partnership and honorship? We will want to avoid the temptation to look for some theological quick-fix. New life in Christ means death to our old ways of being and doing, a radical repentance. And that takes time and thought, working things out with fear and trembling—and with much faith. |
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