D OES GOD CARE what we do with planet Earth? In Genesis 1, God makes a balanced, ordered, structured, and well-designed creation. The Creator brought everything there is into being. Including us. You and I we were created in the image of this God. We are created to look and act like God. We mirror God.
So, when Genesis goes on to say that we humans are to “rule/dominate” all the creatures of land, water, and air and to “subdue” the land made by God, those powerful images must always be viewed in the reality that we act as mirrors of God, not as free agents of our own human desires.
But we tend to play with the world as if it’s ours to do with as we please. That somehow, no matter how we treat God’s creation, it can somehow overcome whatever we decide to do. That’s not the case. Dirty air. Coal ash runoff. CO2 emissions. Pesticides in drinking water.
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WHEN WE BELIEVE THAT WE, human beings, are the center of creation, problems arise because everything we do centers around us. (You know how that doesn’t work in personal relationships. It doesn’t work in the balanced, ordered, structured, design of creation either.)
If creation can benefit us, we use it, perhaps abuse it. If creation doesn’t benefit us, we write it off as having no importance.
The land and soil and water and air, we think, are ours to use and abuse any way we desire. But that’s not a fair and balanced reading of Genesis 1:26–28. We have, in fact, “dominated” the non-human creation; we have in fact “subdued” the land and all its gifts. And the result has been disaster: over-fished seas, threatened bees and birds, withering drought, fouled air.
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THIS IS, AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN and always will be, God’s world. We, you and I, are created in the image of this God — we are to mirror God and act as God acts toward the world. We are not dominators and subduers as some read Genesis 1.
In Genesis 2:15 we read, “The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” Or “to serve it and to protect it.” The image is that we are partners with God and with God’s creation, not masters, not dominators — at best we’re stewards — caretakers of God’s vast creation.
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IMAGINE SOMEONE LOANS YOU a priceless Ferrari. One of the world’s best, most expensive cars. Now the owner of the Ferrari tells you that you can use it but to take care of it. You need this car for transportation, so you drive it to work and the beach and grocery shopping. You haul baseball gear in it. But when you are not driving it, you keep it safe in a garage, wash it regularly, use it, but pamper it — after all, it’s just on loan to you. I suppose you could drive it at top speed — they can go over 200 miles per hour. Recklessly, abuse it. Don’t clean up the spilled milk in it. And then give it back to the owner and say “Oh, well, you can get it fixed.”
Imagine the same with the world, the earth, the land on which you and I walk, the air we breathe, the water we drink. The world, the cosmos, is not ours. Rather it is God’s, and we are assigned the twin tasks of serving this world and protecting it from all abuse, especially abuse from ourselves.
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EARLIER CHURCH LEADERS Chrysostom, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas reflect on the creation story. These are not exactly New Age tree huggers.
Chrysostom, 4th Century Archbishop of Constantinople, notes all creatures are good, regardless of how they benefit or harm us. To think otherwise is ungrateful to God.
Aquinas, from the 13th Century, says “God instilled in each creature a natural inclination toward the good of the whole so each is inclined according to its nature — intellectually, sensitively, or naturally — to the common good of all. Their common good is the internal sustainability of the world … while their ultimate good is God.”
Augustine, late 4th and early 5th Century, sees that God created from nothing a universe of “good things, both great and small, celestial and terrestrial, spiritual, and corporeal.” These “good things” form an interrelating whole that has a “wonderful order and beauty” to bring about “the peace of the universe.”
What is the relationship between Christianity and creation care? We should embrace God’s valuation of the world.
Augustine traced our temptation to devalue aspects of the physical world to two causes:
■ our limitations in knowing and loving the world
■ our self-centeredness.
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ON THE ONE HAND, since we cannot know all about the natural beings and forces and how they interrelate, we cannot properly value them. On the other hand we tend to skew our judgments about the value of things positively if they benefit us, or negatively if they threaten us.
These two causes combine to produce “the rashness of human folly” in making judgments about the value of beach mice or snail darters, or of the safety of fracking or chemical emissions. Our “dominion” of the earth must be subordinate to God’s “absolute dominion.” This means that we should strive to know more about the world and care for it in ways consistent with God’s plan for the world.
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FOR AUGUSTINE, only God sees the big picture of the physical world. “What God sees as wondrously good, humans should also see as wondrously good; we should move beyond our greed and value natural beings intrinsically for themselves and their place in the orderly scheme of creation.”
Chrysostom warns us to “shun … like a lunatic” anyone who does not endorse God’s view of the world’s goodness.
Aquinas believes we should love the world in two ways. “One way of loving Earth with its diverse creatures is by loving them for their usefulness to humans as goods we need in this life while aiming for eternal happiness with God.” Another way is loving other living and inanimate creations as goods that should be conserved for God’s honor and glory.”
— Keith Cardwell
