CHAPTER 4

Christopher J. H. Wright

Christopher J. H. Wright (PhD, Cambridge) is international ministries director of the Langham Partnership, providing literature, scholarships, and preaching training for pastors in Majority World. He spent 5 years teaching at Union Biblical Seminary, India, and 13 years as academic dean and then principal of All Nations Christian College, England. He has written many commentaries and books, including The Mission of God, Old Testament ethics for the people of God, and Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament.

To the LORD your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. (Deut 10:14)

This bold claim that the God of Israel owns the whole universe is echoed in the familiar assertion of Psalm 24:1 (author’s translation):”To the LORD belongs the earth and its fullness,” and in the less familiar claim God makes to Job: “Everything under heaven belongs to me” (Job 41:11 NIV).

The Earth Is the Lord’s

The earth, then, belongs to God because God made it. We do not own this planet, even if our behavior tends to boast that we think we do. No, God is the earth’s landlord and we are God’s tenants. God has given the earth into our resident possession (Ps 115:16), but we do not hold the title deed of ultimate ownership. As in any landlordtenant relationship, God holds us accountable for how we treat his property. Thus, God’s ownership of the earth has significant ethical and missional implications.

The Goodness of Creation

That the creation is good is one of the most emphatic points of Genesis 1 through 2.¹ Six times in the narrative God declares his work to be “good.” This resoundingly simple affirmation tells us two things.

1. A Good Creation Can Only Be the Work of a Good God

The Hebrew account of creation contrasts with other ancient Near Eastern accounts, in which powers and gods of the natural world are portrayed in various degrees of malevolence, and in which aspects of the natural order are explained as the outcome of this malevolence. In the Old Testament, the natural order is fundamentally good, as the work of the single good God, Yahweh. Biblical testimony to the goodness of creation reflects the good character of the God who made it (e.g., Pss 19; 29; 50:6; 65; 104; 148; Job 12:7–9; Acts 14:17; 17:27; Rom 1:20).

2. Creation is intrinsically good

In the creation narratives, the affirmation, “it is good,” was not made by Adam and Eve, but by God Himself. Creation’s goodness is theologically and chronologically prior to human observation. It is not merely a human reflexive response to a pleasant view, nor is it an instrumental goodness because it exists for human benefit. Rather, God’s affirmation of the goodness of creation is his seal of divine approval on the whole universe. He declares “it is good” at every phase of creation—from the creation of light, water and land, sun and moon, and vegetation, to fish, birds, and animals. All of these created orders were present in all their divinely affirmed goodness before humanity arrived on the scene.

The earth has intrinsic value—that is to say, it is valued by God, who is the source of all value. God values the earth because he made it and owns it.

So the earth has intrinsic value—that is to say, it is valued by God, who is the source of all value. God values the earth because he made it and owns it. It is not enough merely to say that the earth is valuable to us. Accordingly, we need to be careful to locate an ecological dimension of mission not primarily in the need-supplying value of the earth to us, but in the glory-giving value of the earth to God.

The Sanctity (but Not Divinity) of Creation

The Bible makes a clear distinction between God the Creator and all things created. Nothing in creation is in itself divine. This rules out nature polytheism, which was prevalent in the religious environment surrounding Israel. In these religious systems, the different forces of nature were regarded as divine beings (or under the control of divine beings). Many religious rituals functioned to placate or persuade these nature gods or goddesses into agriculturally beneficent action.

In the faith of Israel, however, the great realities of the natural world had no inherent divine existence. Such power as they had, which may have seemed to be great, was entirely the work of God the Creator and under his command. The Hebrew Bible, therefore, while it certainly teaches respect and care for the nonhuman creation, resists and reverses the human tendency to divinize or personalize the natural order, or to imbue it with any power independent of its personal Creator.

The Old Testament constantly presents creation in relation to God. The created order obeys God, submits to God’s commands, reveals God’s glory, benefits from God’s sustaining and providing and serves God’s purposes. There is a fundamental difference between treating creation as sacred and treating it as divine. The laws, worship and prophecy of Israel honored the sacredness of the nonhuman created order, as should we, but to worship nature in any of its manifestations is to exchange the Creator for the created. Israel was repeatedly warned against this form of idolatry (e.g., Deut 4:15–20 cf. Job 31:26–28), and Paul links such idolatry with humanity’s willful rebellion and social evil (Rom 1:25 and the surrounding context).

God’s Glory as the Goal of Creation

“What is the chief end of man?” asks the Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Confession, regarding the meaning and purpose of human existence. It answers with glorious biblical simplicity: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” It would be equally biblical to ask exactly the same question about the whole of creation and to give exactly the same answer. Creation exists for the praise and glory of its Creator God, and for mutual enjoyment between the Creator and the created. The God-focused goal of human life is not something that sets us apart from the rest of creation. Rather, it is something we share with the rest of creation. Glorifying and enjoying God is the chief end of all creation.

Creation exists for the praise and glory of its Creator God, and for mutual enjoyment between the Creator and the created.

We human beings glorify our Creator in uniquely human ways, as befits our unique status as the one creature made in God’s image. So, as humans we praise God with hearts and hands and voices, with rationality as well as emotion, with language, art, music and craft—with all that reflects the God in whose image we were made.

The rest of creation already praises God and is summoned, repeatedly, to do so (Pss 145:10, 21; 148; 150:6). There is a response of gratitude that befits not just human beneficiaries of God’s generosity but is attributed to the nonhuman creatures as well (Ps 104:27–28). We may not be able to explain how it is that creation praises its Maker—since we know only the reality of our personhood, and what it means for us to praise God. However, just because we cannot articulate the how of creation’s praise to God, or the how of God’s receiving this praise, we should not deny that creation praises God. It is affirmed throughout the Bible with overwhelming conviction.

This response of gratitude is a fundamental feature of creaturely being that is shared by all the creatures of the earth, humans and animals, landscapes, seas and mountains, earth, wind, fire and rain. The Psalmist charges all things with the first moral duty of the creation, to worship and praise the creator In the Hebrew perspective, humanity and the cosmos have moral significance, and both are required to make a moral response to the creator, a response to God which reflects his glory and offers the return of gratitude, praise, and worship (Ps 150).²

Eventually, the whole of creation will join in the joy and thanksgiving that will accompany the Lord when he comes as king to put all things right (i.e., to judge the earth, e.g., Pss 96:10–13; 98:7–9).

Hope for the Redemption of the Whole Creation

We have considered how important it is to include the Bible’s doctrine of creation in our thinking about the earth. Yet looking back to Genesis and affirming its great truths about our world is not enough. You cannot drive a car looking only in the rearview mirror. You have to look ahead toward your destination. Likewise, the Bible teaches us to value the earth because of whom it came from, but also because of its ultimate destiny. We need both a creational as well as an eschatological foundation for our ecological ethics and ecological dimensions of Christian mission.

New Heavens and a New Earth: Isaiah’s Vision

One of the richest places in the Old Testament to find such a foundation is the book of Isaiah. We could begin with the glorious vision of Isaiah 11:1–9, in which the just rule of the messianic king will result in harmony and peace within the created order. Similarly transforming expectations for the created order attend the return of the redeemed to Zion in Isaiah 35. However, the climax of Old Testament eschatological vision regarding creation is found in Isaiah 65, a wonderful section that has to be read in full.

See, I will create

new heavens and a new earth.

The former things will not be remembered,

nor will they come to mind.

But be glad and rejoice forever

in what I will create,

for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight

and its people a joy.

I will rejoice over Jerusalem

and take delight in my people;

the sound of weeping and of crying

will be heard in it no more.

Never again will there be in it

an infant who lives but a few days,

or an old man who does not live out his years;

the one who dies at a hundred

will be thought a mere youth;

the one who fails to reach a hundred

will be considered accursed.

They will build houses and dwell in them;

they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.

No longer will they build houses and others live in them,

or plant and others eat.

For as the days of a tree,

so will be the days of my people;

my chosen ones will long enjoy

the works of their hands.

They will not toil in vain

nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune;

for they will be a people blessed by the LORD,

they and their descendants with them.

Before they call I will answer;

while they are still speaking I will hear.

The wolf and the lamb will feed together,

and the lion will eat straw like the ox,

but dust will be the serpent’s food.

They will neither harm nor destroy

on all my holy mountain,

says the LORD. (Isa 65:17–25 NIV)

This inspiring vision portrays God’s new creation as a place that will be joyful, free from grief and tears, life-fulfilling, with guaranteed work satisfaction, free from the curses of frustrated labor and environmentally safe! It is a vision that puts most New Age dreams in the shade.

Such passages are the Old Testament foundation for the New Testament hope, which, far from rejecting or denying the earth as such or envisioning us floating off to some other place, looks forward likewise to a new, redeemed creation (Rom 8:18–21), in which righteousness will dwell (2 Pet 3:10–13), because God himself will dwell there with his people (Rev 21:1–4).

Looking Forward to a New Creation

Most of what we find in both Old and New Testaments regarding an eschatological vision for creation is over-whelmingly positive. This must affect how we understand the equally biblical portrayal of final and fiery destruction that awaits the present world order. Second Peter 3:10 (NIV) says, “The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”

I prefer the textual reading of the final word in this verse that the earth “will be found” (which is adopted by the NIV, “will be laid bare”; NRSV, “will be disclosed”; REB, “will be brought to judgment”) to the textual reading reflected in some other English translations (e.g., KJV and NASB, “will be burned up”).³

I also find Richard Bauckham’s interpretation of this convincing: that the earth and everything in it will be “found out,” that is, exposed and laid bare before God’s judgment so that the wicked and all their works will no longer be able to hide or find any protection.⁴ In other words, the purpose of the conflagration described in these verses is not the obliteration of the cosmos itself but rather the purging of the sinful world order we live in, through the consuming destruction of all that is evil within creation, so as to establish the new creation. This fits with the previous picture of the judgment of the flood in 2 Peter 3:6–7 (NIV), used explicitly as an historical precedent for the final judgment: “By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word, the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly.”

A world of wickedness was wiped out in the flood, but the world as God’s creation was preserved. Similarly, by analogy, the world of all evil and wickedness in creation will be wiped out in God’s cataclysmic judgment, but the creation itself will be renewed as the dwelling place of God with redeemed humanity.

This gloriously earthy biblical hope adds an important dimension to our ecological ethics. It is not just a matter of looking back to the initial creation but of looking forward to the new creation. This means that our motivation has a double force—a kind of push-pull effect. There is a goal in sight. Granted it lies only in the power of God to ultimately achieve it, but, as is the case with other aspects of biblical eschatology, what we hope for from God affects how we are to live now and what our own objectives should be.

RETURN TO LESSON 1: The Living God Is a Missionary God

Why Creation Care Is Part of Biblical Mission

A biblical theology of mission, flowing from the mission of God himself, must include the ecological sphere within its scope and see practical environmental action as a legitimate part of biblical mission. Among many others, here are four ways that creation care should be considered a part of how Christians participate in God’s mission.

1. Creation Care Continues the Mission of Humanity

Humanity was put on the earth with a mission—to rule over, to keep and to care for the rest of creation. God instructed the human species not only to fill the earth (an instruction also given to the other creatures) but also to subdue (Hebrew: kabas) it and to rule over (Hebrew: rada) the rest of the creatures (Gen 1:28). The words kabas and rada are strong words, implying both exertion and effort, and the imposing of will upon another. However, they are not, as contemporary ecological mythology likes to caricature, terms that imply violence or abuse. The idea that these words could ever imply violent abuse and exploitation, and the implied accusation that Christianity is therefore an intrinsically ecohostile religion, is relatively recent.⁵ By far the dominant interpretation of these words in both Jewish and Christian tradition has been that they entail benevolent care for the rest of creation as entrusted into human custodianship.⁶

On one level, the first term, kabas, authorizes humans to do what every other species on earth does, which is to utilize its environment for life and survival. All species in some way or another “subdue the earth” to the degrees necessary for their own prospering. That is the nature of life on earth. As applied to humans in Genesis 1:28, kabas probably implies no more than the task of agriculture. That humans have developed tools and technology to pursue their own form of subduing the earth for their own benefit is no different in principle from what other species do, though vastly different in degree and impact on the ecosphere.

The latter word, rada, is more distinctive. It describes a role for human beings given to no other species—the function of ruling or exercising dominion. It seems clear that in Genesis 1:28, God is passing on to human hands a delegated form of his own kingly authority over the whole of his creation. Kings and emperors in ancient times would set up an image of themselves in far-flung corners of their domains to signify their sovereignty over that territory and its people. The image represented the authority of the king. Similarly, God installs the human species as the image, within creation, of the authority that finally belongs to God, Creator and Owner of the earth. The natural assumption is that a creature made in the image of God will reflect godly qualities in carrying out the mandate of delegated dominion. The exercise of this human dominion must reflect the character and values of God’s own kingship.

“I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.” (Gen 9:13–15 ESV)

The “image” is a kingly pattern, and the kind of rule which God entrusted to human kind is that proper to the ideals of kingship. The ideals, not the abuses or failures: not tyranny or arbitrary manipulation and exploitation of subjects, but a rule governed by justice, mercy and true concern for the welfare of all.⁷

If this is how God acts, then how much more is it incumbent on us, made in his image and commanded to be like him, to exhibit the same solicitous care for the creation he has entrusted to our rule?

This understanding turns our supremacism upside down, for if we resemble God in that we have dominion, we must be called to be “imitators of God” (Eph 5:1) in the way we exercise this dominion. Indeed, far from giving us a free hand on the earth, the imago Dei constrains us. We must be kings, not tyrants; if we become the latter we deny and even destroy the image in us. How then does God exercise dominion? Psalm 145 tells us that God is gracious, compassionate, good, faithful, loving, generous, and protective, not to humankind only but to “all he has made.” God’s characteristic act is to bless, and it is God’s constant care that ensures that the cattle, the lions, and even the birds are fed and watered (Ps 104; Matt 6:26).⁸

2. Creation Care Embodies a Biblical Balance of Compassion and Justice

Creation care embodies compassion because to care for God’s creation is essentially an unselfish form of love, exercised for the sake of creatures that cannot thank or repay us. In this respect it reflects the same quality in the love of God—not only in the sense that God loves human beings in spite of our unlovable enmity toward him but also in the wider sense that “the LORD has compassion/is loving toward all that he has made” (Ps 145:9, 13, 17, author’s translation). Again, Jesus used God’s loving care for birds and adornment of grasses and flowers as a model for God’s even greater love for his human children. If God cares with such minute compassion for his nonhuman creation, how much more should those who wish to emulate him?

Creation care embodies justice because environmental action is a form of defending the weak against the strong, the defenseless against the powerful, the violated against the attacker and the voiceless against the stridency of the greedy. These, too, are features of the character of God as expressed in his exercise of justice. Psalm 145 includes God’s provision for all his creatures in its definition of his righteousness as well as his love (vv. 13–17). In fact, it places God’s care for creation in precise parallel with his liberating and vindicating acts of justice for his people—thus bringing the creational and redemptive traditions of the Old Testament together in beautiful harmony.

3. Creation Care Contends with Other Ideologies

If the church awakens to the need to address the ecological crisis and does so within a biblical framework, it will engage in conflict with at least two other ideologies, and doubtless many more.

Destructive Global Capitalism and the Greed That Fuels It

There is no doubt that a major contributor to contemporary environmental damage is global capitalism’s insatiable demand for “more.” The biblical truth relevant here is that covetousness is idolatry and the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. There is greed for the following:

Minerals and oil, at any cost,
Land to graze cattle for meat,
Exotic animals and birds, to meet obscene human fashions in clothes, toys, ornaments, and aphrodisiacs,
Commercial or tourist exploitation of fragile and irreplaceable habitats, and
Market domination through practices that produce the goods at least cost to the exploiter and maximum cost to the country and people exploited.

For the church to get involved in environmental protection, it must be prepared to tackle the forces of greed and economic power, to confront vested interests and political machination and to recognize that more is at stake than being kind to animals and nice to people. The church must do the scientific research to make its case credible. It must be willing for the long hard road that the struggle for justice and compassion in a fallen world demands in this, as in all other fields of mission.

pantheistic, neopagan, and new age spiritualities We may often find that people attracted to pantheistic, neopagan, and New Age philosophies are passionate about the natural order, but from a very different perspective. The church in its mission must bear witness to the great biblical claim that the earth is the Lord’s. The earth is not Gaia or Mother Earth. It does not have independent potency. It is not a self-sustaining sentient being. It is not to be worshiped, feared or even loved in a way that usurps the sole deity of the one living and personal Creator God. Our environmental mission is never romantic or mystical. We are not called to “union with nature” but to care for the earth as an act of love and obedience to its Creator and Redeemer.

4. Creation Care Springs from the Mission of God

The starting point and finishing point in our biblical theology of mission must be the mission of God himself. What is the overarching mission to which God has committed himself and the whole outworking of history? It is not only the salvation of human beings but also the redemption of the whole creation. God is establishing a new creation through the transformation and renewal of creation in a manner analogous to the resurrection of his Son, and as a habitation for the resurrection bodies of his redeemed people.

Holistic mission, then, is not truly holistic if it includes only human beings (even if it includes them holistically!) and excludes the rest of the creation for whose reconciliation Christ shed his blood (Col 1:20). Those Christians who have responded to God’s call to serve him through serving his nonhuman creatures in ecological projects are engaged in a specialized form of mission that has its rightful place within the broad framework of all that God’s mission has as its goal. Their motivation flows from an awareness of God’s own heart for his creation.

Caring for Creation as God Does

All of these points are built on the intrinsic value of creation to God and the mandate of God that we should care for creation as he does. They do not depend on any other utility or consequence of such action, such as human benefit or evangelistic fruitfulness. We are to care for the earth because it belongs to God and he told us to. That is enough in itself.

There is no doubt that what benefits creation is ultimately good for human beings in the long term. Furthermore, since the suffering of creation is bound up with human wickedness, that which is good news for the earth is part of that which is good news for people. The gospel is indeed good news for the whole of creation.

Christian environmental action is also evangelistically fruitful, not because it is any kind of cover for “real mission,” but simply because it declares in word and deed the Creator’s limitless love for the whole of his creation (which of course includes his love for his human creatures) and makes no secret of the biblical story of the cost the Creator paid to redeem both. Such action is a missional embodiment of the biblical truths that the Lord is loving toward all that he has made, and that this same God so loved the world that he gave his only Son not only so that believers should not perish but ultimately so that all things in heaven and earth should be reconciled to God through the blood of the cross. For God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

GO TO THE BEGINNING OF LESSON 2: The Story of His Glory

Notes

1. Ron Elsdon makes the theme of the goodness of creation the thread running through his survey of biblical material in both Testaments on this issue in his book Green House Theology: Biblical Perspectives on Caring for Creation (Tunbridge Wells, UK: Monarch, 1992).

2. Michael S. Northcott, The Environment and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 180–81.

3. The reference to “textual readings” speaks of slight variations of wording found in different ancient manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. Different translation teams must choose which reading they feel is the wording intended by the original author.

4. Richard J. Bauckham, 2 Peter and Jude, Word Biblical Commentary 50 (Waco, TX: Word, 1983), 316–22.

5. The source of this widespread idea that Christianity bears major responsibility for our ecological crisis because of its instrumentalist view of nature, allegedly rooted in Genesis 1:28, goes back to the frequently reproduced and much-quoted article by Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155 (1967): 1203–7. It has been answered by many others since, and it has been shown to be based on a misunderstanding of the Hebrew text of Genesis. James Barr, for example, in 1972, showed that “Man’s ‘dominion’ contains no markedly exploitative aspect; it approximates to the well-known Oriental idea of the Shepherd King The Jewish-Christian doctrine of creation is therefore much less responsible for the ecological crisis than is suggested by arguments such as those of Lynn White. On the contrary, the biblical foundations of that doctrine would tend in the opposite direction, away from a licence to exploit and towards a duty to respect and to protect.” See James Barr, “Man and Nature—the Ecological Controversy and the Old Testament,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester 55 (1972): 22, 30.

6. For a thorough survey of representative expressions of this view down through Christian history, see James A. Nash, “The Ecological Complaint Against Christianity,” in Loving Nature: Ecological Integrity and Christian Responsibility (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), 68–92.

7. Robert Murray, The Cosmic Covenant: Biblical Themes of Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation (London: Sheed & Ward, 1992), 98.

8. Huw Spanner, “Tyrants, Stewards—or Just Kings?,” in Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics, ed. Linzey Andrew and Dorothy Yamamoto (London: SCM, 1998), 222.