Life and Death

  

 

Near the very end of the Torah, after Moses has given all of God’s commands to the people of Israel, he frames the future as a choice between two paths:

 

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse.  Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live…” (Deut. 30:19)*

 

 

Today, we too have a choice between two paths, one of life and one of death.  Like our choices always are, these paths are both this-worldly and spiritual.

 

 

The way we have been living on God’s earth is hurtling us towards ecological and civilizational destruction.  We are already starting to see catastrophic results from a 1-degree Celsius increase in global temperatures from pre-industrial levels.  We are currently on track for 3-5 degrees by the end of the century.  The human costs will be astronomical.

 

But this is also a spiritual crisis.  We have lost our sense of mutual interdependence with one another and with the natural world that is our home and sustenance.  Too often we have forgotten our love for one another, wreaking ecological destruction for our neighbors and for future generations, all the while crying, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  

 

We the privileged rarely realize the true costs of our conveniences.  The sticker price at Walmart, The GAP, and the gas station never takes into account deforestation, dangerous labor, health problems from poisoned water and air, or the loss of homes, lives, and livelihoods to a rapidly warming planet.  We usually just get the good end of the deal.

 

Those who can seem to keep taking and taking, and when the bill finally comes due, we are rarely the ones around to pay it.  But the bills are piling up, and we can’t escape them any longer.  Unprecedented fires are ravaging the western United States; more and more powerful storms are hitting the Gulf Coast; ice sheets are melting; the seas are rising; more extreme heatwaves, droughts, storms, and flooding are becoming the new normal.  The ones hit hardest are the poor and the marginalized, but none of us can escape paying forever.

 

 

When it comes to our climate crisis, we know the problem: we have and are continuing to put too much carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, largely by burning fossil fuels for power and transportation.  

We also know a huge part of the solution: stop doing that.  We are more than capable – financially and technologically – of transitioning to wind and solar energy and to electric vehicles for transportation.

 

We have so much of what we need to change things.  But which path will we take?

 

 

My friends, choose life, that we and our offspring may live.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* If you think I’m misusing this verse, I invited you to peruse my past posts.  Since December, I’ve posted almost exclusively about the environment, especially our climate crisis, and its theological significance.

 

A Short Ecological Liturgy

  

A Short Ecological Liturgy for Inclusion with Other Prayers

 

 

Leader:  The heavens declare the glory of God.

People:  And the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

 

L:  Your voice is in the rustle of the wind in the leaves of an oak and the swaying and whispering of the pines, in beetles and field mice and wolves.  Your words made the trout and the perch.  We hear you in the creaking of glaciers and the lapping of waters on the shore.  We see your glory in the skies, the mountains, and the humblest of prairie grass.  Your face is found in the forests and fields alike, and a thousand birds burst into exuberant praise.

 

With your angels we cry,

P:  Holy, holy, holy is the LORD God Almighty!  The whole earth is full of his glory!

 

L:  The whole of creation worships you.

P:  May we also.

 

L:  You have revealed yourself in the wonders of nature and left them in our care.

P:  We repent, for we have laid waste to what you have made.

L:  You gave us the earth for the sustenance of all.

P:  We confess that we have exploited it without regard for the harm we have caused our neighbor, and we humbly repent.

L:  You have said,

“My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.”

P:  We confess that our treatment of your earthly house is a stumbling block for the world’s worship.

 

L:  Grant us wisdom and loving hearts, that we might live in the world in a way that honors you and reflects your glory in all the earth.

P:  Your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.

 

L:  Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and forever.

 

                                                                                                Amen.

Liberty and the Virus

As COVID-19 ravages our country and many other places around the world, state and local governments have shut down restaurants, bars, and stores, asked people to stay home except for necessary trips out for things like groceries, and asked us to wear masks in order to protect both the healthy and the vulnerable from a deadly disease.  

There are two overlapping sets of people put in danger by this situation: those vulnerable to the virus – everyone, really, but especially those like me whose health is already compromised due to age or sickness – and those whose economic livelihood is threatened by the shutdowns.  We cannot forget either of these groups or their current reasons for anxiety and fear, but whether it comes to our personal decisions about masking and social distancing or political demands for how our tax dollars are spent to relieve those whose income is cut off, our public discourse seems inevitably to come down to questions of rights and liberty.

After all, we Americans (including American Christians) hold our rights and liberties dear.  So dear that our ideas of individual rights and liberties frequently take precedent over all manner of other, more community-oriented social goods.

But just what are our rights?  Does it actually matter?  Do they matter?  Perhaps they do, but for those who profess to follow Christ, maybe they matter less than American culture would seem to suggest.  Not every right must or ought to be claimed.  Instead, we are frequently called to lay them down for the good of others – not by the politics of man, but by the words of Jesus.  Consider the following passages:

Luke 9:23-25

And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.  For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.  For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself?”

John 15:12-13

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

Christians have always found these to be hard teachings.  For the early church, sacrificial love for one another could indeed be a matter of giving up one’s life and facing death.  

But what does love ask of us today?  To take care of family, friends, and neighbors.  It’s possible that to do so may require significant sacrifice, but to many, if not most of us, standing against the pandemic may be as simple as staying home as much as we can and wearing masks if we need to go out.

Yet here in Wisconsin, people have been protesting not being able to do things like get haircuts, with one judge comparing the shutdown to Japanese internment camps in World War II.  Within an hour of the State Supreme Court striking down the governor’s stay-at-home order, the bars were packed with maskless patrons crammed in like sardines with no apparent thought for how these actions might affect others.  In Michigan, protestors have been showing up to the state capitol with guns and death threats.

We believe that the God who created the universe loved us so much that He became a human being to die so that we might have eternal life.  Can there be a greater sacrifice?  But that is how He loves us.  Are we too selfish to sacrifice even a little comfort to save the lives of others?  

We like to talk a big game about giving our lives to Jesus, but what are we doing in the face of even relatively simple impositions for the sake of one another?  We are complaining about our comfort and our money.  Some of us are even threatening violence.  Is a human life worth that little to us?  Is Christ?  Are we not willing to sacrifice for love?

With states opening up, we have many options, some wise and some dangerous.  But what does it profit us if we live as we wish at the cost of offering our neighbors up to die?  What have we then to do with Christ?  We have forfeited our very selves.

Right now, we need to lay down our pride and our immediate self-interest to love one another as Christ has loved us, even if it’s hard.  Especially if it’s hard.

Stay home when you can

Wear a mask when you do go out.

Support those who need it financially.

Stay strong in the Spirit of God, and show the world that the love of Jesus is more than just words on a page.

Glory Unspeakable

This Lent I’ve been writing about environmentalism and Christian theology, and now we’ve come to the climax: the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

“What,” you may ask, “could Easter and the environment possibly have to do with one another?  Is this just bending Scripture to serve my own external purposes?”  It is not, but neither is the answer simple.  Christ’s Death and Resurrection are ultimately about transformation and transfiguration.  They infuse and energize every bit of what follows.

Willis Jenkins notes that in many ways, our ecology has much to do with our soteriology.  In other words, our understanding of salvation colors the way we see the natural world.  Too often, we see Christ’s work of salvation solely in individualistic terms, and yet Romans 8:19-23 expresses salvation in cosmic terms that encompass all of Creation:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; ²⁰ for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope ²¹ that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. ²² We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; ²³ and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 

The salvation of humanity has consequences for the entirety of the created order.  When the Book of Revelation talks about a new Heaven and a new Earth, Creation is being transfigured: set free, not annihilated and replaced.  There will be a new heaven and a new earth as we will be new people.

Consider the following passages:

Ephesians 1:8b-10:

With all wisdom and insight ⁹ he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, ¹⁰ as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

Colossians 1:19-20:

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

And 1 Corinthians 15:28:

When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.

The created universe itself is part of and subject to God’s redemptive plan.  The heart of salvation is healing what has been broken and corrupted, putting right what is wrong, binding up every wound and wiping away every tear.  In some sense beyond our understanding, the very cosmos groans for this salvation, for transformed relationships, and perhaps none of it more than we do ourselves.

John Chrysostom wrote of Christ’s work,

He became Son of man, who was God's own Son, in order that He might make the sons of men to be children of God. … He in nothing diminished His own Nature by this condescension, but raised us, who had always sat in disgrace and darkness, to glory unspeakable.

And 2 Peter 1:4 says,

Thus he has given us…his precious and very great promises, so that through them you…may become participants of the divine nature.

The root of the Greek word for “participants” here is koinonia: partaking through an act of fellowship.  It is more than the simple reception of a gift but a sort of mystical union largely beyond our comprehension, participation in the relational, indwelling love of the members of the Trinity for one another – perichoresis, what Richard Rohr terms “the divine dance”.  We see this in the Gospel of John when Jesus tells His disciples, 

Because I live, you also will live.  In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. (14:19b-20)

And when He prays to God the Father, he says,

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.  The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. (17:20-23)

This participation as fellowship is also a participation of purpose – we become our true selves.  In the beginning of the Gospel of John, Christ is referred to as God’s Word.  The Greek term is logos.  It means more than just “word” in English, it is also a logic, an organizing principle.  Maximus the Confessor writes that in each one of us is a logos, a personalized expression of the divine Logos.  We are our truest selves when we conform to our individual logoi, thus participating in holy harmony in the great Logos of God.  The cross and the empty tomb are at the very center of this transformation.  Through His Death and Resurrection, Jesus destroys the power of sin and death, allowing us to become who we were always meant to be.

And the Incarnation that makes this possible is not an accident or an expediency or a concession but God’s Plan A.  Chrysostom writes of Christ’s bodily ascension into Heaven:

And observe I pray you, the awful and ineffable nature of the mystery. He inhabits this tabernacle forever, for He clothed Himself with our flesh, not as again to leave it, but always to have it with Him.

The very nature of humanity and its link to the natural world is meant for the indwelling divine dance, billions of logoi calling out for the Divine Logos.  Gregory of Nyssa writes,

Now, by a provision of the supreme Mind there is an intermixture of the intellectual with the sensible world, in order that nothing in creation may be thrown aside as worthless, as says the Apostle, or be left without its portion of the Divine fellowship. On this account it is that the commixture of the intellectual and sensible in man is effected by the Divine Being...God, taking dust of the ground, formed the man, and by an inspiration from Himself He planted life in the work of His hand, that thus the earthy might be raised up to the Divine, and so one certain grace of equal value might pervade the whole creation, the lower nature being mingled with the supramundane.

Likewise, Maximus:

With us and through us, Christ embraces the whole creation, bringing together the extremes, uniting them by wrapping them around Himself… Thus He recapitulates all things in Himself, showing that the whole creation is one, as if a human.

In a previous post, we looked at the priestly role of Adam (and humanity in general) in the cosmos as God’s temple.  The New Testament refers to Christ as the second Adam, fulfilling what the first Adam failed to do.  It also says that we as the church share in this cosmic priesthood.  Through humanity and acts of human worship, God draws the physical world into communion with Himself.  All Creation is made to join in the dance, in some sense as we are.

This all seems very theoretical and “head-in-the-clouds”.  What does it have to do with the way we actually live?  What does it have to do with practical environmentalism?

Throughout the gospels, Jesus invites people to enter “The Kingdom of God”.  It is the very core of gospel, but too often we reduce it to a matter of personal salvation.  The Greek word used is basileia, indicating the all-encompassing rule of God, not only eschatologically but very much in the here and now.  The Kingdom is a state in which all relationships are made right, including our place in the created order, a state of eternal and all-encompassing fellowship so that God may be all in all.  Ultimately, this will not be complete until the day when God finally makes all things new, but part of the Kingdom is to work towards it as the first fruits of a new way of living in Christ.  The Kingdom is here now in part but fully in time.

Among the transformed relationships of the Kingdom is ours with the natural world.  The way we treat the rest of Creation matters in the Kingdom of God.  Worship and glory unspeakable are meant to extend to everything we do and are.  Trashing the land and the oceans are not our logoi, neither are the destructive practices that exterminate species God has made or rapidly transform the climate in dangerous and deadly ways.  On the contrary, we are to work for the good of Creation.  We are meant to draw the whole of it into fellowship ourselves and with God.  We are made to live in holy harmony of Eden.  Can we perfect that in the here and now? No, but it is our duty and calling to try our best. 

Resilience, COVID-19, and Our Climate Emergency

This is not quite the blog post I planned to write.  

The outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19) as a global pandemic has forced abrupted changes in the way we live and is making us reevaluate the way we have been living up until now.

I’m going to be connecting culture and ecology, not only thinking about humans as part of an ecological system – a web of interconnections and interdependencies – but also using natural ecology as a model for understanding our culture (our total way of life and thought) itself.  This is not only important for dealing with COVID-19 now but also the challenges posed by climate change and other ecological challenges we face in a dangerous 21^st century.  The way we have been living is neither sustainable nor up to the task of meeting our current and coming challenges.

Sustainability has become a fashionable buzzword across many sectors of our society, but what does it mean for a system to be sustainable?

Henry A. Regier, former director of the University of Toronto’s Institute for environmental studies writes about the idea of “ecological integrity: “A living system exhibits integrity if, when subjected to disturbance, it sustains an organizing, self-correcting capability to recover toward an end-state that is normal and ‘good’ for that system.”  Ethnomusicologist Burt Feintuch takes this idea and applies it to the realm of culture, formulating an idea of “cultural integrity”,

a community’s ability to articulate and maintain what it values about living a good life in the company of others who share one’s place in the world.  The term implies wholeness, interconnectedness, and the soundness of those connections.  And, fundamentally, it involves what can only be subjective – the “goodness” or adherence to moral and ethical standards in community life.  Call that last point an ethic of community life.

Is there any more denying that the status quo is built on a poor ethic of community life?  In the midst of a pandemic unprecedented in our lifetimes, millions of Americans still lack health insurance, and even those with insurance may face financial disaster for seeking medical help due to high deductibles and limited coverage. And even now, when testing for coronavirus is most important for public health, the rich seem to have no problem getting tests otherwise rationed out to only the sickest individuals.  Furthermore, 74% of American workers live paycheck to paycheck, and our social safety net is constantly under attack in the political arena. How can we as individuals or as a society possibly afford respond to unforeseen disturbances?  

For a system to be sustainable, it requires that system to exhibit resilience. 

Ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon writes:

Resilience refers to a system’s capacity to recover and maintain its integrity, identity, and continuity when subjected to disturbance and change…Resilient systems share certain characteristics.  Identifying what makes a…culture vulnerable, what makes it resilient, and ameliorating the former while strengthening the latter becomes, therefore, a practical strategy for enhancing a…culture’s sustainability.  Resilience does not simply mean “learning to live with it,” as people new to the term mistakenly think.  Nor does it mean hunkering down in a defensive stance.  Rather, resilience implies a way to manage disturbance and change and guide the outcome toward a desirable end…

Resilience strategies are meant to exhibit resilience themselves; that is, managing for resilience means living with a degree of uncertainty (although trying to minimize it).  It means to experiment, sometimes to fail, and to adapt management techniques so as to learn from successes and failures.  In the current phraseology, resilience thinking requires adaptive management.  Adaptive management anticipates, and reacts to, changing circumstances, changes in values, and changes in knowledge.  Resilience is meant to be pragmatic and realistic .

How do we become more resilient as local, national, and global societies?  What strategies of adaptive management will we adopt, not only in the face of our current public health emergency but also in the face of the long-term ecological emergencies into which we are currently hurtling?  The challenges in an uncertain and dangerous 21^st century are vast.

David W. Orr suggests that resilience will mean challenging what he refers to as our “pre-analytic assumptions”.  Among these are the possibility of unlimited economic growth, the preeminence of the individual, and the idea that we can solve nearly any problem with technological ingenuity.

Instead, we need a fundamental transformation of society.  Speaking during the Vietnam War, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that,

We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

As Christians we must recognize that, when individualism, “profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people,” we have abandoned the gospel of Christ, and that as a society (religious or not), such priorities are not sustainable.

COVID-19 has laid bare our interconnectedness in new ways and caused us to reevaluate just how well equipped our social, economic, and political systems respond to large-scale disturbance, and yet what we are currently experiencing pales in comparison to what climate change and other ecological degradation promise.

Global warming is changing the earth’s weather patterns in complex ways, leading to more and more extreme weather events such as hurricanes, large scale forest fires, flooding, and droughts and ecosystems and plant communities that used to mitigate the effects of many of these disasters by control flooding and preventing erosion have been cleared out for agriculture, housing, shipping, and other development.  Furthermore, a hotter world has led to an increase in heat-related deaths, especially among the elderly and people with underlying health conditions like myself.

As glaciers and ice sheets melt, sea level rise is making coastal regions progressively less habitable, requiring whole communities to pick up and move.  Some years ago, the low-lying island nation of Kiribati was even considering evacuating its entire population to other countries as the waters continue to rise.

Melting permafrost and sea ice are making the Arctic unrecognizable to earlier generations and threaten the lifeways of indigenous peoples as well as the animals they have depended on for thousands of years.

Pesticide-induced die-offs of pollinators like bees threaten the crops that feed us all.

Overfishing and pollution from oils spills, agricultural runoff, and other sources have caused the collapse of fisheries around the world, including in the Gulf of Mexico, which now has a dead zone that covers up to 6,000-7,000 square miles.

In the North Pacific Ocean, floating garbage patches cover an area of one million square miles,  approximately twice the size of Texas.

     According to the World health Organization, over four million people die every year from outdoor air pollution.

In India, where I lived for some time, the Ganges River provides drinking water for millions, yet it’s so polluted that fecal coliform levels are through the roof, even far upstream from its largest cities.

And, while we don’t yet know the source of COVID-19, many recent epidemics have been directly linked to environmental degradation.  

We can’t keep living like this.  

Our way of life is unsustainable, and we are paying a price that will only increase as time goes on.  And yet, we are not, however, all paying that price equally.  Instead, it is falling most heavily on our country’s and the world’s poor and marginalized.  Those with enough money can insulate themselves for a time, shipping our garbage to poor countries and ignoring what is not in our own immediate backyards, but most of the world’s population is not so lucky.

In Matthew 22:36-40, a religious scholar asks Jesus, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”  Jesus responds, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment.  And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

And in Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus tells His disciples,

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. ³² Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. ³³ And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. ³⁴ Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. ³⁵ For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, ³⁶ I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ ³⁷ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? ³⁸ And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? ³⁹ And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ ⁴⁰ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.’

⁴¹ “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. ⁴² For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ ⁴⁴ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ ⁴⁵ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ ⁴⁶ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

If Jesus says, “Whatever you do to the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you do to me,” what does that say about our environmental impact, or for that matter our response to COVID-19?  Because, as individuals and as a species, we are harming one another, especially those who are the most powerless and vulnerable.

The Bible expresses time and time again that we are responsible for one another.  Will we structure our society and economy in ways that are resilient, sustainable, and care for “the least of these”, or will we continue to put profits over human wellbeing?  Both our present and our future depend on us choosing the former and finally abandoning the latter.

Genesis and the World as God's Temple

This is the second in a series of weekly Lenten pieces on environmentalism.  

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In this post, I want to consider the idea of Creation itself and our place within the created order, particularly what the beginning chapters of Genesis can tell us about our role in today’s ecological landscape.

One of the problems we come across in reading historical texts is that we often exist in a different cultural context and view things through different conceptual frameworks that the authors and original audiences of those texts.  Nowhere does the average American Christian run up against this difficulty on a more regular basis than when encountering the Bible, yet I think we frequently underestimate what can and does get lost in translation when we in the post-Enlightenment West try to make sense of a collection of texts from the ancient Near East.

Whatever we may think as post-Enlightenment Westerners, we need to dig into the ancient cultural context in which a text like Genesis was written if we want to know just what information is trying to be communicated and how.  While some of us have a tendency to see the beginning of Genesis as being a very literal physical and temporal description of creative processes, this may say more about our cultural and interpretive frameworks than those of the author(s) and what they meant to communicate.

Instead, John H. Walton argues in The Lost World of Genesis One that the creation story of that chapter should be interpreted in its original context as being primarily about functional cosmology – that is, that for its ancient Hebrew author(s) and audience, the seven days of creation are about the establishment of the functions of various components of the cosmos, such that their very existence is bound up not in their materiality but in the functions they fulfil. 

Peter Enns makes a similar point in his book, Inspiration and Incarnation, arguing that our obsession with human origins vis-à-vis Darwinian evolution causes us to mistake the kind of literature we are reading and its purpose for both author(s) and audience.

Both support their theses by making use of a significant number of other extraordinarily similar texts from surrounding cultures.  For neither does this mean that the biblical accounts are based on these other texts, but rather that they are similar because they come from similar cultural contexts that used similar language and imagery to say things about their gods, and that these texts can tell us about how Genesis fits into broader cultural and cosmological understandings.

 As such, I’m going to set aside the issue of whether or not Genesis is an account of the physical details of human origins altogether as having comparatively little relevance to the actual topic at hand, which is our place in the created order with respect to today’s ecological needs.  Rather, those concerns are most powerfully addressed by the functional cosmology that provides the original context and message for Chapters 1-3.

For Walton the seven days of creation in Genesis 1 and the following accounts in Genesis 2-3 ultimately represent the process of temple inauguration in ancient Near Eastern cosmology as echoed in a number of other ancient texts, with the completed cosmos as a temple – the dwelling place of God – and humanity installed as its priests and stewards.  

Like the later Tabernacle and Jerusalem Temple, which reflect its imagery, the Garden of Eden’s serves as a microcosm of the cosmic temple and as the center of sacred space into which Adam is placed in a priestly role.  English translations of the Bible tend to understand Genesis 2 as involving Adam being put into the Garden of Eden to work the ground and be its caretaker, but Walton believes that there’s more to it than this. In The Lost World of Adam and Eve, he argues that the words in Genesis 2:15, ^cbd and šmr, variously translated as “work” and “take care of” in the NIV and “till” and “keep” in the NRSV, refer not to agricultural work here but to priestly worship that maintains the proper relationships of cosmic order.

Walton continues, writing that,

Adam’s role must be understood in light of the role of priests in the ancient world.  When we read the Bible, we often think of priests as ritual experts and as those instructing the people in the ways of the Lord and the law.  That is true, but those tasks fit into a larger picture.  The main task of the priest was the preservation of sacred space.  They preserved sacred space by

-       instructing people regarding what sacred space requires of them (purity standards for each zone of sacred space, behavior appropriate to scared space) so that its sanctity can be maintained

-       offering sacrifices in the appropriate ways at the appropriate times and with appropriate gifts so that its sanctity may be preserved

-       guarding sacred space and sacred objects found therein so that their sanctity is preserved

-       keeping out anything that would compromise or corrupt the sanctity of sacred space

-       serving as mediators who make the benefits of sacred space available to the people (thereby extending sacred space) and who assure that the gifts of the people get to God

This final point of humanity as mediator is key to a historical Christian understanding of our place in the created order that seems to much more developed in the Eastern Church than here in the West, certainly among Protestants.  For Eastern Orthodox theologians, the priestly role of humanity is not only a key theological point but is inherent in our very being, as humanity’s dual nature as both a physical creature and a spiritual being in the image of God unites Heaven and Earth as a microcosm of the created order and a mediator through which God unites Himself with His earthly creation.

For example, fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nyssa writes,

Now, by a provision of the supreme Mind there is an intermixture of the intellectual with the sensible world, in order that nothing in creation may be thrown aside as worthless, as says the Apostle, or be left without its portion of the Divine fellowship. On this account it is that the commixture of the intellectual and sensible in man is effected by the Divine Being...God, taking dust of the ground, formed the man, and by an inspiration from Himself He planted life in the work of His hand, that thus the earthy might be raised up to the Divine, and so one certain grace of equal value might pervade the whole creation, the lower nature being mingled with the supramundane.

Likewise, Theodore of Mopsuestia suggests that humanity’s interaction with and use of the rest of Creation should be a blessing to it:

Wanting to make one cosmos of the universe and to epitomize in one being the whole creation, which is composed of such diverse natures…God constituted humankind as the link of all things.  This is why [God] has brought everything back for their use, in order that the entire creation might be united in them and they might be for it a manifest pledge of friendship.

What then of God’s command to Adam and Eve to “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth”?  While it has often been used to prioritize the interests of humans over those of the rest of Creation, the priestly role of humanity in Genesis speaks out against the idea that this is a license for unbridled exploitation.  Walton writes,

Adam was given access to…sacred space as a priest in order to be involved in preserving its sanctity and mediating its benefits.  Sacred space was also the center of order, because order emanates from God.  The idea that people would “subdue” and “rule” is based on the idea that they would have a continuing role as God’s vice-regents (in his image) to preserve order and to extend it under God.

One could argue that exploitation of Creation for their own perceived gain rather than for God’s purposes is a core part of Adam and Eve’s sin.  Seen through the lens of Genesis and later theologians like Gregory and Theodore, their sin is not merely spiritual, as it is often de facto treated, but deeply bound up in the physical world.  (We will see more of this is the following weeks as we examine how physical creation plays into New Testament narratives of salvation, transfiguration, resurrection, eschatology, and the Kingdom of God.)

As Adam and Eve turned from their priestly roles, not only was fellowship with God broken, but so was our relationship with other creatures, with the whole created order itself.  The cosmic order of Eden, as well as the reflections of theologians like Gregory and Theodore, suggest a harmony with nature far from our relationship to it in the modern world.  It seems that we as a species are recapitulating Adam and Eve’s sin far more closely than we even realize.

If Creation is God’s temple and if, as Psalm 24:1 states, "The Earth is the Lord's and everything in it," what does that mean for how we treat the Earth and the other creatures in it?

By trashing the environment and driving countless species to extinction, are we desecrating His temple in which we are meant to serve, mocking God in His own house?  Aren’t we supposed to be the very guardians and caretakers of that house?

We would be heartbroken, maybe deeply angry, if we found the church we attend had been brutally ransacked and vandalized.  Why do we rarely seem to feel anything remotely like that about environmental destruction and ecological tragedy?

Passionate care for the Earth and its creatures is not at its root a replacement for God, as some strangely see it: it is rightly a form of His worship. 

Next week we will consider environmentalism as it relates to Christ’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself” and the human costs of ecological degradation and disaster.