“If we cease to see the world as God’s creation, we shall treat it not as a project in which we are invited to share, but as an absolute possession to be exploited as we will.” (Gunton) Discuss.
It may easily be said that if we see the world as that which was not created by us, and to which we have no right of ownership, we may not despoil it. However, it is debatable whether traditional Christian doctrine in fact affirms this view, and indeed it has been said that Christianity is responsible for the environmental exploitation of the modern world. In recent years the Green movement has become increasingly popular, and although there is a Green Christian movement, many of those active in the conservation of the earth do not hold religious views, yet believe that it is wrong to exploit the earth. While it is true that many governments and peoples have exploited the earth and do not believe it to be God’s creation, and something which is not ours to do as we will with, many governments which profess a belief in God’s creation have done likewise, yet do not believe this to be wrong.
Many commentators now think that Christianity has done more than any multinational company, or government to encourage the exploitation of the earth, and that only by rejecting Christianity can we begin to teach people to care for the earth. The eminent scholar, Lynn White wrote in 1967, “Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia’s religions (except, perhaps, Zoroastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends”
The reason for this condemnation of Christianity is twofold. The first is contained in the Book of Genesis where, after God created the earth, He allowed Adam to name the animals, thus showing his superiority over them, and separating man from nature as something different. This is also shown in the verse where God says, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have domination over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:28) The giving of dominion by God to man reduced nature to what was good for man, and encouraged the exploitation of the same for man’s purposes. Man was given godlike powers over the natural world and a dispensation by God to do as he liked with it, including the hunting to extinction of creatures to provide food (and sport) for man.
The dominion of man over animals with disastrous effect can be seen in the Old Testament, in the story of Noah, where because of man’s sinfulness, all the animals of the earth except two of every kind were destroyed, emphasising Christianity’s doctrine that the animals have no significance in comparison to mankind, that they may be all but destroyed because of him. The insignificance of animals in church doctrine can be seen in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas who wrote “if any passage in Holy Scripture seems to forbid us to be cruel to brute animals, that is either lest through being cruel to brute animals one becomes cruel to human beings or because injury to an animal leads to the terrestrial hurt of man” . It is also said that in Genesis, mankind’s creation is the climax of creation, as man is confirmed as the image of God, whereas the animals are not, thus separating mankind from the animals and confirming them as superior to them.
However, it is possible to interpret Genesis in another way. The Hebrew word for ‘subdue’ (radah) in the Old Testament merely signifies ‘ruling’, which, in those times, had a slightly different meaning to ‘domination’. In ancient times, a ruler had a duty to care for the land over which he ruled, and one who exploited it would have failed in his duty to his kingdom. Colin Gunton wrote that the giving of dominion in Genesis was not a call to exploit the earth in whatever manner man saw fit, but “a calling to be and act in such a way as to offer the whole created order as a response of praise to its maker” It is possible to interpret the story of the Flood as not showing the insignificance of animals compared to man. Noah is called to show his duty to preserve the animals by saving them in the ark, instead of God re-creating them to serve man, which would be more logical if man were the supreme height of God’s creation, and those animals which are placed in the ark and are seen, together with Noah and his family, as the faithful remnant of God’s creation. After the Flood, God makes a covenant, saying “I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth...when the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature [my italics] of all flesh that is on the earth.” (Genesis 9:13-16) God in this instance shows no favour towards man alone, he takes into account the creatures of the earth, including, but not consisting exclusively of, mankind. Such covenants including the creatures are not abnormal in the Old Testament, particularly in the writings of the prophets, e.g. Ho. 2:18; Je. 33:20-25; Ezek. 34:25.
In Genesis, although mankind is confirmed as God’s image, he is created on the same day as the land animals, and Lawrence Osborn in his book “Guardians of Creation” suggests that this implies kinship between them. The climax of creation, he suggests, is the Sabbath day, not the creation of mankind. He also makes the important point that although Adam names the animals, God shows His superiority by naming the general categories and Adam names the animals only in the presence of God, and with His permission.
Although the text of Genesis has been seen to have been instrumental in allowing mankind to exploit the world, it is perhaps, more the later theologies of churchmen such as Augustine in particular, which have allowed mankind to look upon the world as inferior to himself. The church fathers were greatly influenced by the works of the Greek philosophers, especially Plato. Plato thought that there were two worlds, the world of the forms, which were unchangeable, and the lesser, earthly world which was becoming and therefore changeable. He divided the world into the real and ideal and this dualism was a great influence on Christianity. Although this was contrary to Genesis, where the world is seen as good, many theologians believed in the idea of a two-stage creation, although St. Irenaeus, writing against the gnostic heresy, viewed the world as intrinsically good and said that the whole of creation was to be redeemed, not just mankind. However, his views did not form the mainstay of Christian doctrine about the environment, as most theologians preferred the Platonic model. The main theologians to think this were St. Origen and St. Augustine. Origen held to the idea of a two-stage creation: that God first created a realm of spiritual beings, and after the fall of the angels recounted in Revelations 12:7-9, the material world was created so that these spiritual beings could return to their Maker redeemed. Thus the world was merely present for the reformation of the spirit, and was not good in itself. Augustine, too, believed in this two-stage creation, that the Platonic forms were created first, and then matter. Although Augustine held to the belief that God created ex nihilo, and that what He created was good, he still allowed the Platonic doubts about the goodness of matter to engulf him. Augustine also wrote that the world is hierarchical and that therefore, spiritual things are better than the non-spiritual creatures of the earth. This eventually meant that creation ceased to be seen as an act of love but rather as an act of will by God, and a means by which the spirit can be redeemed and enter the ‘better’ higher world. Colin Gunton believes that this emphasis is to blame for the modern world’s tendency toward atheism, by the detachment of the natural world from religion. Another problem caused by the church fathers was the doctrine of original sin. They argued that not only had man fallen and had a permanent tendency toward sin, but that the whole of creation had fallen as well. While mankind had a possibility of redemption evinced to him after the Incarnation, the natural world did not, and remained a sinful place.
Gunton argues that during the enlightenment, because of the Church’s attitude towards science, creation was left merely to scientists and people began to no longer see the world as something which God created, and intervenes in, but rather that God created the world and then left it to its own devices, and authorised that man could do anything he wanted to it. Scientists such as Galileo and Isaac Newton(and later, Darwin) created doubts about the Biblical account of creation, and the Church’s refusal to interpret scripture in any other way than as literal truth (and the persecution of Galileo until he recanted of his discoveries) meant that Genesis, and its account of creation as good, and made by God as an act of love and as something that man held a post of stewardship over, was neglected. One of the main ideas of the enlightenment was that the world was like a machine (though that idea has since been discounted) and this meant that there could be no idea of God having a personal involvement in the world. The scholar Moltmann wrote that if the world is seen as a machine then living creatures other than man “are treated with despite and react in such a way that our own existence is threatened.” The end result of this conflict between the church and science, was that creation was left to the scientists to explain, not the church.
However, while the doctrines of the Christian church may be seen to encourage man to think of the natural world as of no worth, and to allow him to exploit it in any way he wishes, there is an argument against this. God’s interaction in creation is a pivotal point of Christian doctrine. It is emphasised in the New Testament that “the Word became flesh, and lived among us, and we have seen his glory” (John 1:14). The Incarnation serves to show God’s interaction with his creation, and indeed the emphasis in the Gospels that Jesus spent time in the wilderness among the wild animals, and that he became mortal shows that God believes His creation to be worthy of redemption. Justin Martyr believed that in order to know God we must be taught by the Holy Spirit, not in some spiritual realm, but in the world, which Gunton describes as the beginning of the theology that “because God in universal Creator, everything, whether matter or spirit, is alike created, and nothing but God is eternal and divine.” It is evil which prevents creation from being perfect, it is not in itself corrupt and neither did God create the corruption. Augustine wrote that evil is merely the ‘privation of the good’, i.e. that it is merely the absence of good, it not something in itself, and that the Fall of man caused creation to sin. Evil subverted God’s plan for creation and one of the reasons for the Incarnation was to redeem the whole created order. This therefore means that any belief that the world is evil and to be avoided is against Christian teaching, the whole created order, including mankind is to be redeemed through Jesus Christ. A modern scholar, Karl Barth wrote emphasising that God created an ex nihilo world where His covenant of love could be realised, that the world is not just a stepping stone on the way to salvation.
In more recent times, the pre-eminence of science over the doctrine of creation has been challenged by the discovery of quantum mechanics and chaos theory, that the whole world is interlinked and which can therefore support the idea of a creator intervening and taking place in the world.
While Christian scripture supports the idea that mankind has been placed in a position where he may exploit the earth in order that he may conserve it as part of his duty to God, this has not been emphasised in later teachings. Too many influential scholars such as Augustine have popularised the idea that the world is not as ‘good’ as the soul, or the heavenly realms, and that our time on the earth is merely to be used as a means by which to redeem ourselves so that we can enter them, for Gunton to be able to make his statement that if we no longer see the world as God’s creation, we will exploit it. This also seems an incongruous statement in the light of ‘Christian’ governments and peoples exploiting the earth for short-term profits, and also in the light of the continuing popularity of the Green movement, many of whose adherents do not believe the wish to conserve the earth to have anything to do with religious matters. It is possible to, if we interpret the scriptures that way, see the earth as something we must conserve as a solemn duty to God, but it is also easy to say that because of the teachings of the Church fathers, and an alternative view of scripture, we may do exactly as we wish with the environment, as we have been given leave to do so by God. There are many groups whose passionate wish is to conserve the environment in order that their offspring may live in a healthier world, and still other groups who wish to conserve because, for example, they think that the world is a living organism of which humans are merely the brain cells (the Gaia hypothesis put forward by Jim Lovelock). Overall, it seems foolish to say that if we do not see the world as God’s creation, we will exploit it, as, after all, Christians for many years have been exploiting the environment with scriptural backing (although it is possible to interpret scripture in another way), in the end, as Lynn White himself says:
“No sensible person could maintain that all ecologic damage is, or has been, rooted in religious attitudes” .