The Bible in the Ecological Debate

Transcription

1 1 The Bible in the Ecological Debate Richard Bauckham Living in an age of mass extinction Scientists tell us we are living through the sixth great age of extinction. In the three-and-a-half billion year history of life on this earth, there have been, previous to our own age, five periods of mass extinction. These were relatively short periods in which a very large number of the species on earth at that time, probably millions S species, disappeared from the earth. The causes of these mass extinctions seem to have been different in each case. The last one, the fifth, occurred 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs, after dominating the earth for 150 million years, died out, mainly through the effects of an asteroid hitting the earth. In the sixth mass extinction, humans are the asteroid. The mass extinction of species means, to put it another way, the destruction of biodiversity. We can take in the enormity of mass extinction only when we appreciate the staggering statistics of biodiversity. About 1.8 million species (of every kind of living thing) have been described, classified and named. But the number of unknown species is undoubtedly much higher than that. Scientists can only make informed guesses, but the guesses range from 10 million to 100 million. A vast number of them are insects and micro-organisms without which the rest of the community of living things would disintegrate. Globally there are biodiversity hotspots, many in the tropics or on islands, where the concentration of biodiversity is astonishing, but that doesn t mean it isn t remarkable enough in most places. Previously unknown species are turning up all the time, at the rate of more than 300 a day. Many, of course, are the insects and micro-organisms, but there are plants and animals too, even large ones. In 2008 a massive palm tree, 18 metres in height, one of the largest flowering plants on the planet, previously unknown to science, was discovered in Madagascar. A single expedition to north Vietnam in 2002 discovered more than 100 new plant species. More than 400 new species of mammal have been described since 1993, including 25 new species of primate (but those figures I got from recent publications will be out of date already). The ocean floors, 70% of the surface of the planet, are undoubtedly rich in undiscovered species of astonishingly different kinds from anything we otherwise know. Of course, a great many species are disappearing from the world before they have even been discovered. One small piece of tropical forest might contain thousands of species limited to that area. Who knows what industrial trawling of the ocean floors must have destroyed forever? But surely, people sometimes say, extinction of species is a natural part of the history of life on earth? Species have always gone extinct and new species evolve. True, but the scale is incomparable.

2 2 What the scientists call the background rate of extinction the normal rate at which species go extinct outside abnormal periods of mass extinction is one species per million per year. The current rate is estimated to be at least 1000 species per million per year. The current rate is at least a thousand times the normal. To replace those extinct species with new ones would take nature thousands, probably millions of years. All this is happening in the period in which humans have come to dominate the earth to an extent no other species has ever come close to doing. We were already doing the damage many thousand years ago when our prehistoric ancestors hunted to extinction most of the megafauna, the really big animals, the woolly mammoths, the elephant birds and hundreds of other lost species, the kind that now survive only in Africa and tropical Asia, often quite precariously. But not just the megafauna. Across the Pacific islands where the Polynesians settled, half the species of birds vanished, especially the flightless ones that didn t know they needed to fly until humans arrived. Homo sapiens, serial killer of the biosphere, the biologist Edward O Wilson calls us. Then modern Europeans and Americans brought technology to bear. The invention of steampowered trawlers in Victorian Britain began the deadly trawling of our seas that has turned habitats once teeming with life into oceanic deserts. But the engine of the mass extinction now occurring all around us is, of course, destruction or pollution of habitat. Humanity today (it has been said) is on a rampage of changing natural habitats dramatically: cutting them down, plowing them up, overgrazing them, paving them over, damming and diverting water, flooding or draining areas, spraying them with pesticides and acid rain, pouring oil into them, changing their climates, exposing them to increased ultraviolet radiation, and on and on. In addition to all that we endanger species just by moving around the planet and moving stuff around the planet the way we do, the way no other species has ever done. Thousands of species of frogs all over the world have disappeared already in this century, victims of a rare fungus that could never have spread worldwide had it not been able to hitch rides on human movement. And finally, climate change human-made climate change is now adding its own increasingly significant effect. Well, so what? Should we be concerned about all this? Maybe it s just the necessary price that has to be paid for the prosperity and flourishing of the human race. Just as small mammals, our own evolutionary ancestors, survived the mass extinction that put paid to the dinosaurs, we ourselves will surely be able to ensure that we survive the mass extinction of other species that we are causing. We can make sure we preserve the animals and plants that feed us. Indeed, we can now bio-engineer better versions of them. We can even clone our pets. We have seedbanks. And we shall still have all those wildlife documentaries to enjoy, even when the species they depict have disappeared. Won t we be OK and isn t that all that matters?

3 3 The answer I think the Christian answer is that we are not independent beings who can rise above the destruction of the rest of nature. We are integral members of an interdependent community of creation. But a Christian approach must surely have its roots in the Bible. And there perhaps we may hesitate. In the period when people were waking up to the ecological crisis it was quite popular among environmentalists to blame the crisis on Christianity and its Bible. I think, as a result of Christian involvement in ecological concerns, this view is on the decline, but it can still be heard on the lips even on the lips of such an iconic figure as Sir David Attenborough, who really ought to be better informed. So I d like us tonight to face up to the charge that the Bible bears responsibility for the way modern humans have dominated and trashed the planet. I think, on the contrary, that the Bible points us away from domination and destruction and towards a quite different perspective on the rest of creation. But what are the charges against the Bible? It is said that, whereas pagan religions reverenced nature as divine, the Bible, with its faith in one God alone, robbed nature of its sacred character, reducing it to mere stuff that humans can make use of as they wish. It is alleged that, according to Genesis 1, God made the rest of creation for humans and gave humans a mandate to subdue and exploit the rest of creation for human benefit. Humans, it is said, are conceived as fundamentally different from the rest of creation, spiritual beings with an otherworldly destiny, whereas the natural world is a strictly temporary creation, through which humans pass on their way to a higher destiny. These charges are not entirely wide of the mark, as you may be thinking yourselves. That major currents of Christian thought have read the Bible in that way we may have to admit. But if we recognize some truth in them, what should we do about it? What Christians have usually done in situations like this when something seems to have gone wrong in the Christian tradition is this: they have gone back to the Bible. They have looked again at the biblical teaching. Has the Bible been misinterpreted and misunderstood? Has it been read through cultural lenses that have distorted it? The community of creation Asked for a model of how human beings are intended by God to relate to the rest of creation on this planet, many Christians would say: we have been appointed stewards or guardians of the created world. Not many Christians would now say that the rest of creation is there simply for our benefit and use, and that really it is up to us what we do with it. No, most Christians would probably now say that God has put us in charge of his creatures, with a responsibility to care for them, a responsibility that we have all too often abused. I want to suggest that, while that model is certainly not wrong, it needs to be put in a wider perspective. The stewardship model sets us above creation. But

4 4 setting ourselves above creation has been precisely the problem of the modern period in which so much ecological damage has been done. What we urgently need to do is to re-enter creation. Before anything else we relate to our fellowcreatures precisely as fellow-creatures. We belong with them in an interdependent community of creation. This I believe is the wider perspective of the Bible, and it also coheres with contemporary ecological science, which has taught us so much about the intricate interconnexions on which all life on the planet depend. What a biblical and Christian view adds to the notion of community that we might gain just from the science and our observation of nature is that we belong to a community of creatures, created by God, and that therefore this community is a theocentric community not an anthropocentric world centred on humanity, not even a biocentric community, centred on life, but a theocentric community, centred on the God from whom we all come and for whose glory we all exist. A community may consist of a great diversity of members. This is obviously true of many human communities. In the community of creation the diversity is much greater but this by no means reduces the interdependence that constitutes community membership. In some respects the interdependence is greater: a human may at least survive without other humans, but not without earth, air, water, and plants, and not outside a natural context that has been shaped by many other creatures into a form that can accommodate human life. Membership of a common community does not, of course, preclude different roles for different members within the community. The community of creation again requires a very much greater diversity of roles within it than the human community does. Species of life and inanimate forms of nature are all highly specialized in the diverse contributions they make to the whole. A realistic understanding of the natural world must recognize that these roles often entail fierce competition, but even more co-operation. The diverse roles operate within the community, and the distinctive roles of humans (of which there are surely many) are no exception. Exceptional though we may be in many ways, our exceptionality is embedded in the community of creation to which we belong and would be impossible without it. We are not aliens imposing ourselves on or intruding ourselves within the community of creation, but natural members of it. So let s look again at the Bible s opening chapter, the one that many people think is responsible for giving us the idea that we are demi-gods set over creation rather than distinctive members of an interdependent community. Genesis 1 The Genesis account of God s creation of the world in six days has certainly been much misunderstood. I shall take for granted that this is not and was never intended to be a literal history of the way the world came to be. It s not science. Rather it is a richly significant and intricately configured literary portrayal of what it means to see the world as God s creation. It takes the form of a narrative

5 5 because stories are one of the most effective ways in which the human imagination can grasp meaning. But if you look at the diagram on the screen you will see that the text is constructed not only by narrative progression, chronologically, but at least as much also spatially, according to the parts of creation and their inhabitants. God creates, on the first three days, the environments for living creatures, and he names them. On the first day he creates light, so that the sequence of day and night provides, as it were, a reliable cosmic environment for life. On the 2nd day he creates the firmament that separates the primeval ocean, now above the firmament, from the waters below. That was how ancient people thought of the sky. It is how God made space for an inhabitable world. Then, on day 3, God creates dry land by gathering the waters on the earth into their own allotted space, the seas. The earth itself produces the vegetation that makes land a place where animals can live. Having created the three environments, on the subsequent three days God fills each of the environments, in turn and in the same order, with inhabitants. On day 4, he creates the heavenly bodies, especially the sun and the moon, putting them in charge of the alternating periods of light and darkness. On day 5, God creates the sea creatures that make their home in the waters of earth and the birds that live in the sky above. Finally, on day 6, he creates the creatures who are to populate the land. All kinds of mammals, reptiles and insects and, finally, humans. Notice we don t get a day to ourselves, because we too are land animals who must share a common home with other creatures who live on land and from it. We ll come back to the unique features that do distinguish humans. The account is very formulaic. Certain phrases recur again and again. Let s look at the formulas that are most important to us: Each act of creation begins with God saying and ends with God seeing. He commands creation to occur and then he looks at it. He approves it, like the craftsman perhaps who, when he has made an object, checks it over, considers it, sees that it has turned out as he intended, and finally perhaps admires it. The last time that formula occurs, at the end of the 6 th day, it varies: God saw that it was very good. The first six occurrences all refer to specific stages of creation, but the seventh refers to all the creations of all six days: God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Note: it is not the creation of humans that makes the whole creation very good. Humans are essential and so the pronouncement very good cannot be made until they have been created. But all the other creatures are also essential. It is the whole that God pronounces very good. One thing that is quite clear once we really look at the account as we have, is that there is no ascending scale of value as we move through the days and the various categories of creation. Are insects, created on day 6, of more value than whales, created on day 5, for example? What sense would it make to value reptiles above the heavenly bodies? Clearly there is no ascending scale and, whatever we say about the special position of humans (which is special), they do not stand at the end of an ascending scale of value

6 6 in the way that popular, non-scientific accounts of evolution have sometimes portrayed it. The word good in Hebrew is as general and flexible a word as it is in English. Creation is surely not good in only one respect. God has created a wonderfully complex world in which the value of each enhances the value of the whole. But notice that at each stage of the creation God as it were pauses to survey his handiwork and sees how good it is. Even before the completion of the whole enables him to pronounce it very good, he already sees each component part of the whole as good. it seems to me that what the narrative is doing is inviting us to share in God s delight in his creation. Whenever it says, God saw that it was good, we are being prompted to agree. Knowing the created world as we do, we can enter into God s appreciation of it. Yes, aren t the birds of the air wonderful, amazing creatures and so on So when we get to the creation of humans on the sixth day and we read God s command to us to have dominion over the creatures, we already know that what God is entrusting to our care is something of priceless value. It is the world we have begun to delight in as God does. We can only exercise dominion caring responsibility for other creatures, modelled on God s own care for all creatures if we have learned to appreciate the creatures, to love them with at least some small reflection of the love with which their creator loves them. The fact that we can do that is surely part of what it means to be created in the image and likeness of God. The creatures have the value God has given them. We could say that they have intrinsic value meaning that their value is not just the value they have for other creatures, though that is part of it. God has given them value in themselves. But because God is the source of all good and he has made the creatures good, it is better to say that they have value for God, they matter to God, and that in the end is why they must matter to us. I m keen that we don t restrict the word good to just some aspects of the creation. Good is a very big word and we should, in this context, let it be big. But still we can see certain features of this account in Genesis 1 that indicate some of the things God values in his creation. First, there is order. The carefully structured form of the narrative points to an order intrinsic to the creation. In part, God creates by fixing boundaries: between light and darkness, sea and dry land, and so on. The different kinds of creatures are categorized (though necessarily, of course, in a very general way). This observation of order is important, partly, because when the notion that human beings are stewards of creation really emerged in the seventeenth century its advocates portrayed the rest of creation as a disordered mess that needs humans to put it in order. It was a kind of aesthetic prejudice: the world ought to be a sort of formal garden, not a jungle. Of course, science the science that had its origins in the same period finds abundant order in creation. But it s an order with constant variation. And that s actually discernible in the literary structure of Genesis 1: there s a great deal of symmetry but also variation.

7 7 So that brings us, secondly, to diversity. One of the things God delights in must be, because it is such a prominent feature of the account, the sheer, abundant variety of the creatures. Another of the recurring phrases in the narrative is of every kind or according to their kind. We hear of fruit trees of every kind, seed-bearing plants of every kind, sea creatures of every kind, birds of every kind, wild animals of every kind, domestic animals of every kind, creeping things (i.e. reptiles and insects) of every kind. In all, that phrase occurs ten times. This is an account of creation that celebrates biodiversity. It paints a picture of a world teeming with many, many different forms of life. Thirdly, we may see an emphasis not only on the diversity but also on the flourishing and plenitude of life. When God blesses the living creatures, he is endowing them with fecundity. The task he gives the fish is to be fruitful and multiply and fill the seas. The birds, too, are to multiply. And humans are to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Notice that the task of humans up to that point in the text (be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth) is not peculiar to humans (only what follows is the specifically human role in creation). God wants all life to flourish, and, incidentally, there s a particular way, not often noticed, in which the account makes clear that humans are not to multiply to the extent of crowding out other species. After giving humans their special commission (to have dominion over other living creatures) God says: See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food. Why does God tell humans that he has given all the fruits of the earth for the sustenance of the rest of the land creatures as well as to humans? Surely it is to make clear that the earth is a home that we share with other living creatures. They too have a right to the means of living and flourishing. We are not to flourish at their expense. The point is important, not only to stress once again that the other creatures have value in themselves and not just in their value for us, but also because it counters the historical misuse of the command to humans to fill the earth. That command suggests the remarkable extent to which humans have been able to live in a vast range of different kinds of habitat, more than any other species, but it does not mean that we should fill the earth to the point where there is room only for us. The human responsibility for other creatures should never have meant that we should be constantly interfering with it and trying to improve it. That became the modern habit. Very slowly we have learned that a good deal of our responsibility lies in keeping our hands off and letting creation be itself. Letting it be what God has made it to be for his glory. Sadly, we have reached the stage where even the earth s few remaining real wildernesses can only remain so if we actively protect them. I have tried to show you that the creation narrative in Genesis 1 does not set us over creation as though we did not belong to it but situates us within creation with a special responsibility towards our fellow-creatures. In the modern period we have obsessed on the vertical relationship between ourselves and other

8 8 creatures. We need to rediscover the horizontal relationship in which we stand before God alongside the rest of the community of God s creation. There are two other biblical resources that can help us to do that. Psalm 104 Psalm 104 is a celebration of God s creation, a poetic depiction of the community of creatures, that deserves to be read alongside Genesis 1, especially in our time. Like Genesis 1, it celebrates the diversity and fecundity of creation, but it contains hardly a hint of the special role that in Genesis 1 God gives to humans. When we are apt to get that human role out of proportion and out of context, it can be salutary to contemplate the created world as Ps 104 does, a world in which we are one sort of creature among all the others. It s a long psalm and probably not so well known as Genesis 1, so here is part of it: 10 You make springs gush forth in the valleys; they flow between the hills, 11 giving drink to every wild animal; the wild asses quench their thirst. 12 By the streams the birds of the air have their habitation; they sing among the branches. 13 From your lofty abode you water the mountains; the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work. 14 You cause the grass to grow for the cattle, and plants for people to cultivate, so as to bring forth bread from the earth, 15 and wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine, and bread to strengthen the human heart. 16 The trees of the LORD are watered abundantly, the cedars of Lebanon that he planted. 17 In them the birds build their nests; the stork has its home in the fir trees. 18 The high mountains are for the wild goats; the rocks are a refuge for the coneys. 19 You have made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting. 20 You make darkness, and it is night, when all the animals of the forest come creeping out.

9 9 21 The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God. 22 When the sun rises, they withdraw and lie down in their dens. 23 People go out to their work and to their labor until the evening. 24 O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. 25 Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great. This is a psalm of praise to God for his generous extravagance in creating and providing for his creatures, for a world of huge diversity and complexity, a world of abundance of life. There is a pervasive sense of the world as God's gift to all living creatures. All are dependent on God, all are enabled by God to play their distinctive roles. Each has its own habitat, its specific place in an ecosphere, as we might put it. It would be good to read it with some of the disappearing and threatened species of our world in mind. I want to conclude with a biblical theme that I think has a very powerful and special ability to draw us into our God-given place within the theocentric community of God s innumerable creatures. This theme is The praise of God by all creation The Bible depicts the whole creation as offering worship to God. There are many passages in the Psalms that do this, especially Psalm 148, and the theme is taken up in the New Testament too. According to these passages, all creatures, animate and inanimate, worship God. This is not, as modern biblical interpreters have sometimes supposed, merely a poetic fancy or some kind of animism that endows all creatures with consciousness. Other creatures may not think or voice their worship, but they worship God just by being themselves, as God made them, existing for God's glory. Only humans desist from worshipping God; other creatures, without having to think about it, do so all the time. A tree does not need to do anything specific in order to praise God; still less need it be conscious of anything. Simply by being and growing it praises God. It is distinctively human to bring praise to conscious expression in words, but the creatures remind us that this distinctively human form of praise is worthless unless, like them, we also live our whole lives to the glory of God. In Psalm 148, which is the fullest example of a psalm in which all creatures are called upon to praise their Creator, the praise begins with the angels and

10 10 descends, through the heavenly bodies and the weather, to the creatures of earth, reaching humans only at the end of the whole movement. Since the angels head the list, it is certainly not meant to put us at the end in the form of a climax. But on the other hand, nor do I think that the order is designed to make us inferior to all the other creatures. What it does is to give us a sense of a cosmos of creatures glorifying God already, before we ourselves join in. There is a whole universe of praise, a continuous anthem of glory, happening all around us if we choose to notice it. Attending to it can catch us up into the praise of the God who created all things and who is reflected in all his creatures. The key point is that, implicit in these depictions of the worship of creation, is the intrinsic value of all creatures, in the theocentric sense of the value given them by their Creator and offered back to him in praise. In this context, our place is beside our fellow-creatures as fellow-worshippers. In the praise in which we gratefully confess ourselves creatures of God there is no place for hierarchy. A key verse in Psalm 148 says: Let them praise the name of the LORD, for his name alone is exalted; his glory is above earth and heaven. Creatureliness levels us all before the otherness of the Creator. It would be very good if we could restore to our Christian worship today something that was more common in pre-modern periods: ways of consciously situating our own worship within the worship that all our fellow-creatures constantly give to God. Nothing could better restore our sense of creatureliness, and our recognition that the rest of creation is not mere material for us to use or enjoy, but a creation that exists for the glory of God, as we are called to do. To return to the theme of mass extinction, with which I began, what does mass extinction do to the cosmic choir in its ceaseless praise of the Creator? Hopefully, we have come a long way from wondering whether the destruction of biodiversity matters.